Consciously Creating Emotional Triggers

Mastering the art of emotional management essentially involves being able to change on command how you feel. This is quite different from slapping on a happy face and faking it. Such attempts at emotional suppression interfere with your ability to think clearly, and over the long term, have a quite dire affect on your health. Emotional management involves changing how you feel, not masking it.

Managing Not Suppressing Emotions

An understanding of the three factors that contribute to your emotional state equips you with the knowledge you need to successfully manage your emotional state. If you haven’t done so already, read the first article in this series, Understanding Emotional States. This article outlines a proven technique for changing the way you feel whenever you want to by consciously creating emotional triggers. You will need to spend a little time and effort in establishing your emotional triggers, but once you have done so, you will be able to trigger any emotion on demand.

As I discussed in my earlier article, emotional triggers refer to events that produce an automatic, subconscious emotional reaction. While some of these reactions are innate, most have been learnt through a process I call associative conditioning. Your mind has been conditioned to associate an event with a particular emotional reaction. A special song may bring a smile to your face, sitting down for a morning cup of coffee (despite its chemical make-up) may lead you to feel relaxed and flashing police car lights in your rear-view mirror may bring on an instant low. Why? Because through experience,  you have learnt to associate these triggers with a particular emotional state. When you encounter a trigger, your mind subconsciously reacts by putting you into the emotional state that you associate with that trigger.

Most of your existing emotional triggers have been entrenched in your mind by accident. Through the course of life you merely learnt to associate a particular trigger with a particular emotional state. However, Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov showed us that you can choose any neutral act (e.g., ringing a bell) and consciously condition your mind to associate that trigger with a particular emotional state. To do this you need to:

1. Choose an emotional state you want to trigger on demand (e.g., confidence)
2. Select a unique action to use as a trigger (e.g., blowing onto your hand)
3. Repeatedly expose your mind to experiencing the emotional state (e.g., confidence) straight after experiencing the trigger (blowing onto your hand)

Once you have conditioned your mind, you will find that the trigger automatically generates the desired emotional state. You will often see elite athletes using this technique. Personally, I love watching how tennis players use this process. You will see Jelena Dokic blowing on one of her hands just prior to the start of each point. Other payers have their own unique triggers—little habits they do to put them into a confident state just before play begins.

The first two steps described above are relatively straightforward. The third step requires a little more guidance on my part, and some repeated practice on your part. How do you expose your mind to experiencing a particular emotional state just after experiencing your chosen trigger. The answer is through a combination of visualization and memory.

The primal part of your brain that you seek to condition does not distinguish between a real, “here-and-now” experience and the visual re-creation of the event in your mind. You can use the power of memories as your experience.

Try this simple exercise:

1. Gently squeeze your right earlobe between your thumb and forefinger, while taking a deep breath.
2. Now picture in your mind when you felt very proud of something that you had achieved. Remember how you felt back then, and let that feeling enter your body.
3. Repeat step 1, gently squeezing your earlobe while taking a deep breath.
4. Now recall a time when it felt you could do no wrong, a time when you were on a roll, a time when others thought you were wonderful. Step back into that time. Remember what it was like. Remember how it felt.
5. Repeat step 1 once more.
6. Now recall a time when you were really happy, a time when you were grinning from ear to ear (even if it was on the inside).

By now, you should be able to notice some changes in your emotional state. If so, you are on the way to conditioning your mind to feel confident whenever you squeeze your earlobe and take a deep breath.

How long does it take to form a subconscious association between the trigger (e.g., squeezing your earlobe) and a desired emotional state (e.g., confidence)? In truth, it varies. If your emotional reaction was intense, you may form an association after just one or two exposures. This is how we develop irrational phobias or aversions to a particular alcoholic drink. Consistency is also important. Every time you experience the trigger without then experiencing the desired emotional state, you weaken the association. This is why psychologists use graded exposure as a way of helping people overcoming their phobias.

Consciously creating emotional triggers is a powerful and proven way to manage your emotions. However, it is not the only way. Next week, I will share with you two other techniques that you can add to your emotional management toolkit.

Tagged as: emotion