Components of Emotional State
As you saw in a previous post on Emotional Wisdom, emotions exist for a reason. However, there will be times when your emotional state hinders your effectiveness, and you therefore need to know how to successfully manage your feelings. This series of articles will show you how.
BUT BE WARNED—trying to manage your emotional state without understanding how it works is like trying to diagnose a patient without ever having attended medical school. So before jumping into specific techniques for managing your emotions (which I cover in upcoming articles in this series), this article explains how you may come to find yourself in a particular emotional state.
Put simply, your emotional state refers to how you feel. However, your feelings do not exist in isolation. Thinking, feeling and physiology are closely entwined.
Perception
Emotions are not irrational. In fact, they are typically logical reactions to something that has happened. For example, we feel sad when we have lost something of value (tangible or intangible), we feel angry when we have been treated unjustly and we feel scared when we believe something bad will happen to us in the future. Yet, it is important to realise that we do not react to events per se, but rather to our perceptions of those events. We do not just take in information through our five senses. Rather, we interpret and attach meaning to that information. Sometimes our perceptions are spot on. At other times we may find ourselves blowing things out of proportion, jumping to conclusions, believing the grass is greener on the other side, or taking things more personally than we should. Our emotional reactions are shaped by how we think about an event, not just the event itself.
Feelings & Primal Triggers
At a more primal level, emotional reactions can occur without any thought whatsoever. Our brains are wired to react to certain triggers in a particular way, such as salivating when we smell the appetizing aroma of food. These primal reactions are instinctive and occur nearly instantaneously. Researchers believe this is because they occur in parts of the brain that are responsible for emotional memory, habitualized actions and innate drives such as hunger. You take in information through your five senses, but before you get a chance to think about what you have seen, this information is quickly processed by the sub-cortical parts of your mind, triggering subconscious reactions. Some of these primal reactions are innate, such as salivating when smelling nice food. Yet some of our primal reactions have been learned though a process psychologists refer to as conditioning. This happens when you hear a special song and get a warm feeling inside, or when you see a police car and quickly look down at your speedometer with a feeling of dread. You have conditioned the more primal parts of your mind to automatically respond to those triggers in a particular way. You may have unwittingly conditioned your mind to associate certain foods or alcoholic drinks with feeling sick, so that a thought or a smell is all that it takes to turn your stomach. This process of conditioning new primal responses was first noticed by Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov conducted an experiment in which he rang a bell shortly before feeding a dog. The dog learned to associate the bell with food, and after repeated exposure would start to salivate upon hearing the bell even without food.
Physiology
Your physiology is also connected to your emotional state. Throughout history we have experimented with changing our emotional state through changing our physiology, be it through alcohol, drugs, mediation, exercise or even hypnosis. Chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline and endorphins have proven and distinctly different effects on our emotional state. Yet the link between your emotional state and your physiology is not purely chemical. Different emotions are associated with different physical sensations, such as:
- Heart rate
- Body temperature
- Muscle tension
- Breathing patterns
For example, when you are angry, you are literally “hot under the collar”, with heated skin temperature as well as tense facial muscles, shallow breathing and an increased heart rate. By contrast, when you are calm, you are more likely to have a lower body temperature, a slower breathing pattern and an average heart rate.
From Knowledge to Action
Armed with an understanding of how you come to be in a partiular emotional state, you are now ready to put this knowledge to work by using three different paths to successfully managing your emotions.
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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:
- Choose an emotional state you want to trigger on demand (e.g., confidence)
- Select a unique action to use as a trigger (e.g., blowing onto your hand)
- 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:
- Gently squeeze your right earlobe between your thumb and forefinger, while taking a deep breath.
- 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.
- Repeat step 1, gently squeezing your earlobe while taking a deep breath.
- 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.
- Repeat step 1 once more.
- 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.
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Managing Emotions Through Reframing
Your emotions are a reaction to the events and environment around you. However, these reactions may be based on an imperfect perception of your situation. Our minds take the small slice of information that we receive through our senses and attach meaning to it. In this way, your thoughts and beliefs about the situation act as a frame in which you re-present a picture of the situation as you believe it to be. If you can change the way perceive the situation, you can change the way you feel. You can do this through a process that psychologists call reframing.
I am not suggesting that you try to see the world through rose-coloured glasses, or that you stick your head in the sand and just hope that all your challenges will just go away. Reframing is not about unrealistic, wishful thinking. However, human nature is such that when in the grip of a strong emotional state, people have a tendency to lose perspective, overgeneralise, jump to unwarranted conclusions and make other similar thinking errors. Reframing is a way to challenge and refine any distorted or unhelpful beliefs that you have about what has happened.
Try asking yourself some of the following questions to help you reframe your perception of the situation at hand:
- How may you be blowing things out of proportion? What do you really know vs. what do you believe? How are you exaggerating the negative consequences of this situation? What is the realistic scope and fallout that will follow from this?
- What good can come of this? How can you learn from this to make you a better leader? How can you turn potential threats into opportunities to improve? How can you turn it to your advantage?
- Is this really all your fault? What was outside of your direct control? What and who else have contributed to this situation? What can others do to help rectify this?
When people say that emotions are illogical, they are more likely to be referring to the fact that the thoughts and beliefs underpinning our feelings can often be inaccurate and unhelpful. Reframing helps you change the way you feel by forcing you to examine the reality of the situation in a more accurate and helpful way.
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In the first article in this series, I explained how different emotions are associated with different physiological states. Both anger and fear are associated with:
- Fast, shallow breathing
- Tense muscles
Consciously changing your physiology can also help you to manage your emotional state.
Managing Anger
Managing Emotions Through Breathing
The first step in changing the physiology associated with anger is to start breathing deeply. Try practising this simple exercise:
- Place your two hands, palm down, at the bottom of your rib cage, in between your chest and your belly button. Your two middle fingers should just touch.
- Breathe in slowly and deeply, counting to three as you go. You should notice that the muscle separating your lung cavity from your abdominal cavity causes the tips of your two middle fingers to separate.
- Hold your breath as you slowly count to three a second time.
- Breathe out slowly, ensuring that you empty your lungs of all air, counting to three as you go.
- Repeat this 3-10 times.
After slowing down your breathing, it is time to relax your tense muscles. The way to do this may seem counterintuitive because it involves tensing and then relaxing each muscle group. When you are angry, it is your jaw and facial muscles that tense up, so you will want to focus on these areas.
Managing Worry or Fear
Fear, like anger, is characterized by rapid and somewhat shallow breathing. You can therefore use the breathing exercise I outlined above to combat fear as well as anger.
Fear is also associated with tense muscles, but unlike with anger, this muscle tension is spread throughout the body. I therefore recommend that you systematically work your way through tightening and relaxing different muscle groups throughout your body. As you finish each muscle group, spend some time building your awareness of how that group feels in a relaxed state and then try to relax them just a little more.
Emotional Intelligence Through Progressive Muscle Relaxation
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