Imagine being in a demanding situation where you have to perform. There are people in front of you. This is important to you. You want to perform well. But your emotions are running high. Your heart is beating faster, your thoughts are saying you’re going to fail. You’re tense, and your breathing is affecting how you want to speak.
This describes the experience of many people. Yet, what are you doing to change this experience from happening again? What skills are you developing to make beneficial change?
Understanding how emotions get triggered is a useful starting point to making change. And then I’ll offer some helpful ways to develop skills that can manage emotions.
Emotional tags
When you read the next few statements, see if you can pick up what emotion/feeling gets triggered.
- Being on a beach
- Catching up with friends
- Smelling fresh coffee – or fresh bread in a bakery
- Singing karaoke
- Having to do a presentation in front of 100 people
- Being on the moon
Did you pick up a feeling to these statements?
Even though you are just reading these statements out, your brain is trying to make sense of them. And to make sense of them, your brain trawls through your previous experiences to offer you meaning. One way that it does this is to present you with the emotion/feeling that you had when you were in these experiences.
But you’ve never been on the moon! So, what your brain does is make it’s best guess. It immediately runs through any previous experiences that may offer you what being on the moon is like. Maybe you watched a movie? The brain then gives you the feeling related to this.
Your brain attaches emotions/feelings to every experience you have. This is called emotional tagging. It is a very effective and efficient way for your brain to then recall what emotion/feeling is appropriate when in a similar situation in the future. You will have experienced this when you smell something, for example, and how that then evokes a certain emotion/feeling.
What this means, however, is that when you’ve had an experience that has been difficult and has elicited an dysfunctional emotion when you are performing (e.g. getting anxious), your brain tags the anxiety with that experience. Now, because your brain has emotionally tagged anxiety to presentation experiences, this is the emotion that is likely to arise in that situation in the future.
How the brain needs updating on emotional tags
Imagine now, that you are in that performance situation. You have to deliver a presentation, for example, and you are feeling anxious. But you nail it! You feel great and have a sense of achievement.
But your brain has still experienced anxiety with that experience. So, without any update, your brain holds onto that emotional tag with presentations. Your brain has a propensity to prioritise emotions that will keep you safe. Your brain is designed to keep you safe, not to keep you happy! Therefore, the next presentation experience will elicit anxiety once again.
However, you can change this emotional tag. You can update the brain to say that its information is outdated. And you do this through reflection.
The power of reflection
Without any reflection update the brain will be biased to hold onto the emotion it perceives as the most powerful or appropriate. However, reflection processes allow you to give new information to the brain and change this emotional tag.
How you do this is replaying the experience in your mind. Feeling the emotion of being able to achieve, whilst doing the presentation. Visualising the experience and tuning into the more functional emotion of confidence, achieving, being empowered, whatever that was for you.
To successfully update the brain, you need to repeatedly give the brain this updated information. Only when you have played this memory experience out many, many times will your brain upload the new information and tag a new emotion to this.
Your brain, however, still has a powerful emotional tag to presentations. And your brain has its natural propensity for keeping you safe. Therefore, before your next presentation you may need to deliberately bring to mind your reflections of the updated, confident experience. Over time, the association of being anxious with presentations gets weaker and weaker.
Writing down your experience, or journalling your reflection updates is a great way of doing this. Whenever you write things down and look upon the words, your brain makes associations with the experience. So, if you are writing that the experience went well, the brain begins to pair a new emotional association with the experience.
What I have just described is what is called top-down processing. Using your cognitive abilities (thought processes) to manage emotions. However, there is another way to manage emotions that may offer quicker results.
Using the body to manage emotions
As you are reading this, see if you can act out how your body would be if you were anxious.
See if you recognise any of these body signals and how you emody anxiousness:
- Did you contract your body? – round your shoulders? – pull your chin in?
- Did you cross any limbs? – bring hands together?
- What expression does your face do? – grimace, tightness
- Would your breathing rate change?
- Would you be restless? – your movements are jerkier, and done in haste?
- What does your visual attention do? – narrow and you move your head around to see things? – (e.g. like a scared animal does)
Making change to manage emotions can be done more effectively with the understanding that your body is continually sending signals to your brain. Every breath, every posture, every movement, is sending information to your brain. This information is passed to your brain stem and limbic regions immediately. Your brain uses this information to make an appraisal of what emotion it thinks is most appropriate for your present moment experience. If you are displaying and embodying any features in the above questions, then your brain is likely to offer you anxiety-related emotions/feeling.
What this means, however, is that you can exploit this body signalling to update the brain to offer you a more functional emotion/feeling.
Think what it would be like to act out and embodying the feeling of being empowered and confident:
- How would you hold your body? – shoulders back, chest out, chin out, arms by your side
- What would your facial expression be? – smiling, relaxed facial muscles
- Breathing? – slower rate (4-10 breaths per minute)
- Movements? – slow and deliberate, intentionally animated
- Vision? – taking in horizon, edges of the room vs being focused on single point
These changes in the body are what is termed bottom-up processing. They act incredibly fast as they send direct signals to the brain stem and limbic systems. To begin with these may require some deliberate awareness (top-down processing) to make that initial change, However, like above, anything that you begin to do repeatedly, your brain begins to adopt as habit. This is called neuroplasticity.
Managing emotions is a skill that you can develop to offer more effective self-regulation. I work with elite athletes and corporate executives using many evidence-based methods to develop skills for self-regulation and emotional intelligence. My unique and original framework, called the Munro Performance Empowerment Program, backed in two university research studies has helped elite athletes and corporate executives to develop psychological empowerment, self-awareness, resilience, as well as self-regulation and emotional intelligence.
Stuart Munro is a high performance psychologist and a registered member of the British Psychological Society, having completed submissions to be a chartered psychologist. If any of the information has tweaked your interest and you would like to find out more, please contact Stuart at [email protected]