Learning to manage emotions can be one of the toughest parts of being able to perform at your best. Yet, one the factors that may be holding you back from managing emotions is your labelling of emotions as negative. Creating a change in perspective may open up your ability to manage emotions more effectively.
How do you consider these emotions?
Anger – sadness – frustration – fear – guilt – anxiousness – envy – shame
Negative, right?
And this would be totally understandable as to create this list I simply Googled, ‘list of negative emotions.’ We are fed a rhetoric and commanding narratives that these emotions are bad. And accompanied with this is the evangelistic endeavour of trying to live consistently with ‘positive’ emotions.
So, if these emotions are negative. Let’s consider what life would be like without them in our lives. Never have anger to be able to protect yourself or others. Never be sad when a loved one passes away. Never experience the frustration of not quite achieving what you wanted. Never experience any fear so you can’t perceive danger. Never have guilt over actions you haven’t done. Never have the anxiousness building up to the most important things in your life. Never envy someone’ skills or qualities to motivate you to have these. Never feel shame from doing an action that has let someone down.
These emotions contribute to the richness of life. They are as natural as having joy when you see a baby smile, or a spring flower open into bloom. Life would be very dull, and we would probably not achieve much if we didn’t experience these types of emotions.
The problem of negative labelling
When you view any emotions as negative, you immediately flag these in the brain as bad and that they should be suppressed, gotten rid of, avoided. And this has a paradoxical effect.
The brain has a wonderful bundle of nerves that make up the reticular activating system (RAS), and one of its functions is to highlight important and relevant information to you. When you register something as important, the RAS kicks in and will provide you with evidence when this is perceived. When you’ve thought of buying something and then you begin seeing more of this item in your day, this is the RAS at work.
The brain’s job is to keep you alive, not to keep you happy. So, what this means then is that if you flag certain emotions as negative, your brain is happy to provide you with lots of evidence when it thinks that these are needed. Your pursuit of avoiding negative emotions, puts them more into your brain’s attention. A simple metaphor of this effect is when you are asked to NOT think of a pink polar bear – what happens?
These emotions all have a purpose. They are there to motivate you into some sort of action. What your brain may have got mixed up with is the circumstances where these emotions are relevant or functional for you. But the dualistic categorising of emotions as simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is not accurate or relevant in trying to help you. So, instead of boxing emotions into simple categories, a helpful perspective to take is that your brain has made a perception of your situation and is offering you a response to help you deal with that.
Therefore, an emotion is not negative, it may simply be dysfunctional for that moment. And if it is dysfunctional, you can learn to update the brain and inform it that these particular circumstances are not relevant to that emotion. However, that requires getting to understand the emotion you are experiencing in the moment.
How do you change? – approach and explore emotions
If you want to make change and learn to manage emotions, the answer lies in approaching these emotions, rather than avoiding them.
At present, when anxiousness arises, for example, you may have the impulse to try and distract yourself and that is your current coping response. However, what this results in is your tolerance to feelings of anxiousness getting lower and lower. Now, any feeling of anxiousness makes you feel out of control and it can feel overwhelming.
What I help clients learn to do is gently approach emotions. This can be tough and calls for courage, but is a process that can lead to huge transformation. Approaching an emotion can seem overwhelming, so there is a process that you can learn to diminish this distress.
To explore an emotion requires understanding that it is made up of certain components.
When an emotion arises, see if you can turn towards it and ask these questions:
· What thoughts and images are around right now?
· What physical sensations can I feel in the body?
· What feelings can I perceive when this emotion is around?
· What does this emotion make me feel like doing?
What this process does is it strips the emotional bundle into elements that you can deal with and cope with more readily. Over time, you gently build your tolerance to any emotion and a greater perception of control when it arises.
You can learn to feel the emotional reaction without the action, enabling you to perform as you want. The emotion may still be there but it is becoming functional for you rather than dysfunctional.
Start today with noticing how you label emotions. Are you demonising emotions with a label of ‘negative?’ Changing your view to this emotion simply being dysfunctional for the moment, offers you a lens from which you may feel more at ease approaching this emotion. And from approaching, you can learn to manage emotions more effectively and be more able to perform at your best.
Let me know if this has been helpful. And if you want to learn how to manage your emotions, contact Stuart for more details.