It's October, Mental Health Awareness Month, and just a few days after World Mental Health Day, so I wanted to share this story. I had a client who reported feeling constantly angry, and when he wasn’t angry, he was afraid. With coaching, he developed his emotional linguistics and emotional awareness. Through resourcing himself, he moved from his churned-up state into a calm one again. Resourcing means to find something to help calm yourself - it could be a beautiful memory, a thought of somebody who is an ultimate support for you, a lovely view, or a sensation that brings you pleasure and with it, calmness. His impressive ability to function, despite all that caused his emotional dysregulation, inspired this article. I hope it's helpful to you. Helping him learn effective emotional regulation was the aim of our work, because when people have a calm awareness that their emotions are an experience, not an identity, they make themselves much more available to be alive, functional, and engaged in the world.
What is Emotional Regulation?
Emotional regulation or if you prefer, self-control, is the ability to manage disturbing emotions and remain effective, even in stressful situations. “Manage,” is different from suppressing emotions. We need our full range of feelings to feel fully alive. Context matters when dealing with uncomfortable emotions. It’s one thing to release emotion through a heartfelt conversation with a good friend, and entirely another to release your anger or frustration at work. Emotional self-control, enables you to manage your destabilizing emotions, and stay calm and clear-headed. Understanding what’s going on in your brain when you’re not in control, helps with this emotional regulation.
Daniel Goleman, twice a Pulitzer prize nominee, is the author of the bestselling book, The Brain and Emotional Intelligence. He explained in his book:
“The amygdala is the brain’s radar for threat. Our brain was designed as a tool for survival. In the brain’s blueprint the amygdala holds a privileged position. If the amygdala detects a threat, in an instant it can take over the rest of the brain—particularly the prefrontal cortex—and we have what’s called an amygdala hijack.
During a hijack, we can’t learn, and we rely on over-learned habits, ways we’ve behaved time and time again. We can’t innovate or be flexible during a hijack.
The hijack captures our attention, beaming it in on the threat at hand. If you’re at work when you have an amygdala hijack, you can’t focus on what your job demands—you can only think about what’s troubling you. Our memory shuffles, too, so that we remember most readily what’s relevant to the threat—but can’t remember other things so well.
But… the amygdala often makes mistakes…. while the amygdala gets its data on what we see and hear in a single neuron from the eye and ear—that’s super-fast in brain time—it only receives a small fraction of the signals those senses receive. The vast majority goes to other parts of the brain that take longer to analyze these inputs—and get a more accurate reading. The amygdala, in contrast, gets a sloppy picture and has to react instantly. It often makes mistakes, particularly in modern life, where the ‘dangers’ are symbolic, not physical threats. So, we overreact in ways we often regret later.”
So, the big question is : How to Develop Emotional regulation or Self-Control?
Minimize emotional hijacks is the answer, but how? You need to use emotional self-awareness, which is all about paying attention to your inner signals—a mindfulness technique. Notice your destructive emotions as they start to build, and not when your amygdala has already hijacked you. This requires recognizing the familiar sensations of a hijack starting — it may be something like your jaw or neck tensing or your stomach tightening. You may feel rising heat, a constriction in your throat. When you notice these things, it is easier to stop a hijack as it begins.
If you don’t notice that your amygdala has hijacked the more rational part of your brain, you will struggle to regain emotional equilibrium until the hijack has run its course. It’s better to stop it before it gets too far. Mindfulness monitoring of what’s going on in your mind is very useful for example, notice “I’m really triggered now” or “I’m starting to get upset.” You can also take a cognitive approach : talk yourself out of it, reason with yourself. Or, if you prefer, intervene neuro-biologically with a short meditation or relaxation technique that calms your body and mind—such as deep breathing, focusing on something you find beautiful (like a plant or the sky), or tuning into a sound or sensation.
These techniques are almost impossible to draw on in a crisis, if you haven’t practiced them when you are in a calm state first. Support your success by developing “new paths in the grass,” through mastering these practices in your daily life. Then you will not have to take the well-travelled habitual, hijack induced path of dysregulation. I wish you emotional regulation as you go through the rest of Mental Health Awareness month.
Much Love,
Sue
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