This is the first in a three part series on managing emotions. This post looks at how we can manage our emotions instead of letting them manage us. The second part details how to harness or alleviate different types of emotions depending on what we want. The third part examines the roles emotions have on our social skills.
To what degree do emotions control and influence our lives? Take a moment to think about it.
Do they occur only during big moments? Is it roughly half emotions, half ‘rationality’? Can we even measure the degree of influence?
The truth is: emotions shape every aspect of our lives. We might think that decision-making is a domain left to the upper cortices of the brain but in reality, emotional input is necessary to make any decision in the first place. Even when other cognitive functions remain fine, people who have damage to parts of the brain involved in somatic markers (feelings in the body) struggle to make any decisions at all. Emotions serve as filters in fast and complex situations, ones we often encounter.
Yet we cannot allow our emotions to runaway with their influence on our temperament. Excess emotional affect on our behaviour, most notably negative ones, can lead to poor choices and instability, in other words us at our worst.
Managing emotions then, is vital. But there’s a key distinction between managing our emotions and suppressing them.
Managing emotions vs Suppressing emotions
Managing emotions involves both a conscious and subconscious regulation of emotions on our thoughts and behaviours.
Suppressing emotions on the other hand involves a conscious regulation but a subconscious awareness of emotions.
Managing emotions is much more preferable to suppressing them. The paradox of suppression is that by attempting to force an emotion via suppression of another, you’ll likely experience the one you attempted to suppress nonetheless. If you try and conjure happiness by suppressing sadness, your subconscious will still be registering feelings of sorrow even if your conscious mind is telling you that you’re not down, and you’ll never truly feel content.
This is why parroting affirmations in the mirror doesn’t work. Your conscious self is literally telling your mind that you are a particular state, mood, person etc. but it never resonates with lasting impact because your subconscious doesn’t validate it.
So how do we regulate our emotions on both a conscious and subconscious level? One way is the Perspective Shift.
Perspective Shift
Before we cover the Perspective Shift technique, it’s helpful to define what perspective is.
If focus is where we place our selective sensory attention, perspective is our lens with which we see the world.
In a complex and uncertain world, our lenses aren’t always the most accurate nor conducive to a flourishing life. Prolonged negative emotions can smear them for the worse.
The Perspective Shift exercise helps to recalibrate our lenses so that our conscious and subconscious mind limit unhelpful emotions and create a perspective change more beneficial to our lives.
Exercise
When you want to carry out a change in your life or alter your emotional state for the better, think about your desired change and find something that is good and true such that the significance makes you feel a perspectival and emotional shift.
The more reasons you can find, the more powerful the perspective shift will be. So as a minimum, find at least three things for each shift.
For example:
Let’s say you want to find another career (lifestyle change) but you’re worried (negative emotion) about the upheaval of your life and the risk of not progressing further to more senior positions compared to if you stay in your current industry.
Three reasons that are good, true and significant could be:
1. The ‘upheaval’ of lifestyle can be a positive change since in the long-run, you’re restructuring it for contentment and optimising how you’re spending a third of your adult life, even if there’s short-term faff involved.
2. In your current position, there’s no guarantee you’d qualify for more senior roles due to your company size plus the economic forecast of your industry means a pivot is wiser.
3. You value learning and development which come more from newer roles (since remaining in the same role for several years can stagnate learning) than leaning on a single role that you could be adequate in but that doesn’t satisfy your passions and capabilities.
Whatever your desired change, write down your reasons and remind yourself of them during your shift to transform. The combination of goodness, truth and significance means our subconscious mind will also assimilate to the shift from repeated exposure since we’re grounding our mindset in undeniable reasoning rather than mere wishful thinking.
This doesn’t always mean one implementation of the Perspective Shift exercise will lead to permanent change; mindset shifts can be gradual and take time so make sure you come back to your reasons continuously so that they sink in.
Heuristics for managing emotions
We’ll cover advice for managing specific types of emotions in future posts, but the following are rules of thumb you can fall back on for managing emotions.
When you’re in doubt about your emotional state and wellbeing:
Simplify by defaulting to the go-to heuristic for tapping into and controlling emotions — get rid of negative emotions early and amplify the positive ones.
When you experience a positive or negative emotional spike:
Take the time to figure out why. Doing so will develop your introspective awareness which will better teach you how to eliminate negative emotions and enhance positive ones sooner.
When you’re dealing with multiple negative emotions:
When experiencing more than one negative emotion, separate each and don’t tie them to one another. This will help prevent conflating all bad feelings as being the same and quell your bad mood quicker.
Managing emotions to improve your productivity
As discussed, emotions influence everything from our decision-making to our entire perspectives on things. Since this is the case, we might as well use them to better navigate through life. One area the skill of managing emotions enhances is productivity if you know how.
Here’s a basic process you can use:
1. Set up a positive task environment
Structuring your environment is one of the most underrated techniques for improving productivity. A good environment removes distractions and supports equanimity of mood so you can operate with a beneficial mindset.
Arrange your environment to reduce the chance of negative emotions emerging and increase the likelihood of a positive state of mind. Prevent nuisance interruptions by silencing calls and blocking out your calendar for deep work. Wear noise cancelling headphones if in a noisy setting. Eat, sleep and exercise well so that your core physiology facilitates your mood. If you consume caffeine, balance your intake so that your thoughts won’t be ‘scattered’ later on. Remind yourself of your WHY so that the positivity of your perspective trumps any distractions or negativity that may arise.
2. Focus on your most important task
Do the one most important thing that will make your day and near future easier. Do it up to the point of motivation depletion or until you feel tired.
3. Task switch to the next most desirable task
Switch to the next most important thing in your list of priorities. The act of switching to a task that isn’t procrastinatory but still desirable will restore your focus levels and keep you productive. Do it until you feel motivation depletion with this one.
4. Go back to your most important task
Now leverage the same principle and return to your most important task if you haven’t finished it. If you have complete motivation depletion or tiredness, take a restful break for a short period of time before resuming. This process is known as ‘Flowtime’ and works in alignment with your concentration and energy levels.
5. If your list is only full of things you don’t want to do, leverage Small Simple Steps
Small Simple Steps refers to doing a micro version of a task to get started, with the initial momentum spurring you on to do the whole task entirely. For instance, reading two emails leads to covering all of them or doing a minute of cardio leads to an entire workout.
Summary – Managing emotions
Successfully managing emotions is paramount to a well-lived life. Emotions have a governing influence on everything in our lives such as the way we make decisions, our core temperaments, and the perspectival lens with which we see things.
Managing emotions is the operative term, not suppressing them. When faced with an upcoming change or downturn in our mood, we can shift our perspective so that our emotional state and motivational change are registered on both a conscious and subconscious level.
Different emotions have different methods to harness or alleviate them yet managing emotions on the whole needn’t be a complex affair. We can default to go-to heuristics in many situations.
Managing emotions well also enhances productivity. Behind some of the leading processes in productivity culture lie techniques that work in tandem with our emotional states.
The next post in this series on managing emotions looks at a range of specific emotions and various methods to tap into or conquer them depending on whether they’re positive or negative. Subscribe for free to Abroad Lifestyles for unique articles like this and more in the realm of lifestyle design.
