There are two things that people want to be able to do to improve their emotional life.
You want to be able to choose what you become emotional about and when you become emotional.
That’s number one. And the second is you want to be able to choose how you act when
you are emotional. Well, nature didn’t want you to do either.
So it didn’t give you any tools. So if you’re going to learn how to do this, it’s
going to be hard work, and it isn’t going to be the kind of learning like learning to
ride a bicycle. Once you learn to ride a bicycle you can stay off it for ten years
and get right back on it and ride. What I’m going to tell you now, if you don’t
do every day, you’ll fall off. You got to practice it all the time. It’s like
being a concert pianist. It doesn’t stick unless you practice it.
So let’s take problem number one, having more choice about what you become emotional
about. And that’s--the only reason we want that is because sometimes we become emotional
about things that we don’t think merit becoming emotional, or we act in a way that we don’t
approve of afterwards. That’s the number two problem.
The first step is to keep a diary of when you become emotional. Now you won’t know
in advance but you’ll surely know when it’s over that you just had an emotional episode.
Write it down in detail. Do this for a month. Then go through it and look for what are the
themes that are causing your emotions. If it isn’t apparent to you, get a friend to
look at it, but it should be very apparent to you when you read through this diary.
And you should be able to identify three or four redundant things that have again and
again getting you to act emotionally. Now the ones where you think you responded emotionally
and there was no reason to be emotional, draw a red circle around them.
Now how many of those have the same theme? Now you’re equipped. You know what the
triggers are. Now when you’re about to enter a situation, think: Is this likely to
trigger one of my themes? If so, what can I do? Can I calm my mind? Do a full-body
scan? Do meditation? Did I not get much sleep last night, so I’m likely to go off?
Maybe I better postpone this meeting ‘cause it’s going to have one of my hot triggers.
Or, am I in pretty good shape, and I’m prepared and I know what might be coming right down
the road? That’s step one on problem one.
Step two is harder, and it is to increase the gap between impulse and action. The
way this works, an emotion episode begin with an appraisal that something is triggering
your emotion that’s based on your previous life experience that’s stored in what I
call your emotional alert database. This diary is trying to find out what’s in that
database. But this appraisal mechanism is continually scanning wherever you are, looking
for any of these triggers. And it’s incredibly fast and not always accurate. The moment
it clicks on something, an impulse arises. That impulse, if it gets to the circuitry
in your brain for a particular emotion, it’ll set off emotion in your expression, in your
voice, your posture, your words, but there is a – it takes time for the impulse to
get translated into action. You want to lengthen that time so you can
spot the impulse arising before you act. This is not easy. For some people it’s
a lot easier for others because they normally have a very slow rise time, and others I call the
attack dogs. They have almost instant, very little delay between impulse and action.
But strangely enough, the only thing that seems to stretch that out is a contemplative
practice called Mindfulness and it takes a minimum of about 20 minutes a day and at least
four days a week, if you want to try it. And it’ll take about six months to start
to have an effect and then it’ll only continue if you continue to do it. And you won’t
always spot the impulse, but sometimes you’ll have the wonderful feeling of being able to
tell I’m about to get angry. I think I won’t. I’ll let it go; I’ll let that
just go right by me. It won’t happen all the time, but sometimes.
So here are the two techniques. One, the trigger diary to find out what’s in your
emotional alert database. Number two, spreading the time gap between impulse and action.
Now we’re ready to move to the second and somewhat easier step. How do I become aware
of the fact that I’m acting emotionally when I am?
There are two things that can ring the bell and let me know that I’m doing it. One
is, pay close attention to the other person’s facial expressions ‘cause they are the recipient
of your emotions – you can’t see your own face; they see it, but you can see their
face and you can tell how they’re reacting, and you can say, “Oh, my God. They’re
starting to look very disappointed; what am I doing that’s so disappointing them?
How am I acting?” It’s one source. The second source: the
changes within your body, changes in your musculature, in your respiration, in your
sweating, in the temperature of the different parts of your body. They are different,
we found, for different emotions. The problem is we pay no attention to them. The exercise
of making expressions or being a little Stanislavski actor, recalling past emotional experiences,
trying to relive them and focus on what those sensations are. We’ve got to bring the
sensations that are unique to each emotion into consciousness. So you’ll start to
feel it while you’re experiencing it. Those are the two steps. It’s a lot easier
for you to learn how to be more attentive to other people than to learn how to have
any choice about what you become emotional about and to learn to have choice and knowledge
of when you’re becoming emotional, but it’s a good goal and if you succeed you’ll like
yourself better and others will like you better.