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Take Emotional Control
Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
Elizabeth Gilbert
One evening an old Cherokee Indian explained to his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.
He told him that the battle is between two wolves that are inside us all.
One is called ‘Evil’ and is full of anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.
The other is called ‘Good’ and is full of joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.
The grandson listened intently and then, after a while, having pondered the story, he asked his grandfather: ‘So which wolf wins in the end?’
The old Cherokee simply replied, ‘The one you decide to feed.’
I love this story and it is sums up rather well the control that we can have over our emotions. The crucial question is ‘Which are you feeding today?’
Emotional Resilience
Emotions play a huge part in resilience, and emotional resilience is about your ability to adapt to setbacks and stressful situations by managing your emotions in a positive and helpful way. Understanding the way that you respond emotionally to upset, and learning to regulate and develop an internal locus of control, will be very useful. Emotional resilience is not necessarily a quality that you do or do not possess, there will be varying degrees of how well a person is able to handle adversity. Different people will express themselves in different ways on an emotional level.
A more extrovert person may express themselves in a way that others may perceive as highly emotional by crying or getting visibly upset. Introverts may be less expressive and become quieter when faced with adversity and appear to shut down and hide away. We are all unique and we all deal with our emotions differently, there is no perfect expression of emotion. The key is to ensure that your emotional response is as helpful as it can be and doesn’t harm you or others and produce a detrimental outcome. You also need to take responsibility for the way that your emotions can affect others. By being more emotionally aware, you can help yourself to take more self-control and be more resilient in difficult situations.
According to a study at the University of North Carolina, psychologists’ research has shown that people who seed their life with frequent moments of positive emotions increase their resilience against challenges. In the month-long study, 86 participants were asked to submit daily ‘emotion reports’, rather than answering general questions on their happiness history. Those daily reports helped the psychologists to gather more accurate recollections of feelings and allowed then to capture emotional ups and downs.
The study showed that if happiness is something you want out of life, then focusing daily on the small moments and cultivating positive emotions is a very helpful thing to do. Those small moments allow positive emotions to blossom, and that enables you to become more open and receptive. That openness then helps you build resources that will help you rebound better from adversity and stress, to ward off depression and continue to grow.
The emotional dinner table
Your thinking has a very strong influence over your emotions and, as with the earlier story about the two wolves, you can to some degree influence your emotions by addressing the quality of your thoughts. If you allow yourself to get lost in a catastrophic corridor of negative thinking, the chances are you will spiral into a tunnel of unhappiness. If you make a conscious choice to focus on the positive and helpful thoughts you will feel a lot better.
Imagine you are hosting a dinner party for all your emotions and they are sitting around the table, hungrily waiting to be fed. It is up to you who you choose to feed. You can starve the negative emotions and feed up and boost the health of the positive ones with positive thoughts. You are, in fact, the nutritionist of your soul.
Understanding emotions
There are over 600 words in English to describe them and we apparently use over 40 muscles in our faces to express them. Philosophers and psychologists have long debated the nature of emotions, exploring the concept and pondering whether they are cognitive judgements or perceptions of physiological change.
Emotions are an important part of being human, and they help us to protect what’s important to us. The way we are brought up, and our culture, will also influence the way we feel. Emotions help us to form ideas and decide what we care about. From an early age we build up our emotional understanding based on the relationships we have with other people.
Emotions can be very powerful and can create some extreme outcomes, especially when anger, passion and jealousy are provoked. Crimes of passion, and some of the more extreme stories reported in the media, are linked to high emotional outcomes. Our hormones can also influence our emotions, particularly at times of major physical changes in life, such as puberty, pregnancy and menopause.
Jayne was kind enough to share her story with me, one that emphasizes just how powerful emotions can be.
About four years ago Jayne was arrested. She wasn’t given a prison sentence but, in many ways, she was very fortunate that her situation didn’t escalate out of proportion and she received a series of counselling sessions instead. This is what happened.
Jayne and Simon had been together since they were at college and had moved to the Midlands for his work as a scientist. Jayne had decided to set herself up as a freelance wedding planner and her business had soon taken off and she was travelling all over the country. They had a great lifestyle and decided to put off having children for a while. Then, in her mid-thirties, they decided it was time to try. Jayne, however, experienced three miscarriages before being told that, due to an ovarian condition, it was highly unlikely that she would carry a child to full term.
Both Simon and Jayne were devastated and, despite expensive tests and treatments, the possibility of having a child became less and less likely. Jayne suffered severe depression and became obsessed with having a child of her own.
They were both from large families, with brothers and sisters who had lots of children. At every family occasion, Jayne would find herself in tears hiding in the bathroom and barely holding it together. The strain on the marriage became enormous and Jayne lost all sense of self-esteem, feeling that she was worthless as a woman.
One day it all came to a head when she was shopping in town and decided to stop for a coffee. A young mother with three children was sitting next to her in Starbucks with an adorable baby in a pram. As Jayne sat looking enviously at the family, one of the children tipped his milkshake into the mother’s lap. The mother asked Jayne if she could watch the baby whilst she went to the bathroom.
Jayne agreed and, as the mother disappeared, she was consumed by an overwhelming emotional urge. She says, to this day, the memory of the emotion is still immensely powerful. She literally picked the baby up, wrapped it in its blanket, grabbed her bag and left the coffee shop, taking the baby to the park across the road. She found a bench and sat down, rocking the baby and feeling suddenly relieved. Then, literally within minutes, she realized what she had done and ran back to the coffee shop to return the baby. The police, who had already been alerted, arrived and arrested her. However, the mother decided not to press charges and was compassionate to Jayne’s story.
Learning to understand your emotions and, indeed, your emotional responses can be very important especially with regard to the way stress manifests itself. One key emotion that stress can trigger is anger, and the term anger management in the workplace seems more common place these days. I have been called in on several occasions to a work environment to work with teams where managers are lacking in emotional resilience.
A few years ago, I was working on a very challenging project around redundancy in a public sector organization. The team I was involved with were very stressed. There was a huge amount of uncertainty and also a distinct lack of information from the top, which created communication issues. Tempers were frayed on a regular basis.
One senior manager who I worked with seemed to be very lacking in ‘emotional awareness’. He vacillated – from being passive aggressive, saying very little with the occasional sarcastic remark, creating anxiety everywhere he went – to just ‘losing it’ and shouting at people, causing staff to get very upset. He would get even angrier when some of the women cried, and his reaction and comments about his female staff was far from PC to say the least. He really couldn’t see that his emotional responses were probably causing more upset than all the uncertainty and pressure his staff were under. When I spoke to him and fed back what was happening, initially he really couldn’t see the effect he was having. The pressure of the situation had almost blinded him to his own emotions and the importance of taking more emotional responsibility.
Defining Key Emotions
Being emotionally healthy doesn’t mean that you feel happy all the time. Positive emotional health is about experiencing a range of different emotions and being able to understand, accept and manage them.
Why do we need emotions?
The range of emotions that we experience will colour our lives and give us depth and differentiation. Emotions serve several physical and psychological purposes, and some scientists believe that emotions are one of the fundamental traits associated with being human. For some people, strong emotions are linked to creativity and expression. Great artists, musicians and writers thrive on arousing emotions to create a connection with their audience. Some scientists also believe that emotions serve as motivation to behave in specific ways.
Emotions also help you to monitor your social behaviour and regulate and control your interactions with others, which is a very useful skill to develop. In the 1990s, Daniel Goleman, who was a scientific reporter for the New York Times, chanced upon an article in a small academic journal by two psychologists, John Mayer and Peter Salovey. Mayer and Salovey offered the first formulation of a concept they called ‘emotional intelligence’. He later wrote an international bestseller called Emotional Intelligence which is well worth a read; and this is now a term that is commonly used, especially in the workplace.
So what exactly is emotional intelligence?
The term ‘Emotional Intelligence’ was first used in the world of psychology in 1966. The earliest roots of emotional intelligence can be traced to Charles Darwin’s work on the importance of emotional expression for survival. Emotional intelligence is essentially the ability to identify, understand and control your emotions and recognize how they can affect others around you. Emotional intelligence also involves your perception of others and understanding how they feel.
Here is a framework that describes five key elements of emotional intelligence:
So when you read through the key elements and the list of traits it is all very positive behaviour and certainly all those traits will help you to be more resilient. There are many benefits to cultivating emotional intelligence and it is something that can help you in so many areas of your life.
The benefits of cultivating emotional intelligence
Improved resilience
Emotional intelligence will help you to understand and regulate your emotions, which will help you to respond to stressful situations in a much more positive way. By understanding how you are capable of reacting you can create personal strategies that will help you to control your negative emotions in a way that is more helpful for you and those around you.
Improved performance at work
Emotional intelligence can help you navigate the social complexities of the workplace and help you to excel in your career. In fact, when it comes to assessing candidates for a role, many organizations now view emotional intelligence as being as important as technical ability, hence the term competency-based interviews. Some of the work that I do with the United Nations is based around this. Ensuring that people have the right kind of attitude is key to an organization’s success.
Improved physical health
When you are unable to manage your stress levels, it can lead to serious health problems, raising blood pressure, suppressing the immune system and increasing the risk of heart attack and strokes. The first step to improving emotional intelligence is to learn how to relieve stress by regulating and controlling emotions so that you don’t become overwhelmed.
Improved mental health
Stress can also impact on your mental health, making you vulnerable to anxiety and depression. If you are unable to understand and manage your emotions, you will also be more susceptible to mood swings. You will feel overwhelmed and out of control which can make you react in a way that you regret and also seek unhealthy coping mechanisms that will just compound the issue.
Improved relationships
By better understanding your emotions, and how to control them, you will be able to express how you feel in a more articulate way. You will also, by developing empathy, understand how others feel and why they react the way that they do. This will allow you to communicate more effectively and forge stronger relationships, both at work and in your personal life.
How to manage emotions
Breathing deeply
One of the best ways to calm high emotion is to manage your breathing. Get into a comfortable position and slowly take in deep breaths, breathing in from your abdomen. This will help to still a racing pulse and calm your mind. Check your muscle tension, especially in the shoulders, neck, and jaw. As you relax any tight areas, picture a peaceful scene, focusing your thoughts on positive images.
Exercise
When you get upset or irate, it will invariably increase your stress levels, so exercise and any physical activity will be good for releasing endorphins. These are neurotransmitters produced in the brain that reduce pain and can change a negative mood.
Write it down
I strongly recommend this as an approach and it is an excellent way to manage your emotions. Keep a journal and write down exactly what you are feeling.
Get it off your chest
Whether it is to a friend or professional, you may need to talk out your feelings to learn how to manage them better. Seek out a good counsellor or a support group where you feel free to share your deepest emotions. The worst thing you can do is to isolate yourself and not reach out for help. At the back of the book you will also find some useful websites.
Food for Thought
I work with many people who are passionate about the link between emotional health and food. Certainly, in times of stress and change, a healthy body will help to promote a healthy mind and promote resilience. I also know, from personal experience of managing bouts of depression, that diet can have a major impact on the way that you feel. It is very interesting to look at the mind/body link with regards to emotions. A nourishing diet reaches far beyond just simply supporting physical health. Mental functioning, your emotional state and general behaviour are all influenced by the quality and variety of the food you eat. For example, complex carbohydrates are a very important part of a healthy diet. Research has shown that anger, fatigue, depression, and tension are much more prominent in low-carbohydrate dieters than those who balance their protein intake with complex carbohydrates. In order for the body to produce serotonin, a feel-good neurotransmitter responsible for curbing the appetite, improving mood and calming stress, complex carbohydrates are required.
The type of carbohydrate consumed is extremely important to avoid a roller-coaster ride of fluctuating moods. Avoiding sugar-laden foods and starchy foods like potatoes, white bread and white flour is important. These foods create can create a vicious, emotional cycle of peaks and troughs by flooding the system with simple refined sugars. The body compensates by releasing insulin, which causes blood sugar levels to plummet. In response, cortisol production goes into full swing, attempting to balance this downward spiral. As cortisol surges, so does depression and this can trigger yet another cycle of craving refined carbohydrates to boost serotonin and mood.
Omega-3 oils can have a very positive impact on emotional health. Studies show that people who are deficient in this fatty acid have higher levels of impulsiveness, pessimism, and depression. Omega-3 can be found in fish such as sardines, salmon, and mackerel, ground flaxseeds, walnuts, and omega-3 enhanced eggs. Deficiency in iron and thiamine adds to emotional instability as well. Insufficient levels of iron are associated with fatigue, lack of attention, and depression. Foods that are iron-rich include egg yolks, dried fruit, beets, beans, and green leafy vegetables.
Sometimes, when we feel low and crave junk food, it is easy to underestimate the power of our diet on our emotions and resilience. When nutrient-rich food is prominent in the diet, positive mental states are strengthened and the ability to cope better is evident.
The Emotional Roller Coaster
Life, at times, can certainly feel like an emotional roller coaster and, let’s face it, there are some people who even relish the ride. The first step to learning how to feed your emotions positively is to be really honest and open with yourself. Too often people trap their true feelings deep inside through fear. The danger with this is that it can lead to damaging addictions and unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Learning to understand and harness your emotions, and using them to the best of your ability, will help you be more in control and you will be able to turn them into fulfilling experiences with positive outcomes. There are many things that you can do to feed your emotions positively, both mentally and physically, which will in turn develop your emotional intelligence and your emotional resilience.
- Spend five minutes every morning and evening focussing on positive emotions and feeding them with positive thoughts.
I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray