There is a Native American story called “The Two Wolves.” It starts with an old Cherokee telling his grandson about a battle that often goes on inside people.
He says, “My son, the fight is between two wolves. One is evil. It is angry, envious, jealous, sorrowful, regretful, greedy, arrogant, self-pitying, guilty, resentful, inferior, dishonest, proud, superior, and egotistical. The other is good. This wolf is joyful, peaceful, loving, hopeful, serene, humble, kind, benevolent, empathetic, generous, truthful, compassionate, and faithful.”
His grandson thinks for a while, and then asks: “Which wolf wins, Grandfather?” The old Cherokee simply replies, “The one you feed.”
Research consistently shows that self-regulation skill is necessary for emotional well-being. Self-regulation is the ability to act in your long-term best interest, consistent with your deepest values. (Rejection of these values causes guilt, shame and anxiety, which undermine well-being.) Emotionally, self-regulation is the ability to calm yourself down when you’re upset and cheer yourself up when you’re down.
Emotions move us. They energize us to do things by sending chemical signals to the muscles and organs of the body; they prepare us for action. Whether subtle or intense, conscious or unconscious, overt or covert, all emotions have one of three mind sets:
Approach
Avoid
Attack
In approach mind set, you want to get more of something, experience more, discover more, learn more, or appreciate more – you increase its value or worthiness of your attention. Typical emotions associated with this mind set are interest, enjoyment, compassion, trust, and love. Common approach behaviors are learning, encouraging, relating, negotiating, cooperating, pleasing, delighting, influencing, guiding, setting limits, and protecting.
In avoid mind set, you want to get away from something – you lower its value or worthiness of your attention. Common avoid behaviors are ignoring, rejecting, withdrawing, looking down on, dismissing.
In attack mind set, you want to devalue, insult, criticize, undermine, harm, coerce, dominate, incapacitate, or destroy. Attack emotions are anger, hatred, contempt, and disgust. Characteristic attack behaviors are demanding, manipulating, dominating, coercing, threatening, bullying, harming, and abusing.
Emotions are a vital part of our everyday lives. Whether you’re having a good laugh over a text message or feeling frustrated in rush hour traffic, you know that the highs and lows you experience can significantly affect your well-being.
Your ability to regulate those emotions, in turn, affects how you’re perceived by the people around you. If you’re laughing at that text during a serious meeting, you’re likely to get resentful looks from others in the room. On the other hand, if you react with rage at a driver who cuts you off in traffic, you can garner unwanted attention, and perhaps even risk your life.
The study of emotions is not an exact science. Psychologists still debate the body-mind connection in emotional reactivity; don’t have a complete taxonomy of emotions; and are even uncertain about whether emotions are the cause or result of the way we construe the world. However, there are advances being made in understanding the concept of emotion regulation, the process of influencing the way emotions are felt and expressed.
Stanford University psychologist James Gross (2001) proposed a 4-stage model to capture the sequence of events that occurs when our emotions are stimulated. In what he calls the “modal model,” a situation grabs our attention, which in turns leads us to appraise or think about the meaning of the situation. Our emotional responses result from the way we appraise our experiences.
Some emotional responses require no particular regulation. If the emotion is appropriate to the situation and helps you feel better, there’s no need to worry about changing the way you handle things. Laughing when others are laughing is one example of an appropriate reaction that helps you feel better. Expressing road rage may also make you feel better, but it’s not appropriate or particularly adaptive. You could express your frustration in other ways that allow you to release those angry feelings, or instead try to find a way to calm yourself down.
Calming yourself down when you’re frustrated, of course, may be more easily said than done. If you tend to fly off the handle when aggravated, and express your outrage to everyone within earshot (or on the other end of a text), your emotions could be costing you important relationships, your job, and even your health.
An inability to regulate emotions is, according to Gross and his collaborator Hooria Jazaieri (2014), at the root of psychological disorders such as depression and borderline personality disorder. Although more research is needed to understand the specific role of emotional regulation in psychopathology, this seems like a promising area of investigation. For example, people with social anxiety disorder can benefit from interventions that help them change the way they appraise social situations, as shown by research on cognitive behavioral therapy. Many others functioning at a less than optimal level of psychological health, Gross and Jazaieri maintain, could similarly benefit from education about how better to manage their emotions in daily life.
Fortunately, you can handle most of the work involved in regulating your emotions well before the provoking situation even occurs. By preparing yourself ahead of time, you’ll find that the problematic emotion goes away before it interferes with your life. Here a few suggestions to help you learn to self-regulate:
Select the situation. Avoid circumstances that trigger unwanted emotions. If you know that you’re most likely to get angry when you’re in a hurry (and you become angry when others force you to wait), then don’t leave things for the last minute. Get out of the house or office 10 minutes before you need to, and you won’t be bothered so much by pedestrians, cars, or slow elevators. Similarly, if there’s an acquaintance you find completely annoying, then figure out a way to keep from bumping into that person.
Modify the situation. Perhaps the emotion you’re trying to reduce is disappointment. You’re always hoping, for example, to serve the “perfect” meal for friends and family, but invariably something goes wrong because you’ve aimed too high. Modify the situation by finding recipes that are within your range of ability so that you can pull off the meal. You may not be able to construct the ideal soufflé, but you manage a pretty good frittata.
Shift your attentional focus. Let’s say that you constantly feel inferior to the people around you who always look great. You’re at the gym, and can’t help but notice the regulars on the weight machines who manage to lift three times as much as you can. Drawn to them like a magnet, you can’t help but watch with wonder and envy at what they’re able to accomplish. Shifting your focus away from them and onto your fellow gym rats who pack less punch will help you feel more confident about your own abilities. Even better, focus on what you’re doing, and in the process, you’ll eventually gain some of the strength you desire.
Change your thoughts. At the core of our deepest emotions are the beliefs that drive them. You feel sad when you believe to have lost something, anger when you decide that an important goal is thwarted, and happy anticipation when you believe something good is coming your way. By changing your thoughts you may not be able to change the situation but you can at least change the way you believe the situation is affecting you. In cognitive reappraisal, you replace the thoughts that lead to unhappiness with thoughts that lead instead to joy or at least contentment.
Change your response. If all else fails, and you can’t avoid, modify, shift your focus, or change your thoughts, and that emotion comes pouring out, the final step in emotion regulation is to get control of your response. Your heart may be beating out a steady drumroll of unpleasant sensations when you’re made to be anxious or angry. Take deep breaths and perhaps close your eyes in order to calm yourself down. Similarly, if you can’t stop laughing when everyone else seems serious or sad, gather your inner resources and force yourself at least to change your facial expression if not your mood.
Don’t react right away. Reacting immediately to emotional triggers can be an immense mistake. It is guaranteed that you’ll say or do something you’ll later regret. Before refuting the trigger with your emotional argument, take a deep breath and stabilize the overwhelming impulse. Continue to breathe deeply for five minutes, feeling as your muscles un-tense and your heart rate returns to normal. As you become calmer, affirm to yourself that this is only temporary.
Ask for divine guidance. Faith is our saving grace in our darkest moments. No matter your creed, developing a healthy relationship with the divine world will help you surmount your obstacles more easily. This is because when you believe in a higher force, you also believe in the power of divine intervention to show you what you must do, teach you why something is happening or even save you from a certain unwanted situation. When burdened with emotion, close your eyes, envision a positive solution to your problem, and ask the universe to illuminate the best path forward.
Find a healthy outlet. Now that you’ve managed your emotion, you’ll need to release it in a healthy way. Emotions should never be bottled up. Call or go see someone you trust and recount to them what happened. Hearing an opinion other than your own broadens your awareness. Keep a journal and transfer your emotions from your inner self onto the paper. Many people find it helpful to engage in aggressive exercises, such as kickboxing or martial arts, to discharge their feelings. Others meditate and chant to return to a tranquil state of being. Perform whatever activity is best-suited to you in order to liberate your being from pent-up sentiments.
See the bigger picture. Every happening of our lives, whether good or bad, serves a higher purpose. Wisdom means being able to see past the moment and discern the greater meaning of any given situation. You may not understand it in the beginning, but as time goes by, you’ll begin to see the bigger picture falling into perfect order. Even in the midst of an emotionally upsetting moment, trust that there exists an ultimate purpose which you will come to comprehend soon.
Replace your thoughts. Negative emotions bind us to recurring negative thoughts, creating cycles of downright negative patterns. Whenever you are confronted with an emotion which is making you feel or think something bad, force it out of your mind and replace it with a different thought. Imagine the ideal resolution to your problem playing out, think about someone who makes you happy or remember an event that makes you smile.
Forgive your emotional triggers. Your emotional triggers may be your best friend, your family members, yourself or all of the above. You may feel a sudden wave of anger when your friend “does that thing she does,” or a stab of self-loathing when you remember something you could have done differently. But when you forgive, you detach. You detach from the resentment, the jealousy or the fury lingering within you. You allow people to be who they are without the need for escalating emotions. As you forgive, you will find yourself disassociating from the harsh feelings attached to your being.
Identifying which specific emotions you’re feeling. For example, do you know the difference between feeling jealous and feeling envious? Do you recognize when you’re feeling anxious, angry, or ashamed? Are there some emotions you’re better at identifying in yourself than other emotions? (Many people have a hard time identifying when they feel ashamed but an easier time recognizing when they feel anxious.)
Identifying which specific emotions someone else is feeling. For example, do you notice when your partner is reacting angrily because they are feeling anger and embarrassment, instead of just recognizing the anger element. Try to label others’ emotions correctly rather than just labelling others as “in a bad mood.” You’ll be able to provide more effective reactions if you can correctly identify which specific emotions other people are having. If you realize you’re unsure, you can ask the person to help you understand.
Learn to start and persist with pursuing goals even when you feel anxious.
If you can tolerate feeling anxious you’ll be less likely to avoid trying new things, more likely to try things a second time if it didn’t go well the first time, and less likely to abandon projects before they’ve become successful.
Learn to tolerate awkwardness. Can you communicate clearly and directly when it makes sense to do this even when you’re feeling awkward? For example, when you need to explain to someone why you’ve decided not to use their service. Or, do you avoid these situations?
Learn to have intimate conversations rather than stonewall, avoid, or flee. For example, if your partner wants to talk about having another baby and you’re not on the same page, do you flat out refuse to have the conversation (termed “stonewalling,”) try to change the subject whenever it comes up, or disappear from the room when the subject is raised?
Develop the ability not to crumble when someone is pressuring you. For example, can you stand your ground when a salesperson is trying to upsell you or is trying to make a sale by making you feel afraid?
Develop the ability to soothe your own emotions. For example, do you know how to make yourself feel better when something goes wrong or you realize you’ve made a mistake with something?
Learn to soothe other people’s emotions. Do you feel confident in your ability to comfort other people when they’re distressed?
Can you wait? For example, are you able to wait till tomorrow to eat the rest of the dessert you made when you’ve already had one portion?
Manage your positive emotions? For example, do you regularly schedule activities you know you’ll look forward to?
Feelings are the conscious and most misunderstood component of emotions. In contrast to the simplicity of basic motivation, feelings are complex, ever-changing, and subject to moods (like depression), sensations (like warmth, cold, pleasure, pain, comfort, discomfort), and physiological states (like hunger and tiredness). All these can feel like emotions, which is why people often give psychological meaning to anything that feels uncomfortable. Discomfort seems close enough to negative emotions to keep us hopelessly confused, as long as we focus on feelings instead of motivations.
Feelings are not the end in themselves but a means of focusing attention, so we’ll act on the motivation of the present emotion. For instance, if you’re interested in something but don’t approach it, the usually unconscious emotion of interest starts to feel like anticipation, excitement, a nagging hunch, or anxiety. If you have ignored someone you love and don’t approach to kiss and make up, the usually unconscious emotion of guilt will begin to feel like impatience, frustration, anxiety, or depression. If you blame it on your partner, unconscious guilt becomes anger and resentment.
When we act on the basic motivation of emotions, we are usually aware of little or no feelings. That’s how you can get interested in something, look up at the clock, and notice that several hours have passed, during which you were largely unaware of your feelings. It’s also how you can pay no attention to someone you love in avoid motivation and be sincerely surprised when your partner accuses you of ignoring him/her, which you were entirely unaware of doing.
Self-regulation is more attainable when focused on values rather than feelings. The latter should be evaluated as signals about reality – a means to self-regulation, rather than an end in themselves. Indeed, self-regulation is difficult when focused on feelings, simply because focus amplifies, magnifies, and distorts them.
“I feel bad…” focuses attention on the bad feeling, which invokes assessment, explanation, justification, and often interpretation of them:
“This is how bad I feel….These are the reasons I feel bad….I have a right to feel bad…. This is what the bad feelings mean about me or those around me….”
All the above keep you focused on what is wrong. If you blame your feelings on someone else, they will stimulate retaliation motives that will prevent you from improving whatever is truly causing the negative feelings.
Feelings are an important part of how humans create meaning and motivate behavior, but they are never the only factor – and rarely the most important – aspect of the meaning-behavior complex. Indeed, focus on feelings without regard to values will more likely lead to addictions and compulsions than beneficial behavior.
Check the Facts Maybe you can look back at your life and think of a few situations where you overreacted. Or you might notice that something once felt like a big deal when it was really pretty unimportant. You can check the facts in the moment to help reduce the intensity of these extreme emotions. Ask yourself the following questions to check the facts:
1 What event triggered my emotion?
2 What interpretations or assumptions am I making about the event?
3 Does my emotion and its intensity match the facts of the situation? Or does it just match my assumptions of the situation?
It’s only human—most people give more attention to the bad things than the good. If you hear ten compliments, and a single criticism, you’ll probably focus on the criticism. If you notice yourself focusing on the negative aspects of an experience, try to stop and refocus on the positive. Practice by doing a small positive activity every day while making a point to acknowledge the good parts (even if things aren’t perfect). Don’t let minor problems ruin the moment. Adding one or two positive activities won’t change your life, but over time the happiness they create will start to add up. Here are a few ideas for quick positive activities to get you started:
Have a good, unrushed meal.
Watch a movie.
Visit with friends or family.
Go for a walk.
Put on headphones and do nothing but listen to music.
Give yourself a relaxing night in.
Try a new hobby.
Research consistently shows that self-regulation skill is necessary for emotional well-being. Self-regulation is the ability to act in your long-term best interest, consistent with your deepest values. A constant reminder of our ardent nature, emotions surge through us at every second of the day. But we often take wrong actions when wrong feelings filter through our mind without restraint. To avoid the burn of acting out during an emotional upsurge, take a few simple steps to calm your heightened spirit and quiet your uneasy mind. When the moment has passed (in hindsight), you’ll be grateful you were able to be the master of your emotions.
References
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/anger-in-the-age-entitlement/201110/self-regulation
http://www.therapistaid.com/content/0114.pdf
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201502/5-ways-get-your-unwanted-emotions-under-control
https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/self-regulation.htm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-carmen-harra/controlling-your-emotions_b_3654326.html