It’s a familiar refrain – “take control of your emotions” or “take it down a notch” One that we hear when we are being unreasonable and are seriously overreacting to a rather benign situation.
On the inside, we might be thinking to ourselves — “Easier said than done.”
We might even get indignant because the ones offering this advice sometimes struggle themselves. It’s not so easy to tone it down when we are in the emotional thick of things.
Let’s pull apart what is actually going on here.
We do have levers and dials we can use to control our emotions, but it is really hard to access them when we are emotionally dialed up to 12 (on a scale of 1 to 10).
It is far easier to control our emotions when we aren’t dialed up so high. Why is it that sometimes we handle things with ease and other times, we blow our stack?
Remember that Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made, tells us that our body budget plays a huge role in how we react and respond to our emotions. If we are overly tired, famished or brain-drained, it will be incredibly hard to remember that we have tools to dial down loud, distracting and uncomfortable emotions.
Dr. Ellen Langer, author of the Mindful Body, teaches us that next level “mindfulness” is noticing how much variation we have in how we respond and react to life. Some days, we glide through as though we are impervious — and other days, even the smallest things set us off.
Could it be that our body budget is a key factor in our ability to “control our emotions”? The answer is — of course!
When you are well resourced – you got a good night’s sleep, hydrated to refresh all your cells, had your morning coffee and a peaceful morning routine, ate a healthy breakfast — chances are your inner battery is at 100%. You are super-charged and ready to take on the day.
When the opposite is true, your inner battery might be in the red. Your brain and body go into energy saving mode and it will be uber hard to even remember that you have levers and dials to access for emotional control.
Body budget should be the very first thing we take into consideration when we are attending to emotional dis-regulation, when our dials get stuck on the highest volume.
If your phone was at 5%, you’d realize that it needed to be plugged into the charger before you make that long phone call or try to use it for driving directions to a new appointment.
Not us though — we think we are tougher than that — that we can power through even when we don’t have full resources.
Here’s a little known secret: We can only “power through” when our body budget is in the red when we are well-practiced in using our emotional controls; the dials and levers that help us move them in a way that we can actually handle in an appropriate fashion.
The key to controlling our emotions is our ability to mindfully and skillfully use the controls.
Ethan Kross wrote the book Shift with this very purpose in mind. To teach us how to use levers and dials to shift our emotions into manageable states – under a whole variety of circumstances.
We can’t control our emotions by ignoring them, wrestling with them, or projecting them onto others. The more someone tells us to “take the emotions out of it”, the louder and stronger they usually become.
If you think of your emotions as warning signals and remember that they are showing up for good reason, it helps a great deal. Imagine that your emotions are that slowly descending railroad gate. Inevitably that red and white wooden arm will reach out and stop you in your tracks. This mental image is powerful — and reminds you to stop in your mental tracks, to take a pause before crashing through the safety gate.
Think of your emotions as being on a spectrum – sometimes they show up soft and demur; a gentle level 1 or 2. Other times, they hang out in the middle in that range of 4-6. And then there are those times, emotions are dialed all the way up to 10, feeling so intense we can barely think straight.
Ethan Kross delivers just what we need to become the master control operators to use our emotions with more discernment and self-control. His book Shift offers seven different strategies that help us pull a lever and downshift — or reach for a dial and turn emotions up or down to help us meet the moment, maturely and wisely.
Just like changing gears in your car or your bike, it is best to slow down before reaching for those dials and levers. Get really skilled at using a much-needed pause between stimulus and response. That’s the most important step.
In that pause, you can make wise choices. You can pull a lever, turn a dial on your emotional control panel. Again – use a mental image like your car to remind you how easy and automatic this becomes (with practice, lots of practice).
Ethan Kross helps us customize our emotional control panel. Imagine buttons and levels that are labeled as follows:
- Perspective taking – is this situation going to matter as much in an hour or a day?
- Reframing – is this a problem or an opportunity? A big deal or just a pothole?
- Self-talk – is your inner critic advising you or your inner coach/best friend?
- Ask for help – if you aren’t resourced right now, seek help from someone who is.
- Take a break – When important things arise and you aren’t up to the task, be honest. State that this really matters and you want to be your best when you work through it. Give yourself an emotional cooling off period.
- Use your senses – listening to music can shift a mood faster than a pep talk. A short nature walk can restore your inner balance. Smells can invoke self compassion and a reminder of your core values (think of the smell of cookies baking in the oven, or a pot of your favorite soup simmering on the stove).
- Value Calculation – we often solve for short term discomfort giving an immediate action greater weight than the real long term goal we are aiming for; take a little longer pause and invest in your future self. Give greater weight to your longer term goal of working toward mastery in pulling and dialing your emotional controls.
The next time someone tells you to get a grip, picture your emotional control panel and grab a lever or a dial.
The next time someone tells you to take the emotions out of it, pause to consider what your emotions want to tell you. Remember that they are data rich but they simply might be supersized. You can shrink them down to manageable and still work with the important information.
You can actually take control of your emotions by dialing them up or down or pulling a lever and choosing emotions that best suit the present situation you must handle.
Emotions will come and go. Sometimes we handle them with grace and other times e let them run the show — and when they do, they usually run amok.
You already use your emotional control panel in certain occasions, like when you are at work, or at dinner with good friends. So you’ve got a good starting point. What you need is more practice in using the control levers and dials where you get more opportunities.
When and where are you most likely to go off the rails? Use those frequent experiences to level up your mastery of emotional controls.
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