The First Step to Managing Your Emotions

If you follow me on the gram you may have seen my post on Tuesday about naming your emotions. Mathew Lieberman at UCLA has conducted some interesting research suggesting that simply naming an emotion can decrease activity in the brain’s emotional centers (like the amygdala which is responsible for triggering the fight or flight response) allowing the frontal lobe (responsible for reasoning and thinking) to gain control so you can gain perspective and respond rationally.

In Lieberman's words:

“When you put feelings into words, you're activating this prefrontal region and seeing a reduced response in the amygdala. In the same way you hit the brake when you're driving when you see a yellow light -- when you put feelings into words you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses. As a result, a person may feel less angry or less sad.”

The more we are able to identify, label and express emotions like pain, anger and sadness the easier it will be to make this shift in the brain, think of it as mental exercise. As a result, we will be able to respond to our emotions more rationally instead of reacting “emotionally”.

Mindfulness uses the same principal, the first step to being with your emotions, feeling all the feels, is identifying or naming it. This makes it easier to disengage from it, you are observing it rather than identifying AS the emotion (i.e. I am feeling anger vs I AM angry). Then you can turn within, sitting with that emotion without judgement so you can process, release and move on (you're probably wondering, but HOW do I do that?, that's a post for another day).

Most of us have natural responses to difficult emotions that may actually prevent you from properly processing it, here are three examples:

1) Avoidance- do you need to distract yourself? Have you cleaned and organized your entire house, or binged every series on Netflix, slept all day, or managed to maintain a steady buzz all evening (or day- no judgment). There are lots of ways we can distract ourselves, I tend to overwork. We usually turn to avoidance when the emotion feels too intense or too big.

2) Blame – maybe you don’t avoid feeling, but do you play the blame game? Are you super critical on yourself, or others? Do you feel the need to people please, or be “perfect”? Self-blame can sound like “I’m so stupid “why do I always do that!” and projecting blame onto others can sound like “why would you do that to me” “if you cared you wouldn’t do that” “You’re such an idiot”. Something important to point out is that right now we are talking about identifying and sitting with your emotions, not who is at fault, your response to the event causing the emotions will come later. Placing blame and criticism is a way of protecting yourself from your emotions, you are trying to rationalize what you’re feeling instead of just feeling it.

3) Rumination – Blame & criticism often leads to rumination, because you are not actually dealing with the emotion it sticks around and you keep replaying the same story in your head over and over which creates suffering. You can start to feel overwhelmed, and like it’s never going to get better, or that you’re never going to get over it. Our subconscious mind can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s imagined, so by continually replaying these stories in your head you are triggering the emotions over and over again.

This can be a difficult process and it takes time to learn how to face it head on and sit with those uncomfortable emotions but I promise if you work through the discomfort now, it will pay off later. Did you know that emotions actually cause a cascade of biochemical reaction in your body, a physiological response, it is not just a thought or abstract feeling. When we are unable to process and release emotions they can be stored in the body causing tension, discomfort and disease. I’ll dive deeper into that in a future post, for now, I want you to work on identifying your emotional crutches so you can catch yourself and slowly start to face them head on.