Our Volatile Emotions and Why They Reign Supreme Audiochapter from Calm Your Emotions Audiobook

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Calm your emotions. Overcome your anxious negative and pessimistic brain, and find balance, resilience, and calm. Written by Nick Trenton. Narrated by Russell Newton. Though I wasn’t the best student in school, I was able to develop a close friendship with my high school English teacher, Mr. Locke. I’m not sure why he took an interest in me, but I suppose a convenient narrative is that he’s the reason I ended up as a writer, and I have him to thank for all of it. Unfortunately, that would be false to say, as it’s not remotely what we talked about most of the time.

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Throughout the whole year, it was enlightening to ask him about the books we were reading for class and what he actually thought about them. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer? Overrated. The Great Gatsby? His favorite of all time. Of Mice and Men? He preferred the movie.

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However, things got really interesting when the end of the year drew close and he started to open up about the people in my class—my peers. Of course, this was a dream come true for me: an adult willing to gossip with me about my fellow students. Looking back, it was wildly inappropriate for Mr. Locke to engage in such topics with me, but it’s not like the teachers weren’t doing it amongst themselves, anyway. He let me in on a little secret of his: Whenever he had to give negative feedback, he would always make sure to try to build up the individual student a couple days before. He would do this to make sure their self-esteem, at least in the realm of his class, was sufficiently high, such that his negative feedback wouldn’t have as big of an impact. He wanted students to not take things so personally and to be able to separate his comments on their work from them as a person. Too many students in the past had received his feedback in less than ideal ways.

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He wanted them to hear, “This paper could use work,” not “You need work." My teenage mind was blown away, and I told him that he was so clever to use “Jedi mind tricks” on his students. He told me there were a few students he would do this on more than others because he felt they had low self-esteem or he knew they were being bullied outside of his class. My adult mind still admires him and thinks that he had tremendous insight into how people worked—especially future adults who were still figuring themselves out and had fragile egos. It wasn’t until much later that I realized he was helping students gain emotional resilience through raising their self-esteem. Self-esteem is an essential component of emotional resilience and is often deemed the immune system of emotions. When it’s high, you can handle what’s thrown your way, and when it’s low, you are more likely to collapse under scrutiny.

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Mr. Locke had somehow dialed into that and instilled that into his students. Emotional resilience is a trait that is like the background music in a movie. When it’s there, you don’t notice it and it seems that scenes just fit together without a hitch. However, if it’s missing, suddenly words are taken the wrong way, everything feels wrong, and the scene falls apart. In other words, you notice it when you need it, but not when you don’t. Therein lies the conundrum of resilience, emotional stability, and strength in the face of tragedy and despair—how do you get it before you need it, and how do you know if you don’t have it? The ugly truth is that none of us are naturally born with it.

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Some of us are put into nasty situations where we develop coping mechanisms for strength, but that doesn’t mean you are resilient. It just means the dam hasn’t broken yet. And what will you do when the dam breaks? My hope for this book is to arm you, whoever you are and whatever you may or may not have suffered, with tools and techniques to persevere and thrive. Emotional resilience is one of those rare qualities that cause a drastic shift in how you see the world. More importantly, it allows you to see you and gain better self-awareness of your thought patterns and behaviors. First understanding and then being able to harness and master your emotions gives you a lens of safety and control over the world, which gives you the feeling of being able to do anything.

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Emotions are a major part of our existence and our identity as humans. Yet we don’t often take a moment to think about where they come from, what they mean, why we feel certain ways, and how emotion actually affects us. Why did I cry at that movie? Because it was sad. But why did I cry? Because that’s what you do when you’re sad. But .

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. . why? We just accept that we are affected and don’t take the time to think about how to strengthen or regulate certain emotions for our greater well-being. Unfortunately, it’s this lack of attention that leads precisely to a lack of resilience. If you don’t understand the forces at work inside your brain, you can only fall prey to them with no hope of regulating or even combating them. As such, we are completely at the whims of our emotional brain.

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Mastering and conquering our emotional brains requires a bit of knowledge and background into what you are going to be battling. How do emotions function, what is their role, and why are they capable of completely dictating our lives? Emotional Origins What makes us feel emotions? How do we know and understand what we feel and why we feel it? If you were to ask one hundred people to answer those questions, you would probably get one hundred answers (let’s be honest, you’d probably get more than one hundred!). Ultimately, it boils down to a study in neuroscience, but we will first explore two standard theories to explain the emotions that color our lives. The first theory is called the cognitive appraisal theory, put forth by Swiss psychologist Klaus Scherer.

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This theory states that emotions are judgments about the extent that a current situation meets your expectations and goals, no matter how you define them. Happiness is felt because it is an evaluation that your expectations are being met or even exceeded. If you win the lottery, you feel happiness because it solves your financial needs and likely exceeds your expectations. Similarly, if you receive a nasty unexpected bill in the mail, you also feel emotion—surprise and disappointment—since you almost certainly didn’t wake up that morning expecting that to happen. If you’re asked out on a date, you feel happiness because it holds the promise of satisfying your romantic needs. In the same way, when you feel sadness, it is an evaluation that your goals are not being met or that the situation falls below your expectations, and anger might be the feeling that is aimed at whatever is blocking your goals. Here, emotions are an instinctual reaction to objects or situations that relate to your expectations and goals.

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Often our goals are not clearly defined, as they can be both subconscious and conscious. You may not be able to say exactly why you’re happy or disappointed at times—this theory sheds light on the fact that you subconsciously held some type of expectation that was or was not met. If you are unemployed and presented with a job offer, you will feel happiness because you see it as a way to solve your financial worries. Alternatively, if you lose your job, you are saddened because you lose your financial stability. Your emotions are tied to how your status quo changes—another way we hold expectations we don’t realize. In some cases, it may have little to do with the situation itself; maybe you’ve always hated your job and wanted to leave it. But when you’re faced with the unexpected loss, you are saddened because it represents the loss of stability and your future career.

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I had a friend who sometimes liked to toss a coin to make tricky decisions. Not because they wanted random chance to tell them what to do, but because the outcome almost always gave some insight into what they really wanted to do. If the coin “told” them to make Decision A and they found themselves feeling disappointed, they took this emotion as a sign that they unconsciously were already expecting Decision B! Luckily for us, we don’t have to employ such dark arts to gain more mastery and awareness over our own unconscious mental processes. The cognitive appraisal theory also speaks to your perception of how well a situation meets your goals and expectations, so your emotions will reflect that. This theory says that it’s our evaluation of events that causes us to feel certain ways about them. So, we feel positive emotions for an event that we have appraised as having some kind of benefit for us, and negative ones when we perceive some kind of threat or drawback.

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Understanding this theory means that you can better evaluate your emotions by always determining what thoughts accompany them and how these interpretations and analyses actually line up with reality . . . or not. For example, you walk into a room, and a crowd of people bursts out laughing. You feel embarrassed because your appraisal of the situation goes a little something like this: “They were laughing at me." What caused this emotion?

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Not the strangers laughing, but your thoughts about the meaning behind this action. This way of looking at things is keystone in what’s called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and in many ways, it may seem overly simplistic. Nevertheless, the above theory is useful for background about other, more-involved theories of emotion. If you simply pause and become aware of two things: 1. What are my expectations here? 2. What are my interpretations and appraisals of events? then you might find yourself at a very good starting point for better understanding yourself and your emotions. It might help you realize if you are holding subconscious expectations one way or another.

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The second explanation of the nature of emotions is that they are purely an interpretation of the body’s signals. Psychologists William James and Carl Lange proposed that emotions are just the perceptions of change in the physiology of your body—for example, changes in heart rate, breathing, perspiration, and hormone levels. This theory argues that emotions such as happiness are merely a physiological perception instead of a judgment as the previous theory states. Other emotions like sadness and anger are also mental reactions to different kinds of biological functions. According to James and Lange, your body’s state will change first as a reaction to an external stimulus, which will spur you to associate an emotion with it. For example, imagine you are about to perform a speech in front of a group of people and think of your body’s reaction beforehand. You might feel your heart pumping faster or your breathing increasing slightly.

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Your mind will associate the combination of these physical reactions with a feeling of nervousness. There is undoubtedly a connection between emotions and physiological changes. However, the problem with this account is that bodily states are not nearly as fine-tuned or diverse as the many different kinds of emotions. Returning to the previous example, your heart pumping and increased breathing may also be interpreted as a feeling of excitement because of the close physiological similarities—and this is where you may start to wonder whether personal interpretation and appraisal might come into play. This is the problem with associating emotions with physical reactions, because you often have more emotions than reactions, and many biological responses are too similar to differentiate. Some theorists claim that the basic physiological reactions to environmental stimuli are a little like primary colors. Just as you can create a whole rainbow of different shades with just red, blue, and yellow, by mixing and increasing or decreasing the intensity of different “primary emotions,” you can create some of the subtler, more complex emotions.

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Boredom, for example, may simply be a very, very mild form of disgust. Understanding that emotions may be tied to your physical reactions also means you may be able to convince yourself of alternative emotions. Imagine you are about to partake in some public speaking. Telling yourself that you are excited instead of nervous, considering the similarity in bodily reactions, may help you better face the task ahead of you. It can be quite beneficial to perceive negative physiological signs and use them for positive purposes. Neither of these theories tell the entire story; one is focused on emotions as thoughts, and the other is focused on emotions as physiology. In truth, they work hand in hand.

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Emotions, in the most general definition, are neural impulses that move you to act. They are something the brain commands to achieve a better existence, one that has evolved over time to help us survive and meet certain needs. Psychologist Linda Davidoff defines emotion as a feeling that is expressed through physiological functions such as facial expressions, heartbeat, and certain behavior such as aggression, crying, or covering the face with hands. According to her, emotions are a result of changes in the brain, where neurochemicals such as dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin increase or lower the brain’s activity level according to what is more beneficial in the circumstances. For example, the human emotion of love is proposed to have evolved from circuits in the brain that were stimulated and designed for the care, feeding, and grooming of offspring. Having offspring around eventually cemented these pathways and associated it with positive nurturing behavior. Oxytocin is released primarily during childbirth, breastfeeding, and cuddling, but as the theory goes, this bedrock emotion has evolved over time to our social and cognitive understanding of love.

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Gives a new meaning to calling your loved one “baby,” right? Emotion makes us act a certain way based on the stimuli that we have processed and is the interpretation of a series of physical changes. When you are in a situation where your palms begin to sweat, your heartbeat increases, and you are actively searching your surroundings, your body will do these physical things without much thought. They are reactive. But your mind will subsequently interpret the combination of these behavioral changes with a feeling of fear. First you have the stimuli, then the physical reactions, and then the psychological reaction—the emotion—that comes after. It’s important to note that often the brain is wrong, and the brain’s concept of “beneficial” is not always compatible with the modern age.

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ious case of Phineas Gage. In: 1848

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After the accident, he was suddenly abusive, profane, irritable, and irresponsible. He was simply a different person, unrecognizable to family and friends. There was no other possible conclusion other than the areas that were destroyed regulated certain parts of the personality and certain emotions. Later, neurologists explained this more precisely, in that the brain’s frontal lobes are associated with moderating impulsive behavior, setting goals, and other abstract areas of thought. Those around Gage described him as having become fitful, irreverent, prone to the “grossest profanity which was not previously his custom,” and “a child in his intellectual capacity” but with “the animal passions of a strong man." Gage’s case was one of the first true revelations that proved that emotions originated from a biological source and were a direct result of the brain, instead of being associated with the soul, heart, or simple expectations. This is important since it strongly suggests that our appraisals and cognitive evaluations of things are not the source of emotions—or more accurately, they’re not the only source.

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Modern research indicates that during events, the sensory information that you pick up is transmitted to the thalamus, the relay center of the brain, before being transferred to the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. The amygdala instantly processes the information and sends signals so that hormones are released that activate the autonomic nervous system. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex slowly processes the sensory information from the thalamus in the background, a slower system overall. The amygdala causes a person’s instantaneous response to an emotion-evoking event. There is no thought in this; it is pure instinct. The brain has evolved to have two different tracks of stimuli-processing: one quick and one slower. The quicker one is designed for protection and survival: when the amygdala thinks there is a threat that must be acted upon immediately in one way or another.

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Alternatively, the prefrontal cortex is responsible for gradual processing, which allows someone to evaluate the emotion-evoking event and even regulate their emotions surrounding it—and this often happens long after the immediate stimulus is gone. This fast and slow reaction can be seen in everyday life and is much simpler when seen firsthand. If there is a sound in the middle of the night that wakes you, you will instantly be alert and ready for action, even if you’ve had little sleep and your whole body is exhausted. This is an instinctual reaction to a threat so that you have a chance at survival. This is something that can easily be traced back as a result of evolution. If you are slow to respond to threats, you will not be able to survive. On the other hand, the slow processing of external stimuli in the prefrontal cortex is for less-instinctual emotions.

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Something like love takes longer to process because of the number of contributing factors. It is not instinctual to feel love when presented with an event or situation. It takes a bit longer and more processing of the overall situation. So what are emotions? We’ve discovered that they are part biological and part based on evaluating the world around us. But they are far more than that, as any romantic comedy will show you. Perhaps the best and most helpful way to conceive of emotions is this: They depend on your unique brain chemistry, your circumstances and status quo, your expectations, and your entire life of experiences that inform everything prior.

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The Purpose of Emotions The purpose of emotions really stems from that track of processing that goes directly to the amygdala for instant action. Emotions evolved for a reason. They are one of the most important indicators of what will keep us alive and happy by letting us know what we should avoid and what we should pursue. Think of emotions as the mental version of your sense of taste. You will avoid foods that don’t taste good, such as rotten fruit, because they are likely to be bad for you, and you will actively eat what tastes good to you because they are likely to be good for your health and survival—though not your waistline. Of course, this is why fat tastes amazing and why feces has a foul smell. Consider that for flies and other insects, feces must smell like heaven!

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Why? For them, it represents a precious and nourishing location that supports the survival of their eggs and larvae. So, they’ve evolved to pursue, not avoid, that smell. Emotions go a level further than helping you avoid rotten fruit (or go for it, if you’re a fly . . .). They help you avoid dangerous situations, psychological damage, and less-subtle dangers that are just as fatal.

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Emotions lead to the well-being and ultimate survival of both individuals and groups by providing a quick and automated reaction to certain events and circumstances. This is so that we can avoid danger and take advantage of opportunities. This can be seen in both animals and humans. However, unlike animals, human emotions often clash with socially and culturally acquired conventions and rules. In this case, these automated responses may actually be disruptive and less adaptive than consciously deliberated responses. Tears of sadness may garner sympathy, but it can also denote weakness and a moment when someone’s defenses are down. Emotion is beneficial because it causes an organism to carry out certain preset behaviors that have been adapted over time to lead to the best outcome.

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In most cases of emotion, our movements lead to developing an intense focus on the object that triggered the emotion, something that focuses all our attention. This can be seen in behaviors like freezing in place, fleeing from a threat, or nurturing our young. All these actions are caused directly because of our reactions to specific emotions. If it’s not positive focus, it’s negative, paranoid fixation. They both assist survival. An example of this is when a herd of deer is grazing, and even if only one of them hears the slightest noise, the entire herd looks up and concentrates very specifically on its surroundings and is able to identify and focus on a nearby lion before fleeing. A human example might be when a parent hears their child scream from across a room.

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They are immediately focused on nothing but their child and develop tunnel vision until they find out what’s wrong. This happens because we are inclined to have a much greater focus on the object that causes whatever emotion we are feeling. Along with pure survival instinct, emotions also serve to alert us to threats based on our past experiences. We all develop “emotional programs” that we adopt in situations that warrant emotion. For example, we have had to learn how and whom we can trust, how to cope with failure, and how to react to death. These all come with behaviors that we have had to learn over time so that we know how to act in certain emotional situations. Based on the above, the purpose of emotions is to first detect evolutionary survival cues, then trigger reactions that have worked in the past and that we have deemed as good solutions to those problems.

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It is a continuous commentary on how we, and others around us, see the meaning of things. Some emotions are automatically signaled because we have such an immediate and quick reaction to them. Other emotions, such as jealousy or guilt, can be harder to identify and consciously react to. In either case, emotions help us because we are able to see what they are pointing an arrow at. You may have noticed that since emotion has the convenient purpose of keeping us alive, it tends to have a negative bias. Negative emotions are more noticeable to us because attending to negative events is often more important to our survival than dealing with positive events. The worst outcome when you delay a reaction to a positive event—for example, a birthday, a promotion, or a wedding—is that you celebrate a little later than you normally would have.

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However, with a negative event, there are much worse things that can happen if our reactions are delayed. It seems quite appropriate that we focus on dealing with negative things first, as they have the power to kill us, whereas positive events merely enhance our well-being. There is an infinite number of ways that situations can take a turn for the worse rather than taking a turn for the better. The night before a big event, we are most often thinking about every single thing that could go wrong, not everything that could go right. If any of these possibilities actually occur, you need to deal with them, so it’s better that you imagine them and aren’t caught off guard. Appropriately, negative emotions take up more mental bandwidth. Avoiding death is simply more important than eating cake.

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iate and healthy manner. In a: 2012

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It can cause you to fixate more on what you are avoiding and can be detrimental to your physical health. As if this wasn’t evidence enough, another study in the United States by experts at the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Rochester showed that those who fail to say or express how they feel increase their risk of premature death from all causes by about thirty-five percent. When researchers evaluated specific causes of death, they uncovered that the risks increased by forty-seven percent for heart disease and seventy percent for cancer. Death rates are highest among those most likely to bottle up their emotion rather than express it to others and let them know how they feel. All of this is to say that no, mastering our emotions does not mean that we suppress or deny them. Rather, it means that we learn to understand them so that we can consciously choose our actions instead of allowing ourselves to be pushed around by forces we don’t see or even understand. Emotions are at the center of almost all that we do and who we are.

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They add color and dimension and meaning to life, and existence would be pretty meaningless without them. And yet we don’t have to be held hostage by them. We must strike a fine balance between fully feeling them, not suppressing them, and regulating them. Takeaways: • Our emotions have enormous power over us. Sometimes this is good, and other times, it makes us feel completely out of control. This is bad. But there is good reason for this type of power—you can view emotions as a type of warning signal that has evolved alongside humans to keep us alive and healthy.

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In the absence of higher critical thinking, emotions taught us about the world and how to regard it. This is also the reason that negative emotions can make us spiral out of control so quickly. • These types of dangers aren’t present anymore in our modern lives, and our task now is less survival and more controlling and harnessing our emotions. The extent to which we do this can wholly determine how our lives go. In no way is this suggesting that emotional suppression is the key to happiness. In fact, emotional suppression is linked to poor health outcomes, so we must simply find the fine line of healthy emotional expression and reaction. Chapter 2. The Keys to Eliminating Emotional Triggers Emily is having a brilliant day out with her family.

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They’re at a theme park for the day; the sun is shining, and she’s in an excited, carefree mood. Her mother asks them to pose, snaps a picture, and then shows Emily the photo. “Cool, looks great,” says Emily, but in fact from that moment, her mood starts on a steady downward spiral, and in an hour, she’s feeling miserable. We’ve all heard it and we’ve all felt it: a small provocation that can send our emotions spiraling in a direction that we didn’t anticipate and that objectively shouldn’t have any impact whatsoever. This could be that one song that reminds you of something extremely traumatic, or maybe that one person you don’t see often enough, but when you do, your emotions are out of your control. It could even be mentioning a single word, such as a name or the word “fat” that is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what it represents to you. For Emily, the photo made her think a certain cascade of thoughts: She saw how old her father looked in the photo and realized all at once that this just may be the last time they get to come to this theme park as a family.

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This sets her off thinking about the death of her grandfather the year before, and in no time—seconds, even—she’s unhappily mulling over the idea of death itself and her own mortality, and she even finds herself wondering, “What’s the point of it all if everyone you love will eventually disappear?" These are emotional triggers: things that elicit an immediate emotional response. Like the trigger on a gun, it can be small and its movement slight, but the result of firing that emotional gun can be devastating. There are positive and negative triggers, but we don’t need help with positive ones. Some can lead to positive emotions, like discovering an item from your childhood that you immediately associate with happiness or love. It boils down to something you have a special sensitivity to, and it can impact you for the entire day or even week. With only a few words, you are feeling entirely off-center and fall into a pit of anxiety, depression, guilt, or shame.

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Why are we so deeply affected by something that we rationally know should not affect us as badly as it does? Can’t we be logical creatures that aren’t ruled by our emotions? Yes and no. We have emotional triggers because we have lived, struggled, and come of age. Our triggers are proof of our experience. No matter how lucky you have been in life, you have had moments of hardship and trauma you never want to experience again. Things that happen in the past, especially when we were children, are often ingrained deep into our minds.

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We may not have been able to deal with the pain or suffering or embarrassment that we felt when we were younger, so we suppress it—in fact, that’s the logical part. We work hard to avoid, deny, or ignore things to keep our days pain- and worry-free. And years later, when we are adults, reminders of our pain can bring those feelings screaming back. It’s not productive to go completely down the Sigmund Freud route and assume that all of your adult pains are the result of childhood traumas, but we can say that our triggers and causes of pain from which we want peace and escape are rooted somewhere in the past. For Emily, this trauma isn’t some psychological complex bubbling up from memories of a deep dark childhood—it’s the very real trauma of losing someone she loved just a year ago. Within the past, there is usually a story accompanying our pain or trauma; sometimes it isn’t something you can pinpoint, but a variety of events that lead to a painful idea overall. There is nothing wrong with you if a painful memory triggers pain; it just means you’re human.

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It doesn’t mean you’re weak or mentally ill, because everyone does the same. It’s just a feeling that we have because of what something may lead you to think or what something may represent to you. For instance, the pain of being constantly berated and ridiculed for being overweight as a child is something you can easily imagine causing multiple emotional triggers in adulthood. You may be extremely sensitive about your weight, or you might have developed eating disorders to cope with those feelings of inadequacy. You might feel an overwhelming need to exercise for hours a day, or you might still have a terrible body image and see an obese person in the mirror. After you are triggered, how do you act when you suddenly experience great pain? You retreat into whatever habits or defense mechanisms you’ve developed over the years.

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For some, this will be physically withdrawing, while for others, it means a complete mental breakdown into a state of hysteria. The worst reactions will prevent you from living your life as you want, and this is the real downside to feeling our emotions fully. For Emily, the cruel irony is that her negative thought processes actually cause her to stop enjoying the day out with her family, and even if this were her father’s last day on earth, she was too upset and distracted to appreciate it. The word trigger is an important point here. The idea of an emotional trigger is that it is something that occurs automatically. One of the goals of this book is to move away from this automatic, involuntary path and onto a more conscious path. A gun will always fire if you pull the trigger, but luckily for us, emotions are more malleable.

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“Between stimulus and response, there is a space,” said Nazi concentration camp survivor and author Viktor Frankl. “In that space is our power to choose our response." By learning how to identify your emotional triggers, you can start to seize control of your compulsions and respond rather than react blindly to them. Once you start becoming aware of these triggers, you can begin to monitor them and realize that you can intervene in the period of time between the trigger and your response. This intervention is the key to changing the outcome of the situation and trying to get a more desirable result. Emotional triggers often lie behind some of our worst behaviors. If you think about negative behaviors that seem automatic or out of your control, then you may just be unaware of the emotional trigger that caused it.

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Have you ever found yourself saying “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did that”? Chances are, you were triggered and responded so automatically that your conscious mind was scarcely aware of what happened. In Emily’s case, the thoughts may be so swift that she finds herself feeling miserable—but has no idea why. Triggers are very personal. Different things trigger different people, and so a trigger for you may not affect another person at all. The emotional intensity that is felt by a trigger is of a similar intensity as the initial trauma itself, which perfectly explains why anyone would want to avoid it. These triggers can be activated by any of the five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste.

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A trigger can even be another thought or emotion, itself triggered by another stimulus. This explains why someone like Emily got caught up in a downward spiral. This is the old familiar pattern where you feel depressed about being sad, or ashamed about being embarrassed, and so on. When looking to better respond to your triggers, you need to identify the trigger itself first. The external stimuli may appear to be innocent (because, in a real way, it is!), but it could be a trigger simply because of what it represents to you. It may have nothing to do with the words that someone said to you and more to do with the links you make in your mind. Perhaps a comment is made about you never attending college.

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This is a plain fact, but it may also make you think about other things you never had the chance to do or things that you missed out on. It might make you feel small and inferior to the people around you. Does this comment mean that you are dumber than the people around you? Is everyone in on the joke except you? How dare they imply that traditional higher education is the only way to be a respectable member of society! A single sentence has the power to unlock all of these wayward thoughts. Because it’s a trigger, sometimes you can’t help but follow this train of negativity.

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The following thoughts have nothing to do with the initial trigger, but you are led there regardless. It is the story of the trigger that is important, no matter how significant. Finding the story behind the trigger is key to solving it and changing your responses. The Nature of Triggers For our purposes, we will think about triggers as purely external; there is an external event that gives rise to an internal reaction. External triggers might be benign or harmful by themselves, but remember, they aren’t necessarily related to why you might experience an emotional breakdown. Examples of external triggers include the following: • being rejected or abandoned • helplessness in painful situations • being ignored • being misunderstood • when someone is angry at you • being mocked • being treated unequally • when someone doesn’t make time for you • being vulnerable or exposed • when someone shows disapproval • being blamed or shamed • being judged • when someone isn’t happy to see you • when someone is trying to control you None of these are rare in everyday life. In fact, someone might not actually be rejecting you, but it’s what you will perceive if it is a trigger for you.

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For some, they are just the tip of the emotional iceberg and are related to much deeper-rooted pains and wounds. This is why people’s emotions may escalate very quickly in response to a trigger. In other words, the former list of triggers is a direct reminder of negative associations involving the following list: • acceptance • respect • being understood • being in control • attention • being needed or liked • being treated fairly • being included • predictability • safety • insecurity • pride • lack of confidence • love There are repeated and overlapping themes. Once these emotions are triggered, the typical response is certainly not to calmly address it, but rather intellectualize it out of existence or lash out in an attempt to cope. Both tend to lead to self-destructive behavior, and this also means the next time you face the same emotional trigger, it may even have a worse effect on you. The coping mechanisms that we develop as a result can vary. We may create interpersonal conflict, act in a passive or aggressive manner, or stop communicating at all.

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The problem with these negative coping mechanisms is that over time, they will become patterns that produce further emotional stress, drain our energy, and influence our lives and our work. You’ll begin with distress about your trigger; then the distress will compound as you notice the effects of your negative coping mechanisms and how much you want to stop your behavior patterns. These self-destructive habits may include the following: • lashing out at people • becoming needy and attention-seeking • becoming a people-pleaser and ignoring your own needs • completely withdrawing from others • deflecting blame onto others • becoming addicted to soothing behavior, such as food, alcohol, sex, drugs, shopping, and so on The whole situation, from trigger to coping mechanism, is doomed from the start because of all the negativity that surrounds it. Imagine you are at work and are asked to do a certain task, such as handing in a report or something similar that your employer expects and trusts you to complete. You do as you’re told, but his feedback is not ideal. Though you may have put a lot of time into the project, he is unsatisfied and finishes off by saying he is disappointed. Those words could be the trigger for you: the idea of disappointment.

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It isn’t so much that you have to fix the report—that’s something that will only take an hour or two. It’s the fact that you let someone down. Maybe you can relate that to your own childhood and a situation where your parents depended on you but in the end weren’t able to rely on you after all. The weight of a parent’s disapproval is hard to accept even as an adult, but especially as a child. Logically, you know you aren’t a child any longer and the situation is different, but triggers aren’t rational. Someone in a semi-paternal role to you, your supervisor, has given you a negative evaluation, and that brings feelings of inadequacy flooding back. From there, you become withdrawn and turn away from everyone else, especially those who care about you.

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Being alone only allows the negativity to fester and build further, and you begin to wonder if people hate you. Negative thoughts sustain themselves by adding more negativity to the fire, and you will berate yourself even if you’re not sure why you feel so badly. Subconsciously, the story you’ve told yourself from childhood is in full effect. Feelings of insecurity, anger, remorse, or guilt will make themselves felt as well. You are feeding into a constant cycle where every rejection or disappointment will lead you to replicate this behavior, and this compounds as you feel bad about the behavior itself. Is there even an exit for this ride, or are you doomed to stay in the cycle? Does this sound familiar?

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You can easily recognize this as self-destructive behavior, but it’s not so easy to stop the freight train when you’re in the heat of the moment. This is a classic example of an external trigger (the disappointing comment from your supervisor) that digs deep into your psyche and conjures up something that is only tangentially related (the disappointment from your childhood). This isn’t a sequence you can stop without deeper self-understanding. Emotional Needs Specifically, we must understand what emotional need is being exposed or poked when we encounter an external trigger. The trigger is like a sharp dagger digging into a soft spot of weakness in your psychological armor. For example, a common emotional need is the need to be in control, which may have stemmed from not having control at an earlier stage of your life. These needs aren’t bad; in fact, they have served you extremely well in the past.

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The reason you have them is because at some point in your life, they allowed you to reach a certain goal or enabled a certain outcome. Your life experiences may have taught you that success depends on maintaining control, creating a safe environment, and surrounding yourself with people who appreciate your organization. So what might happen if you feel that someone is subtly trying to wrestle control away from you, even if all they say is, “Well, what about this restaurant instead?”? It might seem that your emotional need for control is being destroyed, and rather than deal with the discomfort of not having control, you make sure that you can keep it and that others know it. All of those options are unpleasant for everyone involved, especially when they occur loudly in a split second. By the way, the list of emotional needs has a complete overlap with the list of negative associations from triggers: • acceptance • respect • being understood • being in control • attention • being needed or liked • being treated fairly • being included • predictability • safety • insecurity • pride • lack of confidence • love Of course, the less these needs are fulfilled, the more your mind will actively search for situations or events that threaten them. Your mind becomes volatile, and you start to think only in terms of self-protection and security.

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Someone may try to simply assert their own opinion, and you may react negatively because you see them as trying to cause havoc in your life. At this point, you need to judge the truth of the situation. Are you really losing the need that you have? Is something actually being threatened, or is your reaction borne solely out of vicious defense? Only you can answer that, but in most cases, your reactions and emotional responses are far more about you (and your stepped-on emotional needs) than anyone else. We’ll talk more about how to handle feelings of discomfort and emotional distress in the next chapter, but for now, all you need to do is ask yourself “Why?" You need to consciously acknowledge the need that is triggering your response or you will be enslaved to that need.

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If someone wants to try a new approach to an activity and asks you first, are you really giving up your control? Are you hanging on to a certain feeling rather than responding to the situation at hand? Can others indeed be trusted to take care of things and also not hurt you simultaneously? And for that matter, is the need for control as imperative to you as it once was? What will happen if you do not possess it at every moment of every day? Understanding emotional triggers will have a very real impact on your life. You may not even realize that some of your negative habits are a result of triggers.

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If you find that you are following distinct patterns of emotional triggers and then have a reactive negative event, then it is time to do something about it. Own your emotional needs and understand that you are acting out of pain and longing—everything that occurs afterward is just a projection of this. There’s no reason that dealing with reminders of your past should be so painful and destructive. The Emotional Spectrum To better understand our emotional needs, we actually need one additional foundational skill: being accurate with our emotions. In doing so, we must define the entire emotional spectrum so you know what you are dealing with, can guess where it came from, and then can react in the most optimal way. A doctor is only effective if she can diagnose the underlying sickness. Once that is achieved, she can prescribe medicine and actions to help that particular sickness.

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We can’t seek to strengthen our emotional resolve if we are taking a stab in the dark at what emotional needs are feeling depleted. Emotional granularity is what we are truly seeking when we think about accurately expressing and feeling our emotions. This is the process of understanding what you are feeling by putting a specific name on it. It seems insignificant, but you will be able to release some of the intensity of the emotion just by labeling it. This is because there is a certain amount of tension from uncertainty and a lack of clarity about your feelings. Consider when you visit the doctor and have an illness, and the diagnosis is elusive. This is uncomfortable because you feel an intense lack of control and knowledge.

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granularity was coined in the: 1990

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However, the study found that some people used the words to refer to distinct and differing experiences. Each word represented multiple emotional concepts and feelings. Others in the study lumped these words together under a single conceptual meaning, basically alluding to the feelings of being miserable. According to Barrett, the greater the granularity, the “more precisely” you can experience yourself and your world. This means that you can pinpoint how you feel and better identify a solution. By using different words for different emotions and individualizing your vocabulary, there are many more benefits to your emotional health. We become what we label ourselves, and this can either help or hurt you.

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People who were able to learn diverse emotional concepts were able to understand more finely tailored emotions. Emotional granularity can have a large influence on your health and well-being because it equips your brain to handle a wider range of emotions that you may experience. In other words, by knowing what you’re feeling, you know better what the causes and underlying emotional needs are, and you know how to solve it. For example, you may be feeling a combination of sadness, boredom, restlessness, and yearning, and without the proper understanding of your emotions, you may just generalize it as feeling sad.

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But this does not solve the problem because it may not be exactly what you’re feeling.

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However, this all changes if you have emotional granularity and are able to correctly identify your emotion as loneliness.

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Lumping emotions together means that you may not know how to deal with them, but identifying them all as distinct, independent emotions promotes understanding.

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Acting to fix a general feeling of sadness is a far different course of action than acting to fix loneliness.

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The better your understanding of what it is exactly that you’re experiencing, the more flexibility your brain has in anticipating or prescribing actions.

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It is easy to generalize or dismiss what you are feeling, but it is much more effective to give it some thought and pinpoint exactly what your emotional state is.

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One step to take in increasing your emotional vocabulary is to take a look at the true spectrum of emotions.

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Quick, try to name as many emotions as you can.

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How many did you come up with?

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Here, the spectrum is represented by Robert Plutchik’s wheel of emotions (courtesy of wired.com): The purpose of this wheel is to provide a visual method for identifying a variety of emotions and to help relate them all to each other.

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Emotions on the outside, such as love, are a combination of two emotions in the petals beside them, in this case, joy and trust.

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Similarly, awe is a combination of surprise and fear.

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In this way, you can view a range of different emotions and you can visually map which ones are similar and what emotions make up others.

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You may have been able to name only five emotions before seeing the wheel, but you can now see there are subtle differences and degrees for each.

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You can probably also imagine circumstances that would create each feeling and match the corresponding faces.

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Understanding emotional diversity is fundamental to our well-being.

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A study led by Anthony Ong of Cornell University investigated the effect of emotion on health.

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The study suggested that happiness is too often considered the emotion most strongly connected to a healthier body.

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The researchers found that feeling a wide range of emotions—what they termed emotional diversity, or emodiversity—may be the link to better health.

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This includes negative emotions and is another powerful argument for understanding emotional granularity and familiarizing yourself with Plutchik’s wheel.

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Ong had participants keep a journal of their emotions for thirty days.

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The participants had to rate the extent to which they experienced sixteen positive emotions that day.

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Happiness, enthusiasm, determination, pride, inspiration, and strength were among the positive emotions.

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They also recorded any negative emotions they experienced, such as sadness, anger, shame, and guilt.

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Emodiversity was measured by the number of different emotions felt by a person, the overall distribution, and the number of times each emotion was felt.

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Ong found that people who experienced a wider range of emotions, including negative ones, were better at regulating emotions, keeping their cool, and refraining from using alcohol as a coping mechanism.

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He explained by comparing the emotions to a natural ecosystem, which is healthier when each various species serves its specific, functional role.

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If any one species becomes too dominant, it destroys the balance of the entire ecosystem and causes, for example, the dodo bird to go extinct.

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Emodiversity similarly helps us prioritize and regulate our behavior so that we can cope and adapt to any given situation.

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Experiencing many different but specific emotions has more adaptive value than experiencing fewer emotions or more general ones.

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This is because the more specific emotions provide richer and more useful information to guide our decisions and how we face challenges.

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For example, if you identify that you are feeling a variety of emotions such as anger, shame, and sadness, this will be more useful to you than just saying you feel “bad,” which is a general term that doesn’t provide you with much insight into how to solve the problem.

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By specifying anger, you can then delve into what or who made you angry.

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By specifying shame, you are implying that you yourself have done something that you may regret.

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By specifying sadness, you may believe that the cause of your current emotional state shouldn’t have happened and you want to fix the issue.

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All these points of action simply come from being able to identify your real emotions.

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If you had just stopped at feeling “bad,” you may not have done anything at all.

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Indulging in the full range of negative emotions simply prepares you.

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Admitting you have emotional triggers and needs is only the first step to emotional resilience and calm.

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This chapter takes the additional steps of understanding emotional granularity and the overall importance of attaching a name to feelings.

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Indulge in your emotions and feel the entire spectrum of possibilities.

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Your happiness depends on it.

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Takeaways: • When we talk about emotional resilience and calm, we are really talking about the emotional triggers that push us over the edge.

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The vast majority of the time, these triggers will be subtle and external and not at all proportionate (or even related) to the response they will create within you.

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This is the classic case of overreacting to a simple statement based on how it made you feel, not the actual substance.

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• Of course, this is because our emotional needs are being exposed, poked, or prodded in an uncomfortable way.

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To escape this discomfort, we react by lashing out, avoiding, or coping in a variety of other ways.

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Very few of these habits are healthy, and this sequence of events is what will lead to your unraveling and emotional instability.

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• It’s not enough to simply know your emotional needs; we need to gain emotional granularity into what is actually happening.

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A doctor can only treat a sickness if they know the actual cause, and Plutchik’s wheel of emotions is a useful tool in labeling yourself and escaping the uncertainty of a general feeling of dread and discomfort.

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In fact, diversity of emotion helps us remain balanced and even-keeled.

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d by Russell Newton Copyright: 2022