Habits and Strategies

Getting overwhelmed or misled by our emotions can be a source of significant trouble. Emotions are not simple, but sometimes there are simple actions we can take to manage complex things. Today let’s look at a simple way to avoid getting overwhelmed by your emotions.

• When people were treated for phobias, practicing this simple skill lowered their fear by over 18%, and their psychological reactivity by over 27%. They also were less constricted generally, shifting from feeling a sense of threat to a sense of opportunity.
• When feeling stress, using this technique led to people having 40% fewer alcoholic drinks when they went to a bar or party than those who did not use this technique.
• When feeling angry with someone, those using this technique were 40% less verbally and physically aggressive than those who did not.
• Rejection brings with it actual pain. When feeling rejected those using this technique showed less activity in the parts of the brain connected to physical and emotional pain.

Using this simple tool can help us to deal with emotionally upsetting situations with a greater sense of calm and competence.

Okay, enough buildup, here’s the skill:

Learn to identify and name the specific emotions you’re experiencing in any emotionally charged situation. The appropriately straightforward name for this is “emotion labelling.”

But the problem with simple techniques is that we tend to ignore them; because they’re so easy we figure they can’t be very useful.

For example:

• If you want to improve your immediate sense of happiness and well-being, do something kind for another person. It’s so simple, but that’s the most effective action we can take to feel happier right now.
• If you want to increase your overall happiness, think of three good things that happened today, and how they came to happen. Simple. Takes a couple of minutes at most. But among people experiencing deep depression who did this for two weeks, a significant number lifted out of their depression. For those who were not depressed, their happiness increased significantly, too.

The problem with simple techniques is that in order to get the full benefit of any skill, we need to practice it until it’s a habit. It has to be something we can eventually do without thinking much about it. When something takes work to learn, we’re practicing it just in the learning of it, and then, having invested that time and energy in it already, we’re more likely to continue practicing it.

When something’s this simple, though, there’s not much to learn. We just have to do it. But we haven’t invested in it yet, so we tend to take it in, think, “wow, that’s a cool idea, I can do that,” and then when we’re actually in a stressful situation, we haven’t done the groundwork so that it comes naturally to us. We haven’t made it a habit.

It’s kind of like taking a math class, where we get the concept easily, but because it’s so obvious, we don’t do the problem set to practice it. When it comes time to take the test, we have to consciously remember and think about each problem, slowing us down, increasing our stress, and hindering our performance. Whereas had we practiced doing the problems, the answers would come more easily and automatically during the test.

And emotionally charged situations are a kind of test. The stress can be acute, and often important consequences flow from how we deal with them.

So let’s dive a little deeper into this. When we think of emotions, we tend to think in terms of positive or negative. Positive emotions feel good in themselves – things like joy, love, excitement, delight, serenity. Negative emotions don’t feel so good – things like anger, pain, grief, anxiety, regret.

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We each have, in effect, two selves: an experiencing self and a remembering self. Understanding the difference can help us make the most of our best times, and minimize the memory of our unpleasant ones.

Imagine that you’re asked to hold your hand in ice water for sixty seconds. It’s unpleasant and painful; not something most of us would choose to do for fun.

Now, imagine that you’re asked to do the same thing, same temperature, but then once that 60 seconds is up, continue holding your hand in the ice water for another 30 seconds. The only difference is that the additional 30 seconds will be one degree warmer than the first 60 seconds.

Which would you choose?

The shorter one, of course! After all, the initial 60 seconds will be identical in both cases, and then you’re adding another 30 seconds more pain to that for the longer one…

Well, strange as it sounds, you’re likely to choose the longer one.

When this was researched, after experiencing each of these, most people chose to repeat the 90 second painful experience over the 60 second painful experience.

Let me tell you why.

When we experience something painful, what our memory stores is the most painful moment and the ending. We don’t remember much how long something lasts.

The people choosing the longer pain were choosing from their remembering self. The part of our mind that stores the experiences we have. Whereas just now in the thought experiment you were choosing from your experiencing self. You were imagining what the experience would be like as you’re going through it.

This can be confusing, because while we live our lives moment to moment in our experiencing self, we hold all of our experience, integrated with our sense of self, our life story, and our understanding of how things are, in our remembering self.

Our self-concept, our sense of who we are, is primarily created around our remembering self, while we live in the moment through our experiencing self. This has implications for how we make decisions.

As Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, puts it: “The experiencing self is the one that answers the question: ‘Does it hurt now?’ The remembering self is the one that answers the question: ‘How was it, on the whole?’”

So with the ice plunge, we don’t really remember that one was 60 seconds and the other was 90 seconds. The peak of pain would’ve been the same, since both include that first 60 seconds at the same temperature. What we remember is that the last 30 seconds of the longer session seemed a little less painful – since it was a tiny bit less cold.

That last 30 seconds of very slightly reduced pain made an impression, and because of that, we remember the whole experience as less unpleasant. So even though in reality we’ll be exposing our experiencing self to an additional 30 seconds of pain, our remembering self will prefer it, because of the impression that it was less unpleasant overall.

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The popular saying is that money can’t buy happiness. The Beatles sang that they don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy them love.

I think the Beatles were mostly right about money and love. But there are ways of spending our money that can actually make us happier.

After a few years of frugal living, Cindy and Jeff had saved enough for a down payment on a house they liked. They bought the house, which they like a lot. Even though the mortgage payment was a bit of a challenge, they could manage it. For years they put all the extra money they had into the house – new appliances, furniture, decorating, repairs…

While they were doing this, they passed up on several travel opportunities with friends, and missed other adventures and opportunities to go out. They avoided spending any extra money on these experiences, which they saw as fleeting moments in time, while they focused on building their house the way they wanted and accumulating the things they thought would bring them a higher quality of life.

Unfortunately, thinking that these more enduring possessions were the prudent things on which to spend their money, they also ended up spending more than they had on some of them, using credit cards and a line of credit they had added to their house. This debt crept up and caught them by surprise when interest rates began to climb.

They found themselves resenting the money they were throwing away servicing this debt, as well as the large mortgage they had on their house; and regretting the time they were spending taking care of all their things.

They also saw some of their friends doing lots of things, going out to dinner, taking trips, having fun adventures together. They missed those things. They missed their friends.

And they began to wonder where they went wrong.

George Washington once said, “Government is like fire, a useful servant but a dangerous master.” Money can be like that, too. Money can be a tool in the service of our good life, but for that to happen, we need to be conscious and in charge of how we make and spend our money.

It can also be a dangerous master, when we allow our spending to follow from our impulses and habits, and when we allow debt to pile up.

How we spend our money has the potential to enhance our lives or ruin our lives. The difference comes down to how we choose what we spend our money on.

This is easy to say, harder to do, because our habits are strong and enduring, and compelling emotions and impulses often flow from those habits. Any bad habits we’ve accumulated with respect to our spending have a well paved road on which to drive us – to the same place where good intentions can take us. Whereas any new habits we seek to build will start with the equivalent of a wispy, overgrown path through the woods.

This means that we need to purposefully, consciously, train ourselves in the new habits for long enough that that wispy path becomes paved and enticing; while we allow the old road to fall into disrepair.

But we also need to know what sort of spending is likely to improve our lives, and what is not.

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In Greek and Roman Mythology, Narcissus stared at his own reflection, so absorbed in his own image he was oblivious to anybody else. The idealized image that he saw withdrew him from the world. He was in an emotional vacuum, devoid of anything but what he wanted to see.

But aside from Narcissus, and those suffering from the psychological condition of narcissism, our own self-reflection can provide us the kind of useful assessment that allows us to live up to our own standards.

Researchers Robert Wicklund and Shelley Duval discovered back in the 1970s that when people were in front of a mirror and told they were being filmed, those people changed their behavior in very positive ways. They worked harder, gave more accurate answers to questions, were more consistent in their actions, and acted more consistently with their values.

About a decade later, Charles Carver and Michael Scheier looked at this in more depth, and within their larger explorations of self-awareness and self-regulation, found something fascinating.

When people sat at a desk with a mirror—not a great big ostentatious mirror mind you, just a small part of the surroundings—they were more likely to stay true to their own values than to follow someone else’s orders. They would work harder, they resisted being bullied into changing their opinion, and when they were told to administer shocks to somebody, they were more restrained in doing so.

A simple, small mirror provided enough reflection for people to better regulate their behavior.

Self-regulation is the moral fulcrum that allows all other moral behavior. Without the capacity for self-regulation, we would live in an amoral world; a world where the concept of right and wrong is meaningless. If we are not in charge of our actions, if we don’t have a choice in what we do or don’t do, then we can’t reasonably be held responsible for our actions.

Self-reflection is what makes self-regulation possible. It allows us to see ourselves in action. In these experiments, a mirror was used to enhance people’s self-reflection. But self-reflection is also enabled by the feedback we receive from others—and therefore our choice of relationships can make a big difference in our lives.

If a mirror can have the kind of impact that was demonstrated in these experiments, think of how great an impact we have on the people in our lives—particularly those who look up to us: children, employees, students, and lots of other people we might not ever think we were influencing.

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Our social nature has huge benefits, and underlies much of our resilience and success as a species. But it can also steer us in bad, sometimes disastrous directions, and can be used to manipulate us.

We are social creatures. We influence one another, we care about each other, we follow each other and are able to cooperate and act together as a team.

We’re also cultural creatures. We learn from each other – and learn most effectively by watching what other people do. It matters to us what other people say and think and do. The accumulated knowledge and habits and standards of the ages become part of our own self-concept.

For much of what we do, this works extremely well. For small bands of hunter gatherers, which is how mankind has spent most of our existence, it’s been essential for our survival and flourishing.

And yet these very qualities can be used against us to manipulate us into accepting, doing, and buying things that work against our deepest values, that we can come to regret, and that sometimes can lead us into horrible tragedy. They make cults possible; they make the most murderous regimes and criminal gangs possible. They allow us to be passive when emergency action is necessary.

The madness of crowds has led to the most ridiculous of buying fads – the Tulip Bulb Craze in Holland in 1636, stock buying and selling frenzies, and desperate mobs fighting to get a fad Christmas gift that are in short supply – often deliberately so (the toy we promised isn’t there, so we buy something else more expensive to make up for it, then we go back in January to get the initial toy we had originally promised. – it’s very effective).

Like most of our nature as human beings, this quality is not good or bad in itself. It isn’t something to reject whole cloth – living a hermit’s life is a recipe for misery. But our social nature also isn’t something to embrace unthinkingly – its dangers can be horrific.

This is a part of our nature to master: to bring consciousness to, to be aware of our own tendencies, and to be vigilant of going off the rails into groupthink.

To this end, let’s look at some specific tendencies, and then how we can bring a degree of mastery to them.

• We tend to look to what others believe or do for signs of how we should believe or act in a situation. When we see evidence that other people are doing something, we are more inclined to do that same thing ourselves.
• We’re also more inclined to follow the crowd when the crowd is big.
• We are much more influenced by people who are similar to us. This is the power of peer pressure, and it’s more powerful than we usually acknowledge. “If little Johnny jumps off a cliff, are you going to jump off a cliff, too?” Well, actually, you’ll at least be tempted – especially if Johnny and all the rest of your friends do it.
• We’re also vulnerable to obedience to authority, as Stanley Milgram found in his famous experiments. Fully two-thirds of participants from all walks of life administered a seemingly life-threatening dose of electricity to – what they thought were – subjects in a learning and punishment experiment. If you don’t think you’d be among those folks, guess again. Two thirds of you reading this would likely do the same.
• BUT, when participants in that same study saw someone else refuse to comply, only 10% went on to comply themselves. So what we see others do can also have a very positive influence as well.
• We’re more vulnerable to social influence when we’re uncertain. We look around for clues of what others are doing when we’re not sure what to do ourselves. This is why we see a group of bystanders failing to take action when someone may need help. It’s not because “those are bad, cowardly, uncaring people,” it’s because they see that nobody else is doing anything, and the situation is ambiguous enough that we’re drawn to do what others are doing – which is nothing.

In order to counter these tendencies, it’s important to remember that in most situations they actually serve us fairly well. Other people brush their teeth, we brush our teeth too. Other people obey the rules of the road, we obey the rules of the road (most of the time). Other people are less violent than our ancestors, we’ll do that, too.

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There’s a vow that, if taken by romantic couples, would go a long way toward establishing safety and trust, and limiting much of the pain that couples commonly experience – much of the pain that couples commonly inflict upon one another.

There will be pain in any relationship, we hurt each other without even trying. There’s plenty of conflict in the very best of relationships. John Gottman has found in his research that in successful marriages about 69% of conflicts never get resolved. So a happy marriage isn’t about the absence of conflict, or an absence of hurt.

It all comes down to how we treat each other given that there is conflict, and times when we unintentionally hurt each other.

In other words, it’s what we do or do not do intentionally that makes the difference.

The vow that I suggest to make between the two of you is this:

Never do anything to deliberately hurt one another.

That means you don’t call each other names, you certainly don’t physically harm each other, you don’t say things on purpose that you know will wound, and you don’t do things on purpose that you know will cause pain to the other.

This can seem very weird to some couples. Some people have a philosophy of emotions that says that we should express whatever we’re feeling or thinking, regardless of whether it hurts or not, in order to be “honest” or “authentic.” It can feel like you’re not being genuine if you don’t express your emotions however they come out, or say what’s on your mind – even when that includes harsh attacks, criticisms, and bitterness.

But, to be blunt, that’s a rotten philosophy of emotions. Our feelings are not wise, all knowing guides. At best they are clues to check something out with the other person. At worst they are reflections of old habits or indulgent impulses.

What’s more, if we’re angry and worked up to the point where our heart rate is above about 100 beats per minute, we’re probably switched over to our sympathetic nervous system and we don’t have full access to our higher brain functions – so what we say in the heat of anger can feel essential to express, but the chances are it’s just a primitive impulse, the fight part of our sympathetic nervous system aiming to inflict damage on a perceived threat; and that’s not a good communication strategy between two people who love each other.

Our emotions are important, of course, and we don’t want to ignore them. But emotions without thought are worse than useless; bringing consciousness to our emotions is essential. I might be angry about something my partner does or says, but then I need to take responsibility for what I’ve brought to that reaction, and how I express myself. I might be angry because what she said or did reminded me of something that hurt long ago, but was not intended to hurt now. I might have misunderstood or misinterpreted what he did or said. I may be stressed out or troubled by other things that put me on edge completely aside from what she did or said.

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