Keep Your Emotions in Perspective

 Keep Your Emotions in Perspective

By Jeffrey M. Bowen

Do emotions control our decisions?  At times they can.  My first reaction to many situations is how I feel about it.  I think this is only human.  Remember Spock from Star Trek?  His stone-faced lack of emotion originated from another planet.   This came in handy in emergencies, but it drove the volatile human Dr. McCoy (Bones) to distraction.

 Bones had a point.   Real-world life without emotion is impossible.  Neuroscientists and other experts agree that perceptions, reactions, and motivation are shaped by our emotional presets.   When exposed to certain situations repetitively, we experience emotions that become habitual predispositions.  Often these become a lifelong feature of our identity.

To illustrate, in high school I was fortunate to compete in many speech contests.  Having an audience and getting positive reinforcement produced an memorable emotional high.   Accordingly, I chose a career that depended on public speaking.  Standing before a group, I always felt an adrenaline rush, but never fear.

On the other hand, years ago, a long period of river flooding caused a massive bridge on the state thruway to collapse without warning, drowning several families.   I get a creepy feeling every time we cross that bridge.   Similar mishaps, dramatized by media photos of cars teetering on the edge, stoke my fears of unrepaired bridges.      

When emotions galvanize action and are purposeful, they can be quite productive.   Anger, for instance, can prompt us to join a political campaign, while love may nurture caring and forgiveness.   The problem is that fears driven by negative experiences leave lasting emotional scars.

 My wife’s anxiety about moving is linked back to the seven disruptive times her family had to move when she was a child.   My own fear of boating in the fog derives from my dad’s terrifying nautical habits.   As for high school algebra, I won’t even go there.   Although reason and logic may temporarily overrule such fears, our emotions embed themselves in our views of the world.  Bad judgment and bias, mental or physical illness can result.

Why is this apt to happen?  In his current best seller, “Factfulness”, Dr. Hans Rosling stunningly documents how instant news coverage sets off alarm bells.  Journalists and activists typically focus on bad news.   Even though reported violent crimes in the U.S. have declined by about six million since 1990, the media mission to report worst case scenarios makes us feel just the opposite.

 We don’t stop to think that natural disasters, plane crashes, murders, nuclear leaks, and terrorism explain only a tiny proportion of deaths annually, compared to causes dominated by diseases, infections, and strokes.   Yes, the big causes are serious, but we confuse imminent danger with fear.  Despite minimal odds of exposure, we stress more about spider, snake, and shark bites than most anything else.    

The paradox of all this emotional upheaval is the plentiful factual information available to counteract our sense of crisis.  Dr. Rosling marvels that our data-based knowledge of world trends is worse than random guesses by chimpanzees.   Of course bad things happen out there, but in recent years virtually every indicator of our social, economic, physical and psychological health has dramatically improved.

 Our depressing insistence that the “world is going to hell in a hand basket” stems from the fact that we persist in remaining ignorant, misremember the past, or cling to outdated knowledge  in a world that is changing much faster than we realize.  I live in the present, but my data biases are locked in the 1950s and 60s.

Emotional control responds to strategies of mindfulness.  Here are a few suggestions that might help:

Ø  Avoid the “chicken little” trap.  Remind yourself in any stressful situation, it is unlikely that the sky is really falling.

Ø  Step back and don’t rush to resolve emotional situations.  Give them time to resolve themselves.

Ø  Blame bad situations on a gremlin, especially small emotional hassles.  Gremlins are always hovering about.  Displace blame in ways that don’t do harm to others.

Ø  Don’t fight your emotions.  Identify them, and apply reason of course, but denying the emotions just makes those worse.

Ø  Remember that your emotions are influenced by your past and often misremembered experiences.  These tend to become your vulnerabilities.   Accept this, and remain alert to it. Your emotions are you.

Ø  Practice reading other people’s emotions as it will attune you to your own.

Ø  Go to your happy place, get a good night’s sleep, put food on your stomach (especially ice cream), and remember intently those people who made you feel good, and just when that was.

Accept emotions as a big feature of life.  When we realize that our feelings are more about us than anyone else, we can change them.  On balance, we live in a world that is improving all the time.  Let’s feel good about it.