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Feb 21, 2021

The Tyranny of Feelings

Crying Baby by Harald Groven kongharald 16655857630 EDIT

Emotions matter, in countless ways. They alert us to potential opportunities and threats. They're essential inputs into the process of logical reasoning. They allow us to rapidly process vast amounts of data from multiple sources in parallel, without having to rely on the much slower process of conscious deliberation. [1] And they enrich the human experience immeasurably: What would it be like to live without joy--or without grief?

I emphasize the importance of emotions in my coaching practice, in part because a leader's emotions are contagious, and a leader who's unable to regulate their emotions in order to have the most useful impact on others is going to be much less effective. [2] And in a number of other settings over the past 15 years I've been involved in efforts to highlight the importance of emotions and their value in organizational life, from teaching Interpersonal Dynamics (aka "Touchy Feely") and launching The Art of Self-Coaching at Stanford [3] to running workshops on communication and feedback with startups and executive teams.

Over this time I've observed a meaningful shift in our conceptual understanding of the role of emotions at work and in the behavioral norms that govern emotional expression in practice. By no means has this shift been universal--it varies widely across firms, industries, and cultures--but in general there's a greater appreciation for the value of emotions in professional life and a corresponding acceptance of a wider range of emotional expression.

This work has yielded substantial benefits. People can communicate more clearly, more directly, and on a wider range of topics. They can develop deeper, more meaningful relationships with colleagues. (In some cases this change in professional life has had a positive impact on peoples' personal relationships as well.) And people can simply be themselves more fully on the job, accessing their instincts and intuition without worrying that they'll be labelled "emotional."

But I'm also observing an increasing cost, which I describe in brief as "the tyranny of feelings," or, more expansively, as the constant privileging of our subjective emotional experience. A simplistic interpretation of the idea that "emotions matter" is "My feelings are justified, because they are my feelings. My feelings at this moment take precedence over all other considerations. I have the right to express my feelings any way I see fit. And if I believe that you are causing my feelings, you are obligated to modify your behavior in order to align with my desired emotional state."

This, of course, is the logic of young children, who must privilege their subjective emotional experience because it's the only way they know to navigate the world--and it's a necessary survival tactic deeply rooted in our evolutionary biology. Human infants can't do much to fend for themselves, compared to the offspring of other mammals, but they can readily capture our attention and care by indicating their distress.

But I don't believe that acknowledging the importance of emotions requires us to think like children, nor must we always privilege our subjective emotional experience in order to realize the benefits of a deeper understanding of emotion and enjoy a broader range of emotional expression at work. So what can we do? Here are some concepts I find useful to bear in mind:

We Are Not Emotions--We Have Emotions

The relationship between emotion and consciousness is complex. We certainly have the capacity to reflect on our feelings and take other deliberate actions to influence our emotional state. [4] But emotions are typically generated involuntarily, outside the window of consciousness, and by the time a feeling registers in our conscious mind it can seem thoroughly immersive and all-encompassing. In part this is due to the physiological dimension of emotion--the neurotransmitters that accompany an emotional response have a powerful effect on our bodies in numerous ways, from altering our heart rate and blood pressure to the various visceral responses we describe as a "pit in the stomach," a "sinking feeling," or "butterflies," among many others.

The enveloping nature of our emotional response serves an essential purpose by priming us to take swift, decisive action. But sometimes that's exactly the wrong move, and we're better served by resisting those impulses and considering a broader range of options. This process starts with an awareness that we are not an emotion, we are having an emotion. The emotion is a transitory state of mind and body, not an identity. It can feel stilted and silly to say "I'm having the experience of anger" rather than "I'm angry!" But we're well-served by heightening our awareness of the distinction between the two. Perhaps "I'm feeling angry" is a reasonable compromise.

External Factors Do Not Cause Our Emotions

Further, recognizing the distinction between our sense of self and our subjective emotional experience allows us to more readily see the ways in which we actively influence the latter and to take greater responsibility for our emotional state. It's all too easy to blame other people or circumstances for "causing" our emotions, but that fails to acknowledge our own contributions. As I've written before:

Saying that someone else "makes us feel" an emotion suggests that they are responsible for our emotional state, and that's highly problematic. When another person's statements and behavior trigger an emotional response in us, it's inaccurate to presume that the other person is the responsible party and that we're an innocent bystander.

We're not passive recipients of the data through which we interpret and make sense of the world. We play an active role in every stage of the process as we gather, interpret, and respond to that data, which includes other people's statements and behavior [as well as other circumstances we encounter]. [5]

Having established some distance between our sense of self and our subjective emotional experience, we can then assess the steps through which we have contributed to our own response:

  • The data we've chosen to focus on, and the data we've chosen to ignore--including any missing data we've failed to even envision. [6]
  • Our interpretations of this data and the meanings we've assigned to it.
  • The theories and beliefs that explain our interpretations--our "explanatory narrative."
  • The actions we take (or refrain from taking) as a result of our explanatory narrative.

At each step of this "Ladder of Inference" [7] we have agency and are making active choices. External factors serve to trigger our emotional response, but the nature of that response is a function of our internal mental processing.

Reasoning Is Not Enough

We possess two distinct forms of mental processing: the first is automatic and involuntary, while the second is deliberate and effortful. Work by social psychologists beginning in the 1960s resulted in the terms "System 1" and "System 2," coined by Keith Stanovich and Richard West [8] and later popularized by Daniel Kahneman. [9]

System 1 thinking extends well beyond the realm of emotion. (For example, when asked to calculate "2 x 2" we engage in System 1 processing and automatically think "4," although there's obviously no emotional dimension to the experience.) But most emotions can be characterized as System 1 responses, arising involuntarily in response to a situation and, as noted above, our explanatory narrative of the situation.

System 2 thinking entails a conscious decision to focus and direct our attention. We can characterize System 2 as reasoning, but the idea that emotion and reasoning act in opposition to each other has been thoroughly debunked by neuroscience research. Emotion is not an unerring guide to right action, and unregulated emotion can obviously trigger irrational behavior and contribute to biases that distort the reasoning process, but in general emotion and reasoning act in concert. [10]

And yet while a heightened awareness of the nature of emotional experience and of the choices we make as we navigate the world can be helpful, we can't simply rely on reasoning to defuse undesirable emotions. As Kahneman notes, this is a result of the complex and interdependent relationship between System 1 and System 2, and our susceptibility to various cognitive biases [11]:

In the context of attitudes...System 2 is more of an apologist for the emotions of System 1 than a critic of those emotions--an endorser rather than an enforcer. Its search for information and arguments is mostly constrained to information that is consistent with existing beliefs, not with an intention to examine them. [12]

Emotions Can't Be Controlled, But They Can Be Regulated

Given these challenges, we might wish to be able to control our emotions--but as psychologist Daniel Wegner has noted, this would be disastrous:

It is clear that emotion should not be very susceptible to willful control. If we could turn off all our emotions, feel no pain, never laugh, not be gripped by fear or despair, stop being excited, and so on, we could easily end up dead... The priority of emotions over will is important for our survival because it allows our plans to be interrupted by the immediate pressures of reality. [13]

But even though we can't--and wouldn't want to--control our emotions, it's essential--and eminently possible--to regulate them. And to be very clear, emotion regulation does not mean suppressing our feelings. Suppression is essentially an act of make-believe--we pretend we're not feeling what we're feeling and hope to distract ourselves until the feeling passes. We can do this for short periods, but not for an extended length of time--and some research suggests that the effort may be counter-productive. [14] In contrast, emotion regulation involves improving our ability to sense, comprehend, articulate and express what we're feeling, and we develop those skills by getting closer to our emotions, not by distancing ourselves from them:

  • Sense: Emotions are physiological events before they register in consciousness, so being more attuned to the physical manifestations of particular emotions--which are highly individualized--can allow us to (literally) feel our feelings sooner.
  • Comprehend: We often know we're feeling something, but we're not quite sure what. Expanding our emotional vocabulary rather than using one-size-fits all terms can help us more accurately identify subtle, nuanced feelings. [15]
  • Articulate: Ample research demonstrates that talking about our emotions makes them easier to regulate. [16] Reflecting on them and writing about them are also helpful, but interpersonal dialogue is a much more powerful mechanism. (And we can't always pause an interaction in order to reflect or journal.)
  • Express: Beyond labeling and giving voice to our emotions, we convey what we're feeling in a host of ways. Cultivating the ability to utilize tone of voice, facial expressions, body language and gestures, and other actions allows not only to regulate our own emotions, but also to help others regulate theirs. [17]

A final point on regulation: We often focus on the need to down-regulate emotions associated with negative states: impatience, anger, anxiety. But it's just as important to be able to down-regulate emotions associated with positive states--unbridled exuberance and optimism can be equally problematic.

Get MESSy

All of this is easy to grasp conceptually--and very difficult to bear in mind when we're in the grip of an emotional response. But there are a set of practices that allow us to enhance our capacity for emotion regulation in the moment. I'm not a fan of cheesy acronyms, and this is literally the only one that I use in my practice and my teaching, but I encourage clients and students to "get MESSy":

  • Mindfulness: The most reliable path to a mindful state is meditation, but activities such as walking, time in nature, and certain forms of exercise can have a similar effect. The goal of mindfulness in this context isn't to achieve some sort of bliss, but simply to be more effective at noticing what we're feeling. [18]
  • Exercise: Regular physical activity attunes us to our unique physiological manifestations of emotion and allows us to sense an emotional response earlier in the process. [19]
  • Sleep: Ample research shows that when we' re not well-rested our ability to regulate emotion is severely impaired. [20]
  • (Reducing Chronic) Stress: Persistent exposure to chronic, low-level stress also diminishes our ability to regulate emotion, and there are often stressors we can minimize with some modest changes in our daily routines. [21]

In Closing: On Authenticity

One of the driving forces behind "the tyranny of feelings"--the simplistic understanding of the idea that "emotions matter"--is the contemporary emphasis on (and misconception of) authenticity. I've seen this occur many times over the years with people who've gone through a program like Interpersonal Dynamics (aka "Touchy Feely") at Stanford or some similar training--and I went through it myself when I took Touchy Feely as a student in 1999.

Many of us who enter such programs have a gap between the wide range of emotions we feel internally and the much narrower range of emotions we're able to express outwardly with others, and this gap often leads us to feel inauthentic. These programs are designed to narrow that gap by encouraging us to express our emotions more fully with others--and although we all make mistakes and go through struggles in the process, most of us conclude such programs feeling more capable of expressing emotions effectively. We feel more authentic, and it feels great!

But then we must apply these lessons out in the real world, and as I used to say to students when I taught Touchy Feely, the experiences we've had here are real, but this is not the real world. We must take what we've learned and translate these concepts into behaviors that will allow us to be effective in very different environments with very different expectations regarding emotional expression. [22] And if we've misconstrued "authenticity" as the constant privileging of our subjective emotional experience, it's highly unlikely that we will meet with success.

The solution is to recognize that authenticity is not unregulated self-expression, but something much more complex. As I've written before,

Authenticity isn't an individual characteristic; it's an interpersonal experience that occurs in the context of a relationship. We are not--we cannot be--authentic in a vacuum or at a remove from others. To "be authentic" in isolation is meaningless. To "be yourself" without taking the context into account isn't authenticity--it's narcissism. While authenticity certainly entails some degree of self-disclosure, and while we may choose "to let our true selves be seen" in some way, for these actions to have value we must do so in a way that's mindful of the impact on others (and ourselves.) [23]

Emotions matter. And the ability to express our feelings in ways that enrich our lived experience and our relationships with others rests upon a host of internal and interpersonal skills that are eminently learnable--and may take a lifetime to master.

 

This piece draws upon a number of others I've written on themes related to emotion at work:

Footnotes

[1] For more on the nature and purpose of emotion:

[2] For more on leadership and emotional contagion:

[3] For more on Interpersonal Dynamics (aka "Touchy Feely"), see A Brief History of T-Groups. For more on The Art of Self-Coaching, see the (freely available) public version of the course.

[4] Attitude and Behavior

[5] You Make Me Feel... (On Language and Responsibility)

[6] Seeing What's Not There (The Importance of Missing Data)

[7] Racing Up the Ladder of Inference

[8] Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate? (Keith Stanovich and Richard West, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 23, Issue 5, October 2000)

  • Stanovich and others have gone on to point out shortcomings in the System 1/System 2 framework, while affirming its utility, and it is certainly sufficient for the purposes of this discussion. For more, see Dual-Process Theories of Cognitive Processing: Advancing the Debate (Jonathan Evans and Keith Stanovich, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2013)

[9] Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman, 2013)

[10] As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has noted, "Reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behavior." For more on the relationship between emotion and reasoning:

[11] When Heuristics Go Bad

[12] Thinking, Fast and Slow, pages 103-104 (Daniel Kahneman, 2013)

[13] White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts: Suppression, Obsession, and the Psychology of Mental Control, page 123 (Daniel Wegner, 2nd edition, 1994)

[14] For more on the impact of suppressing emotions:

[15] Vocabulary of Emotions

[16] Talking About Feelings

[17] Despite the importance of non-verbal behavior and other forms of action, the idea that "93% of communication is non-verbal" is a myth that has been refuted by Albert Mehrabian, the UCLA psychologist whose research was the basis for that figure. See Mehrabian and nonverbal communication (Olivia Mitchell) and "Silent Messages": A Wealth of Information About Nonverbal Communication (Albert Mehrabian)

[18] On mindfulness:

[19] On exercise:

[20] On sleep:

[21] On chronic stress:

[22] Conform to the Culture Just Enough

[23] Cautionary Tales (Authenticity at Work)

 

Photo by Harald Groven.