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Nov 05, 2022

Emotional Speed Bumps

Speed Bump by Andrew Rivett veggiefrog 3435380297 EDIT

A major theme in my practice is emotion regulation--helping clients better manage their inner emotional experience, and then articulate and express what they're feeling in ways that allow them to accomplish their goals more effectively. [1] Much of that work involves down-regulating strong negative emotions: anger, fear, grief.

But sometimes we're tripped up not by strong emotions, but by weak ones. We're not enraged, just annoyed. We're not terrified, just worried. We're not overwhelmed, just sad. These weak feelings rarely lead us to take significant steps that trigger profound remorse, but they often cause us to feel stuck in some way, making it more difficult to obtain a desired outcome or resulting in expenditures of time or effort that we later regret.

I've come to think of these feelings as "emotional speed bumps"--they create a slight barrier between us and a goal or a preferred activity, raising the necessary activation energy just enough that we fail to move forward. And in the process, while held in place, we fall prey to unproductive impulses--nothing catastrophic, just poor uses of our attention--or we procrastinate on a task that can be deferred, perhaps indefinitely, when we would have been better off addressing it.

Something--or someone--evokes annoyance, or worry, or sadness, and although these feelings aren't strong enough to derail us, they do disrupt us and distract us. We avoid that task at the top of our to-do list. We don't send that important message or have that tough conversation. We don't get up off the couch and take a walk or go to the gym. Instead, we pursue something easier. We find something on our to-do list that makes us feel "productive." We spend a little too much time on social media. We watch one more episode, or have one more drink, or go for one more level in the game. There are no tragedies here, no great losses--but eventually, at some point, we look back and wish we'd done things a little differently. What helps? Raising our awareness and taking action.

Raising Our Awareness

While awareness is rarely sufficient to drive change on its own, it's the necessary first step. You may already feel self-aware in some important ways--for example, you may have a clear sense of your strengths and weaknesses, your values, and the conditions under which you do your best work. [2] But that big-picture perspective doesn't necessarily translate into in-the-moment awareness of low-intensity emotions.

Some of those feelings may be right on the margins of consciousness--in which case they can still affect your behavior. [3] In this context it's important to distinguish between regulation and suppression. The former involves decoupling feelings and subsequent reflexive behavior, while the latter essentially entails pretending that we're not feeling what we're feeling. We can suppress emotions for brief periods of time, and, in some circumstances--such as a dire threat to our physical safety--this is a useful strategy. But we can't suppress emotions for long, and even making the attempt can be counter-productive. [4]

The key is increasing our conscious awareness of low-level feelings so that we can be intentional about the resulting behavior. There's no simple solution, but there are several practices that enable us to be more attuned to our emotions and to be more deliberate about our subsequent choices. A cheesy acronym I like--the only one I use in my practice--is getting MESSy:

  • Mindfulness: The goal of mindfulness here isn't stress reduction, but simply being more effective at noticing what we're feeling.
  • Exercise: Regular physical activity attunes us to the physiological manifestations of emotion and allows us to sense an emotional response sooner.
  • Sleep: Ample research shows that when we' re not well-rested our ability to sense and regulate emotion is impaired.
  • (Reducing Chronic) Stress: Chronic, low-level stress diminishes our ability to regulate emotion, and there are often stressors we can minimize with some modest changes in our daily routines. [5]

Taking Action

We often assume that our attitude determines our behavior, and that we act as we do because of underlying feelings. But this view of ourselves poses a challenge when a "speed bump" lies between our current state and a preferred alternative. We may conclude that our feelings are keeping us from engaging in desirable behaviors (or compel us to engage in undesirable behaviors), and somehow we're helpless bystanders, prisoners of our own psychology. We know we should act differently, but we don't feel like it.

However, rather than being a one-way causal relationship, it's a two-way street: While our attitude obviously informs and influences our behavior, our behavior also informs and influences our emotions in a dynamic and cyclical process. To be clear, we can't simply will ourselves out of profound dysfunction caused by strong negative emotions. But we do have much more power than we typically realize to consciously choose behaviors that will affect our attitude and influence the "speed bumps" that can get in the way of our goals and objectives. [6]

This shouldn't be interpreted as a command to "Stop whining and suck it up." Occasionally, yes, that's exactly what we need to hear, but such dictates are often counter-productive--even when we're just talking to ourselves. Rather, the key is to avoid relying on willpower, a finite and unreliable resource [7], and instead construct a robust and predictable set of routines that will make it more likely we'll follow our intentions, take action, and thereby influence our feelings. [8]

William Faulkner supposedly said, "I only write when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes at 9:00 every morning." [9] He didn't wait until he felt like writing--if it was 9:00, it was time to write. You may not require such a rigid schedule, but one of the values of a predetermined routine is that it makes it easier to follow through with commitments we've made (to others or ourselves), whether or not we feel like it. Another writer, Steven Pressfield, contrasts the "amateur," who works when they feel like it, with the "pro," who has a very different point of view:

When we turn pro, everything becomes simple. Our aim centers on the ordering of our days in such a way that we overcome the fears that have paralyzed us in the past. We now structure our hours not to flee from fear, but to confront it and overcome it. We plan our activities in order to accomplish an aim. And we bring our will to bear so that we stick to this resolution. This changes our days completely. It changes what time we get up, and it changes what time we go to bed. It changes what we do and what we don't do. It changes the activities we engage in and with what attitude we engage in them. It changes what we read and what we eat. It changes the shape of our bodies. [10]

 

Footnotes

[1] For more on emotion regulation:

[2] From Peter Drucker's Managing Oneself:

Most people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are well past their mid-twenties. By that time, however, they should know the answers to the three questions: What are my strengths? How do I perform? and, What are my values? And then they can and should decide where they belong. Or rather, they should be able to decide where they do not belong.

[3] For example, see Effects of subconscious and conscious emotions on human cue–reward association learning (Noriya Watanabe and Masahiko Haruno, Scientific Reports, 2015)

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

[5] For more on these MESSy practices:

[6] Adapted from Attitude and Behavior

[7] Against Willpower (Carl Erik Fisher, Nautilus, 2017)

[8] Building Blocks (A Tactical Approach to Change)

[9] Quote Investigator

[10] Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life's Work, page 72 (Steven Pressfield, 2012) I discuss Pressfield's work further in Leadership as Professional Practice.

 

Photo by Andrew Rivett.