There I was. I was now in the big leagues. Or at least, so it seemed to my young, teenage brain. I was finally on the church stage with my cello as part of the music team. Since starting to play cello, this was one of my goals. After achieving a minimum level of proficiency, and auditioning for the music director, I was finally part of the team. I got my music in advance, practiced my part, and showed up to rehearsal an hour before service. Now it was my first opportunity to play. The music director tapped his baton and got our attention. Three, four, go!
No sooner than the music began, I was behind, scrambling to catch up, desperately attempting to play a fraction of the notes on the page that comprised my part. I could feel a wave of emotions welling up from somewhere deep inside me. Tears began to form, but I worked hard to repress them because a teenage boy should not cry. My initial thought was that everyone was being unfair, playing the music so proficiently and quickly while leaving me in their dust. How was it that everyone could be so indifferent to the fact that I was new to this? How can they be so calloused to not nurture a young musician? But then, I thought, No! They are not being unfair. You’re playing in the big leagues. This isn't a reflection on them. They are performing up to the standard. This is about you. You need to step up your game! Sink or swim, make it happen!
This is one of my early memories of transitioning from the mind of a child to the mind of an adult. Now fast forward almost 3 decades, and I see this same paradigm playing out in my children. Tying shoes, practicing piano, reviewing spelling words - when something is hard and when pressure is applied, they respond with tears and accusations. They respond, like I did, with their emotions. Frankly, that instinctual impulse is still present in my own mind – though I have learned how to see it and work past it.
Emotions are rooted deep in the brain in various locations such as the amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus, nucleus accumbens, and other loci known collectively as the limbic system. This region of the brain is responsible for primal and rudimentary processing of motivation, reward, emotional information, and memory. The limbic system is highly connected to other areas of the brain allowing our emotional center to control our autonomic nervous system (fight and flight vs. rest and digest) as well as receive higher level control from our prefrontal cortex. As such, emotions play a powerful role in how we view and interact with the world on a reflexive level.
Emotions are crazy things. At the same time, they add amazing color and profound complication to life. While in one sense, it would be convenient to have the Spock like ability to divorce emotions from all of the decisions that we make, there would also be significant downsides. By blunting our perception of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust we would lose the richness of relationships and put ourselves at a profound disadvantage as we navigate a world full of pleasures and threats. In fact, people who have this problem are diagnosed with various conditions like depression and schizophrenia.
At the same time that we need emotions. We also need a higher-level reasoning. Emotions make a really great barometer. But they make a really lousy compass. Part of what it means to grow up in to mature adulthood and to pursue excellence is to learn how to control your emotions. So the question that naturally arises is, how do you control your emotions? While this may not be the definitive treatise on emotional control, here are a few of my thoughts.
Understand
The first key is to understand why you have emotions. In the 1970s, psychologist Paul Eckman identified 6 basic emotions that are universal across human cultures. These are happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, anger and surprise. These feelings in different combinations are core to our personality as illustrated in the Pixar movie, "Inside Out." Other psychologists have subsequently discussed various combinations and have expanded on this list.
At a fundamental level, an argument can be made that emotions are a way of adding a particular dimension to human existence that allows us to exist more safely and effectively in this world. Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow discusses the research behind the idea of Type 1 and Type 2 thinking. Type 2 decision making is what we classically refer to as thinking. It is cerebral and critical. It is slow because it analyzes and weighs options. Type 1 decisions on the other hand are made out of a sense of intuition and instinct. They are influenced by our past experiences and also our emotions. So, as we look over the landscape of decisions that we make in a given day, it would be easy to see that it would be intellectually exhausting and logistically cumbersome if we had to dispassionately weigh all of the options before we could make a decision. The joy we anticipate steers us toward activities that are rewarding. Fear can be a warning that we are headed into danger.
Emotions are also a fundamental part of what it means for us to be distinctively human. Theologians describe God as exhibiting the distinctive characteristics of intellect, emotions, and will. This trichotomy of personhood is one of the aspects that makes God distinct from creation. And as creatures created in the imago dei, this trichotomy is also what makes us distinct from other creatures. My dog, for example is very smart, he knows his basic obedience and has been trained to mark and retrieve birds and thrown objects. At times he even seems to express a personality. But what he lacks is some sense of higher order processing guided by will.
Finally, emotions are a blessing that allow us to experience life to the fullest. Just think how bland the experience of a sunrise would be if the only tools that we had to experience that event was a description of the colors and hues of the sky. To feel joy, we also need to know grief. To experience the triumph of courage, we need to suffer the terrors of fear.
Detach
The second key to controlling your emotions after understanding their purpose is to learn to engage our Type 2 decision making by decoupling our emotions from our decisions. An intellectual mentor of mine is Jocko Willink, Former Navy SEAL, now champion of the phrase "Discipline Equals Freedom." Jocko explores in his books and his podcast life and leadership lessons. Among these is the principle of detachment. A good leader has the ability to detach him or herself from the present situation, to take a step back, and see the bigger strategic picture.
The principle of detachment is critical in many areas of life including managing our emotions. As we discussed above, emotions are signals that we do well to heed. But they are not the vehicle or means by which we most effectively accomplish our objectives. This is in part because emotions cause us to focus inwardly on ourselves and not outward on the variables and conditions around us. Detaching gives me the ability to realize that my present perception is not about me. While our anger signals to us that there is a relational problem that needs to be addressed and our fear signals that there is a potential for danger, having the ability to detach gives us the ability to see through the fog that emotions create and navigate a path towards our objective.
Do Hard Things
Recently I was awakened from a deep sleep by the emergency alert on my phone. A tornado warning had been issued for my area. We got up and observed the weather for changing and worsening conditions. The next morning, we woke up to down tree branches around our area and the reports that multiple tornados that had passed through the region. Just like a tornado results from the collision of warmer and cooler air, our emotions are the result of the collision between our desires or expectations and reality. We desire, or expect people to behave in a certain way, and when they don’t, we get angry. We desire and idolize someone’s time or attention, and when we get it, we are overcome with an intoxicating elation.
One of the realities of life is that suffering will someday find us. We may be spared of the extreme suffering that was endured by survivors of the holocaust or other similar situations. But whether we live a comfortable life or not, we will encounter situations that entail suffering. This is classified as involuntary suffering; the type of hardship that is imposed upon us by other people or life circumstances. The question becomes, how do we prepare ourselves for times of involuntary suffering so that we can respond well?
Much can be said about strategies (which will likely be the subject of a future post), but a helpful approach is to do hard things or engage in voluntary suffering; that is the suffering that we impose upon ourselves. When we do hard things, and seek out hard things, we begin the process of clarifying our perception of reality. We begin to recalibrate our desires and our expectations. As we do hard things, we set the thermostat of our resilience. Viewed through this perspective, lesser things become less difficult. We are less prone to reacting and more prone to responding. Suffering has a tendency to have a simplifying effect in life.
It’s an Opportunity to Grow
Finally, as we think about emotions, we should view the situations as an opportunity for us to grow. I have written in previous posts about the importance and benefits of fitness; particularly strength training. There is much about the human body and about life that can be learned and clarified when exposed to a heavy barbell. In this context, muscle growth needs a stimulus for hypertrophy to happen. We need to move the weights rep after rep and set after set. As the muscle fibers are fatigued and broken down, they have the opportunity to respond by becoming stronger. Without the strain, growth will not happen.
As I sat in that seat, I made up my mind that my present difficulty was an opportunity to get better. By the time service started, I was doing it. Maybe not 100% perfectly but I was there. That brief period of emotions followed by mental redirection was a huge leap in maturity. Rather than collapse and crumble under the weight of emotions, I used it as an opportunity to get better.
Similarly, as we face situations that seek to unmask our emotions, we do well to use them as an opportunity for personal growth. We can use this opportunity to prove to ourselves and prove to the world that we are stronger than our circumstances. If we never fail reps in the gym or in life, we will never understand and know our true potential.
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