Have you ever experienced a powerful emotion rising swiftly to the surface and felt powerless in it’s wake? We can all feel challenged by difficult interactions with others. The ability to manage emotion and choose our response in emotionally charged situations can sometimes seem like a Herculean task but mindfulness can provide the key to positive change.
Renowned emotional intelligence expert, Paul Ekman, identifies two core skills for mastering emotional response:
1. Establish what triggers your negative emotional behaviour.
2. Learn to increase the length of time between registering an emotional impulse and acting on it.
How to Establish themes and triggers
1. Keep a journal. Make a note of when emotions are high and record these moments in detail. After a month or so of maintaining the diary, analyse the information and look for patterns.
2. Connect trigger incidents and themes. What triggers the emotional behaviour? Where you noted incidents that prompted negative, disproportionate emotional behaviour, look for themes. You can establish your triggers by noticing how many incidents have the same theme.
3. Decide on a plan of action. Knowing which themes commonly trigger negative emotional behaviour alerts you to challenging situations in advance and enables you to ask, ‘what can I do?’ to manage the situation. Will a technique to reduce stress suffice and calm me or do I need to avoid the situation because it involves a strong trigger? Alternatively, you may recognise that a theme is present but decide you are feeling in good emotional shape and are prepared for any triggers that may arise.
4. Increasing the gap between impulse and action
Psychologist and holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, described the ability to choose how we respond to any given situation as the ‘last human freedom.’ Emotional responses are often triggered by previous experiences which we store in our memory or, as Ekman terms it, our emotional database. The emotional alert database constantly scans for triggers and when it finds a trigger the emotional impulse occurs. The emotional alert database is not always accurate or helpful but when the emotional impulse reaches the brain it activates the emotion in all external behaviours, voice, facial expressions, posture.
5. How to identify when your emotions are negatively affecting your behaviour. A useful source of information can be the facial expressions of others. If the person on the receiving end of your behaviour looks horrified or disappointed in response to your words, posture or facial expressions, ask yourself what you might be saying or doing to prompt their reaction.
Developing the ability to identify your own physiological response in stressful situations is another useful technique for identifying negative emotion. Do you experience physical tension? Does your breathing rate, perspiration or heart rate increase? Perhaps you experience certain sensations in different parts of your body, a knot in the stomach or a tightness in your throat? The more able you are to identify the physical feelings that accompany emotions, the earlier you will be able to sense your triggers and themes and act to manage them.
6. Mind the gap. The good news is that there is a gap between registering the emotional impulse and it being translated into action. It is this gap that we are seeking to increase providing more time to choose a response rather than being hijacked by our emotions. Mindfulness is a great technique that can be used to lengthen the time between impulse and response.
Research shows that as little as 20 minutes of continuous mindfulness practice each day day increases our ability to recognise the themes that trigger emotions and choose how we respond to emotionally challenging situations.
7. One mindfulness practice to try today. Try this simple mindfulness technique to help develop your focus and manage your emotional response in challenging situations:
1. If you are new to mindfulness it can be useful to set a timer (or use a mindfulness app) for a duration of 20 minutes, or less if you want to gradually build up to twenty minutes. A timer can help avoid the distraction of wondering how long you have been practising the exercise.
2. Take a breath and notice how the air feels as you inhale. What other sensations do you experience?
3. Exhale and focus on the sensation of releasing the breath. Does your breath feel warm? How do other parts of your body feel as you exhale?
4. If your thoughts wander, don’t worry, this is normal, simply notice that your attention has wandered and return your focus to your breathing.
5. If you experience an emotion during this mindfulness technique, note the emotion, rather than the emotion defining you, label it, for example, ‘that’s a happy emotion’. Notice how it feels, including any sensations you experience physically in your body. Remember that this type of physical sensation is one of the techniques you can use for establishing that an emotion has been triggered. Identifying where you feel the emotion in your body during this exercise will help you identify the sensation and emotion at other times when that emotion is triggered. Return your focus to the breathing process.
Regularly practicing mindfulness and following the techniques to identify emotional themes and triggers will help you to increase the gap between impulse and action. A combination of all three techniques leads to an increase in emotional awareness and emotional intelligence which will enhance your relationships with others.
