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Happiness, 4.09 (V) Week 4 Video 8 - Learning Simple Emotion Regulation Strategies

4.09 (V) Week 4 Video 8 - Learning Simple Emotion Regulation Strategies

[MUSIC] Shalom my Hebrew speaking friends and friends from all around the world. I ended the last video by discussing how the reason many of us are overly control seeking is because we lack a sufficiently high level of internal control. So in other words, the reason why taking personal responsibility for our happiness helps mitigate the fourth deadly sin of being overly controlling of others or of outcomes, is by making us less desirous of this external control. In this video, I want to discuss the strategies for gaining internal control. There are two main strategies, which are learning simple tactics for regulating emotions and leading a healthier lifestyle. In this video, I wanna focus on the first of these two strategies, which is learning simple tactics for regulating emotions. There are essentially four simple tactics under this strategy for regulating emotion, which are situation selection, labeling your emotions, attention deployment, and cognitive reappraisal. The first tactic, situation selection is to nip it in the bud. That is, avoid situations that evoke unwanted negative feelings. As you can tell, this is more of a prevention tactic rather than a cure tactic. And a simple logic underlying it is that if you don't get to experience an unwanted feeling, then you don't need to regulate it. So for example, if you know that watching a horror movie on the eve of an important exam is likely to give you nightmares, and make you nervous, and disturb your asleep. Don't watch a horror movie before an important exam. Likewise, if you know that meeting a particular person before making a sales pitch is probably gonna make you pessimistic, and dampen your mood, then don't meet this person. It's really as simple as that. The rest of the tactics, tactics two through four, are for situations in which the unwanted emotions has already been triggered. The second tactic, labeling your emotions, literally means just that. Telling yourself that you're feeling angry or anxious, or sad or guilty or jealous or whatever it is that you're feeling when you experience these emotions. It turns out that merely labeling emotions actually lowers its intensity. If this seems surprising or even unbelievable to you, you're not alone. One study showed that most people think that labeling their emotions will not help them control their emotions and may even intensify them. And the reason these people think this, that labeling the emotion may intensify it, is because from our own past experience, when you discuss or analyze an emotion, emotionally charged event, you do end up intensifying the emotion. But labeling an emotion is different from discussing or analyzing an emotion inducing event. It really literally simply means naming the emotion and moving on. So for example, if you're stuck in slow moving traffic and you're getting increasingly frustrated you could tell yourself, hm this is really frustrating. What the researchers are finding is that doing so helps you gain better control over your emotional state. Since you now know exactly what you're feeling and this somehow reduces the uncertainty and gives you a sense of control over this negative state that you're feeling. What you don't want to do is to get into an elaborate analysis or discussion of why you're feeling frustrated and the thousand other things in life that also make you feel frustrated. That will almost definitely worsen your frustration. Now moving on, the third tactic for regulating emotion is attention deployment. Which means either directing your attention away from the things that trigger negative thoughts, or towards the things that trigger positive thoughts. Now, as you may recognize, this tactic is very similar to situation selection, but it's a tactic you use after the unwanted emotion has already been triggered in you. Whereas with situation selection, that's a tactic you use before the negative emotion has occurred. Most of us of course, are familiar with both trying to direct attention away from negative things and towards positive things. Even children as young as five years old know to do this. But what many of us may not know, is that one of the most common ways by which we enact this tactic, which is to engaging in what's called the self-serving bias, is actually not a good way of feeling good. Self-serving bias involves taking credit for successes and blaming others or luck for failures. For example, if you win a badminton game, you tell yourself, oh, I won because I'm just way too talented and skilled. Right? And if you lose the game, you blame it on your shoes or the bad racket or the crowd, or whatever. Some external cause for it. So you selectively pay attention to a attribute a different explanations for successes versus failures to make yourself feel good or not feel bad. The problem with this kind of self-serving attribution way of dedicating attention to explanations that work in your favor, to help you feel good is that it can work in the moment. It can make you feel good in the moment, but it is likely to work against you in the long run. Know that self serving bias' involving either putting down other people or puffing yourself up and both of these are problematic. When you put others down, you're naturally making it difficult to build healthy relationships and that's not good. Because as we saw last week, our happiness depends quite a lot on the health of our relationships. And when you puff yourself up, you are being delusional and that's not good either. As Barbara Ehrenreich discusses in her book, Bright-Sided, findings show that excessive optimism and looking at the bright side of things all the time, and engaging in these self-serving attributions, self-positivity bias can lead people to make bad decisions. So the trick is to figure out a way to direct your mind away from the negative thoughts, and towards the positive thoughts, without engaging in self-serving bias. One way to do it is to bring to mind things that make you feel authentic pride, or love, or abundance, rather than hubristic pride. For example, if you're feeling tense about an important meeting, you can bring to mind the previous occasions in which you made a great presentation, or you've had a successful meeting. Or you could bring to mind the people that you love. Maybe you can carry with you a photograph of your family or your children. The love that you feel will likely dampen your nervousness. And cloud it out. The fourth and final tactic which is a tactic that's actually somewhat related to the attention deployment tactic is cognitive reappraisal. Basically this tactic involves reinterpreting situations so that you feel better about them. In the example, where you're feeling stressed out about an important impending meeting. You could re-interpret this situation and tell yourself that, far from feeling stressed out about the meeting, you should actually be feeling blessed that your life doesn't involve hard manual labor. And your next meal is not something that you're uncertain about. And that the problem that you're currently facing of doing well in an important meeting is really a first world problem. And that you should be privileged to have a problem like this. This type of reinterpretation involves putting things in perspective as you can probably tell. And doing that can make you feel a lot better about the situation you're in. So in all, there are four really simple tactics by which you can get to regulate your emotions and have some semblance of control over them. First, by avoiding situations that trigger or intensify unwanted feelings. Second, labelling the unwanted feelings. Third, deploying attention away from negative thoughts or things that make you feel negative thoughts. And towards things that evoke positive thoughts. And fourth, reappraising the situation. Of course in executing the tactic of deploying attention or reinterpreting the situation, it's very important to avoid the self-serving bias. Since although it can make you feel good in the moment, it's likely to be problematic and make you feel worse in the long run. And speaking of things to avoid, another thing you should avoid, according to research, is suppressing your emotions. Say that you're in a meeting and someone says something that upsets you. In this situation, many of us tend to suppress our feelings and for good reason. We feel that expressing our negative feelings in the situation may make an already awkward situation even worse. But what research, for example this paper that you see on this screen is showing, is that suppressing emotions is likely to have a negative impact on our happiness levels. There are many reasons for this. First, it turns out that merely suppressing emotions doesn't actually make the emotion go away. It turns out that your limbic system, which is the emotional part of your brain, gets activated and stays activated even if you don't express these emotions. Second, it turns out that suppressing your emotions takes effort and brain capacity. What this means is that you won't have as much capacity left over to focus on the task at hand, such as the important meeting in which somebody said something that upset you. Finally, it turns out that when you try to suppress your emotions, other people can usually sense this and their blood pressure actually goes up at this point. So for all these reasons, its sometimes not a good idea to suppress your emotions. Of course, this doesn't mean that you necessarily tell everyone exactly how you're feeling at all times. But what it does mean is that you should realize that suppressing your emotions is not necessarily gonna make you feel happier. In fact, if anything, it might even make you feel worse. What it also means is that you should actively consider using some of these other tactics that I discussed. Situation selection, that is avoiding situations that make you feel negative or labeling you emotions, attention deployment and reappraisal to alter your emotional state. With that let me say, [FOREIGN] and see you in the next video, where I will discuss the second main strategy for taking personal responsibility for your happiness, namely, leading a healthy lifestyle. [MUSIC]


4.09 (V) Week 4 Video 8 - Learning Simple Emotion Regulation Strategies

[MUSIC] Shalom my Hebrew speaking friends and friends from all around the world. I ended the last video by discussing how the reason many of us are overly control seeking is because we lack a sufficiently high level of internal control. So in other words, the reason why taking personal responsibility for our happiness helps mitigate the fourth deadly sin of being overly controlling of others or of outcomes, is by making us less desirous of this external control. In this video, I want to discuss the strategies for gaining internal control. There are two main strategies, which are learning simple tactics for regulating emotions and leading a healthier lifestyle. In this video, I wanna focus on the first of these two strategies, which is learning simple tactics for regulating emotions. There are essentially four simple tactics under this strategy for regulating emotion, which are situation selection, labeling your emotions, attention deployment, and cognitive reappraisal. The first tactic, situation selection is to nip it in the bud. That is, avoid situations that evoke unwanted negative feelings. As you can tell, this is more of a prevention tactic rather than a cure tactic. And a simple logic underlying it is that if you don't get to experience an unwanted feeling, then you don't need to regulate it. So for example, if you know that watching a horror movie on the eve of an important exam is likely to give you nightmares, and make you nervous, and disturb your asleep. Don't watch a horror movie before an important exam. Likewise, if you know that meeting a particular person before making a sales pitch is probably gonna make you pessimistic, and dampen your mood, then don't meet this person. It's really as simple as that. The rest of the tactics, tactics two through four, are for situations in which the unwanted emotions has already been triggered. The second tactic, labeling your emotions, literally means just that. Telling yourself that you're feeling angry or anxious, or sad or guilty or jealous or whatever it is that you're feeling when you experience these emotions. It turns out that merely labeling emotions actually lowers its intensity. If this seems surprising or even unbelievable to you, you're not alone. One study showed that most people think that labeling their emotions will not help them control their emotions and may even intensify them. And the reason these people think this, that labeling the emotion may intensify it, is because from our own past experience, when you discuss or analyze an emotion, emotionally charged event, you do end up intensifying the emotion. But labeling an emotion is different from discussing or analyzing an emotion inducing event. It really literally simply means naming the emotion and moving on. So for example, if you're stuck in slow moving traffic and you're getting increasingly frustrated you could tell yourself, hm this is really frustrating. What the researchers are finding is that doing so helps you gain better control over your emotional state. Since you now know exactly what you're feeling and this somehow reduces the uncertainty and gives you a sense of control over this negative state that you're feeling. What you don't want to do is to get into an elaborate analysis or discussion of why you're feeling frustrated and the thousand other things in life that also make you feel frustrated. That will almost definitely worsen your frustration. Now moving on, the third tactic for regulating emotion is attention deployment. Which means either directing your attention away from the things that trigger negative thoughts, or towards the things that trigger positive thoughts. Now, as you may recognize, this tactic is very similar to situation selection, but it's a tactic you use after the unwanted emotion has already been triggered in you. Whereas with situation selection, that's a tactic you use before the negative emotion has occurred. Most of us of course, are familiar with both trying to direct attention away from negative things and towards positive things. Even children as young as five years old know to do this. But what many of us may not know, is that one of the most common ways by which we enact this tactic, which is to engaging in what's called the self-serving bias, is actually not a good way of feeling good. Self-serving bias involves taking credit for successes and blaming others or luck for failures. For example, if you win a badminton game, you tell yourself, oh, I won because I'm just way too talented and skilled. Right? And if you lose the game, you blame it on your shoes or the bad racket or the crowd, or whatever. Some external cause for it. So you selectively pay attention to a attribute a different explanations for successes versus failures to make yourself feel good or not feel bad. The problem with this kind of self-serving attribution way of dedicating attention to explanations that work in your favor, to help you feel good is that it can work in the moment. It can make you feel good in the moment, but it is likely to work against you in the long run. Know that self serving bias' involving either putting down other people or puffing yourself up and both of these are problematic. When you put others down, you're naturally making it difficult to build healthy relationships and that's not good. Because as we saw last week, our happiness depends quite a lot on the health of our relationships. And when you puff yourself up, you are being delusional and that's not good either. As Barbara Ehrenreich discusses in her book, Bright-Sided, findings show that excessive optimism and looking at the bright side of things all the time, and engaging in these self-serving attributions, self-positivity bias can lead people to make bad decisions. So the trick is to figure out a way to direct your mind away from the negative thoughts, and towards the positive thoughts, without engaging in self-serving bias. One way to do it is to bring to mind things that make you feel authentic pride, or love, or abundance, rather than hubristic pride. For example, if you're feeling tense about an important meeting, you can bring to mind the previous occasions in which you made a great presentation, or you've had a successful meeting. Or you could bring to mind the people that you love. Maybe you can carry with you a photograph of your family or your children. The love that you feel will likely dampen your nervousness. And cloud it out. The fourth and final tactic which is a tactic that's actually somewhat related to the attention deployment tactic is cognitive reappraisal. Basically this tactic involves reinterpreting situations so that you feel better about them. In the example, where you're feeling stressed out about an important impending meeting. You could re-interpret this situation and tell yourself that, far from feeling stressed out about the meeting, you should actually be feeling blessed that your life doesn't involve hard manual labor. And your next meal is not something that you're uncertain about. And that the problem that you're currently facing of doing well in an important meeting is really a first world problem. And that you should be privileged to have a problem like this. This type of reinterpretation involves putting things in perspective as you can probably tell. And doing that can make you feel a lot better about the situation you're in. So in all, there are four really simple tactics by which you can get to regulate your emotions and have some semblance of control over them. First, by avoiding situations that trigger or intensify unwanted feelings. Second, labelling the unwanted feelings. Third, deploying attention away from negative thoughts or things that make you feel negative thoughts. And towards things that evoke positive thoughts. And fourth, reappraising the situation. Of course in executing the tactic of deploying attention or reinterpreting the situation, it's very important to avoid the self-serving bias. Since although it can make you feel good in the moment, it's likely to be problematic and make you feel worse in the long run. And speaking of things to avoid, another thing you should avoid, according to research, is suppressing your emotions. Say that you're in a meeting and someone says something that upsets you. In this situation, many of us tend to suppress our feelings and for good reason. We feel that expressing our negative feelings in the situation may make an already awkward situation even worse. But what research, for example this paper that you see on this screen is showing, is that suppressing emotions is likely to have a negative impact on our happiness levels. There are many reasons for this. First, it turns out that merely suppressing emotions doesn't actually make the emotion go away. It turns out that your limbic system, which is the emotional part of your brain, gets activated and stays activated even if you don't express these emotions. Second, it turns out that suppressing your emotions takes effort and brain capacity. What this means is that you won't have as much capacity left over to focus on the task at hand, such as the important meeting in which somebody said something that upset you. Finally, it turns out that when you try to suppress your emotions, other people can usually sense this and their blood pressure actually goes up at this point. So for all these reasons, its sometimes not a good idea to suppress your emotions. Of course, this doesn't mean that you necessarily tell everyone exactly how you're feeling at all times. But what it does mean is that you should realize that suppressing your emotions is not necessarily gonna make you feel happier. In fact, if anything, it might even make you feel worse. What it also means is that you should actively consider using some of these other tactics that I discussed. Situation selection, that is avoiding situations that make you feel negative or labeling you emotions, attention deployment and reappraisal to alter your emotional state. With that let me say, [FOREIGN] and see you in the next video, where I will discuss the second main strategy for taking personal responsibility for your happiness, namely, leading a healthy lifestyle. [MUSIC]