Common Thinking Traps. No. 7 – Emotional Reasoning

To ‘cut to the chase’ it’s the unconscious mind that governs emotion. I like to think of the unconscious as a young puppy. Often wildly responding and out of control unless we keep a loving, but tight, reign. The limbic part of the brain (at the heart of the unconscious mind) deals with the ‘Freeze, Flight or Fight’ Response. (It’s in that order of response, by the way, and not ‘Fight or Fight’, as it’s so very often referred.). What happens with Emotional Reasoning is that we ‘reason’ that what we are believing is true without questioning its validity.

The very phrase, ‘Emotional Reasoning’ is actually an oxymoron. Emotions aren’t reasoned responses. They are just ‘played out’ by the Limbic System / unconscious mind. That’s why we ask ourselves after our response: “Why did I do that?” The neocortex part of the brain is seeking to reason the emotional response.

Further, what psychologists call cognitive dissonance abounds in Emotional Reasoning. We create reasons that justify our behaviours, and ignore, as well as delete, behaviours that don’t fit in with ourEmotional Reasoning. Cognitive dissonance exists when conflicting beliefs and attitudes exist at the same time within someone. One of those beliefs must give in to the other one. Humans are remarkably adept at dropping one belief to allow another one to dominate. Practise it for long enough and we can justify any behavioural response, never questioning whether it is a helpful thing to do or not!

I feel guilty.

Guilt is a very powerful emotion. I believe that it is one of the most damaging and destructive emotions. Guilt grinds us down, freezes us from releasing change and creates excessive levels of stress with long-term damage to our bodies. Yes, guilt is that powerful.

We should challenge guilt at every opportunity. But how? An excellent website with some very practical advice can be read here. There are some very powerful questions that we can ask ourselves when feeling guilty. They involve asking what someone else might be feeling, thinking, saying and doing if they were in the situation that we find ourselves in. The very act of asking this question helps to calm the emotion (the unconscious/Limbic System) and allow our conscious mind to consider, reflect and enable a more desired response. For example, asking ourselves how our trusted friend, John might be feeling if he was in our situation may well give us a different perspective to our own. John might behave in a different way if he were in our situation and he might also say something more helpful in the long-term.

Acting this way (yes, it’s good to act) can help reduce the emotion, will help stop us saying or doing what isn’t helpful and will free us to live the life that we want to live.

I generally find that forgiveness helps too. It might be forgiving others for what happened; it might be forgiving yourself for what happened. Forgiveness frees us. It’s the opposite of guilt. Whereas guilt grinds us down, forgiveness frees us up. The more we are freed up, the more satisfied we will find our lives.

As a Christian, I believe that Christ has bought me freedom from guilt through His death and Resurrection. By believing in Him and not letting guilt have any power over me it’s helped me to look up and live the kind of life I want to lead.

Whatever your personal beliefs, getting rid of the power of guilt will make such a positive difference to your life. It will probably feel like a massive weight has been lifted off your shoulders. There are things that I wish I hadn’t done (regrets) but I refuse to let the guilt of those events take a hold. Those events are what I’ve done; those events are not who I am. I’m looking up and moving forward and no event or belief is going to hold me back or down.

How might you free yourself up today?

Summary:

Challenge: I feel guilty.
Opportunity: If (someone you trust and respect) was in this situation what would they say/feel/think/do?
Reflection: emotions can mist. What evidence can I find to disagree with my judgement and how might I think and behave differently if I did?
Saying: Guilt grinds me down; forgiveness frees me up!

 

Common Thinking Traps. No. 5 – Emotive Language

 

It was the worst experience of my life! Anyone’s life!

Oh, we all do this don’t we? Shouting out loud to anyone who will hear us that the event that has just befallen us is the worst in anyone’s living memory. The thing is, it’s seldom the case. Our ‘blurting out’ might easily be passed off as ‘letting of steam’ by ourselves, to continue the figures of speech, but someone’s been on the end of our monologue: if it’s not someone else with verbally spoken words it’s ourselves with self-talk language. (Self-talk language, by the way, can be more destructive to our emotional state. We self-talk at a considerably higher speed than verbal talk. After all, there’s no one else to interrupt us and correct our thoughts is there? Telling yourself in your thoughts that you’re such a useless person merely affirms to your unconscious that you are such a useless person. You’ve given your unconscious mind permission to bombard yourself with negative emotions and it will happily do so.)

What’s my point? What you speak is a result of what you have thought and what you think is a result of the paradigms or principles by which you live your life. Paradigms dictate your thoughts and your thoughts dictate your actions whether they be words spoken in your head, words spoken aloud or things that you go and do. Words spoken ‘in the heat of the moment’ to others can cause upset and disappointment: to others. It tends to be over fairly quickly though. Words spoken ‘in the heat of the moment’ to ourselves tend to go deeper, last longer and have a more lasting, negative, effect.

Being aware you’re negatively self-talking is crucia

l. Recognising the danger signs is fundamental to habit change (yes, negative self-talk is a habit we could all do with ending; it starts with realising we’re doing it, and our emotional state when we do, and asking the appropriate questions to reduce or prevent it happening again). The website by The Extra Gear has some useful strategies for recording the occurrences of self-talk. I particularly like the paper clip idea.

So, if you find yourself saying emotive language statements, stop immediately and ask yourself, as a question, whatever was the key emotive word that you used. For example, in my opening, it said:

It was the worst experience of my life! Of anyone’s life?

There are a couple of words here to attack. Yes, we’re going to attack and defeat this negative talk! The words: worst and anyone’s both make suppositions (assumptions) so take the opportunity to ask them back to yourself as questions: Worst? or Anyone’s? This technique helps to reduce the emotion and, since it’s emotive language that we want to avoid, this is a very good thing to do.

Then, ask yourself in reflection, what someone else might say or do in the situation that you are in. Putting ‘someone else in our shoes’, or, indeed, ‘putting ourselves in their shoes’, is a powerful tool to engage the neocortex part of the brain: the rational, problem-solving, creative part of the brain. Emotional response involves little if any neocortex. It’s the ‘fight or flight’ protection part of the brain that deals with emotion and it needs taming, else it will ‘run riot’. Reflecting on how another might deal with the situation calms the emotional part of our brain and helps us use the neocortex, as we focus on solutions.

It’s also worth saying, as a reminder, to take out the emotion. This will help us to think more clearly, may well prevent us from saying, or doing, something that we’ll regret and lead to a happier and healthier state of mind, both for ourselves

and for others.

There you go! Easy isn’t it? [Ehem...]

In summary:

Challenge – It was the worst experience of my life! Anyone’s life!

Opportunity – Worst? Anyone’s?

Reflection: What might someone else think in this situation? How might they behave?

Saying – Take out the emotion

PS I wrote earlier in the article that recording your emotional state when you say the emotional language is an important thing to do. To break a habit it’s vital to record what the habit is that we’re carrying out and our emotional state when we do. This greatly increases the chances of finding what the cue is for the routine (habit) so that we can break it by finding a different reward that is beneficial or far less damaging. The Habit Loop and how to break it has been written by Charles Duhigg in his excellent book: The Power of Habit. I highly recommend his book.

PPS As a bonus you might find the Self-talk Interrupt diagram below useful. Interrupting the negative self-talk will change how you think and thereby change how you see yourself, thereby changing what you tell yourself…

 

 

What’s shouting louder?

“What we do always shouts louder than what we say.”

A short post this week. Short posts will be part of a series called ‘Short and sweet’. Look out for more of them in the future.

Franklin is generally attributed with a quote similar to the one above but this is my take on it. Sadly, many of us are used to people shouting at us: verbally, that is. However, it might be a bit of a shock to note that all of us ‘shout’: by our actions, every day to everyone that we meet.

The question therefore becomes: Is what I’m ‘shouting’ what I want to ‘shout’? People will hear our words; it’s our actions though that will speak the highest volume.

When there is a miss-match between words and actions then our lives aren’t congruent (in agreement). We want to walk-the-walk and not just talk-the-talk, as others have said and in a way that honours others and honours ourselves. (As a Christian, I want to honour God too.)

One of the saddest things I hear is the ‘Don’t do as I do, do as I say’ comment. What would it be like if actions and words were congruent? How much less stress; how much more honouring the other person, and ourselves, would exist; how much better all-round?

Words shouting louder than actions? What can you do about that?

 

Be kind to yourself

It’s amazing just how powerful this instructional sentence is when we allow the question to sink deeply inside of ourselves. Give yourself time (that’s already being kind isn’t it) and then ask yourself (there’s another one!): how will I be kind to myself right now? Or later today? Or tomorrow? Of course, this may well trigger numerous other questions such as: What does be kind to yourself actually mean? I’m in the business of asking questions, as a Powerchange partner. Want to know more? Let me know your thoughts / questions by posting a comment.