Episode 40 - How to change the way you feel about pretty much anything - A Mini-Course in Emotional Agility Part 1
Welcome to this episode of the managing the smart mind podcast with Master Certified Coach Else Kramer, a.k.a. Coach Kramer.
Over the next couple of Episodes I’m diving into something that has a massive impact on our life and well-being: emotions.
In this mini-course on Emotional Agility you’ll learn:
- What emotions are and how they are created
- Why you want to intentionally manage your emotions
- How to decide which emotions you want to change
- How to change the way you feel about pretty much anything
What are emotions?
There isn’t a definition all scientists agree on - but here’s the one I have adapted from neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett which goes a long way to explaining the role and nature of emotions:
Emotions are sensations that your brain creates to let you do things which will balance your body budget.
Now, this may not be the definition you were expecting - so let me pull it apart for you.
Emotions are sensations: when you have an emotion, something happens in your body.
And I don’t mean the reaction an emotion elicits (for example, an elevated heart rate when you experience fear), I mean the feeling of the emotion itself. It’s a sensation in your body - even if it may be hard to pinpoint what kind of sensation exactly.
Emotions are created by your brain
Now this may blow your mind - but emotions aren’t an automated response to certain stimuli unless they’re generated by the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex is bypassed completely.
So outside emergency situations when you enter the freeze/flight/fight response, your brain actually actively generates your emotions.
If you’re interested in learning how this works in more detail I recommend checking out Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book ‘How Emotions are Made’.
For the purpose of this podcast, suffice to say that when your brain notices that something changes in your body, it immediately wants to figure out what that means for your energy management.
It does that through input from your interoceptive network as well as from your memory bank of past experiences.
Once it’s made a prediction then this can result in it generating an emotion which, hopefully, will cause you to react in a way that restores your body budget.
So:
Change in body causes => interoceptive network + memory bank start to work
Leads to => prediction
From which => brain generates emotion to create suitable reaction
Now all this makes much more sense when we look at examples, so let’s make it specific.
Let’s say your brain notices that you have an elevated heart rate.
That elevated heart rate could be caused by very DIFFERENT things.
- You could be freaking out about a presentation you’re giving in 10 minutes.
- You could be going on a date with someone you’re very much into - and you have a suspicion the feeling may be mutual.
- You could be watching your soccer team have to do the penalty thing at the world cup.
- Or you could be attacked by a rabid dog.
All these can cause an elevated heart rate, which your brain registers.
But now it needs to make a prediction.
What does this mean for our next step?
Should we be terrified? Excited? Tense?
Should we run for our lives? Or run towards the thing or person with our arms wide open?
So many decisions to make in a split second!
So your brain:
- notices the changes in your body, and the corresponding affect (the basic sensation you’re experiencing).
- digs into your memory and belief database to help it decide how to handle this thing. (big teeth => run away)
- makes a prediction on what type of reaction you should have based on a mixture of current experience and past experiences
- creates an emotion to facilitate that reaction
In a very short amount of time.
Which leads me to the last part of the definition, the body budget:
Emotions are sensations that your brain creates to let you do things which will balance your body budget.
The main task our brain has is to keep us alive. To do that it needs to constantly monitor and manage our body budget - i.e. the amount of energy we have and where we allocate it.
If it doesn’t do that well, if it decides to allocate all glucose to the brain for example, when we need to run, we’ll just topple over. (and yes, this is a gross oversimplification, but you get the general gist).
This, by the way, is also why our brain is always trying to stop us from trying new things, because they make it hard to balance the body budget.
So what may look like self-sabotage actually isn’t at all - it’s self-preservation!
So, all together now: emotions are sensations that your brain creates to let you do things which will balance your body budget.
I’m guessing it makes a lot more sense now, right?
Which brings me to the next part:
Why should you care about your emotions?
Isn’t it better to be a Buddhist and let it all wash over you?
Absolutely. If the emotions you experience have zero fall-out, cause no reactivity in your mind or body whatsoever, by all means, keep doing whatever it is you’re doing.
But I’m guessing that since you’re listening to this podcast you haven’t quite reached enlightenment yet.
For us non-enlightened folks, emotions can have a massive impact on our daily lives.
They influence the way we experience our life.
What we think about ourselves, other people, and the world.
How we think about our past - and even what our future will look like.
And they can consciously or subconsciously block us from doing certain things, from achieving our goals or even going after them.
Again, let’s look at an example - this is one from my personal experience.
I’ve never been very fond of dogs due to an experience with a Great Dane as a toddler. But I wasn’t terrified of them - I just passively avoided them.
That changed in an instant when, in 2016, I was in Istanbul and went on a morning run.
When I’d reached the Blue Mosque, I was attacked by a wild dog.
It scratched and bit me (although luckily not very ferociously), and - this was probably the worst part - it wouldn’t leave me alone.
It took a long time before I found someone willing to help me get rid of the dog, and find me a taxi to get me back to my hotel and then onwards to a clinic for some tetanus and rabies shots.
This experience created a memory which then, the next time I saw a dog, even though I rationally knew they weren’t dangerous, made me jittery. Which, if you know dogs, can cause dogs to behave badly because they feel you feel weird.
Fast forward a couple of encounters and my emotion of anxiousness whenever I saw a dog had turned into a phobia (which, by the way, I was able to resolve through self-created photographic exposure therapy).
So this is an example where an emotion that I didn’t manage ended up influencing all my future experiences with dogs in a bad way.
Now it isn’t always so extreme that an unmanaged emotion morphs into a full-blown phobia.
But it can still be harmful in other ways.
If something a colleague you don’t particularly gel with does today annoys you, and it annoys you again tomorrow, then you start laying the foundations in your brain for getting annoyed by them every single day - regardless of what they do.
If you experience disappointment about the amount of money you’re making at the end of each month, then that can easily turn into a habit of being disappointed with your money-making skills, and even end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So YES, you definitely want to manage your emotions.
Emotions co-create our future.
As Lisa Feldman Barrett puts it:
“Every experience you construct is an investment, so invest wisely.”
Which leads me to the next question:
How do I decide which ones I should manage? Is it a matter of good vs. bad emotions?
No. That completely depends on context.
There are emotions that are unproductive in certain contexts - and those you definitely want to manage.
Think massive anxiety when you speak in front of an audience, disgust when you look at your own body, or disappointment when you think about your achievements.
But you want to experience the whole gamut of joy, melancholy, excitement, grief, anxiety, lethargy, etc. - they all have their place in a rich and authentic human life.
It’s when certain emotions STOP you from leading that life where you want to start managing them.
Is it even possible to change them? Don’t they just ‘happen’?
It is.
Because your brain creates emotions based in part on what you think and what’s happening in your body, you can change your emotions by changing either what is happening in your body, or what you’re thinking.
And as your emotions shape the way you perceive and experience the world, then through changing your emotions, you can change the way you experience things, people, events, EVERYTHING.
It gets even better: If you can change the emotions you experience - you can also change what you make things MEAN, in other words, the way you write your personal history.
If all this is completely new to you and a bit much to take in, just remember this:
- your brain CREATES emotions;
- your emotions co-create your experience of reality and your memories;
- It’s possible for you to influence this creation process.
This means you not only have power over how you feel right now - you can also change how you feel about the past, and influence how you’re going to feel in the future.
Now I’m not saying this is necessarily easy - especially when it comes to long-held beliefs and experiences.
But it is totally possible - and that is incredibly empowering.
You can change the way you feel about those three years spent on a degree you never finished.
You can change the way you feel about your body.
You can change the way you feel about people in your life.
You can change the way you feel about losing a loved one.
In the next Episode I’m going to give you a whole list of tools you can use to do exactly that.
But for now, I want you to start noticing your emotions more consciously than you’ve ever done before.
Do you have emotional patterns around certain situations, tasks, or projects?
Do you have an overall emotional ‘mood’?
Start noticing - and it can be handy to keep a journal to take notes, so you know exactly what to work on using the tools I’m going to share with you in the next Episode.
And if you don’t want to wait for that, go to coachkramer.org to see how I can help you change the way you feel about everything that matters to you.
Have an amazing week,
Else a.k.a. Coach Kramer
Ready to get some help in managing your smart mind AND your emotions? I can help. DM me on LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook to learn how you can work with me, or email me via podcast@elsekramer.com.
Thank you for listening to the Managing the Smart Mind Podcast, I love that at
the time of recording this there are smart humans listening in 81 countries! I really appreciate you - do send me any questions or requests for topics you have. And if you enjoy the podcast I’d love for you to give it a five-star review so other smart humans can find it - thank you!
