Can We Really Control Our Emotions

Yesterday Swaroop sent me a few links saying he was planning to do a course from 'Coursera', and I was once again reintroduced to the fund of brilliant stuff available online.

In the process of browsing, I came across a podcast of a lecture series titled 'How to Think like a Psychologist', which quite naturally I guess, caught my attention. 

One of the lectures I fully listened to was 'Can We Really Control Our Emotions' by James Gross, a professor of psychology, at Stanford.

Here's a synopsis:

Emotions are something everyone has, there's positive emotions and negative emotions, neither good or bad, each having it's function depending on context and personality.

Positive emotions are nice .....they help relationships, increase creative flow, higher productivity and so on.

Negative emotions are also not always bad .... there are many a times they can help, maybe like fear to energize or to stay alert, or anger to self protect.

What we would want to look at is the negative emotions that are not helpful. How best can we handle the emotions that drag us down.

And a deeper question for the sceptics. Why?

Because it matters. That's a given, because they cause conflict and pain, to oneself and to others. At an individual level, at a relationship level, and at a wider level even between communities and countries.

Now that we have the why out of the way, lets look at the 'What' and 'How'.

What are Emotions?

Emotions as commonly believed, are not just feelings. Sure, feelings are a major component, but they also have a behavioral and physiological component. Behaviorally, they help us prepare our response, have appropriate cognitive consequences. With emotions things stick better. They help us track what we care about, what's important to us. The physiological we will look at in due course.

His fundamental question was of Expression. Emotion and it's Expression.

There is now enough research in the area to indicate that expression of an emotion is a part of what it means to have that emotion. Your expression, what plays out on your face magnifies or diminishes the emotion. Expression influences the emotional trajectory. The trajectory is feeling - behavior - physiological

Expressing positive emotions, enable the emotion, the feeling, the behavior and the physiology. Yet not expressing a negative emotion does not help it wither away.

If you bottle up the emotion, turn down the behavior, you will have impact on physiology.They travel together.

And this is the concept that underlies a lot of health psychology.

If you deny the expression, it's going to bubble up again in other channels. Suppression does not mean everything goes down. As one goes down, something else goes up. 

You denying it it's channel of expression has immediate impact on blood pressure, the cardiovascular system, and body temperature.

Physiology is magnified with suppression. Chronic suppression results in serious health concerns.

We can control our emotions through suppression, but know there are consequences.

Suppression is also 'cognitively costly' . Research has proven that with suppression, later memory of the instance gets impacted as a lot of energy gets expended in the process of suppression.

And what's worse, the suppression of one individual in a relationship can have the same impact on the other person in the relationship. You suppress and the others blood pressure goes up. So, suppression is also 'socially costly' , as also assessed through partner reports of lesser rapport.

So the question is, 'are there ways to regulate emotions' ?

Does thinking differently help regulate. Decreased expression of negative emotion, not by suppression, but by intercepting the emotion and retracking. And what are the best ways to regulate?

Reappraisal .

Reappraisal is modifying the meaning of the situation to change it's impact. Reappraisal helps not just feel better, and look better, but also decreases autonomic and endocrinal responses.

It's worth a try. Look at it this way. An action has an emotion because it's getting filtered through your belief. That's the frame that can be changed. Knowing which belief is serving you and which not.

Also being flexible.

Flexible enough to know when the exceptions are needed. For instance in anger at bad behavior. Rationalization or reframing in such situations will mean justification, and can result in acceptance of even unacceptable behavior.

Acknowledge and recognize the emotion, know when it's serving you and when not, that's the only way you know when you need to reframe and when not.  The consequence is not just a more peaceful you, but also a healthier you. Worth the awareness, what say?