In the last article, I concluded, or rather Bev concluded that emotional resilience was more like an internal suit of armour. As she put it:
“Emotional resilience is just about knowing where you are emotionally at any time, and then being able to deal with your emotions in a positive way, so they don’t adversely affect your actions, reactions, thinking and decisions. So that you do what you need to and perform like you can.”
I have placed the emphasis on the work adversely for two reasons:
Firstly our emotions are always part of our thinking, reactions, actions and decisions. It is a delusion to think we can do any of these without influence from our emotions. Our thinking and emotions are part of the same thing, they are not separate ‘things’. It is not a delusion to think we can affect how our emotions impact on our thinking, reactions, actions and decisions and that we can alter the outcomes of those emotions. We can, usually by altering how we think about the emotions; how we build habits or connections between our emotions and our reactions, either by strengthening the habits or weakening them. We can and do naturally control these daily. Emotional resilience is about doing this consciously.
Secondly it is a mistake to think that emotional resilience means without emotion. It does not. It actually means with full cognisance or awareness of our emotions with the ability to change our relationships to those emotions to enhance performance or prevent adverse outcomes from the feeling we naturally have. Just because you feel fear does not mean that you have to react to it in any particular way. It is also very possible to reduce or dishabituate fear. What I mean by this is the feeling of fear is connected to our reaction to the fear, be that wanting to run away, or whatever. The emotion and our reaction to the emotion are two connected but different things.
For example, two people are about to go on a flight. They both feel fear about flying. They both get similar initial symptoms; increased heart rate, dilated pupils, sweating, jumbly feeling in their stomach and they start easily at sudden noises or movements.
However one has built the habit of reacting to the feeling by becoming more and more focussed on the feeling, going inside and noticing every change in the feeling, particularly any increase in the feeling. They also have built a habit of a connection with these feelings to a thought pattern that might go something like this “I feel awful. I just know we are going to crash. This is it. Oh my god. I am going to die. I am dying. I can’t fly. I am not doing this any more. “ and so on. This person has a truly terrible experience on their flight as the feelings feed off the thoughts and steadily get so bad that they think, ney are convinced that they are about to drop off this mortal coil. This is a typical fear – thought – action negative downward spiral. So the next time this person goes on a flight the awful experience is remembered and repeated thus becoming a bigger habit. A habit of fear.
The second person however knows they are feeling fear. At this point this person has a habit of concentrating on things outside of their body. They don’t fall victim of their feelings, instead read a book or annoy the stewardess, watch a movie or anything rather than think about their feelings. As a result they don’t get the downward spiral, instead they find they start to feel a bit better and they notice this improvement in feelings. They think to themselves, oh it was only temporary and it is going now. And guess what happens. The feelings do indeed go.
The main points:
1. There are 3 things The stimulus (an aeroplane) → The Emotion (fear) → The Reaction (focus in / focus out)
2. Each of these 3 things get associated, linked, anchored, chained or connected together in our brains.
3. More or less of any of the elements in the chain increases or decreases the intensity of the connections with the other two components. The greater the emotion (fear) the greater the reaction. The greater reaction to the fear the stronger the association between the links of the chain gets. So eventually just the thought of a plane gets frightening. Now we are in the territory of an habituated pathological fear.
4. Conversely if the reaction to the emotion gets less, the links or associations in the chain weaken. If that happens then the link with the stimulus also weakens until eventually the links get broken. The habit of fear can then turn into either a habit of neutrality or even enjoyment.
5. Not everyone has the same reaction – some people love flying (honest!). This shows how the links between a stimulus, emotion and our subsequent reactions (which feed back to the emotion and strengthen or weaken this link or connection between the stimulus, the emotion and out reaction) change the affect from one adverse affect to neutral or even positive affect.
Emotional resilience is indeed the ability to change the direction of the spiral.
