by Ray White
Are We Victims of Our Emotions?
Emotions are caused by chemicals released in the brain. Chemically, most will dissipate after about six seconds. But if we dwell in our thoughts on those emotions, we can make them last much longer. We can prolong and increase the amount of chemicals released and the intensity of the emotions by ruminating on how angry we are. So even though an external event can cause a feeling or emotion, that feeling will only last more than six seconds if we think about it and simmer in it with the stew of connected and related thoughts. If we are angry, we can focus on and think about why we are angry and increase our anger. Or, we can focus on and think about something else and let the chemicals that caused that feeling of anger dissipate. After six seconds, what we think controls how we feel.
This is a difficult concept to accept. Most of us feel that we have the right and the responsibility to get angry if someone wrongs us. That belief, however, is more closely associated to habit than to conscious thought. We react based on how we learned to respond when we saw other people react in similar circumstances. By taking a millisecond to stop and choose our reaction, we can improve our relationships, become calmer and more focused, and become happier.
Living with events and people in our lives that we can’t control is scary. But becoming the victim of all the twists and turns in life is a form of the “learned helplessness” illustrated in the studies discussed earlier. We can choose how we respond. We can find autonomy and control over our lives by choosing our responses. It is empowering and gives us the confidence to face almost any situation if we know that we can experience the feelings, then choose our reaction. The events in our life are many and varied, but how we respond is completely within our control. Happiness is a choice. We can be victims of our circumstances and old habits, or we can create our lives to be whatever we want them to be. We can choose to be people who, no matter what is going on around them, are calm and deliberate in their reactions.
It is important to distinguish between suppressing your feelings and acknowledging your feelings and choosing a different reaction. Rather than pretending you don’t feel anger, we are suggesting you accept that you feel angry and know that it is ok to feel it. But feeling the anger does not mean you have to act on it in a negative way. You have control and can decide how you will react. If we suppress our feelings for long periods of time, we run the risk of bursting out with a seemingly “out of character” reaction to what seems to everyone else to be a small challenge. We act irresponsibly or in a way we would prefer not to because of stress-related chemicals that have built up over time. Some event becomes the “last straw” in a long line of emotional reactions during that time period.
Stress creates cortisol in your body, which builds up over time, much like natural gas might collect in a house before an explosion. Once the cortisol has built up, it only takes one spark to ignite it and set off what would appear to be an unexplainable torrent of emotions. It is the fabled “straw that broke the camel’s back.” Your brain actually reacts to the cortisol by shifting into a fight-or-flight mode instead of remaining in a clear thinking mode.
Take the Moment to Choose
"Because how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." - Annie Dillard
Our lives are made up of years. Our years are made up of days and our days are made up of moments. How we spend the collection of those moments will determine how we spend our lives. We can control how we spend many of those moments by choosing how we react to the events in our lives. In the millisecond between action and reaction, we control our lives.
Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response.
In those choices lie our growth and our happiness.
Stephen Covey, The 8th Habit
What You Can Control vs. What You Can’t Control
The world is full of things we can’t control. Something like the weather seems obvious. Yet how often are we unhappy because the rain ruins our plans?
It may be less obvious that we can’t control the actions of another person, even someone close to us. Our ability to influence them makes us believe we can control their actions, but eventually we are disappointed when they make decisions and take actions different from what we would have preferred.
When we start listing the things we can control and the things we can’t, the things we can control are centered on us and our actions while the things we can’t control are external to us--people, nature, and the stock market, to name a few.
Start with the list of things you can control. Now list the decisions you are making. For example, you can control what you wear in the morning, what you eat, and how you get to work. You can even control which job you have. This is important; if you say “I have to work, I don’t have a choice,” you are still making a choice. You could choose at any moment to be homeless and hungry. It may not feel like a good choice, but it is still a choice you're making that many others have made differently. Recognizing your power to choose is important to feeling autonomy. Your choice may be to work at a place you don’t like or risk not having enough money to live where you want to live or eat what you want to eat, but all of those are choices you are making. Appreciating the opportunity to make those choices is an important part of improving your happiness.
What Can you Control? What is your Choice? What Can’t You Control?
1.Who you hang out with
1.How they behave or react
2.Where you work
2.How nice your co-workers are
3.What time you wake up
3.Physically, your body requires sleep
4.What clothes you wear
4.What people think about the clothes you wear
5.Whether or not you brush your teeth
5.The bad breath or cavities that result from not brushing your teeth
6.Where you live
6.How much it costs
7.What time you leave for work
7.Whether or not there is construction or an accident that creates heavy traffic
8.What you read
8.What someone else writes
9.Whether you take action based on what you have read
9.Other people’s reaction to those actions
Add Your Own Add Your Own
10. 10.
11. 11.
Activities to help you “Take Control of Your Life”
1.Finish the list above with things you can and can’t control. Think through what you do each day. How many choices are you actually making that you never thought about?
2.Go back through your list and put a check next to the areas where you can practice autonomy, where you can choose the course you are going to take rather than being a victim of your circumstances.
3.Start a new list. What areas of your life are you most unhappy about?
4.Write down what you can control in those areas of your life.
5.Write down what choice you are going to make to change it.
6.Here are some quick activities to help us pause and work through our emotions rather than ruminating and prolonging the negative effects. It is important to note that these only work if you really want to reduce your negative feelings or negative actions.
a.Pause. Breathe. Now count backward from 10 to 1. If that emotion is still strong and not fading, start at 100 and count backward. Focusing on counting backward will take your mind off the negative emotions.
b.Sing your happy song. What is a song or a lyric that makes you feel better about yourself and the world? One of my favorites is, “In every life we have some trouble, when you worry you make it double. Don’t worry, be happy,” by Bobby McFerrin.
c.Who is your favorite person in the world? What would they tell you about this situation?
d.Go to your happy place. What is a memory of a real or imagined place that is just wonderful? Imagine in detail what it is like there. What is the temperature, what is around yo
u, what are you doing?
e.Breathe deeply. Count 10 breaths. Then start again and count 5 breaths.
f.What is your happy thought? It could be a memory, or a goal, or just something that calms you down when you think about it. I like to think of seeing my family or sitting down and petting my dog.
Chapter 7
Being the Catalyst
Steering and Pedaling vs. Along for the Ride
Are you happening to life or is life happening to you?
Are you steering and pedaling down the road to happiness, or are you just along for the ride? Taking control of your life means playing an active role in deciding how your life unfolds. You can’t control everything, but you can admit that not making decisions is a choice that has consequences in your life. If you get up every morning and say “I hate my job!”, but take no action to change or improve your job, you're acting like a victim. It's an easy trap that many of us fall into; but if you act helpless, you create a life where you are the victim of your circumstances. It takes creativity, hard work, and energy to change your circumstances. But the rewards are significant, and they include happiness.
Let’s continue with a discussion about occupations, which many people would name as a source of their unhappiness. There are many things that have led to your current job, including your education, experience, location, skills, connections, and level of effort. All of these things can be changed and improved. It won’t be easy and it won’t happen overnight; but there are thousands of stories about people who worked two jobs to save for a better house, or who went to school at night while working a full-time job, or who worked at one job to make money and worked at a second job to learn a skill. A young woman I know, a few years out of college and into the work force in a stable government job, was employed for her writing skills. She'd graduated with a degree in Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations, a field with a relatively narrow real-world application. She had complaints about her job and its direction, as everyone does, until she made the decision to change her situation. She decided to become a doctor, which would mean starting from scratch on that career path: undergraduate science classes, volunteer work, standardized tests, everything. Nearly ten years later, she's graduated from one of the top three medical schools in the United States and will complete her residency in a matter of months. During the middle part of these years, by the way, she became a mother to two children. Needless to say, her choice and subsequent actions to change her life have been incredibly fulfilling, despite the huge amount of effort required.
Change, however, doesn't have to be this drastic: you have the ability to change how you think about your job. What attitudes are you taking into your job? If you hate your job, everyone knows it without your saying anything. The way you walk, talk, interact, and carry yourself are all indicators of your satisfaction on the job. Changing how you think about your job or how you talk about your job will change your attitude, which may improve the attitudes of those who interact with you. Are you accidentally putting out signals that you are grumpy and hate your life, or are you putting out signals that you want to improve your life?
You can also take action to change the job itself. Bring a plant to work. Find a friend you can talk to at work. Pick some part of your situation and start to improve it.
Is there someone who is ruining your day each time you go to work? Let's say there's one person in particular that you dread seeing because of his behavior. Ask yourself why he behaves that way. Are you the only one who feels conflict with him? Does it have more to do with you than with him? Does he know he has that kind of an impact on you? Spend some real effort attempting to get to know him. He is human like the rest of us and has fears and emotions. He is trying to get through life, just like we are. What makes him tick? What makes him happy? What is so negative in his current life or his past that he feels forced to behave this way?
Find something positive that comes out of your job each day. Who is helped by your work? Whose life is touched by what you do? If you are a roofer, can you find satisfaction in helping people stay safe and dry? If you have a monotonous desk job, are you helping people get approvals or get information that will help them in some way? What is work enabling you to do? Does it keep you from being homeless? Does it allow you to live where you want to live? Does it pay the bills while you figure out what you want to do with the next part of your life?
If you don’t know what actions to take to change your life, ask a friend or family member. Write down your goals or your dreams. Build a plan as if there were no obstacles and you could create exactly the life you wanted, and then identify and overcome one obstacle at a time. Take one small step, and you will immediately start to feel more control over your life. Then take another and another until you can take one tiny step every day. Do something as small as deciding what time you will go to bed or what time you will get up. Decide what you will eat for breakfast every morning.
Decide what you will wear to work. If you wear a uniform, decide on some small token to wear underneath the uniform. Wear a band around your wrist or ankle. Wear a different color of underwear. Put a good luck charm in your pocket. I have two small medallions. One says patience and the other says wisdom. Depending on what I feel I am most in need of, usually patience, I choose one to put into my pocket for the day. I often reach into my pocket and rub the medallion to help me remember to be patient or to call on wisdom rather than rash reaction. Deciding which medallion and phrase to carry with me and focus on is my opportunity to choose. Choosing to be patient or trying to act with wisdom are things I can control.
Owning our Successes and Failures - Accomplishment
We have all felt that feeling of accomplishment, when the boss or customer liked something we put a lot of effort into at work or the teacher gave us an A on the paper or test at school. Part of taking control of our lives is recognizing those accomplishments ourselves and not depending on others for that feedback. It is great to hear feedback from other people. It keeps us grounded in reality and provides a boost for our ego. But many of the things we have to work on are internal and personal. We need to be able to appreciate ourselves and give ourselves that positive boost.
Also, we can’t control who will or won’t recognize or appreciate our efforts. We will become much more confident if we are proud of things we give 100% effort on, and then add feedback from other people as a bonus. It also makes it much easier and much more productive to hear feedback if we are not dependent on others for that feeling of accomplishment. If we know we put 100% effort into something and we already feel good about it, then when someone criticizes that work, we can listen to the feedback with less defensiveness and use that feedback to identify ways to improve or take our efforts to another level.
Accomplishments help us build happiness and confidence. Setting a goal and achieving it makes us feel good about our past and gives us confidence that in the future we can accomplish something else. It’s like making deposits in a bank. When you are young, you only have a few memories or accomplishments to withdraw and invest in your confidence; but over time you build up a collection of all shapes and sizes, and you can access all kinds of examples that will give you confidence you can use for the next challenge.
Owning Small Successes
One challenge to owning our successes is not recognizing the small accomplishments. We think that accomplishing something everyone else can do, or something no one knows about is not really an accomplishment. But that's like taking money out of or not putting money into our confidence bank. Getting up and going to work every day is an accomplishment. We think of it as something we're just supposed to do, or something everyone does. But there are many people who can’t keep jobs because they just can’t drag themselves out of bed and make it to work. In many cases your boss and other people are not going to notice this accomplishment. But if you recognize yourself for this one effort, it will add a little to your confidence bank for the next accomplishment. Lots of little accomplishment
s add up to big accomplishments.
We should also track and savor our accomplishments. Don’t let the day get away without stopping and appreciating what you have accomplished. We get so busy and have so much going on that we don’t stop to appreciate what we really accomplish and how we're improving our lives a little each day. By taking a few moments to stop, think about, and appreciate these accomplishments, we build our confidence and make it easier to take on the next challenge. We can build a belief in ourselves just based on what we do every day without waiting for a heroic or extraordinary accomplishment. People don’t graduate from college in one day. They put in years of attending classes, doing homework, and practicing discipline on a daily basis. People don’t get promotions because of something they did one day. Promotions come from showing up every day and putting in the extra effort to make sure lots of small things are accomplished over and over again.
One Small Step Leads to Another
Large successes give us confidence to move forward, but we rarely start with large successes. Most big successes are a result of many small wins spread out over a long period of time.