Understanding emotions can be difficult. There are so many mixed messages out there about being vulnerable versus trauma dumping or looking out for others versus minding our own business. If one person does what they want, they’re considered either balanced or selfish, depending on the context. If another person worries about others, they’re considered selfless or obsessive. How do we figure out when, how, and why to act on our emotions?

In this article, we’re going to talk about managing emotions in the context of meeting a goal. Regulating your emotions is one of the components of building the skill of Adaptability, which is our Skill for Success for the month of April. 

If you do not have a goal, it is almost impossible to manage your emotions, because there is so much stimuli (from culture and from society) telling you what you should care about. When you have a goal, you can consider your emotions in the context of what you’re trying to achieve and what you’re actually capable of doing in any given moment. To do this, it’s important to develop a new relationship to your emotions. 

Did you know that there is no definitive explanation of emotions? Historians of emotion consider them to be a modern invention. As Richard Firth-Godbehere explains in his book, A Human History of Emotion: How the Way We Feel Built the World We Know, “Emotions are just a bunch of feelings that English-speaking Westerners put in a box around 200 years ago. Emotions are a modern idea. A cultural construction.The notion that feelings are something that happens in the brain was invented in the early 19th century.” 

We feel all kinds of things. We feel things from our environment, like cold from the wind or pain from a slap. We also feel things from within our own bodies. This is known as interoception. As neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett describes: 

“Your brain is always regulating your body. Your body is always sending sensory information back to your brain like how much glucose, how much oxygen, how much salt? What’s the status of almost every metabolic factor that keeps you alive and well? And your brain isn’t wired in a way for you to experience those sensory changes specifically. Instead, what you experience is a summary. And that’s where those feelings of pleasantness or unpleasantness, comfort or discomfort, feeling worked up or feeling calm and acquiescent, that’s where those simple feelings come from. Feelings are properties or features of emotions, of an episode of emotion, of an instance of emotion. But they’re not synonymous with emotions. Just in the same way that you would experience sound as quiet or loud, you can experience feeling very activated or very calm. And what your brain is doing is telling itself a story about what is going on inside your body in relation to what’s happening in the world.” 

Let’s remember what a story or a narrative is. A story or a narrative is something that has a beginning, middle, and end. Things are stable (exposition/regular world), something happens that disrupts that normality (inciting incident), there’s a build-up of energy and excitement and anxiety as you figure out how to fix this (rising action), there’s an explosion of energy (climax), there’s falling action as you deal with the fallout of that climax (falling action), and then there’s the ending when you return to feeling the way that you did at the beginning of the story even if your world is now slightly different (resolution). When we’re experiencing overwhelming thoughts and emotions, a story is comforting because even if we cause a lot of damage, we’re convinced there’ll be some kind of resolution. We’re convinced that we’ll go back to feeling balanced even if we wind up with some new adverse outcomes as side effects. Examples of stories may be: 

• You’re going about your day (Exposition)
• You experience a sensation that makes you uncomfortable (Inciting incident)
• You start looking for an explanation for this sensation like your lunch order being delayed or the cost of a particular employee’s salary (Rising Action)
• You decide to explode at your employee with personal attacks and vague comments about not meeting expectations and then go grab a greasy burger and fries (Climax)
• You feel better but now you have indigestion and you have to worry about whether your employee is now going to get another job despite the fact that you really do need them (Falling Action)
• But even though you feel bad that you wasted money on junk food or that this person is now upset, you feel like you’re re-balanced, and you feel like you can proceed with your day and you tell yourself you’d rather use this energy on other things and deal with your health and your employee’s morale later (Resolution)

The unintended consequences of this are that you’ve now provided real-world data and experience to feed future stories in your head. You remember how good you felt after that greasy meal that last time, and you execute on that story again. Or, the way you treated someone feeds your paranoia and creates negative future stories. For example: 

• You’re going about your day (Exposition)
• You experience a sensation that makes you uncomfortable (Inciting Incident)
• You look for an explanation for this sensation and remember how you lost your temper on an employee last week and become convinced that they want to leave your company or that they’re going to steal clients (Rising Action)
• You accuse your employee of being disloyal and start threatening legal action and citing their contract then you get a greasy burger and fries (Climax)
• You feel better but you have indigestion and you remember that that employee just brought in a new client. (Falling Action)
• You start worrying that your employee is definitely going to start looking elsewhere now, but you’re feeling good now, and you can’t use this burst of energy and relief on that because you have other matters to address and your employee seems fine right now, so you’ll deal with it later. (Resolution)

And the cycle continues until your body has enough fat to give you heart disease and your level-headed, diligent employee has enough reason to believe that you’re unstable and that they should look elsewhere. 

When we’re overwhelmed, we want a way to release the pressure. Stories help us do that. And taking action – even if we’re taking action on incomplete information processed during a heightened emotional state – makes us feel like we’re in control. Finding a justification to be mad at someone that you’re terrified of losing makes you feel in control. It makes you feel like even if they leave, they left because of the narrative you created: they’re disloyal, they’re a liar, they’re a cheat. But all you do is maintain control over a false identity and a false narrative that you have about yourself. 

A helpful way to think of emotions is as feelings, and the story that you assign to those feelings helps you take action. 

You may assign an unhelpful meaning or a story to those feelings like, “I’m never gonna get anywhere because of this screw up from 5 years ago” or “No one trusts me, and I don’t blame them, because I wouldn’t trust me on paper either.” 

Another option is to say to yourself, “I’m having feelings and sensations. They are uncomfortable. This is the unhelpful story I want to assign to them. I understand why I’m assigning that story. But that story is not getting me anywhere. What’s a new story that I can tell that doesn’t feel like a lie? If I don’t believe anything, how can I humble myself by completing one task that I think is beneath me and that I think won’t make a difference in the grand scheme of things? Oh, I just washed a dish. I just took out the trash. I just learned one new word in a different language. I just picked up that one piece of garbage and put it in the trash.” 

Your emotion goes from “How is this gonna matter in the grand scheme of things?” to “I just made one material physical change in the world.” It takes time, and you may fall back into old habits many times, but you start to become aware of your own power. Your emotions and your past and your feelings become fuel for creative action instead of fuel for destructive fire. 

Use your emotions as fuel for your goals, not as fire to destroy your life

When you have a goal, you can stop thinking of your emotions as a complex story that only exists in your head and start thinking of them as feelings that you can use as fuel to get to your next step. You can start to view your feelings not as facts, but as an indication of how you would have responded in the past and an opportunity to hold a vote with all the sensations in your body and ask them what they’d like to be used for instead.