Can you control your emotions?

Perhaps you feel like a victim of your past, a prisoner of your emotions. You constantly get triggered, get yourself into toxic relationships, or overreact to situations that don't seem to bother others. 

You might have heard thousands of times from spiritual teachers that freedom lies in your choice of how you respond to a particular situation. But you don't seem to have any choice over your panic attacks or rage outbursts. They just happen.

So where is that freedom, free will, your agency? And can you always be in control? 

You can deal with overwhelming emotions or sensations as they happen. 

You can directly influence your heartbeat by changing your breathing pattern. The trouble is that you might not be in a position where consciously changing your breathing is possible. Tell a person with a panic attack to take a deep breath. It's simply not going to happen. Picking up the signals of safety from your direct environment first might make it easier.

You can deal with overwhelming sensations, emotions, or thoughts by consciously moving your attention outside the body or to the parts of the body that feel good. Dilute the discomfort to manageable doses.

I said many times emotion is expressed through the body. But there's even more to that. The mounting scientific evidence suggests that the sensations in the body are interpreted by the brain as particular emotions. This happens based on your previous experience and the context of the situation (how similar this situation is to the one from the past). Talking about emotions without referring to the sensations in your body doesn't make any sense. Period. Everything starts in the body. 

But how dealing with your body can affect your thoughts?

When you experience racing thoughts, your brain looks for an explanation for the body sensations that you experience as horrible. Your brain hates uncertainty - it wants to act. Worries are the possible scenarios of the future. They give you some semblance of control. At least you imagined what could happen as a consequence of the current situation.

 If you address unpleasant sensations (eg. racing heart) that were causing the racing thoughts, worries, and black scenarios, the source of and the fodder for your worries disappears. 

Your nervous system must NOTICE that you stopped experiencing those unpleasant feelings. Otherwise, you keep on repeating the same reaction pattern regardless.

Creating the agency long-term is another story. It is undoubtedly true that your patterns of reaction come from your past. They were shaped by your previous experiences, starting in childhood or even in your womb. What happened to be the first input - for example, the information that the world is dangerous or that you need to deserve the love of your caring figure - becomes your default mode for years to come.

But, and it's a big but, your brain learns continuously. That's what neuroplasticity is about. If new neural connections get strengthened long enough, they eventually override the old ones. Your nervous system will readjust if it receives new data proving your predictions wrong. Notice that smoking is neither pleasant for your senses nor it solves the source of your anxiety. If you notice it frequently enough, you can break the habit of smoking.

 How can you provide new data to your brain?

•  Bring the message of safety when you experience fear or anxiety. Change the meaning of that stomach churn and pounding heart.
  

• Create and reinforce new neural pathways. New ways of experiencing your body. 
  It involves dosing discomfort. You're building resilience by showing that this quicker heartbeat is ok. It doesn't necessarily mean something horrible will happen to you in a moment. You give it a new context. For example, you can start noticing a faster heartbeat as you playfully move. Suddenly, your racing heart doesn’t have a solely negative association.
  

•  Do things that nourish you rather than deplete you.

  Know your resources and the savings you can deposit into your ‘‘energy account’’. You will be very much in need of these resources in a challenging moment. If you mostly hang out in the rest and restore mode of your nervous system, you will cope with the taxing fight/flight response much better. And you won't fall into the abyss of a no-energy, numbed-out freeze state once you run out of fuel. At least, not for too long.

•  Create new social connections that are based on safety and healthy attachment.
  Spend time with people you like and trust and, most of all, who hang out in the rest and connect mode when you're around. Humans are herd animals. They are hard-wired to co-regulate each other's nervous systems. The scientific term is synchronicity. When you're around someone calm, your breath and heart rate will slow down. This is, by the way, true also for co-regulation with other species. That's where the magic of the calming presence of your pet comes about. 

 It's not a one-off, immediate remedy. It requires slowly rewiring your brain to interpret the world differently. Most scientists agree we're evolutionarily hard-wired to see the world as dangerous and predict the worst scenario as a go-to. It's life-saving. In the face of a genuinely life-threatening situation, you don't want to downplay it. It will cost you your life. However, if you give your brain enough data to prove it wrong, it will learn new ways of responding. 

You might ask how it differs from consciously giving a new meaning to a situation. For example, telling yourself in your mind that the situation is not scary and that you're calm. That doesn't work that way.

The signals from your body will clearly say something is going on. And if you have negative memories, you will experience the situation as scary anyway, despite your inner dialogue.

Two things must happen to change your reaction:

 1. the sensations must change (and you must register them). This will immediately change how you feel.

 2. the sensations might stay the same, but you must have some examples from the past where these sensations in a similar context were giving you a thrill, not a fright.

Alternatively, you can convince the brain that the context of the situation is not frightening and that you're safe. Hence, fear is an inappropriate response.

PS. If you’d like to start learning with me the practical ways of building your resilience which will help you to cope with challenging situations and bounce back from any crisis, book a short call with me. Perhaps my 1-2-1 mentoring program might be a good fit for you.