Some of us are too scared or too overwhelmed to take certain actions that will help us achieve the goals we set or the life we see for ourselves. But it doesn’t have to be this way! In this short video, I explain one fundamental misunderstanding that may help free you.
--
Here to share some tips on emotion from neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Just listened to her on a podcast. She's coming out with a new book actually; she had her previous book “How Emotions Are Made” earlier...a bit hard to read, to be honest, even for a psychologist, but still very interesting concepts. I might reread it actually.
Her research is pretty much showing that there are no “basic emotions.” You probably heard of...the universal emotions of sadness, anger, disgust, etc.
But for her, coming from a neuroscience perspective looking at brain patterns, even like...they put an electrode on the muscle on the face to see if there's any patterns. And her data and other people's lab’s is showing that there's actually no one signal or pattern that's very consistent for emotions across people and culture.
She gives the example of sometimes you're angry, you yell, sometimes you're angry, you get very quiet, and you're angry, you cry.
We have this stereotype of what emotions should be or look like, but it's actually very learned, and different signals in our body can actually mean different things.
Actually this should be an empowering message. Earlier, I was giving a guest lecture to some undergrad students in management on interviewing, and I talked to my colleague and friend, Dr. Amanda Tobe, who's an interview anxiety expert, and she was sharing data on how…
If you think about the physiology of anxiety and nervousness, a lot of people feel nervous or anxious go into an interview. The body actually has pretty much the same exact signals like the same breath pattern, there are sweaty palms, heart racing, it’s pretty much the same as excitement.
So instead of trying to calm yourself down, it's actually easier to label that things happening in your body as excitement to reframe it, so that you're not “nervous or anxious,” and you're like, “Oh I'm excited! And this is my body giving me energy to get ready for something!”
Dr. Feldman Barrett says that emotions and a lot of human body system is really about metabolic allocation. So we have limited, you know, metabolic...I'm not a neuroscientist, but we have different budgets in our body, to go to our brain or body, etc. and we have limited amounts. (I looked it up, it’s called Allostatis).
So, in a way sometimes “emotions” (what we see as emotions) it's actually our body trying to re-budget our body a certain way.
Let’s say there's something threatening in our environment. You might not want to expend your energy. The body's like, “Let's conserve energy,” and your brain actually consumes a lot of energy, so it's like, “You know what, that's kind of taking a lot of energy, let's pull energy away from it,” which might result in feelings of mild levels of depression or feeling sad, so you withdraw.
She really sees emotions not as something that just comes out of nowhere and takes over you. It's really just kind of feelings in the body that we actually put a lot of meaning over it.
If we can work on ourselves to reframe what these internal feelings are, we actually have way more control over our “emotion” than we think we do.
I know it's kind of an esoteric concept, but the bottom line is; emotions, in our culture, how we see it, is a lot of cultural construct and learned.
So if you can relearn that or choose something different, like, “Huh, my heart is racing, and that doesn't have to automatically mean anxiousness.” Just notice, “My heart is racing,” and that's it, and let it stop there.
And then you can choose what thought, what actions you want to do or take that will help you get closer to the life you want to live, or the values you want to live, or things that are going to be actually more productive in a situation.
It's about, to me, a message of empowerment that you don't have to succumb to these “emotions” that are coming up within you.
They are just bodily functions. And you don't even have to succumb to the thoughts that come with them. There are just sounds in your brain and you, who's separate from all this brain neurons firing, and stomach and heart and internal system moving, you can choose what you want to do and be in your life.