3: Managing Our Emotional Triggers
Consider the experience of standing near the edge of a cliff: though there is a sturdy railing and the path is not slippery, we feel a sense of fear, even though we may be aware there is no real danger. We recognize the emotional response, know it to be irrational - but still we feel the emotion. There are many instances in which our success depends upon the ability to act contrary to emotional impulses we cannot help feeling.
It is particularly difficult because emotion has a tendency to paralyze our logical faculty - when we feel something strongly enough, we are unable to think. We are both unable to access the knowledge in memory, unable to correctly analyze what we see, and unable to reason through the cause and effect to know what we should or should not do in the instant.
And it has also been found that our reasoning often follows our emotions: that we feel things first, and then think - and think in a way that makes us feel justified in our initial emotional reaction. Again, emotion distorts and disables the reasoning mind.
Emotional Persistence
The author refers to the "refractory period" during which we act on emotion without pausing to evaluate the circumstances. Neurologists have found that the emotional center is engaged three milliseconds before the logical parts of the human brain, but a person may choose to remain irrational for minutes or hours - sometimes even for years - continuing to act upon emotion without engaging logic, or using logic to justify the emotional response.
Consider the near-miss car accident: the incident took place in a fraction of a second, but it may be several seconds before the feeling of panic subsides. Some drivers even need to pull off the road and wait for several minutes to regain their composure.
He gives the example of a spat between a married couple - a misinterpretation leads to an accusation, leads to a retort then another retort, until the couple find themselves in a shouting match. This is not a conversation between two rational people, but a constant escalation between two emotional people - each reacting to the way they feel without thinking, in a rapid-fire exchange of hostilities that does not provide a break to cool off and think about what they are saying to one another.
There is also the tendency of emotions to perpetuate - because you were irritated in traffic on your way to work, you are snappish and hostile to a colleague. It is not uncommon for an emotional incident in childhood to perpetuate into adult life, becoming part of a "script" that influences the way in which a person reacts to a given stimulus.
And just as with the sense of fear we feel while standing at the edge of a cliff, we may recognize the irrationality of our emotional reactions, but we still feel the emotions.
Emotional Control
Many people wish to have control over their emotions - it is the primary reason people seek the help of a therapist. But we do not wish to switch off our emotions entirely. Some emotions are pleasant to experience, and even negative emotions have beneficial effects: fear enables us to avoid danger, anger prepares us for physical exertion to eliminate an obstacle, and sadness signals others that we need assistance.
So rather than disabling our emotions entirely, we seek to disconnect certain emotional reactions to certain triggers in a selective manner. A person wishes to overcome their fear of flying so that they can travel by airplane, or to set aside their self-doubts so that they have the confidence to try again in a situation in which they previously failed.
In most instances, emotions are a conditioned response - like Pavlov's dog, we have become programmed to exhibit an emotion in reaction to a specific stimulus. It is theorized that we can gradually de-program ourselves, or intentionally program ourselves to elicit a given response in a given scenario. Emergency preparedness training attempts to do exactly this: to turn down the fear and replace it with an automated response in a given situation.
In other worse, we are afraid of something because we have learned to be afraid of it and we become angry because we have learned to be angry. There was an incident in which that emotion served us well, and we seek to repeat the success of the past.
It's also noted that the mind employs inconsistent and fuzzy logic: to have been bitten by a horse may instill in us a fear of any large animal, not just horses. To have been bitten by a horse at a carnival may instill in us a fear of popcorn if we were experiencing that scent at the moment we were bitten. Emotions are not precise, so we cannot often state with great confidence exactly what connection has been made in the mind between stimulus and emotional response.
Weakening Emotional Triggers
There are a few reasons to doubt that we can completely disconnect emotional triggers.
The first is that there may be innate fears. Mice who have been raised in a laboratory and who never encountered a cat will show fear of a cat the first time they see one - so it's theorized that certain things are innate triggers and that overcoming these can be difficult and is perhaps impossible.
The second is that the human mind is well adapted to learning new things and making new connections - but not at all adapted to the unlearning process. When we accept an irrational belief, we have a very hard time letting go of it, and maintain it in the face of strong evidence to the contrary. Our emotional system is much the same - and because it is largely autonomous, it is even more impervious to logical reasoning.
So in all, a more reasonable goal than disconnecting the triggers is weakening them - to give us the ability to recognize that we are triggered, to recognize that we are having an emotional moment, and to make a better choice in our reaction. To this end, the author identifies six factors or themes.
The first factor is the similarity of the present stimulus to that of the stimulus by which the trigger is programmed. In a spat between a couple, emotions are aroused quickly and strongly if the wife says to a man the exact same phrase his mother used to irritate him when he was a child. If the same idea were conveyed by any other words, it might not arouse his emotions as strongly.
A second factor is the similarity of conditions or environment between the trigger and the programming event. If a traumatic event occurred at a bank, the person may be emotionally primed any time they are in a bank, even though the physical location was incidental to the event that occurred.
A third factor is the period in life when the trigger was set. It's generally found that events that occurred during childhood have a much stronger and deeper impact - likely because a child lacks the experience to evaluate and compare, to reason the connection, hence anything "new" makes the strongest impression.
A fourth factor is the intensity of emotion in the programming incident. A person who is startled by a horse is less likely to have a strong trigger than one who was bitten by one, because the trauma of physical pain makes the memory more intense, strengthening the trigger.
The fifth factor is repetition of an event. A person who was routinely bullied by a classmate has a much stronger association than someone who might have been bullied only once or twice during their entire youth.
The sixth is the individual's emotional resilience. People who tend to feel things deeply and dwell on their emotions form very strong triggers when compared to others who are more emotionally balanced and tend to recover and forget about things quickly.
The typical approach to weakening a trigger involves recognizing the trigger itself - figuring out exactly what causes us to have a strong emotional connection - and then recognizing that the emotional responses is inappropriate or harmful. Optionally, we can practice an alternative response - or at the very least, to create a response of not responding immediately. A few seconds to pause and think can he highly effective.
And going back to what was said at the beginning of the chapter, we cannot help having emotions, but we can choose whether to act upon them - the fear of heights makes us wish to flee from the precipice, but we can choose not to act on that fear. The emotion itself does us no harm, but the harm is done by the action we take.
Dealing with Moods
An emotional reaction is instantaneous and short-lived, but a mood perpetuates. The emotion of fear is intense and fleeting, but we can also be in an apprehensive mood that makes us more likely to experience fear, and that mood can last for several hours. Being in an irritable mood makes us more likely to get angry, being in a melancholy mood makes us more likely to feel sadness, etc.
In some instances, moods are the lingering after-effects of an emotion. A person who experienced the emotion of anger while walking to work (a specific response to a specific incident) may remain in an irritable mood for the rest of the day, poised to feel anger at the slightest provocation, and one which may not have aroused his anger if he were not in such an irritable state.
Moods can also be induced by milder stimuli - an incident occurs that does not fully arouse an emotional reaction, but which puts a person in a mood to experience it if later stimuli correspond. A person may have had "a bad day" and experienced a number of minor incidents, no one among them enough to pull their emotional trigger, but the cumulative effect has put them in a mood.
And moods can also be aroused by internal causes - simply thinking about something can arouse an emotion or set a mood - so even if a person's physical activities are observed, the mood may stem from an internal monologue that is not evident to anyone else.
Because moods are more subtle, their causes are more subtle - and may not be noticed even by the person experiencing a mood. A person can usually reflect on events to discover what made him angry, but he may have no idea why he is in such an irritable mood because the stimuli were so subtle as to be unnoticed, or unremarkable even if they had been noticed.
While the author can see the value of emotions, he is "far less convinced that moods are of any use."