You can never think your way out of something you felt your way into.
Consider the last time you had an instant emotional reaction to something that someone did or said. Looking back, you can almost feel the moment your executive “thinking” brain was hijacked by a highly emotional response.
Scientists have observed that it takes us 20-30 minutes to return to a calm state once we have been triggered into a reactive state, yet it is in this calm state where we operate from a more rational and reasonable capacity rather than an overly emotional one.
If you try to out talk, out justify, or out smart whoever triggered you, you’ll likely not get very far. You’ll do much better if you get back into a calm emotional state first. But how?
For years, I’ve talked about the usefulness of developing high resilience to triggers, high emotions, stress, and challenging conversations by practicing mindfulness around your emotional state. To do this, I utilize and teach a concept I’ve termed Flow and Mud. In Flow, we feel good. We feel positive, optimistic, confident, loving, creative and a multitude of other helpful emotions. In the mud, we feel negative, pessimistic, insecure, frustrated, defensive, judgmental, and a host of other less helpful emotions. It only makes sense that we make better decisions and have more productive conversations from the flow versus the mud.
So how do we master this dance between the two? How do we shift once we’ve been triggered? We have to get out of our minds and into our bodies. I use a variety of techniques to do this: box breathing, going for a quick walk (usually with my Flow Spotify playlist in my ear), calling a friend with whom I can vent, or using one of my favorite meditations saved on YouTube.
If I’m in a situation where I can’t take the time to do any of these, I rely on deep breathing, bringing my attention to the feeling of my feet on the floor, softly rubbing my hand over my upper arm, and/or discreetly tapping my fingers together slowly under the table or in my lap. I slow my speech and lengthen the pause between the other person speaking and my response. Any and all of these will bring me out of my automatic emotional response and back into a more thoughtful rational response.
I find the more I use these tools, the faster I get at returning to a calm state. Seriously, it does not take me 30 minutes any more to get calm again, and I owe that to the mindfulness practice of managing my emotional state on an ongoing basis.
Our results are our answer. If you continue to get triggered and respond emotionally to people and circumstances, you can do better. You can be in control of yourself instead of allowing others to control you. It only takes the desire to get a different result, a few simple tools, and a little bit of practice.
“The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength.”
~ Marcus Aurelius
