Calm Your Emotions: Overcome Your Anxious, Negative, and Pessimistic Brain and Find Balance, Resilience, & Calm

Chapter 1. Our Volatile Emotions and Why They Reign Supreme

Though I wasn’t the best student in school, I was able to develop a close friendship with my high school English teacher, Mr. Locke.

I’m not sure why he took an interest in me, but I suppose a convenient narrative is that he’s the reason I ended up as a writer, and I have him to thank for all of it. Unfortunately, that would be false to say, as it’s not remotely what we talked about most of the time.

Throughout the whole year, it was enlightening to ask him about the books we were reading for class and what he actually thought about them. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer? Overrated. The Great Gatsby? His favorite of all time. Of Mice and Men? He preferred the movie.

However, things got really interesting when the end of the year drew close and he started to open up about the people in my class—my peers. Of course, this was a dream come true for me: an adult willing to gossip with me about my fellow students. Looking back, it was wildly inappropriate for Mr. Locke to engage in such topics with me, but it’s not like the teachers weren’t doing it amongst themselves, anyway.

He let me in on a little secret of his: Whenever he had to give negative feedback, he would always make sure to try to build up the individual student a couple days before. He would do this to make sure their self-esteem, at least in the realm of his class, was sufficiently high, such that his negative feedback wouldn’t have as big of an impact. He wanted students to not take things so personally and to be able to separate his comments on their work from them as a person. Too many students in the past had received his feedback in less than ideal ways. He wanted them to hear, This paper could use work, not "You need work."

My teenage mind was blown away, and I told him that he was so clever to use Jedi mind tricks on his students. He told me there were a few students he would do this on more than others because he felt they had low self-esteem or he knew they were being bullied outside of his class. My adult mind still admires him and thinks that he had tremendous insight into how people worked—especially future adults who were still figuring themselves out and had fragile egos. It wasn’t until much later that I realized he was helping students gain emotional resilience through raising their self-esteem.

Self-esteem is an essential component of emotional resilience and is often deemed the immune system of emotions. When it’s high, you can handle what’s thrown your way, and when it’s low, you are more likely to collapse under scrutiny. Mr. Locke had somehow dialed into that and instilled that into his students.

Emotional resilience is a trait that is like the background music in a movie. When it’s there, you don’t notice it and it seems that scenes just fit together without a hitch. However, if it’s missing, suddenly words are taken the wrong way, everything feels wrong, and the scene falls apart. In other words, you notice it when you need it, but not when you don’t.

Therein lies the conundrum of resilience, emotional stability, and strength in the face of tragedy and despair—how do you get it before you need it, and how do you know if you don’t have it? The ugly truth is that none of us are naturally born with it. Some of us are put into nasty situations where we develop coping mechanisms for strength, but that doesn’t mean you are resilient. It just means the dam hasn’t broken yet. And what will you do when the dam breaks?

My hope for this book is to arm you, whoever you are and whatever you may or may not have suffered, with tools and techniques to persevere and thrive. Emotional resilience is one of those rare qualities that cause a drastic shift in how you see the world. More importantly, it allows you to see you and gain better self-awareness of your thought patterns and behaviors. First understanding and then being able to harness and master your emotions gives you a lens of safety and control over the world, which gives you the feeling of being able to do anything.

Emotions are a major part of our existence and our identity as humans. Yet we don’t often take a moment to think about where they come from, what they mean, why we feel certain ways, and how emotion actually affects us.

Why did I cry at that movie?

Because it was sad.

But why did I cry?

Because that’s what you do when you’re sad.

But . . . why?

We just accept that we are affected and don’t take the time to think about how to strengthen or regulate certain emotions for our greater well-being. Unfortunately, it’s this lack of attention that leads precisely to a lack of resilience. If you don’t understand the forces at work inside your brain, you can only fall prey to them with no hope of regulating or even combating them. As such, we are completely at the whims of our emotional brain.

Mastering and conquering our emotional brains requires a bit of knowledge and background into what you are going to be battling. How do emotions function, what is their role, and why are they capable of completely dictating our lives?

Emotional Origins

What makes us feel emotions? How do we know and understand what we feel and why we feel it? If you were to ask one hundred people to answer those questions, you would probably get one hundred answers (let’s be honest, you’d probably get more than one hundred!). Ultimately, it boils down to a study in neuroscience, but we will first explore two standard theories to explain the emotions that color our lives.

The first theory is called the cognitive appraisal theory, put forth by Swiss psychologist Klaus Scherer.

This theory states that emotions are judgments about the extent that a current situation meets your expectations and goals, no matter how you define them. Happiness is felt because it is an evaluation that your expectations are being met or even exceeded. If you win the lottery, you feel happiness because it solves your financial needs and likely exceeds your expectations. Similarly, if you receive a nasty unexpected bill in the mail, you also feel emotion—surprise and disappointment—since you almost certainly didn’t wake up that morning expecting that to happen.

If you’re asked out on a date, you feel happiness because it holds the promise of satisfying your romantic needs. In the same way, when you feel sadness, it is an evaluation that your goals are not being met or that the situation falls below your expectations, and anger might be the feeling that is aimed at whatever is blocking your goals.

Here, emotions are an instinctual reaction to objects or situations that relate to your expectations and goals. Often our goals are not clearly defined, as they can be both subconscious and conscious. You may not be able to say exactly why you’re happy or disappointed at times—this theory sheds light on the fact that you subconsciously held some type of expectation that was or was not met.

If you are unemployed and presented with a job offer, you will feel happiness because you see it as a way to solve your financial worries. Alternatively, if you lose your job, you are saddened because you lose your financial stability. Your emotions are tied to how your status quo changes—another way we hold expectations we don’t realize. In some cases, it may have little to do with the situation itself; maybe you’ve always hated your job and wanted to leave it. But when you’re faced with the unexpected loss, you are saddened because it represents the loss of stability and your future career.

I had a friend who sometimes liked to toss a coin to make tricky decisions. Not because they wanted random chance to tell them what to do, but because the outcome almost always gave some insight into what they really wanted to do. If the coin told them to make Decision A and they found themselves feeling disappointed, they took this emotion as a sign that they unconsciously were already expecting Decision B!

Luckily for us, we don’t have to employ such dark arts to gain more mastery and awareness over our own unconscious mental processes.

The cognitive appraisal theory also speaks to your perception of how well a situation meets your goals and expectations, so your emotions will reflect that. This theory says that it’s our evaluation of events that causes us to feel certain ways about them. So, we feel positive emotions for an event that we have appraised as having some kind of benefit for us, and negative ones when we perceive some kind of threat or drawback.

Understanding this theory means that you can better evaluate your emotions by always determining what thoughts accompany them and how these interpretations and analyses actually line up with reality . . . or not. For example, you walk into a room, and a crowd of people bursts out laughing. You feel embarrassed because your appraisal of the situation goes a little something like this: They were laughing at me. What caused this emotion? Not the strangers laughing, but your thoughts about the meaning behind this action.

This way of looking at things is keystone in what’s called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and in many ways, it may seem overly simplistic. Nevertheless, the above theory is useful for background about other, more-involved theories of emotion. If you simply pause and become aware of two things:

1.      What are my expectations here?

2.      What are my interpretations and appraisals of events?

then you might find yourself at a very good starting point for better understanding yourself and your emotions. It might help you realize if you are holding subconscious expectations one way or another.

The second explanation of the nature of emotions is that they are purely an interpretation of the body’s signals.

Psychologists William James and Carl Lange proposed that emotions are just the perceptions of change in the physiology of your body—for example, changes in heart rate, breathing, perspiration, and hormone levels. This theory argues that emotions such as happiness are merely a physiological perception instead of a judgment as the previous theory states. Other emotions like sadness and anger are also mental reactions to different kinds of biological functions.

According to James and Lange, your body’s state will change first as a reaction to an external stimulus, which will spur you to associate an emotion with it. For example, imagine you are about to perform a speech in front of a group of people and think of your body’s reaction beforehand. You might feel your heart pumping faster or your breathing increasing slightly. Your mind will associate the combination of these physical reactions with a feeling of nervousness.

There is undoubtedly a connection between emotions and physiological changes. However, the problem with this account is that bodily states are not nearly as fine-tuned or diverse as the many different kinds of emotions. Returning to the previous example, your heart pumping and increased breathing may also be interpreted as a feeling of excitement because of the close physiological similarities—and this is where you may start to wonder whether personal interpretation and appraisal might come into play. This is the problem with associating emotions with physical reactions, because