First and foremost, welcome to 2024! I hope your 2023 ended with opportunities to celebrate wins and explore what will bring you more joy in this new year.
To start this year, I want to share with you a couple powerful tools that are grounded in neuroscience to help you better de-escalate from emotional triggers so you can start this year making excellent decisions. Because that’s what we all want, right? We know if we can make better decisions, it’s going to lead to better outcomes, more success, more joy.
Let’s start today’s discussion by exploring what’s happening when we get into emotionally triggered states. Science teaches us that if we understand the steps we took to get where we are, we can work backwards in our mind to help us return to a state of clear thinking and smarter decision making.
First, let’s draw on a situation many, if not all of us, have experienced; a difficult coworker. Take a moment and think about this person and think about what makes them difficult. Maybe they’re a prickly personality or maybe they send emails non-stop when the issue can be solved with a simple 5 -minute conversation, but they won’t pick up the phone. The goal here is to remember the parts of the issue that get your blood temperature from a happy simmer to a lively boil.
It probably didn’t take you long to get there, and it’s probably creating some emotions in you along with statements of frustration or annoyance. Let’s walk through what just happened:
First, these responses are filtered through your amygdala, which is the lizard center of the brain. All of the fight, flight, freeze emotions start here. It’s the body’s way of telling you that your survival is at stake. These heightened emotional states actually shut down our prefrontal cortex, which is the logical thinking part of our brain. With the thinking part of the brain shut down, our ability to think logically about a situation goes right out the window. Are we really in danger? Probably not, but our feelings for survival in that moment are 100% real.
See, the human brain, despite being capable of amazing feats of intelligence, really hasn’t seen an upgrade for many centuries, whereas the world we live in has greatly evolved. We don’t live in a world where lions, tigers, and bears are going to eat us, and we haven’t for a long time. The problem here is when we get triggered, we’re still using the original survival programming that keeps us alive, rather than using our full brain to learn, improve and become happier. The best description is we’re functioning on Human Operating System 1.0 instead of 2.0. The only way to get to 2.0 is learning these steps to de-escalate yourself and re-engage your thinking brain.
Remember all those thoughts you had about your difficult co-worker? Do they sound anything like this?
- “I’m feeling so annoyed by this person. I think they just want to waste my time.”
- “Do they waste everyone’s time like they do mine? That’s so frustrating!”
- “I’m feeling insecure about my job opportunities. They promoted this person twice, but I don’t want to be like them. Maybe I need to find a new place to work.”
- “I’m so disappointed that this person and I can’t see eye to eye. They’re just ignorant.”
What else we know about the brain is that neurons that wire together, fire together. So these emotions that are triggered in this state, wire together neurons to bring on this line of thinking. Those initial reactive thoughts about your coworker are automatically wired to those emotions, which trigger more wired-in thoughts, so your brain just pushes you these same old, reactive thoughts, regardless of whether they are valid, helpful, or even remotely accurate. And it makes us sound like a toddler having a temper tantrum. Not flattering.
Unfortunately, our amygdala processes cognition at the level of a 4 year old. It’s a cause and effect that if we don’t learn to manage, we’re setting ourselves up to stay trapped in our old thoughts instead of learning to move forward, de-escalate, and learn how to do better.
Today, I want to leave you with 2 mental exercises you can use to de-escalate in these situations, regulate your emotions, get off old thought-paths and return to a centered state:
Emotions as birds, and letting them go.
This is a great one for naming your emotions and giving yourself the opportunity to let them go. When we release the emotions we can think more clearly, and avoid getting sucked down that old thought path. First, and most importantly, is to name the emotions you are feeling in the moment. Whether it’s frustration, confusion, anger, sadness, disgust, guilt, insecurity…. Whatever it is, name it. Make sure to name at least 5 emotions as part of this exercise, because naming one just isn’t enough- emotions come in groups. As humans, our emotions are complex and there are usually more than one happening at any given time.
Next, close your eyes and imagine these emotions are annoying birds flying around your head creating noise and distraction. They’re relentless and non-stop- dive-bombing you, squawking, pecking at you. Makes it hard to get a moment’s peace with all that noise in your head, right?
Now, hold out your arms and invite the birds to land on your arms. Acknowledge each one of these individually. I encourage you to come up with your own phrase, but you can start with the following to help you start the process of releasing the emotions: “Anger, I’m glad you’re here. Thank you for warning me that I’m feeling threatened. Now you can go.”
After you make the statements of letting go, breathe in to a count of 4, and exhale to a count of 8-10. Do this 3 times. The goal here is to use this process to activate the parasympathetic nervous system to bring you back to logical decision making and a calmer state. True emotions only last for 15 seconds, so if you can make it through those initial moments, you’ve got a really good chance of making it through the whole situation.
As you calm down and regulate your emotions, you’ll find your thoughts are much more clear and you’ll start seeing options you didn’t see just a few minutes ago.
Get the Train off the Tracks
Once we’re able to access the smart thinking part of our brain, we have the opportunity to break old patterns of thought. To do this, imagine a rickety old train in your head. Now imagine this train has cars behind it with all your old thought patterns. This is your old “train of thought.”
Now that we’re thinking more clearly, we need to stop the old train of thought before it has the opportunity to continue. Imagine the train coming off the tracks. Whether a wind gust knocked it off, the tracks end, or you’re a giant ogre pushing it over, the goal is to imagine that train not functioning anymore.
In its place, imagine a brand new train, and behind it, the cars of the thoughts you want to think in these situations. Now imagine this shiny new train heading off into the sunset, on open ground, no tracks. There’s no pre-determined way to think about this. You just want to explore with curiosity and clear intent. That new train carrying your new way of thinking, free to go where it’s actually constructive to go, with curiosity as its fuel.
I hope both of these exercises help you in the future to regulate your emotions and think clearly. Remember, we’re going to have emotions, and we’re always going to have the Human Operating System 1.0. We must choose to engage system 2.0 to navigate our complex world.
At Mission Squared, we’re all about helping business leaders and their teams operate at higher levels of awareness and intelligence to build better and more successful teams. If you’d like to learn more about how to regulate your emotions and become a better leader, we invite you to contact us.