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"A Simple Trick For Becoming A Calmer Person”

Thursday, February 21, 2019 4:25

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“A Simple Trick For Becoming A Calmer Person”

by David Cain

“In his one of his many excellent columns, Oliver Burkeman offers a counter-intuitive strategy for those who have trouble sleeping: tell yourself it’s not a big deal. You’ll fall asleep when you fall asleep. The point is that telling ourselves we must get to sleep right away – and that grave problems will arise if we don’t – is probably the number one reason we can’t sleep. That doesn’t mean sleep isn’t important, or that sleep problems are never serious, only that the more vehemently we insist we must already be sleeping, the less sleep we will ultimately get.

This strategy acknowledges a subtle but important reality about the problem: we can’t directly control when we fall asleep. We really want that control, however, and we can make the problem much worse by grasping too stridently at it. And whether we do that is something we can control. With practice, anyway. We can make use of a similarly counter-intuitive approach for becoming generally calmer people in waking life.

We all want to be more calm. We want to spend more time feeling peace and ease, and less time feeling anger or agitation. Naturally, we try to experience more of the thing we like, and less of what we don’t like. So, when calm is present, we try to keep it around, and when emotions like anger and agitation appear, we reflexively try to get rid of them. We try to fight them and push them away.

This pushing-away impulse is another instance of nature’s crude approach-avoid programming leading us astray. As you know by now if you read this blog, many of our reflexive responses to pain and adversity are tuned for survival rather than happiness, and lawless savannahs rather than modern life. By trying to steamroll our tough emotions rather than let them naturally arise and dissipate, we’re actually ensuring that they cause us more distress and stick around longer.

This habitual pushing-away tends to take the form of rumination. We try to neutralize the uncomfortable emotion with a firehose-blast of reactive thinking – mentally reliving the inciting event, rehearsing indignant speeches we’d like to make to certain parties, or otherwise trying to argue our way back to peace and calm. But this habit only fuels the fire. Just like a self-flagellating insomniac, we’re trying to assume a kind of direct control over our experience that simply isn’t available, and that makes us feel even more out of control. The emotion snowballs. The mental scenarios proliferate.

There’s a counterintuitive approach that works much better, as taught by some therapists, and every single meditation teacher: When you feel an unpleasant emotion, like anger or agitation, instead of trying to get rid of it, try becoming aware of it. But aren’t we already aware of it? I wouldn’t be upset if I was unaware of my anger, right? Well, no. When something sets us off, we might become briefly aware of the anger, for a second or so. But anger is unpleasant, and we don’t want to experience it. So our attention rebounds off it like a bullet into our thoughts, where we feel we have some control over what’s happening.

Once we’re preoccupied by the situation around the emotion, we’re no longer directly aware of the emotion. In an effort to immediately resolve the trouble, we madly rehearse imagined confrontations, fantasize about the cavalry coming, or explain to ourselves – or perhaps to some unfortunate person nearby – why we shouldn’t have to experience this.

But what if, once we recognized that anger (or any other strong emotion) is present, we refrained from engaging with those fantasies and narratives, at least for a few minutes, and instead just observed the emotional experience itself, in as matter-of-fact a way as possible?

By “the emotional experience itself” I’m referring to the embodied, physical part: the actual pit-in-stomach feeling, the heat, the raised heart rate, the various clenching and contracting that tends to happen. Although we often conflate them, the rumination and argumentation around the emotion are not the emotion. They’re reactions to the emotion. But they can fuel the emotion indefinitely, sustaining and deepening it. If you simply did your best to observe and allow* the emotional experience itself, returning to it each time you got caught up in the surrounding story, how long do you think that emotional intensity would last? The answer is: the least possible amount of time.

You’d think that refraining from fighting the emotion would lead to it ballooning uncontrollably until it took us over. But the opposite happens. The initial heat and noise is intense, but without the fuel source of rumination and rehearsal, the peak comes – and goes – relatively quickly. Rumination, on the other hand, does tend to billow out until it consumes our entire experience. The inner arguing and rehashing provide a limitless fuel supply for the fire.

Don’t take my word for it, but doing this practice can help a person recognize that most emotional sensations themselves aren’t nearly as painful, or as long-lived, as the struggle to avoid feeling them. Once you take up that struggle, then you’re caught in a form of the insomniac’s paradox: inadvertently keeping the emotion wide awake by insisting that it must “sleep” immediately. At its heart this is a simple trick, arising from a simple insight. Knowing that you can’t force unpleasant emotions away, try being aware of them instead of fighting with them. That’s it. Try it and see how the outcomes differ.

This practice, if you take it seriously, will make you a calmer person over time, guaranteed. That doesn’t mean you’ll never experience anger, or shame, or sadness, or any fewer than every single one of the emotions that make us human. But you’ll get caught in them for hours or days much less often. Rumination will still happen, of course, but you can come to see it as reminder that there’s an alternative.

Like many simple tricks – shuffling cards, poaching an egg – you can learn this to an effective level just by trying it a few times, while mastery might remain a lifetime away. Years into my mindfulness practice I keep discovering new layers to my reactivity and emotional habit chains, and as time goes on I can observe increasingly intense emotions in this way. (Of course I still get overwhelmed sometimes.) It’s not an instant magic bullet, of course, it’s just the most sensible thing to do. It can be learned, and there will be as many chances to practice as you could ever ask for.”

- https://www.raptitude.com/

***

“I feel the need to point out that accepting the presence of anger (or any other reactive emotion) is not the same as accepting the situation that triggered the emotion. You still may want to take some sort of sensible action, which invariably does not require anger, nor is anger any help in deciding what’s sensible. In fact, in my experience, most emotional reactions are simply reactions to the possibility that there is a problem. Only a minority of the time is there a real problem that requires intervention.”

Source: http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2019/02/a-simple-trick-for-becoming-calmer.html

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