Emotional Self-Regulation

Welcome everybody, Doug Noll and my lovely wife, Alaya.

Ciao.

So tonight we thought we would talk about emotional self-regulation. It's one of the components of emotional intelligence or what I call emotional competency. And we want to just spend a few minutes talking about what it is and how you can develop it. Because emotional self-regulation is a pretty basic and foundational skill that every human being should master. In its essence, emotional self-regulation is the ability to work against what you're feeling in the moment. If you're really angry and you want to hit somebody or yell or scream, you are emotionally self-regulating when instead of doing that, you stop and listen to what the other person is saying and maybe affect label them, or maybe listen to them or engage in some sort of problem-solving process. In other words, your behavior, your action, and your words are contrary to what you really want to do, what your body is telling you want to do. And what's going on here is there's a huge conflict going on between the executive centers of your brain and other parts of your brain that are highly reactive and they're not the non-thinking parts of your brain. And all they want you to do, all those neural networks are pushing you to do is to take action. So having self-regulation becomes critical to your ability to manage your own emotions and ultimately to manage the emotions of other people around you. So that's what it is. Aleya, do you have any perspectives from your, vantage point about emotional self-regulation?

I do. So when there is that need for self-regulation, emotional self-regulation, there are things that you may do that are going to be incredibly uncomfortable. So if you don't have it and you get yourself into a situation, a relationship where you're talking to somebody and they say something and then you respond just immediately, you don't even think about what you're saying. And you put your foot in your mouth or you shame them or you criticize them or you're controlling them or you're negative, and then you reflect later about the conversation, the interaction with that other person, you might then start to feel guilt. You might start to have shame. You might have to like self-critic of your own self, which creates this discomfort. The discomfort is there to actually help you build more awareness so that you then have the ability to begin cultivating that impulse control with your emotions. So if you've got this tremendous rage, frustration, irritation coming up in the presence of another person, but you are not in the present moment, you're not aware, you're not even conscious that you're feeling this, you just blow up, emote. But again, that discomfort that you feel afterwards, if you take a moment to reflect, is the Wake Up, Wake Up creating an opportunity for you to behave differently in the future. And so instead of creating a situation where you experience shame or guilt because of your behavior, every single day you could do this very simple practice. And it's sort of like step 1 of bringing your energy and awareness into this present moment. One of the things that works against us with cultivating more awareness is that we're not in the present moment. And you actually have a breath that you do multiple times a day, and you can use your breath to be like, I'm just going to be here right now. I'm going to be with my breath. Do a little inner check-in. How are you feeling? What's going on with your body? Just that simple practice is bringing you into the present moment, which then increases your capacity to be aware of your emotions when you're interacting and engaging with others. Another very simple practice when you're in the presence of another interacting and engaging is you start thinking about what you're going to say, how you're going to respond, and then ask yourself, is that the way that I really want to respond? How am I going to feel 3 hours later when I reflect upon this? Is this really moving from my heart? Am I really deeply listening to this person? And then there's the skill set that Doug teaches about cultivating the ability to listen someone into existence. And so I'm just going to kind of hand it over to you now, Doug, that whole piece of like awareness, the emotions, listening to somebody, being present.

So in order to self-regulate, you have to be emotionally self-aware. All of these skills, these emotional competency skills, build on each other, and you can't possibly begin to regulate yourself until you become aware of your emotional experience. So we'll probably take another session to talk about How do you develop emotional awareness? But one of the things that you can do when you are developing your emotional self-regulation is to think about and label the emotional experience you're having in the moment. We call this self-affect, A-F-F-E-C-T, self-affect labeling, where you're actually going to label your own emotional experience. It requires you to have a working vocabulary of words around emotion, And as I said before, to become emotionally aware, but when you become aware of your emotions, you will now label what you're experiencing. So for example, if I'm angry, I'll say, I'm really angry right now. I'm really frustrated. I'm really mad. And I'm a little sad. Is that when you put feelings into words, and those are Matthew Lieberman's words, that's the title of his seminal paper, scanning study. That's the, his, the, his seminal brain scanning study is called Putting Feeling into Words. And so when you put feelings into words, all sorts of amazing things happen in your brain. Most significantly, you, as you label your own emotions, your prefrontal cortex comes back online while the emotional centers of your brain become inhibited. In other words, you immediately calm yourself down and this is all unconscious. So one of the most powerful ways to self-regulate is to label your own emotions in the moment as soon as you're aware that you're experiencing that emotion. And that will allow your prefrontal cortex to come back online, and then you'll calm down, and then you'll be able to move from there. So try Affect Labeling. The, um, the importance of self-regulation and impulse control can't be overstated. There is a great video, actually there are a lot of videos, but if you Google in marshmallow test, you'll be taken to a recreation on YouTube of a test done back in the '70s, I believe, at Stanford. And what the experimenters did is take 4-year-olds, little boys and girls, and put them in a room with a plate, and the instruction was, "If you can withhold, if you can withhold or not eat this marshmallow until I get back, you'll get 2 marshmallows." And sometimes this has been replicated with cookies, and they videotape the kids. Well, the important information is that the children at 4 years old who are able to fight the temptation to eat the marshmallow to get the reward showed in later years, 15 and 20 years later, were far more successful in life than those kids that did not have impulse control at 4 and just ate the marshmallow and, and went for the instant gratification as opposed to going through the pain of delayed gratification to get a bigger reward. So impulse control cannot be overstated in terms of its importance about helps your life. The other thing about emotional self-regulation that is important to know is that in the beginning of your life, you're modeling your emotional behaviors based on what your parents do. Most parents do not teach emotional self-regulation other than to say, shut up or stop crying, and they'll emotionally invalidate you. And even the most loving parents will do this unconsciously because they don't know any better. So you are really never taught how to emotionally self-regulate except to either stuff your emotions down, don't show your emotions other than good emotions like happiness and joy and excitement. And if you're overexuberant, you're told as a child to stuff that down. And if you have bad emotions, so-called bad emotions, you know, like anger or rage or frustration, you're told to stuff that down too. So the way that you're taught to emotionally self-regulate is to to stop feeling or to shove everything down. And of course that creates a feeling of emotional, lack of emotional safety, which causes you to shut down, to not be able to relate to people, to not be able to have intimate relationships later on in life.

And body pain, a lot of body pain, because you have to process the emotions somehow. And so then you want to turn to biology.

That's right, a lot of body pain. So another reason why we want to develop emotional self-regulation is so that we're not afraid of our own emotions. Because we've been taught from the time we're very little children, most people, 95%, have been told that emotions are bad and emotions are evil and it makes you weak and it doesn't make you a whole person. And of course that's all wrong. We're 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Why are we, why are we leaving 98% of who we are on the table? So the importance of learning how to regulate, it goes far beyond just being able to anger manage. It goes far beyond anger management. It's much deeper and allows us to express who we are as human beings without fear and without anxiety. Because that's what most people experience when they— I mean, I sure used to have that problem until I learned all the— taught this stuff and learned it for myself, learned it and discovered it.

And there is actually another layer that we'll talk about maybe in another little snippet, but recognizing that when you do know how to process your emotions, you've labeled them, you're processing them, it actually helps your body go through developmental stages. And so as a child, if you didn't let yourself feel these particular emotions, and even in your teens and your 20s, your 30s, 40s, 50s, your body literally hasn't matured. And that's why you might still be reacting like the 2-year-old, because your body hasn't gone through these developmental processes. So by labeling the emotions. And then we'll talk about how to process your emotions to help your body in its evolution process, in its awakening process, and cultivating more awareness.

Yes, Gordon Neufeld, a brilliant developmental psychologist in Vancouver, British Columbia, talks about emotional stuckedness. And he works with children. And the reason he works with children is that they're a lot easier to shit than Adults. He's pretty funny about that. But he says what happens is that when children are invalidated, their emotional development stops. And he says just because we're in adult bodies does not mean that we're emotionally adults. And he said most adults are not. Most adults are still emotionally childlike because they were stuck at 6 or 7 or 8 years old. And, and as a result, when they get under stress or conflict, they have the ability to self-regulate of a 6-year-old, which is not very great. And that's as a direct result of emotional invalidation, where the parents were not acting as emotional coaches, but were acting as authoritarian people telling the child how not to behave, which is how not to be emotional. So that's a problem we have to deal with too. And you know, there's a lot of baggage that has to be worked on. But the good news is that emotional self-regulation is teachable. It is learnable. And it won't— once you start working on it, it doesn't take long to really develop it. In fact, if you take any of our courses, you'll find out that you can actually develop your emotional competency, including emotional self-regulation, about 4 to 6 weeks of practice. Practice. It's, it's, our brains are very plastic. So that's it on emotional self-regulation. Alea, any closing words?

Be in the present moment and affix label yourself. Start with that.

Okay, well, thanks for watching and tune in again for our next episode.