OK I appreciate that sounds weird. I mean none of us enjoy feeling sad, bored, frustrated, irritated, anxious etc. However, if we can manage to accept and endure these emotions rather than – what we tend to do –
- try to avoid them (impossible)
- suppress them (gives us little chance of managing them well) or
- escape them (means they’ll just come back at another time!)
then we not only reduce our chances of becoming emotionally intelligent, we will usually find ourselves behaving in ways that are really unhelpful to us and others.
(You might not think you do anything other than simply experience our negative emotions but in reality, most of us have a complicated relationship with them. As I have said before, we receive a lot of messages that we’re meant to be happy all the time and that feeling emotions like anger or jealousy are ‘bad’. This can prevent emotions from arriving and leaving without the extra baggage of shame. So rather than emotions simply arriving and leaving, this means we can often complicate this process.)
Now we all know the feeling of getting home when the stress of the day is still with us. What’s your ‘go to’ when that happens? Is it chocolate, a social media binge or a glass of wine? I suspect few of us think, ‘OK so I am experiencing an uncomfortable emotion, I had better sit with it, process what I need to process and wait for it to leave!’ So herein lies another difficultly (aside from reducing our comfort zone) with the inability to simply endure uncomfortable emotions: it can lead us directly to bad habits.
It takes a surprisingly small number of repeats of a behaviour for it to become a habit. This is because the dopamine reward/learning circuit that worked so well to drive our ancestors to search out food for example, and know how to repeatedly do so, is not adapted for how we live now. Today in the western world, we can immediately gorge on so many things that are not great for us, and our antiquated wiring is only going to encourage us.
The dopamine reward triggers this learning system to implant a habit very quickly. When the triggers of boredom, stress, sadness, agitation etc.….. are temporarily relieved by a quick dopamine hit (from chocolate, online shopping etc.), our very old system embeds that process because it believes it’s helping us survive. How could it know that many things can actually be bad for us as those things were not around when we evolved this reward system? It hasn’t been updated.
The fact these offerings are so readily available and we can repeat them so quickly, also doesn’t help. It means we can fast-track the development of those habits. It also doesn’t help that this learning is not the domain of the pre-fontal cortex (the part of our brain responsible for higher level thinking that we evolved more recently). This ‘learning to repeatedly find a reward’ drive is a raw survival response which overrides higher level thinking and the reason why habits are so hard to kick. We can rarely just think ourselves out of habits.
Part of addressing habits is learning to notice, acknowledge, accept and endure uncomfortable emotions to avoid developing them in the first place.
But also beneficial is to increase our awareness of our emotions and thinking in ‘the moment’ if we are to have any chance of diverting habitual action. A few of us can do this by just increasing our awareness of this process (trigger> behaviour > reward). The rest of us need mindfulness, meditation (and anything that increases our ‘presence’ in this moment) to help us create a distance between our triggers and our responses. A mind that’s detached enough to be able to observe our responses rather than engage automatically the same way we always have, is a mindful one! However, this still doesn’t make kicking habits easy.
Something useful I read recently by Dr Judson Brewer outlines how instead of just trying to resist the reward response, you can tamper with this fundamental drive so you arrive at another place: so you can kick these unhelpful habits. He talks about re-evaluating your ‘reward’ and what it gives you by asking ‘What does this behaviour do for me?’ and then exploring this mindfully by considering sensations, thoughts and emotions.
Take for example you’ve had a stressful day and your ‘go to’ is a bag of crisps. At some point the slight pleasure of something salty rewarded you enough for you to repeat that and it became a habit. Only now this habit is embedded, your dopamine drive makes you grab the crisps, you polish them off in a state of autopilot, chances are you didn’t get much enjoyment out of them and their ‘reward’ was actually minimal. And to top it off, you feel a bit rubbish because you know that you eat too many crisps!
Brewer states that if you really look at what your habitual ‘go tos’ actually give you, you can re-evaluate them and start to associate them with the opposite of ‘reward’. If you really tune in to how rubbish you feel about yourself after you’ve eaten the crisps and the fact that guzzling them isn’t actually that satisfying, the reward drive can be de-activated as you realise there’s no real reward in those crisps. You need to feel, think and receive the sensation of this disappointing experience to de-activate this ‘reward’ (and that’s where mindfulness comes in hand again).
Likewise, if when you reach for your phone when you’re bored or procrastinating (and you think it’s going to soothe you) noticing that it actually agitates you, wastes time, prevents you from achieving what you need to achieve and makes you kick yourself afterwards, it’s ‘reward’ diminishes along with the drive to do it.
I remember doing exactly this at the biscuit tin once. I got home from a stressful day and caught myself reaching for the container full of chocolate biscuits. I stopped and said to myself, ‘I could eat every last biscuit but that experience would soon be over and then what would I be left with? I also thought, ‘if I start, I probably will polish the lot off!’ (possibly how my brain is wired – I am quite ‘all or nothing’!)
Do you believe me when I say I haven’t had a single biscuit in the last year and very few for many years before that? They are just an optimised-for-temptation salty, sugary, fat combination made to tempt us to make lots of money for someone. I don’t think their creators have our best interests at heart!