For many of us, our emotions can strongly influence our thoughts and behaviour without us even noticing they’ve arrived. Our emotions can drive unhelpful and/or unproductive behaviours without us even being aware of them working away in the ‘background’ we often assign them to!
Over the years, talking to many different people, it seems to me that when adults engage in less-than-desirable behaviours (also including here some unhelpful inactions and mindsets) it can be generally because of one or more these reasons – all linked to emotions :
- Avoiding anything that might possibly carry the risk of triggering uncomfortable emotions (e.g. avoiding the necessity to be assertive and stick up for ourselves). It is not surprising emotions can have this power over us as in a reductive description of emotion’s purpose, they draw us towards things or push us away from them.
- Having an automatic and unconscious reaction to something. This can be triggered by a personal sensitivity or reason for feeling ‘threat’ that we might even have held onto since childhood (e.g. becoming defensive when someone laughs at us) although included in this ‘reason’ could also be: reacting because of stress, tiredness, emotional leftovers from something that happened earlier, a prior ‘bad’ experience of something, feelings towards others involved that we are not overly aware of etc.
- Little awareness of, and poor ability managing, the dopamine-driven reward system -making impulses and compulsions difficult to resist.(e.g. needing to check our phone frequently).
- Letting unhelpful, emotion driven, negative thoughts, go unchallenged and believing them. Often our mindset is detrimentally impacted by negative emotions and our resulting thoughts can sometimes run away with themselves if left unchecked and, in turn, impact on our behaviour and resilience. (e.g. assuming everyone thinks we are rubbish because we made a mistake).
Here I explore some unhelpful behaviours, mindsets and avoidance that we can engage in because of poor emotional awareness and management. Any one person is unlikely to engage in all of these but some might resonate.
Do you ever find yourself…(?)
Refusing to leave your comfort zone
Leaving our ‘comfort zone’ will increase unpredictability, which we perceive will risk triggering uncomfortable emotions that we assume we will not cope with. This can be a very unconscious process and we might only notice is that we don’t want to do certain things.
A person who remans solely in their comfort zone is less likely to grab opportunities, as they guard themselves against venturing beyond what they know and feel totally secure with. This might only be a problem if our comfort zone is cripplingly tiny! Often, we can expand our comfort zone by proving to ourselves that we can cope when we make small changes and step-by-step moves beyond what we are comfortable with.
Giving up easily/poor motivation
Sticking at something we find difficult requires us to be able to endure uncomfortable emotions. If we feel a strong urge to escape any frustration, disappointment or irritation triggered by something that doesn’t come easily, we will struggle to be determined to achieve and giving up will always seem like the more attractive option. This results in poor motivation and/or drive. I explore this further in Help you child manage mild discomfort
Compulsive behaviours/bad habits/impulsive behaviours
Being driven to eat the whole tin of biscuits despite having not savoured or enjoyed a single one, is driven by our (no longer entirely useful) dopamine reward system. This system just tells us we want more, with no clever discernment for whether or not ‘more’ will be good for us. These compulsions can often have little to do with reward as we will often feel terrible for having succumbed to whatever we did! Re-writing the reward can sometimes help: e.g. ‘I am so happy I resisted that strong temptation and have not crammed myself full of sugar’!
I have read in several sources, and it rings true for me, that this dopamine/reward system has been ramped up by – for example – interaction with social media, foods with compositions to max out our dopamine buzz, colourful supermarkets etc – all things our ancestors did not have access to when this reward system was just about going back to pick more berries!
Avoiding and ignoring someone who has triggered you to be upset
Sometimes when we feel emotionally wounded by the words or actions of another, we might not address the situation directly or we might ‘punish’ the other person by avoiding or ignoring them. It takes emotional bravery to sort the situation proactively (which can risk further emotional discomfort), rather than let our resentment continue.
Sulking
When we sulk, we usually hope someone else is going to do the emotional labour for us and take the initiative to come and ask us about what is wrong. This is often because we believe the other person is ‘wrong’ (and we are ‘right’) and therefore it is their responsibility to make the effort to sort things. Our indignance can get in the way of re-finding harmony!
Such black and white thinking is unhelpful as we nearly always have some part in allowing a fractious situation with another person to unfold. Sulking can also be, in part, because we anticipate (often without awareness) that we will struggle to address issues successfully. It is far more effective to address problems assertively and directly with someone, than remain in the position of ‘victim’ or ‘rigidly affronted’ and hope someone else takes action.
Inability to be assertive
Being assertive is often the best response in situations where somebody has breached a boundary and ‘put upon’ us. However, we are not always assertive when it would be the most effective thing to do because we (barely consciously) anticipate that our assertiveness will trigger uncomfortable emotions and therefore be extremely awkward – which it might! We will often put up with things or go elsewhere and complain in preference to being assertive. I explore this further in: It takes emotional intelligence to be assertive.
Controlling/being inflexible
Some of us feel the need to control, and never deviate from the plan, because we perceive we’re unable to manage the emotions triggered by unpredictability and unplanned events. This means we tend to strive for certainty which is nearly always impossible to achieve. What’s more, this futile striving can trigger the anxiety any careful planning is trying to avoid in the first place! The need to control is often linked to the need to stay within a comfort zone too.
Distracting
Often this is a survival behaviour from a childhood filled with intense emotion. Because unenjoyable emotions cause so much discomfort (due to the lack of regulation offered by the adults around in childhood), we create a distraction, often by using humour or a sudden interjection. This distraction aims to provide a reprieve from whatever is triggering the intense, unenjoyable emotions. The problem with this can be that nothing is addressed or resolved.
Taking things out on someone else…
…for example, our irritation and anger built up by the traffic jam we were in, the person who cut up in front of us and the fact your neighbour blocked the drive with their bin – leads us to snap at the person who greets us at home. Some of us might take out our anger and frustration on the person at home without any awareness of what we are doing. This is prevented by ‘managing’ anger resourcefully beforehand. This starts with bringing the anger into full consciousness and owning it -which many of us were not brought up to do.
Always blaming others
When we can’t take responsibility for our behaviour or the mistakes we have made – because it’s too uncomfortable (and shame inducing) to admit failure or being less than perfect, it is usually because we cannot cope with the shame triggered by being ‘wrong’. It’s easier to always find a scapegoat and project the ‘wrongness’ onto someone else.
Being judgemental
Most of us carry around our version of what is right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, good and bad, and this can helpfully guide how we personally choose to act. However, when we apply instant ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ judgements towards others, this black and white thinking can act as ‘anti-empathy’, is rarely likely to bring about lasting beneficial change and will probably impact detrimentally upon our interactions with others. Often many of these unwritten rules that we judge with have their origin in our childhood. I think it’s always interesting to observe and make ourselves aware of the underlying emotions going on for us when we feel the need to make a strong judgement of others.
Snapping defensively/making and reacting to negative assumptions due to personal sensitivities/taking things personally
Most of us have things about ourselves we can be sensitive about – many of which were ‘put’ there in childhood. If our self-image includes exaggerated distortions that we are – for example – not very good at getting certain things done, we are too serious or we’re not worth listening to – and someone stumbles upon one such sensitivity, we might react defensively. We can negatively attribute far more to what was said than was intended, as the whole prior baggage of our sensitivity reacts. Being defensive is often an emotional over-reaction that is not driven by impartial thinking. It’s good to remember most things that are said are not intended to be personally vindictive. People are usually more concerned with that is going on in their own minds than trying to affect the minds of others!
‘Snapping’ can also, of course, be a result of feeling tired, ‘put upon’, stressed, overloaded etc. but it still makes it a less than desirable behaviour that we could avoid through self-awareness and disclosure: ‘Sorry I am feeling tired and overloaded.’ Most of us respond well to others admitting their vulnerability.
Aggressive outbursts
Some of us are more prone to aggressive outbursts than others – verbally or physically. (Neurodivergence seems to make them more likely and can be a reaction to overwhelm or feeling vulnerable.) Aggression nearly always makes situations worse and tends to trigger negative emotions in any other people involved, which also makes escalation more likely. Rarely does aggression help with finding solutions palatable for all, as anger tends to make us self-absorbed.
Males are more likely to turn anger into aggression than females as they often receive the message that anger/aggression is an acceptable emotions to express, so they can express it even when, in reality, sometimes they are feeling vulnerable/overwhelmed. If we are prone to aggressive outbursts, learning to manage anger and other intense emotions usually takes a lot of self-awareness and some practice.
Becoming unable to act
Stress and overwhelm can trigger us to ‘freeze’ and become unable to know what to do. This is OK if you don’t panic and see it as a need to regroup and break down the issue triggering the emotions into smaller manageable parts.
Fear (and avoidance) of things that can’t actually harm you
The somewhat simplistic fear response is a ‘better safe than sorry’ one. Consequently it can be more easily triggered than is helpful. Either by watching a significant adult be petrified of spiders in childhood (learned fear) or by an anxious response to uncertainty (e.g. the dark), once the response has been triggered, the brain really takes notice and can be easily triggered again. This was helpful when dangers were often life-threatening in the tribal living of thousands of years ago, but we are left with a readily-triggered system that can mean we become fearful over things that really cannot harm us. This can impact on us quite drastically when it leads to phobias and we go to great lengths to avoid what we are scared of.
Rumination and catastrophising/kicking yourself/assuming the worst so you dread things
The brain’s negativity bias means ‘bad’ things are magnified much more in our brain than ‘good’ things (so we notice bad things more – which we evolved to keep us safe). Once anxiety is triggered, the anxious brain can switch us into ‘looking for problems’ mode – including those that are unlikely to be there. This can trigger us to ruminate (dwell on negative thoughts or possibilities over and over) and catastrophise (convince ourselves that everything that could go wrong, will go wrong) and leads to the result that we can sometimes let our mind ‘beat us up’ for some time! This can consume us and trigger stress. This can impact on what we think about future events such that we dread them – often unnecessarily as most things turn out to be OK!.
‘Kicking ourselves’ is ruminating on something we did that made us feel disappointed in ourselves – again the negativity bias is giving us a hard time as it can drastically exaggerate just how bad the situation really was! Even awareness of this tendency can help us to stop doing it.
Inability to accept feedback
Some of us can experience intense shame (that we can struggle to manage well) when given feedback, receiving criticism or we make a mistake. Instead of being able to consider whether the criticism was valid or not, or learning from our mistake – we experience a tirade of uncomfortable emotions and/or self-loathing.
Most people are unsettled by criticism, so managing it well is about being aware of, and dealing with, the emotions it triggers. Managing criticism well will mean you can rationally decide whether you need to act on the feedback or not or if you can remedy, or learn from, a mistake – with an objectively balanced viewpoint and not an exaggerated sensation that consumes you!
Assuming everyone else thinks you’re useless/paranoia
Negative interactions can trigger some of us to exaggeratedly decide everyone must think we’re useless. Our negativity bias can exaggerate this process. This is similar to ‘deciding you must be completely rubbish’ but with an added component of paranoia as you make negative assumptions about what several others are thinking about you– which are very unlikely to be true. I think of paranoia as projecting our own negative thoughts about ourselves into the minds of others! Some people suffer from it more than others.
Not completing tasks
It’s not uncommon to have had tasks we fail to complete but if it is a ‘tendency’, then it can mean we are uncomfortable about the final judgement that arrives once a job is completed. We might also be a perfectionist and not like the ‘closed-ness’ of completion because we have to admit we haven’t achieved our impossible aspiration of perfection. Or we might just prefer the start up part of anything we do. I know I used to almost equate having an idea to being almost as good as it it being achieved! However, I like to think I have the discernment to know what to take beyond the idea stage, and the motivation to complete things now!
Withdrawal from situations and/or participation
When strong unenjoyable emotions have been triggered, we can decide we can’t cope and simply leave the situation. Or if a strong emotion is triggered during an activity with others, it can trigger us to stop participating (or even become disruptive) as the emotion takes hold, triggers unhelpful thoughts and make us unwilling or unable to participate. Making the emotions more conscious and learning to accept and then endure them can help prevent his kind of disabling response.
Passive-aggression
Going along with something we really don’t want to do and then expressing our irritation ‘quietly’ by either sabotaging events or incessantly complaining about whatever you’re reluctantly doing, is often labelled ‘passive-aggression’. Tuning into your emotions to realise how much you don’t want to do what has been asked of you and then being emotionally brave enough to say, ‘no’ in the first place, avoids passive aggression. We are often reluctant to say, ‘no’ for fear of repercussions that we perceive will trigger further uncomfortable emotions – usually because we are worried about how we will be perceived.
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Increasing our self-awareness is the best way to tackle these behaviours – some of which we might be surprisingly and totally blind to doing, even though we might engage in them frequently. Gaining feedback from those we love and trust about how we behave and becoming more curious about the backstory of our reactions are two ways we can really increase our self-awareness and reduce unhelpful behaviours.
I know I will have missed many behaviours (e.g. telling lies, putting others down, cheating, holding grudges etc.) but once you start considering the thoughts and emotions driving our behaviour, it eventually becomes easier to be more flexible and engage in more resourceful and beneficial actions and reactions! Emotional intelligence, really can bring about favourable changes: improve our relationships skills, interactions, self-awareness, empathy, motivation and generally make life far less tricky and more enjoyable!
