How to master your emotions

The secrets of self-control

Hello!

Emotions accompany almost every waking thought, but how much are they within your control?

It might be helpful to imagine your emotions as a horse, and your rational thinking as its rider. Some people believe that the animal is impossible to tame; when it gets started, it will carry them away from the desired path and they have no way of managing its movements. Others have greater faith in their capacity to hold their feelings under a close rein. Unwanted events might leave them temporarily faltering, but they can soon bring that horse back into a steady canter.

As I write in my latest cover feature for New Scientist, these “implicit theories” can easily become self-fulfilling prophecies:

“In the mid-2000s, Maya Tamir at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her colleagues asked first-year university students to rate some statements on a scale of 1 (completely disagree) to 5 (completely agree). These were:

• Everyone can learn to control their emotions

• If they want to, people can change the emotions that they have

• No matter how hard they try, people can’t really change the emotions that they have

• The truth is, people have very little control over their emotions.

The first two statements were designed to reflect the view that our feelings are malleable, while the last two reflected the view that they are fixed.

Over the following 10 weeks, students who held the fixed theories of emotions tended to have lower well-being and poorer social relationships than those who believed they had conscious control over their feelings. They were considerably more likely to report feeling anxious, angry, lonely or depressed, for example, and less likely to report feeling happy, proud, loved or stimulated. Overall, it seemed that the people with fixed beliefs were struggling to cope with the uncertainty they were facing, thanks to the major life shift of starting university, preventing them from making the most of their time there.”

It seems that people with the fixed theories are simply less inclined to look for ways to break them out of their bad moods. They are less likely to use a strategy called “cognitive reappraisal”, for instance, which involves questioning your interpretation of the thing that is upsetting you.

More sophisticated emotional regulation is associated with better health and slower ageing (Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash)

To practice reappraisal, you might attempt to reframe the event more positively. After a breakup, for instance, you might try to recognise the reasons that you were incompatible, while looking for reasons to be grateful for the time you were together, and valuing the things that you learnt from the relationship.

In other situations, you might reexamine some of the assumptions that are leading you to feel bad. A student panicking over an upcoming exam might be obsessed with the prospect of failure. To remedy this, they could gently question how likely the worst-case scenario is to occur, perhaps by reminding themselves of all the times that their fears have been unfounded. They might also remind themselves of all the practical steps that they can take to maximise their chances of success. They might also look beyond the test itself to consider whether a failure would even be as catastrophic as they fear. In the grand schemes of their lives, will it be a major disaster or a minor blemish on their record?

“Cognitive reappraisal is a very good form of emotion regulation, but many people don’t use it as often as they should,” Ronnel King at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told me for the New Scientist article – and his work suggests that this is a direct result of the implicit theories that Tamir studied.

Working with Elmer Dela Rosa at Central Luzon State University in the Philippines, he surveyed 355 college students about their emotional lives – including a section on cognitive reappraisal, in which they had to rate their agreement with the statement “when I want to feel more positive emotion, such as joy or amusement, I change what I’m thinking about”. As expected, people who think emotions are malleable enjoyed greater psychological well-being, and this was partly explained by their use of cognitive appraisal. Those with fixed views tended to dwell on their bad feelings without seeking to change their thinking patterns.

Malleable mindsets

Most of us will have built these beliefs without thinking about them consciously – but I can’t help but suspect that some deliberately hide behind them as an excuse for bad behaviour. I’ve met plenty of people who will continually blame their stress for their rude and inconsiderate behaviour. We all make mistakes, of course, but I wonder if they have even tried to find more constructive means of handling their frustrations? I can think of few things more selfish than believing it is your right to impose your emotional storms on others when they are, in all likelihood, facing their own difficulties.

Like other mindsets, our assumptions about emotions will be malleable; simply learning about the scientific evidence is often enough to change people’s minds. Techniques like cognitive reappraisal may feel difficult at first, but they can become much easier with practice.

My New Scientist feature also explores the reasons that emotional regulation is so important for our health and wellbeing, with emerging evidence that it can shape how quickly we age. (This is even apparent in our appearance: people who have poor self-control tend to look older than their years.) It draws on the work of Ethan Kross, whose new book Shift offers a broad toolkit of techniques to build our resilience.

That’s all for this week. Next time, I plan to cover “echoism” – a new spin on narcissism and its ramifications for close relationships.

Have a great weekend!

David x