Rational Control of Emotions
I once wrote a post called The Number Devil about how we continue to grow mentally even after we stop growing physically.
That was in May 2022, about four years after I became an adult. Roughly the same amount of time has passed again. I think I’m still growing. There are things I can do now that I couldn’t do then. Some are small, like getting my gloves out and putting them on before the cold makes me miserable (amazingly, I think this is the first year I’ve managed to do that properly). Others are fundamental enough to help me in every part of my life. Today I want to write about one of those.
Why do humans have emotions? Having emotions helps us survive. Fear makes us flee danger, and anger makes us fight threats. Hope motivates us to work toward long-term goals, while love and empathy play important roles in forming social bonds and living together.
But emotions don’t always work in our favor.
Sometimes they ruin things.
When I’m overjoyed, that’s not really a problem. It means something wonderful has happened, so who cares if a few other things go wrong? Joy that intense is rare and short-lived. I might as well enjoy it.
The opposite is the problem: when negative emotions take over. When something bad has already happened, and the feelings it leaves behind threaten to ruin other things in a chain reaction. At times like that, I’ve wished I could briefly become a robot—one that feels nothing and acts only on reason.
As if that were possible. If you’re human, you can’t help having feelings. What matters is how you respond to them. Over the years, I’ve developed a manual for dealing with mine:
First, consider how long it’s been. How long have you been feeling this way?
1.
If the feeling has just appeared, it’s easy. Emotions that arise in an instant fade quickly, too. Anger, for example, is said to take only about 90 seconds for the chemicals that trigger it to be produced and then dissipate. So you don’t need much of a strategy. You just have to get through that one- or two-minute window.
For that brief time, refrain from saying or doing anything driven by the emotion. Park Yong-maan, former chairman of Doosan Group, said in a documentary that he keeps two- and five-minute hourglasses on his desk. Before acting on an important decision, he turns one over and waits for the sand to run out. By then, he said, the emotion has drained away, and many of his decisions change. That stuck with me, so I bought a three-minute toothbrushing hourglass at Daiso and put it on my desk. Fortunately, I haven’t yet had a moment heated enough to make me turn it over.
2.
Emotions that have been building for a long time, or that linger, need a more careful approach.
2.1.
First, find the cause. Why do I feel bad right now? Once I’ve identified it, I ask whether it warrants feeling this strongly. Questioning whether my own feelings are justified might sound a little psychopathic, but it genuinely helps. Surprisingly often, the cause turns out not to be such a big deal—or there’s no particular reason at all. For me, the former has usually been disappointment in someone, and the latter, a low mood. Feelings I’ve found to be unwarranted at this stage are relatively easy to shake off.
2.2.
The next step for feelings that do have a reason behind them is to change my perspective. I can’t undo what happened, but I can change how I take it. In psychology, this is called reframing. Suppose I completely botch a presentation at a conference. Rather than see it as a failure and wallow in frustration, I can see it as a chance to address my weaknesses and do better next time. That not only makes me feel better in the moment; it also leads me to analyze and document my mistakes from different angles and prepare more systematically for the future.
2.3.
Still not enough? Then fight back. Identify a few active things you can do to overcome the feeling, and do them whenever you feel bad. These aren’t quite the same as things that make you happy, like hobbies. Those can lift your mood in one area and offset the bad feeling in another, which certainly helps to a degree. But the activities I mean can bring the bad mood itself back toward neutral. What works will be different for everyone. Here are a few things that have worked for me:
-
Sleep
It has a good chance of dispelling the thoughts that come late at night. So if it’s late, stop thinking about everything else and get some sleep. -
Aerobic exercise
Something you can do at a steady pace for a long time is good, especially if you can look at the scenery while you do it. Running outdoors and cycling, for example. Personally, anaerobic exercise hasn’t helped me much with regulating my emotions. - Watching a movie
- Playing an instrument
As I write this, I’ve just realized that all these activities have something in common. Sleep is obvious. During aerobic exercise, I have to manage my breathing and pace; when watching a movie, I’m absorbed in the protagonist’s situation; and when playing an instrument, I’m trying not to miss a single note. Each demands my full attention, and I have to stay focused for at least several dozen minutes. That forces me to spend some time apart from whatever hurt me. Perhaps that’s exactly why these activities help me recover.
2.4.
But what if an emotion still won’t come under control after all those steps? Then there’s nothing left but the last resort.
Think selfishly. Is staying like this doing me any good?
Sometimes, no matter how I look at it, the world really does seem to be treating me unfairly, and I can’t find a single positive angle. Some experiences leave feelings that a good night’s sleep and a run won’t resolve. But am I going to spend the rest of my life frustrated and cynical because of them? That won’t do me any good. When a situation is already bleak, the only way to make even a small positive change is to get moving. The person who breaks free of an emotion’s grip and acts is the one who ultimately wins.
I added this final trick to my manual after watching a YouTube video recommended to me one day. I hope you’ll watch the video I’ve embedded below. Can a one-minute video change your life? I don’t usually believe that sort of thing. But this one changed mine. Not completely, but it made me more resilient, better able to overcome the many hardships I’ll face in the long years ahead.
When repeated effort brings me nothing but failure, and I feel myself growing cynical, I always think of Conan’s words.
I think back to myself just a few years ago, before I had this manual. I was so young. I’d sulk over little things, or sink into a low mood for no particular reason and get pulled deeper and deeper into it.
I’m much better at handling it now. Most things don’t upset me easily. Or rather, even when they do, I can recover quickly. Not long ago, something happened that took me all the way to step 2.4. I was in a situation where I couldn’t do any of the activities in 2.3, either, so things got pretty precarious. But remembering 2.4 got me through it. Since putting this manual together, I haven’t encountered anything I couldn’t overcome.
These days, though, I’ve started to have the opposite concern—just a little. Life isn’t much fun. More precisely, it has lost a lot of its dynamism. I still enjoy the everyday pleasures of doing research and writing posts like this, but much of the fun that used to come from life’s many unpredictable turns is gone. I even gave up soda about two years ago, as if I needed to get any healthier (which has made me a thoroughly boring person who consumes none of the usual indulgences—not alcohol, cigarettes, coffee, or soda). Being someone who depends on nothing and doesn’t have big emotional swings was my ideal. Now that I’ve achieved it, I find myself wondering whether I’ve done the right thing. It’s ironic. Maybe life is just like stochastic gradient descent: you roll this way and that at first, then move in smaller and smaller steps until you finally reach a stable point.
Anyway, this is the life I’m living. I’d be glad if you appeared in it from time to time, added a little unpredictability, and brought me some joy.
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