the self-help industry the psychology world and the spiritual field are all AB Buzz with the idea of emotional regulation you can't go anywhere without hearing people talk about how important it is to learn to regulate your emotions and to be emotionally regulated well in today's episode I'm going to explain to you why the idea of emotional regulation is detrimental and needs to be put to rest for good as well as what needs to be done instead [Music] the unfortunate reality is that we are alive at a time when humanity is in the Dark Ages relative
to emotion and feeling in the way that in the 1600s doctors considered bathing unhealthy because they thought that it removed a protective layer of oil and dirt exposing the body to unclean water and diseased air they also considered bloodletting the right treatment for all kinds of physical maladies so it shouldn't surprise us at all that in the emotional Dark Ages experts have all kinds of misconceptions about emotions and with how to deal with them first let's talk about emotions emotions are reactions in and of themselves they occur within you in response to many different stimuli
such as people places things situations circumstances energies that you're encountering in the external world as well as your own thoughts especially your own thoughts about those external stimuli now I need you to remember that thoughts can be subconscious or conscious so most of the time you're completely unaware of what thoughts your emotions are coming up in response to when we encounter a stimulus we experience a reaction to it in the form of a highly physiological response what we feel within this felt based response is information emotions carry a lot of information about our environment and
also about ourselves most especially about our subjective experience of our environment and our personal truths some people might refer to this as cognitive interpretation for example a person may be having a strong emotional reaction and contained within this emotional reaction might be the information that makes me feel powerless to fill-in the blank bad thing happening and I need to feel like I have some hand in making sure that doesn't happen this is why emotions can serve as a kind of uh internal guidance system and they can influence a person to take a certain action sometimes
it's helpful to think of emotion as a different language in which information is received and transmitted when we have an emotional reaction most of the time that information within the emotion is totally subconscious and we don't take the time to make it conscious we don't tune into this language that is occurring within us so as to consciously ascertain the information it contains and because of this we simply have a behavioral response to the emotion this is what people are most familiar with the actual behavioral expression of an emotion one of the biggest false assumptions that
people make is that all people experience emotions the exact same way and with the same level of intensity the reality is they don't for example anger may feel very different in one person's body as it does in another person's body some people also feel emotions much much more intensely than others and for longer our emotions are an automatic response and for very good reason when we are out navigating the world and the people places and things in it we need to have reactions to things and make sense of things very quickly the physiological arousal response
element of emotions which you feel as well as the cognitive interpretation element of emotions which you are only very rarely consciously aware of happens in such an immediate and also intertwined way and yet all of the focus is on trying to regulate emotions let's look at what it means to regulate shall we to regulate means to control or governed by a rule principle or method to adjust to some standard or requirement to adjust so as to ensure accuracy of operation or to put something in good order you should not be trying to govern control hold
a standard for expect accuracy from or order your emotions and here is why one emotions are not a problem they certainly are not the problem and this mentality that you must control your emotions paints emotions to be the problem it paints them as not okay and not good it scapegoats them two you cannot control whether or not an emotion occurs within you you should not be trying to control the way you feel you're not going to be able to bring order to the way that emotions occur within you either and you need to stop considering
emotional control of virtue when we try to control our emotions we approach our emotions as our adversaries and when we do this several negative things happen first we make our emotions the problem for existing we resist them rather than opening ourselves up to feeling them and becoming conscious of the information that they contain and we fall into behaviors like denying disowning negating suppressing rejecting opposing and disconnecting from our emotion slash the way we feel also playing mental games with oursel to try to convince ourselves that we shouldn't feel the way we feel or don't feel
the way we feel or that everything is fine when it isn't three our approach of trying to change and manipulate and control the emotion we feel doesn't actually work so it doesn't lead to results so you just end up feeling like something's wrong with you and start fearing distrusting and hating this fundamental aspect of yourself this is a very big deal when you realize that the way you feel is the core of your life experience you're not going to have a good time if you're walking around at odds with that four when it comes to
emotions the idea of holding your emotions to a standard or to some requirement is utterly bizarre after all emotions don't have the free will ability to live up to a standard requirement five emotions are sometimes a perfect reflection of reality and emotions are sometimes very much not a perfect reflection of reality especially given that emotions are responding to all kinds of factors including previous life experiences that have informed a person's cognitive interpretations of events in this way emotions cannot ever be held to the standard of accuracy or appropriateness for that matter nor should they be
our emotions may not perfectly fit the reality of a situation and still they are very important and carry very valuable information that serves our awareness six there is no way to prevent emotion from occurring there are a great many things you can do regarding the cognitive interpretation of things and this may in turn alter what emotional reaction you have when you come into contact with a specific stimulus what is important to accept is that you can't prevent an emotion from occurring within you and you can't choose which emotions you experience the process we call an
emotional response happens very quickly and without your conscious will your rational mind is not involved in this process when you're out navigating the world you can however decide what you do with emotions when they occur when we are trying to consciously intervene is in that tiny let's be honest sometimes INF fantasmal gap between the experience of an emotion and the behavioral response to the way we feel most of us behaviorally react to our emotions on autopilot and mostly according to patterns from the past for example you feel angry and therefore you hit someone or you
feel insecure and therefore you withdraw therefore we need to stop talking about learning to regulate our emot tions and start talking about learning how to consciously Master our Behavior very different discussion any tool out there that is presented as a way to regulate emotion is actually a tool that is designed to regulate Behavior emotion you could say the way we feel is a very important part of us it is a key component of being truly alive and staying alive emotions are absolutely constructive don't let anyone tell you otherwise and as so this language should be
mastered and the way we feel should be consciously tended to when emotions occur they must be acknowledged they must be seen as important they must be owned fully felt and allowed to move through our being the information within them ascertained and then your response to the emotion which should include the information that was contained within the emotion must be consciously chosen we should not be trying to prevent or control or govern or hold a standard for or expect accuracy from our order from our emotions at all we should be trying to prevent the activation of
the automatic behavioral reaction so that we can consciously choose to respond to our emotions and according to the information inherent within them and guess what the more you try to control suppress deny disown negate reject or oppose your emotions I.E regulate them the harder it becomes to do this help me to change the discourse in this world around this top topic because in this case the discourse and the semantics really do matter and really do have a negative impact on people and on Humanity at large help me to change discussions around emotional regulation into discussions
about emotional embracing plus behavioral Mastery have a good week [Music]
