How to Win the Inner Fight When Emotions Run High
How to Win the Inner Fight When Emotions Run High
What can you do to win the inner fight when your emotions run high?
As a brain trainer and mental fitness coach who helps clients get their minds to be their ally rather than their enemy, that’s a question I’m frequently asked.
We’ve probably all experienced a heated situation when our emotions got the better of us and we reacted in a way that we later regretted. In the ever-changing and unpredictable environments we currently often find ourselves, emotions can already be running high. Then, one thing happens that tips the scales and our response becomes disproportionate to the situation. Our emotions overpower us and win.
Victor Frankl said: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
The challenge is often finding the space in the moment.
In emotionally charged situations, your brain can “go offline” so to speak. A triggered event occurs and you hit the panic button in your brain that tells you to react. When that happens, you most often go into fight, flight freeze, or please mode. This effectively shuts down the thinking and responding areas of your brain to channel all of your energy to do what you’ve told yourself you most need to do – survive, not think.
How do you get your brain to come back online?
One of the most effective ways is to breathe. We’ve all been told that right? Breathe. Count to 10. Here’s the problem. You may be breathing, yes, but rather than focusing all of your attention on the rise and fall of your chest or stomach, the sound of your breathing, or actively trying to deepen your breath or slow it down, you’re using that time of breathing to add to the story in your mind that’s fueling the fire, prepping you even more to fight.
Brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor has shared that if you’re experiencing an emotion for more than 90 seconds, it’s because you’re keeping that emotion fueled by the story you’re telling yourself. So, don’t keep adding to the story in that moment. Do the following instead:
- Notice what’s happening in your body.
Is your breathing shallow or rapid? Are your shoulders up by your ears like an animal ready to pounce? Is your jaw tight or your teeth clenched? Notice what’s happening in your body.
- Get yourself out of survival mode.
Choose one area of tension that you’ve noticed in your body and focus on relaxing it. For me, the easiest is to focus on how I’m breathing. When I notice that my breathing is rapid and shallow, I know my body is preparing to fight. So, I switch my focus and attention to actually slowing and deepening my breathing. This tells my brain that I’m not in survival mode. If I can breathe slowly and deeper, I’m not in a situation where I need to fight. Taking 10-15 seconds to avoid potential catastrophe is worth it.
Brain imaging tells us that only one part of the brain can be activated at a time. When you help your body to know that you do not need to fight, flee, freeze or please, you can activate the other brain regions like the prefrontal cortex which aids in response flexibility, emotional regulation, insight, creativity – all helpful tools for actually solving and resolving problems.
Noticing and getting yourself out of survival mode help to get your brain back online, but how do you win the fight?
Well, how does a prize fighter become a champion?
Hint: it’s not by only trying to fight an opponent once he or she is in the ring.
A champion becomes a champion through frequent training and conditioning.
It’s the same with us.
If you want to respond from choice rather than react from compulsion so that you can win the fight against your emotions, you train when you’re not in the fight.
Neuroscience has helped us to know that rewiring and training our brains can happen even outside of high-stakes moments. The connections in your brain that bind together to create the superhighways that make your behavior quick and automatic can be built whether you are doing an action or just visualizing yourself doing it.
Take advantage of this key insight.
You can do this in multiple ways.
Here’s my favorite way:
- Recall a situation in which you wish you would have responded differently rather than reacted and allowed your emotions to overpower you. You know you’re going to think about it again (and possibly again and again), so make good use of that rethinking.
2. This time, when you recall the situation, reexperience it the way that you wish you would have. This means not just going through a mental exercise, but actually feeling your breathing be shallow and rapid then actually slowing down and deepening your breathing. It means feeling your shoulders up by your ears and actively relaxing those raised hackles. It’s feeling the tension in your jaw and clenched teeth and dropping your tongue from the roof of your mouth and relaxing those muscles.
3. From this more calm and relaxed state, imagine (see, think, feel, or know) yourself being able to respond in productive and healthy ways (Not with that snarky comment that you wish you would have said. That’s just another way of fighting, my friend, and you’re trying to get out of that survival mode.)
4. Repeat this three times.
5. Each time you allow your emotions to overpower you and win the fight, when you’re going over it later in your mind, choose to repeat these steps.
We all create mental models that tell us how to respond in different situations. The good news is that our brains are great at automating. The bad news is that we automate too much too often which results in us reacting rather than responding when we’re not actually in a life-or-death situation. You aren’t responding, your brain is reacting.
So, in order to become a champion and win that inner fight when emotions run high, do what a champion does. Train and condition your mental muscles to respond in productive and healthy ways so that you can win the fight.
