Emotion, the new rational!
You are driving to an important meeting. The outcome might well decide your life. You are already running late. An idiot cuts your lane without signalling and you are forced to literally stand on your brakes. You almost hit him.
Your vehicle has stopped but your heartbeat has accelerated. Every muscle in your body is constricted. Your body is pumped up with adrenaline. Your mind is mighty stressed. You are bloody pissed.
You are in no mood for the meeting. Yet, you need to pick yourself, calm your senses and presume nothing ever happened.
You have an option. You can get out of your vehicle, catch the idiot driver and blow his head off. That may vent your anger and hopefully take it out of your system.
But that won’t work. Anger is a difficult emotion to flush out of your system. When you try to do it by shouting, you only end up sustaining elevated stress responses in your brain and cardiovascular system.
What you need to is review the situation, revise your thoughts and reassess the whole thing. Simply put, you need to change your belief about what happened!
Try and imagine that the driver was a distraught husband trying to reach his pregnant wife to the hospital. There are two lives at stake in his car. One desperately trying to come out. The other dreadfully trying to help her come out!
Wouldn’t this thought immediately reduce your anger?
You will even feel sorry for him. Your meeting now feels less important. Interestingly, your anger and stress are gone!
This is called Cognitive Reappraisal – deciding to change your belief about what happened. Research done by Stanford Psychologists, using fMRI, proved this to be effective in decreasing brain’s stress levels. Changing the beliefs is an effective and healthier solution than attempting to repress or ignore emotions.
Next time you find yourself on the verge of anger and aggression, try cognitive reappraisal. Consider an alternate reality. You are not doing it for their sake. But for yours!
The rational thing to do, at times, is to be emotional!