Toni Roberts first started to experience feelings of depression when she was a young girl. She remembers feeling sad all the time, wanting to stay in her room and not play with other children. As she went into her teen years, it got worse. Daily bouts of crying were normal for her. To those around her, though, she appeared to be on top of the world. She was a good student and a well-liked leader. But Toni participated in leadership roles and school activities such as cheerleading as a diversion, an attempt to compensate for the pain and emptiness she felt on the inside.
Her depression continued on into her thirties as she struggled to raise her family and manage her successful career as a professional fundraiser.
Toni knew she had a serious problem, and she desperately wanted help. She tried everything from religion and prayer to meditation, therapy, and anti-depressants but found only random, temporary relief. After decades of trying to rid herself of this emotional disease, she finally came to the stark conclusion that she would never feel better. All she could expect to experience was feelings of hopelessness.
One day a friend told Toni about HeartMath. She was tired of chasing a cure for her problem but decided to attend a HeartMath training program anyway. During the weekend she made a sincere effort to make contact with her heart, and during one of the many exercises something remarkable happened. She had a breakthrough, a profound experience of hope and release. For days after the seminar she felt different—better—but how could this be?
Toni had had temporary breakthroughs before but they’d never lasted. She feared now that she’d slip back into the depths of chronic depression. After so many years it was hard to accept that by going to her heart she could be free of it. Toni kept practicing what she’d learned, however, using FrEEZE -FRAME when she felt the need, consciously activating core heart feelings, and doing HEART LOCK-INS. Within a month, the fear that her depression would come back was gone. She knew that her emotional problems were behind her. They seemed now like nothing more than a bad dream. As her health continued to improve dramatically, a joyfulness, a lightness, and a zest for life replaced her depression. That was six years ago. Toni now works for HeartMath and says that her life continues to become more fulfilling and enriched every day.
Toni’s rather dramatic experience is a wonderful example of what can happen when our hearts come alive. Emotional problems are among the most difficult to deal with, especially if they’re long-standing, as Toni’s were. Perhaps Tony had even looked to her heart for help before, but because she didn’t know how to activate heart intelligence with consistency, she continued to suffer for years. Once she did make that deeper heart connection, however, her emotions responded accordingly and her life took a major turn for the better.
Emotions
What would it be like if you somehow managed to climb to the top of Mount Everest but couldn’t feel the exhilarating rush of excitement? What if you spent time with family or close friends but couldn’t feel the love between you? Our emotions are such a natural part of our existence that we take them for granted. They allow us to experience the textures and colors of life. Without them, we can still climb Mount Everest and spend time with our family and friends, but what’s the point? Emotions—and emotions alone—give meaning to our lives.
The ability to laugh or cry, to feel alternately pensive and blissful, imbues our existence with beauty and value. We crave feeling, because the experience of emotion makes life matter. It transforms our world from an objective, conceptual fact into a living, breathing experience.
Facts are crucial too, but in a pinch the compelling power of emotion almost always wins out. As the English writer Thomas Browne said in 1690, “Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion.” With a force of their own that must be honored and appreciated, emotions consistently transcend reason in our lives. And yet they remain a great mystery.
While the enigmatic power of emotions can enrich our lives beyond measure, it can destroy us just as easily. Emotion, not reason, is the force behind a large majority of the wars and conflicts the world has seen. The intelligence needed to manage this potent inner force, using it for our highest good, has eluded mankind for centuries.
The emotional frontier is truly the next frontier to conquer in human understanding. The opportunity we face now, even before that frontier is fully explored and settled, is to develop our emotional potential and accelerate rather dramatically into a new state of being.
The word “emotion” literally means “energy in motion.” It’s derived from the Latin verb meaning “to move.” While a feeling—a closely related concept—is any conscious experience of sensation, an emotion is a strong feeling, a feeling such as love, joy, sorrow, or anger that moves us. An emotion generates various complex reactions with both mental and physiological changes and accompanying autonomic nervous system manifestations. [1] What we think of as emotion is the experience of energy moving through our bodies. In itself, emotional energy is neutral. It’s the feeling sensation and physiological reaction that make a specific emotion positive or negative, and it’s our thoughts about it that give it meaning.
Emotions serve as carrier waves for the entire spectrum of feelings. When our hearts are in a state of coherence, we more easily experience feelings such as love, care, appreciation, and kindness. On the other hand, feelings such as irritation, anger, hurt, and envy are more likely to occur when the head and heart are out of alignment. Our emotional experiences become imprinted in our brain cells and memory, where they form patterns that influence our behavior. [2]
Feeling Is Faster Than Thought
Emotional energy works at a higher speed than thought. This is because the feeling world operates at a higher speed than the mind. Scientists have repeatedly confirmed that our emotional reactions show up in brain activity before we even have time to think. We evaluate everything emotionally as we perceive it. We think about it afterwards. [3]
If emotional energy works faster than the mind, how can we expect to manage our emotions with our thoughts? Good question. And in fact it takes more than the mind to manage emotions. The heart’s coherent power is required as well. Heart coherence helps balance our emotional state. It aligns head and heart to facilitate higher brain function, which appears to create a direct link to intuition or super-high-speed intelligence. Intuition bypasses mental analysis and gives us direct perception independent of any reasoning process. [4] Intuition gives us clarity on how to direct and manage our feelings before we invest emotional energy in them.
Emotions in themselves aren’t really intelligent. But anything that has a flow—as emotion and thought do—has a theme of intelligence organizing it. How we organize our thoughts and emotions and what we do with them reflect our intelligence.
One of the main purposes of emotion in the human system is to provide a means of expression for core heart feelings. But since heart intelligence isn’t developed in most people, the mind more often hijacks our emotional energy and uses it to express its perceptions and reactions.
When we let our unmanaged thoughts dictate how we respond emotionally, we’re asking for trouble. In addition, emotional memories and reactions can operate at a subconscious level and influence our thought processes. Our subconscious emotional system can trigger a feeling faster than the mind can intercept it. [5] That’s why we often experience feelings without knowing why. And even when we do know why, and try to manage our emotional reaction, we can’t; emotions are simply too fast. The rational mind by itself doesn’t have the ability to intervene in ways that produce helpful results. The disorder of an unmanaged mind combined with the power of unmanaged emotion often creates an internal war. We get caught in a depleting internal argument that can go on for hours.
Example 1: Jeff is in a restaurant when an elderly man walks by and knocks over his coffee, splashing the hot liquid all over his suit and tie. Rationally, he knows that the man couldn’t help himself, so Jeff says, “That’s okay, don’t worry about it.” But in his feeling world, he’s having a fit. His thoughts are screaming, “Look at my suit! What am I going to do? How can I go back to the office with coffee stains all over my clothes?” Jeff is reacting at two different levels—reason and emotion. Each level has its own perspective, and if Jeff lets them, they’ll fight each other all afternoon.
In this case it would be energy-efficient for Jeff to stop pretending that everything is okay and recognize that his emotions aren’t in balance. He could then do a quick FREEZE-FRAME to rebalance his nervous system and heart rhythms, activating a core heart feeling such as appreciation or compassion to stop the energy drain before it colors the rest of his day. From a point of heart coherence, he would then have the power to take some of the significance and emotional energy out of the issue, reassuring himself that things like this happen to everyone at one time or another. When he asked himself, “What would be a more efficient response to the situation, one that would minimize future stress?” his intuition, common sense, and sincerity would tell him that people back at the office aren’t going to judge him for coffee stains on his clothes and that he’ll easily be able to get his suit cleaned the next day. In this state of head/heart alignment he can let the issue go completely.
Example 2: There’s an incident at the office between Barbara and Dan, who are both stressed out trying to meet a deadline. They snap at each other, and everyone notices. Later, in thoughts and words, they exchange apologies. But in their respective feeling worlds, it may take all day for the dust to settle. Their rational minds are okay, but their feeling worlds aren’t. It’s the continued motion of energy in the feeling world, and the speed and momentum of that energy, that causes continued drain.
If the rational mind continues to say that everything’s fine when it’s not, the emotional drain goes on, placing a cloud over our quality of life and slowly damaging our health. After awhile we’re left with a vague awareness of feeling bad but no accompanying thoughts that would explain why.
If Barbara and Dan would stop to connect with their heart intelligence, they could reduce the time it’ll take to regain emotional balance. Sooner or later they’ll forget about the incident anyway, of course, but they’ll lose a lot of energy along the way if they ignore the need to come back into alignment in the moment. By making the effort to engage with the heart, and even trying to activate a core heart feeling of nonjudgment or forgiveness, they could access the power and self-awareness needed to release the unresolved emotions around their tense exchange and stop the energy drain. It takes effort to shift to the heart and gain the coherence to let go of inefficient thoughts and emotions, but as heart intelligence is developed, that process gets easier.
The Cascade Effect
Each person’s entire emotional history is logged into his or her neural circuitry and imprinted in memory. Thus an emotional response in the present can trigger a cascade of associated emotional memories, adding more fuel to the fire. If we were hurt in the past by someone we loved, we can become paranoid about getting hurt by others who show us love. Sometimes even the smallest reaction can cause a download of associated emotions from prior incidents. Old grudges, lingering bits of unforgiveness, unpleasant associations, and unresolved fears can become amplified by the most trivial issues.
Because of this cascade effect, we’re usually dealing not just with the emotions of the moment but also with the accumulation of emotional experiences stored in our emotional memory banks. And there are physiological reasons for this.
Deep inside the brain is a processing center called the amygdala, which is responsible for assigning emotional significance to everything we hear, smell, touch, and see. [6] The amygdala can influence and be influenced by information from our cerebral cortex, and it’s also influenced by input from the heart. [7]
Neuroscientist Dr. Karl Pribram explains in his book Brain and Perception how the amygdala compares what’s familiar in memory with new information coming into the brain. [8] If an old emotion has become familiar, we often respond to new, similar situations with the same emotion, whether it makes sense or not. In a strange way, the familiarity makes us feel secure.
For example, a boy who lives in a house where there’s frequent yelling and violence develops emotions of insecurity and a pervading sense of fear. At school, if a classmate raises his voice or even looks questioningly at the boy, that action can trigger the familiar sense of fear. Perceiving the current situation from a perspective of familiarized fear, he may react with more aggression than is warranted, perhaps even hitting the classmate. Emotionally, his response would feel like self-defense; he’s doing what he deems appropriate to feel secure. For the same reason, when this boy grows up he may resort to violence and abuse with his own family.
The amygdala eavesdrops on incoming information flowing through our brains, searching for anything that has emotional significance. All of us have had the experience of meeting someone and disliking him immediately without apparent cause. Maybe he evokes the unconscious memory of a schoolteacher who always picked on us in class, even though we can’t remember the guy’s name. The amygdala assigns significance very rapidly, but not always very accurately.
For decades it was thought that all information from the senses went first to the cerebral cortex, where it was mentally analyzed, and then to the amygdala for emotional assessment. Only recently have neuroscientists discovered a brain circuit that lets our perceptions go directly through to the amygdala without passing through the rational decision-making area of the cortex. [5] That’s why the boy from the abusive household may feel his heart pounding and adrenaline surging whenever someone raises his voice, though he may not even realize that the raised voice reminds him of his father.
Where Do Emotions Come From?
When parts of the brain are damaged or surgically removed in older children and adults, those people can no longer experience certain emotions. For that reason, many scientists have concluded that emotions originate only in the brain.
Another group of scientists believe that emotions are created only through biochemistry. This would imply that we’re completely at the mercy of our biochemical experience, however—that we have no choice regarding our emotional experience. And it doesn’t explain why electrical and biochemical changes in the brain very often occur in response to emotions and perceptions over which we do have choice.
The latest evidence shows that it works both ways. Candace Pert, M.D., author of Molecules of Emotions, concludes that our biochemistry affects our emotional responses, but our emotions affect our biochemistry in return. Dr. Pert reveals that biochemicals are actually the physiological correlates of emotions. The molecules of emotion run every system in our body via a communication system that clearly demonstrates a body/mind intelligence. [9]
Our brain circuits are shaped by our experiences throughout life. Thus it’s never too late for change and growth. We’ve found that the heart is the most powerful agent for emotional change in the body. Here’s why.
Information from our heart finds its way to the amygdala. In fact, the cells in the amygdala exhibit electrical activity that’s synchronized to the heartbeat. As the heartbeat changes, so does the electrical activity in the cells of the amygdala. [10] This may explain why positive changes in feeling and perception occur when heart rhythms become more coherent as people use the HeartMath Solution tools and techniques. [10–14]
A recent cardiological study showed that 55 percent of participants who experienced symptoms of panic disorder actually had an undiagnosed heart arrhythmia that triggered the feelings of panic. In the majority of these cases, once the heart arrhythmia was treated, the panic disorder went away. If their arrhythmias hadn’t been discovered, all of these people would have been sent to a psychiatrist for treatment. [15]
Overcoming Emotional History
Ordinarily, when we set out to eliminate emotional baggage, we look to various psychotherapeutic techniques. Among the most common choices are psychoanalysis, behavioral modification, and cognitive therapy. Our new understandings of the function of the brain and heart give us clues as to how these approaches work.
According to Joseph LeDoux, a leading authority in neuroscience, it’s believed that these three major therapies each help the cortex override the amygdala, but they use different neural pathways to do it. [5]
Behavioral and cognitive therapies teach patients new behaviors, primarily depending on the interaction between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, requires patients to achieve conscious insight into their behavior. To do that, it delves into memories stored in the temporal lobe and the cortical areas related to consciousness.
Because it seeks to eliminate emotional baggage and other more serious disorders by achieving, conscious insight into memories, psychoanalysis is inherently a longer process. And it’s not an easy one: as we’ve said, emotional memories can distort perceptions and override conscious thoughts. This is in part because within the wiring of the brain, the neural connections from the emotional system to the cognitive system are stronger and more numerous than the connections going from the cognitive to the emotional system. [5] At every step of the way, then, conscious thinking can be overcome by powerful, amygdala-driven emotion.
Because our emotional history and reactions can be triggered unconsciously and then bypass the mind’s reasoning process, it takes a power stronger than the mind to change emotional patterning. Our theory is that when conscious insight does occur, in any type of therapeutic process, it’s because the coherent power and intelligence of the heart have become engaged.
The most effective therapists know that it’s through a heart connection that patients experience their deepest “aha” moments and insights. That heart connection can be initiated through the caring and sensitive communication of a therapist, or it can come about as the patient connects with her own core heart feelings.
On the basis of the Institute’s research, we’re suggesting that a more direct route to emotional freedom can be achieved by helping patients consciously go to the heart first. In going directly to the heart by using FREEZE-FRAME, applying CUT-THRU, or activating a core heart feeling, people often have intuitive perception shifts that help them find release. They don’t necessarily have to bring up or relive old emotional memories. Rehashing emotional memories more often than not reinforces those memories in the cells of the brain. Thus that process, instead of bringing us the insights we need to release old memories from our system, often reignites the mind’s justification and hurt, creating more incoherence. When we’re trying to work through a long-standing, emotionally charged issue, reinforcing memories isn’t a means of resolution. We need to access the heart’s deeper intelligence.
As knowledge of heart intelligence increases in the therapeutic community, doctors and patients alike will benefit by learning to access their hearts in the first place and then proceed from there. By engaging heart intelligence, therapists will have greater intuitive insight on how to guide their patients, and patients will have greater power and intuitive insight on how to release emotional history and keep the past from conditioning perceptions and reactions.
A benchmark of emotional management and responsibility is the realization that our past can no longer be blamed for our actions in the present. While it’s important to acknowledge emotional history, we shouldn’t give in to the tendency to use our past to excuse our current behavior. Despite good intentions, a lot of people committed to personal growth know that they shouldn’t do that, but they lack the power to stop themselves. They wander off down a sidetrack, feeling sorry for themselves and blaming other people.
With the pace of change and stress accelerating, people won’t have time for sidetracks much longer. They’re too costly in time and energy. The ability to quickly shift out of negative emotional states, past or present, into new understanding and insight is on the horizon. Though it represents a quantum leap from working things out incrementally, it’s not as far off in the future as we may think.
As you practice the HeartMath Solution tools and concepts, you’ll gain the power and intelligence you need. The tools will help you become more aware of your thoughts, emotions, attitudes, actions, and reactions. As you practice them, you’ll develop a keen assessment of mental and emotional assets and deficits. You’ll see where you allow yourself to mechanically adopt attitudes or hold on to mind-sets that entrap you in emotional discord. By engaging the power of your heart each step of the way, the tools will help you build emotional coherence and achieve more control over the direction of your life.
A New Level of Mastery
At HeartMath, we foresee that the next major step in the evolution of the human species will necessitate the development of a higher degree of emotional management than we’ve ever experienced. This level of emotional management, this application of heart intelligence, will be the root of our power for profound personal and societal change.
We’ve all experienced managing our emotions to some degree. But what we usually practice is a kind of “fair-weather management.” When the sun is shining and the sky is clear, we can smile and feel emotionally balanced. But when a storm appears—especially one that wasn’t forecast—our emotions are thrown into turmoil. We’re basically at the mercy of our inner environment.
When life conforms to the standards set by our minds, it’s easy to keep a light rein on our emotions and still feel pretty good. But if one little thing happens that we think shouldn’t have happened, it’s over. We haven’t yet learned the skills to move to the next level emotionally. We’re still like adolescents.
If you gave a bunch of eager ten-year olds the keys to your car, they’d be happy to drive it, but they wouldn’t know how. When they got behind the wheel and drove off, there’s a good chance they’d have a wreck. That’s where many of us are when it comes to managing emotions. We don’t know how to manage how we feel, so year after year we suffer the consequences.
Most of us are doing the best we can. But emotional management has to be carefully cultivated, and unfortunately there aren’t many instruction manuals. For the most part, people learn through a trial-and-error process—the school of hard knocks. They master enough emotional management skills to survive and to conform to social norms, but they can’t consciously orchestrate emotions well enough to “drive” effectively.
Let’s look at a simple example of how unmanaged emotions can drive us into the ditch. You wake up on a Saturday and decide to take a peaceful drive in the country. It’s an impulsive decision, and since you usually plan things carefully, you feel pleased with yourself—so pleased that you forget to gas up the car. Five miles down an absolutely gorgeous mountain road in the middle of nowhere, you run out of gas.
“How could this happen?” you groan. “Things were going so well!”
You look for someone to blame—and you’re the only one around: “I can’t believe I was so stupid!” On your five-mile walk back to civilization, blame gives way to self-pity: “Every time I try to do something fun and spontaneous there’s a problem.” Then fear and anxiety take over: “I remember passing some buildings five miles back, but was there a gas station?” Finally panic and despair set in: “What if this turns out to be a twenty-mile walk? What if someone vandalizes my car while I’m gone?”
Here’s a better what-if: What if, at any point along the road, you’d been able to engage your heart intelligence, giving you more emotional control and a balanced reaction to the situation—one that didn’t take you into blame, self-pity, fear, and panic? What if you’d remembered to FREEZE-FRAME as soon as you started to feel your emotions begin to boil? Not only would you have saved a lot of energy, but you would’ve been developing emotional management skills that could come in handy a hundred times a day.
Instead of feeling disappointment, self-judgment, and anxiety about the incident, with a one-minute FREEZE-FRAME you could have shifted from a stressful response into a state of neutral; perhaps you could even have see your predicament as fun, relaxing, and regenerative. The walk to the gas station on a beautiful day in the mountains might have been quite enjoyable, under other circumstances. Without emotional stress coloring the perception of the event, you might easily have seen the gift in it all. Remember, stress is a matter of perception.
Life is filled with mistakes, accidents, people who don’t do what we want, and things we can’t control. But we can control our emotions. Having control over our emotions in a positive, healthy way can make all the difference.
Emotional intelligence implies the ability to self-regulate our moods, control our impulses, delay gratification, persist despite frustration, and motivate ourselves. It includes empathy for others and the buoyancy of hope. [16] When we’re equipped with those strengths, the twists and turns of life don’t get us down. We roll with them.
We tend to think that further development of the head and reason will help us manage our emotions, but reason is what got us into emotional despair on that five-mile journey to find a gas station. It takes the heart-directed head to provide commonsense reasoning.
Heart intelligence helps us realize that we don’t have to blame ourselves, the weather, or anyone else for our emotional experiences; we can adjust and regulate our emotions ourselves. The coherent power of the heart helps us perceive what to do and gives us poise and balance. Remember, heart intelligence isn’t something sentimental or overly sweet. It has a businesslike quality; it’s balanced, it’s efficient, and it takes all possibilities into consideration. From a perspective of well-developed heart intelligence, it’s easy to see that not expressing anger at someone doesn’t mean that we accept or condone her behavior. And not judging ourselves—not feeling guilty or wallowing in self-pity—doesn’t mean that we don’t want to grow from our mistakes. If we listen to the heart and follow its directives, we can make the choice to manage our emotions early on in the reactive process, without getting sucked into a downward spiral.
Positive Thinking Versus Positive Feeling
As a young man, I (Doc) used to love reading Norman Vincent Peale’s books on the power of positive thinking. Although I enjoyed practicing Peale’s positive affirmations, sometimes my emotional world got in a funk and refused to go along with my positive thoughts. I could change my thoughts but not my mood.
As I embarked on my research into the human heart, I realized that people are more a product of their feeling world than their thinking world. I concluded that the biblical saying, “As a [person] thinketh in his heart, so is he,” would have had a very different meaning if it said, “As a person thinketh in his head.”
Imagine a group of people who practice positive thinking driving to the country for a picnic. They enjoy each other’s company and have a pleasant drive, but they can’t help but notice the clouds forming overhead.
By the time they get to the picnic area, it’s raining. “So,” they tell each other, “here’s a chance to practice our positive thinking. Let’s not worry about it. We can have a picnic another time.” That’s a nice, positive thought. But their feelings are saying something quite different. These folks have just taken a long, pointless drive in the rain, and they feel disappointment and regret in equally large measure. Those feelings aren’t bad or wrong. They reflect human nature. But there’s another solution.
By pausing to go to their hearts, and using a HeartMath tool to activate the power of core heart feelings, they could shift their feeling state and tap into the wisdom of their hearts. Activating core heart feelings would introduce a much deeper emotional experience—perhaps gratitude for each other, the fun of being together, and the joy of unexpected moments. Surrounded by emotions like that, it’s easier to see that disappointment and regret are not worth the energy. Instead of having to try to affirm themselves or grudgingly talk themselves out of thinking and feeling a certain way, by shifting perception to a wider picture they can release disappointment and regret quite naturally.
The power to change or transcend our feeling world comes from within us, from our own heart relaying its intelligence through our emotions. It’s not about trying to affirm or reason our way into emotional intelligence. Without heart alignment, we’d chase that dream forever. Heart intuition or intelligence brings the freedom and power to accomplish what the mind—even with all the disciplines and affirmations in the world—can’t do if it’s out of sync with the heart.
Preset Patterns
When something throws you off, you can react from the head or act from the heart. It’s not always easy to stop the head, but activating heart power enables you to delay reacting and slide into neutral more freely, without letting subtle emotions get the best of you.
Life is full of opportunities that encourage us to give up trying to become more emotionally balanced. Society is entrained as a whole to the mismanagement of emotions. In this environment, it can be especially challenging to do something original, to act effectively rather than react predictably.
We call our individual or social reaction patterns “presets.” Someone does us wrong, and predictably we fall into habit patterns ingrained in our emotional psyche and reinforced by societal programming. Someone pushes our buttons, and all those well-worn neural circuits kick in, triggering a preset reaction before we even know what hit us. That’s where almost everybody gets stuck.
Presets are entrenched responses such as, “My father always makes me angry when he says that!” or “I’ll never forget what my ex-wife did!” After months or years of practice, these patterns have so much force and stability that we need as much energy to overcome them as we invested in the first place—if not more. That’s why we need an accumulation of heart power to change them.
The Major Energy-Draining Presets
Two major presets can quickly compromise our efforts at emotional management: justification and principle.
Both of these mind-sets can seem so right. We feel good about it when we’re “justifiably” angry, hurt, hostile, disappointed, or intolerant. Then, after we’re drained by those emotions, we blame the person or situation we were “justifiably” upset about for making us feel bad. But we’ve already seen, in Chapter 3, that our bodies don’t make a distinction between the times we’re in the right and the times we’re in the wrong. Even if we could prove to the whole world that we were right, our bodies still wouldn’t care. Our heart rhythms and our nervous, hormonal, and immune systems would respond the same way they would if we knew we were wrong. Justified or not, emotions that cause stress—those that are sometimes labeled “negative”—simply aren’t healthy. They deplete our emotional bank account, making it harder for us to regain emotional balance, and they inhibit our reasoning abilities.
Because the cascade effect of emotions throughout the body doesn’t depend on whether emotions are justified or not, we prefer to call emotions that add coherence and energy to our system “asset emotions” and emotions that cause incoherence and deplete energy “deficit emotions,” rather than labeling them “positive” or “negative”—terms that imply right or wrong, good or bad. The biological reality is more neutral than that. From the body’s point of view, emotions aren’t right or wrong, but we can say that they’re either efficient or inefficient for our health and quality of life.
The Justification Trap
Indulging in justification is an obvious, natural mistake. In fact, justification is the number-one reason that people don’t successfully manage emotions.
Like fair-weather management, justification implies that we need to manage our emotions only under certain circumstances—not, for instance, when it’s “understandable” that we got mad or frustrated. If we have a good reason to feel hurt, then we don’t need to manage our tears of disappointment or blame and we don’t need to try to work the issue out with the other person. Understandable or not, justification simply costs us too much.
When we suspend our emotional management because we have reasons that “excuse” our emotional indulgences, the aftereffect is like pollution or secondhand smoke in our system. It creates cross-currents in our feeling world that we then have to spend valuable time and energy clearing out.
As we become more observant of what goes on internally, we can see the progression: justified reaction, emotional drain, backwash of more depleting thoughts and emotions about the same issue, overload, more drain, then blame.
For some people, this emotional progression starts before they get out of the shower in the morning. One justified reaction to mere thoughts in the shower—about how much we have to do, how the day is going to go, or what someone did yesterday that we didn’t like—and the emotional backwash starts. Then we spend the next few hours trying to feel better and recoup our lost energy—and wondering what truck hit us.
It’s easy to become trapped in this process unless we realize how deficit emotions work. With that understanding, though, we can start to notice that one or two of these progressions in a day leaves us significantly less energy to appreciate and enjoy what we value in life.
The Principle of the Thing
Let’s look at the second major preset that compromises emotional management. Very often our justified reactions are based on our mind’s adherence to principles. We justify our rude response to someone because “he shouldn’t have talked to me that way.” We justify the debris on the kitchen floor by telling ourselves, and anyone else who will listen, “It’s not that I can’t take out the trash. It’s that she should take it out once in awhile. It’s just the principle of the thing.”
Sticking to principles can ensnare us in a morass of deficit emotions. If we hide behind self-righteousness, we separate ourselves from our heart and our potential connection to others.
There’s nothing wrong with having high standards. Principles build character and integrity and provide a useful baseline for guiding our decisions and behavior. But if our sense of principle is used to sanction being judgmental, resentful, or indignant because something isn’t right or fair in our eyes, then “principle” isn’t working for us. It’s going to deplete us quickly.
Sometimes we think of “righteous anger”—anger in defense of principle—as good anger. But it creates the same incoherence as any other anger. Unless it’s taken to the heart and transformed into coherence, it blocks effective solutions.
Sometimes we think that we can’t take needed action, whether in a confrontation or in getting something important done, without being propelled by anger. While anger can give us a short burst of energy, until we manage the anger we can’t see what action would be best to take. The information is simply not available to us. The emotions have short-circuited the pathway in the brain that helps us see the most appropriate action.
We all know people who say, “It’s the principle of the matter,” to justify the toxic emotions they’ve sustained for years. As they hold onto their anger or hurt, they bleed away their energy reserves, often ending up bitter and depressed.
We knew an eighty-year-old man, the eldest of eleven siblings, who died lonely and bitter because he refused to make amends with his one remaining living brother. Forty years earlier, he’d stopped talking to this brother because he hadn’t asked him to be part of a business investment that included another brother. The old man had never met this offending brother’s grandchildren, and he’d avoided parties and family gatherings where he’d be present. It was the principle of the matter. How many destructive family feuds and years of misery are based on principle?
Dealing with Energy-Draining Presets
Any rationalization of deficit emotions—whether it’s based on justification or principle—traps our emotional energy in hurt, blame, fear, disappointment, betrayal, regret, remorse, or guilt. These attitudes tend to last a long time, because we continually rejustify them. Thus their devastation is cumulative.
What we may not anticipate is that, as they slowly drain our energy reserves, they leave us more vulnerable to new emotional drains. Yet rationalizing our emotions with justification or principle often starts with just a few seemingly innocent thoughts that we let ourselves get worked up over. For instance, how often do we find ourselves thinking or making statements such as these:
“I’m not mad; I’m just hurt.”
“I’m not upset; I’m just disappointed.”
“It’s just not fair.”
“I’ve been misunderstood.”
“It’s the principle of the thing.”
“I have a right to be hurt [or angry or to feel betrayed].”
“If only I’d just…”
Though this type of inner dialogue seems normal, it’s like a car tachometer that’s missing its red warning line. If left unchecked, it can lead to serious consequences. In fact, much of the emotional stress in the world is ignited by this type of inner dialogue.
When people and situations don’t satisfy our mental expectations, it’s easy to rationalize our emotional behavior. And the statement, “I’m not upset; I’m just disappointed,” implies a certain degree of emotional management. But even disappointment means resignation to emotional drain. You’ve merely traded a stronger emotion—being upset—for a lesser one. Being upset costs you more energy than being disappointed, so you come out a little ahead in the short term—but not by much, and not in the long run.
It’s tricky, because the mind can justify being disappointed longer than it can justify being angry and upset. The stronger deficit emotions throw our mental, nervous, hormonal, and immune systems out of balance to the point that it’s obvious we need to do something. The body compensates, fighting to bring itself back to normal, when stressed by strong deficit emotions. Getting upset burns a lot of energy physically, mentally, and especially emotionally. Eventually we simply run out of the emotional energy needed to sustain the upset.
Disappointment, on the other hand, is less intense. Although disappointment has a depleting effect on our physiology, it’s more subtle and takes less energy to sustain. So we let disappointment linger, often until it bleeds into sadness. And then sustained sadness bleeds into depression or despair. Because the initial feeling is justified, you may not notice that disappointment is setting you up to experience more disappointments and draining emotions.
Hurt works the same way. The very term “hurt feelings” implies an inward drain of emotional energy. Like disappointment, hurt can also linger and progress into blame, anger, grief, guilt, and other draining attitudes. It’s time to stop the drain, time for us to understand how emotions work and realize that we have new choices in how we respond to them.
So what do we do? Innocent people do get hurt. People do misunderstand us and disappoint us. Freeing ourselves from justified feelings of betrayal requires a courageous act of self-care. It takes new awareness and the power of the heart to release, let go, and move on. An understanding of how thoughts and emotions work is what gives us the new intelligence and motivation we need.
First of all, if you recognize yourself in the inner dialogue statements given above, don’t worry or get stressed about it. We all make these statements sometimes. Just realize that they represent common, stress-producing attitudes that remain hidden behind a cloak of justification. Once you remove the cloak, you can begin to identify patterns that ignite your emotional stress, and then you can use your heart intelligence to change them.
A Laundromat Story
Years ago, when I (Doc) was sitting in a laundromat in North Carolina waiting for my clothes to dry, I saw two women I knew, Maude and Cassie, standing over by the dryers, fanning themselves and gossiping.
I heard one of them explaining that she’d lent Billy and Margo, a couple she knew from church, three thousand dollars to help pay for some unexpected medical bills.
“They said they’d pay me back in three months,” Maude said, sighing. “But it’s been five months now, Cassie, and they haven’t given me any money. It looks like they’re avoiding me.”
Cassie looked uncomfortable for a minute, trying to make up her mind, and then said, “Maude, I heard that they did pay some money to the hospital. But I also heard that they used the rest to build that new deck onto their house. Billy hasn’t been working much lately. They just don’t have the money to pay you back right now.”
I watched as Maude tried her best to manage her emotions. She gathered herself up not to react.
“Well, I’m just not going to get worked up about it,” she said firmly, speaking mostly to herself. “They know where to find me when they get back on their feet. It’s better just to let it go and hope for the best.”
“That’s good,” Cassie said. “There’s nothing you can do about it right now anyway.”
Neither one of them spoke for several minutes. Then suddenly Maude blurted out, “I’m not mad at them. But I don’t understand how they could build a new deck with that money. It kind of hurts my feelings. Just when you trust somebody. It’s … disappointing.”
Maude knew she didn’t want to get upset about the situation, but putting a cork on her emotions didn’t seem to be working. They spilled over anyway. Her first response had been anger. When that made her uncomfortable, she tried to stave it off by insisting that she wasn’t mad.
I watched Cassie to see what she’d say next, what advice she might give, but she kept her eyes cast down and folded her clothes deliberately. The sound of the washers and dryers roared over their uncomfortable silence.
Still grappling with her emotions, Maude tried to turn things on herself. “I guess I should have seen it coming. How could I be so stupid? I’ve got nobody to blame but myself.”
Trying to deal with feeling taken advantage of, she soon lashed out at her friend: “Cassie, if you knew about this, why didn’t you tell me sooner? Why didn’t you stop me from giving them money if you knew they were like that?”
Cassie mumbled something inaudible as they packed up their clothes and walked out of the laundromat. The last thing I heard was Maude saying sternly, “Well, I’m not going to put up with this. It’s just not right, and I’ve got every reason in the world to be mad as hell about it.”
Watching this woman suffer as she fought to control her emotions made me feel deep compassion for her. She went through an emotional progression I’d seen so often: first hurt, then anger, then disappointment, then guilt or resentment, then betrayal, and finally justified fury. Though the anger rankled, she’d probably been taught from childhood that getting mad was wrong. Besides, she had a sweet temperament—I could see that she didn’t like feeling angry—and she could probably see how uncomfortable the anger made her friend. So she was up against personal and social imperatives to feel something else. And she made a valiant effort to fend the anger off before giving in.
If Maude had had tools to tap into her heart intelligence, she could have eliminated her struggle altogether. Anyone hearing that her trust had been betrayed would have been alarmed. Anger is a natural response to news like that. But knowing that anger prevents us from thinking clearly, intuitively, and objectively, and knowing its destructive impact on the body, we don’t have to either indulge it or repress it. We can do something different.
Stepping back from Cassie’s news and consulting her heart intelligence, Maude might have realized that (1) Cassie might not have had her facts right, and (2) even if Cassie was accurate, the betrayal probably wasn’t a personal insult. Billy and Margo were probably just being irresponsible again. Maybe they did take advantage of her, but they still intended to pay her back. If Maude had asked her heart for advice about how to handle this betrayal, she might have come up with some very firm guidelines to present to Billy and Margo.
At the very least, heart intelligence gives us the power to delay emotional reactivity until we have all the facts. Emotional management doesn’t mean that we acquiesce to whatever happens to us. On the contrary, we often have to stand up for ourselves and take action. But heart intelligence helps us see what to do cleanly and clearly, with less suffering.
Progress can be made in releasing emotional issues if we identify each issue and take back the power we’ve invested in it. Our heart can show us a healthier response to any of these unmanaged emotions. It comes fully equipped with the ability to give us the awareness to make new choices and move on. The highspeed, intuitive intelligence of the heart can quickly help us see where we’re compromising our emotional integrity and give us the power to do something about it.
Taking the Significance Out
If you asked a hundred adults to spend a day with four- and five-year-olds at a day-care center, it wouldn’t be long before they started using heart intelligence without even thinking about it.
In a large group of kids that age, it’s never long before one starts to cry. Perhaps his toy is broken. Or perhaps other kids have taken the wagon and left him behind. Either situation seems like the end of the world. Most adults would try to calm the child by helping him put things in perspective. The toy can be fixed, they say. The other kids will be back soon. For adults, it’s instinctual to help children take the significance out of problems.
The same thing happens with teenagers. Say you’re visiting a family with a couple of teenagers who are upset because their parents won’t let them go to a concert. One is angry and acting out; the other is crying. Hoping that you can persuade their parents to let them go, the kids turn to you for support. The first thing you try to do to calm them is help them reduce the significance. You show them different ways to look at the situation and different approaches to take with their parents. On your way home, you may tell yourself that someone needs to show those kids how to manage their emotions. Your common sense tells you that when too much significance is assigned to any situation, there’s an enormous emotional energy waste.
Taking the significance out of issues and events is second nature to adults dealing with children. But we don’t tend to offer that same help to ourselves. Instead, we do what most kids do—argue, pout, and blame. But if taking the significance out works for kids, it’ll work for us too. And when we do turn that tool on ourselves, the results are powerful.
Emotions have to be checked in the moment or they cascade. It’s the extra significance and the ongoing emotional investment that we put into an issue that make us feel we’re going to blow up. Our reactions are no different than a child’s tantrum. Sometimes we intuitively know that we need to let go of a deficit emotion but can’t make the shift because of what we might call a “mind pout.” We cut off our nose to spite our face: we know that we’re depleting our system, but we just won’t release the significance. We develop an attachment to the drain and give way to a mind pout.
The trouble is that when we ignore one deficit emotion and refuse to take the significance out even after we’re aware of it, the emotional depletion builds, undermining our progress in other areas. The next thing we know, we feel a sense of guilt and failure. Nothing’s working. It seems hard to make any progress; we feel as if we’re taking two steps forward, three steps back. Soon we’re feeling sorry for ourselves.
In reality, it was just that one initial thing that went wrong, starting the drain, but now it feels as if everything’s gone wrong. If we go back and isolate the precipitating thing and take the significance out of that, we replenish our energy and free ourselves to notice and appreciate the other things we’ve made progress on.
Many people cave in to emotional drains, offering the popular excuse that “they just can’t help it.” It’s time now that we learn both how and why to “help it”—or at least become open to the fact that we can. Emotional management means knowing when to cut loss and take action to self-restore our system by mustering our own heart intelligence to do something different. To take the significance out, we have to call on our own higher self: the wisdom coming through the heart.
Approach It with Heart
The tools of the HeartMath Solution will help you reroute your feelings through the heart so that the energy drains that are invisibly depleting your system stop. Each time you use a tool, you build your heart’s capacity to get back into an intuitive flow. Emotions liquefied become flow, and mind aligned with heart becomes intuition.
As you develop the connection with your heart, that organ of intelligence will assure you that refined emotional behavior is within your grasp. You’ll learn to ease uncomfortable emotions out through the heart and increase coherence so that the intuition of your heart becomes louder and clearer. Soon you’ll be identifying and acknowledging emotions and taking the significance out of problems naturally.
Managing emotions and getting them in balance has to be approached in steps. If you have a tendency to be angry, acknowledge the anger, then balance it by easing back to the heart and using FREEZE-FRAME. This creates a window of opportunity for intuition to come in from the heart and do what the mind can’t do—whether because of discipline or repression. Intuition is freeing and can present you alternative perceptions and new responses to anger.
Understandably, there may be moments when you feel a little apprehensive. All of us quail at taking an unguarded look at our own emotions, afraid that we’ll come across something that’s hard to accept or control. Our emotions are in Pandora’s box, and we want to keep the lid on.
At moments like that, it takes courage to take on our emotions, but the effort is worth it. Luckily, courage is associated with the heart. By using tools that tap into the power of the heart, we’re positioned to draw on an inner courage that we may not even have known we had.
Here are some tips that can help you improve your emotional management:
• Start using the HeartMath tools on small drains and go to the heart for resolution as those drains come up.
• Use FREEZE-FRAME with consistency and ask your heart to help you see where you’re falling into fair-weather management or reacting based on justification or principle.
• Call on the heart’s transformative power to take the significance out of issues so that you don’t let emotional deficits stack up.
• If you have a setback, don’t be hard on yourself. Take the significance out, go right back to the heart, and start again. Give your heart intelligence a chance to offer its perspectives and solutions. That’s treating yourself with emotional balance and maturity.
• Try not to think of emotional management as something to dread—just one more thing you have to do. It’s exciting to know that you can move quickly to your next level of fulfillment by applying heart to your emotions.
When emotions are managed by the heart, they heighten your awareness of the world around you and add sparkle to life. The result is new intelligence and a new view of life. Just be sincere in your efforts and appreciate the progress you make, not expecting to be free from unpleasant emotions all at once. Each success builds more power and excitement. It gets easier as you go. When longstanding emotional issues lose some of their intensity and importance, things won’t bother you as much.
With just a little effort to unlock your heart intelligence, you’ll begin to experience an exciting new freedom. Your emotional experiences will become substantially more pleasurable, and you’ll begin to feel textures in the heart that you’ve never felt before. People everywhere who are trying to follow their hearts are confirming this. They’re comparing notes and discovering similar exciting results. And as you progress, experiencing more and more of those rewarding textures, the progress itself will become a powerful motivation to keep unraveling the mysteries of emotion.
KEY POINTS TO REMEMBER
The emotional frontier is truly the next frontier to conquer in human understanding. The opportunity we face now, even before that frontier is fully explored and settled, is to develop our emotional potential and accelerate rather dramatically into a new state of being.
Emotional energy works at a higher speed than the speed of thought. This is because our feeling world operates at a higher speed than your mind.
Emotions in themselves aren’t really intelligent. But anything that has a flow—as emotion and thought do—has an organizing intelligence behind it.
People approach life from the perspective of familiarized emotional reactions stored in the amygdala of the brain, and they respond with familiarized behavior in an attempt to feel secure.
A benchmark of new emotional management lies in realizing that our past can no longer be blamed for our actions in the present.
There are two major mind-sets that quickly compromise efforts at emotional management: justification and principle. These mind-sets trap your emotional energy in hurt, blame, fear, disappointment, betrayal, regret, remorse, and/or guilt, which create cumulative drain and deficits in your system.
One of the main keys to emotional management is learning to quickly arrest a draining or deficit emotion and generate an attitude shift from a place of deep heart maturity.
To reclaim the energy out of a deficit emotion, we have to take out the significance we’ve assigned to it (or that our amygdala has assigned to it). To take the significance out, we first make an effort to back off; then the heart can open up.
HeartMath Solution tools help you reroute your feeling-world memories, purifying them through the heart so the drains stop. Each time you use a tool, you build heart capacity to get back to an intuitive flow. Emotions liquefied become flow, and mind aligned with heart becomes intuition.
As heart-based emotions and textures begin to replace old patterns, you’ll feel a whole lot better. Experiencing more and more of those rewarding textures becomes a powerful motivation to keep unraveling the mystery of emotion.