Emotional Awareness
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.
—Dale Carnegie
Do you control your emotions, or do they control you? Unless you’re the Buddha, there is no simple answer to that question. Our internal experience is amazingly complex and often unpredictable. Our brain is constantly evaluating and trying to make sense of the barrage of perceptions, memories, thoughts and emotions—distilling them down into a reaction or course of action. In this mix of information that our brain constantly sorts through, our emotions are almost always the wild card. Often these emotions may be as predictable as the sunrise, or as surprising as a capless tube of toothpaste triggering a rush of anger.
Emotions—the good and the bad—guide us through life. They tell us how to respond to the world around us and can be a determining factor in the way our life plays out. Emotional intelligence (or EQ), is believed by some experts to be a more important factor in the achievements of a given individual than their IQ. Emotional stability and maturity are just as important for leadership and success in the boardroom as it is in a healthy, thriving relationship. But emotions are so very hard to pin down. They do not play by the rules of logic. Time of the day, time of the month, brain chemistry, fatigue, hormones, diet, and past experiences can all play a role in our emotional response to the world around us.
Just as our emotions can be affected by our physical condition, so can our physiology be affected by our psychology. Consider how emotions such as anger, sadness, and grief can generate a racing heart, uncontrollable tears, or body-shaking sobs. Emotions can have a more insidious effect on our bodies as well. Chronic conditions such as depression can ravage our immune system, resulting in all kinds of disease and dysfunction, and intense emotions such as anger and grief are implicated in heart attacks, strokes, and emergency room visits of all kinds.
Our emotional experience is a crucial piece of our overall quality of life because not only is the state of our mind and emotions reflected in our bodies, but it is our life experience. It tells us how we feel. When our mind is hurting, our body hurts too. Now that doesn’t mean that if we only think happy thoughts we will never be sick, or that all sickness is caused by negative thought, but it has been shown to play a significant role. And more evidence is accumulating every day. Gaining control of our emotions, to whatever degree we can, gives us tremendous power to control the way we experience and interact with life. Emotions manifest in our thoughts and in our bodies, and the breath is our window into this interior world. It provides us with a vantage point from which we can intercept, evaluate, experience, and change our emotional responses.
Exercise: Feeling the Difference
Understanding the degree that our emotions are influenced by our breath can be easily demonstrated. You may have already noticed the effects from the previous exercise in chapter 4.
To start, let your head and shoulders slump forward and your chin drop to your chest and take short, shallow breaths into the very top of your lungs (the neck and shoulder area). Do this for one minute (even though it may seem like an eternity). How does that feel? Did you begin to feel anxious? Like your skin was crawling? Could you feel your heart rate and adrenaline level start to rise?
Now straighten up and take a couple of slow deep breaths. From an emotional standpoint, how does that feel? Notice the physical and emotional changes.
The Health Connection
The wealth of research results on the effects of mental and emotional stress, as well as counterproductive thinking, is undeniable. When we are able to exercise more control over our thoughts and emotions, it directly affects our health and happiness. Consider this:
The connection between our emotions, our physiology, and our health makes it clear that managing our emotions can benefit us tremendously, and the degree to which our emotions are intimately bound up with our breathing is quite remarkable. Psychologist Rolf Sovik writes, “Negative emotions have an immediate effect on breathing. Do you remember the way your breathing changed when you last lost your temper, were startled by a loud sound, or felt overwhelmed? As we focus on managing a disturbing event, deeper, more abrupt, or more rapid breaths shift the balance of energy within the body. This momentarily heightens our attention level, preparing us to take action or allowing us to vent emotional energy.”
What happens to your breathing when you hear something go thump in the night? It stops so that we can hear every little sound. This habit is ingrained in our DNA. It is the same for most mammals. When your pet dog hears a sound and picks up its ears, watch what happens to its breath—it stops. It is a survival instinct that helps us stay completely still and hear the slightest sound. When we become angry or frustrated, our breathing often becomes fast and shallow, preparing for fight-or-flight. At the same time, our body releases several powerful chemicals into our body, including cortisol and noradrenaline, to prepare us for battle or escape. In the past these habits were necessary for survival and these chemicals serve us very well when the best response is to fight or flee, but when that is not the case, these chemicals can be toxic.
For most of us, modern stress and threats to our well-being are not mitigated in the least by the physical responses that protected us from wild beasts and marauders of the past. Unfortunately most of us still react by holding our breath whenever we are stressed or feel threatened, whether we need to hear better or not. Holding your breath, or succumbing to the fast, shallow breathing that accompanies a blast of adrenaline, does not serve us well when we are gridlocked in traffic or informed by the boss that we have to work yet another weekend.
On the other hand, when we are relaxed and at peace, our breathing tends to be slower and deeper. This relationship between emotions and breath is reflected in our language as well:
Although this relationship between our emotions and breath has long been recognized and accepted, it is important to realize that the reverse is true as well—our breathing can affect our emotions.
How many times have you heard someone who is caught up in the grip of anger, frustration, grief, or other strong emotions be advised to stop and take a couple of deep breaths? The reason this practice has persisted over the generations is that it works! When we stop and take a couple of deep breaths, it causes us to stop and take a big step back out of the middle of whatever emotional whirlwind we are currently caught up in, and this gives us a more objective perspective. It also invokes our parasympathetic nervous system—the one that counteracts the fight-or-flight response and restores our body to a relaxed, restful state. Our breathing acts like an emotional anchor, moderating our thoughts and allowing us to better understand why we are feeling or acting the way we do.
“If we are going to make use of the breath at times of emotional distress,” states Sovik, “we need to learn to bring it easily to our awareness. This can be done by making the cleansing and nourishing sensations of breathing a familiar reference point. Daily practice is the key: It gives us the opportunity to observe relaxed breathing and to bring the interactions between breathing and emotion into view, much in the way that a laboratory environment amplifies the clarity with which experimental effects can be observed.”
Mindful Emotions
As you begin to develop breath awareness, you will find that your breath begins to act as an early warning system. When strong emotions like anger, frustration, or grief begin to take hold, you will notice your chest muscles tightening and your breathing will often stop or become short and shallow. This is the cue that your emotions are building up and starting to take control of both your mind and body and it’s time to stop and take a few slow deep breaths. This will help keep you focused on the moment instead of reliving the past, falling into previous patterns, or worrying about the future, and help you understand your feelings and how best to consciously and rationally address whatever problems confront you.
A March 2006 study in the Journal of Consumer Research found that when we are able to consciously examine our feelings and determine their source, we are better able to keep those feelings from influencing our decision making and behavior. That can directly affect the quality of our personal and professional lives. By developing the habit of awareness and using our breath as a bellwether to both monitor and manage our emotions, we can keep them from overwhelming our rational thoughts.
To this point, Dr. Santorelli has said, “It may be that one begins to become receptive to the actuality of a breath coming in and a breath going out and it’s not with the intention of ‘breathing my problems away.’ It’s with the intention of staying very much in the midst of what’s going on right now and yet, by adding a little added ingredient, which is called mindfulness, one is able to not just be in the maelstrom, if you will, but to be able to see it in a very particular way that has the feeling of having stepped back slightly, but it isn’t a step back as in not participating in it, you step back by participating in it. By actually feeling what is happening right now, whether it’s emotionally noticing what is actually arising in the mind right now—whether it’s fear or helplessness or joy or confusion—in that sense the breath is a tremendous ally because it helps keep us here.”
It is this ability of the breath to act both as an early warning system and an emotional stabilizer, and as an anchor in the moment that makes it one of the first and most important techniques taught in anger, grief, pain, and depression management programs. It gives us an additional measure of control, letting us acknowledge and experience our emotions, but also lets us do it consciously and intentionally. We are able to remain objective without being detached and present without being overwhelmed. We can experience the full current of our emotions and when we are firmly tied to the anchor that is our breath, we can allow them to guide us and inform us, and no longer are we swept away. (For more in-depth information about emotions see Part Five.)