Breaking Yourself Out of Unresourceful Emotions

While the skills of getting yourself ‘stepped in’ to resourceful emotions are super powerful, it can be just as powerful of a skill to get yourself stepped OUT of states!

How easily/effectively can your get yourself out of emotional states that don’t serve you? How many methods do you have? How long does it take you to get out?

Getting ‘out of state’ is an important skill for when we find ourselves and others in unresourceful states that are not productive for the task at hand.

All Primary Emotions are Valuable

Before I get into breaking states in yourself I want to make an important distinction…

All ‘primary’ emotions are useful in their appropriate time and place, even the so called ‘negative’ ones.

Primary emotions are emotions that are in response to a real world trigger such as being sad about losing a loved one, or angry about someone scratching your car.

These primary emotions are distinct from ‘meta’ emotions such as depression and anxiety that are not directly related to any real world trigger but are either embodied in us over time or in response to an imagined trigger. These unresourceful ‘meta’ emotions are typically not useful and there are usually more resourceful ways to achieve the purpose they are trying to achieve.

But regarding primary emotions, it is ‘human’ to get sad in response to losing something you love, and to get angry when something violates your values. To prohibit those emotions altogether in yourself actually compounds your problems rather than solving them, and makes it near impossible to support another person who is going through that emotional experience.

That being said, there is a time and place to experience the full range of human emotions and although all primary emotions are useful it doesn’t mean they are appropriate in all situations.

Taking Care of Your Physical Needs is a Must

A quick note is that if you haven’t eating right, sleeping right, or exercising it will be much more difficult to manage your emotional states as we live in a mind-body-emotion system if we aren’t taking care of our body our mind and emotions will suffer as well.

Developing habits that support your lower needs will not only make it easier for your to break out of unresourceful states but will create a physiological environment that supports maintaining the resourceful states for longer levels of endurance.

It’s Easier to Break Others Out of States than Ourselves

An interesting side note here on the topic of breaking states is that it is typically easier for us to break other people out of states (and others to break us out of states) than it is for us to break ourselves out of states.

A great way to interrupt states is to shock, jar, interrupt, surprise, confuse, etc. and it is easier for something outside of us to surprise us than for us to surprise ourselves! I mean, its not easy to be the surpriser and the surprisee!

This makes it important to keep a couple of methods for surprising, confusing, and interrupting ourselves ready for when we need them most.

Techniques to Break States in Yourself

Physical Methods

• Physically break the state state by physically shake it off
• Change your posture
  Do the hokey pokey
• Take a walk
• Do some jumping jacks/pushups
• Take a walk or jog and clear your mind.
• etc.

Environmental Methods

• Changing your environment may also help break your state so cleaning/organizing your area
• Going somewhere you enjoy
• Putting on some music aligned with your desired state
• Stepping outside
• etc.

Psychological Methods

• Cognitively shift your focus e.g. ask yourself a difficult question e.g. what is your phone number backwards?
• Count backwards from 1000 in increments of 8
  Change the tone of the voice in your head (Scooby Doo, Mickey Mouse, a sexy tone of voice, etc.)
• Step out of your mental movies and give yourself some distance from memories/imaginations
• Expand the frame: “How will I feel about this in 10, 20, 50 years?”
• Lose your mind and come to your senses: “What can I notice in my present environment right now… What do I see? Hear? Feel on my skin? Smell? Taste?”
• Challenge the semantic reaction: “Is there something in the room right now that is triggering this? If not then my reaction has nothing to do with my present situation.”
• Question the value: “Does this serve me? Is this useful right now?”
• Question the necessity: “Do I need to respond this way right now?”
• etc.

In Closing

It is important to have multiple methods because not all methods will work because not all methods will work for all people, and all emotions, in all circumstances. Have some methods ready to roll and some backup methods and contingency plans.

My question for you is, have you ever successfully broken yourself out of a state that was inappropriate to the context?

How did you do it? I am very curious! Comment here: https://www.facebook.com/perceptionacademy/posts/1495228657295956

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