You Aren’t At the Mercy of Your Emotions
Once you have a general understanding of the content from the chapter, please watch the 18-minute TED Talk “You Aren’t At the Mercy of Your Emotions—Your Brain Creates Them” by psychology professor, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gks6ceq4eQ
What are two of the most important ideas presented by Feldman Barrett? How does your personal experience support or contradict these research claims? How can you apply these concepts to improve your communication in your own life? (Give specific examples of how you might actually be able to use this information to strengthen your emotional well-being and communication patterns.)
Give me a comment that you agreed about for each of them please:
1 One important takeaway from Dr. Feldman Barrett’s presentation is that emotions are not absolute truths. Instead, they are based on predictions and guesses that happen in our minds. Another important takeaway is that we have some amount of control over our emotions. This is because how we interpret our body signals can alter emotions. The example she gives for this in the talk is people with test anxiety learning to interpret nervous signals as signs of being pumped up and determined instead. I’ve never purposefully tried to change my interpretation of my emotions, but I have experienced that sometimes my emotions are a result of how I am thinking about physical sensations. For example, if my heart starts racing, I will assume that I am nervous, but sometimes I’m not actually nervous about anything and this is just a result of drinking too much caffeine. I think that I could apply these concepts to my life by changing the way that I think about and interpret emotions. For example, when I get nervous about meeting new people, I could reinterpret that as excitement. I could also make sure I am conscious of potential physical explanations for my emotions. If I think I am irritated, I could consider whether I am hungry or overheated.
2. The two key ideas from Professor Feldman Barrett’s TED Talk are that emotions are not set in stone in one’s brain and that individuals can learn to control their emotions.
This rings true in my experience. I used to work in customer service and in the service sector, when I first started working with unhappy customers was very difficult. While I never disagreed with a customer, it used to be really difficult, and my initial urge was to serve best the person who was the most vocal about their complaint. With more practice, I learned to take criticism and negative emotions less personally. Learning to take negative feedback less personally, more in stride demonstrates that emotions can change with practice and exposure.
I remember when I first started to drive, how nervous I was. My driving lessons were every Saturday morning for about two hours through the Dutch countryside. Sometimes traffic got very busy and I would get too nervous to make good decisions. However, I once had a driving instructor who observed, as we were driving through a particularly scenic patch of landscape, “rijden kan ook ontspanden worden [‘driving can also be relaxing’]”. This stuck with me and from then on, even though my driving didn’t improve immediately, viewing my driving lesson more as a start to the weekend ritual then a tour certainly improved my disposition. Whenever I am in a stressful, unfamiliar situation I try to ask myself “can this also be relaxing?”
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