Learn how to regulate your emotions instead of being driven by them …

Both conventional news outlets and social media were abuzz this past week when it was reported that Wilmer Flores, the 23-year-old short stop for the New York Mets, was crying on the field.

Crying?

In baseball?

Yes.

As it turns out, a false report had reached Flores during the game against the San Diego Padres that he had been traded to the Milwaukee Brewers. Flores had signed with the Mets when he was just 16 years old; playing for the Mets, and “being” a Met, was all he knew in baseball and was a joy in his life. The thought of being traded away from the team that helped him realize his dream of becoming a professional baseball player brought tears to his eyes.

Players who are being traded usually don’t play in their current game, so Mets manager Terry Collins was pelted by questions from reporters in a post-game interview as to why Flores had not been pulled from the game, and about Wilmer crying. Collins explained he knew nothing of a trade but defended Flores …

“”You guys think these guys are stone-cold robots. They’re not. They’re human beings who have emotions,” Collins stated.

Any of us can relate to Flores’ experience — a time when our emotions “get the best of us” and just can’t be contained. But also many of us would have to say our emotions “getting the best of us” happens quite often. Many people live lives driven more by a lack of emotional awareness and unregulated emotions than they do as self-aware persons who make more rational decisions for themselves.

A lack of self-awareness and failure to appropriately regulate our emotions will generate negative consequences in our lives.

The “low road” or the “high road”?
A great deal of new research in recent years is helping us better understand what emotions are and how they affect us. One definition of emotion is “the body’s response to the interpretation of sensory data.” That definition is expanded slightly in this definition: “An emotion is a complex psychological state that involves three distinct components: a subjective experience, a physiological response, and a behavioral or expressive response” (Hockenbury & Hockenbury, 2007).

Some of this new research is being taught in “Couple Communication I: Collaborative Marriage Skills” (Miller, Miller, Nunnally, Wackman, 2007) as the “high road” and the “low road” capacity …

“Neuroscientists speak of two general pathways for processing information in the brain. These can be referred to as two roads.

“One pathway goes immediately through the circuitry of the emotional brain, down to the root brain. This route, called the low road, is:

• • Reflexive and reactive.
  • Largely unconscious and instinctual.
  • Your “default system,” ready for a fight or flight reaction.
  • Very powerful and able to overwhelm and limit the executive functions of the thinking brain.
  • Expressed in Fight Talk and Spite Talk — communicating the distressed, aggressive and defensive aspects of the emotional brain.

“The other pathway activates the networks of the thinking brain to process information and provide choices of behavior. This avenue, called the high road, is:

• • Reflective and proactive.
  • Consciously aware, creative and potentially collaborative.
  • Capable of integrating and managing powerful drives and emotions originating in the middle brain subsystem.
  • Active in Search and Aware Talk.”

As we have subjective experiences, our emotions are the body’s response to the sensory data collected. Thus, a person may respond from these “instincts” or urges. That’s taking the “low road” with our emotions. To regulate our emotions is to learn to take the “high road” by choosing not to react but instead give critical thought and assessment to the data we have and then choose our response.

So let’s simplify this: “Emotion regulation” refers to the mental and behavioral processes people use to influence their own feelings and the feelings of others. For example, you can make yourself become anxious by worrying, or attempt to “cheer yourself up” by doing something fun or enjoyable. Ways we influence the regulation of the emotions of other people include trying to calm an excited child or by criticizing a co-worker.

Dehabituation and Rehabituation
For some people, taking the low road with their emotions has become habitual. As they experience life they react physiologically with little or no regulation to their emotions. For example, when they become anxious, they eat; when they become afraid, they eat; or when they become angry, they eat. They respond to physiological impulses from their experiences with “feeling” behaviors, actions that are reactionary to physiology, rather than taking the high road to get to the root cause of their anxiety, fear, or anger, and more constructively respond to these causes.

In order for such people to not have their lives driven foremost by emotions they must learn to dehabituate from reacting to sensory data on a physiological level and rehabituating themselves to take the high road by thinking more rationally and critically, and then choosing a more appropriate and more healthy response. Competent counselors and therapists can help most people learn how to regulate their emotions in a way that is appropriate, effective and healthy for them.

Scotty