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When Emotions Cause Anxiety
One of the things that we sort of feel about our emotions is that they sort of run through us and we have very little control over them, and the fact is our emotions are here to teach us. That’s my belief. An emotion has about a 90 second biological effect in your body. So the emotion has 90 seconds of biology going on in you, and then it goes away. And yet we hold onto it, emotionally, psychologically, in our mind and our heart much longer. So the question is, how do we help our emotions teach us things? How does joy uplift us? How does empathy unite us? How does regret help teach us something? How does humility create connection with other people?
So for me, I started to realize that our emotions, instead of being these things that I needed to be frightened of, as if there’s some evil twin lurking inside of me ready to take over me, that if I take a step back and I’m an observer of my emotions, I’m able to see that there’s something to be learned here. Quite often anxiety builds when you have an emotion that you don’t know what it is, and when you can actually name the emotion it actually takes you from the amygdala, which is the caveman part of our brain, to the prefrontal cortex, our reasoning part of the brain, and that’s a good thing.
So when you’re feeling an emotion or you’re feeling something and you’re really sort of confused by what it is, my recommendation is to sit down in a place where you’re not distracted. First of all, feel it where it’s happening in your body because quite often the initial reaction is physical. It may be something in your gut, in your throat, in your shoulders, and then on a piece of paper, write down the kind of emotions or physical sensations you’re having. Put them in the positive category and the negative category, partly because you just need to initially get conscious about what’s happening to you. So writing down a series of emotions, trying to understand what you’re feeling, and then starting to piece them together as a means of understanding some of the constant emotional habits we tend to fall into.
Anxiety = Uncertainty x Powerlessness
Anxiety is the most prevalent emotion in most organizations. So anxiety has two component parts. It’s what you don’t know and what you can’t control. So anxiety equals uncertainty times, not plus, because it’s combustible, anxiety equals uncertainty x powerlessness. So the way you could work this equation is the following. Think of something that makes you anxious and then create four columns. The first column is what is it that I do know about this thing that’s making me anxious? Second column is what is it that I don’t know? Third column is what is it that I can influence? And the fourth column is what is it that I can’t influence?
Once you’ve spent 15 to 20 minutes making a list, you may be surprised to find that 75 to 80% of us, when we make our lists, find that we have more things under columns one and three, the assets on this anxiety balance sheet, than we do in two and four, the sort of liabilities. And once you realize that, that makes you feel like, “Oh, I’ve got some things I do know and that I can control,” but more importantly, you can look at column two and say, “What is it in column two that ‘what I don’t know?’ How could I actually learn that?” Maybe you think you’re going to lose your job. Maybe you could ask your boss. Maybe you think your spouse is cheating on you. Maybe you could ask them.
The truth is, we don’t want to do that because it’s like, ah, I don’t want to learn that, but there’s a fascinating study done 20 years ago that showed that when people had the choice between getting an electric shock now that’s twice as painful as one they might get in the next 24 hours but it will happen without them knowing, sort of randomly, most of us would choose twice as a painful shock now. So a lesson to us as leaders is that quite often it’s best to actually deliver the bad news rather than to let people stew in their anxiety juices.