SDS 236: How to Deal with Negative Emotions

Welcome back to the SuperDataScience Podcast ladies and gentlemen, this is Kirill Eremenko and I’m super excited to have you back here on the show today. And today I’d like to share a small tip that I learned for myself and I think you might find useful. So the tip is on how to deal with negative emotions. 

But before we get started, I wanted to quote quite a famous neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio who says that according to his research, the deciding factor for about 95% of our decisions is actually emotions. And, he’s famous for the quote that ”We aren’t thinking machines that feel, but we are rather feeling machines that think”. And one of the ways that he’s come up with this conclusion is that it’s through researching patients who unfortunately through trauma, accident or other reasons were incapable, physically incapable of feeling emotions, for instance, that part of the brain in such patients was damaged.

And so what he found was that patients who weren’t capable of feeling emotions when they were faced with a choice, they were able to state the logical pros and cons for either decision. However, they were just incapable in most cases, they were incapable of actually making the choice itself. And that lead him to believe that, among other things that led him to believe that most of our choices are actually, and decisions are actually made through emotions rather than simply through logic. And hence we are not thinking machines that feel, but rather feeling machines that think. And that stands to show how important emotions are in our live how they can actually influence many of our choices. And now what happens when we have negative emotions whether it’s fear, doubt, self-criticism, feeling unhappy, feeling overwhelmed, feeling exhausted. When we have like all these negative emotions and feelings, what do we do?

How do we not let them influence our decision making process? Of course, sometimes it’s okay to feel tired and for that feeling of tiredness to influence our decision to, for instance, go to bed or do something, but sometimes we actually need or want to push through these feelings when, these feelings are not what we want to be feeling. For instance, they might be fear or they might be a feeling of tiredness. For instance, when are at the gym and you want to go that extra mile, you want to reach in your barrier and you’re just feeling tired. It’s not like you’re going to yourself, it’s not like you’re on the verge of what is possible. You’re just feeling tired or maybe you’re feeling lazy and you don’t want to get out of bed in the morning or maybe you’re feeling fear before asking for that promotion or for that job, for the new job or for the pay rise.

Or maybe you’re feeling anger that, you know, somebody made you angry and now you’re about to make certain decisions in that feeling of anger and maybe respond to them angrily. So those are all negative feelings that we don’t want them to be influencing our lives. So how can we actually avoid them or not even avoid. How can we, when we experienced them, how can we go through them and not let them influence our choices and decisions? Because like Antonio Damasio said, most of our choice and decision actually, it’s influenced by feeling.

So when we’re experiencing a very negative feeling that we don’t want to be experiencing, how do we not let it affect us? And so what I found for myself, was an interesting insight into how to deal with these situations. And so when you are feeling first, let’s take angry, right? When you’re feeling angry about something that happened or something that didn’t happen, or somebody said something. When you’re feeling angry, the better way to look at it is like it, it just happens, right?

Those are the chemicals in the brain. Those are emotion, that’s emotional state. And there’s no way you can live your whole life and completely avoid being angry 100%. That’s not going to happen. So sometimes you will feel angry and so a better way to look at it is to not equate yourself with that feeling, not let that feeling define you. How’d you do that?

Well you need to change the way you phrase it even to yourself or to others in order to separate yourself from that feeling. And the way to do that is instead of saying I’m feeling angry, better way to say it is I am feeling anger or I am experiencing anger and that completely changes the whole game. When you say I’m angry or I’m hungry or I’m tired or I’m exhausted, you are saying I am that, like I am a human, I am a professional, I am six foot tall. You’re saying, you’re defining what you are, you are defining characteristic of who you are and then your brain also actually process it that way.

But when you say it differently, when you say I am experiencing anger, I am experiencing frustration, I am experiencing hunger, I am experiencing exhaustion. When you say it that way, you instantly started seeing it as here I am, this is me. I’m a human and right now I’m kind of like, it’s like kind of imagine like you’re walking through a massive sphere of this feeling. It’s not part of you. It’s not in you. You’re just walking through it. It’s like you’re walking through a swimming pool or you’re walking through a hot room. Some, you know, it’s just like the temperature has changed. You’re experiencing it and in your mind instantly becomes a temporary thing.

Something you can overcome, something you can walk through, you can just observe it. You’re not feeling angry anymore. You’re actually experiencing anger and you can observe yourself experiencing that feeling. Or a hunger. You can see the physiological differences. You can listen to your stomach churning or chirping away or making like growling noises or if you’re angry you can, you can observe how your eye is twitching or how your hands are shaking and instantly you are not that feeling anymore. You are now separate to that feeling, you’re just experiencing. It is a complete game changer. So next time you feel angry or hungry or frustrated or tired or whatever other feeling, try to phrase it that way. Don’t say even in this podcast, half the time I said it wrong. Instead of saying, when you’re feeling angry, say I’m experiencing anger or whatever other feeling. 

So try that out as an example, as an exercise and see how that goes for you. For me it does magic. For some friends and relatives that I’ve shared this tip with also works really well and has helped some people. For instance, pushed through a fast, they were doing a fast for a day, 24 hours plus without any food and instead of saying I’m hungry, they were saying I’m feeling hunger. And that really helped them get that, make the right decisions, make the right choices, not go and grab some snack or some food because they knew their end goal. They have a bigger purpose in mind, bigger goal in mind, and that works with virtually any negative feeling. So rather than saying, I am X, say I am [inaudible 08:14], I am experiencing X, or I am feeling X.

On that note, thank you so much for being here. Hopefully that was helpful and maybe you’ll try it out sometime and I look forward to seeing you back here next time. Until then, happy analyzing.