Stress and Emotions
Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book How Emotions Are Made is an eye-opener. For those of you familiar with Daniel Kahneman’s best-selling book, I describe it as Thinking, Fast and Slow but for the emotional aspects of our brains. In a nutshell, Dr Feldman Barrett shows that our ordinary understanding of how emotions function is largely backwards.
Rather than processing all of our sensory input, our brains take a small sample of what we perceive and then combine that input with our past experience to construct what we interpret as reality. The image of the world that results is therefore tainted by prejudices, guesswork and predictions — what we see is much less representative of reality than most of us would like to think. Our lived experience has a strong impact on the way we view the world.
If that sounds mind-blowing, it’s because it is. And if the thought is immediately disorientating — I, too, like to think that what I see is what I see, and not what my brain fills in based on what I have seen in similar situations in the past — ultimately it provides us with valuable tools for managing our stress.
As Feldman-Barrett explains, we experience emotions when our brains combine exterior and interior sensory input and then assign a reaction to it. The emotion is our brain’s interpretation of what these inputs indicate.
Imagine the following situation: you walk into a room filled with hundreds of people. As you walk to the podium to give a speech:
your heart starts beating more quickly;
you feel a tightness in your stomach;
your palms begin to sweat.
What emotion are you feeling?
Chances are, most of you said something like “fear” or “anxiety”. But a substantial few of you thought “excitement”. All based on the exact same physiological reactions. How you interpret them is based on your past experience, as well as based on other input you’ve received over the course of your life (e.g. things you have read and heard about public speaking).
The upshot: you have more control over your emotions than you think. In fact, numerous studies have proven that stopping to mentally recategorise fear responses — for example from “fear” to “excitement” — reduces anxiety and improves performance (for more details, see p. 189 of How Emotions Are Made). In other words, the next time you find yourself feeling anxious about something that shouldn’t make you fearful, take a few seconds to pause and say to yourself that the physiological responses you feel indicate excitement. Over time, you can train yourself to internalise this more productive interpretation so that it becomes second nature.
I'm telling you this because it provides a neuroscience angle to a few important insights about human behaviour:
simply understanding a problem is a major step towards solving it;
we have more control over our minds—and particularly our emotions and stress responses—than we think;
because our minds are in constant evolution, we can use what we know about neuroscience and development to develop new behaviours that ultimately rewire our brains to react to stimuli in more useful ways.
Take back control of your career.
Are you currently reflecting on how to get the most out of your job — instead of letting it get the most out of you?