Just the facts ma'am

If we want to become better at regulating our emotional responses, we start out with identifying and describing our emotions. But that’s only half the battle. Next we need to take action.

But before that can occur we have to identify the situation in front of us. We don’t want to act solely on emotion or on our interpretation of an event as our thoughts and environment can heavily dictate those emotions. On that same hand, our emotions can alter our thoughts around an event and therefore influence how we act. So the first step is to establish the facts.

Just like in an analysis of behavior, we can analyze our emotions and the events surrounding them.

What emotion do we want to change?

What prompted this emotion?

What am I applying to the situation (thoughts, assumptions)?

Is there a threat to my safety? Is that an assumption?

What is the crisis at hand?

Am I responding with a reasonable intensity and duration of emotion?

Much of our difficulties in regulating emotion have to do with our assumptions of the events in front of us rather than reality. We assume, we have bias, and we create our own narrative. If we can instead break down our biases, we can look at the actuality of the facts at hand.

A simple phrase I like to fall back on is this:

“Is that a fact or a feeling?”

Both are important. Both have value. But we must separate one from another in order to accurately assess events in our lives and the emotions that envelop them.