Emotional resilience: Self regulation & mindful behavior

A lot of my work has to do with building psychological resilience, the capacity for emotional regulation and mindful behavior. In this page, I will first include some excerpts from a NY Times article about calmness and how it can be cultivated. I will then go on to briefly discuss how this type of mindful behavior differs from the traditional concepts of self control and willpower.

1. Excerpts from “The Cool Factor”, by Kate Zernicke, New York Times, November 30, 2008:

… the calm temperament is not so superhuman, nor is it entirely the gift of the chosen few. It can be cultivated, even as the world cleaves around us…

… “What studies have shown us is that there’s great plasticity, even though people are genetically built in ways that make them respond anxiously or not,” said James J. Gross, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of its psychophysiology laboratory. “Genetically identical people can give very different outward impressions because they think differently, they regulate their emotions differently…”

… Researchers estimate that about half the variation in our personalities reflects our genes, based on studies comparing, say, adopted siblings or fraternal and identical twins. The rest is shaped by environment, though how is harder to know…

… Many researchers argue for two ways to think about calmness: you are calm, or you learn how to be. Imagine two people with equally high measures of neuroticism dealing with the same irascible boss. One gets yelled at and leaves the boss’s office perfectly composed; the other gets yelled at and flees to the bathroom in tears or storms out and kicks the wall. The difference is that the first person has learned to regulate.

People tend to think that the confrontation produces the reaction; if you’re faced with an irrational rant, who can blame you for falling apart? But researchers in emotional regulation tease out a factor in between: how we think. Between the “a” of the antecedent and the “c” of the consequence, they argue, is the crucial “b,” for belief, which in the case of the person melting down might sound something like: “My boss hates me, everyone hates me, I’m a total failure.” That is the opportunity for emotional regulation…

… “Even if you’re someone who is initially anxious, you can develop tricks and strategies, so someone on the outside would say: ‘Her, anxious? She’s awesome at cocktail parties, she’s great at public speaking,’ ” Professor Gross said. “They wouldn’t understand that if you didn’t have those strategies, you wouldn’t be able to do those things.”

(This is the end of the excerpts from the article.)

2. Does this type of “mindful behavior” differ from the traditional concepts of “self control” and “willpower”?

First, it makes sense to acknowledge the similarities between “emotional regulation” and “self control”. In both cases, the approach is proactive:
- You observe how you tend to react;
- You decide that this is not how you want to behave;
- You make the effort to change what you do in order to get to the desired result.

However, there is a major difference between the traditional concept of self control through willpower, and a mindful approach to self regulation. It is about how emotions are handled.

The phrase “keep a stiff upper lip” captures the traditional approach. Emotions are seen as dangerous, and are best handled by being repressed. It’s not just that you don’t express dangerous emotions, you train yourself not to feel them. The stiff upper lip reflects the straightjacket that restrains your emotions. You may appear calm, but you’re certainly not cool.

A mindful approach to self regulation does not in any way ignore emotions, even difficult ones. To the contrary. You get more in touch with a bodily felt sense of your emotions. You become more able to notice the difference between feeling an emotion and acting it out.

You experience that there is more to you than the emotion that had seemed to be overwhelming. There’s a bigger container, within which the difficult emotion is contained, not repressed. You develop more resilience, i.e. the capacity to contain difficult emotions. As a result, you have more “bandwidth”, more inner resources, to handle the actual crises that trigger difficult emotions.

You develop a more integrated sense of self. A sense that your emotions and will and intellect are harmoniously integrated, instead of the jagged experience in which they too often seemed to work at cross purposes. Grace under pressure.