Living Skillfully: Your Mind and Health

Managing moods and emotions is something that many of us struggle with. Sometimes it seems like every day something happens that instantly triggers off fear, anxiety, anger, frustration, sadness, despair, guilt or shame. But with a simple technique, you can start managing those emotional hijacks and bringing them under your control.

Emotion figures by Fuyoh!

Anyone who’s had successful “talk therapy,” or even a helpful conversation with a friend who just listened, knows that sometimes putting our emotions into words helps us to get over them. It works with written words, too, as you’ll know if you journal. A study of expressive writing by cancer patients found that even a 20-minute, one-off session of expressive writing, while waiting for an appointment in a busy clinic, helped improve cancer patients’ quality of life.

What’s happening when we put our feelings into words? Matthew D. Lieberman and colleagues did a brain imaging study, reported in Psychological Science 18 (5). They found that when participants in the study labeled the emotions they were feeling, it disrupted the activity of the amygdala (which isn’t a Star Wars princess but a part of the brain involved in emotion). The use of words activates a different part of the brain, and appears to shift the mental activity there, away from feeling the emotion.

The way that I teach my clients to exploit this effect is based on Mary Mrozowski’s “welcoming prayer”, which isn’t actually a prayer at all. It’s simply a practice to use when you notice yourself feeling an emotion: saying “Welcome” and giving it a name – “Welcome, fear,” “Welcome, anger” or whatever the emotion might be.

In doing so, you are paying attention to the emotion – so it won’t go behind your back and manipulate you into doing something you may regret. You are accepting the emotion as being part of your conscious experience, which then enables you to let it go more easily. And you are naming the emotion, which brings into play the mechanism identified by Lieberman et al.

I practice in the shower most mornings, when I’m relaxed, just welcoming the four main negative emotions – fear, anger, sadness and guilt. That way, when one of them comes along during the day, I’m in the habit of the welcoming practice and can immediately discharge a lot of the energy of the emotion.

Please let me know your experiences – and any other good techniques you use – in the comments.

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