Staying Emotionally Mindful in Times of Chaos and Turmoil
Learning how to mindfully observe and experience your emotions will help you successfully navigate political stress
I recently introduced a series of essays on how to better regulate your emotions in these turbulent times – when sociopolitical turmoil regularly provokes strong (and often unpleasant) feelings. I have already received a strong, enthusiastic response to the initial essays. This demonstrates that for many there is a strong hunger for skills on how to better manage their emotions in these tumultuous times.
In the first essay of this series, I emphasized the importance of not impulsively reacting to strong emotions that get triggered by provocative stimuli. Impulsivity almost always leads to regrettable actions, and it rarely leads to productive solutions. My goal now is to review additional elements of emotional regulation.
Envision in a situation in a stressful occurrence has stirred up intense feelings (i.e., anger, fear). Imagine that you have successfully resisted initial urges to respond with a rash, impulsive action. What do you do next? Yes, it is good to resist mindless, reflexive responses to strong emotions. But there are further steps to take to optimize how you handle the situation at hand.
Before you ultimately decide on a reasoned response to what you have experienced, an important intermediate step is to take time to fully experience, identify, and understand your emotions. Doing so will enable you to formulate the best possible response to what triggered you initially.
As with my prior essays on these topics, I am drawing much of this from key elements of dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), a variant of psychotherapy initially designed to help individuals who experience extreme problems with regulating their emotions and behaviors.
In the context of these topics, it is important to understand the concept of mindfulness, one core element of DBT. The term “mindfulness” has quickly entered popular discourse in recent years, and unfortunately it is often misused and misunderstood.
Ultimately, mindfulness is a simple but powerful concept. It describes being fully, deliberately, and carefully observant about our inner states and outward behaviors.
Mindfulness involves things like:
Observing and understanding your emotional state in the heat of the moment, without judgment
Discerning stimuli in your environment that routinely provoke strong feelings
Being deliberate with your words and actions, so as to avoid impulsive and injudicious behaviors
Experiencing fully the present moment while not dwelling on the past or worrying about the future
Some people are more naturally skilled for mindfulness than others. However, those with less innate capacity can learn it and gain proficiency. Mindfulness is an important life skill, and any person can benefit from practicing it (whether it be in the context of a formal treatment such as DBT, or something you practice on your own).
I now want to explore more at length how the concept of mindfulness applies to the specific matter of managing your emotions when you feel stirred up by political stress. Being mindful of your feelings and behaviors in these situations will enable you to respond wisely.
When you are hit with strong emotions, it is important to allow yourself to fully experience them. This can be hard for more negative feelings, such as anger, fear, or anxiety. A normal human response is to try to ignore and suppress these emotions. This is understandable, as it can feel uncomfortable to allow yourself to experience these unpleasant feelings.
However, such avoidance is not helpful. It prevents you from gaining a better understanding of your circumstances, and it makes it hard to formulate appropriate solutions.
Mindfulness concepts from DBT encourage you to experience emotion as a wave – coming and going, hitting you more at some points than others. You aren’t necessarily running toward it, but you aren’t running away from it either. You are calmly observing and understanding it, without judgment.
To be clear, this does not mean wallowing in your emotions, or obsessively ruminating on them. Wallowing is neither healthy nor productive. You want to allow yourself to experience your feelings but not let them overwhelm you. You want to understand your emotions but not dwell on them.
As you are experiencing your emotions, you also need to take time to accurately describe them. Many emotions feel similar, and it is not always easy to distinguish one from another. Knowing what precisely what you are feeling helps you better understand the situation at hand. It helps you understand why the initial trigger precipitated this specific response within you, and it enables you to formulate the best possible response.
For example, anger and fear – both intense, negative emotions – can feel similar, and it may not always be immediately easy to distinguish one from the other. However, the appropriate response to an anger-inducing stimulus can be very different from the response to a fear-inducing stimulus. Thus, the better you can describe and identify your feelings, the better you can respond appropriately.
These things will not necessarily feel easy. It can be difficult to allow yourself to sit with negative feelings. Many of us work hard to suppress and ignore these emotions in our daily lives. We don’t regularly take the time to understand why we are feeling what we are feeling. Thus, all of the interventions described above will take practice. With time and practice, it will become easier to observe and sit with your emotions.
Once you have taken the time to experience and understand your emotions, you are then prepared to proceed with taking action in some form. In subsequent essays, I will describe more at length how – when you are feeling provoked by a stressful stimulus – to choose and execute a definitive course of action that is healthy for both you and others.
With all this in mind, regularly make efforts to practice mindfully observing and experiencing your emotional state, especially during stressful times. In doing so, you put yourself in an excellent position to take actions that will be judicious and productive.