Strong emotions often produce behaviors that can be damaging and are regretted later. We overreact to a perceived slight and hurt the ones we care about most. We overreact to a driving incident doing something dangerous in response. We overreact to attractive potential romantic partners, making fools of ourselves. We overreact to restrictions with rebellion. We overreact to a drop in stock prices and unnecessarily sell at a loss. The examples are almost endless.
It is obvious that we need to better control our emotions and our responses to these emotions. Mindfulness can potentially help. It has been well established that mindfulness is associated with improved emotion regulation. Mindfulness does not simply lead to less emotionality, or that mindful people experience less emotion, but rather through a present-moment awareness and acceptance of emotional experience.
Emotions are also important to our happiness. A blunting of emotionality is actually characteristic of depression. The good thing about mindfulness is that emotions aren’t blocked. They are felt and experienced. It just makes us better able to effectively work with them. This allows mindful individuals to detect emotions early on and stop them from spiraling out of control.
In today’s Research News article “Mindfulness and emotion regulation—an fMRI study“
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4040090/
Lutz and colleagues demonstrate a neural changes underlying the improved emotion regulation. They demonstrate that when dealing with negative emotions, mindful individuals have increased activity of the prefrontal regions of the brain. They also found that activity was reduced in the amygdala, and parahippocampal gyrus.
The prefrontal area is associated with self-awareness and cognitive control, indicating that mindfulness increases our ability to be aware of the emotions and to exert control over them. Although mindfulness increased the activity in this area it was also found that the higher the level of mindfulness the less the activation. This seemingly paradoxical finding indicates that as people become more mindful they require less energy and effort to effectively regulate the emotion. In other words they get more efficient.
The amygdala, and parahippocampal gyrus are involved in the processing of emotions. So, the reduced activity associated with mindfulness suggests that mindful individuals are less reactive to the emotion. It has been shown that mindfulness reduces the response of the sympathetic nervous system which is involved in producing the physical sensations in emotions. By holding down the emotion’s intensity both centrally and peripherally mindful people are less likely to be overwhelmed by and overreact to their emotions.
Mindfulness actually expands awareness of the emotion even though it tamps down its intensity. Mindful people are very aware of what they’re feeling. This allows the storm of emotions to take its course, feeling it completely, not suppressing or denying it. This allows the individual to effectively process it with reason and understanding and thus deal with it more effectively.
Mindfulness has also been shown to decrease rumination where we try to think our way out of the problem. Rumination is also called fixating, or obsessing and leads to repetitive thoughts such as “Why do I feel this way? What could I have done differently? I’m no good. I’m letting people down. What’s wrong with me?” These tend to amplify the emotion making it more difficult to control it. Being more attuned to the present moment can reduce this tendency making emotion less problematic.
The research findings clearly suggest that mindfulness better equips the individual to regulate their emotions. To experience them fully and process them fully, but react efficiently and effectively and then move on.
So, practice mindfulness and “get a grip” on your emotions.
CMCS
One thought on “Mindfully “Get a Grip””