Putting on your emotional game-face on before emotional game-day

• I overreacted

• I should have said X

• I should have done Y

• Why was I so angry?

• How could I have made such a dumb mistake?

Life is full of these reactive moments of regret. The “shoulda-coulda-woulda” train is quick to leave the station after we make a mistake.

If we can be vulnerable with ourselves, we can perform internal postmortems on these incidents, working to investigate the root causes and plan out what we want to change next time. We might find gremlins from our past - like an immediate defensive response triggered by certain circumstances, or we may discover unhelpful mental habits we have developed over time. 

By ourselves (or with the help of a coach or therapist), we can start to unwind these learned patterns and change future outcomes. The difficulty with this approach is that we don’t often have the opportunity to practice what we have learned until a similar situation arises, and in similar situations we will experience similar levels of stress, increasing our likelihood of responding with previously ingrained patterns. 

How can we get ahead of this curve and become more proactive in regulating emotional response? The key to making a successful change is applying ourselves incrementally, testing our boundaries over time to increase our comfort zone. In reactive mental situations, we need to find ways to practice the responses we would like to have in situations that are more under our control than real world moments.

Practicing Fight or Flight

In the hunter/gatherer era of human history, our brains helped us survive by encoding various sensory inputs (like the snap of a twig behind us or the smell of mold in our food) to immediate reactions (like running away or not eating rotten food). 

In the modern era, the methods of encoding have not changed, but our situations have changed drastically. We are rarely facing a saber-toothed tiger, but we are built to create and use survival instincts all the time. 

Being social and highly interdependent creatures, we are primed to recognize changes in our social status, isolation from the group, and shame as potentially life-threatening events with specific encoded reactions. This can lead to outbursts in the boardroom, extreme defensiveness, and other maladaptive behaviors that are entirely out of character for us, but feel so natural in the moment. 

As Dr. Bruce Perry explains with Oprah Winfrey in the book “What Happened To You?”, our brain functions like an upside down triangle. The “lizard brain” at the narrow bottom receives all sensory inputs before any other part of the brain. This portion of the brain checks inputs against our history of threats and filters any responses which it determines require immediate action. Finding those, the body can begin taking immediate action. This mechanism is incredibly useful for survival, but anything that is triggered in this portion of the brain is not immediately sent to other areas of the brain for further analysis. As we move up the triangle, we get to more advanced functions of the brain, eventually getting to the top and widest portion, the cortex, which is responsible for logical reasoning and complex analysis. If our reaction to a situation is determined before we can reason it, we find ourselves reacting “irrationally.”

A situation like being yelled at in the workplace can logically be seen as “unlikely to be a survival threat,” but if our brain has experienced repeated verbal abuse from a parent, teacher, or previous boss, the situation may be encoded with a fight or flight response already. This causes us to aggressively fight back or potentially flee from the situation as best we can before we’ve even rationally considered it. Once we have reduced our instinctive adrenaline rush, we might feel the shoulda-coulda-woulda thoughts popping back up, potentially with additional shame for our initial reaction. 

Lizard brain reactions are a cause of symptoms of PTSD - as certain stimuli are interpreted long before our conscious mind considers them and our reactions are already queued up. In an interesting - and very telling - twist, the base section of the brain does not have a concept of time, so a war veteran who hears a motorcycle backfire can immediately be brought back to situations with gunfire, no matter how much time has passed since they were in that threatening situation. While combat is usually the lens through which we understand PTSD, trauma reactions are actually common in every human life, resulting from our brain’s tricks meant to keep us out of harm’s way. An abusive past or any traumatic event is interpreted like wartime trauma, encoded by our brains to create instinctive reactions that help keep us alive.

The good news is that these patterns can be changed with dedicated practice, re-encoding our brains to reduce the knee-jerk reactions and increase our ability to reason in triggering moments. The key again is incremental pushes to expand our comfort with situations that otherwise could trigger a reaction we do not want to have. But how do we practice managing our fight and flight reactions when they occur before logical processing? 

Movement and rhythm, EMDR (eye motion desensitization and repossession), and cognitive behavioral therapy are all helpful ways to dig in and reprogram our reactions, and there are a few other, less-proven techniques we can try at home. One way I have found to be particularly effective is cold water. Tim Ferriss discusses this technique as a way of managing depressive symptoms, where you voluntarily get into water that is below 60 degrees (Fahrenheit). Whether in a shower, a bath, or a lake, the low temperature will trigger several survival instincts in the body. 

In choosing to do this activity, we are creating a fight or flight reaction that we control. We can always step out of the water or change the temperature quickly if we are in a shower, but while in the water, we can feel an instinctive reaction beginning. Before our bodies can adjust to the cold feeling, our breathing increases to gasps and we feel the involuntary pull to remove ourselves from the situation as quickly as possible. Staying in it, however, we have the opportunity to practice making conscious choices while survival instincts are in full force. We get to experiment with choosing different feelings in moments of stress or try out a response we would like to have next time our adrenaline starts pumping. 

I have even tried visualizing certain situations which cause me the greatest stress in an attempt to work on those specific encoded reactions. This is much easier said than done, but with repetition and deliberate practice, we can move the needle on reprogramming default reactions. We see there are other choices when we are feeling panicked, and we proactively prepare for future situations. 

Any cold water exercise is not easy, and we should exercise significant self-awareness to understand when it is too much, when we need a break, whether we find it personally helpful, and how often we would like to attempt it if so.

Practicing Self Compassion

Dr. Kristin Neff, a leading researcher in the field of self compassion, has studied the importance of compassion when we are growing and learning. As she describes in her interview on the Science of Success podcast, self compassion is not about giving ourselves a pass or being over-coddling, it’s about learning to be the kind of friend to ourselves who wants to see us succeed and is willing to hold us accountable along the way. This friend does not simply accept any and all behaviors but rather works on constructive ways to help reach goals that are important to us, providing honest but not harsh feedback along the path. 

Studies have indicated that berating and shaming are not linked to long-term behavior changes, and this applies as much to leading other people as to the way we talk to ourselves. When we are looking to change our behaviors and habits, we stand the best chance of success when we treat ourselves with compassion. 

Telling ourselves we are worthless for not going to the gym every day in a week is counterproductive to our overall goal of becoming healthier and stronger. 

If you want to check out what your inner critic sounds like, concentrate on the moments you make small mistakes in a day: spilling some coffee creamer on the counter, stubbing your toe, sending an email with a typo, slightly burning the food you are preparing, etc. Are you frustrated? Exasperated? How quickly do you move on? 

If you’re like me, your voice may be particularly harsh, instinctively spitting thoughts like:

• That was really stupid

• Are you really that clumsy?

• You know better than that, how could you make this mistake again?

• Did you even go to school?

• Maybe <insert external critic here> was right and you really are bad.

Once again, incremental change and practice are key to changing the well-worn patterns we use without thinking. We need to be able to enter and control a situation in which our inner critic is likely to come out, so we can practice responding in a different way.

For me, I practice with the Killer Sudoku app on my phone. I like playing a game or two on the wind-down before bed, and this mixture of logic and arithmetic, combined with a small phone interface where I accidentally type the wrong number often, is a perfect sandbox for interacting with my inner critic. 

Every game allows for multiple chances to make a basic arithmetic mistake or punch the wrong key. Previously, that would have resulted in the following thoughts:

• Don’t be stupid, that doesn’t add up to 16

• A 3 there? Are you an idiot?

• You can do better

Given how rapidly such mistakes can be made (especially while trying to set a new time-record), there are ample opportunities to catch the critic as it emerges and change the interaction. Over weeks, this practice has dramatically changed my internal monologue not only during the game itself, but in life. If I practice understanding and forgiveness in a seemingly unrelated (and low stakes) arena like a phone game, I add to my foundation of compassion in the rest of life.

As any professional athlete or sports team can attest, practice is crucial to game-time execution, so why not give ourselves the best chances of success in our daily interactions by practicing those challenging moments and default behaviors in protected ways? 

We can train ourselves to be more aware of our own thoughts, constructively change our behaviors, and lead with more intention than instinct. And we don’t have to put ourselves in high stress situations to get there.

Of course, now I play a lot more phone sudoku than I intended, so not all the outcomes are positive.