Emotional regulation ultimately requires high-level emotions

The core of emotional regulation has never been technical operations such as "suppressing anger" or "forced calmness". In the final analysis, you must first have more stable and transcendent high-level emotions - that is, those emotional experiences that transcend immediate gains and losses, instinctive likes and dislikes, and are related to responsibility, meaning, and deep connection. This is the underlying support that can support all emotional fluctuations.

Not long ago, I was squatting downstairs in the company with a friend who worked in Internet operations, eating steamed buns. She was scolded by a client for half an hour, and then the director changed the activity plan to version 8. Six months ago, she had been squatting on the side of the road crying until she was in tears. That day, she was still in the mood to joke with me: "The sauerkraut filling of this steamed bun is not changed as many times as I planned." ”I asked her why her mentality was so stable now. She didn't say anything about how she learned breathing techniques or how to use the ABC emotional theory. She rubbed her eyes and said, "I took my mother for a physical examination last week. All the indicators were normal. I even rescued a little orange cat that got stuck on a street tree after get off work the day before yesterday. What do you think this trivial matter at work is compared to these?" ”

Interestingly, the psychological community has actually been arguing about the path of emotion regulation for many years. One is the more familiar technology stream, with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) as the core, teaching you to identify automatic negative thoughts and adjust irrational beliefs. It is very practical and is indeed useful for short-term relief of emotional outbursts. However, in clinical practice, I often receive feedback: "I understand the principles, but I just can't suppress it when the anger arises." ”The other group is researchers of existentialism and positive psychology. They always believe that only working in the closed loop of "emotional triggering and regulation" is essentially a waste of time. To solve the problem of emotional irritability from the root, it is necessary to establish a higher emotional anchor point for people. The "higher emotion" here is the standard definition in general psychology, specifically referring to the sense of morality, reason, and beauty that are bound to people's social needs. It is completely different from the primary emotional experiences such as joy, anger, sadness, and fear that occur when physiological needs are met.

When I took on a case before, I met an e-commerce girl. The first thing she did when she opened her eyes every day was touch her mobile phone to check store ratings. If she dropped 0.1 points, she would keep her eyes open all night until dawn. At the beginning, I also taught her to keep an emotional diary and do muscle relaxation training, which was useful, but I only managed it for half a month at most, and the score still collapsed during the big sales period when the score fluctuated. Later, she signed up to serve as a volunteer teacher in a mountainous area for half a month. She came back and talked to me. She said that that day at the primary school in the mountain col, she watched the children squatting on the loess soil and using gravel to draw five-pointed stars. The wind blew her hair and her hair was covered with gray. Now she still keeps an eye on store operations every day, and she still gets headaches when her ratings fall, but she no longer suffers from insomnia - she now uses a portion of her profits every month to buy colored pens and exercise books for the elementary school. This idea of ​​"what I do can help others" is more effective than all the adjustment skills I taught her.

I’m not saying that those little tricks for emotional regulation are useless. If you’ve just been scolded by your boss and your hands are shaking with anger, it’s definitely safer to take three abdominal breaths first than to slam the door and resign on the spot. But these are essentially emergency patches. You can’t live by patching your whole life, right? Just like if your mobile phone runs out of memory every day, and you clear the background and delete photos every time, it will free up a few hundred megabytes of space at most. It is better to just add 1T of memory, which can hold everything. Advanced emotions are something to expand your emotional capacity.

Look at those people who are particularly stable at critical moments. It’s not that they don’t have emotions at all. It’s that they have something more important in their hearts that suppresses their emotions. During the wildfires in Chongqing last year, the young men born after 2000 riding motorcycles to deliver supplies to the mountains had holes burned in their trouser legs by sparks, and their arms and legs were injured after falling. No one stopped to cry. They asked, "The firefighters up there haven't eaten yet, I have to deliver them up quickly." I also read an interview with an old academician who was engaged in semiconductors. He said that when he was young, he was locked up in a bullpen without even a paper or pen, and he could still secretly derive formulas in his mind. The reason for surviving was simple: "I know that what I made is successful, and the country will not have to be choked by others. This grievance is nothing." ”

Many people have misunderstandings about emotional regulation. They think it is best to control emotions submissively and be always peaceful and happy. How can there be such a good thing? As long as people are alive, they will encounter bad things. The subway is late, the takeaway is leaked, colleagues blame others, and the boss makes trouble. Any of them can make people annoyed for a long time. The more you struggle with those emotions, the easier it is to get stuck and unable to get out.

In fact, there is really no need to force yourself to be an "emotionally stable adult". It is better to save more "advanced emotions" when you have time. There is no need to create a grand narrative at the beginning. If you want to strive for a lofty goal, just start with something very small: raising a kitten or puppy. When you come home every day and it jumps into your arms, you will have a sense of responsibility that is needed. ； Go to an art museum on the weekend to see a solo exhibition. Even if you can’t understand it, you can still feel the beauty that is separated from the trivial worldly matters by staring at a painting you like for ten minutes. ； You can even bring extra cups of coffee to your colleagues or feed intestines to the stray cats downstairs. These small things that seem to have nothing to do with "emotional regulation" can be your most stable emotional backing if you save enough of them.

To put it bluntly, if you have too many worthwhile things in your heart, those trivial and annoying things will naturally not have much room for them.