Mind These Emotional Habits if You Want to Live In Peace
Taking control of your emotional reactions
Habits aren’t just about staying consistent or becoming more disciplined. There are also emotional habits you have to wrestle with.
It’s called a schema. And it’s like a storage of feelings, thoughts, and reactions you develop as you experience things in life.
A schema is like an emotional habit.
Some habits are good and some are bad. Your emotional habits can be bad if they distort your view of what’s actually going on. Or if they make you overreact to things you shouldn’t overreact to, for example.
Like any other bad habit, a bad emotional habit can make your life a living hell.
Here’s why.
Tunnel vision
Your schema is like a foggy lens.
It distorts your perception of events. If you lose your job, your marriage is in ruins, and your finances are not looking good, you blame it on the world. But it could well be your schema patterns that are causing all this.
Your habit or schema prevents you from expanding your view of what’s actually happening.
Weird mental habits
Here are five distortions typical of schemas at work in your mind:
Selective perception
This is where you see things only one way and ignore any evidence that contradicts your views.
Over-generalization
This is where you think in “always” or “never”.
Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, calls it a permanent explanatory style.
It’s the way you explain things to yourself.
Mind reading
This is where you cook up the worst reasons when something happens.
If your friend is running late to meet you at the restaurant, you start thinking that she’s going to flake on you. And you even come up with reasons your friend may want to end the friendship.
Jumping to conclusions
You believe your worst thoughts even though there’s no evidence to prove it.
For example, there’s a schema called social exclusion where you believe you don’t belong. So, if you go to a party, your thought is already, “No one here is going to talk to me and I don’t belong here.”
Exaggeration
You catastrophize a tiny fact.
Thoughts get fogged with emotion
Say you have a thought about something that happened like you failed a test.
It’s not the thought. It’s the emotional association you develop from the statement. You season your thoughts with emotions. So, your thought of, “I failed a test” turns into a downward spiral of “I fail” and then “I fail at everything.”
Seligman calls it a pervasive explanatory style.
The schema storage unit
The trigger for a schema attack (emotional overreaction) is the amygdala.
It’s the brain’s storage center for your negative emotional memories. And guess what? The amygdala prefers a specific way to respond, and it’s whatever habit it learned through repetition.
So when you react in certain ways, you’re creating that emotional habit to react in the same way.
You become different versions of yourself
There’s a notion in Buddhist psychology that says that whatever mental state dominates your mind at a given moment will shape how you perceive and react to whatever is going on.
So, as your mental states shift, so do your perceptions and reactions. A schema is like a mini-self. It has a group of feelings, thoughts, memories, and propensities to act that define your version of reality at that specific moment.
So, you’re a different person with each schema you carry.
So, what to do?
- Learn the different schemas, patterns, and triggers (I’ll write an article on this later).
- Use a journal to become aware of your current emotional habits and how they play out in your life. You can’t fix something you don’t even know exists.
- Practice mindfulness.
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