How to Harness your Emotions when Facing Adverse Situations
“When a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master.” — Spinoza
Living in a world full of demands and constant pressure, handling adverse situations effectively constitutes a vital factor for your well-being.
Current scientific research on the field of psychology, studies changes in emotionality following adverse experiences in daily life.
Human beings handle conflict in a variety of ways. Some of the factors influencing their response are personality, habits, and sociability. Apart from the initial act though, the key to finding the balance between our emotions and adversity lies in self-reflection.
Self-reflection is the process of diving deep into your behaviors, thoughts, emotions, motivations and determining the great, “Why?” behind them.
Self-reflection can be categorized into self-distancing and self-immersing, depending on the angle of view that we approach the situation.
Self-Distancing
Self-distancing often entails visualizing the event from a “fly on the wall” observer perspective and taking psychological distance from the situation. For example, by reflecting on the experience using third-person language. Adopting a self-distanced perspective promotes a “big picture” view, recognizing that life events are in flux and may not fit one’s expectations.
Accumulating evidence suggests that reflecting on adversity from such a perspective can facilitate constructive reasoning and effective regulation of negative emotions.
Experimental evidence also suggests long-term for emotion regulation not only immediately after adopting a self-distanced perspective, but also when recalling the same event again a week or even a month after.
Participants who recalled a single distressing event on the first day of the study and engaged in expressive writing exercises about this event (vs. a neutral topic) for the next three days showed more spontaneous self-distancing in their writing and simultaneously reported less negative emotionality, both immediately after the study and during a follow-up one month later.
Self-Immersing
When reflecting on past experiences people often adopt a self-immersed perspective, visualizing the event through their own eyes and immersing in the specific details and emotions they experienced. Following this pattern is similar to looking from a “narrow window”, having a smaller room for cognitive focus.
Self-immersed reflection is associated with narrower thinking, negative emotionality, distress, and depressive symptomatology.
Results
Self-distanced participants showed a change toward positive emotionality while maintaining the same level of negative emotions, whereas self-immersed participants did not show changes in positive or negative emotionality.
We also observed that self-distancing reached its maximum effect (“dosage”) for positive emotionality in the third week of the experiment.
Conclusion
The research found that people who reflected on everyday adversity from a self-distanced perspective experienced growth in their positive emotionality, while people who reflected on everyday adversity from a self-immersed perspective did not.
Importantly, self-distancing appears to lose its effectiveness in promoting positive personal change after 3 weeks of repeated exercise.
Personal Note
Having this knowledge in mind, the next time adversity and conflict start “knocking at your door” remember that the only way to harness your emotions and come out of this situation stronger, is to use a self-distanced reflection method. Take some space far from the situation and try to approach it with a clear mind.
It is not easy to distance ourselves from a situation that hurt us, it needs consistent training to achieve this state of mind and the learning curve may be tough. But know this. Once you’ve mastered self-reflection you are in total control of your emotions and ready to bring value and wisdom out of any adverse situation you face.
Conversation Note
Which self-reflection approach do you use when faced with conflict situations? Is it working out for you? I’d love to learn about your experiences.
Let me know in the comments!
Sources
- Self-distancing promotes positive emotional change after adversity: Evidence from a micro-longitudinal field experiment Anna Dorfman | Harrison Oakes1 | Henri C. Santos | Igor Grossmann.
- Aldwin, C. M., & Levenson, M. R. (2004). Posttraumatic growth: A developmental perspective. Psychological Inquiry.
- Blackie, L. E. R., Jayawickreme, E., Tsukayama, E., Forgeard, M. J. C., Roepke, A. M., & Fleeson, W. (2017). Posttraumatic growth as positive personality change: Developing a measure to assess within-person variability. Journal of Research in Personality.
- Funder, D. C., & Ozer, D. J. (2019). Evaluating effect size in psychological research: Sense and nonsense. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science.
- Gortner, E. M., Rude, S. S., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2006). Benefits of expressive writing in lowering rumination and depressive symptoms.
- Grossmann, I., Gerlach, T. M., & Denissen, J. J. (2016). Wise reasoning in the face of everyday life challenges. Social Psychological and Personality Science.
Writer Bio
My name is Georgio Ziozas, I come from sunny Greece, 25 years old.
I refer to myself as Knowledge Gangster. Maybe here lies the reason i used this name for my medium publication.
Knowledge Gangster pub focus: Brief, Credible & Simply Explained Research-based Knowledge.
Nothing fascinates me more than acquiring new knowledge, reading philosophy, using technology to make our world a better place, and watching Lord of the Rings.
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- Currently studying for Master Degree in Cyber Security & Business Analytics from, University of Peiraeus.
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