How to control your thoughts and emotions ft. David Foster Wallace
Regulating our emotions is a hard task. We face different people everyday — some pleasant and some infuriating. It seems like sometimes there are people out there who are going out of their way to deliberately make you angry.
Allowing these trivial, negative experiences to dictate the rest of your day is counter-intuitive, yet we consistently allow every small unpleasant encounter to affect us more than we’d like to admit.
How many times have you muttered under your own breath the incompetence and recklessness of the car that just cut you off and weaves through traffic, endangering everyone else?
How many times have you gotten slightly or unreasonably annoyed at a text message?
How many times have we become hotheaded when customer service refuses to acknowledge our suffering, and places us on hold for 30 minutes?
Let’s be honest, we’re not so angry at these specific trivial moments in our lives. There are countless emotions that we’ve suppressed — frustrations, sadness, anger, disappointment — which manifest themselves in moments throughout our lives where it is least deserving.
The people who actually need to hear your frustrations and true feelings are never the recipients of your anger.
Maybe you have a friend that annoys you with certain habits but you’ve never wanted to bring it up for the sake of keeping the friendship steady and clear of conflict. You find that the habit makes you feel disrespected but you’ll never say anything.
You go home that day and when your mother asks you for a favor, you find that you have a lower threshold of patience and you end up getting annoyed at her. You might even end up directing the anger that was pent up from your interactions with your friend to someone you deeply care about. An innocent bystander has been hurt because you failed to tackle the core problem.
While this specific situation might not happen to many people, I’m sure there are variations of these moments where we lose the mask we put on in front of everyone. Moments where we can’t keep our cool and make snide and sarcastic comments, low jabs, or simply yell and manifest destructive behavior.
How do we approach this problem? How can we access the situation and respond rather than react?
Analyze the emotion and ask yourself why you feel that way
When you feel angry, you show physiological symptoms. You may feel an increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure, and increased levels of adrenaline.
The first thing you have to realize is that you choose to become angry. You choose to feel certain emotions. You uphold the responsibility of maintaining your civility and sanity.
Let’s say someone says something that objectively you can define as offensive. You happen to be walking down the street and they just choose to say some mean words to you. You’ll process these words in your head and now you have the ability to choose.
- You can choose to allow some stranger to dictate how you perceive yourself.
- You can choose to feel offended and turn around and list out all the reasons why you are not what they just described you to be.
- You can choose to allow it to fill your head for the rest of the day, and allow these provocateurs to succeed in riling you up.
OR…
- You can keep walking, stop analyzing the thought, and go on with your day.
- You can look into their head and analyze the situation.
Why would this person say this to me? Do I, myself, believe this statement to be true? What does that person know about me? What would I gain from escalating the situation in any way?
What does this person want from me? Attention? Emotions? Conversation? Do I allow his words to characterize who I am as an individual?
Then you should walk away. Always know that you have the power to control your emotions and the more you harden your skin, the more confidence you will have in yourself and the less power anyone will have over you with their words.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never break me.
Look beyond yourself
David Foster Wallace wrote an essay, This Is Water, that attempts to answer these two questions:
- How do we keep from going through adult life unconsciously, comfortably entrenched in habit?
- How do we remove ourselves from the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion?
He tells us that we grow up all our lives with a lens that places us as the center of the universe:
Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down.
Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of.
The world as you experience it is there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
This subjective perspective of the world exacerbates the difficulty of thinking in the perspective of others. In a sense, everyone is thinking about themselves and how things look outward from their perspective.
He also touches on “learning how to think”, and how it will help you control your thoughts and emotions:
“Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
He goes on to construct a daily life of being an adult — filled with monotonous, boring, and miserable chores that we all must inevitably face. He talks about a long day at work, followed by chores and a traffic jam, all the while littered with annoying, petty, and frustrating experiences. In these little moments, however, we have the power to choose how and what we think.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in.
Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default setting is that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem, for all the world like everybody else is just in my way, and who the fuck are all these people in my way?
And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I’ve worked really hard all day and I’m starved and tired and I can’t even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.
We’ve all been at the peak of Mt. Frustration. Our thoughts race with lines similar or exactly like Mr. Wallace’s. We berate and belittle and curse everyone around us for the sake of our desires. Without the power to choose how and what we think, we exhibit our true nature of our self-centeredness and selfishness. Mr. Wallace offers a different way of viewing these situations:
The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations.
In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It’s not possible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to rush to the hospital, and he’s in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am — it is actually I who am in his way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is probably just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people actually have harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.
And so on.
He believes that if we learn and practice how to think and pay attention, we will not resort to deprecating thoughts and find it easier to seek compassion and feel peace.
It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things.
… You get to decide how you’re going to try to see it.
So the next time you feel yourself feeling negative emotions, shift your perspective and give others the benefit of the doubt. You have the power to choose what you want to think and how you’re going to see the world.
