Emotions are hard. I bet it sometimes happens to you that you find yourself not wanting to have an emotion you are experiencing at the moment. Emotional calibration can help you with that.
Human emotions are attractor states that modulate our cognition. What I mean by that is that for example when you are angry you’re more likely to notice things that will make you angry. When you are happy you’re more likely to notice things that will make you happy. This kind of modulation is evolutionary, which means it proved useful in the past. And I think it’s still useful as ever, if not more.
Thus, I see it as one of the main goals of self-development, or spiritual path, to:
- learn to notice your emotional state
- learn to understand your emotional states
- find out in what ways your emotional states modulate your cognition and how it can be helpful
- learn to notice when your emotional state is not optimal for the situation you’re finding yourself in
- understand how emotional states transition from one to another (eg. why you feel the way you currently feel, what were the steps that lead from one emotional state to another)
- this will naturally lead to calibration of your emotions over time
What does it mean for emotions to be well calibrated?
- your emotions reflect the situation
- when you loose something/someone valuable to you, you feel sad
- when you gain something/someone valuable to you, you feel happy
- when someone is using/wasting your resources, or violating your boundaries in any other way, you feel angry
- (…)
- in effect, this means experiencing those emotions that are best serving for the current situation
A separate, but related and very important concept is to have actions aligned with your emotions.
- including (but not only) displaying your true emotions to others
- ie. your displayed emotions reflect your internal emotional state
- so you don’t feel like making jokes when something sad happened (very frequent social strategy)
- or you don’t feel angry when you don’t know something, but you feel confused instead (very important for learning)
- ie. your displayed emotions reflect your internal emotional state
- this is especially useful, because it helps you:
- accept your emotional state
- not to confuse yourself and others about your emotional state
- this will help you transition to other emotional state if it’s more beneficial for your situation
- often people will react more appropriately and will try to help you, if they understand you well
- generally, I find that being honest about my emotions (even, or maybe especially, negative ones) deepens my relationships with others
Find out for yourself
My goal is not to force you into feeling in a specific way, and you shouldn’t try to force yourself either. I want to invite you to observe your various emotional states and find out for yourself what states are the most beneficial for which situation. And the calibration, or healthy emotional regulation, will come naturally with better awareness and understanding.
How sadness can be helpful
I think everyone can imagine why positive emotions are helpful. But I’d like to give a few examples of how negative emotions can be, as well. I will explain it on this example why feeling sadness works for me the best when I lose something valuable:
- sadness modulates my brain into wanting to take a pause, a step back, and acknowledge the loss
- my brain will be more likely to recall how valuable the thing was for me
- and accept that it’s no longer with me, it’s no longer able to provide this value for me
- the sadness will make me reflect on why it happened, what I could have done differently, and what the loss means for the future
- as I progress through these steps of mourning, the sadness will gradually wane off and I will be more likely to think about the next steps – how to adapt to this change and move on
- all this is essential for my learning – to do better next time, and to adapt to the new situation – realize what I’m missing and what I can do to improve the situation
- if you dismiss the loss instead, you are not making it less likely that it will happen again in the future, probably the opposite
How anger can be helpful
Or an example how anger can be the most beneficial reaction to a situation when somebody violates your boundaries, or when you are stuck in a bad situation and you don’t see a way out.
Let’s say you are stuck for years in a job that you hate. It gives you stable income, but mostly it makes your days miserable. You are working on things that don’t make any sense and your boss doesn’t want to hear about it. You’ve patiently explored every option for making the job better, but everything failed. You’ve taken the time off to reconsider everything, but then you return to work and the first thing your boss does is to give you a new responsibility which makes even less sense than the one before. At that point, I argue the best emotional response is to get angry, say fuck that shit, and leave.
The other side of the same coin is that once your emotional state has served you well (you resigned from the job you hated) and as a result the situation changed, it’s best that your emotional state evolves further.
I know how important this is based on my own experience. In the past it was really hard for me to get angry. I was suppressing the anger inside me, which only made things worse, and when I finally got angry and got out of the situation, I couldn’t fully release the anger that was accumulated inside me and it went on impacting me long after it ceased to be useful.
On the other hand, when your emotions are well calibrated, you get angry when you need to take a strong action, but once it’s done, your anger naturally and quickly goes away and you can continue to live your life happily.
Navigate the world in a more skilful way
What’s even more important, by acknowledging and accepting the negative emotion you are making it accessible to your consciousness which opens the door for you to actually understand the reasons behind it. This understanding is essential for informing your future actions. This way, you’ll be able to learn to navigate the world in a more skilful way, leading to a life more in line with your values.