Emotions on Top of Emotions / Mild to Moderate Panic Attacks

There’s one state of mind that makes emotion regulation more difficult than it should be. This difficulty comes from the person’s reaction to certain emotions, when a feeling triggers an emotional reaction. For example, when an anxiety attack triggers fear, the fear locks the anxiety, and the only way to get rid of the anxiety is to turn off the fear first. One of the most difficult mental states to deal with is when anxiety triggers anxiety—which is not that unusual—the state in which it becomes extremely difficult to compose oneself. Oftentimes, this mental state is called the panic attack. If the intensity of the emotion is mild to moderate, then for taking control over it, it should be sufficient to simply lean back in a comfortable chair while imagining the situation that triggers your anxiety. You need to stay perfectly still in relation to the emotion, particularly during the very beginning of its appearance. It takes about two months of half an hour every day practice to develop a mental gap between the primary and secondary anxieties. Once you split the two anxieties, you’ll be able to turn both of them, always shutting down the secondary anxiety first. In fact, no matter what combination of emotions you’re working on, the secondary feeling needs to be resolved first.  

Locations of Feelings . . . Revisited

Several readers on different occasions asked me about a similar problem: They don’t feel the emotions described in Secret Techniques for Controlling Sadness, Anger, Fear, Anxiety, and Other Emotions in the places in which those emotions should occur according to the book. For example, one woman reports experiencing sadness in her throat instead of her chest. Even though these readers’ experiences differ from each other, the cause of their confusion is the same.

When you picture yourself in a situation from your past or take it from your imagination, your mental and emotional state shifts from the state of relative comfort to the one reflecting the chosen situation. Now, when you want to ruin the same situation again so you can notice the very beginning of the emotional shift, you absolutely must let go of that situation and ensure that your mental and emotional states return to the original state of comfort. In fact, the greater the feeling of comfort you can reproduce, the clearer will be the shift back to the emotional reaction that you chose to examine or shut down.

If you don’t let go of the emotion completely before you imagine it again, the sensations that comprise that emotion won’t become turned off. As a result, when you recall the situation again, you won’t feel it appearing in your chest. What you’ll feel is spilling of that emotion to other areas of your body, such as the throat.

I hope this explanation isn’t confusing.  

Feeling in the Head

A friend of mine asked me the other day how he can change what he “feels in his head.” To my surprise, his question wasn’t all that unusual. Another acquaintance asked me about a sensation of something being stuck in her neck. Someone else asked me what to do when a feeling is stuck in his shoulders.

If you observe your emotional responses to various situations, you’ll see (well, feel, actually) that no feeling ever appears in your head, neck, arms, shoulders, legs, or hips. We all experience emotions in our torsos. At the same time, some emotions cause secondary sensations.

For example, when we feel worried, our hands and voices can tremble; when we feel angry, our faces can turn red, and we can develop headaches, later on; or when we experience stress, we can feel tension in our upper backs and stiffness in our necks.

While stress is not a primary emotion but a reaction to an emotional irritant, it produces real somatic sensations of discomfort. It may take more questions and observations, but it’s highly likely that that my friend’s sensation in his head is a result of stress and/or suppressed anger.

Thoughts or Feelings?

Did you ever wonder which come first thoughts or feelings? Suppose you carefully thought about a job offer in a different state--or even different country. On one hand, you try to be objective about your decision, and you consider all your thoughts regarding pros and cons of taking the job that requires relocation. On the other hand, however, what makes you even consider taking that job? Whether the reason is money, or advancing your career, or change of scenery, or something--in fact, anything--else, if you dig deep enough, you will find an emotion that triggered your thinking about that particular topic. Does this mean that emotions lead and thoughts follow? Well, yes and no.

Let's consider the very beginning of the thought/emotion process. Before you start thinking about anything or even forming an emotional reaction to it, you see a multitude of objects and situations in your mind and in real life. Few of those objects and situations attract your attention, and even fewer attract your interest. But what is interest?

Imagine seeing a house, a car, a career, or anything else that you wish you had. A mere instant after you saw it either in reality or your imagination, you feel a tickling rush of joy in the center of your chest. You experience this joy because to your mind, the moment you wished to possess or achieve something, you've already accomplished it. After you experienced joy in relation to the object or situation, you realize that you want to possess or achieve that something in real world. Now the question that you're facing is whether or not you want it enough to actually do something about it or you'd rather save your time and energy for something else. If you decide to move on, then you'll have a feeling of lesser or greater disappointment, or anger, or another feeling that will stay with you for the rest of your life. If you choose to after that goal, then your state of mind will be somewhat different. On one hand, you'll have the feeling of satisfaction if you accomplish the goal that you'd set for yourself, similar to the one that you had experienced when you felt interest at the very beginning of this cycle. But on the other hand, your accomplishment will always look and feel different from how you imagined it would, and they will include a smaller or greater number of trade-offs.

So in a nutshell, your thoughts and emotions are interlocked, and they all always rest on your mental attachments. (If you want to know more about this process and how to regulate it, read the chapter on Goal Setting in my book Secret Techniques for Controlling Sadness, Anger, Fear, Anxiety, and Other Emotions.)    

Sources of Secret Techniques for Controlling Sadness, Anger, Fear, Anxiety, and Other Emotions

I want to point out that the techniques described in Secret Techniques for Controlling Sadness, Anger, Fear, Anxiety, and Other Emotions are not based on Buddhist sources. I suppose anybody who practices meditation from any philosophical or religious system can retrace the steps explained in the book, but the notion of emotions being part of regular organ function belongs to Taoists. While this relationship between organs and emotions is taught in most modern acupuncture schools that use Taoist philosophical approach that each emotion is generated by an associated organ, this concept is treated as a belief by modern-day mainstream practitioners, and few actually use it in their practices.  

Difference in Psychological and Buddhist Approaches

If you look up research on meditation, you’ll most likely come across the term “mindfulness.” On one hand, the term’s definition is quite clear, ”Mindfulness is a characteristic of mental states that emphasizes observing and attending to current experiences, including inner experiences, such as thoughts and emotions” (Hill & Updegraff, 2012). This definition is similar to what some meditation schools (particularly Buddhist) aim to accomplish. But then the researchers’ focus shift shifts toward something confusing to me, “Mindfulness, then, may also be helpful in improving emotion regulation by increasing awareness, and, more specifically, emotional awareness of subtle differences between emotional experiences in the present moment” (Hill & Updegraff, 2012). The problem with this approach is that once you shift your attention to your emotions, you instantly lose your mindfulness. While the researchers do emphasize the importance of paying attention only those emotions that you experience in the present moment, your emotions represent only a fraction of your experiences in a present moment. At the very least, your mind in order to be full should include at least three types of experiences: 1) your body’s movements, 2) everything you feel, see, and hear from the surrounding environment, 3) your thoughts and emotions. The researchers then discuss the effects of emotion labeling (which, for some reasons, they continue calling “mindfulness") on emotion regulation. They state, however, “it is well known that Buddhist meditation is thought to improve emotional awareness and control by learning to focus one’s attention on aspects of emotional responses,” which is simply false. I never heard of a Buddhist method that would set a goal “to improve emotional awareness.” But I’m not writing this to argue; I just want to point out that once you start to focus on your emotions, your mind latches on to it, making it increasingly difficult to move on to other things. It may seem beneficial at first, because you distance yourself from a troublesome emotion by analyzing it, but after that you’re stuck with that emotion not only on the emotional but also on the mental levels.

            Buddhist approaches vary depending on school of thought, but one of the most commonly used methods is mantra. I met monks and nuns from South Korea, India, Burma, Tibet, and Japan who use this type of meditation. Essentially, the method of mantra allows you to create an independent from your attachments (which are all those experiences that trigger an emotional or mental reaction from you) point and to solidify it by training to concentrate on that mantra 24/7. The details on how to use mantra can easily get overwhelming, but basically it allows you to observe all and any experiences coming and going through your mind without discrimination, that is, it helps you to train yourself not to pay more attention to your emotions than to the little dot on the floor that you’re staring at when you meditate.    

Reference:  

Hill, C., Updegraff, J. (2012). Mindfulness and its relationship to emotional regulation. Emotion,             12, 81–90.    

Emotions and Chemistry

I had an interesting conversation with a psychiatrist a few days ago. “You can do anything you want with emotions,” he said, “it won’t matter, because it all boils down to brain chemistry, and unless you take care of that chemical balance, certain emotions will persist.” On one hand, he’s right. When some hormone is secreted in deficient or excessive amounts, a person would experience certain changes in his or her emotional state. But on the other hand, if a person doesn’t experience one persistent emotion for a long time, it means that his or her emotional state naturally switches. And if it does, then the body and mind have mechanisms to regulate them and the chemistry of the brain.

For example, suppose you feel sad. Even if this feeling persists for a month, every day, it still can’t be the only feeling you’ve been having. Whether a telephone suddenly rang or a pot fell and startled you, or you felt very worried because you were running late for work, or you saw a magic trick that really surprised you, in any case your body and mind switched your emotions. I’m sure that chemistry was involved in all these emotional shifts, but obviously there are built-in mechanisms in our bodies to regulate that chemistry. From my experience, it’s amazing what your body can naturally do, the only thing is, it often takes some practice to learn how to use these mechanisms. But it’s well worth the effort, or so I think.

Of course, if a person can no longer switch his or her emotional state, it means that there's something wrong with the mechanisms that switch emotions. If this is the case, then that person needs professional help. The methods described in the book won't help, because they work through the mechanism that naturally switch emotions.