Emotional Reasoning, Denying & Overlearning

Amigos and amigas...

No snow in my part of the UK yet. ❄️⛷️ (Lol "in my part" as if I own the country).

Anyway...

The big 3 newsletter is here!

• 1 mental health tip
• 1 social skills tip
• 1 personal reflection

Let's begin with this week's mental health tip...

1.) Emotional reasoning

2 weeks ago I went on a walk through my local woods because I wanted to refresh my mind after being stuck indoors all day.

I was feeling low and I hoped going on a walk would help.

But as I entered the woods and began walking along the muddy path, I felt worse and worse with each step.

The sounds of the forest that usually bring me instant peace; the sounds of squirrels cracking their nuts and the birds chirping above me all orchestrated by the swaying of the leaves in the wind went by completely unnoticed because I was too caught up with the out of tune orchestra of negativity playing inside my head.

The walk clearly wasn't helping.

I wanted to feel better but for some reason I just couldn't.

So as I continued walking amongst the trees, my head and shoulders now slumped downwards and my feet wobbling aimlessly along, I decided to stop walking and begin debating whether I should just abandon the walk and go back home.

So as I stood there, halfway through the forest, not a person in sight, feeling utterly defeated, drained and despondent and as if my life has always been dull and depressing, the sounds of nature eerily came to a halt as if everything in the world was waiting in suspense for my decision.

But as I looked up at the trees around me, the trees I usually love to stand and look at in awe, I noticed they all looked grey.

In fact, everything around me looked grey.

Nothing vibrated with the usual colourful greens and browns of nature.

So now feeling even worse than I felt when I left my house to go on the walk, I looked down at my feet to see my muddy trainers, sighed and I then made the decision to walk back home.

But as I turned around to start walking back, the negative orchestra in my mind came to an abrupt halt.

The emotional and out of tune instruments of depression, sadness and self-loathing suddenly stopped. And everything became clear to me within a matter of seconds.

As I turned away from the direction I was walking in to start walking back home, it was as if my mind had ended the old playlist of gloomy thoughts and I was able to come up for air in the gap of silence between the old playlist and the playlist that was about to play next.

In fact, it was as if I had chosen what playlist to play next. A playlist of understanding.

So I began to laugh as I realised: how I felt wasn't based on facts. Instead, I was choosing to feed an emotional hallucination with my thoughts.

Everything around me appeared grey and depressing because that's how I felt inside.

The trees were the same, the wildlife was the same, the route was the same but I was... different. I had chosen my emotional state and unconsciously projected it onto the world. Fuelling how I felt.

So feeling relieved and equipped with this new understanding, and as if the bright colours were starting to return around me, I turned back around, continued my walk further into the forest and laughed as I realised this would be a great topic to explore in a newsletter one day.

Distillation...

Before you think I'm a psychiatric ward patient who's escaped the mental hospital and is now on the loose in a forest somewhere in the UK, what my brain was doing on that walk was something called emotional reasoning.

Emotional reasoning is when your brain convinces you that your emotions are facts.

In a sentence it sounds like this: "I feel it therefore it must be true."

For example:

• "I feel jealous which means my partner is definitely cheating on me."
• "If I feel offended by what someone else has said then he must have wronged me."
• "I feel depressed so that means everything is hopeless."
• *Concluding you feel fat and ugly even though you have a healthy body weight.
• *Deciding that because you feel lonely, that means no one loves you or wants to hang around with you.

When your brain is emotionally reasoning, it believes what you feel is the only concrete evidence for your beliefs and it rejects all counter evidence.

In fact, it doesn't even know the counter evidence exists.

Emotional reasoning also plays a big role in depression, anxiety and procrastination.

For example:

• If you feel anxious you conclude whatever is making you feel anxious is too dangerous to face.
• If you feel depressed you convince yourself life is just passing you by and has always been this dull and lifeless.
• If you're procrastinating you decide the task ahead is too overwhelming to face.

You can tell you're in the grips of emotional reasoning if...

• You are dismissing facts or evidence because it contradicts what you are feeling and feel that you’re correct (even though others don’t agree).
• You are making conclusions based on a feeling.
• Your feelings strongly impact your view of a situation and cause conflict or distress.

But if emotional reasoning is clearly unhelpful, why does your brain get you to do it?

Well...

Because you've evolved from humans who were rewarded for making lightning fast emotional decisions.

For our ancestors, believing their emotions were factual, such as anxiety in response to a strange noise in a bush, would've been the difference between life or death.

So from our brain's perspective, it's better to be cautious than dead.

The second reason why your brain engages in emotional reasoning is because of context dependent memory.

This is when the context you're in determines what memories your brain has access to.

Here's an example to illustrate how it works:

• If you try to remember what your first school was like whilst sat at home, you might remember a few things.
• But if I took you to the school's campus, you'd suddenly have access to a lot more memories you didn't have access to before. That's because you're now in the context of that memory (being at the school).

Your brain does the same when you're in a bad mood; it sparks your memory of other times you were in a similar mood giving you the impression life has always felt that way.

For example:

• Feeling defeated because you failed something suddenly reminds you of all the other times you messed up (making you conclude that you're a failure).
• Feeling depressed clouds your memory so you only think about the past in a negative way (making it hard to remember a time when things were more positive).

So, in a nutshell...

The worse your mood, the more you'll automatically remember negative memories.

The better your mood, the more you'll automatically remember positive memories.

The bottom line...

To challenge your brain's context dependent memory and emotional reasoning, you need to...

1.) Realise that when you feel low and your brain is feeding you with negative memories, your life hasn't always been this way and it won't always be this way. You just feel this way right now because that's your current mood.

2.) Apply the ICE method.

• Identify = the thought and the feeling.
• Call =  it what it is – a cognitive distortion or emotional reasoning.  
• Explore = the evidence that supports the thought and feeling and the evidence that contradicts the thought and feeling. Check-in with someone else and get their feedback.

The final part (explore) is the most crucial because this is what will enable you to gain distance from the emotional reasoning and challenge it with counter evidence.

But because emotions are powerful, you're likely to forget to do this in the heat of the moment when they arise.

So to help you, I'd recommend writing the following questions down on a piece of paper and keeping them in your back pocket at all times...

• Is this thought realistic?
• Am I basing my thoughts on facts or on feelings?
• What is the evidence for this thought?
• Could I be misinterpreting the evidence?
• Am I viewing a complicated situation as black and white?
• Am I having this thought out of habit, or do facts support it?

Use them as ammunition the next time you feel overwhelmed with a particular emotion.

Now let's cover this week's social skills tip...

2.) Denying, taking over, swallowing up and making unreal

Imagine your friend's girlfriend has just broken up with him.

And each time you go to see him he's sad and despondent.

Often he declines your invitations to catch up or hang out, so after a while you start to reason...

• "They weren't suited for each other anyway. He should really be over this by now. Why doesn't he focus on making himself more cheerful?"

So after a while, as he continues to decline your invitations to meet up, you fall out of connection and become like strangers to each other.

Then, after some months, you assume he's doing alright and probably has a new girlfriend.

From Irish-British philosopher Iris Murdoch's perspective, the above exemplifies the dangers of 'taking over', 'swallowing up', 'denying' and 'taking over' other people.

For example:

• By reasoning "they weren't suited for each other anyway" you're 'denying' and 'making unreal' his reality.
• You then assumed how your friend should be feeling and you put the blame on him for not getting better (taking over).
• You then 'swallowed' him up by making his reality fit your needs due to impatience (believing he was unreasonable and self-indulgent in his grief).
• Then you feel guilty so you assumed he was happy in his new life without you and you don't need to think of him anymore.

Although this is a very specific example, and of course sometimes relationships end for good reasons, what the above demonstrates is our natural desire as humans to conquer other people's realities and problems instead of respecting other people's realities as different.

The opposite of doing this, as Murdoch highlights, is practicing something called virtuous attention.

Doing so rewards us with ‘the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,’ as Murdoch puts it.

So in the same way as your brain engages in emotional reasoning to convince yourself how you feel is how reality actually is, catch yourself the next time you leap onto someone's problems and interpret their situation in a way that suits your reality. And instead, just let it be. No matter what that reality might mean to you or the other person.

Why?

Because by resisting the urge to conquer other people's realities, you'll not only save yourself an incredible amount of time and energy but you'll gift people the responsibility and space to solve their own problems whilst having you there as support.

Better to be a supporter than a constant fireman to other people's problems.

As a rule of thumb stick to this principle; people know themselves the best.

"Sacrificing a relaxing evening with a film to call your friend and ask him how he’s doing is one thing. Attending to him in such a way as to make room for his grief, his neediness, his loneliness, is another. We are very quick these days to talk about relationships as toxic, of friends and relations as energy vampires. And, of course, attending to people in difficulties can be draining and sometimes more than we can manage. But a person who is truly understanding is willing to go to great lengths. That person is willing to be affected by and feel for another." - Eva-Maria Düringer

Now let's finalise with this week's personal realisation...

3.) Overlearning

I read a lot.

Around 1/2 books per week.

And sometimes I fall into the "productivity reading mindset" of believing the more books I read the better.

But recently I've been feeling a strange anxiety with each book I finish, and I've realised that anxiety has stemmed from a lack of understanding and learning overwhelm.

My learning anxiety and overwhelm arouse because I wasn't digesting the books I was reading, nor was I dedicating enough time to thinking about what I'd learned so it sinks into a level of understanding rather than just knowing.

The analogy I like to use for understanding vs knowing is fluency when learning a language.

You become more fluent in a language when you can use the same words, tenses and phrases but in different contexts. And its the same with understanding.

To "know" something is to just regurgitate it in the same way you heard it.

To "understand" something is to repurpose that knowledge across multiple different contexts so that your "knowledge" becomes "wisdom".

And you'll be able to understand things a lot better if you stop rushing to learn more and instead give yourself time to digest what you already know.

2 weeks ago I tweeted this...

"Overlearning is procrastination from thinking.

You're afraid to unplug and let your mind think for itself so you convince yourself you need to "learn more" and bury your mind in more knowledge.

But your brain needs to digest what it's absorbed.

Just give it space."

Thanks for reading,

Until next week!

Lew

Request for feedback: would love to hear from you guys about how you're finding this newsletter. Does the structure of 3 things work for you? Or is it a bit too hard to context switch? (Feel free to respond to this email, it would be greatly appreciated). I'm asking because I'm wondering if writing about 1 topic for the same length each week would be a better option. Looking forward to hearing your feedback.  

P.s. Weather has been grey. Standard. New life hack: when you're feeling down go cook a colourful nutritious meal. Plus I'm going to London tomorrow to stay with a friend and spend the next 2 days sitting in cafes and talking about life. What are your plans for the rest of the week?

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