In Tomorrowmind, Dr. Rosen Kellerman & Dr. Martin Seligman tell us:
“Two of the most important emotional regulation skills are slowing down and cognitive reappraisal.”
Slowing Down:
In The Willpower Instinct, Dr. Kelly McGongial tells us:
“You won’t find many quick fixes in this book, but there is one way to immediately boost willpower: Slow your breathing down to four to six breaths per minute… Slowing the breath down activates the prefrontal cortex and increases heart rate variability, which helps shift the brain and body from a state of stress to self-control mode.”
Cognitive Reappraisal:
Revaluate or reframe the situation. We can do this with a sentence starter from real-time resilience. A better way of seeing this is…
In Iconoclast, Gregory Burns tells us:
“While it is impossible to eliminate uncertainty in any competitive environment, it is still possible to keep the amygdala in check through fairly simple psychological approaches. The amygdala has an input and an output stage. The lateral amygdala serves as the input stage and makes the associations between environmental cues and unpleasant events. But it is the central part of the amygdala that is primarily responsible for activating the stress response. Although a conditioned fear may not ever go away, the output, or expression of this fear, can be inhibited. One of the most effective strategies for regulating the expression of fear is through a technique called cognitive reappraisal. This simply means reinterpreting emotional information in such a way that the emotional component is diminished… There is growing neurobiological evidence that when people reappraise emotional circumstances, the prefrontal cortex inhibits the amygdala. A recent fMRI study found that when people successfully reappraised emotional scenes, meaning they replaced a negative reaction with a positive one, activity in the prefrontal cortex increased, in an amount that correlated with the decrease in the amygdala.“
I do this all the time. You can use what psychologists call a sentence starter. “A better way of seeing this is…” you can use a one-word reappraisal like Jocko Willink, such as “Good…”
My wife was diagnosed with cancer. A better way of seeing this is its early stage, and chemo is likely to wipe it out entirely.
When a car cuts me off in traffic or I receive negative criticism, it is “Good…” because it allows me to practice my philosophy on my way to becoming immune to obstacles.
