Chapter 9: Strategies to Manage Emotion & Memory “There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.” — Carl Jung Emotion Emotions are a type of information processing that includes your mind, body, and relationships. Emotions orient you to yourself and your environment, as well as get you prepared to respond. Emotions are fairly complex as they are shaped by your history or past experience as well as your present experience. A feeling is the cognitive label we give to the mind and body experience of emotion. For our purpose here, consider that emotions are information. The emotions themselves are always valid and provide us with clues to self-understanding. In general terms, negative emotions drain our resources, narrow our focus, and tune us into threats and survival concerns. Positive emotions foster integration and regulation, broaden our perspective, and orient us to other people. Emotions involve both our brain and body. Most important is to mindfully notice what emotion is present. Through being aware of the emotion and being curious about it, you will create space to decide how to respond. When you are not aware of what emotion is present, you will be more likely to react without intention. This workbook is focused on the emotion of anxiety, but of course you will be experiencing many other emotions throughout your day and as you tackle your worry. Part of a strong foundation (e.g., see chapter 2) and a protective factor for anxiety is to grow positive emotion. You can do this at the same time as you are working on shrinking your worry. A negative emotion like worry will tend to take over and eclipse positive emotion. For this reason, it will be very helpful for you to pay attention to and create room for more positive emotion. I will provide a few practices that can help grow positive emotion in the next section. It is very common to want to avoid negative emotions because they are usually not very pleasant. This doesn’t work very well though, and can even help the negative emotions ‘stick’ around longer. Instead, try the following when you notice negative or challenging emotions: • Notice what is already there (e.g., “I feel sad/worried/unhappy….”) • Turn towards the emotion • Turn towards yourself with an act of kindness Growing positive emotion is especially important when you are struggling with stress, worry, and anxiety because you may not notice the good things as these are overshadowed by what you are worrying about. There are many ways to grow positive emotion, and there has been some really wonderful research in this area in recent years. If you are interested in learning more about this, an excellent website is hosted by the Greater Good Science Center from UC Berkeley (https://ggia.berkeley.edu ). You will find many helpful ideas here.
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