CHAPTER 9: Strategies to Manage Emotion and Memory

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.

Here are a few ways you can grow positive emotion:

Add smiles: intentionally smile in places you would not normally

Notice the good: pay attention to good things that happen. These can be very small and concrete things that you would not normally notice. For example, if you stop to have a soothing cup of tea, notice this and bring your attention to all the positive aspects of that. Or really pay attention to a nice flower as you are walking along. We don’t need to work on noticing the bad or the negative, by directing your focus to good things, you notice things that you otherwise would not have paid attention to.

Gratitudes: At the end of each day, recall things you are grateful for from that day. Like when you notice the good moments in life, the things you are grateful for can be small and concrete.

HEAL: Dr. Rick Hanson (from Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence) developed the acronym HEAL for noticing the good things. HEAL stands for:

Have a good experience Enrich it Absorb it Link positive and negative material

Here are the four steps in a bit more detail:

STEP 1 (H): Notice a positive event or experience and bring your full attention to it, letting yourself feel good.

STEP 2 (E): Stay with the positive experience for 10 to 20 seconds. Be open to how this feels and sense it in your body.

STEP 3 (A): Grow and absorb the experience by attending to it with all of your senses.

STEP 4 (L): Important note: the L is optional, I suggest you approach this step with some caution. The idea here is to keep the positive experience in the foreground and link to a negative experience in the background. If the negative experience, which is often very strong, takes you out of the positive experience, return to a focus on only the positive. The idea here is to be able to integrate the positive and negative, in effect to mix them together and link these very different experiences. By doing this, you take the ‘power’ away from the negative experience, so that it is not able to overwhelm you. When you can keep the positive and negative in your attention at the same time, you will have a broader perspective. This can be hard to do given how much negative experiences tend to grab our attention and narrow our focus.

Memory

Implicit and Explicit Memory

When talking about memories, we usually mean explicit memories. An explicit memory is when you can remember all the details of an experience including what happened, the sensations that you associate with this experience, and when it happened. In other words, an explicit memory is when the story of what happened is connected to the time stamp and the sensory information.

We also have memories that we are not consciously aware of. Another way to think about this is that three important elements of memory are not connected; a) the time stamp or when it happened, b) the story of what happened or chronology of events, and c) the sensory information are not connected. These are called implicit memories. Implicit memories are often from when we were younger than age 5 or from traumatic or overwhelming experiences. These memories can really impact us, even impacting how we feel, think, and act. But we don’t know when we are remembering this kind of memory as the details are separated from the sensory information and when it happened. We are often left with just the sensory information. For example, you may feel anxious and notice your heart pounding without knowing what caused this.

When learning to manage anxiety, you don’t need to think about which are explicit or implicit memories, you will likely not be able to put all these pieces of your history together and you really don’t need to. This information about memory is helpful because it shows you that there is not always a strong present moment logical reason for the anxiety to be there. You can spend a lot of time wondering why you are anxious and trying to use logic to talk yourself out of feeling anxious. This approach does not work that well because anxiety originates from brain systems that are not logical, they are interested in survival. Your anxiety may have been shaped by implicit experiences which will often feel like only sensory information that may connect to past experiences as much as present. I am providing you with this information to help challenge the idea that anxiety has a good reason to be there and that you need to figure out why it is present. Your anxiety may be shaped as much by your history, even history you are not able to remember, and you do not need to figure this out in order to start to manage your anxiety. You are better served to focus on your present experience of anxiety and respond to what is here right now.

Some aspects of your experience and history that are worth exploring in greater depth, perhaps in a therapeutic setting, are challenges within family relationships and traumatic experiences that you have had. This kind of inquiry is beyond the scope of this workbook but I want to let you know that these are factors that can add additional challenges to learning regulate your anxiety and responses to stress.

You can also use memories as a helpful intervention. The Calm Place practice is a good example of this.

Calm Place: In addition to self-compassion, part of developing a healthy relationship with yourself includes feeling calm and safe. Worry and anxiety leave your feeling unsafe. A practice that can help develop the ability to feel more calm with your own experience is to think about a time and a place when you felt really calm, comfortable, and safe. This might be a place you visited like a beach, or another natural setting, or perhaps your own home. As you think about this

place, close your eyes and consider in detail what you see. If you are not comfortable closing your eyes, let your gaze softly settle just in front of you. Imagine looking around and taking in all the details. Then turn your attention to what you can hear, noticing all the sounds that are unique to this place. Now consider what you can smell, turning your attention to all the smells that your notice when you are in this place. What about what you can taste, if that is something that you notice when you think of this place. Finally, consider what you feel and what you notice in your body as you revisit this place in your mind. Bring your full attention to where you notice the calm, comfortable, safe, and pleasant sensations in your body. When you are ready, open your eyes and return to this time and place and remember that you can return to your calm place whenever you like.

You may want to practice more of this kind of visualization where you go to a positive experience and recall it using all of the sensory information available. You may also want to draw a picture of your calm place to help your recall the details. For some people, especially if you have experienced trauma or other very difficult experiences, reflecting on memories can be overwhelming. Only use the memory strategy if it is comfortable for you.

Intense emotional experiences like anxiety hook your attention and you can remain stuck on that ‘negative channel’. It takes practice to notice and be mindful of intense emotions and learn to switch from a ‘negative channel’ to a more positive one like you did in the calm place practice. This chapter introduced you to being curious about your emotional experience, developing the capacity to mindfully observe your emotions and to intentionally tap into memories of feeling calm to help shift your experience when faced with anxiety. In the next chapter, we will start to pull together the three sections of the 3A Toolkit, Awareness, Assessment, and Action, so you can start to see the 3A Toolkit in action and get closer to managing your anxiety.

Awareness of Emotion & Memory

Here are some questions that will help you be aware of how emotion and memory shape your experience of anxiety:

Emotion

What information does this emotion provide? What can I do to experience more positive emotion?

Memory

What is another time when I felt like this? What is a positive memory I can recall to help redirect my attention away from the anxiety?

Summary

I hope that you have found this information in this section on relationships, emotion, and memory interesting and helpful. I want to remind you that changing personal habits and patterns is really hard and takes time. With this in mind, try to be kind to yourself and recognize that this kind of change is a process that unfolds over time and has ups and downs. Really look for the positive changes you make and recognize your effort and persistence. In the next section, Part Three: Planning Ahead, we will look at a few more things that will help keep up the progress you have made.