Stoic Wellbeing - Emotions: How They’re Made & How to Master Them

Episode Date: March 19, 2022

Note: I recorded this awhile ago. With everything happening in Ukraine, this information is more important than ever.  ***Where do these emotions come from? What are emotions? How can we cultivate healthy emotions that improve our own wellbeing, and thereby our positive impact on the world? That’s what I want to talk about today.  Here's a little taste...  Most people think emotions run their lives, but, in her popular Ted Talk, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, says that, “Emotions are not what we think they are...They are not hardwired brain reactions that are uncontrollable...emotions are guesses...Your brain is predicting. It's using past experience based on similar situations to try to make meaning.”When you’re confronted with a situation, your mind and body will try to make sense of it by reading your body’s automatic physical response, and running through past thoughts/feelings. This happens instantly and automatically to give you an initial understanding of the situation. The Stoics called this initial impression phantasia. They believed that your emotions are a result of value judgements you’re making about what’s happening, and it seems that they were right. As Epictetus said, “It’s not things that upset us but our judgments about things.” Visit sarahmikutel.com for full show notes.  Enjoy the episode!❤️  Hello! I'm your host, Sarah Mikutel. But the real question is, who are you? Where are you now and where do you want to be? Can I help you get there? Visit sarahmikutel.com to learn how we can work together to help you achieve more peace, happiness, and positive transformation in your life. Book your Enneagram typing session by going to sarahmikutel.com/typingsessionDo you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free Conversation Cheat Sheet with simple formulas you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you’re in a meeting or just talking with friends.Download it at sarahmikutel.com/blanknomore and start feeling more confident in your conversations today.

A lot of us say that we want more meaning in our lives to be part of something greater than ourselves, to feel more connected to other people in the universe. This begins with becoming more connected with who we are and more self-aware of what's unconsciously motivating us. Welcome to Stoic Wellbeing. I'm your host to Sarah Megatel, an American in England who uses stoicism and other techniques to help my coaching clients become more present, productive, and open-hearted. I am here to help you to visit Stoicwellbeing.com to learn more. At the beginning of World War I, Germany demanded that Belgium let them pass through to get to France. Belgium refused and Germany invaded and more than a million Belgians fled for their lives.

Many of them arriving where I live now in England. More than 100,000 Belgian refugees sailed into Fokston's Harbor. Many of them kept moving, thousands stayed throughout the war or settled permanently here. This week, another refugee arrived, a giant puppet of a nine-year-old little girl, a Syrian refugee named Amal, which means hope. More than 11 feet tall, she was created by the same company that crafted the animals for the play War Horse. Little Amal is making her way from the Syrian-Turkish border to England and traveling through eight countries in search of her mother and a safer life, and she's meant to represent all the displaced

children around the world. This is part of a traveling art festival called The Walk, and cities and towns along Little Amal's journey, including folks in welcomed Amal with songs and dance and other performances, and I was there at the harbor with tears in my eyes as I saw this larger-than-life little girl coming down the old rail station by the harbor. Because I'm not just seeing a giant carbon fiber puppet. I'm thinking about the real children who are walking the world on their own, who've been separated from their parents at borders, whose families have died in wars, and I'm thinking, about how it's hard enough to start over in an unfamiliar place when you have money and resources and a fallback plan. And I'm also thinking about the kindness and the spirit of the people standing and singing alongside me, clapping for Amal as she passes by us. I felt sadness, hope, joy, anger that children have to go through this, compassion, different waves of emotion, lifting and weighing on my heart. Where do these emotions come from? What are emotions. How can we cultivate healthy emotions that improve our own well-being and thereby our positive

impact on the world? That's what I want to talk about today. Mark Twain supposedly said, I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened, meaning he created a lot of his own suffering because of how he interpreted the events in his life. Mark Twain didn't actually say that, but it was attributed to him like all of the best quotes, So I've learned that I need to fact-check any quotes by Mark Twain, My Andaloo, Winston Churchill, because everything is attributed to them. So I'm fact-checking this quote that Mark Twain supposedly said and see that the concept actually goes back to Seneca and maybe even before then. So Seneca said there is nothing more wretched or foolish than premature fear. What madness it is to anticipate one's troubles.

He suffers more than is necessary, who suffers before it is necessary. For such a soul will never be at rest. In waiting for the future, it will lose the present blessings which it might enjoy. And that's in Seneca's letter 98. Most people think that emotions run their lives, but in her popular TED Talk, Dr. Lisa Feldman-Barritt says that emotions are not what we think they are. They are not hardwired brain reactions that are uncontrollable. emotions are guesses. Your brain is predicting it's using a past experience based on similar situations to try to make meaning. Unquote. So when you are confronted with a situation, your mind and body will try to make sense of it by reading your body's automatic physical response and running through your past thoughts and feelings. And this happens instantly and automatically to give you an initial understanding of the situation. The Sto called this initial impression, Fantasia, they believed that your emotions are a result of the value judgments that you're making about what is happening. And it seems that they were right. As Epictetus said, it's not things that upset us, but our judgments about these things. Let's say somebody calls on you during a meeting and you're not expecting this and you start blushing when all eyes are on you. The external event of somebody calling on you triggered an automatic bodily reaction. The stoics considered involuntary physiological responses like blushing to be pre-emotions, which come before full emotions or passions as the stoics referred to them.

These pre-passions show up in your body as internal physical sensations like butterflies in your stomach or as visible emotional reactions like crying. And these pre-passions are out of our control as opposed to the full-on passions that come on later, the ones that we can learn to men, So in the conference room with your cheeks burning as your colleagues are staring at you, you might automatically feel panic and embarrassment and think, stop blushing, stop blushing, stop blushing, and of course this resistance makes you blush harder. A feeling of humiliation might wash over you. And if you make the value judgment that you are actually humiliated, you might spiral into pathos and think, I hate speaking in meetings or people are judging me.

and you've been in the situation before. To quote Lisa again from a talk that I heard her give for coaches rising, your brain is using past experience to make meaning out of what is happening inside your body in relation to the world. So your brain is attempting to make meaning out of sensations to determine what actions need to be taken next. Scientists today call this interoception, your perception of what's happening inside your body regarding physical sensations, like hunger and also emotional sensations, like a shiver down your spine. But are you accurately interpreting what these sensations mean? Or do you need to increase your emotional vocabulary?

Lisa, who wrote how emotions are made, says that the words we know for emotion are like tools for our brains. The more words you know, the more emotions you can make and perceive in others. So erasing heart doesn't have to be anger. It can be curiosity. sweaty palms can be determination rather than anxiety. So if you want to expand your emotional vocab, you can download a free app that Yale has created called the Mood Meter app. We are born with a certain temperament, which we can see in Enneagram archetypes, but then our environment

and our experiences start shaping our history, and this starts at birth. Dr. Andrew Huberman, who is a professor of neurobiology at Stanford, says that when babies are hungry, they feel anxious and they feel agitated, they cry, they are responding to what's going on internally. Then external forces like adults come in and respond, and the babies start to look into the outside world and make predictions. They know that crying will relieve anxiety because people respond. And this continues into adulthood, we look to the outside world to make us feel better. In the neuroscience of change course I'm taking, Mandy Blake says that learning happens from the inside out and from the outside in, and it's an interactive process of sensing

and taking action in the world. That's a physical thing that we do with our bodies and involves our whole neurobiology. So earlier I mentioned in terraception, your sense of what's happening viscerally inside your body. Your body also makes sense of the world through exteroception, which is your way of perceiving the external world through your five senses. So taste, touch, here, smell, see, and pro preoception, which is our sense of knowing where our body parts are in space. So, for example, people can walk, clap their hands, touch their nose because of this body awareness. This is called pro preoception. So let's say that I'm walking down a really dark, sidewalk and I'm by myself. I might feel on guard. My immediate impression is based on my internal

sensations, my personal history, my external senses, my sense of where I am. If I think about what's in control in this situation, I might choose to walk in the road instead of the sidewalk because the road is lighter and I can see more of what's around me. And I assent to this feeling of caution because I should be alert in this situation. But I don't need to. panic that am in grave danger. Chris Fisher, author of the traditional Stoicism blog, says that how we deal with impressions is entirely up to us. We cannot control the impressions that press upon us. However, we are in complete control of our reactions to those impressions. What we assent to, what we agree with, creates our moral character and determines our psychological well-being.

So what is your character? Do you want to be the type of person? Do you want to be the type of who feels humiliated and vows to never speak in a meeting again? Or do you want to challenge your immediate reactions? The Stoics would say that we absolutely need to challenge our impressions because we are often wrong. So in that meeting room, when your heart jumps at being called on, the Stoics would encourage you to calm down and question your thoughts, to get curious, and to consider what is going on in factual language without any drama. Your cheeks are red, So what? Is this really a big deal? Is it in your control or not? Instead of fighting it, except that this is what's happening right now. Ground yourself in your seat. Slow, deep,

belly breaths. In the last episode, I talked about how using thought records can help you manage your mind. Mindfulness meditation will also help you regulate your emotions, but you need to make it a regular practice. Don't wait until you are in crisis to begin these different techniques. prepare yourself for hard times now. In the meditations, Marcus Aurelia says, The mind is the ruler of the soul. It should remain unstirred by agitations of the flesh, gentle and violent ones alike.

When they make their way into your thoughts through the sympathetic link between mind and body, don't try to resist the sensation. The sensation is natural. But don't let the mind start in with judgments, calling it good or bad. I mentioned pre-passions before that interoception. So when somebody really takes us off, that immediate flash of anger can be felt in our body, maybe blood rushes to our face, or fury starts churning in

your stomach and rises up to your chest. Stoic said these involuntary sensations are totally natural, no use in trying to fight them. Then reflect, don't react. There's a quote attributed to the Holocaust survivor of Victor Frankel, that Stoics today quote all the time. Between stimulus and response lies a space. In that space lie our freedom and power to choose a response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness. It's unclear who actually wrote that, but the quote became popular after the author Stephen Covey said it sounded like something Victor Frankel would say. Regardless, this is a very stoic idea and one that helped Frankl survive. life in a Nazi concentration camp. We don't have to accept the thoughts that pop into our mind. We don't

have to assent to them, as the Stoics would say. We can question our thoughts. We should question them. And that is the space. Something happens and we pause and give ourselves space before responding. Is this true? Is one question that we should often ask ourselves? If we don't allow some space for our initial impressions, then emotions like anger, revenge, and anxiety can just take off. You might have the impulse to tell off your boss or your partner or to completely withdraw from them. Instead of repressing or acting out your emotions, get curious about them. Try observing your thoughts neutrally, as if you're just listening to words on somebody else's podcast. We're acting like scientists here. Observing, experiencing, experimenting.

To quote Mandy again from her book, Your Body is Your Brain. As you become more aware of your sensations, you introduce the possibility of choosing your response. Training to increase your embodied self-awareness can help you align with a sense of purpose and meaning, make a bigger contribution, experience more satisfying connections with others,

find the courage and composure to face down challenges, and step into more powerful and authentic leadership. A very stoic idea indeed. Not all of our emotions are negative impressions that need to be challenged, of course. Stoic author John Sellers says that the Stoics also acknowledged positive emotions like affinity. He says, we are naturally predisposed to care for our close family relations as well as ourselves. And if we develop into well-rounded rational adults, we will extend those circles of care or concern to include our neighbors and ideally to include all of humankind. Little Amal, the 11-foot puppet, is traveling nearly 5,000 miles, embodying the message of

don't forget about us children. I'm thinking about all of the emotions I felt when I saw her pass by, looking into the crowd, staring at the sky, hearing the birds, and wandering her path with childlike wonder. When it comes to our emotions, I like to think that there's something larger going on than just our history and experience, a universal law that. It's a universal law that says, when we are at our best, when we are healthy and living in what the Stoics called aurete, which means our personal excellence, that when we see a child suffering, we help them, we call our elected officials, we don't change the channel. And the Stoics agreed, they said that we are guided by universal reason. To quote Marianne-Horowitz, who writes in the

Journal of the History of Ideas, the Stoics believed that the mind is born predisposed to certain ideas, which are not yet consciously held when we're born. But as we grow up and experience life, these ideas are evoked and developed through the stimulus of sense impressions and the development of reason. She goes on to say that Epictita says that even though we have these innate concepts in all of us, they get hidden by false opinions. So we get stuck in our personality patterns. We go on autopilot. We get distracted. But we can remove our blind. spots by becoming more self-aware and challenging our assumptions and judgments. This is how we find the truth, and it's also how we become happier, more well-adjusted people,

because we're not walking around with our blinders on believing the stories that we're telling ourselves. We are getting more in touch with reality and equanimity. The director of the traveling festival with puppet Amal explains the purpose of the event this way. It is because the attention of the world is elsewhere right now, that it is more important than ever to reignite the conversation about the refugee crisis and to change the narrative around it. Yes, refugees need food and blankets, but they also need dignity and a voice. The purpose of the walk, which is the name of the festival, is to highlight the potential of the refugee, not just their dire circumstances.

Little Amal is 3.5 meters tall, which is 11 feet, because we want the world to grow big enough to greet her. We want her to inspire us to think big and to act bigger. Yes, we have neuroscience to explain emotions, but we also have spirit and soul to help us feel into becoming better people. Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free conversation sheet sheet with simple formulas that you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you're in a meeting or just talking with friends. Download it at sarah micotel.com slash blink no more.