Chapter 9
How Your Brain Works
How Can I Actually Start Doing Better? Try Me Power Conditioning
Each of us can choose to take responsibility for our wellbeing and performance, and purposefully work toward being at our best.
If we think in terms of a scale, at one end we could refuse to try to be at our best. This means that you are passive and let the VUCA world control you and what you learn to become good at. This can result in people getting really good at lots of unhelpful things. I call this end of the scale “VUCA World Conditioning.” If you want to lose the Learning War, refusing to try to be at your best will guarantee it!
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Figure 9.1: The Best Doing continuum.
At the opposite end of the scale, we could purposefully choose to work toward being at our best. It turns out that choosing to be at your best gives you a much better chance not only of fulfilling your potential but also of being happy.
I call deliberately choosing to do this “Me Power Conditioning.” Learning how to do this is at the heart of becoming a Habit Mechanic.
To help you do more Me Power Conditioning, I want to help you understand more about how you think. We pay attention to things by thinking about them, and this leads to learning. In other words, attention drives learning.
Thinking about Your Thinking
First, let’s take a few moments to consider how we think.
Thinking Exercise
Please take a moment now to complete this simple task, which will help you understand more about how you think.
Imagine you are wearing a pair of headphones (place your hands on your ears if that is helpful). Describe them to yourself. Are they large or small (e.g., earbuds or large noise-cancelling headphones)? What color are they? What song is playing?
Now, notice how you are talking to yourself inside your own head. If you don’t think you are talking to yourself, notice how you are saying to yourself: “I’m not talking to myself; I’m not crazy.”
The aim of this exercise is to highlight that we are always thinking. Recognizing that fact is an important part of the Me Power Conditioning process. Our brain is always on: it’s designed to keep paying attention.
However, our attention span is naturally short—and it’s becoming shorter because of how we use it in the modern world. We can think of our brains as “frog brains” that jump from one thing to another.
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Figure 9.2: The attention economy is shortening our attention span and making it more difficult to focus.
Our brains are designed to pay attention to things that bring us short-term gratification (pleasure). This can stop us achieving long-term objectives that would bring truly great satisfaction and fulfillment (personal growth).
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Figure 9.3: Even with the best intentions to get things done, it is easier than ever to get sidetracked.
Remember, the more we think and do unhelpful things, the better we become at them.
These unhelpful behaviors (thoughts and actions) also make us less efficient and effective. For example, it feels easier than ever to spend 10 minutes doing a task that we could do in five minutes because we become easily distracted by our smartphones or emails. It also feels easier than ever to waste time beating ourselves up.
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Figure 9.4: It is easy to waste a lot of time each day doing and thinking unhelpful things.
By the end of the day, we find we’ve lost 30 minutes. And by the end of the week, we are three hours down. We will never get this time back. We will probably have to stay at work later, spend less time with our loved ones, and beat ourselves up even more as a result. We find ourselves trapped in a negative cycle. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can all strike a better balance between work and home life by learning how to do more Me Power Conditioning, so we build more helpful habits.
How Do You Use Your Day?
All of us have just 24 hours in any single day. We can be doing (and thinking) either things that are helping us achieve our health, happiness, and performance goals, or things that are unhelpful and stopping us from achieving them. Think of it like a barcode (see Figure 9.5): The white lines represent helpful thoughts and actions (e.g., sleeping properly, doing focused work, speaking to yourself in a positive way, practicing your stress management skills). The black lines represent when you are doing and thinking things that are unhelpful for your health, happiness, and performance (e.g., beating yourself up, eating the wrong foods, procrastinating, staying up too late). To be at our best more often, we need to get better at recognizing our unhelpful behaviors and removing one unhelpful black line at a time.
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Figure 9.5: I will show you how to identify your black lines and eradicate them one at a time.
“Helpful versus Unhelpful”—NOT “Positive versus Negative”
It is important to say that helpful thinking is NOT necessarily the same as positive thinking, and unhelpful thinking is NOT necessarily the same as negative thinking. For example, receiving negative feedback about something you are trying to improve can be really helpful (e.g., if delivered in the right way, it will help you improve). Eating a donut every morning for breakfast (which if you like them will be a VERY positive experience) can be really unhelpful (e.g., it might make it more difficult to achieve your weight loss or healthy eating goals).
But why is it so easy to think and do unhelpful things? To understand this, we need to consider how our brains work.
I am going to show you how your brain works using three different but interconnected models. They range from simple to complex.
1. Simple—Lighthouse Brain
2. Intermediate—APE Brain vs. HAC Brain
3. Complex—Emotional Regulation
I created the insights I am about to share to make it as easy as possible to understand how we can all begin to spend more time doing and thinking more helpful things, by building more helpful habits.
Chapter 10
The Lighthouse Brain
We might know what we want to do or achieve, but accomplishing it is a different story. To help you understand why, I want to tell you a story about how your brain works. The concepts in this will be the basis for everything else that follows in this book. They will provide a solid foundation so you can understand exactly how you, or you and your team, can fulfill your potential. I’ve created this story to make complex psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral science easy to understand. I will provide more details about the science later.
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Figure 10.1: The Lighthouse Brain.
First, imagine you have a lighthouse in your brain. Two characters live there. The first is HUE. This stands for Horribly Unhelpful Emotions. The second is Willomenia Power, or Will Power for short. Most importantly, Will Power is HUE’s guide and mentor.
HUE
HUE works in the lighthouse’s control room. Its first instinct is to search for threats. Imagine HUE using a beam of light emitted from the lighthouse to mindlessly scan your thoughts, your feelings, and the environment around you. It scans for past mistakes or regrets. It projects worst-case scenarios about what might happen in the future. And it searches for any immediate problems.
HUE’s second instinct is to find easy, new, and exciting things that make it feel good. HUE loves doing things and having experiences that give it short-term gratification.
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Figure 10.2: Meet your Horribly Unhelpful Emotions (HUE).
Will Power
There is a training room in the lighthouse. Will Power likes to learn about how to help you fulfill your potential and spends most of its time in there, studying and learning. When HUE notices a problem, or a short-term gratification opportunity, it sometimes calls Will Power for help. When everything in your brain is working properly, Will Power guides HUE to solve the problem or manage unhelpful impulses.
This makes it easier for HUE to deal with similar problems if they occur again.
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Figure 10.3: Meet Willomenia Power, or Will Power, HUE’s guide and mentor.
The Will Power Mentoring process looks something like this:
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Figure 10.4: A simple overview of how Will Power and HUE can work together successfully.
When Will Power can do its job properly, your HUE will be calmer, and it should be easier for you to:
• build good diet, exercise, and sleep habits;
• successfully manage stress;
• spend less time thinking unhelpful thoughts;
• build and maintain robust levels of confidence;
• be focused, productive, creative, and good at solving problems;
• perform well under pressure;
• be a better leader; and
• be a better team member.
“Calmer HUE, better you.”
But, as I have already shown, the modern world presents many new challenges that can overwhelm us.
• We can find it hard to switch off, which can negatively affect sleep, rest, and recovery.
• Social media leads us to compare our lives to others’, and we can beat ourselves up too much.
• We are tempted to eat bad food, buy things we don’t need, and spend money we don’t have.
• We become distracted, so a 10-minute job takes 20 minutes. Over a week, this accumulates into several wasted hours.
These types of challenges result in an unhelpful imbalance between HUE and Will Power. HUE can become overactivated, and Will Power can quickly get overwhelmed and exhausted. This makes it very difficult to be healthy, happy, and at your best.
If you want to win the Learning War, be your best, and help others do the same, your first job is to get HUE and Will Power working together efficiently and effectively, creating more balance between these two powerful assets.
To help you do this, let’s dig deeper into the inner workings of your brain.
Test?
If it is helpful, write down what HUE stands for to test your memory!
Chapter 11
What Actually Happens inside My Brain?
Obviously, there isn’t really a lighthouse in your brain! I created this story to make some very complex processes easy to understand. Let me explain in more detail what is going on.
HUE
HUE operates the limbic regions of the brain. I call these areas the APE (Alive, Perceived, and Energy) Brain. This was partly inspired by neuroscientist Paul MacLean’s seminal “triune brain” metaphor, and also the fact that Homo sapiens (humans) are Great Apes. The APE Brain makes us prioritize survival.
Note: I sometimes use the terms “APE Brain” and “HUE” interchangeably.
Will Power
Will Power operates the prefrontal cortex, or the HAC (Helpful Attention Control) Brain (pronounced hack brain). We can use the HAC Brain to manage the APE Brain and build better habits.
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Figure 11.1: A cartoon drawing of the human brain to show the broad regions where the APE and HAC Brains are located in my model.
Your APE Brain Prioritizes Saving Energy, Making Change Difficult
To understand more about the APE Brain, please read aloud the following passage.
To make sense of words it deosn’t mttaer in what order the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny ipmoratnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pclae.
Even though the letters are mixed up, you can still understand the meaning. This is because most of our thoughts and actions (behaviors) are mindless. We mainly guess and predict. In fact, science shows that at least 98 percent of our behavior is unconscious or semi-unconscious, meaning it is habit.
You have the equivalent of over one trillion microscopic biological moving parts in your brain that mindlessly drive most of what you do and think.
So you did not need to read the passage consciously, taking the time to process each individual letter in each word. Your brain reads each word as a picture, meaning that even if some of the letters are not in the correct place, the picture still makes sense.
Because habits make thinking and doing things more energy efficient, we have evolved to run on them. This means we do not think about most of the things we do.
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Figure 11.2: Examples of everyday things you do that are mainly habit.
Our habits dominate what we do and how we think. Our experience of the world is what we are in the habit of paying attention to. For example, if we only pay attention to our failures in life and the setbacks we’ve experienced, that becomes our reality. Equally, if we only pay attention to how fantastic we think we are, and how nothing is ever our fault, that becomes our reality.
Our family, friends, colleagues, teams, and organizations all run on habits. The most dominant habits are those they practice most, because of the process I explained earlier known as neuroplasticity.
Some of our habits are helpful for us being at our best, and some are unhelpful.
We Are Not Designed to Be Healthy, Happy, and at Our Best
Homo sapiens have been around for about 300,000 years. Our primal instincts, driven by our APE Brain, mean we are not designed to be happy and at our best in the context of our 21st century lives.
Alive
Instead, we are designed to survive. To stay Alive, we prioritize all the things that are essential for doing that. Although for most people things like food, shelter, and warmth are a given in the modern world, notice how quickly the supermarket shelves emptied during the COVID-19 pandemic.
We are also instinctively concerned about our physical safety. Notice your reaction to a loud bang or a stranger getting too close to you, or your heightened sensitivity to shadows in the dark after watching a horror movie.
Perceived
Closely connected to staying alive is our concern about how we are Perceived by other people who are important in our lives—think social status, peer pressure, and how social media is used. Communication, cooperation, and alliances with other humans support our survival. Humans are not the biggest or strongest animal on the planet, but they are the best at working intelligently in teams. Teamwork has been the foundation of human survival and success (i.e., historically, if you got kicked out of the team or the tribe, your survival chances were significantly reduced, as were your chances of passing on your genes). Our success in life can be closely connected to how we are viewed by people who are important in our lives. So, we often worry too much about what others think.
Energy
Finally, as food—our main source of energy—has not always been readily available (i.e., we used to be hunters and gatherers, and not supermarket shoppers), we make every effort to conserve Energy. This is why we sometimes prefer to sit and watch TV instead of exercising, and we avoid work that is mentally challenging. Thinking hard burns a lot of energy! For example, it will take less mental energy to perform a well-practiced task than it will to learn a new skill or perform a difficult task.
We can even see this in our food preferences. Your brain knows that it is more energy efficient to eat a donut than an apple. It takes just as much energy to eat both, but there are more calories in the donut.
Survival Habits
The collective APE result is what I call “survival habits.” Here are some examples:
• Worrying too much
• Being unfairly self-critical or beating yourself up
• Giving in to temptation
• Easily getting distracted
• Procrastinating
• Giving up easily
• Jumping to conclusions
• Easily becoming stressed
These habits operate like any other: the more you practice, the better you get. For example, if you want to get better at worrying, all you have to do is practice worrying a lot and you will become a world champion worrier. This is because the more you practice it, the more you grow and strengthen the neurons in your brain that are connected to worrying.
In the Learning War, these types of habits are becoming increasingly problematic because of the challenges we face in the VUCA world. These unhelpful habits mean we can beat ourselves up too much or procrastinate on things that we really do need to get done.
In fact, these habits are often the biggest waste of personal resources in any 24-hour period.
And if they are the biggest waste of resources for an individual, they are also the biggest waste of resources for a team, business, or family unit.
Think back to the black and white barcode (Chapter 9, Figure 9.5). The white lines represent helpful habits and the black lines represent unhelpful habits (the barriers to your happiness and success).
Habits underpin everything we do:
• How we think and feel
• What we eat
• How much we exercise
• How well we sleep
• How we manage stress
• Our confidence levels
• How productive we are
• Our creativity and problem-solving abilities
• Our performance under pressure
• Our performance as a leader
• Our performance as a team member
• Our performance as a parent
If we want to be at our best more often, individually and collectively, we need to learn how to build more new helpful habits.
The first step to building new habits is called “intelligent Self-Watching.” The Daily TEA Plan and the Daily 3:1 Reflection (learn more by Working with the Confidence Coach) both require you to do intelligent Self-Watching. Let’s do some more now.
Test?
If it is helpful, write down what APE and HAC stand for to test your memory!
Chapter 12
How to Start Me Power Conditioning
To start identifying some of your unhelpful habits, I want you to do some intelligent Self-Watching. This simply means thinking about yourself in a focused and systematic way, so that you can precisely identify your unhelpful behavior. This can be difficult to do because you are designed to run on habits.
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Figure 12.1: Self-Watching is like switching on a CCTV camera that monitors your thoughts and actions.
To help you do this, I have created a short “APE Brain Test.”
There are no right or wrong answers. This is just about what you think about yourself right now. The more you practice Self-Watching exercises like the APE Brain Test, the better you will become at understanding yourself. I complete this type of test about once a month to help me stay on top of my APE Brain. The more I practice intelligent Self-Watching, the better I get.
You could complete the test either from your own point of view, or on behalf of a person you want to help. Score each statement from 1 to 10, where 1 equals never and 10 equals always.
Note: It doesn’t matter what your scores are. The important thing is that you are thinking about yourself and identifying your strengths and areas for improvement. Don’t overthink your scores; just go with your gut instinct. The more you practice intelligent Self-Watching, the better you will get at it.
1. I reflect on my diet, exercise, and sleep, and plan to make daily improvements in these areas. Score: ____
2. At the end of the day, I always reflect and highlight what went well, and what I can improve tomorrow. Score: ____
3. At the end of every week, I reflect on what went well, and plan how I can improve next week. Score: ____
4. From time to time, I think about my future. I set long-, medium-, and short-term goals to focus my efforts and achieve major objectives. Score: ____
5. I regularly update my yearly and monthly calendar to add important work and life activities. Score: ____
6. I recognize when I’m stressed and successfully plan to reduce my stress. Score: ____
7. I monitor my confidence levels and successfully build up confidence in areas where it is low. Score: ____
8. I recognize when my emotions are unhelpful and can successfully keep them under control. Score: ____
9. I successfully plan to improve my productivity levels. Score: ____
10. I successfully plan to spend less time dwelling on unhelpful thoughts. Score: ____
11. I successfully plan to improve my performance as a leader. Score: ____
What next?
1. Circle the area you think it will be most helpful to make a small adjustment to today to help you be your best.
2. Write down one small thing you will do differently to improve this area.
(Tip: Writing “Be less stressed” is too vague to be helpful. Instead, be more specific—e.g., “Write a 3:1 Daily Reflection at the end of the working day.”)
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
3. Explain why (e.g., “It will make it easier to de-stress, switch off, sleep well, and be at my best tomorrow”).
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
Don’t worry if you are not sure how to improve the area you have selected, because I am going to cover all of the core APE Brain Test themes throughout the remainder of the book.
Although this book has been written to be read sequentially, you can jump ahead to get some improvement ideas—if you promise to come back to this point in the book and continue reading 🙂. I have listed where you can learn more about each core APE Brain Test area below:
• I want to improve my sleep and/or diet and/or exercise. (Work with the Sleep and Health Coach)
• I want to improve my long-, medium-, and short-term goal setting and motivation. (Work with the Motivation Coach)
• I want to get better at managing stress and thinking more helpfully. (Work with the Stress Coach)
• I want to improve my confidence. (Work with the Confidence Coach)
• I want to get better at performing under pressure. (Work with the Pressure Coach)
• I want to improve my focus and productivity. (Work with the Productivity Coach)
• I want to improve my leadership. (Work with the Leadership Coach)
I want to improve my team (Work with the Leadership Coach)
I want to improve my habits (work with the Habit analysis coach and the Habit Building Coach)
If you do jump ahead, remember that the key to Habit Mechanic success is learning how to build sustainable new habits. Knowing what you need to do is very different from doing it. For the remainder of this section of the book (Step 2) and the beginning of the next (Step 3), I am going to really get under the hood (or bonnet) of what it takes to develop more new sustainable helpful habits.
But first, I want to finish this chapter by introducing a concept called the “Me Power Wish List.”
By taking the APE Brain Test, you will have identified the most significant challenge(s) or problem(s) your APE Brain poses in your life right now. (If you complete it again next month, the scores might be different because your life circumstances and habits might be a little bit different.)
You may now want to begin creating your Me Power Wish List. This is a list of all the small new helpful habits you would like to build and changes you would like to make based on your APE Brain Test results.
Your Me Power Wish List
Create your list where it is most helpful for you, for example, a notebook, Word file, phone note.
Please remember it’s only realistically possible to make one tiny change/build one tiny new habit at a time. This is a wish list for a reason: nobody has the resources to make all the changes they want at once.
I have a list of daily, weekly, and monthly habits I developed over many years that started on my Me Power Wish List and are now cables in my brain. Remember: knowing (knowledge), to doing (skill), to habit.
Example Me Power Wish List
Daily
• 6.30 a.m. run (if this sounds too difficult, you could go for a five-minute walk instead)
• Core—40 push-ups and 40 sit-ups (if this sounds too difficult, you could start with one push-up)
• Stretch
• Post my Daily TEA Plan in my Habit Mechanic app
• Will Power Boosters (e.g., one fewer check of my phone, apps off my phone, phone off, no TV news during the week, no emails at night) (learn more by Working with the Pressure Coach)
• Drink two liters of water per day
• Aim for approximately eight miles of running/walking per day
• End-of-day positive reflection/Expressive Writing (learn more by Working with the Stress Coach)
• Complete my “Me Power Weekly Wall Chart” goals for the day (learn more by Working with the Habit Building Coach)
Weekly
• Structured weekly reflection
• Plan week ahead using Brain States method (learn more by Working with the Productivity Coach)
• Create my Me Power Weekly Wall Chart (learn more by Working with the Habit Building Coach)
Monthly
• Habit review (learn more by Working with the Habit Analysis Coach)
• “Future Ambitious Meaningful Story” review (learn more by Working with the Motivation Coach)
• “Team Power Leadership” review (learn more by Working with the Leadership Coach)
Next, let’s think about what happened in your brain as you were completing the APE Brain Test.
Chapter 13
Using Will Power to Self-Watch, HAC, and Develop Resilience
In my model, the prefrontal cortex is the HAC (Helpful Attention Control) Brain. We can use it to manage the APE (Alive Perceived Energy) Brain. We imagine the HAC Brain is operated by Will Power.
Will Power is our first line of defense against the APE Brain because it allows us to resist temptations (e.g., eating too much junk food) and distractions (e.g., checking our social media).
What is Resilience?
Using your Will Power to HAC (pronounced “hack”) your brain is a two-step process:
Step 1. Regular Self-Watching to help you recognize when you are doing and thinking things that are unhelpful and that make it more difficult for you to be at your best (e.g., recognizing that you are beating yourself up too much).
Step 2. Refocusing your attention* onto things that are more helpful and make it easier for you to be at your best (e.g., focusing on thoughts that make you feel more positive about yourself).
*I find the most powerful way to refocus my attention is to write down my thoughts, that is, create a written reflection or plan (learn more about this by Working with the Stress Coach).
The outcome of this two-step process is resilience. So being resilient is an outcome you can achieve in this way. And this is exactly what you did when you completed the APE Brain Test in the last chapter. You highlighted your unhelpful behavior (i.e., by answering the test questions), and then you focused your attention onto doing something that was more helpful for you (e.g., completing a Daily 3:1 Reflection at the end of each day to help you de-stress).
Like anything else, resilience is something we can all learn to improve. We just need to practice it properly.
Resilience makes it easier to
• build better habits;
• be healthier;
• be happier;
• persist;
• manage stress effectively;
• increase your confidence;
• focus your attention;
• be more efficient and effective;
• be a better problem solver;
• be more creative;
• perform better under pressure; and
• be an outstanding leader.
When you HAC your brain to activate your resilience, you are actually managing your emotions. The centrality of emotions during this process is evident when we look at the different terms different scientists use to describe what I call HACing (pronounced “hacking”).
• Social scientists call this emotional self-control.
• Neuroscientists call this emotional regulation.
Whichever term you use to describe the process, the outcome is the same: it helps people manage their emotions so they can be more resilient.
Resilience Is Like Your Swiss Army Knife for Life Success
Many preeminent scientists have studied this process since the 1960s and large sets of compelling research data have been collected about its importance.
Professor Roy Baumeister is one of the world’s most respected and prolific social psychologists. His work has been cited by other academics over 200,000 times, he has over 650 publications, and he has written 40 books.
He lists the outcomes you are far more likely to experience if you are good at managing your emotions:
• Succeeding in education
• Experiencing better mental and physical health
• Feeling happier
• Achieving enhanced creativity
• Being more popular with others
• Enjoying stronger marriages and relationships
• Being more trusted
• Having fewer drinking problems and addictions
• Being less likely to commit crime
• Being less abusive
• Living longer
• Enjoying success in life
In short, if we can HAC our brain (manage our emotions) effectively, we become more resilient. This makes it easier to do important things really well. Remember, the first step of the HACing process is recognizing helpful and unhelpful behavior. We use Will Power to Self-Watch our thoughts and actions. Then, if we notice we are doing unhelpful things, we can also use our Will Power to deliberately begin switching our attention to more helpful things.
It is also important to say that Will Power is a limited resource, and this is why we need to use insights from behavioral science to build robust new habits. We will talk about habits, and how to develop more long-lasting helpful ones, in much greater detail a little bit later.
Right now, let’s take a deep dive into our emotions and learn more about the role Will Power plays in emotional regulation.
Chapter 14
The “Secret” Science of Fulfilling Your Potential: Emotional Regulation
WARNING! This short chapter is science heavy, but I will guide you through it and try to make it as easy as possible to understand. One of the big differences with Tougher Minds and the journey to becoming a Habit Mechanic is that cutting-edge science is the foundation of our work. If you understand the scientific underpinnings of the habit building techniques you learn in this book, they will be more powerful in helping you and those around you make lasting beneficial changes.
Here we go…
The scientific name I prefer to use to describe “HACing” (pronounced “hacking”) is emotional regulation.
Effective emotional regulation underpins all aspects of wellbeing and high performance. Getting good at it is central to becoming a Habit Mechanic. Professor Barbara Fredrickson’s work persuaded me that emotions are immediate biological signals that command us to act. This means emotions drive attention, and attention drives learning.
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Figure 14.1: Emotions demand your attention and therefore drive what you learn/get good at (for better or for worse).
Emotional regulation is the engine that drives your abilities to learn. If you want to win the Learning War, the first thing you need to focus your learning superpower on is improving emotional regulation.
Both helpful and unhelpful emotional regulation brain regions (see Figure 14.2) can be strengthened with practice. So, we can all learn how to get worse at regulating our emotions. The good news is you have already begun improving your emotional regulation skills and habits by using Habit Mechanic Tools (e.g., Daily TEA Plan, Daily 3:1 Reflection, APE Brain Test, etc.).
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Figure 14.2: A cartoon of a neural map of emotional regulation systems (adapted from Phillips, Ladouceur, and Drevets 2008 ). To learn how these brain circuits change with focused practice, check out Professor Richard Davidson’s research and Dr. John Arden’s work (I have studied with Dr. Arden).
Fast and Slow Emotional Regulation
Insights about the specific neural circuitry involved in emotional regulation have revealed that emotional regulation operates on a continuum.
Conscious, effortful, and controlled regulation is at one end of this. This is called explicit emotional regulation (or slow).
On the other end of the continuum is unconscious, and possibly effortless, regulation. This is called implicit emotional regulation (or fast).
Both fast (or implicit) and slow (or explicit) systems work together to regulate emotions.
Most importantly, this means we can automate some elements of emotional regulation. Or, in other words, turn it into helpful habits.
Don’t worry if this still feels intangible, because understanding the specifics of the science is not essential for learning how to get good at managing your emotions and becoming a Habit Mechanic.
We’ll now consider emotional regulation in more practical terms.
Proactively Manage Your Emotions
Emotions arise from a combination of your thoughts and feelings. The first step to managing your emotions is being more aware of them. We know HUE’s (Horribly Unhelpful Emotions) first instinct is to use the lighthouse searchlight to seek out and dwell on threats and problems. But we are not always fully aware when and why this is happening, so negative emotional states can last for longer than necessary.
To deal with this more effectively, we can use Will Power to help us Self-Watch. For example, at the end of every day, we might take a few moments to think about our thoughts and feelings (emotions) and whether they are helping us be our best. If they are not, we can take action. Successfully regulating your emotions might take some time, but if you are proactive, you will do it faster and waste less time dwelling on unhelpful thoughts.
You CAN Take More Responsibility for Managing Your Emotions
Kristina Vogel is a former record-breaking German cyclist. She won two gold medals and a bronze at the Olympic Games, and 11 world titles. She was a genuine global sports star and champion.
Unfortunately, at age 27, she suffered serious spinal and chest injuries in a training accident at her home velodrome in Cottbus, Germany. The incident in June 2018 left her paralyzed; Kristina will never walk again. In the aftermath of the accident, she explained her feelings in an article on the BBC Sport website.
“I realized quickly I would not walk again,” she said.
“Tears will not help. It is what it is. I am ready to take on this challenge and make the best of it.”
In a news conference at the Berlin hospital where she was treated, Vogel described to the BBC the moments following the crash.
“I said ‘breathe, breathe, breathe’ and then I checked,” she said. “Then I saw where I lay, how I was. When my shoes were off, I knew that this was it with the walking.
“Asking ‘why me?’ does not bring you any further. I want to get back into life, not depend on a lot of help. I must use this strength I had in competitions for my life.”
In 2019, Kristina Vogel gave a follow-up interview to the BBC. This was done by British cycling great Sir Chris Hoy.
In a supporting article on the BBC Sport website, Hoy wrote about Vogel’s take on her situation. He explained how the German told him: “This is the toughest challenge ever, but what do you do? Lie in bed and do nothing each day? Or take it on and achieve what you can?” Kristina also said: “I am still happy to be here, and my situation could have been worse than it is…it could be that I have no movement in my arms.”
Sir Chris also outlined how Kristina “talked about having new goals and new things you can look forward to in life. She talked about how lucky she felt to have support from all around the world to help get an adapted car, a new wheelchair and a new house that is going to be a bungalow with wider door frames and better access.”
This is what we might call a world champion example of somebody taking responsibility for what they can control and regulating their emotions. In other words, doing their best to be their best.
Vogel successfully reappraised the meaning of her life-changing accident. She began to think about how things could have been worse and looked for benefits. She asked how she could adapt her personal goals. And she identified what sporting opportunities she still had.
Just like Kristina, you can also learn to think about your life circumstances in a much more helpful way.
How to Start Regulating Your Emotions
There is another useful way of understanding your emotions. Psychologists use a tool known as the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) to help people monitor and measure their emotions and mood in a given situation. The PANAS emotions are shown in Figure 14.3.
I will use the PANAS emotions to explain an example emotional journey after a stressful experience, and show how we can take more control over our emotions than we imagine.
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Figure 14.3. The PANAS emotions organized as main emotions and subcategory emotions—as detailed on the PANAS questionnaire.
An Example of Successful Emotional Regulation
Imagine going into a pay review meeting at work. You are very confident. You’ve been telling your friends and family you’ll receive an increase. But in the meeting, you are told otherwise. There is a major disconnect between what you expected and what actually happened. HUE’s natural response is to make you angry.
Then you might start to feel guilty for letting people down (no new house for your family—you were planning to move to a better school district). Then you get fearful. Will your family think you’ve let them down?
The above response is natural. If you think back to the Lighthouse Brain model, you will remember that HUE’s first instinct is to dwell on threats and problems.
However, you can intervene.
Step 1. You can use your Will Power. First, you can use it to notice these unhelpful thoughts and feelings. This will shift your emotional focus from fear to being more attentive to the fact that you are dwelling on the negatives. By doing this, you are stepping back and using perspective, which makes refocusing and reframing your thoughts easier.
Step 2. Then you can use your Will Power to look for beneficial aspects in what has happened. For example, you now know what to do to get a pay raise next year. Or you can see that a different workplace is more suitable for you. You start to feel excited about the future. You realize you can make your family proud again after this setback. You start to feel much stronger.
This may happen over days or weeks. The key is to proactively manage your thoughts and deliberately pay attention to more helpful ones (learn more by Working with the Stress Coach and the Confidence Coach). Doing this will help you manage your emotions and thinking and take more control over your life. This is the essence of successful emotional regulation and central to becoming a Habit Mechanic.
When we encounter a stressful situation, we cannot avoid feeling stressed. But Habit Mechanics recognize that they do have some level of control over their emotional states, and they definitely have more control over them than anybody else. Me Power Conditioning (deliberately working toward being our best) empowers us to do our best to be our best. Habit Mechanics take responsibility for doing this.
Proactively shifting your attention from unhelpful to helpful thoughts will save you time. Instead of spending weeks dwelling, you could deal with negative emotions in a day…an hour…or even minutes. This makes it much easier to achieve your health, happiness, and performance goals.
If it is helpful, take a moment to make a few notes about, or think about, how good you are at noticing and managing your unhelpful emotions.
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If you manage people, take a moment to make a few notes about, or think about, how good they are at noticing and managing their unhelpful emotions.
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How Will Improving My Emotional Regulation Make Me Happier?
What is happiness?
My understanding of what it means to be happy is drawn from two broad schools of thought.
One is called the hedonic approach. This focuses on achieving a state of happiness—via experiencing positive emotions—by pursuing pleasure (doing things that make you feel good in the short-term) and avoiding pain, boredom, and stress.
The other is called the eudemonic approach. This focuses on delaying short-term gratification in pursuit of bigger, more meaningful goals. This sometimes means experiencing negative but helpful emotions, for example, pain, boredom, and stress. This could mean, for example, resisting the desire to check your phone so you can focus on writing your book; defying HUE’s desire to watch the next episode of your favorite TV show so you can get to bed on time; and making yourself do your daily, weekly, and monthly planning and reflection exercises even though it is not always that enjoyable and there are other things your HUE would prefer to do.
For simplicity, we will refer to the hedonic approach as pleasure, and to the eudemonic approach as Habit Mechanic development.
To achieve happiness, first we need our brain to be working well. Therefore, we need good sleep, diet, and exercise habits (learn more by Working with the Sleep and Health Coach), and to have positive personal relationships (think of the “P”/Perceived in APE).
Then we need to strike a balance of both pleasure and Habit Mechanic development.
Why Is Striking This Balance Difficult?
HUE can have a profoundly negative impact on how engaged, fulfilled, and satisfied you feel with life. The problem is that the activities we engage in to pursue pleasure (the hedonic part of the happiness equation) can be very rewarding for HUE, meaning that we can become addicted to them, and they become unhelpful habits. By addiction I mean that we continue to engage in behaviors even though they are having negative consequences on our health, happiness, and being our best. For example, you know that checking your phone as regularly as you do is not good for you, but you can’t stop yourself.
The trouble is that the states of pleasure we derive from these experiences disappear quickly, and our happiness returns to levels it was at prior to the experience, or worse still even lower.
So, wanting to feel good (pleasure) all the time is leading to lots of people feeling happy for short periods but deeply unsatisfied for most of the time.
Also, wanting to feel good (pleasure) all the time is not always compatible with great sleep, diet, and exercise habits, and great relationships with other people.
What Will Make You Happier?
To sustain feelings of happiness, we must also challenge ourselves to grow by becoming Habit Mechanics. This means that we will experience the highs and lows of pushing ourselves to our limits. We will expose our weaknesses but also discover our strengths. People who engage in this type of purposeful development experience flourishing and higher levels of wellbeing.
The challenge is that HUE is incentivized to do things that help you stay alive, focus on what important people think about you, and conserve energy. So pushing and challenging ourselves to grow can be difficult because not all of the work you will do to become a Habit Mechanic will give you immediate gratification. You will have to expose your weaknesses and fail from time to time. None of these ideas are appealing to HUE, so it resists.
Is Being Unhappy Addictive?
HUE can become addicted to pursuing pleasure (hedonic states). And it can compel you to avoid Habit Mechanic development activities (eudemonia). This is because challenging yourself to do better can expose your weaknesses. So HUE talks you out of engaging in challenging developmental processes, or talks you into giving up, and then beats you up for failing or not trying at all. So pursuing happiness is one thing, but achieving a good balance of pleasure and Habit Mechanic development is another.
I believe the best way to strike a pleasure/Habit Mechanic development balance is by developing our emotional regulation skills and habits (in other words, becoming a Habit Mechanic). This makes managing HUE and becoming truly happy much easier.
How Can I Improve My Emotional Regulation Skills?
For the remainder of the book, I am going to show you how to strengthen your abilities to regulate your emotions. I will do this by showing you how to analyze your habits and build more helpful ones for improved:
• work-life balance;
• Habit Mechanic intelligence;
• motivation;
• stress management;
• sleep, diet, and exercise;
• confidence;
• performance under pressure;
• focus and productivity; and
• leadership.
Do You Want to Practice Regulating Your Emotions Right Now?
Use the Daily TEA Plan or the Daily 3:1 Reflection I introduced earlier.
To learn more simple and practical emotional regulation tools, keep reading. I call these Habit Mechanic Tools.
I think of Habit Mechanic Tools like bicycle stabilizers. They are designed to help you learn how to become a Habit Mechanic. The more skilled you become, and the more helpful habits you develop, the less reliant you will be on your Habit Mechanic Tools. But the tools will always be there to fall back on when you notice your habits slipping and during the more challenging periods of your life.
Congratulations! You have now completed Step 2!
Before you move on to Step 3, please take a moment to notice (in the Habit Mechanic language and tools list) everything you have learned so far. You are doing great!