Being Objective About Emotions

When making decisions, whether they’re major life decisions or day-to-day choices, one of the most important concepts is to be objective: to take in all of the relevant data, determine the possible outcomes, and choose the best choice based on the constraints.

When doing this, emotions will f*ck you up.

What stops people from reaching their goals nine times out of ten?

Acting on short-term emotions instead of doing what they KNOW they need to do. Most people don’t come anywhere close to viewing their emotions objectively. What separates winners and losers is that winners are able to take action based on their goals and the things they desire in their life, while losers allow their feelings to get in the way. Excuses are based on emotions, not on rational logic.But wait, emotions are subjective experiences.

So how is it possible to be objective about emotions?

Fortunately, humans are irrational in predictable ways, which means that there are proven psychological methods to being objective when making decisions, and not letting emotions get in the way.

Here are some strategies of dealing with emotions that are backed up by actual science:

1. Labeling emotions“Right now I’m feeling social anxiety so I don’t want to approach that girl”

“I’m feeling fatigue so I don’t want to go to the gym”“I’m feeling embarrassed because that girl rejected me ”Negative emotions are a part of life. Having the emotion isn’t the problem; what matters is how you act on it. Instead of looking at the world through the lens of the emotion, look at the emotion itself. This means having the self-awareness of recognizing how you are feeling and how it is likely to make you behave. Labeling an emotion stops you from choosing a self-defeating action.

2. What is my mind telling me?“

My mind is saying this workout is too hard”“My mind is telling me not to hit on that girl” “My mind is telling me I want McDonald’s”This is based on a psychological technique called defusion, which gives you mental space from brain chatter. It’s similar to labeling emotions, but instead of targeting the negative feeling, it gets at the thought behind the feeling. Remember, all that matters is your actions, not your thoughts. For this reason, this strategy is effective because it allows you to consciously control your behavior instead of letting unconscious thoughts dictate your actions.

3. Deep breathing

Sure, this might seem cliche and we’ve all been told to take a deep breath before, but knowing the science behind deep breathing can turn it from being a useless technique we skip to an actual way to regulate emotions.Our nervous system has two parts that play a major role in the body’s experience of emotions: the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. When you feel negative emotions like anxiety and stress, the sympathetic nervous system gets activated. This is the “fight or flight” response that a lot of people know about. What fewer people know, is that deep breathing taps directly into the parasympathetic nervous system, which counteracts the nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system is activated when we’re resting, and also after eating and during sexual arousal. It’s impossible for both systems to be active at once, so deep breathing literally forces the sympathetic nervous system to slow down. This stops the uncomfortable fight or flight reaction most people get in stressful situations.

4. Getting advice

It’s important when getting advice from other people to ask not what they think you SHOULD do, but what they HAVE done that was successful. Even experts are bad at predicting human behavior, and so it’s important to focus on past proven results rather than unknown outcomes. So next time you ask someone for advice on how to make a decision, ask them what other people who have been successful in the past have done, instead of what they think you should do. Getting advice also helps you see how your emotions are fucking you up, because other people don’t have the biases that you are blind to when you’re invested in a decision.

5. 10/10/10 Rule

How will you feel about your decision 10 minutes from now?How will you feel about your decision 10 months from now?

How will you feel about your decision 10 months from now?Emotions are short-term physiological responses. Biologically, they are supposed to help us react to information in our environment, but in the modern world, they get triggered by thoughts and imagined scenarios as strongly as the actual situations we encounter. What’s the antidote for this? Countering the emotional short-term thinking with rational long-term thinking.

Objectively, we often know the right decision to male, but the short-term discomfort gets in the way. You can overcome this tendency by giving yourself some perspective on the decision. Ask yourself how you will think about the decision in 10 minutes, months, and years. This will shift your perspective to a more objective view of the situation based on logical reasoning rather than emotion.

Try any or all of these techniques to help you operate more efficiently in your decision making and the way you handle emotions.

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