Emotional regulation ultimately requires high-level emotions

That is, those emotions that go beyond instinctive joy and anger, are deeply bound to self-worth, connection with others, and long-term meaning, such as enthusiasm for a specific thing, empathy and concern for others, and a sense of certainty about one's own existence. These are the lowest levels of support for emotional regulation.

I met a girl who works as an e-commerce operator a while ago. She had taken three emotion management courses before, and she knew the key points of 478 breathing by heart. She wrote three large emotional diaries. However, during the Double Eleven promotion, her plan was rejected by her boss for the third time. On Saturday, she had a fight with her boyfriend over missing a date. When she squatted downstairs in the company and cried, she forgot all about her skills. Finally, when she was touching her pocket, she touched half of the cat strips that were left over from feeding the stray cats last week. She suddenly remembered that a few days ago, the three-flowered cat had a dead sparrow in its mouth and put it on the steps where she usually sat to "repay the favor." At that moment, she suddenly felt, oh, I am still missed by a little life. This little thing is nothing. She wiped her tears and stood up to change the plan. You see, what worked at this time was not the techniques she learned at all, but the soft care between her and the cat, which were the most specific high-level emotions. It was not fancy at all, but it worked.

I have met many clients who believe in technical skills before. They think that emotional regulation relies on method training. The more they practice, the more they can become "emotionally stable adults." However, when it comes to the actual situation, I find that all the methods written down in the notebook cannot be retrieved at the moment of adrenaline surge. In fact, the academic community’s understanding of this point is also slowly iterating. In the early years when cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) was first popularized, everyone was practicing automatic thought recognition and refutation of irrational beliefs. Many people eventually became masters of self-PUA. They were clearly panicked and forced themselves to "My idea is unreasonable and I want to correct it." On the contrary, they created more serious psychological problems. In recent years, new branches of CBT have deliberately put "value anchoring" ahead of technology. They first help clients find the long-term value they really care about, and then talk about emotional regulation. To put it bluntly, you know where you want to go, so that you don't get stuck on the stones on the roadside.

The humanistic school is more direct and never advocates "controlling emotions." Their core logic is that emotions themselves are a part of you. What you have to do is not to suppress it, but to have enough "certainty" inside you - to make sure that you are loved, that what you do is meaningful, and that you have a real connection with the world. If there are enough of these things, when the emotion comes, you will not regard it as a scourge, but can just watch it finish and leave like a naughty child in your own home. Even positive psychology, which has been criticized by many people as "chicken soup for the soul", research in recent years has long escaped the misunderstanding of "hard optimism" and instead emphasizes the construction of "sense of meaning" and "positive connection". In essence, it is helping everyone build their own advanced emotional system.

Many people have misunderstandings about "advanced emotions" and think that they have to have the world in mind and care about the country to be considered advanced. In fact, they are not at all. The stray cat you have to feed every day after get off work, the film camera you saved up half a year's salary to buy, the tacit understanding you and a friend you've known for ten years can understand without speaking, these are the most specific high-level emotions - they are not your instinctive joys and anger of seeking advantages and avoiding disadvantages, but the bond you have developed with the world by spending time and effort.

I once had a visitor who worked in the primary market. He is a typical "rational person" who calculates the input-output ratio in everything. His mood is not very stable at ordinary times, and his subordinates think he has no temper. As a result, he lost more than 2 million yuan on a project he invested in last year. He threw the computer in the office, had a big fight with his wife when he got home, and almost got divorced. He later told me that at that moment he felt that he had nothing, and that his life had been in vain - you see, his only emotional anchor was "making money", and it was completely based on the instinctive desire for profit. If it was broken even a little bit, the whole person would collapse. If he usually has other hobbies, such as collecting old records, or playing basketball with his friends every week, he most likely won't get into that problem at that time. At worst, he will sigh, go to play basketball after get off work and sweat all over, and then come back to find a way to solve the problem.

Of course, I’m not saying that techniques such as breathing techniques and emotional diaries are completely useless. During an acute anxiety attack, 478 breathing can indeed quickly calm the heart rate and prevent you from doing impulsive things, but these are emergency fire extinguishers. You can’t rely on a fire extinguisher every day, right? If you have to rely on these techniques to suppress your emotions every day, then you might as well stop and think about it, has it been a long time since you did a "useless" thing that you really like?

The first assignment I give to visitors has never been about learning emotional regulation skills. It is to spend two weeks finding 3 small things that you can do without forcing yourself or even forgetting the time. It is of no use, even if it is squatting on the roadside watching ants move, building Lego, or studying how to cook perfect soft-boiled eggs. If you keep doing these little things, they will slowly become your emotional "safe island". Next time you encounter something bad, you don't need to think about any skills, just do it for half an hour, and your mood will naturally go smoothly.

To put it bluntly, the purpose of our lives is not to be emotionless robots, nor to practice until everything is calm, but to accumulate enough of these soft bonds with your own warmth. These things are your roots. When the wind comes, you will not be blown around. Just like a sentence I saw before: "The things you love will never betray you" - Oh no, it actually doesn't mean that you won't betray, it means that even if everything else collapses, you still have these things in your hands, so you have the confidence to start over.