Self-control 2: How to control your emotions and destiny?

Chapter 4 Emotional Family (2)
For weeks afterwards, I did not recover from this strange sense of powerlessness.It’s like when you’re hungry and suddenly you get a big, luscious pie, you eat it all in one gulp, and you’re back to having nothing.My partner smiled and said, "Paul, you're already successful, so you don't need anything, do you?"

This is precisely a defense function that our emotional genes have long had.When you express a certain emotion too vigorously, it will open an opposite "space-time channel" to you, allowing you to walk through it without any preparation, resulting in ups and downs, and a sudden transition from the extreme A side to the B side.

Sadness is harmful, of course, but too much excitement is harmful. They also have the effect of leading people to despair.One of my students, Husky, was from Eastern Europe and toiled in an auto parts manufacturing company in Los Angeles.When he finally got his green card in the United States, he was admitted to the hospital because of hyperactivity, and stayed in the intensive care unit for 3 months.If you regard one thing as the biggest goal in life, then at the moment it is completed, it will be difficult for you to control your emotions, so you will be like riding a roller coaster.

This is the principle that extreme happiness often leads to sadness, and it comes from our subconscious self-adjustment program.For people who are often under great pressure, if they are prone to overexcitement, then success is not a good thing for him, but a result that must be treated with caution.

Nothing comes closer to despair than excitement.

When we are so excited that we don’t know where things are going, where our hearts are beating fast, or when we are full of high fighting spirit, after a second, we may feel that we have nothing, feel lost, and enter a state of confusion.It is this exaggerated process that things must be reversed. Sometimes excessive excitement will make people experience a feeling of despair instead of sadness.

In Hong Kong, some people won the Mark Six lottery. He was so happy that he danced and turned blue with excitement. Then he had a heart attack and died.This phenomenon exists all over the world, and it exists objectively.Anyone who has experienced emotional loss, the ecstasy when getting a promotion, and the elation when getting an order are all manifestations of "extreme joy".

It is precisely such moments that we need to be vigilant.If you are irrational yourself, your emotions will also be irrational; if you are a person who is not good at controlling emotions, even the positive force of excitement can lead you to despair.

What happened between "Extreme Joy" and "Sadness"?
Happiness is a very good emotion, how can people be sad when they are happy?Rooted in our psychological capacity, it is a mechanism similar to the biological immune system.When people face pressure and challenges, the subconscious mind will activate psychological immunity, and be in an active state of fighting and preparing for battle like white blood cells.At this time, people's psychology is deliberately suppressed, and they are often under great pressure. All "energy" is prioritized to achieve goals and overcome the challenges in front of them.

When the challenge is completed and the pressure disappears, people will experience a huge psychological contrast, which is so different from the long-established depressed psychological state, just like returning to the ground suddenly from the space station, and the pressure will disappear instantly .This particular moment can easily lead to disastrous consequences.

Some people are eager to see their life goals, and they have worked hard for them for more than ten years, and once they succeed, their personalities will change drastically.

Some people have been under great pressure for many years, and when they are completely released one day, they can no longer live normally.

Some people play fierce games with their opponents, go through thrills, overcome countless difficulties, and finally win, but what they get is endless loss and emptiness, which is completely unacceptable to such a result.

They are obviously victims of "overexcited" emotions.

Therefore, excessive excitement, a huge turnaround, is often the neighbor of impasse.It doesn't happen to everyone, but it always works for the silent, low-willpower majority.In order to prevent similar tragedies, we must learn how to channel and release our psychological energy—not only to vent our inner depression in a timely manner, but also to reduce our desire for goals, and not to care too much about certain things or certain things.That is to say, we need to dilute the pent-up emotional power in the body from time to time.In this way, when we encounter situations that trigger overexcitement, it is less likely to cause an explosive psychological disaster, and the turning point in life will not produce a serious crisis.

A friend of mine told me about his method of managing emotions.He is a scholar. Because of his poor heart function, he lives in San Francisco all year round, rarely goes out, and hardly participates in public and expert seminars.Therefore, his research results are like "pets" kept in the back garden, which are not easy to be discovered and recognized by peers.This was a blow to him, because no one wants their academic research to be ignored by society.

One day, good things finally came.He suddenly received a call from the American Association for Science, telling him: "Sir, your achievements have attracted the attention of many people, and many famous scientists have recommended you to us. We have decided to invite you to Washington to participate in the American Association of Science annual forum and is ready to honor and reward you."

This is really a great joy!But, he said to me, "Paul, you know, I'm a weak guy. I'm wise enough to realize that I can't handle such a big cake. I may have passed out when I entered the venue, or Because the thinking logic became confused, low-level mistakes were made during the speech, which became the laughing stock in people's eyes. In the end, I decided to replace me with my assistant to receive this unexpected honor."

He maintained a calm state of mind in the face of the sudden ecstasy, and handled it wisely, avoiding possible damage to the heart, and calmly defusing a potential danger that turned a lucky opportunity into a life crisis.

This suggests that if our mental capacity is low, we still have ways of coping with psychological and emotional upheavals, such as taking a conservative approach to avoiding the wonderful outcome that comes from the sky and avoiding it causing excessive excitement.In fact, reducing the desire for goals and controlling inner desires can also solve the problem of extreme joy giving rise to sorrow from the root.This means that we must pay attention to the cause of the high, and not just fix it when it does harm, making ourselves the dramatic victim of positive emotions.

Emotional Self-Management Course
self-control hyperactivity
Goals: If our goals are set too high, we will have great expectations, resulting in increased psychological immune stress.This is a beginning - all the potentials are mobilized and we sprint towards the goal, and all the emotions will be smoldering, and the weight will become heavier and heavier, gradually filling the accommodation space of our hearts.Therefore, the first step in controlling hyperactivity is to check our goals, whether they are large or small, and make sure that we put our expectations for the future in an appropriate position, instead of always letting it be high or too eager for it.

Tension Index: Measure and assess your stress-induced tension index—if your palms sweat, your heart beats faster, or you feel the urge to try something, it's a sign that you're overstretched.You need to adjust the release mechanism of stress, not release it with "goal achievement", but transfer them smoothly in the process of effort.When you can generate a mental state similar to "it's okay" about a successful expected outcome, the tension level drops to a relatively low safety position.

Suppression: Take strong and decisive measures to suppress our excitement. If it cannot be released before it comes, we can let go of the source of excitement, stay away from it, temporarily stop accepting, celebrating, carnival, or diverting attention, and find someone to deal with the aftermath.The purpose of suppression is not to drive away the positive emotions of excitement, but to dilute them to an acceptable level for one's emotional balance ability.

Distance: Keep a distance from both sides of A/B to avoid entering extreme emotional environments.For example, you can attend a two-hour cocktail party at the graduation ceremony, but it is best not to join the midnight carnival; when our work has achieved phased results, try not to design a formal celebration ceremony, but is to take a relaxed and casual approach to congratulations.Distance yourself from any possible emotional extremes that can leave you high and then suddenly exhausted.

Examination: Keep an examination of yourself at any time-use the correct way to change the wrong method of emotional management.We have to unfold ourselves in all directions, like a military parade, and check all emotional triggers that tend to go to extremes.It's a form of positive self-mastery, like looking in the mirror, you start to learn to take responsibility for yourself.Examination is to achieve two goals: first, not to be too depressed when the situation is not going well; second, not to be too excited when the wind is smooth.This shows that scrutiny is a kind of yardstick, in order to maintain emotional balance, and to prevent two extremes - too low self-esteem or too proud.

◎"I'm so useless!"

In special situations, some people feel incompetent and experience a strong sense of "powerlessness".They can feel out of control over something, in a passive state.Usually, this sense of powerlessness will disappear in a short period of time, and the inherent adjustment mechanism of people can quickly reverse this wrong cognition and restore confidence.But if this kind of inferiority complex continues to ferment deeply through continuous events, it will stay in the body for a long time, develop from the subconscious to the conscious, invade inward from the emotional level, occupy his rational area, and then affect his thinking and behavior.

At this time, he really thinks: "I am an incompetent person, and I can't do anything well." The most prominent manifestation is that he will be full of resentment against himself, thinking that troubles are always caused by himself, and the problem always lies with himself. Instead of others, I even discovered a "sure" fact: I am everyone's burden.

For such emotions, we generally call it inferiority complex.People sometimes use another word to define it: masochistic.From a small perspective, people perceive and magnify their own incompetence, which is self-abuse; from a large perspective, a team, an organization or even a country conducts self-deprecation and contempt, which is also self-abuse.In shallow levels of masochism, it is an emotion that is easily dismissed.When this emotion pervades and develops to a deep level, it seeps into our minds and joins our instincts.Therefore, no matter whether he is good at a certain thing or not, even if he has a strong advantage, he will habitually position himself as a person who "cannot make a difference", and feel ashamed in front of his opponents who are far inferior to him.

Zhao Peng from Shandong is an employee of Huawei's US branch. His ability to beat hundreds of colleagues in the competition of selecting the best from the best and becoming a member of the team of the US branch shows that he has excellent working ability, which is beyond doubt.But his problem is not work, but how to face women.

He said: "I have been a very good boy since I was a child. I look good, and I study well, and I have a good body. But somehow, from elementary school to university, and now, I have always been afraid of dealing with girls. I am afraid to associate with them. Whether it is in life or work, I feel uneasy when I see the opposite sex. I blush involuntarily. I am afraid that I will not perform well, and I am afraid that the other party will think that I am not good enough. This makes me have a bad image in their eyes, which seriously affects my mentality. Recently, I often get angry, and I will quarrel with my colleagues for no reason, and I am very annoyed afterwards to apologize."

Zhao Peng is 28 years old this year, and he has failed 24 blind dates. He carefully counted the things he didn't do well each time, and wrote them down, so he increased the degree of self-denial and became more "powerless".Until one time, he broke out in front of the leader: "I can't do well, don't look for me!" He threw the document on the ground, touched his head and fled out of the leader's office in frustration.

The leader said in surprise: "I've never seen him get out of control."

This is his deep awareness of his transition from denial to despair—the persistent interpersonal inferiority complex for many years has severely damaged his emotional balance and caused his self-control mechanism to gradually collapse.In the end, there will always be a day when it explodes, and he unfortunately vents these "resentments" on the leader.Fortunately, the department head of Huawei's US branch did not blame him, but instead gave him two weeks of vacation time to find a way to adjust.

(End of this chapter)