CBP S3E3: Emotionally Hijacked! 3 Ways to Take Back Control

The world is going crazy right now. Our personal worlds are turned inside out, upside down. In situations like this, it’s easy for our emotions to jump in, take control, and ruin our ability to make rational decisions about what’s happening. We get emotionally hijacked! I struggle with this a lot, and found some ways that I think will work well to help us to control an emotional hijack and get some mastery over our emotions when they threaten to overwhelm us.

If you’re struggling, please don’t wait to ask for help. Times like these can make us feel more alone than usual, maybe than we’ve ever felt before. Everyone needs help sometimes.

Referenced in this episode:

• Empathy and Emotional Intelligence | Coffee, Grit, and Inspiration
• Strong Emotions: Name It To Tame It! (video)
• The A-Z Guide to Feelings and Emotions | Laughter Online University
• Reduce Emotional Hijacking With Emotional Intelligence | TTI Success Insights
• Tame Reactive Emotions By Naming Them | Mindful.org
• What Was I Thinking? Handling The Hijack | Dr. Relly Nadler, True North Leadership | Psychology Today

Show Notes

• Times are confusing, hard, and everyone is freaking out. No one knows what will happen and that can be scary.
• It can cause us to feel a whole range of emotions, and those emotions might take us over if we’re not careful.
• Emotions are different than feelings. One article expresses it this way: a feeling is a viewpoint. An emotion is an experience.
• An emotional hijack is when your amygdala – the part of your brain that controls things like your fight-or-flight response – takes over and you lose the ability to make rational decisions.
• We can be hijacked by positive emotions just as easily as by negative ones.
• You can regain mastery over this by improving your emotional intelligence.
• 3 ways you can try:
  • Breathe. Take a breath and think about what you’re feeling right now.
  • Name it to tame it. Get some distance by naming the emotion you’re feeling. Suppressing your emotions can lead to being fearful of them.
  • Take an emotional audit. Ask yourself some questions to understand more about what you’re feeling in the moment.
• You’re not alone. Even in times like this, you’re not alone. Join us in the Facebook community if you’re not already, and please reach out. I’d love to connect with all of you.

Transcript

Hi everybody. This is Dianne Whitford from Coffee, Grit and Inspiration, and this is your weekly Coffee Break podcast. I actually missed a week due to, you know, my world blowing up as I’m sure many of you have as well, hoping to be back on track now though. And in the upcoming weeks I am actually hoping to post a little bit more often since I’ll be spending a lot more time at home. So that could be a good thing I guess. But between, you know, all this stuff that’s happening in social media, the news, hearsay from everyone, Facebook, all the announcements at work, we’re getting announcements almost every day about how our company is handling coronavirus and what we should be doing. UI work in healthcare. I don’t know, I don’t know where all you guys work, but for us,uas with many, many, many other industries, there’s just a lot going on.

I’m grateful to be working. I’m grateful that my family is working and so far we’re all healthy, but it is a very, very concerning time as I think everybody’s feeling right now. I’m scared. I know that there’s a lot of folks out there that are scared and, and it’s hard to know what with everything coming at you from multiple different places, you know, what’s real and what’s not and what is really worthy of being concerned about and what isn’t and you know, fake news everywhere, whatever. And that can be really difficult. And it made me think about something I wrote about a few weeks ago called emotional hijacking. And this is where something is happening and it can be a short term event and you have an immediate reaction. It can be long-term event and you’re just kind of stuck in this mental place. But an emotional hijack is when a part of your brain, the amygdala, the primitive part of your brain, the one that controls the fight or flight response takes over.

And when this happens, your emotions are so strong and so pervasive that you have a hard time making rational decisions. And the more I looked at this, the more I realized that it’s important to understand the difference between emotions and feelings. And I struggled for a while to kind of wrap my head around that because it seems a lot of times we use the term emotions and feelings interchangeably. But here’s what, after reading and reading and reading and reading and researching, this is what I believe that it comes down to. Emotions are typically short term, instinctual and physical. You can actually measure them. You know, how red your face gets, your body temperature, if you sweat, if you get clammy hands, your accelerated heartbeat. All of those kinds of things and feelings are more long-term learned behaviors where we’ve actually cognitively with the non-primitive part of our brain, assigned meaning to whatever it is that we’re feeling.

So an article I found expressed it this way. A feeling is a viewpoint and an emotion is an experience. And this all was really complicated and it was hard for me to understand specifically. The point I’m trying to make is that by understanding our feelings and being able to identify them, we can engage our rational minds to control our responses. Can’t always control your emotions. It’s a physical response or reaction maybe triggered by a bunch of different things. You may be able to get over those triggers, but a lot of times you feel the emotion because you’ve assigned meaning to an event and something that happens. So emotional hijacking is when those emotions take over and you’re, you’re not able to make rational decisions and they sometimes call it amygdala hijacking or emotional hijacking. So the amygdala is the part of your brain that triggers that fight or flight response.

And when that happens, the part of our brain that makes those rational decisions and judgments and things like that basically takes a vacation and shuts down. So when you’ve been hijacked, you experience your emotions, but with no filter. You may get angry or fearful, something like that, which may trigger feelings that are hard to control. So when you see this happen in someone else, you might think, what were they thinking? And the reality is they probably weren’t. There’s an article I read that gave a whole bunch of examples, you know, like when Mike Tyson bit off that guy’s ear or something like that, you might wonder later like what the heck was he thinking in that moment? And the answer is he probably wasn’t. He probably was in this fight or flight type of mode. He’s been amygdala hijacked or emotionally hijacked and he’s just going to go do whatever.

And that’s what, that’s the kind of thing, and I’m not saying that you’ll get emotionally hijacked and go bite off somebody’s ear, but it does make it more difficult to have more of those rational responses to things. So you might also, you know, know you’ve been hijacked if later you think back on it and you regret the way that you acted or you, you regret something that you said, maybe you blame your actions on, you know, this person made me do it. Those kinds of things. Those are all kind of clues that you’ve had some sort of a hijacking type of experience. So the good news is that you can gain control over those hijack situations as opposed to them controlling you. And, and one of the keys to doing that is to increase your emotional intelligence. We talked a lot about emotional intelligence on the blog over the last few weeks.

You guys probably know by now there’s four main components, self-awareness, social awareness, relationship management, self management. So all of those things kind of play into what I’m, what I’m talking about today in different ways. So for example, self-awareness is a key component because when you are trying to control your hijacks, your emotional hijacks, you have to be aware that it’s happening. You have to be aware of what’s going on, knowing what emotions you’re experiencing, how they show up in your body, how they show up in your, in your heart and in your mind is an important way of saying I, I am really emotional right now. I’m feeling overwhelmed. I’m feeling stressed out. There’s too much going on. I’m not making great decisions right now. It’s also important to understand that emotional hijacking is not always caused by negative emotions. If you’ve ever known somebody or for you yourself –

I know I’ve been in this boat multiple times where you make bad decisions because you love somebody, you’re so in love and you make a poor decision that later you’re like, what was I thinking? And again, the answer is you probably weren’t. So an emotional hijack is not always caused by negative feelings. It’s anything where the emotion overwhelmed you so much that you can’t…really can’t think straight. For me, where they shows up a lot in work is I’ll be in a conversation, somebody says something, I’m immediately triggered and I respond before I think. I say something snappy or something sarcastic or, or sometimes the way it shows up for me might be I shut down. I am so irritated or mad or frustrated or whatever that I can’t even argue. I just shut down and then I’m tuned out to everybody and what they’re trying to say and I’ve, I’ve disengaged from the conversation.

That’s another form of emotional hijacking. It’s like an automated response that you do when you have this emotions that overwhelm you. And like I said, it’s not a situation where you go running around biting off people’s ears every time you get hijacked. It could just be you have a momentary, you know, you, somebody says something, you get triggered and you say a response. And the problem is when you do that, especially when you’re talking with somebody else, they may not remember it exactly what you say to them, when in those kinds of moments, but they will remember how you made them feel. And if, if you’re saying something in a moment of anger that you later regret, there’s no way to take those words back. There’s no way to make that person not feel whatever it is they felt when they heard that from you.

It’s not a great way…it’s not a good look, right? It’s not a good look. Especially right now, there’s so much going on. There’s so much information coming at us. Everyone’s freaked out about am I going to be able to pay the bills? Am I going to, you know, am I going to get sick? Am I going to lose a family member? Is is my family safe? Am I safe? All of those things are causing us to be, you know, a lot of people are on edge and, and it can be really easy to just lose it at the drop of a hat in a situation like that.

So what can you do? Talking a lot about what it is and how all the bad things that happen, but there is good news. These aren’t, these aren’t things, we don’t have to be ruled by our emotions.

We don’t have to be taken over by our emotions every time we get angry or every time we fall in love, we can still figure out ways to keep that under control. So one of the things that I am trying to do when I feel emotionally hijacked, when I can tell that my emotions are, are just taking me over, is to just pause. It’s like the easiest, best and most effective thing that you can do is take a breath. Don’t snap. You know, don’t open your mouth and let that sarcastic thing come out right away. Sit on it for just a second and make sure that you’re not allowing yourself to respond in anger. Something I read about, which I’ll talk about in a minute, is a, is an audit. And so when you’re doing that pause, maybe take an emotional inventory. What are you feeling right now?

What are you feeling right now? Why are you feeling it? What is that feeling making you want to do? You need more than a minute to pause, to maybe need to come back to this later at a different time. Those kinds of things. Just even being aware, I’m feeling strong emotions. I don’t know what they are. I’m feeling strong emotions. Something in what’s happening right now is making me feel anxious, mad, angry, whatever. I just need a minute before I respond. One thing that I heard in a work thing, and I’ve also seen online a lot and heard from other places is name it to tame it. And that was according to the articles I’ve been reading, a psychiatrist named Dan Siegel coined that phrase, name it to tame it, and it basically helps you get distance from whatever emotion it is that you’re feeling. So it’s the opposite of ignoring your emotions, trying to suppress them in an effort to pretend they’re not happening or to get, get out of that situation.

A lot of people are like, I’m not mad. I’m not mad. I’m not. When you are mad, you’re obviously mad. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience. You’re talking to somebody and they’re, you’re like, what’s wrong? Nothing’s wrong. I’m fine, I’m fine. I’m fine. Because where it’s way more satisfying and probably for both parties when they say, you know, I’m upset because this, or even just, I’m upset and I don’t know why. And that’s okay. When you can name it and say, I’m angry. That helps you get a little bit of distance from that anger and it helps you to, to, you know, I’m sad, I’m upset, I’m scared, I’m whatever helps you get a little bit of distance there. It doesn’t mean you stop feeling that thing. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to let all the emotions in when you do something like that, but the benefit to doing that is you’re no longer pressing it down and suppressing it because I really believe, and I don’t know if you guys have seen this happen, but I really believe that the more you suppress your emotions, the more they’re going to explode at some point and maybe at the times where you least want them to do that.

One last thing about name it to tame it is you don’t want to become fearful of your emotions. You don’t want to get to a point where you’re, you feel something strong and you’re afraid of that because you’re afraid of what you’ll do. Are you afraid of how it makes you feel or if you’re afraid of what might happen because you feel this strong emotion, you don’t want to become fearful because when you’re fearful, you deny your emotions, you suppress them. And eventually that could end up with you suppressing all emotions, even the good ones, even the ones of joy and love. You end up suppressing all of that. And that takes away from, in my opinion, it takes away from our humanity. And you don’t want, I don’t think you want, so I could be wrong, but I don’t think you want to be someone who has no emotions at all.

So that’s name it to tame it. The next one is count to 10 and do an audit. And this is from a paper I found on Psychology Today and I’ll put it in the description as well, and it mentions an emotional audit. And I hadn’t heard about this before, but what it is, is you take five seconds between each question to just kind of redirect your focus and help you get a handle on what’s happening to you. And the questions they recommend – there’s five of them is: what am I thinking? What am I feeling? What do I want now? How am I getting in my own way? And what do I need to do differently? So you ask yourself those questions in your head, whatever, give yourself five seconds between each question to really kind of come up with the answer and process it. That means you can get through the whole thing in like 30 seconds, something like that.

It doesn’t have to take a whole lot of time, but doing that even throughout the day when you’re not in a, you’re not being triggered, you’re not in a hijack situation can help you get used to constantly monitoring, what am I feeling? What am I thinking? What do I want now? How am I getting in my own way? I like that question particularly because I feel like I get in my own way a lot. I’m making things harder than they need to be. I’m thinking too hard about things. I’m overthinking things. I get in my own way a lot. And what do I need to do differently? So you know, all these things are happening. What is a different way I could respond to this situation to get something different out of it. The other reason I like this is because I have a lot of times I have a hard time understanding my emotions, not just what am I feeling but, why am I feeling it?

Why does this thing you know, make me anxious. I’ll be sitting at home and all of a sudden I feel anxious or bad or sad or whatever and I don’t know why. And I think doing the that, that kind of an emotional audit will help me be a little bit more in touch with what I’m feeling at any given time. So do that throughout the day even they recommend, even if you’re not being hijacked, just to get into that practice of understanding what you’re feeling. I think that understanding your emotions is, is really important. If you’re ever going to be able to master them. And I don’t mean master them, like never feel them. I mean master them to where they don’t take over your thought process. They don’t hijack your brain. They don’t take over your brain every single time, you have one. I mean, I think, I think of myself as a pretty emotional person.

I feel a lot of things. I feel all of the things, sometimes. I cry at commercials. I, you know, I’m, I’m just, I’m sappy and sentimental and I’m emotional and passionate and a lot of that time, a lot of times that comes out, but a lot of times it also gets in my way and I have to figure out a way to still feel those things, but not let them take me over. I put a lot of links in the description to a lot of this stuff that I found. There’s pretty good stuff out there about that and I felt like it was really relevant for the situation that we’re finding ourselves in right now. So I just wanted to end with a reminder that you’re not alone. You know, social distancing doesn’t have to mean social isolation and there’s people around you. Fortunately, I know social media is sometimes a blessing and a curse because you don’t, you know, it’s got a lot of drawbacks. But another thing about it that is good is it helps you stay connected to people. And, I recommend that you guys use that mechanism. Text people, call people, email them, do FaceTime with them, Google Hangouts and do conference calls with your family, whatever it is to stay connected to the people around you. I think that’s, to me, the scariest thing about this whole situation is the distance that it’s going to introduce between us as people. Reach out on Facebook. If you’re not a part of the Facebook group. I would love to hear from you. I’ll put a link for that in the description as well. You can drop me an email. My email is dianne@coffeegritandinspiration.com. Anything, just to let me know how you’re doing. I love to connect with you guys. Keep breathing. I know it’s hard sometimes. Keep breathing, build each other up. Love each other. Thank you for listening. Be well. I’ll talk to you next week. Bye now.