Resilience_Lesson5Script解读

1、LESSON 5Welcome back! Week 5 deals with emotions, both positive and negative. How can cultivating positive emotions like love, empathy, gratitude, and awe contribute to your resilience? How can you learn to manage negative emotions? Youll find out in this lesson. Youll work with your Practice Partne

2、r, practice managing positive and negative emotions, and share your experiences with your fellow students.Video: Lesson 5-1 What are Emotions Part 1 (9:38)SPEAKER Clay Cook:This is lesson 5, managing intense negative emotions and cultivating positive ones.In this lesson, were going to dive into ever

3、ything related to emotions.And were going to learn that to become resilient means gaining mastery of our emotions.So they dont get the best of us, but also getting the most out of life by spending more time in a happy fulfilled state.The first thing I want to do is jump into some quotes, some releva

4、nt quotes that kind of capture the importance of emotions.And the first is by author Oscar Wilde.And he said, I dont want to be at the mercy of my emotions.I want to use them, enjoy them, and to dominate them.And this really captures the essence that emotions can help us, but they can also dominate

5、us, and actually take control of our lives.Daniel Goleman, whos the author of a book called Emotional Intelligence, he issued this quote, and it basically says this, if your emotional abilities arent in hand, if you dont have self awareness, if youre not able to manage your distressing emotions, the

6、n no matter how smart you are, youre not going to go to get very far in life.This is very true.If we look at scientific research on emotional control, an individuals ability to manage their distressing emotions, as well as intentionally incorporate practices, activities in their lives that cultivate

7、 positive emotions, its intimately related to their well being, and overall life satisfaction.In order to have a productive conversation about why we need to manage intense negative emotions and cultivate positive emotions, we first need to define what they are.So if big toes are for balance and our

8、 tongues are for tasting, our noses are for smelling, then what kind of possible function can emotions have?Emotions actually serve many vital purposes such as learning, development of memories, our ability to communicate, gain information about our environments, and ultimately to motivate us.So mot

9、ivations are a critical aspect to our functioning in our behavior.There really are three criteria that define emotion. The first is an emotion is a subjective experience that combines our bodily reactions and our cognitive reactions, such as pleasure or pain.Let me go a little bit further into this

10、component.So our bodily reactions could consist of our heart rate, how fast or slow we breath, the temperature of our skin, whether we have butterflies in our belly or not.Those are the types of bodily sensations we can experience that are attached to an emotion.So emotions carry that bodily reactio

11、n. They also have an aspect of the mind, which we call our cognitive reaction, such as thoughts or images that come along with this reaction to a real or perceived environmental input.The second component is that emotions are in response to a real or imagined event or object.And are designed to give

12、 us information about those real or imagined events or objects. So it tells us or communicates something to us about our environment or about something were anticipating in the future or reflecting on in our past.The last component of emotion that defines it is emotions fundamentally motivate us to

13、take certain types of behaviors or actions.And emotions serve a vital motivational component.They essentially up the ante to behave in a certain way.And were going to see how different types of emotions actually motivate or compel us to behave in different ways.In many ways emotions get a bad rap be

14、cause we stay really focused on kind of emotions that produce discomfort, pain, or suffering.But really, emotions are essential to being a human and performing well in life, and ultimately getting the most out of life.So they serve several different useful purposes.First, as I mentioned earlier, the

15、y energize and motivate us to perform.Feelings can serve kind of as an internal judicial system in certain ways.For example, if you feel wronged and are upset, they compel you to act and defend yourself.Hopefully in good ways.So they result in asserting oneself.Emotions also can energize us in a ver

16、y positive manner such as if youre happy or youre really excited, they actually cause us to engage in certain behaviors that feel good, that cause us to reflect on life as being really satisfying.We also mentioned how emotions give us feedback about our environment.They communicate to us.For example

17、, the easiest way to think about it is a lot of emotions communicate threat. Theres a reason why we experience anger.Anger helps us to defend ourselves.So if we feel angry, were having that bodily reaction, and we have thoughts of anger, they often compel us to defend ourselves in many ways in justi

18、fied ways.But well also learn how that anger could also get the best of us.There also important for memory and learning.Things that carry emotional weight to them are more likely to be recalled at a later time point.The quintessential aspect of this is whats called flashbulb memories.When something

19、really emotionally intense happens, someone is likely to be able to remember that event with such intense detail at a later time point, a year, five years, a decade later, given how emotional tense the situation is.On a more subtle level, its really important to think about if we want to learn thing

20、s and remember them, there has to be an element of emotion that we bring to the fore in order to retain the information.If theres not much emotional weight to the subject matter, thats when learning is at its lowest.Last, think about, emotions add flavor to our life.If we didnt experience emotions,

21、reflect just one moment what life would be like.Youd experience kind of a numbness.You would go through life without any type of up or down.Now, what we need to do is figure out how to spend more time up and prevent how much time we actually spend down.And thats what were going to go into next is di

22、scussing different types of emotions. In a very simple way, emotions can be classified as either negative or positive. Negative emotions are those that accompany somewhat unpleasant or aversive experience.So your body, the sensations in your body are somewhat unpleasant.The images or thoughts that a

23、re coming to your mind are somewhat unpleasant. What that element of unpleasantness produces is it restricts our attention and ultimately narrows our behavior.So we often think about negative emotions as narrowing our attention and our behavior. The easiest way to think about this is the negative em

24、otion of anxiety.Anxiety is an element of feeling uncomfortable.And what we focus and narrow our attention on is that which is producing the anxiety. So imagine if youre stressed about finances and its causing you to be really anxious, youre really narrowing your focus to actually solve that issue a

25、t hand.So negative emotions can be useful in the sense of causing us to really hone in and focus on something to solve it.Think about anger.Anger is a negative emotion and it causes us to narrow our attention and ultimately narrow the types of actions were going to engage in.And that is to protect o

26、ur self or defend our self.If something is causing us to feel angry, what is that?Were going to focus on what is causing us to be angry and were going to try to make it stop.Or were going to try to just get out of the situation entirely.So we can see how negative emotions actually narrow or restrict

27、 our attention, and ultimately limit the types of behaviors or actions well take.Positive emotions, if negative emotions serve the purposes of narrowing, then positive emotions serve the purpose of broadening our attention and broadening our behaviors. So we can think about a positive emotions such

28、as joy leads to greater play or partying. Pride for example, broadens our perspective, gives us greater confidence, and were more likely to commit to taking on additional things.Interest is a positive emotional experience.When youre highly interested in something, it causes us to explore, which is a

29、 broadening of the repertory actions were likely to take on.So we can kind of see that theres value to both negative emotions and positive emotions.Negative emotions narrow and restrict our attention in our behaviors.Whereas positive emotions broaden both our attention, what we attend to in our envi

30、ronments, and ultimately our behaviors.+Video: Lesson 5-2 What are Emotions Part 2 (7:52)SPEAKER Clay Co:okEach one of us experiences emotions.Emotions have a lot of range to them.They can range from being very subtle to actually ranging to be impairing and disordering to us.For example, everybody e

31、xperiences and society.In a lot of situations, anxiety is justified.Its a normal fear in response to life.Whereas a panic attack or absolutely freaking out is when anxiety becomes too intense. So we think about emotions ranging from normal to impairing.We all experience emotions.Im sure youve experi

32、enced anger before, but has that anger led you to grabbing a baseball bat and actually bashing in the window of someone elses home or car?So we can all experience anger, but sometimes anger become so intense it results in highly problematic behaviors.We all experience sadness.Youre going to experien

33、ce it in life multiple times.But does sadness reach its level of depression?And often when sadness becomes too intense, someone can be called clinically depressed.That means they have a really negative, saddened outlook about life.Even happiness can range from what is actually normal levels of happi

34、ness to very exaggerated, impairing levels of happiness.This is what we call, in a clinical sense, mania or a manic episode.Where someone is so happy and excited that they cant even get sleep.And they engage in certain behaviors that are problematic in terms of risk taking behaviors.So its important

35、 to understand the emotions in terms of their range, or a continuum they fall on that start with normal reactions to impairing reactions.Our goal is to manage your emotions, so they dont reach that level of being impairing to us and causing problems.Ultimately, compromising our resilien.ceThe reason

36、 why we would need to manage intense emotions is they can really make us stupid.Weve talked about in previous lessons about the brain and our response.So we have the limbic system here.We have our frontal cortex.These two do communicate with each other, but when emotions get really intense, we can b

37、low our lid, and we actually lose our ability to engage in rational, logical thinking. Think for a moment why the character Spock on Star Trek is so appealing to people. Who would they go to for good decisions?Why would they go to Spock?And when we look at that character, whats interesting about him

38、, he allegedly didnt experience intense emotion.So we he can maintain good, rational, logical thinking to solve problems.This is where emotions really contaminate our ability to think clearly and make good decisions.And the way I like to think about it is people do really regrettable things under th

39、e influence of intense negative emotions.If you happen to drive your car, think about the concept of road rage for a moment.We all behave in certain ways that we later regret when we get upset while driving. Someone cuts you off or does something you dont like.You might say a few choice words.You mi

40、ght actually gesture at them in an aggressive manner.And when you calm down you, you reflect on that and go why did I even do that?Thats how negative emotions work.Im sure if youve had a friendship or an intimate relationship with a partner, youve said or done something when you were upset that you

41、later regretted and realized you could have handled yourself differently.This is the impact of really intense negative emotions.They cause us to behave in ways that are self defeating, make the situation worse for ourselves and others.Its important to do a self-assessment of our emotional reactions

42、and whether they actually fit particular situations.So were going to go over a couple of examples that highlight an assessment of whether an emotion actually fits the situation.The first thing I want you to consider is a woman who may be grieving in response to the death of a loved one.Is it normal

43、for someone to be saddened and cry in response to the loss of a loved one? Obviously its a normal reaction to feel saddened.This isnt a situation in which wed someone to exert emotion management and control. Thats a normal reaction to a situation.However, lets fast for two years ahead and imagine th

44、at the woman has lost her job, no longer goes out with friends or family, and make statements such as theres no reason to keep on going.Because shes still saddened and grieving the loss of that loved one.We can easily see in the latter situation how emotional reactions dont necessarily fit the situa

45、tion.Lets imagine another scenario.And this one involves a young child with dogs.In the first scenario, theres a big ferocious dog trying to attack a child.Would it be a normal reaction, fear reaction, for the child to scream and try to flee the situation?Thats completely normal.Now lets imagine tha

46、t the child goes to different places and, even if theres a nice, cute, cuddly puppy, the child will freak out and want to flee the situation.It gets so bad that the parents cant even take the child anyplace where there might be a dog because the child becomes so upset.As you can see in the second pa

47、rt of this, that the emotion no longer fits the situation. And thats when theres a need to actually manage that intense negative emotion. Lets take one more example here.Imagine I sneezed in my hand, and you happen to be with me here.And I went to shake your hand.And you were thinking man thats pret

48、ty disgusting, but just to be out of social reciprocity, you extend your hand and you go ahead and shake it.Would it be a normal reaction to feel kind of disgusted and be thinking about man I need to wash my hands so I dont get germs?Thats a normal reaction to that situation.And so you feel disguste

49、d, and you want to clean yourself.What would be an abnormal reaction is if you felt disgust, you went to the bathroom, scrubbed your hand and were so anxious that you would catch some type of germ or disease that you had to re wash your hands and re wash your hands over, and over, and over, Such tha

50、t you stayed in the bathroom for over 30 minutes.There are people who get so worked up emotionally when situations like that happen that they obsessively do things over, and over, and over, until they feel like theyve actually rid themselves of that.So its important here.Video: Lesson 5 3 Managing N

51、egative Emotions Part 1 (7:15)SPEAKER Clay Co:okWere now going to focus on how to manage intense negative emotions.Weve all had experiences in which, in the heat of the moment, we did something we really regretted later.Our reaction flew out of the gate without any ability to catch it or stop it bef

52、ore it came out.Our reaction not only surprised us, but others around.And we end up saying things like how could Ive done that.What was I thinking?Well in reality, you werent really thinking.You were actually overwhelmed with an emotional reaction.You were actually hijacked by your amygdala.Our amyg

53、dala is that kind of emotional epicenter in the brain thats part of the limbic system.An amygdala hijack is a term coined to describe the process of losing rational, logical thinking when becoming emotionally upset.And as Dan Siegel says, you actually blow your lid.The amygdala takes over and domina

54、tes our thinking and behavior.Remember when its a negative emotion, it really narrows our attention and ultimately narrows our behaviors.So we often dont engage in the most effective response to the situation.We do the one that we feel most compelled by our emotions to engage in, which is later some

55、thing we regret.A more technical way of thinking about the amygdala hijack is called emotional dysregulation.And this refers to a persons inability to control or regulate their emotional responses to certain situations.We all have our buttons, our hot issues that cause us to become emotionally upset

56、, but someone whos emotionally dysregulated is often experiencing a crisis.A crisis is when someone experiences a very serious problem, but the solution isnt readily coming to mind.So emotions are so high and distressing in crisis situations, that someone actually has a tendency to engage in behavio

57、rs or saying things that actually makes the situation worse in the long run.So part of becoming an emotionally resilient person is to develop regulatory skills. Those are those things you can do to manage intense negative emotions.In response to those situations that have previously gotten the best

58、of you.I want to go over a couple of metaphors that help to understand why we need to manage intense negative emotions.And the first is called the rock slide metaphor.So lets imagine your sole task in life is to manage rock slides, and you have one of two options you could take in your attempt to manage the rock slide.The first is to be way up on the hill or the mountain, and as the rock slide has its first few pebbles, your goal is to stop it right