Mush Brain: What To Do About It by Susan Dunn, MA, Emotional Intelligence Coach
You’re frustrated, hurt, betrayed, scared, desperate, or desperately in love and there you sit, stand, walk or stomp around, with nothing “intelligent” coming out of your mouth.
Maybe you cry, maybe you lash out, maybe you stammer, maybe you pout or roll your eyes in disgust, maybe you sit, moony-eyed and tongue-tied or say exactly what you meant not to say, and through it all you realize nothing you’re doing is helping anything. Where is your brain when you need it the most?
When we’re under strong emotions, our brains turn to mush. What is going on?
Why This Happens
What happens is we’re under threat. That’s how our primitive brain is taking it anyway, the one that’s there to preserve us in the short-term, and is not thinking about things in the long-term. Our thinking brain (neocortex) has been disabled.
When emotions surge, out reptilian, or primitive brain, has taken over. This brings with it physiological responses that affect us – your head is pounding, your pulse is raising, your blood pressure goes up, you have trouble breathing and your stomach is in knots. Your body is on full alert to protect you from a threat. It doesn’t want you to think, it wants you to act – fight or flight. And the reason you’re feeling this way is you fear the same things are going to happen to you – you’ll either be abandoned or attacked.
What You Can Do
What can you do when you’re in this state? Well, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. These emotional states are part of life. We welcome the positive states, and dislike the negatives states, and both are going to happen. Polishing up on your emotional intelligence competencies can help you understand these states better and deal with them more constructively.
Your thinking brain is still around, if you can learn how to access it. You’re probably familiar with such recommended techniques as taking a deep breath and counting to 10, or taking a time-out, or self-soothing techniques. And if you’re like me, at the time these pressured-events occur, being told to take a deep breath is like being told to take a warm bath when you’ve just lost your job. It doesn’t work for you unless the groundwork has been laid.
What Else Can You Do?
Work on this proactively. When you understand better your own feelings and how they work, and how to express them appropriately (because not all of them need be expressed), you’re prepared.
Emotional Intelligence starts with self-awareness. Start by getting in touch with your own feelings. Check in with yourself several times a day. This is not the “How are you?” “Fine,” sort of interchange. Ask yourself how you are feeling emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually. Then answer yourself!
You’re Angry … and What Else?
Start with angry, which is an onion of many layers of feelings. Learn how to sort through them. When you remember to add in your physical state, for instance, you may find that one of the major components of your anger at the time is that you’re exhausted, or it’s 90 degrees in the room and you’re sweltering, or you haven’t eaten in 6 hours and you’re hungry – looking for kill!
So, while you do feel angry, there’s a huge component there that’s related to your internal state. Another day, another time you’d be far less angered.
Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is the cornerstone of Emotional Intelligence. Without it, you can’t understand other people. Learning how you work, and why, allows you to perceive how this might be operating in other people. This is important because they, like you, have trouble expressing their emotions.
While the other party may not be perceptive enough to acknowledge they’re having a bad day, or are too tired to communicate well or connect, or may not want to admit this, considering it either a weakness or irrelevant, you’ll have the information. This allows you to avoid provoking someone in such a state, to save your discussion for a better time, to soothe the other person, or to avoid them at this time.
Empathy
When you know your own feelings well, and how they’re expressed, you can more quickly pick up on what’s going on with others.
Our emotions guide us if we pay attention to them. From our emotions we learn what’s good and what’s bad, what we want to be around and what we don’t, what’s going to feel good and what isn’t.
Emotions are also contagious. Self-awareness and empathy allow us to keep good boundaries. When you can sense the other person’s brain has turned to mush, or is about to, then you have good information!
How can you tell? The same way you’ve learned to tell what’s going on with yourself. When we get angry, there are usually visible external signs. The same as go on with you. A flushing face, pounding fist, tapping fingers, bouncing leg, crossed arms, pouting face, eyes turned to slits. Know your own and you’ll recognize them in others.
There are many nonverbal signals to any emotional state that you can become more aware of. 90% of all communication is nonverbal, and the emotions are expressed more compellingly through nonverbal means. That’s because they are less under out control.
Even the most controlled person will have trouble controlling the expansion or contraction of their pupils, and certain other physical manifestations of emotions can’t be controlled at all.
We generally don’t make mindful choices about gestures and expression, because we’re too busy talking to notice or care.
However, we can learn to read them in others, and generally we do. This is how we come to know our loved ones so well, and know what that tilt of the head means, that little smile, that certain hand gesture.
To Connect, Not to Manipulate
Learning to understand other people better is about learning to communicate, cooperate, and connect. We’re all after something in our interchanges. At work, for instance, we may be working on a joint project that needs to happen. With good boundaries on both sides, we can suggest and influence, understand ourselves and others better, and accomplish more positive outcomes.
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