You’ve been asking yourself “why do I fly off the handle so quickly?” and you want to know how to stop reacting emotionally, how to stop overreacting. This blog post explores three ways to master your self management.

Self management: what to do when you want to fight or flee

Self management is being aware of and influencing your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors to be able to respond in a situation, rather than following the burn in your chest or the twitch in your hand which is telling you to fight, or the tingling sensation in your foot and the constriction in your breast which is telling you to run. Self management is being able to respond in spite of the emotion, rather than in reaction to it. Self management will help you make informed intentional decisions and free up your energy to put into things that serve you.

If you are reading this, I’d guess you already know why you want to manage yourself, but what you want to know is how to do it. Let’s look at three skills that are critical for mastering the art of self-management.

Awareness

The first self-management skill involves developing your awareness of what’s going on for you. In the most basic sense, awareness is an attention to sensations in the moment. When you become angry, frustrated, apathetic, where do you sense those feelings in your body? Is the anger in your hands or the tips of your ears? Is it a tingling or a piercing sensation? Does the frustration cause you to flush hot or cold? Is the apathy a dull weight in your chest or an absence of sensation?

Where you can’t connect your sensations to your feelings, you are driving blind. I say that because biologically emotions are simply your nervous system sensing your environment and sending you a message. Your brain interprets that message and you get a feeling. If you can’t connect to the messages, it’s like driving with blinders on. How can you make any decisions about whether to brake, accelerate, or turn if you don’t notice any incoming signals?

Emotions are data points that you need to be able to make informed decisions. Otherwise, the emotions are there – you can’t control your autonomic nervous system – but they are invisible to you.

Let’s look at an example – say you burned out, but you don’t consider yourself someone who burns out, so you hide this. You don’t talk about it, but you carry the shame and stigma around with you. It bows your shoulders, it hangs your head, it stops you speaking up, and its insidious voice continually punishes you. Where you can’t sense that, the shame will invisibly direct all of your actions.

The first step to mastering your self management is noticing your sensations, so you can begin to surface the invisibles.

Sensations are only available to us in the moment, so this is something you will practice in real time; which means it will be difficult – patterns that are reinforced by a familiar whole-body emotional experiences will have bone deep roots.

But as Glennon Doyle says, “[you] can do hard things.”

The next time you are upset, find a place to be quiet and turn off your cognitive analyzer for a moment. Just sit quietly and get curious about where the sense of helplessness is showing up. Try to pinpoint as specifically as you can how it feels. Describe the temperature, color, texture, location, and feeling of the sensation.

When you can surface the invisibles, you can begin using the data from these biological messages to inform your decisions. This gives you the power to make intentional decisions that help you, rather than reactive fear-based decisions.

And being aware of the invisibles also gives you the ability to predict your reaction – e.g. you know that when your ears get hot, it means you are angry, so when you start to notice they are warming up, you can decide in advance to take action on behalf of yourself before you fly off the handle.

Distance

In the heat of the moment, you become your feeling. The emotion feels like TRUTH. Nothing is truer than whatever you feel. But, in the same way that being ignorant of your sensations blinds you, falling into your feelings blocks your ability to see the truth. When you are so fused with the feeling that you can’t see anything outside of it, you aren’t able to accurately gauge what’s going on, much less problem-solve in a healthy and positive way.

All of life is relational, you don’t exist in a vacuum, so being able to take into account the context – e.g. other people, cultures, structures, related events – will critically impact your ability to choose to respond in a way that serves you.

Continuing the example above, where you are ashamed and believe that the feeling that you weren’t strong enough or capable enough to endure the situation that you burned out from is true, you won’t be able to get enough distance to accurately judge other contributing variables. You won’t be able to see another perspective – one that might show you as Atlas, lifting the world on your shoulders, because you were carrying an oversized burden.

This perspective might help you realize that your feeling of shame isn’t the truth because no single human could exist in that situation for the duration you did and NOT burn out. If you can’t find the emotional distance, you won’t ever see another angle, a vantage point that helps you see yourself as super strong, rather than not strong enough. Coming from this mindset, you will make assured and confident decisions for yourself. However, coming from a space where you see yourself as not capable enough, you will make decisions to play small.

To increase your ability to step back from your emotions, develop an observer self. Notice you’re your brain is able to do many things at once. How many times have you participated in a meeting while making mental grocery lists, to-do lists, thinking about the fight you had with your partner, as well as what outfit you will wear to dinner?

That you can break your mind into so many separate pieces is a superpower. You just need to learn to harness the power of it. If you can mentally do three things simultaneously, you can see at least that many different perspectives. Get curious about how many angles you can see the next time you feel you are about to fly off the handle. A tip that makes this practice even easier is to think about and talk to yourself in the third person.

Focus/Story

The last time you were angry, did it last 90 seconds? What would you say if I told you, an emotion is a physical sensory “event” that only persists for 90 seconds. Anything beyond that is story. Typically, emotional episodes last a lot longer than 90 seconds. When I blow up at my son, usually my tirade alone takes a full five minutes! Your story, the interpretation that you apply to the emotion, drives the resulting feeling that can last for days, weeks, or years.

We are built to apply story to our physical sensations. Your brain wants to be able to make sense of what your body is feeling as quickly as possible to be able to ensure you can react quickly enough to ensure your survival.

Once you have enough accumulated sensory experiences, your brain, the master magician it is, begins to apply the amalgamated information to sensory input before you even realize what’s going on. If we were still fleeing lions, this would be incredibly useful – you’d start running before you even consciously registered that a smell that indicated danger! In the office or your house, this plays out a bit differently. Your brain applies an interpretation to which you blindly react. And if it’s a familiar story, it’s likely that you haven’t recently asked yourself how true that thought is.

So the third skill that is fundamental to managing yourself is identifying how the story in your head influences your reaction.

Going back to the story of burnout and shame, if you grew up being rewarded for overachieving and punished for not measuring up, if you learned early that you are what you do, your story will have started long before you burned out. Your story will tell you that if you are the type of person that burns out, you are worthless. That story will affect all of your choices before and after the burnout. And the story, which is so familiar, will attract all of your focus.

But why is that story any more true than the story that if you are the type of person that burns out, you are the type of person that dedicated enough energy and passion and persevered long enough to burn out. Seeing yourself as dedicated, energetic, passionate, as someone who kept going when the going got unendurable is an interpretation that helps you see your value and strength. Choosing to focus on that story, puts you in a much better position than your familiar story which shows you as weak and worthless.

Identifying the story and how it’s contributing to that feeling that you react volatilely is no less important than choosing the story that you will focus on. The next time you find yourself reacting, identify the current story and the story you will use to replace the old story. Can you imagine how much free positive energy you will get back if you aren’t putting all of your energy into bearing the negative feeling that has lasted much longer than a minute and a half?

Picture all the energy you lose when you overreact. To get it back, get curious about what you are sensing when that feeling comes up. Use your observer self to detach from your reactivity and ask yourself what the story is. Decide to focus on a story that serves you.

If you want to a partner to work through any of the steps above, schedule a free call on me where we’ll create a tailored plan to get you to where you want to be!

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With gratitude to Sophie Moates for her evocative illustration. Find more here: https://sophiemoatesdesign.tumblr.com/