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HOW TO ACHIEVE EMOTIONAL CONTROL
By Psycholex
INTRODUCTION
In this report, I will present some of the most powerful ways to gain control over your own emotions. For most of us, our emotions seem to take over automatically,influencing how we think and how we behave, and consequently, how we conduct our lives. You can vastly increase your personal power by imposing more and moreconscious control over your emotional states. Furthermore, your personal power tendsto decrease to the extent that you indulge in
negative
emotions. Negative emotions,which have a biological usefulness, are largely destructive in modern humans livingin our artificially enhanced environments. I might also add that many of us habituallyabdicate control of our negative emotions without ever realizing that doing soamounts to a tremendous waste of our lives.
OVERVIEW
The following is a brief overview of the main elements of emotional control coveredin this report. By integrating and implementing this material you can profoundlyincrease your control over your own emotions.• Brain physiology. Learning how your brain works is an important aspect of emotional control. Once you realize that emotions are largely an automatic function of the human brain, it is much easier to learn how to begin controlling them. Personalgrowth and evolution is mostly a matter of exerting more control over our reflexes.Reading this report will give you a rudimentary understanding of the physiologicalorigins of emotions.• Inappropriate diet and hormonal imbalances may affect your emotions adversely.• Automatic thoughts. In many instances our negative emotional responses are directly preceded by automatic thoughts. These automatic thoughts remain hidden for most people. Unless you train yourself to look for these thoughts, you will probably beunaware of them. This report contains instructions for learning how to monitor your automatic thoughts.• Identification. When we identify ourselves with our negative emotional states, it isdifficult to control them. By identifying with our negative emotions, we open up the possibility (and likelihood) that we will become dominated by them. Emotionalcontrol is essentially a matter of disidentifying with or detaching ourselves from our negative emotions.• Emotional control techniques and therapies. Freeze-framing is a simple yet powerfultechnique for disengaging from negative emotions. When you freeze-frame, you shiftout of gear and into neutral.Thought field therapy enables you to access the deepest, most fundamental underlyingcause of all negative emotions. Major debilitating emotions such as depression,
anxiety and phobias can be quickly eliminated bycorrecting the problem at the fundamental level.Idenics is a self-development technology which enablesyou to rid yourself of unwanted mental or emotionalconditions.At the end of this report I suggest specific steps for beginning to achieve emotional control.
THE TRIUNE BRAIN
In order to increase your control over your emotions, it is helpful to understandemotions from the viewpoint of a brain specialist. This will help you to understand theorigins of our emotions and why we have them. The advantage of this is the same of any type of self-knowledge: the more you become aware of the mechanical or automatic aspects of yourself, the more you are able to increase your control over them.Although we often refer to our brains as a single, solid unit, it is clear that this is notan accurate description. Rather, our brains consist of a conglomerate of various sub- brains and sections, all interconnected. Dr. Paul D. MacLean, a prominent brainresearcher, has developed a model of brain structure which he calls the "triune brain."In other words, humans have not one brain but three. (Actually, even this is anoversimplification; but this model has the advantage of displaying our evolutionaryheritage.) MacLean states that the human brain "amounts to three interconnected biological computers," with each biocomputer having "its own special intelligence, itsown subjectivity, its own sense of time and space, its own memory, motor, and other functions." Each of the three brains corresponds to a major evolutionary developmentand are categorized as follows: the reptilian brain, the old mammalian brain and thenew mammalian brain. MacLean illustrates this point facetiously when he points outthat when a psychiatrist asks his patient to lie down on the couch, he is asking him tostretch alongside a horse and a crocodile.According to the triune model of the brain, evolution has simply added new sub- brains to preexisting ones like a man who keeps building additional structures onto anold house. However, to continue with the analogy, with each new addition to thehouse the physical structure of the older components were altered or modified to someextent. In other words, the reptile brain in humans is not exactly the same as the brainof a lizard. That is not to say we haven’t retained any reptilian functions in our brains;we most certainly have. MacLean has shown that our reptile brains play a major rolein our aggressive behavior, territoriality, ritual and social hierarchies.In
The Dragons of Eden,
after describing the characteristic behaviors of the reptile brain which I’ve just listed above, Carl Sagan says, "This seems to me to characterizea great deal of modern human bureaucratic and political behavior." Bureaucratic behavior is "controlled at its core" by the reptilian brain, hence we observe coercionand physical violence, territorial and jurisdictional claims, political rituals such as the presidential motorcade, and the social hierarchies for which bureaucraticorganizations are notorious. Sagan does, however, believe there is hope for the human
future since it is within our powers to adjust the relative role each section of the triune brain plays in our lives.We are also highly influenced by our old mammalian brains which, as we will seelater, are capable of a much wider range of emotional response.
The R-Complex
The most ancient of the three brains is called the reptilian brain or the R-complex.(See diagram above.) The R-complex evolved around 200 million years ago.As I’ve mentioned above, the reptilian brain is still influential in humans; in fact, itstill performs in much the same way as it did for our remote ancestors. Much of human behavior can be described in reptilian terms, especially those involvingaggression and territoriality.In addition, the R-complex also influences our emotions. If, as MacLean suggests, our brains are a kind of biological computer, then just like all computers, they are run by programs — instruction codes. Programs can be genetically transmitted or they can beacquired after birth. Furthermore, the older and more primitive a brain, the fewer programs it has to choose from; it also tends to rely almost completely on genetic programs which have been "hard-wired" into the brain. The primitive reptile brain is basically a survival brain, possessing only a few dozen or so ancient programs tochoose from.The emotional responses of the reptile brain are severely limited. Leslie Hart, a writer on brain research, states: "As we look at the three-brain structure of humans, it becomes manifest that, in general,
the old, more primitive schemata and programsand the cruder emotions are in the oldest brain tissue, and that the highly subtle pattern-detecting capabilities are in the newest, the neo-cortex"
[author’s italics]. Inother words, initially, emotions were directly related to basic survival needs. To seewhy this is so, we need to understand the concepts of "homeostasis" and "biasing."The human body has a built-in ability to regulate itself; it maintains the settings of various bodily conditions within certain established parameters. Take, for example, body temperature. We have a kind of thermostat which regulates the temperature of the body, just like we have thermostats attached to the heating and air conditioningsystems in our homes. We have many of these thermostats regulating and adjustingvarious bodily factors.For the most part, the aim of these thermostats is to keep our various bodily systemsin balance — something called "homeostasis." The oldest function of emotions was tochange the bias or setting of our bodily systems. To illustrate this, imagine a rabbitfeeding on some vegetation. In this quiet and calm state, its internal systems are biased at a low setting. Now imagine a fox suddenly shows up. Noticing this, therabbit reacts by abruptly shifting its internal setting. It has rebiased its homeostasissetting to "emergency." This is similar to suddenly moving the thermostat pointer inyour house from 78° to 44° and the heat (or cool air if it’s summertime) starts pouringin. When the rabbit changes over to the emergency setting, the drastic changes invarious bodily systems prepare the animal for immediate action. "This emergencyshift of bias," says Hart, "lies at the heart of what we call emotion."
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