We’re all privy to our emotions. It’s what makes us human. And I am no exception. Like many people that I know, there have been many moments in my life when I’ve been stressed. When I felt forced to make split decisions. When I’m not rational. Only to regret my actions and words down the road. Despite it all, though I have friends and colleagues who have, I’ve never dipped my feet into therapy. Instead, after years of diligence, I found solace in other solutions to navigate through my mental gymnastics:
- Meditation and visualization,
- Exercise/swimming,
- Gratitude journaling,
- And, dream journaling.
Last week, I caught up with a founder who found her initial sanctuary in therapy – a service I have only observed from the periphery. Historically, therapy seems to have carried a negative stigma. If I were to say, “I’m going to see a therapist.”
Many people’s naturally response would be: “What’s wrong?” Subsequently, many people have used therapy and its cousins as a reactive measure, rather than a proactive one. Luckily the conversations around mental health have finally reached the limelight, and people, more talented than I am, are working to change the biases associated with mental health. Although just a comparatively small step, I’m writing this post now to help shed light to an industry that for too long has remained behind stained glass.
The toolkit of skills
“Therapy, just like any other class out there, pairs you with a set of skills to tackle the world.”
So, I asked her, “What was the most impactful skill you learned in therapy that enabled you to better react to the world around you?”
“There’s this process I learned, when in the moment, where I first identify the initial ‘bad’ cause. Then I notice and name all the colors in the room. And after I do so, then I identify the next action I would have taken after the ‘bad’ cause.”
Seeing, my perplexed look over Zoom, she elaborated, “In the beginning, I would count a lot of colors in the room. But over time, I only needed to count less. The reason… so that I could take time to think and react appropriately to situations.”
Just like I was taught to take deep breaths when Joey steals my crayon. Just like meditation isn’t inherently bad or good, it’s merely an exercise you do to channel your thoughts. If you become obsessed with negative thoughts, you will heighten you respective emotions. If you focus on more positive thoughts, you will leave with a happier state of mind.
Counting colors was that for her. And practice makes perfect, as do all skills – be it mental or physical. Our brain is a muscle that’ll only get better the more we stretch, ‘tear’, and put it through the wringer. Although now she’s “graduated” from such exercises, she still practices her mental discipline through other means, like journaling.
In closing
Too often, we regress to our instinctual emotions. The purpose of such exercises is to give time for our mammalian brain to catch up to our reptilian brain. Or, more scientifically put, for our pre-frontal cortex (PFC) to catch up to our amygdala. And in giving them time to level out the playing field, we are able to make a decision where we can minimize our regrets in the post-mortem.
I’m not advocating to throw away your emotions. Personally, on multiple occasions, I have to thank my emotions for the results I was able to achieve – from channeling anger and frustration to keep myself going in the last leg of an open-water race to embracing contentment to inspire me when writing. Emotions can be your strength or your weakness. But hopefully, in honing in the toolkit available to you, you are able to make better judgments at the many crossroads of your life. One of such tools in the toolkit may just be letting the tortoise catch up to the hare, metaphorically-speaking. Or the hare catch up to the tortoise, physiologically-speaking.
Photo by Pietro Mattia on Unsplash
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