I have long been a fan of Alain de Botton, the British philosopher who wrote Essays in Love and who offers many compassionate insights into the emotional complexities of relationships and how humans work. These are available through, among other things, a company he founded called The School of Life. I recently signed up for their newsletters and received an extract from The Calm Workbook, a resource they put together to help people deal with anxiety. In it is a section on handling moods.
Moods, the workbook says, are “proud, imperious” things. They manage to convince us that whatever we’re going through right now will last indefinitely, that their version of reality is the truth, and that whatever conclusions we draw from them about our future and our identities are certain and absolute.
Below are a few key insights I highlighted from this section of The Calm Workbook, which I found particularly helpful because they offered me some new perspectives on anxiety. Whereas in my last piece I considered anxiety as fear of the future, in this post I reflect on the ways in which it might in fact derive from the past. Rather than being a “fear of future feelings”, as I put it, perhaps anxiety can be viewed as a way in which our fearful past selves keep up with us.
Insight 1: Moods are impermanent (obvs, but still)
Of course we know this, but when we’re in their grip, we forget. I marvel at how I can shift from catatonic misery to carefree joy within a single day. It is possible, amazingly, to maintain a part of ourselves that can keep perspective of the transience of whatever feelings we’re having, and even call their bluff (or as the book puts it, “politely ignore them and change the subject”). This does not mean, however, that we shouldn’t seek to understand where they come from, and empathise with ourselves for experiencing them.
Which leads to the next point:
Insight 2: We shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves for being sensitive.
To paraphrase the workbook, we can’t expect ourselves to be able to appreciate the subtleties of, for example, a great work of art, and then not get affected by the accumulation of what seem like tiny upsets in our daily lives.
But several things make this challenging. First, we’re often completely unaware of what it is that’s affecting us. We might leave the house in a state of hurried desperation and curse at other drivers, despite not being late for anything, and then step back and wonder whether we were set off by that micro-expression on our partner’s face after we asked them to help with chores, or by something we read online, or by that third cup of coffee. An ongoing curiosity of mine is the balance between the physical (where my energy levels are at, whether I have indeed had too much caffeine or too few calories) and the mental (what preoccupations are triggering certain emotions, and/or what I’m telling myself about my present state).
The second problem is that it’s hard not to judge oneself for having emotions when you consider how bad the “branding” of emotionality is in general, and certain emotions in particular. Here I recall something mentioned in a podcast interview between Brené Brown and Emotional Agility author Susan David. They were discussing having noticed a banner at a Trump supporter rally, which read “F**k your feelings”, and it bemused them because this was so obviously an emotive statement. The irony points to a critical observation, which is that anger is often not thought of as a feeling. Or rather, anger is an emotional response that is generally more acceptable for men to have, and because archetypal men are not supposed to have emotions, or at least not certain ones, it must be something else. Uncoincidentally, when you hear the word “emotional”, or “over-sensitive”, you are probably more likely to associate it with crying than shouting – and, I think, with a woman rather than a man.
The point of this sidebar is that there are differences in how emotional behaviour is interpreted and labelled, depending on who is displaying it. This results in very different types of social feedback which, I believe, must also lead to differences in how we process and label our own emotions as we’re having them, and the degree to which we feel they are “acceptable”. The bigger point, as we relate all this back to our main topic, is that much of our emotional state is surely about judging ourselves for feeling the way we do, or generally for being “so damn sensitive”.
Insight 3: Moods are a product of the past
This jumped out at me in particular as one of those things that are obvious and therefore easiest to forget. Because of the anticipatory nature of anxiety, it is easy to assume that the locus of one’s fear or angst is the future. But our anxious responses are, like most of our other emotional responses, the product of prior conditioning. And forgetting is the very thing that makes conditioned behaviour so efficient.
When I mentioned this idea to a psychologist friend, she brought up a useful related term: procedural learning. This is an implicit form of learning that involves acquiring behaviours through repetition – as compared to declarative learning and memory, which involves consciously learning and recalling facts and information. Think about a complex task like driving a car: once you’ve learned how to change gears and have practised it often enough, you can do it without thinking.
Procedural learning applies to the tasks and behaviours we perform repeatedly, but it might also apply to our habitual responses to certain stimuli. External stimuli or social cues then become a trigger for automatic reactions (such as reflexively laughing at a joke before our brain has registered its full meaning, because that is what people do when they are told a joke) and feelings (such as getting anxious when we see something that we associate with a traumatic or upsetting incident that happened in the past).
If our moods can be learned, and can become habitual or automatic, anxiety might in some instances be something of a pre-programmed response. It might become a default response, a sort of modus operandi, or even an unconscious coping strategy. This is not to say that our moods are all our own fault; neither is it to say that they are entirely out of our control. From a very broad perspective, one could say that they are a product of our entire genetic, social, and cultural inheritance, as well as our personal history and habits. But importantly, if we can recognise that our moods are, to some extent, based on a previous version of reality that may no longer be true or relevant, we can realise that our operating system is essentially out of date.
As The Calm Workbook puts it: “Our moods are far more about a past we still need fully to mourn than a future there is any reason to dread.” “Mourning”, I would think, in the fullest sense means acknowledging that our learned behaviours did serve a purpose within the context in which they originated. As de Botton writes elsewhere, “There is always a logic and there is always a history.” In a way, we can ask ourselves how we might use our own history as useful insight into how we (often misguidedly) navigate the present. We might then be able to understand the triggers for our programmed responses, as a necessary step towards unlearning them.
Photo by Namroud Gorguis on Unsplash
There is one final key element to how the book describes moods, and particularly how they present themselves to us: through voices.
Insight 4: Moods talk to us (or perhaps we talk ourselves into them)
The Calm Workbook says: “We should learn to historicise such voices and differentiate them from a trustworthy verdict on the present.”
What are these voices? As I interpret it, our moods – as well as, I think, our habitual ways of responding to the world in general – seem to operate through, or be mediated by, internal dialogue. I first got a hint at this when I began to wonder how much of my own anxiety results not from being overwhelmed by options, decisions, dilemmas, or threats (both real and imaginary), but by being overwhelmed by how I talk to myself about all these things.
Anyone with a human brain is likely to have observed that, alongside everything we do and everything that happens to us, there is usually a kind of inside commentary running in parallel. By inside, I mean inside your head. Some of this commentary is useful, serving as a kind of performance aid – for example, it might be helping you keep track of the steps of a process you are still learning (“Ok, we’ve switched on the indicators. Next, check the mirrors and blind spots…”), or giving you affirmation (“Great job, you can do this…”). Much of it is random, especially when our brains are on standby mode (“Hey, remember that funny ad we watched in 1995? How did that jingle go?…”).
Some of it, for me, seems to create a kind of “reality latency”: it adds an extra layer to our direct experience, and can often distract us (for example, when we mentally replay and second-guess something we have just said to someone, instead of listening to their response).
And, as mentioned earlier, much of our inner commentary consists of self-judgement around what we are doing, what we are feeling and what it might all mean – both about what will happen next, and about who we are. What my hypothesis basically boils down to is that your self-talk puts you in bad mood, rather than what happens to you. Or at least it might keep you there. It must be said that, if nothing else, we are remarkably self-sufficient creatures.
Where does the self-talk come from? This is not the spontaneous commentary of an untrained observer who’s just stepped in for the day – more often than not, it presents itself as the voice of experience, of authority. Someone with a history.
Our inner voices may essentially be understood as relics of the past, which we carry with us, largely unaware of the extent to which they influence or even dictate our present state. But they might also offer us useful clues towards identifying the origins of our automatic responses – if we can first learn to recognise what those voices sound like.
All & None of the Above 