This is the second in a five-part series on Joy. We both read a little book by Dr Marcus Warner and Chris Coursey: The 4 Habits of Joy-Filled People: 15 Minute Brain Science Hacks to a More Connected and Satisfying Life. And thought it would be great to share with our listeners.
I (Renee) wish I had this information when I was raising my kids!
Many of us are walking around with an inner world of fear. A fear house. And those of you listening who have a fear relationship with your parents or your employer or with God, know that it is not sufficient to create a life that is rich and full.
If you missed the introductory episode, we recommend that you go back and listen to it because it lays a foundation for all the future episodes. As a reminder, we said in that episode that in Western cultures we tend to see joy as a choice. But joy happens predominantly in the relational right hemisphere of the brain, while choices and cognition happen in the left.
This is significant, because the data flow in the brain moves from right to left, not the other way around. Right brain activity informs left brain activity, not the reverse.
Joy is primarily a relational experience that is more like a reflex anchored in the relational part of our brain. so our choices can help us move toward Joy. we can choose to visit a friend who lights up to see us. we can choose to dwell on memories of relational joy. We can choose to spend time quieting and appreciating the good things in life. At the time of birth the part of the brain that grows with the experience of joy is barely developed. how well it develops and grows is largely influenced by relational activity. These essential skills can be developed before we are even old enough to speak. and we can develop them all throughout our lives no matter our childhood experiences.
There are four habits you’ll need to build your joy house, the authors use the acronym CASA, which means “house” in Spanish.
C – Calming
A – Appreciating
S – Storytelling
A – Attacking Toxic Thoughts
Today, we are talking about CALMING.
There are tools and tips for quieting your body when it feels out of control. this is where the foundation of the house is laid. and calming isn’t simply a choice. it does no good to tell someone to just calm down. sometimes we can quiet ourselves and sometimes we need help and there are strategies for calming yourself when you are alone but sometimes having other people around makes the world of difference. our emotions can be very physical, so much of what we mean when we say we need to calm ourselves is that we need to quiet our bodies.
Our body is the canvas for the brain, so noticing and quieting our body helps us reduce tension everywhere.
There are four best practices for quieting your body and calming your emotions. Right up front the author’s note that calming or quieting doesn’t mean making an emotion disappear. It means reducing it to the point that it is manageable. these four practices can be remembered with the word BEST. As in, this is a list of best practices for calming emotions.
B – Breathe in a box
E – Exaggerate the Emotion
S – Soothe your senses
T – Tell yourself the truth
B – Breathe in a Box
This practice, also called Foursquare or resetting your breath breathing, is it common strategy taught in the military for dealing with pressure situations. one of the first physical reactions we have to overwhelming emotions is that our breathing becomes shallow. we may even hold our breath when we become stressed, anxious, or upset.
taking deep breaths helps us regain control of our bodies and helps us quiet our emotions. deep breathing activates the brakes of our nervous system so we can shift out of high energy fear responses to low energy rest states. for box breathing, we simply empty our lungs, and hail through our nose to the count of four, hold our breath to a count of four, then exhale to the count of four, and hold to the count of four. we can do this several times and increase or decrease the count as needed you might try breathing in a box two or three times right now and see how it makes you feel.
Do this for the listeners…
E – Exaggerate the Emotion
Exaggerating the motion and quieting it is like removing the tension from muscles by bracing and then relaxing. when we say to exaggerate the emotion, we are specifically referring to the physical reaction that the emotion creates. here are a few examples.
Fear– when babies under 2 months old feel fear, they have an involuntary reaction in which they gasped and throw their hands over their heads. this is called the startle reflex. building on this instinctive response to fear, Dr Wilder developed an exercise called Shalom your body. it works like this. find a private place to go because this will look strange in public! throw your hands over your head and gasp as you quickly breathe in then slowly breathe out as you lower your arms and clasp your hands at your chest or waist you can do this three or four times. this exercise is designed to calm your fear response which will help you get control over the anxious feelings in your body.
Renee: I learned this in a women’s energy book by Donna Eden. They call it “releasing the venom.” And it works! I visualize throwing all my emotions and even the situation or people up to God as I take a deep in-breath and throw my arms, hands clenched in fists, up in a circle to the heavens. Then I expel my breath really forcefully as I throw my arms down to the earth. When I feel like I’m running out of steam, then I throw my arms up one more time and slowly lower them, as I visualize myself pulling the peace of God into my body.
Anger – Most of us are familiar with the Hulk pose made famous by the Rockstar of the Avengers movies, when he would clinch his fist in front of his body and flex his biceps, while scaling and grunting and anger. the Hebrew word for anger is actually the same word used for nose, which is a good reminder that people people often flare their nostrils when they get angry. a good way to exaggerate the feeling of anger is to find a private place and build the help close and flare your nostrils. I can also help to bring a towel or something like that. the goal is to get the energy of the emotion to Peak so it can begin to quiet. after increasing the energy in this way, takes several deep breaths and refocus on the task at hand.
shame – the feeling of Shame triggers the biggest nerve Network in the back of our neck so that we instinctively drop our heads. this is why encouraging someone can sometimes be referred to as lifting their head. it is a sign that you are not ashamed of them and want to help them feel like themselves again when we feel shame we can follow a similar process to the one who described above. hang your head and feel the same. then lift your head and inhale deeply. repeat this process a few times.
S – Soothe Your Senses
This practice is about doing something to change your environment or your body chemistry. sometimes it helps to shock your system like taking a cold shower or splashing cold water on your face. other times we need to comfort ourselves by snuggling in a chair with a weighted blanket or taking a hot bath. the idea is to do something physical to get control of your body’s response to your emotions. you can rub your arms from top to bottom as if you’re wiping the tension out of them. you can use your right hand to rub your left shoulder and your left hand to rub your right shoulder. you can move your eyes from side to side while keeping your head perfectly still. look up. look down. looks side to side. this helps distract your brain from your upsetting thoughts.
it is probably worth noting that many addictions start by trying to find ways to soothe their upset emotions and relieve tension from our bodies. we drink alcohol, watch p***, take drugs, and way too much ice cream and an attempt to soothe our bodies from the upset emotions we feel. of course, there are many unwanted side effects to such addictions, which is why learning these best practices is an important part of an addiction recovery as well as managing our everyday emotions.
T – Tell Yourself the Truth
negative emotions are not our enemies. they serve an important purpose. they serve as an alarm to alert us that something needs our Attention our problems arise when they are triggered by false beliefs or when we cannot quiet them. our brain has two engines for our emotions: our thought life and our reactions to the environment. telling yourself the truth focuses on the cognitive engine on the left side of the brain that ties and narrative to our negative emotions. there’s a lot more to say about telling yourself the truth when we come to the fourth habit of joy-filled people attacking toxic thinking. for now, it is helpful to understand that part of calming ourselves from upsetting emotions involves dealing with some of the destructive thoughts that often accompany our troubling emotions.
it is important to know that it is very difficult to think your way out of any emotion. generally we just dig ourselves into a deeper pit because our minds get stuck in the fact that we are in such a big battle. it can also be helpful to realize that it is okay to distract ourselves from negative thoughts. we don’t always have to defeat them or play tug of war with them. sometimes just distracting ourselves and shifting our attention from the battle so that we think about something else is enough to break the tension and stop the downward spiral. for long-term success however we are going to need to learn how to reprogram the faulty thinking patterns that accompany our troubling emotions. attacking toxic thinking, have it for, we’ll focus on how to do that.
for now we’ll just give you a simple strategy that can help you tell yourself the truth as you quiet upsetting emotions. for you children of the 80s it’s VCR – validate, comfort, recover.
V – Validate
validate – tell yourself the truth about how you were feeling. give it a name. identify how big it is.
give examples.
C – Comfort
tell yourself the truth about how to handle your emotion and ask what do I need when I feel this way?
give examples.
R – Recover
this is not so much a step in the process as a sign that the process has worked. I no longer feel overwhelmed but can remain relational and act like myself despite how I feel.
See pp 59 and following for other ideas:
Have a plan. Hope is defined as having a plan.
Interactive Quieting. With kids. Kneel to their level. Match their energy levels. Attune wth them to help them calm down.
Nurture a rhythm. We all need times of high-energy joy and low-energy rest. Pay attention to your calendar.