Kate's Nuggets

4 Tools for Emotional Control in a Crisis
Episode 29

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:
Hi there. Today I want to give you four tools for emotional control during a crisis.

These are specifically geared for when a big challenge comes up suddenly and your body interprets it as a threat. You may find that you want to calm your autonomic nervous system down and reduce some of the physiological my-body's-under-threat kind of responses that you have in order to be able to think clearly and with a little bit of creativity about how to respond. Because if you process your experience through the threat assessment is high state of your body, you tend to have narrow focus and fast reactions that are instinctive and not necessarily the most creative and reflective.

Unless you're in a situation that really requires you to move incredibly fast, most of the time it benefits us as human beings to calm our threat assessment system down. When we calm our threat assessment system down, we relax our vagus nerve and stimulate our parasympathetic nervous system. Our parasympathetic nervous system is what we need to bring online our creativity, our calm, clear thinking. Our prefrontal cortex and cognitive processing goes offline when our body is reacting as though we are under threat.

These are specifically going to the physiological responses and not to cognitive control of your emotions or what you might think of as emotional self-regulation skills. The reason for this is of course that emotions are physiologically experienced and if we change the sensory experience of our bodies, we change our emotional experience and we give our cognitive processing different information in terms of figuring out whether we're under threat or not.

When a sudden challenge arrives in our lives, most of us compartmentalize our emotions, act out, or freeze. If we compartmentalize our feelings and deal with the crisis without feeling our feelings, we can maintain a level of control that allows us to handle the crisis.

We will eventually need to release the emotions provoked by the situation or they will become frozen in our bodies and have a negative impact on our future flexibility and adaptability, but we will at least get through the present moment. If we act out our freeze, however, we may not even be able to successfully navigate the current situation without making things worse.

The tools that I offer here are especially helpful in calming the emotional storm for people who tend to act out or freeze. If you tend to compartmentalize, you may not feel like you need these tools but you might find that some of them help you save post-event processing time later.

These tools go directly to the physiology of stress. The first tool is one that may strike you as a little odd. One of the things that happens under stress is often that our bodies heat up. We may find ourselves actually getting hot, physiologically hot, and in this case we can use an ice pack or cold water applied to our skin to cool the body down. This counters the heating up. This is literally chilling out. We have all sorts of metaphors, anger being hot under the collar. This is actually physiological warmth, so you might want to try actually splashing cold water on your face or putting an ice pack across the back of your shoulders or on your forehead to cool your body down.

Second, under threat our body produces adrenaline. Adrenaline is a source of energy and when we have adrenaline coursing through our body, our bodies are driven to act and to act fast. So if we want to slow down our reaction cycle so that we can actually do a little bit of thinking, we need to do something with the energy that has been released by the adrenaline.

So, some physical exertion, going for a quick run if you have time, or some jumping jacks or push-ups or sit-ups. Or if you're not particularly strong, one thing that you can do is you can stand a few feet away from a wall and put your palms up against the wall like you were going to do a push-up against the wall, and push hard against the wall to use up some of that energy that has been released.

Thirdly, when we're under the pressure of a challenge, our breathing speeds up. Our body generates this desire for more neurotransmitters flowing through our blood more quickly so that everything gets the message that it's time to jump into action, or freeze all at once. Slowing down our breathing can be very powerful in helping us regain emotional control. I do not suggest that you just pay attention to and notice your breathing. That can actually reinforce anxiety, it can reinforce the stress response, and it can become a cycle that increases the emotional distress. Instead, I recommend box breathing.

Box breathing actually gives you something that you do with your breathing that exerts control, using some of that adrenaline, and you use your intention to slow your breathing down. To start box breathing, you want to exhale fully. Take a long exhale that clears your lungs of all the air in them. At the end of the exhale, when there's nothing in your lungs, inhale slowly to the count of four. Hold your breath for the same slow count of four. Exhale slowly for the slow count of four, and hold your breath out for a slow count of four. Do that inhale, hold, exhale, hold, each step for a slow count of four. Do the full cycle four times.

This slowing down and holding your breath actually allows carbon dioxide to build up in your blood, and this blood carbon dioxide inhibits the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve, when it's stimulated is what causes the fight, flight, freeze response. So by calming your vagus nerve, you engage the part of your brain that's more creative and flexible.

Finally, I'm going to offer you our resource to combat the tendency for us to lose contact with our bodies completely when we are under stress. One of the things that happens when we are under a challenge is that our body releases natural opioids. This is the foundation of the dissociation that at its extreme happens in post-traumatic stress disorder. But it happens in small ways when we are stressed generally.

This is incredibly useful if for instance you are severely injured, something that would hurt tremendously, and you are still alive and at risk by having this opioid release, by not feeling what you feel in your body, by actually going numb in your body and not being present, you stop feeling the pain and you can get out of the situation until you get somewhere where you are safe enough to collapse, where you've gotten help.

So a simple way to get back into your body is to touch your skin with your skin and feel in detail the sensations of that touch. You can do this in several ways. You can rub your fingers across an exposed piece of skin. That can be an exposed piece of skin on the other hand, on an elbow, on your legs if you're wearing shorts, on your feet, on your face, on your ears, even just rubbing your fingertips together. If you have difficulty feeling the sensation of just rubbing your fingers lightly, you can tap or rub your body a little bit harder. The idea is just to feel with your body from the outside another part of your body.

The thing about when we touch ourselves with our hands is that we actually double up on that sensation, because our hand is feeling the sensation and the part of our body that we're touching is feeling the sensation. And so it does double duty for helping us feel where the edges of our body are, where we are in space, and it brings us in a very real way into contact with our body.

So these four tools are quick and simple, and when you are in a crisis or you've had a crisis, you've dealt with a crisis and you're still amped up, revved up, and you want to release that, these four tools are useful.

Once again, physiologically cooling your body down with water or an ice pack. You could even use a fan, something to physiologically cool yourself down. Some way of physically using the energy that has been released by the adrenaline. Box breathing, inhale for a count of four, hold for four, exhale for a count of four, hold the breath out for four. Let those be four slow counts. And then finally, using your hands and your sensation of touch to get back into awareness of your own body by touching your body either lightly or with tapping or deep pressure.

I hope these tools are useful for you the next time you find yourself dealing with a crisis or a stressful situation of any sort that comes up in a hurry and gets your body into fight, flight or freeze mode.

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Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.