(Emotional) life is great when we feel enthusiastic, contented, peaceful, happy, interested, loving, etc. But when we’re upset, or aroused to go looking for trouble, life ain’t so great.
To address this problem, let’s turn to a strategy used widely in science (and Buddhism, interestingly). Analyze things into their fundamental elements, such as the quarks and other subatomic particles that form an atom, or the Five Aggregates in Buddhism of form: feeling (the “hedonic tone” of experience as pleasant-neutral-unpleasant), perception, volitional formations, and consciousness.
We’ll apply that strategy to the machinery of getting upset. Here is a summary of the eight major “gears” of that machine – somewhat based on how they unfold in time, though they actually often happen in circular or simultaneous ways, intertwining with and co-determining each other.
The point of this close analysis, this deconstruction, is not intellectual understanding or theory, but increasing your own mindfulness of your experiences, and creating more points of intervention within it to reduce the suffering you cause for yourself – and other people.
This will be more real for you if you first imagine a recent upset or two, and replay it in your mind in slow motion.
Appraisals
-
- What do we focus on? What do we pick out of the larger mosaic?
- What meaning do we give the event? How do we frame it?
- How significant do we make it? (Is it a two on the “Ugh” scale . . . or a ten?)
- What intentions do we attribute to others?
- What are the embedded beliefs about other people? The world? The past? The future? In sum, what views are we attached to? -> Mainly frontal lobe and language circuits of left temporal lobe Self-Referencing.
- Upsets arise within the perspective of “I.”
- What is the sense of “I” that is running at the time? Strong? Weak? Mistreated?
- Are you taking things personally?
- How does the sense of self change over the course of the upset (often intensifying)?
Circuits of “self” are distributed throughout the brain.
Vulnerabilities
We all have vulnerabilities which challenges penetrate through and/or get amplified by (moderated by inner and outer resources).
- Physiological: Pain, fatigue, hunger, lack of sleep, biochemical imbalances, illness
- Temperamental: Anxious, rigid, angry, melancholic, spirited/ADHD
- Psychological: Personality, culture, effects of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.
Depending on its nature, a vulnerability can be embodied or represented in many ways.
Memory
- Stimuli are interpreted in terms of episodic memories of similar experiences.
- And in terms of implicit, emotional memories or other, unconscious associations. (Especially trauma)
- These shade, distort, and amplify stimuli, packaging them with “spin” and sending them off to the rest of the brain.
Hippocampus, with other memory circuits.
Aversion
- The feeling tone of “unpleasant” is in full swing at this point, though present in the previous “gears” of survival reactivity.
- In primitive organisms – and thus the primitive circuits of our own brains – the unpleasant/aversion circuit is more primary than the pleasant/approach circuit since aversion often calls for all the animal’s resources, and approaching does not.
- Aversion can also be a temperamental tendency.
- The Buddha paid much attention to aversion – such as to ill will – in his teachings, because it is so fundamental, and such a source of suffering.
Involves the limbic system, especially the amygdala.
Bodily Activation
- The body energizes to respond; getting upset activates the stress machinery just like getting chased by a lion.
- Sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight).
- Hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.
- All this triggers blood to the large muscles (hit or run), dilates pupils (see better in darkness), cascades cortisol and adrenaline, increases heart rate, etc.
- These systems activate quickly, but their effects fade away slowly.
- There is much collateral damage in the body and mind from chronically “going to war.”
Negative Emotions
- Emotions are a fantastic evolutionary achievement for promoting grandchildren.
- Both the prosocial bonding emotions of caring, compassion, love, sympathetic joy . . .
- And the fight-or-flight emotions of fear, anger, sorrow, shame.
- Emotions organize and mobilize the whole brain.
- They also shade our perceptions and thoughts in self-reinforcing ways.
Loss of Executive Control
- The survival machine is designed to make you identify yourself with your body and your emotional reactions. That identification is highly motivating for keeping yourself alive!
- So, in an upset, there is typically a loss of “observing ego” detachment, and instead, a kind of emotional hijacking – all facilitated by neural circuits in which amygdala-shaped information gets fast-tracked throughout the brain, ahead of slower frontal lobe interpretations.
- With maturation (sometimes into the mid-twenties) and with experience, the frontal (especially prefrontal) cortices can comment on and direct emotional reactions more effectively.
Emotional Hijacking
In light of this machinery of survival-based, emotional reactivity, let’s look more narrowly at what Daniel Goleman has called “emotional hijacking.”
The emotional circuits of your brain – which are relatively primitive from an evolutionary standpoint, originally developed when dinosaurs ruled the earth – exert great influence over the more modern layers of the brain in the cerebral cortex. They do this in large part by continually “packaging” incoming sensory information in two hugely influential ways:
- Labeling it with a subjective feeling tone: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. This is primarily accomplished by the amygdala, in close concert with the hippocampus; this circuit is probably the specific structure of the brain responsible for the feeling aggregate in Buddhism (and one of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness).
- Ordering a fundamental behavioral response: approach, avoid, or ignore.
The amygdala-hippocampus duo keeps answering the two questions an organism – you and I – continually faces in its environment: Is it OK or not? And what should I do?
Meanwhile, the frontal lobes have also been receiving and processing sensory information. But much of it went through the amygdala first, especially if it was emotionally charged, including linked to past memories of threat or pain or trauma. Studies have shown that differences in amygdala activation probably account for much of the variation, among people, in emotional temperaments and reactions to negative information.
The amygdala sends its interpretations of stimuli – with its own “spin” added – throughout the brain, including to the frontal lobes. In particular, it sends its signals directly to the brain stem without processing by the frontal lobes – to trigger autonomic (fight or flight) and behavioral responses. And those patterns of activation, in turn, ripple back up to the frontal lobes, also affecting its interpretations of events and its plans for what to do.
It’s like there is a poorly controlled, emotionally reactive, not very bright, paranoid, and trigger-happy lieutenant in the control room of a missile silo watching radar screens and judging what he sees. Headquarters is a hundred miles away, also seeing the same screens – but (A) it gets its information after the lieutenant does, (B) the lieutenant’s judgments affect what shows up on the screens at headquarters, and (C) his instructions to “launch” get to the missiles seconds before headquarters can signal “stand down!”
Suffering and More Suffering
The “spin” or “packaging” added by the amygdala and its partners may be great for survival – “jump first, ask questions later” – and probably why, in the order of the aggregates in Buddhism, the feeling aggregate comes before the perception aggregate: in evolution, it’s more important to sense whether there’s a threat than to know what it is.
But this primal circuitry is a major source of the “second dart” of life: the secondary cascade of uncomfortable emotions, action plans, views, etc. that follows the bare sensory data of the first dart of elemental physical or emotional pain.
In other words, we are continually having reactions as a result of being alive, and they have an inherent tone of being pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.
The usual state is one in which we react to those reactions – by reaching after what’s pleasant, grasping after it . . . or resisting or trying to get away from what’s unpleasant, averse to it . . . or wanting what’s neutral to hurry up and turn into something pleasant!
These understandable reactions to our reactions have just one small problem:
They are a key link in the chain of suffering.
You can see for yourself:
Your reactions to the initial reaction of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral very, very often make you or others suffer. Pure and simple. No way around it. Like gravity.
And then those reactions to reactions . . . become the basis for more reactions which lead to suffering.
This is, of course, depressing.
Cutting the Chain of Suffering
But it’s also incredibly hopeful.
The link between (A) our initial, primary reaction – of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral – and (C) suffering and harms to ourselves and others . . . is (B) our secondary reactions of grasping and aversion.
If we just block those reactions, then whoosh, we’ve snipped the chain. Nipped it in the bud! And equanimity is the scissors. It stops reactions developing to that initial, primary feeling tone. And that makes all the difference in the world.
In essence, calm is when you aren’t having reactions, while equanimity is when you’re not reacting to your reactions. (Indifference – let alone apathy – are near enemies of equanimity. Often there is anger – i.e., aversion – buried in indifference and apathy.)
In a state of equanimity, we haven’t yet permanently broken the chain of suffering, since there are other factors at work generating suffering that still need to be addressed. And our relief from suffering is contingent, dependent, lasting only as long as our equanimity does, and thus not utterly reliable – in the “heartwood” sense of complete liberation and freedom.
Nonetheless, even a momentary relief from suffering is great. And in the space of clarity and non-disturbance that equanimity provides, we are also able to have more insight into our own minds – into the factors that promote the welfare of ourselves and others, and those that do not – and able to cultivate wholesome qualities, such as patience, investigation, and compassion.
Want to Know More?
Keep reading to learn about changing the machinery of upset and how to cultivate peace of mind.
This is Part Two of the three-part “Peace of Mind” series. Part One: Your Brain and Emotions.
Part Three: Cultivating Peace of Mind.
