by Leo Volont » Tue Jul 14, 2020 7:14 am
Hi Yoda,
Great! You're watching yourself. As I said above, the heart and soul of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is critical self observation. And, yeah, you've run into the problem that we all face while doing CBT, and that is we know what is bad, but what do we replace it with. You found yourself in an emotionless flat monotone. Well, that is a lot better than plunging into more anger episodes, when your priority now is to stay calm long enough for your poor overworked leaky amygdala to heal (I wish I could remember how long that takes). Oh, it was good that you were attentive to other people's reactions. If we had to choose between our own opinion on behaviors or that of the people we live and work with, it would probably be more productive to tailor our behavior towards others. Remember: "when in Rome do as the Romans do". Our own reaction to others still might be useful. the other day I found it quite annoying that this one young person in the neighborhood would laugh out loud to punctuate every statement, gesture or event. But it brought me up short the next time I myself laughed in public. Hmmmm. Laughter is socially reassuring, but so are smiles and smiles must be less abrasive to those who cherish peace and quiet.
Oh, Yoda, did you notice anything about your jaw muscles tensing up. There is a way to test your jaw muscles against a cortisol reaction: you take a pin and you resolve on stabbing yourself in the hand with it. Most the time you will find that your jaws tighten up just as you are making the motion to stab yourself, but if you actually get as far as stabbing yourself then you will almost certainly feel your jaw muscles tighten. But, remember, don't indulge the feeling. You need to consciously relax right away in order to shut down the amygdala's cortisol flow or otherwise you will get all wired up and stressed.
Oh! I just remembered. The principle of 'picking your battles'. In the same way we know what will trigger ourselves, we can sense what might trigger others, and those are very stressful interactions. Confrontations are stressful. Yes, we can do our best to keep ourselves calm and try to de-escalate any rising tension, but just going forward with "unpleasantness" is stressful in itself. Again you will find the signs of a Cortisol/Adrenaline "hangover" with your mind going over what was said and should have been said. SO, on the principle of "picking your battles" a lot of stuff we can have problems with are best to just let go. In regards to your own job quality and that of your workers, well, remember that Good Enough is Good Enough.
I learned that in a strange way. Everybody drives cars, right? Well, I learned that when some driver does something crazy, well, if you do not react or say anything.... you know, just let it go, then in a minute it is like it never happened. But if you flip the guy off, honk the horn, or even just engage in commentary, well, it turns on the Anger Circuit and there is some proportional amount of Cortisol that gets pumped into it. It starts to make your day suck. I was a sergeant in the Army and you always let the men drive, and they even like to drive. But if they started to cuss and swear and hit the horn and wave at other drivers, I'd relieve them on the spot and put in another driver. I would tell them that the driver should drive and let the rest of us relax and enjoy the ride. Then I noticed that the Duty Days would go better if the day was allowed to start peacefully for everyone. About the same time I noticed that soldiers at this one base would be giving the cooks and servers a hard time in the serving line. I looked around and I had enough relative rank and tell everybody that they they needed to chill, that the cooks were up since 3 o'clock and just want to have a nice day like everybody else, and complaining wouldn't make the food any better, and if everybody just acted nice and smiled this would be be a good start to the day instead messing it all up at the start. My job was on a Mobile Team, but when I cycled back to that base after about a month, I walked in and it was basically the same Servers and Cooks and the same soldiers eating breakfast, and they all said "Look, that's SARG" and they applauded me. It turns out that they all tried out being nice and it worked for them and they were waiting for me to show up so they could thank me.
But, yeah, it is a problem.... we know what is bad about ourselves, but REPLACING the behavior brings a choice. Who do we want to be now that we know we have a choice?