In My Mind 15 - Perceptions from social media, Overriding reactions, and Naming emotions

Social Media has warped our perceptions

I was in the sauna at the gym the other day speaking to another guy who is currently in training to compete in a natural bodybuilding competition - by 'natural' I mean that performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) are banned, some competitions allow 'enhanced' athletes to compete. He's currently in a 'bulking phase' eating close to 4000 calories a day but his body fat percentage is still quite low. Because of this he looks reasonably toned.

He was saying that when he mentioned to a work colleague that he's competing later this year they replied saying "oh, you go to the gym?" Now I'm not saying that this guy is huge but he's in far better shape (in terms of muscular build) than the vast majority of people you'd meet in day to day life. In fact, if you took social media out of the equation, he's probably in the top 5% of muscular builds that you'd meet in your lifetime. But, due to our social media feeds being filled by 'enhanced' athletes who don't have to declare that they're using PEDs, our perception of what a gym-goer looks like has been warped so far from reality we're actually putting down those that go 5-6 times a week, eat consistently, and are able to step on stage in a bodybuilding competition!

This is only made worse with a film world full of super heroes where actors have very short periods of time in which to change their body to suit the role. Dr. Todd Schroeder, associate professor of clinical physical therapy and director of the University of Southern California Clinical Exercise Research Center at the USC Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy suggests that between 50% and 70% of actors playing these roles use PEDs to get into shape.

You are not your reactions

We are animals. We have urges, instincts, and reactions just like any other animal in the world. The difference between humans and any other animal is that we are able to reason with our reactions and alter our behaviour in real time.

If a deer is in danger it will run away, but it doesn't take account of other dangers around it, resulting it lots of deers being killed on roads where they've run out in front of cars. As humans we are able to bypass our reactions if the reaction will put us in more danger. Imagine you're in a building and there's a fire. The only escape route is a beam to another building that you'd need to pull yourself along like 'monkey bars'. The beam is burning hot due to the fire. When you touch the bar your body reacts by pulling your hand away. You realise that in order to escape the fire you need to override your reactions and touch the bar anyway. In this moment you are able to hold on to the bar for longer than your reactions would usually allow, because you have reasoned with the reaction and understood that your reaction could end up killing you.

Now imagine a far less dangerous situation - you are to give a presentation at work. If you're not very experienced at public speaking this could bring a lot of nerves and anxiety, especially just before the presentation. Your body will likely go into fight or flight mode just before the presentation, filling your stomach will butterflies and making you wish you hadn't agreed to present in the first place. But, you are capable of reasoning with your mind and coming to the facts which are "I'm not in danger. I am capable of this. There is no threat to my life here". With this you're able to step in front of people and deliver the presentation. It may take some practice, but over time you'll need to reason with yourself less and less to overcome the initial reaction.

If you can't name it, your can't tame it

As babies our only way of communicating is through crying. Parents say they can recognise the difference between a hunger cry, a wet nappy cry and a tiredness cry - I don't know if this is true but if a baby learns that crying in a more specific way gets their needs met more efficiently, I can't see why this wouldn't stick. But as we grow up we need to develop better ways of communicating our needs and emotions.

Unfortunately, there are big gaps in our understanding and vocabulary to help us communicate about emotions. Lots of people struggle to identify their own feelings being "good", "bad", or "stressed". This isn't a dig at those people - if you've never been taught the vocabulary it's near impossible to use it. In psychology settings it is common to use emotion cards to help develop an understanding how an emotion feels. The card will have an emotion on them and then the physical sensations common with that emotion. There are some crossovers, shaking can be common with anxiety and excitement, but pairing physical sensations to emotions helps to identify the emotion at play.

Research shows that if you can't name a feeling, it's harder to distinguish it, talk about it, or do anything constructive with it. This is known as "emotional granularity", your ability to make fine distinctions between emotional states. You are considered to have high emotional granularity if you can distinguish between emotions such as irritation, frustration, disappointment and resentment.

The benefit of learning this skill is when you can specifically identify the feeling you can ask more specific questions of yourself to change the feeling. For example, if you're able to recognise that you're feeling anxious you can ask yourself what you're anxious about? Is the anxiety rational? What would help reduce my anxiety? Imagine you weren't able to identify the anxiety and instead just knew you felt "bad". Would the questions be different? Would the questions be less useful?

The good news is you can expand your emotional vocabulary at any age. You can start paying more attention to the physical sensations you feel today, note them down alongside what happened just before you felt like that and try to find emotions that relate to these sensations. There's an app called "How We Feel" which is designed to help you distinguish between emotions by asking you to 'check in' during the day. On check in you're delivered a grid of emotional states, each with a short description so you can correctly identify your current emotion. From there you're able to expand on the emotion by journalling in app before being offered to "dive deeper" using questions presented by an AI, all in the app. It's been incredibly useful for me to be able to more accurately describe what I'm feeling, and then to understand why.