Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Dr. Erin Olivo. Erin is an assistant clinical professor of medical psychology at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the former director of the Columbia Integrative Medicine program. In addition, she currently maintains a private psychotherapy practice in New York City.
With Sounds True, Erin Olivo has created a new book, Wise Mind Living: Master Your Emotions, Transform Your Life—a book that serves as an owner’s manual for working with emotional experience.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Erin and I spoke about the physiological basis of emotions and their evolutionary value. We also talked about what she calls “the cycle of emotion” and how emotions come in waves. Finally, we talked about working with our emotional reactivity as parents, and how to teach emotional literacy to our children. Here’s my conversation with Dr. Erin Olivo:
Erin, I’m curious to know how your Wise Mind Living program grew out of your work as a clinical psychologist—grew out of your actual work with clients.
Erin Olivo: It did. One of the things that I realized as I was practicing year after year was that a lot of people came to me with very general complaints of, “I’m really stressed out. I just don’t feel good in my life.” They didn’t really have a language—when I really tried to push deeper for, “What emotions are you feeling?” or, “What are you struggling with?” They didn’t have a language for their emotions—to talk about what emotional things were actually causing many of [their] problems.
The other thing that a lot of people come to me for is that they’re having a problem with a particular behavior or a relationship problem. They wouldn’t talk a lot about the emotions that might be fueling those things.
So, I really started thinking, “Wow—there’s not a lot of emotional literacy in the world.” If you really even look at the way we teach kids about emotions, I don’t really feel like we talk a whole lot about teaching kids what their emotions are and how to do something about them when they don’t like them.
So, I felt like it was an important thing to write an “owner’s manual,” if you will, for people’s emotions.
TS: It’s interesting—we’re going to talk about the Wise Mind Living program and your suggestions [and] practices for helping people work with their emotions. By the time I got to the end of the book—Wise Mind Living—I thought, “God, it’s not really that hard to work with your emotions.” I wonder why it’s such a black box—if you will—for so many of us. Why [do] so many of us feel like, “Where do I even start?” Why do you think that is?
EO: I think one of the reasons is [that] because there’s a stigma about even talking about emotions. In our society, people don’t—you ask somebody, “How do you feel?” and people say, “Fine.” If they are actually going to endorse something negative, then they usually just say, “Ugh, so stressed out,” or, “So busy.”
I think of stress as a throwaway terms in some ways. “Feeling stressed” is a very general term, just like “fine.” I think that it’s because if we actually said, “Oh, I’m feeling anxious,” or, “Oh, I’m feeling sad,” that people would be like, “Urgh, I don’t really want to talk about that.”
So, I think it starts with—we are all growing up in a society where emotions are considered, in some ways, weakness or [audio briefly cuts out]. And we don’t really think a lot about them or work with them often.
I think that’s part of it. It’s just really about waking up to it and even just thinking about it at all. The minute we do start to pay attention, it isn’t all that hard sometimes. Obviously, there are really big emotions that we feel that are much harder to regulate. There are ongoing situations in life that can be very hard to cope with emotionally. But the day-to-day emotions that we all experience—and we do all experience emotions all day long. Those are—once you start to pay attention to them—much easier to feel in control of as opposed to feeling like they are just something that happens to us.
TS: Let’s start now at the beginning of Emotional Literacy 101, if you will, and help us know what an emotion [is]. I mean, it might not be as obvious, I think, as we say about, “My emotional this [and] that.” But what actually is an emotion?
EO: An emotion is, fundamentally, a physiological phenomenon. It’s something that happens in your body as a response to a trigger [that’s] either internal or external in the world. [It] is a complex group of hormonal changes, electrical changes, cognitive changes—things that all happen in your body in response to what’s happening around you. You take in sensory information and it results in responses in your body.
And we all have developed emotions. There’s an evolutionary advantage to feeling emotions, right? So, we’ve developed emotions to keep us safe in the world. The most obvious, easy one that everyone understands right away is fear. Right? If there’s something dangerous in my environment, then fear acts as the signal to me that that is the case. And then it automatically sets up an action urge that goes with it for, “I want to do something to keep myself safe.”
So, fundamentally it’s an evolutionary, physiological phenomenon that happens for everyone.
TS: What do you think is the importance of understanding the physiological basis? And I ask that because [I don’t think] most people think about their emotions physiologically. They think of these weird cloud banks of different forms that take us over. Do you know what I mean? We don’t think, “Oh, this is physiological.”
EO: No! In fact, I think probably most people think of it more as cognitive. When you ask somebody, “What do you feel?” you often get a thought—not a feeling, actually—from them.
So, you’re right. I think people don’t think about it as happening in their body. I think one of the reasons why it’s really important to recognize it as a physiological phenomenon is that if you don’t manage the physiology of an emotion—that activation that happens in your body—then you actually can’t get to regulating a lot of the—using a lot of the other strategies to regulate emotion. [This is] because when we have that physiological arousal, some of our higher-level thinking and acting is shut down.
So, it’s really important—I always say to all of my patients, “One of the very first things that I want you to do when you’re feeling any big emotion or you’re feeling really stressed out is calm your body down first.” Physiologically, the fight-or-flight arousal that we feel—everyone’s pretty much heard of that term, and we’ve all experienced it at least a couple times in our lives. It’s that thing that happens if you’re driving down the street and somebody pulls in front of you that you’re not expecting, and you have to slam on the brakes or swerve out of the way. Then you notice your body.
Your heart starts racing. You’re probably breathing fast. Your temperature might rise—like, you feel hotter. There are also a lot of things happening internally for you in that moment. Your muscles are getting tense. Your blood pressure is going up. More platelets are being produced. The stress hormones—cortisol and adrenaline—are being released.
So, all of that is happening and—let me just say—that all happens in other, less extreme emotional responses too. At maybe a lower level, but that’s all happening there too. When that all happens, what happens in your brain is that your brain shuts down the ability to think very flexibly and very abstractly. In those moments, all that your body is doing is trying to get you ready to be able to do one of two things: fight or get away from the danger.
Your body doesn’t need you to be able to solve complex math problems or think abstractly about something. It just wants you focused on the danger and focused on how to keep yourself safe. So, we get very small-minded—in a sense—of what we’re thinking, and hyper-vigilant for danger.
If we don’t calm all that down, then we can’t use our brain to then help us regulate emotion—to really evaluate the situation [and] to problem-solve in a really creative way. So, we really have to do something about our body first.
TS: Now, you mention that there are two parts of the brain that are important to understand in terms of working with emotions. In the Wise Mind Living program, you talk about the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. So, maybe you could help our listeners understand those two parts of the brain and why it’s so important to understand how they both function.
EO: Yes. The brain process that happens in emotion is incredibly complex. So, I am absolutely boiling it down to the bare-bones basics of what it is that might be helpful to understand about this. I just want to say that first—that there’s a whole lot more that happens than just this.
But if you really want to break it down to its simplest form, we [essentially] have an alarm system—the amygdala—and the brakes—and that’s the prefrontal cortex. So, something happens. We use all the sensory information coming in from the external world. Something we see [is] dangerous. It actually rings the alarm bell of the amygdala. So, the amygdala is what starts off the process of this fight-or-flight response—and gets you moving for safety.
The prefrontal cortex, which is part of the neocortex—part of the newer part of your brain that has evolved as humans have evolved—is the part where you actually can stop and think through, “Hold on—what is this, really? Is it as dangerous as it seems?” That, then, can put on the brakes of that alarm bell that’s being rung whenever you’ve experienced something as activating or stressing.
TS: Now, this makes sense to me in terms of working with fear. But in your Wise Mind Living program, you list eight different big “buckets” of emotional experience, including love and happiness. So, would I ever want to be putting the brakes on love and happiness?
EO: Yes, actually you would—because sometimes—
TS: I would? I would?
EO: Yes!
TS: I’m not sure I’m with you here. So, help me understand that.
EO: Well, let me tell you. So, no, really—I think that sometimes—certainly, an easy example of this is when you are loving something or someone that’s not loving you back. Then, that’s definitely something that we want to put the brakes on.
But even just excitement and happiness—sometimes, it actually can be more activating and cause us to not think very clearly about the choices we’re making. Probably every person listening has, in a moment, found themselves carried away by either love or happiness. And maybe [they] made some choices that—if they had made those choices in a calmer moment—they might have made a different choice.
So, while we certainly want to try as much as possible to bring as much love and happiness into our lives as we can, there is an extreme level [with] this emotion-mind way of being where it really can be driving the train and taking you to a place that isn’t all that helpful for [you] or wise for [you] that [you] do want make sure [you’re] on top of.
But the same strategies that we can also use to decrease emotions, we can also use to increase them. We can also use [them] to say, “Oh, I want more of that—so I’m going to really focus in on that.” One of the strategies that I talk about in the book is a behavioral strategy for changing emotion [that] is “opposite action.”
I mentioned before that a lot of the physiological aspect of what happens in emotion is hard-wired and creates an action urge. It creates something that you want to do—that the emotion makes you want to do. So, with fear, it’s to hide or avoid something that you’re fearing. If we do the thing that our body tells us to do, it actually makes the emotion bigger because your body wants you to listen. It thinks, “Oh, this emotion is a warning system for something. I should listen to my emotions.” So, when you engage in that behavior, it will increase the behavior.
When I do the opposite of what my body’s telling me to do—what my urge is in the moment—it actually then decreases the emotion. If I approach something that—once I’ve really thought it through—isn’t all that dangerous—like going in the elevator to the fortieth floor—I won’t actually have any major consequences for doing it. Once I’ve approached that dangerous thing, my anxiety and fear should come down—and it almost always does.
So, opposite action works in that way, but you can also think, “Oh, well then, that means that if I want to feel something more, I can just engage in the urge that I have.” The urge that goes along with love and happiness is usually that you want more of it or that you want to approach it more. You want to think about it more. We’ve all had that moment—when we were teenagers, probably—where we wrote the guy’s name over and over that we were madly in love with at that moment. Right? That’s enhancing the feeling the love.
For instance, one of the things that I ask my patients to do on a regular basis—especially when they’re having some relationship conflict, for instance—is to stop and remind themselves why they love the person that they’re in this relationship with. I ask people to write down three things [every night] that you love about that person. That increases the feeling of love that we have.
So, that’s regulating love in moments where maybe I’m having a hard time connecting to it. So, regulating emotion is meant to be really regulating emotion. I can up-regulate or down-regulate because once I really start thinking about what I’m feeling and making wise choices about what I’m doing, I can make a choice about increasing it or decreasing it. I am in control of my emotions.
TS: Now, what about this idea that controlling our emotions—”I’m in charge of my emotions” is a little bit upside-down, in that we want the emotions themselves to tell us—bring us the message—that they have some intelligence. We don’t want to necessarily be rigging the system to where we want it to go. But we want these emotions themselves to bring their communication, whatever it might be. I’m curious what you think about that.
EO: I don’t think that those are mutually exclusive. I believe strongly in the idea that there is wisdom in our emotions and that they are important communicators. But, as I want to be a discerning listener or viewer of the information around me, I don’t want to just take every bit of news and information around me as absolute truth. I really want to investigate it and figure out, “Does this help me or does this hurt me? Do I really believe this, or is there more evidence to the contrary?”
So, I want to do that with my emotions just like any other bit of information. But I do believe that it is important to listen. I’m going to listen and pay attention, and that’s where mindfulness really comes into all of the Wise Mind Living strategies. I have to be more mindful and aware of exactly what my body is telling me or what my emotions are telling me.
But, then I get to use another layer of investigation to decide what I think about that and what I feel about that and what I want to do with that. That’s where I have control.
But I’m not at the whim of my emotions. Just because it’s being communicated to me doesn’t always mean it’s the truth. I think a lot of people have heard that slogan of, “Feelings are not facts.” I think that that’s really important to keep in mind. Yes, sometimes they are important bits of information. But they’re not always the truth—or they’re not always the last word on something.
TS: Now, you talked about emotions as having value and understanding them from an evolutionary perspective. I thought it might be interesting to explore some of the other emotions besides fear. You talked about fear, but let’s take something like sadness. There’s an evolutionary value to something like sadness? What could that be?
EO: Absolutely. The evolutionary advantage to feeling sad is that you will more likely not take for granted the things that you have because you know you will feel sad if you lose them. So, it helps us protect what we have. It helps us value what we have and cherish those things.
I think that’s a really important evolutionary concept, because if you think about how being connected and close in a tribe—valuing the resources that I have. Not just people, but resources too. All of those things are really important to survival. So, I want to value things. That’s just the flip side of valuing something and feeling it’s very important—[it’s] that we have the chance of feeling a sense of loss or sadness when it’s not there.
TS: OK. I think this line of questioning is really interesting to me, so let’s keep going with some of these other emotions. What about the evolutionary value of shame?
EO: Shame. Yes. Shame is a big one that a lot of my patients ask, “Why in the world do I feel so unworthy or shameful? That can’t be helpful!” I think that what happens is it often isn’t helpful because we all experience a lot of unjustified shame. But the way I actually distinguish between what’s justified and unjustified is to use the evolutionary purpose of shame, and check against that.
So, the evolutionary purpose of shame is that if I engage in any behaviors that might get me thrown out of the tribe, I’m really going to have a hard time surviving. So, I will feel the emotion of shame as a way of trying to ward against engaging in those behaviors or ways of being that might actually get me thrown out of the tribe.
I ask a lot of my patients sometimes, “Well, so you’re feeling intense shame over this. But your tribe—your group—who really is going to throw you out? Or really reject you for this thing? Do you think you really will get rejected?” And when we really start to ask ourselves those questions, sometimes just even realizing that can minimize the amount of shame that we feel—when we realize that it’s probably not so justified.
TS: OK. And the evolutionary value of jealousy?
EO: That one I think is pretty obvious, right? So, I have something and I need to protect it because I don’t want you to take it. That goes back to resources, as well. So, I think that that also has an evolutionary advantage because it keeps the resources helping me and not someone else.
TS: OK, we’re almost through the list here, but I’m going to keep going: Disgust.
EO: Disgust. So, I think [disgust] started really from a very biological place. It has clear biological roots—that we do not want to go anywhere near things that are dangerous for us. So, we feel disgust. Something that’s [like] rotten food—think of the immediate revulsion we get from something like that.
So, I think it really probably started more as a biological experience of disgust. But now, of course, as we evolved into social animals, we can feel disgusted by lots of things and people. Again, we experience it though—at its extreme, disgust feels like it’s dangerous. If we really stop and think, “Hold on a second. Is that—I don’t like that guy, but is he really dangerous? Is it really that bad?” That can help us reduce our feelings of disgust or dislike sometimes—when we realize that.
TS: Now, even I—I think—might have some insight into the evolutionary value of love as being directly related to sex and procreation.
EO: Exactly.
TS: What’s a little harder for me to understand is the evolutionary value of happiness.
EO: When we feel happy, we do more of whatever it is that makes us happy. And so, it’s an emotion that helps us stay motivated and keep working towards things, or keep doing things that feel good or get us good things.
So, that’s also, obviously, a helpful thing for gathering resources and staying alive. That’s why I think we feel happiness.
TS: And then the last one on your list of eight emotional categories, if you will, of experience, is anger.
EO: Yes. Also about protecting our resources—which is what most of these evolutionary reasons are. If a goal of mine is being blocked or someone is actively trying to hurt me, then that’s going to trigger anger. That will then motivate me to protect myself and protect what’s mine.
So, justified anger is when the situation is truly about someone blocking something that is important to you—or actively hurting you. But where that one goes wrong and isn’t sometimes justified is that we feel intensely angry as if someone was really out to get us or trying to hurt us. But we have to step back and say, “Well, wait. Were they really trying to hurt me? Or do I just not like what they were doing?” That’s one of the ways to also regulate emotion—by thinking about that justification based on evolutionary standards.
TS: So, a lot of times, I think, when people start identifying, “I’m having some kind of emotional experience right now,” they don’t necessarily know how to label that emotional experience. Do you think it’s important that we start being able—in this conversation here, Emotional Literacy 101—to be emotionally literate at the beginning stages, even—do we need to know which of these emotions we’re feeling at any given time?
EO: Absolutely. There’s research that actually shows that the simple act of labeling the emotion reduces the physiological impact of an emotion on your body. So, just labeling it—just saying, “I feel sad,”—reduces the physical activation of feeling sad. Or fear, or anger. Whatever it might be. That—on a sort of very physical level—is clearly important.
But I also think that what I’m going to do if I’m feeling fearful is going to be very different than what I’m going to do if I’m feeling angry. Sometimes, we can get mixed up about which it is. Then we can take an action or problem-solve it, and we’re going down the wrong path. So, I think it’s important to step back and truly identify what we’re feeling for that reason too.
TS: I wonder if you could give an example of how fear and anger sometimes get confused, and how somebody can sort that out.
EO: Yes. I think—let me try to think of an example. I don’t have one off the top of my head right now.
You know, I do think that at a lot of times in work settings this comes up—where someone might feel as if people are blocking their goals, so they get angry. But what they’re really feeling is, “I’m afraid I’m not doing this well enough.” It’s that example of where you kind of look outward and blame someone else for something that’s not going right, and you’re not really taking into consideration that you’re really fearful about your ability to do this.
Or, even—and this could sort of go into the example of feeling a sense of shame over something. I’m not doing well enough at something, and so I look for, “It must be that person’s fault.” So if I look for a solution to the anger I feel at this other person, then I’m not ever really going to get to the underlying emotion of, “Yes, actually, I feel bad about this and I need to do better at this job.” Or, “I need to ask for help with this job,” as opposed to looking for how [that] other person [is] hurting me.
TS: I think that’s a great example. What it brings up for me is: could the person in that experience be feeling fear, anger, and shame? All three—and they’re all kind of mixed together and woven in?
EO: Absolutely, because we can feel lots of things all at once. It’s really helpful to back up and slow it all down—and realize that it goes through these cycles of emotion. But you can go through a cycle in a millisecond and then be on to the next emotion that that one triggered.
In the book, I break down the cycle of emotion into these component parts. So, every emotion has the same components. There’s something that triggers it. There’s an interpretation that you make about it—the story you tell yourself about what’s happening, what you think and believe about it. There’s a physiological change. There’s an action urge. There’s an action that you usually take. And then there’s an aftereffect. So, whatever it is that you did or thought will then lead you to another way of thinking or feeling. That starts a whole other cycle.
So, the first cycle going around could be, “I feel shame over [thinking] I didn’t do a good job at something.” And then what I think is, “Oh God, this is going to be really horrible if anyone knows this. I’ve got to get this better. I’m going to lose my job if I don’t do this well.” Then that leads me to seeking out where else I can put blame, maybe even. Right? And the action I take might be to look for—scan the environment—for who else didn’t do their job. Then the aftereffect would be that now I feel angry, because now I see somebody else didn’t do everything that they were supposed to do. Instead of then staying with the feeling of, “I didn’t do what I was supposed to do,” I’m going to focus on that.
And then I’m going to go around that cycle again—this time with that angry feeling. Then, that might take me to an action of lashing out at that person. That can create the aftereffects of, “Now I’m in a fight with someone.” And I have to go around the cycle again and again. This is how we go from an emotion—which is a discreet phenomenon that happens over the course of usually just a couple of minutes—all the way to a mood, which we know can last for weeks at times. That’s that spiral of emotion.
I think that the key is to step back and try to slow it all down. Identify what the various emotions I’m feeling [are] and [whether] I can break them down into their component parts so I can see what’s happening—because the great news about each of those components is that they each offer an opportunity to do something different. So, I can intervene on any one of those components I just mentioned.
TS: OK. So, I want to go deeper into this cycle of an emotion. You started by saying there’s a trigger, and I get that. The next thing you said was “an interpretation, followed by a physiological change.” What I’m curious about is: might the physiological change come directly after the trigger, even before you’ve interpreted it? Or is the interpretation necessary before our body starts to show this changed way of being?
EO: You’re asking a question that people have devoted their entire careers to trying to answer.
TS: I just want you to give me the answer. I don’t really want to put that much time into it.
Anyway—I’m just kidding, Erin.
EO: Right. [Laughs.] So, there’s no right or wrong answer to that. I actually think—from the perspective of helping my patients regulate emotion—it doesn’t matter which you notice first or which comes first, necessarily.
I believe that the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle of—sometimes, you think first and feel it in your body second. Sometimes, it’s the opposite. But there are lots of different theories on this.
The cognitive model of emotion states that you really have a thought first. I think—for the most part—a lot of my patients know about what they’re thinking even better than knowing what their body is doing sometimes. So, that’s part of why I usually put it first.
But like I said earlier, when you’re actually going to try to intervene, I think it’s better to start with your body anyway.
Sorry, but that’s sort of a non-answer. I don’t know which comes first, but I really don’t think it matters. I think we have to do something about all of it.
TS: OK. Let’s talk about intervening in this cycle of emotion. So, I’m triggered by something. I could imagine all kinds of things. I’ll just use an anger trigger, because that’s so obvious for me. I’m starting to run a story about it. My body’s changing. I’m getting all hot inside—red. My fists are filling with the desire to punch someone. That kind of thing. I get it.
You’ve talked about how you teach your patients to calm their body right out of the gate. Let’s talk about that. How do I calm myself at this point?
EO: So, the first thing is to identify that it’s happening. The next thing would be to say, “And now I’m going to try to slow down my breathing.” I’m going to try to reverse that physiological effect that happens pretty universally for most emotions.
My heart rate is probably increased, even if I don’t know it right now. My breathing is more shallow and rapid. I’m going to try to do the reverse of both of those things. So, one of the best ways to do that is to just breathe more slowly. All of the physiological change that’s happening is happening in your autonomic nervous system. That word, “autonomic,” sounds like “automatic” because it all is automatic.
But the one thing that we do have control over in our autonomic nervous system is our breath. It, in turn, creates a cascade of events that happens that reduces or minimizes all of the other activation that’s happening.
So, stop and take 10 slow, little-bit-deeper breaths. The key here is not to hyperventilate, though—which some people, when they hear me say, “Take deep, slow breaths,” they start really hyperventilating—trying to breathe in all the air in the room kind of thing. That actually activates us.
So, it’s take a breath in through your nostrils and out through your mouth. In through the nostrils, out through the mouth, and try to extend the exhale. You want to try to count to maybe a beat of five. Not too fast. And see if you can do that [with] just even 10 breaths.
The other thing that you can do while doing that is try to decrease the tension in your body. If you tune into it, you probably notice that your shoulders are up by your ears. Like you said, your fists get clenched. If you can try to—with your exhale—reduce the tension that you’re holding in your body, that also helps.
So, I ask people to just do that quickly before they then try to engage in thinking it through. That would be the next place that I might go—which would be to ask them to challenge the story they’re telling or challenge some of the interpretations.
TS: And how do I do that? My interpretation is—basically, pretty quickly—”I’m going to kill this person.” I mean, not really. But I’m starting to have those kinds of thoughts, I’m so mad in this anger response.
EO: Right. So, I would ask first about the interpretations, “Well, what do you think this means about you? What do think this means about the other person? What do you think this means about the world?” What’s making you angry isn’t just, “I want to kill them.” Right? There’s some other thing that you’re telling yourself about this. It’s probably, “They shouldn’t have done this. It isn’t fair that they have done this.” It’s something like that.
There are some typical ways that people think when they’re very activated. They tend to be that they are either amplifying or catastrophizing the situation, or they’re doing this very non-accepting, “It should be this way! It shouldn’t be that way.” Really, when we step back from it, we can realize, “OK, maybe my rules here aren’t quite as solid,” or, “I don’t have the right to be making all these rules.”
So, we can start to look and see if we’re engaging in any of these distorted, extreme ways of thinking—which many of us are. In the book, I list a bunch of these patterns of negative thinking that people fall into. Almost always, when I share it with people and I ask them to take a look, they come back after the first time and say, “Oh my God! I do every single one of them! Does this mean I’m crazy?” And I say, “No, it means you’re human.” Because we all do every single one of these things when we’re feeling something in a big way.
But the minute you start to identify yourself engaging in one of these kinds of distorted thinking—black-and-white thinking, jumping to conclusions, catastrophizing—the minute you even recognize it, that in and of itself sometimes defuses it. And you start thinking differently right then and there.
TS: I’m wondering: just like you have this slow breathing technique that you suggest to people, is there some question or a couple of questions that I could ask myself on the spot—no matter what emotion I’m feeling—that would help me interrupt this interpretation tendency that I have to turn it into a bigger deal than it is?
EO: I think the one question I ask—if I was going to boil it down to one question, it would be, “Is there another way of thinking about this?” Then, maybe the second question is, “And am I falling into any of the common traps?”
Once you start to pay attention to this, people—like I said—come back and say, “I do all of them.” They probably do do all of them, but they probably have one or two that they customarily use as a pattern. So, a lot of my patients are catastrophizers. they make things from, “I messed up on this one project,” to, “And I’m going to lose my job and I’m going to be homeless.” That’s an example of catastrophic thinking or over-generalizing it in the moment.
So, once you start to know what your go-to ways of distorting are, you’re going to ask yourself if you’re doing that.
TS: You talked about this cycle of emotion, and how emotions come in waves. I’m curious: is there any length of time that you think emotions were designed to last, versus potentially the amount of time we spend in an emotional state?
EO: Yes. I think the research says that most emotions—as physiological phenomena—rise and fall within two to three minutes. But if you ask people their experience of emotions, almost everyone will say to you, “No, no. Emotions must last longer than that.”
But actually, what I think happens is—as I described before—we are re-triggering our emotions with what we’re thinking and doing. So, it might have risen and fallen in that two minutes if we stayed out of it. But of course, we don’t. We’re so involved in this experience of the emotion—and thinking and doing in response to it—that we keep the emotion going. When you keep an emotion going long enough, that’s when it actually reaches the level where we say, “Now you’re in a bad mood or sad mood or an anxious mood.” Moods last days and weeks.
TS: Now, I’m curious about something like grief. Would you say grief is a mood that we’re continuing to trigger in some way? How do you understand it? I think of someone who’s lost somebody very dear to them and potentially is in a grief state. Granted, it’s not all the time. But it’s there for—it could be a year or two years.
EO: Absolutely. Yes. I think of grief as a complex interplay of a bunch of different emotions. So, I guess I would categorize it more in that “mood” category than a specific emotion.
The predominant emotion in grief, of course, is often sadness—a real sense of loss and a longing for something that you’ve lost. But also, part of grief is anger. Guilt and shame can be a part of the process of grief. Fear.
So, really, all of the emotions are wrapped up in it. It is, then, [a] cycle of experiencing those emotions that can last a long time.
TS: Now, you talk in Wise Mind Living—that a Wise Mind approach is not about getting rid of emotional experience in any way. At the same time, I could imagine someone listening who is saying, “Well, I’m intervening in this cycle so that I can ‘not stay in the emotion that long.’ I’m taking this intervention.” How do we know the right amount of time to spend in an emotion?
EO: I don’t think there is a right amount of time. So, I don’t think we can know. I think that it depends on the situation and it depends on how you’re feeling in the moment. It depends on your capacity to tolerate an emotion—how big it feels and how destructive it feels.
So, I think that it’s about doing what we can when we recognize that we don’t want to feel what we’re feeling—that it’s intense and distressing, and we really want to do something to down-regulate it. Then we need to try to work on a change-oriented strategy for changing how we feel.
But we can’t change everything that we feel. The rest that’s left over, we have to try to practice acceptance with. Acceptance is another way of decreasing the suffering we experience from that negative emotion.
I talk with my patients, and this comes from dialectical behavior therapy—this concept of balancing the acceptance strategies we use with the change strategies that we use. It really is finding that balance—going back and forth from, “Right now, there’s not much I feel I can do to change this or change the way I feel. So, how can I practice acceptance so that I’m not fighting with it or struggling with it. So that I can have it be something that I can tolerate a little better.” But, just acknowledging that it’s still going to be here. “I’m still going to feel this negative feeling.”
Then, other times, where we feel, “I’m ready to really change this. I’m ready to approach this in some way where I want to challenge the way I’m thinking. I want to challenge the way I’m choosing to behave or respond to this. I want to actively do something—” even if it’s distraction. Even if it is just, “I want to think about something completely different right now because I don’t want to feel this anymore. I want to be out of this emotion for right now, at least.”
TS: This combination of approaching things in terms of, “I want to change it!” or, “I just need to accept it,”—that seems like such a profound idea to me. And one, actually, that I don’t hear that many people talk about. How to bring together both an attitude of, “I’m going to accept this,” and, “Gosh darn it, I’m going to change it.”
So, I’m wondering: how do you help your patients tune into what’s needed in any given moment? Acceptance or, “I’m going to change it?”
EO: I think that it begins with “always acceptance.” So, I try to ask my patients—I try to think about acceptance as, “I’m going to acknowledge what I feel.” So, I’m going to just sit here and feel what I feel, so then I know what to do with it. At that point, I can make a decision as to whether or not I’m ready to start to move into a change strategy—or I need to stick with tolerating this distress, trying to cope with it, and trying to practice acceptance.
Really, I’m asking my patients and the readers of the book to start by using an acceptance strategy—which is mindfulness, essentially. Awareness and acknowledgment of what I’m feeling in this moment. From there, I’ll then decide what to do with it.
TS: Well, that’s interesting—that you’re starting with acceptance in each situation. I think that’s really interesting. Now, you mentioned that you teach your patients mindfulness as a beginning acceptance strategy. In the book, Wise Mind Living, you talk about three different types of mindfulness practice. I thought this was useful—formal practice, informal practice, and also “living with mindful awareness.” I wonder if you could just briefly talk to us about each of these three different practices and how you teach people to work with these three different approaches.
EO: Sure. The formal practice is what we hear so much when we hear a lot about mindfulness these days. We hear about mindfulness meditation. So, formal practice is making the decision that you’d like to designate some time in your life for sitting still and being mindful. That’s formal meditation practice that I teach my patients to use in their life.
Informal meditation practice is finding moments when you’re going to be doing something else that you would ordinarily do, and you’re going to designate that activity as something that you’re going to practice mindfulness while doing it. So, it would be, “I’m going to take a shower this morning, and I ordinarily do that without mindful attention. In fact, I use that often to make my lists of all the things I have to do today. But instead, I’m going to be present and one-minded in the way that I’m going to take this shower. I’m going to bring mindfulness to this.” So, I’m going to mindfully present with the act of just taking a shower.
Then, living mindfully is that I haven’t really designated it as an exercise—”This is the moment when I’m going to do informal mindfulness practice.” It’s just really trying to infuse that into everything that you’re doing in your life. That’s really fully participating and living fully awake and aware. That’s—I think—the goal that we can all set for ourselves.
And [it’s] hard to live sometimes. It’s what the other two kinds of mindfulness practice help us achieve. When we do designate the time and form the intention to really practice, it helps us then live more mindfully also.
TS: Now, Erin, I know that—in addition to your work as a clinical psychologist—you’re a parent of a four-year-old son. I’d be curious to know if you could take us through an example of Wise Mind Living in parenting. What I mean by that is: sometime with your son—and I can imagine that you have many instances to draw on—where you felt an emotion [of some kind] come over you that was distressing [or] difficult. How [were] you able to employ the Wise Mind Living approach to emotions? [What] were the challenges you faced in employing it?
EO: Yes. I think there’s nothing more than relationships in general that are more activating and triggering for emotion. Right? If we all could go sit in a room by ourselves all day long, we would have far fewer emotions than we have when we’re out interacting with other people.
Then, on top of that, there’s very few relationships that can be more activating that having a relationship with a child—especially a very young child who doesn’t have a lot of emotional control yet. [Laughs.] So, I think absolutely every day I use Wise Mind Living strategies when I’m parenting.
The first thing that popped into my mind when you asked this question was that any time that my son is experiencing a really big emotion—whether it’s full-on tantrum or it’s just some very irrational moment on his part—“But I really want to do this first! This is my plan, and I don’t want to do your plan!” Or something like that. But that’s triggering for me. It’s really hard to be in the presence of another person having a big emotion-mind storm, because instantly we’re drawn into a storm of our own usually.
That’s when I use these strategies the most, probably, with him. But I try to first calm my body, because if I’m activated, intense, and ready to jump, then that’s not going to help the situation. And he picks up on it energetically. Either it reinforces it because, “Oh, I got a rise out her, so I’m going to keep going with this,” or it just makes the whole thing bigger and messier.
Then I really try to think through what’s happening in front of me and what [I am] feeling. What interpretations am I making? Is that an assumption that’s right or wrong? How could I look at this whole situation differently? Usually, that comes in relationships in a version of, “How do I try to understand the emotion I’m seeing of the person in front of me right now? How do I not just be reactive to that emotion, but really try to be responsive—and allowing, accepting, and acknowledging of what’s going on in front of me?”
Because a lot of times, what’s most activating is, “I want this person to be doing something different!” That’s pure change-oriented—of, “This is not OK. What’s happening in the world is not OK.” And I have to back up—allow it to be what it is first—before I can start to work on, how do I then work on changing it.
So, that’s how I would say I use Wise Mind Living strategies with him, really—I don’t know—a hundred times a day, I’m sure.
TS: I’m curious: I imagine out of those hundred times a day, there are times when you don’t employ the Wise Mind Living strategies as well as you’d like, and potentially even get upset or act in some way [that] later you think, “Gosh, I can’t believe I got so mad.” At least, I know I’ve had that experience—especially with young kids. I haven’t done a lot of babysitting for nephews and nieces, but I’ve done a little. And I’m like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I was able to get to that point!” That this little kid brought me to this point of being so agitated. I can’t believe it.
I’m curious: after you don’t use the Wise Mind Living practices as successfully as you wish you had on the spot, what happens then? How do you relate to yourself then in those moments?
EO: Well, I try to relate to myself with compassion then. Right? That I’m human, and these little people can get us from zero to a hundred in no time flat. Yes. I teach this all day long, but of course, I’m not perfect at using it all the time. Nobody is.
So, I try to have compassion for myself around that—because if I don’t, instead I start beating myself up and telling myself, “Oh, you’re a horrible mother and how could you do that?” But then I’m just starting a whole another emotion-mind cycle. That’s not helpful, and it’s certainly not going to make me a better mother.
Really, I try to just take what I describe in the book as, “A little self-compassion break.” “Yes, wow. That wasn’t good.” [Laughs.] “That was really not me at my best. Argh! I’m going to try to do better, but I’m going to forgive myself for that in this moment. What did I learn from that? What am I going to do differently next time?” [I] try to have that compassion for myself around it.
I’m pretty successful with that most of the time, I have to say. So, that’s good. But then, of course, there’s other times when we just have to feel bad about it. Then, maybe actually make a repair if it was really bad. Right? So, “I’m sorry that I yelled at you.” My kid knows the terms “emotion,” “mind,” and “wise mind.” Like, “I was really in emotion-mind, and I’m sorry that I did that.” That’s sometimes the best that we can do. Then, we just try to do better the next time.
TS: Now, we started our conversation by talking about how [it is] in our culture today that most people still find it so difficult just to get to a basic level of working with their emotions in a skillful way. You mentioned that you thought part of the reason had to do with—as children—we weren’t taught to work skillfully and successfully with our emotions.
So, I’m curious: how [are] you approaching raising your four-year-old son such that hopefully he’ll have a different type of training around working with emotions?
EO: I’m already teaching him mindfulness. So, that’s what I would say is the foundation of it.
TS: Can you say that? How do you teach a four-year-old mindfulness?
EO: We read some books about mindfulness and we also have made what we call a “mind jar.” So, we have a little—it’s a bottle, actually—filled with water and glittery glue and glitter sprinkles. He shakes it up and watches the glitter fall. We’ve had a conversation about how this is the way that our thoughts and emotions can be sometimes too. And when we get really angry or really upset about something, we can take a few moments and let them all settle—just like the glitter is settling in this bottle of yours.
So, he loves it. We try to follow our breath as we wait for the glitter to settle to the bottom. It’s kind of like a snow globe, in a sense—if you can picture it. He likes it. Every once and a while, he’ll actually say to me—if he’s really upset about something—”I think I need my mind jar.” He’ll go and shake it up, and sit and try to take a few mindful breaths and watch while the glitter settles.
So, that’s the beginning of him understanding a couple of things. One, that he actually has a choice about feeling different and that he can do something about it. Also, that he can settle his body. So, he loves it.
Kids really do like it. I’ve also gone into his nursery school class and taught the whole class about this. We talked about making mind jars. All the kids thought it was really cool.
They get it—that they feel things in a big way. We just need to give them tools to learn how to do something about it. Also, to ask for help. The other thing that I’ve taught my son is that he can ask me for help in calming down any time he wants. So, often, instead of giving a time-out, he’ll often actually ask, “Can we have a time out so that you can help me calm down? I need help.”
I think that that’s important. If you teach that at a young age, he’ll be able to regulate as he’s growing.
TS: And then: when your son comes to you and says, “I need help right now,” what do you two do together? What do you do at that point?
EO: We either take deep breaths and we try to breathe slowly or—he loves to sing. So, we sing a song. We have a couple of go-to songs. Depending on his mood, he usually requests. He makes requests. We sing a song together.
Usually, physical closeness. There’s something really amazing in calming us about having physical contact. Usually, he needs a hug and we sing a song at the same time.
TS: OK, Erin. I just have two more questions for you. One is that when I was reading Wise Mind Living, I got to this very interesting point towards the back of the book where you offer this tip that people can use when they’re totally overwhelmed. You call it “practicing the dive reflex.” I’ve never heard anyone introduce this technique before—for when you’re feeling really overwhelmed—and I want our listeners to hear it. So, can you tell us what the dive reflex is?
EO: Sure. The dive reflex is a physiological reflex that we have—think a doctor hits your knee and your leg goes up. That’s a reflex. Well, we also have a reflex that if we dive into cool water, our body senses that at the place on our forehead and face—that cool wet on our face—and prepares your body to be underwater. So, it slows down your heart rate and need for oxygen, basically.
That is what we want to do when we want to slow down the reactivity of our autonomic nervous system. We can mimic that dive reflex without having to dive into cold water by actually putting something cold and wet on our forehead, and holding our breath for like thirty seconds. Fifteen seconds.
I ask all of my patients to do it. We also [sometimes] use an ice pack. So, I have some of my patients who are really struggling with panic attacks or a lot of anxiety—they’ll actually carry an ice pack. One of those ones that you can just break and it gets cold. They’ll carry them in their bag with them. [They] go into a bathroom if they need to and put it on their forehead, hold their breath for a few seconds, and try to do the breathing exercise.
So, it’s really helpful to sort of jumpstart that relaxation response. It’s a helpful strategy.
TS: I was imagining—you know, here I am, I’m talking to my partner at night. Let’s say I’m getting agitated about something in the conversation, just reaching over into the freezer, grabbing an ice pack, putting it on my head, and saying, “Just give me 30 seconds.”
EO: Absolutely! Or the peas. I have some patients who use the peas from their freezer, too.
But you know, I have patients who actually—their partners have learned that it’s helpful. They’re having a fight, and their partner will just walk into the freezer, get the peas out, hand them to them, and say, “Let’s take a moment.”
It’s a great strategy. It maybe seems a little silly at times, but it really does work.
TS: And I just have one final question for you, Erin. I’m curious to know what your underlying motivation is, if you will, for putting out the book Wise Mind Living and for the teaching work you’re doing. What’s motivating you?
EO: That’s a good question. You know, I love what I do. I feel like I’m teaching my patients every day. I really feel like I am a teacher—more even than being a therapist. I’m a teacher. I’m educating people about all this stuff that I put in the book every day.
I just felt like, on the one hand, writing the book means that I can reach a larger audience. but the other thing is that I don’t think everybody needs to be in therapy to get these skills. I think they really are life skills that everyone can use. So, instead of having to go to therapy to get them, I feel like they should be available to people. That’s the other motivation for writing the book—to give that to people who don’t need to go to therapy but really want to learn this stuff.
TS: I’ve been talking with Dr. Erin Olivo. She is the author of a new book, Wise Mind Living: Master Your Emotions, Transform Your Life. With Sounds True, she has also created two audio programs. One’s called Living in Wise Mind and the other is an audio on Free Yourself from Anxiety: A Mind-Body Prescription.
Erin, thank you so much. Thanks for sharing all of your wisdom. I really loved—and there’s one more thing that I got from the program. Actually, I’m going to end with this note. You can make a comment on it. In the book, you talked about noticing the small things that bring us happiness as a way to increase our happiness. You used the example of when the elevator is right there. I thought, “Well, this is a great New York example.” When you press the button and the elevator’s right there, and it makes you happy.
But I’ve been starting to notice [that] here at Sounds True, we have an elevator just from one floor to the second floor. And it’s only really for handicapped use and stuff like that. But I notice almost every time I press the button, the elevator’s there! And now I’m happy every day that I get in the elevator as a result of this. I’m increasing my happiness.
I’d be curious if you could share here, just as we end, one final way that you notice happiness in your days—and by noticing, expand that feeling of happiness that you have.
EO: I would say that another way that I—when I think to do it, because I have to remind myself to do it too. But whenever I’m walking around New York, you get a great feeling from just smiling at people. Most people smile back. And that’s a moment of happiness—of just that connection and a shared smile. So, I encourage a lot of my patients to try to do that. Just smile at somebody. Instead of just having a blank face when you get your coffee in the morning, give them a real smile. You almost always get one back.
TS: OK. Well, you can’t see it, because of course we’re in different locations—but I’m smiling at you now!
EO: Well, I’m smiling back.
TS: All right!
EO: Thank you, Tami.
TS: Thank you. SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
