Solving Problems with Emotion Regulation
The Onist #1
This week was a whirlwind. A barrage of exams and responsibilities crept up on me, nearly knocking me off my feet. As I worked, I felt my performance drop from the fatigue of stress. This got me thinking, how do people maintain high performance in high-stress situations?
After enough deep-diving, I stumbled across some legitimate-seeming advice from high performers and scientists.
First, let’s categorize our stress. Is it…
Beyond our control (e.g. waiting for a reply on something important)
Within our control (e.g. finishing an important assignment)
If it’s 1, then I’d look to Ryan Holiday and his insightful books on stoicism. In those cases, it’s less about maintaining high-quality output and more about resolving the stress.
If it’s 2, then look no further. This paper conducted an experiment to explore the relationship between emotion regulation tendencies and performance on leadership tasks.
They investigated a couple of strategies: situation modification, attentional deployment, and cognitive reappraisal.
Situation Modification
This strategy deals mostly with modifying the characteristics causing the emotion, focusing on the situation and not the emotion. It’s most obvious in situations where you’re in control. For example, you may choose to separate two team members who are having a disagreement, thereby regulating emotions by altering the situation. Another way is to interject humor into a tense situation, again altering the situation that may cause emotions of nervousness.
This strategy can also be used in individual situations. Most obviously, former SEAL leader Jocko Willink says that he manages stress by confronting it as quickly as possible. This is great and all, but it doesn’t hit the core problem — maintaining high output in the midst of stressful situations.
Conclusion: Good strategy to employ in team situations, but requires too high EQ and has underwhelming applicability to individual situations.
Attentional Deployment
This strategy describes how focusing on different aspects of the situation can cause different emotions. Have you heard of the platitude, “Look at the silver lining?” It’s basically that — finding ways to seek the comforting aspects of a stressful situation in an effort to switch off your sympathetic nervous system quicker.
There are two ways to regulate attentional deployment: distraction and concentration.
Distraction is what we do when we procrastinate. We fall into YouTube rabbit holes or start other tasks instead. We avoid facing, much less finishing, what we need to do. But in the end, we end up in the concentration stage anyway, just with less time.
Concentration is a much more confrontational approach. In a stressful situation, the concentration strategy pushes you to focus on your emotions and feelings. Excessive use of this strategy may lead to self-awareness. However, you risk the potential of rumination, where too much concentration snowballs into an overwhelming negative spiral. The key is to concentrate on why you’re feeling stressed and how you can accept that feeling, rather than on all the negative feelings at once.
Conclusion: Easier said than done. But, it works. Over time, this method should be the most impactful toward stress levels, but it takes a lot of upfront investment into self-reflection.
Cognitive Reappraisal
This strategy also focuses on inward reflection but instead uses it to reinterpret the situation and its demands. For example, you may choose to view a particularly important project as “just another project” in an effort to minimize its impact and, in conjunction, lower the stress tied to it.
Cognitive reappraisal is associated with the experience of more positive emotions and decreased levels of negative emotions (Gross and John, 2003). Additionally, studies on cognitive reappraisal demonstrate improved cognitive functioning (e.g., memory; Richards and Gross, 2000), better social functioning (Gross and John, 2003), and higher task performance (Wallace et al., 2009).
In essence, broadening your perspective on something usually helps improve your performance on the task. You’re not simply ignoring or suppressing the feeling, but instead zooming out and finding another way to provide healthy context to the situation.
One particular way that’s worked wonders for me is the “I have to → I get to” reappraisal. When you have to do something, you’re burdened by the act of completing the task. However, when you get to do something, you can relish the privilege of being responsible for something. Whether it’s a chore or a test, finding gratitude has helped me prevent stress-caused bad performance.
Conclusion: Zooming out shows the most direct benefit for performance.
The Takeaways
Unsurprisingly, high performance under stress requires different strategies depending on the context. Let’s go over each one:
If you’re in a team situation: try situation modification. When tensions run high, propose a quick break or aim to be action-oriented.
If you’re looking for a long-term fix: try attentional deployment, specifically concentrating on the feeling of stress. Focus on finding a pattern of stressors and finding ways to substitute other feelings.
If you’re needing a quick boost in performance: try cognitive reappraisal. Focus on finding the broader context of a situation. You’ll often find alternative ways to see a situation that is less stressful and therefore prevent performance decline.