Emotional Control

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Pavlov’s Dogs – controlling emotional thinking

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In the early 1900s, Russian Physiologist Ivan Pavlov, measured the saliva that dogs produced when he brought them food, as their bodies prepared to digest the food. Then for a while he rang a bell at the same time he brought the food. Then he rang the bell but did not bring food.  The dogs produced saliva exactly as if he had brought them food. In other words an unconscious physiological response was produced to stimulus that would not have normally produced that response.

This is called a conditioned response and usually happens to us more powerfully with bad or fearful things. These responses can be very specific. One lady got terrified when she heard drinking glasses clink together because it reminded her of the start of an earthquake.

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Emotional Thinking for everyday, stress and performance enhancement.

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Emotional thinking is part of everyday life, whether it be related to work, family, finances, school or sport. Yet often people feel like it is working against them. Negatives seem to affect us effortlessly, whilst it can be difficult to counteract them even for resourceful, confident people.

There are 4 things to remember about emotional thinking.

1.     Negatives get stuck more powerfully than positives because they are related to fear and survival. (see Mental Strength  in the Healthy Habits Blog on this website).

2.     Negatives inhibit and turn down the effect of positive emotions. This means that when you are stressed, things that should make you happy, confident and resourceful, seem weak and ineffective.

3.     You can’t influence emotional thinking with logical, analytical thinking. Phrases like snap out of it, there’s nothing to worry about, just get on with it and pull yourself together don’t have much impact.

4.     Simple Pavlovian Conditioning techniques ( see Healthy Habits Blog article  Pavlov’s Dogs) allow us to anchor and enhance positive emotional thinking to counterbalance negative fearful emotional thinking.