One sunny morning as I turned a corner onto campus, a young man on a skateboard jumped off the curb directly in front of my car.
I honked my horn as a warning and hit my brakes to slow the car. My heart was beating wildly, and when our eyes met I expected to see relief. Instead, this man offered me a scowl and his middle finger.
Anger boiled inside of me. I couldn”t quite believe someone could be so thoughtless. Hadn”t I just done my part to prevent serious injury? Was it me who rode in front of on-coming traffic? My self-righteousness brewed. I was imagining launching a whole campus-wide campaign on civility.
Jamie Derrick
Then I did something I”ve learned from practicing mindfulness meditation. I caught myself, and I put a label on my experience. “I feel angry as a thunderstorm.” It wasn”t long before noticed myself simmering down.
Mindfulness involves intentional focus on our immediate experiences without judging or attempting to alter it. It is practiced during meditation to develop tools for everyday living. In the same way an athlete practices to prepare for the big game, people practice mindful awareness in meditation to prepare for life”s challenges.
By mindfully noticing my anger and labeling it without judging myself, I calmed my emotion in two important ways. I interrupted a chain of thoughts about rudeness that were really upsetting me and I calmed down the limbic region in my brain, which is responsible for emotional reactivity.
Brain research using MRI shows that the simple act of labeling an emotion calms the amygdala. This can be done with any negative emotion.
Labeling emotions can actually help others calm down too. It has been used effectively in extreme situations by Chris Voss, former head of FBI hostage negotiation, to try de-escalate potentially deadly situations involving hostages.
Once I had calmed down a bit, it occurred to me that the guy on the skateboard was probably scared. He overreacted and I was glad he was OK. He wasn”t right to be rude to me, but I didn”t want to spend any more of my energy on it.
Mindful awareness is like pattern recognition software. With some patience and attention, we start to recognize patterns in ourselves. There is a tremendous freedom in knowing that we don”t have to overreact for every thought and feeling that surfaces during our inevitable moments of frustration, anger, anxiety or fear.
These mindfulness practices invite us to notice our emotional experiences, rather than judge, ignore or suppress them. Give this a try and see what happens, and don”t give up if you forget sometimes. Like an athlete, you have to keep up the practice.
Jamie Derrick is the founder of UI Mind. She can be reached at [email protected]