By Noam Shpancer Ph.D. | Published May 4, 2021 | Last reviewed on August 16, 2022

Life, goes the saying, is like a diamond—hard and beautiful. Many are experiencing the hardness of it quite acutely these days, in the form of stress, dread, and fatigue. Much of our success in navigating these difficult times depends on our mental health.

People may visualize mental health as a place one arrives at or a treasure one possesses. But mental health is neither a destination nor a property. Rather, it is something you do—the practice of proper mind management.

Your mind is a lot like a car: Both churn with energy; both can take you places; both can veer off course to devastating effect. Most important, the usefulness of both will depend in large part on how you handle them.

Good driving is a process of constant adaptation characterized by high responsivity and requiring myriad specific skills: how to take a turn, merge into traffic, change lanes safely. Likewise, sound mental health is a process of constant adaptation, characterized by psychological flexibility—the ability to recognize and adjust your mindset and behavior to various situations so as not to callously hurt yourself or others, and so that you may continue to represent your values and pursue worthy goals in the face of distractions and obstacles.

Like driving, the process of mental health requires its own set of specific skills. Here, the skills in question are those that let us manage well the products of the mind—our thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Psychological science provides some useful instructions for that purpose.

Think Accurately.

Lying in bed at night, you hear a sudden “thud” coming from downstairs. What do you feel? What do you do? Your subsequent emotion and action will depend on what you tell yourself—your interpretation of what the noise means. If you think, This is just snow falling from the roof, you’ll likely turn back to sleep unbothered. But thinking, A burglar is at my window, will get your heart racing and have you reaching for your phone or gun, depending on your politics.

Cognitive psychology research over the past few decades has shown that our thoughts—beliefs and subjective interpretations—give rise to our emotions and behavior. Thinking, in other words, is important for our emotional state.

One oft-repeated axiom of advice is that you should, therefore, strive to “think positively.” Positive thinking gets good press, and in proper doses it can be useful. Optimism, as the work of psychologist Martin Seligman and others has shown, can help us endure periods of hardship, bolster a sense of hope, and improve mood.

Alas, positivity, while differing in content, is similar in process to negativity: Both are biases, and both obscure and distort the truth. Basing a response on anything other than the truth carries grave risks. If you’re falling, there’s no use in telling yourself that you’ve learned how to fly. Decisions guided by truth and facts are more likely to prove successful. Sound mental health is served best by accurate thinking.

Thoughts are like viruses. Letting the wrong one into your system may cause harm. Bad thoughts—racism is one—have caused more damage than bad viruses. And they’re harder to eradicate.

Accurate thinking amounts to an informal application of the scientific method—a process of refereeing between competing truth claims based on evidence. To develop accurate thinking skills, we must first appreciate that our brain’s operations rely on two central processes: control and automatic. Control processes are slow, effortful, and highly vulnerable to disruption; they demand concentration and full attention. Automatic processes are fast, robust against disruption, and do not require attention or concentration in order to operate successfully.

Learning how to drive a car is a control process— effortful and demanding. But 10 years later, your driving has shifted to automatic—effortless and requiring no concentration. Such autonomous operations have an important evolutionary role: They free up energy and allow conscious attention, a limited resource, to focus on what is new. That permits us to keep up with the ever dynamic conditions of reality, the better to survive and thrive.

Habits are automatic processes operating outside of awareness. This fact has two main implications. First, you cannot describe something well if you aren’t aware of it. The more automatic a process becomes, the less information is available to us about how it works—one reason great players are not often great coaches. Their playing, what they do over and over, has become automatized; they no longer have clear conscious knowledge of how they do it. Second, you cannot change what you’re not aware of. A habit in motion tends to stay in motion.

Throughout our life we acquire “thought habits”—automatic ways of thinking about the world and ourselves. Functional thought habits—like good eating, sleeping, or driving habits—help us operate efficiently and safely. However, distorted thought habits—like poor eating, sleeping, or driving habits—will over time result in psychological pain and maladjustment.

If, for example, you’ve developed a thought habit of believing that anything short of perfection is failure, then you are bound to judge yourself a failure often, thus experiencing psychic pain. Your actual problem is not imperfection—which is merely a condition of all humanity, excepting Beyoncé—but the distorted automatic belief that perfection is the only form of success.

Distorted thinking habits are not usually adopted randomly or through some mind abnormality, but because they served a useful purpose at the time of their adoption. For example, after years of driving to your place of employment, you need not notice the road. The route has been automatized, allowing your thoughts to wander quite freely during your commute. It’s a fine, adaptive habit.

But if your office is suddenly moved to a new location across town, the same old habit is rendered maladaptive. You’ll need to exert effort, pay attention, and use your control processes to learn a new route.

Sound mind maintenance likewise requires identification and change of outdated and ineffective thinking habits. Doing this takes several steps. First, you need to become aware of your thinking habits. In other words, you need to think about your thinking in order to detect recurring patterns. You can do this by asking yourself such questions as, What am I telling myself right now? or What thoughts come up for me in these kinds of situations?

The second step is to realize that your initial thoughts in a given situation are just old habits at work rather than truth revealed. Thoughts in general are not world events but mind events. They are not facts but hypotheses, conjectures about what may or may not be. As such, you can observe them dispassionately and with curiosity and choose whether to engage or let them drift by like clouds in the sky. Such detached awareness may sometimes in itself neutralize the corrosive effects of troubling thoughts.

Becoming aware of a distorted thinking habit also allows you to change it. Awareness alone, however, is insufficient: Realizing a place exists doesn’t automatically get you there. You need not know why a habit arose, but to replace it you’ll need to challenge and engage actively with the old thought habit.

To do so, you’ll want to first generate several alternative thoughts. Ask yourself, What else may be going on? What else may happen? What else can I tell myself here? Then, evaluate the different thoughts based on evidence. (Asking yourself, Which of these thoughts would I bet my life on, if I had to? may encourage your evidence search.) Finally, choose the thought that is supported by the best evidence. Then repeat that thought to yourself and act from it.

Accurate thinking is like buying eyewear. You don’t just grab onto the first pair of glasses you see. Rather, you check out the merchandize, try on a few pairs, pick several viable candidates for purchase, compare them based on assorted criteria of evidence— fit, price, style, brand—and choose the most appropriate pair for you. As with your glasses so with your thoughts. It’s best to inspect and evaluate the merchandize before making a purchase.

Neither Deny nor Obey Emotions—Accept Them.

Emotions hold great sway over our lives, coloring and flavoring experience. That said, it is useful to remember that emotions, like thoughts, are mind events not world events, which means that we have much say in regulating them.

Science has yet to fully decipher the nature, structure, and origins of emotional experience. What we do know is that, pragmatically, emotions constitute a type of data that is often useful for navigating the world. A measure of emotional arousal helps us learn new things and remember important events. A baby’s cry of distress effectively summons the caregiver’s attention. Fear keeps you off the dangerous edge of the cliff.

However, as with data in general, two questions loom large over emotional experience: First, are the data any good, or are they incomplete, corrupt, or distorted in some important way? And second, what’s the best response, given the data?

Psychological research from David Barlow and others has shown that mental distress often emerges not from emotional experience itself but from errors in emotion regulation—mistakes in handling the data. The first such common error is that of denial, whereby emotions are resisted, disallowed, or avoided. This happens when you tell yourself you’re not allowed to feel what you’re feeling. Feeling the jitters before a big presentation, you admonish yourself to not get anxious.

The impulse to deny emotions, particularly negative ones, is understandable. Negative emotions are no fun, and we often associate them with negative events and outcomes that we wish to avoid or forget. In fact, research from George Vaillant and others has shown that a measure of conscious emotion suppression—choosing not to engage or talk about distressing feelings—is often a useful, healthy coping mechanism. Such suppression, however, entails awareness, acceptance, and a lack of fear in the face of the emotion.

Denial, on the other hand, denotes a fearful unwillingness to feel. Attempts at denial are ineffective, for several reasons. First, one law of our internal architecture is that whatever you tell yourself you’re not allowed to feel or think, you’re already feeling and thinking. Pushing against emotion is thus futile, as ill-advised and as fatiguing as swimming against a riptide.

Moreover, designating a certain emotion as forbidden, intolerable, or dangerous can make you hypervigilant about the very emotion you’re trying to deny. Constant vigilance about an impending negative experience becomes a negative experience in itself.

Finally, habits of denying negative emotions may, over time, morph into “experiential avoidance,” a general tendency to avoid difficult internal experiences. Research from Steven Hayes and others has identified experiential avoidance as an underlying factor in much psychopathology, for several reasons.

Life is an obstacle course even in the best of times. Keeping one’s bearings and achieving meaningful goals involve a willingness to face and overcome adversity. If your only response to difficulty is to back off, you’ll end up retreating from life itself. Inability to tolerate difficult emotion impoverishes your mental life.

Avoidance is appealing because it brings quick relief. The human brain is biased toward favoring short-term calculations and immediate gratifications. Rewards that are placed within our reach loom larger than faraway consequences. The bucket of fat-drenched French fries is all the more enticing for being right here in front of me, while the looming heart attack is years in the future, dimly sketched in the mind. No wonder I reach for the fries.

Life was once—in our species’ early environs—precarious, strictly a short-term proposition. Privileging immediate reward was adaptive. Our lives now are, with any luck, long term and require long-term strategies. Holding your breath works to keep you alive under water in the short term; it is not effective for long-term submersion. Likewise the habit of avoidance, effective in the short term, becomes maladaptive over time.

Avoidance teaches you nothing but how to evade more, and therefore tends to metastasize with time. The more you avoid, the less competent, knowledgeable, and confident you become, and the less of life you can fully experience.

The second common mistake in handling emotions may be called “emotional obedience.” We assume our emotions represent the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth and must therefore drive our actions: I’m scared, therefore I must run. I’m angry, therefore I must fight.

Such emotionally driven behaviors are problematic because research has shown—and self-reflection will no doubt confirm—that our emotions often provide distorted, partial, and biased information. A roller coaster ride may produce genuine terror, but it presents no real danger, short of badly messed up hair. Things we fear more (airplanes, strangers) are often safer than things we fear less (cars, family members). Your drunken insistence that you feel fine to drive is another case in point.

Even when they tell a true story, our emotions rarely capture the whole of it. How you feel about buying a house is important, but far from the only consideration in finding an abode. Budget, family size, neighborhood, market conditions, and available alternatives matter too, often more so.

To properly regulate emotional data, we must refrain from either denying or obeying emotions. Instead, there’s a simple two-step process. The first step is acceptance. Emotions are, in a sense, internal weather, and it’s as advisable to accept the truth and fact of our emotions as we do the weather’s. If you’re anxious or sad, your best first move is to acknowledge and accept what you feel: I am human. Humans have emotions. This emotion is part of my experience right now.

Acceptance confers benefits. It is a form of facing facts, like describing a difficult event in honest detail. Doing so may be hard, but it manifests your courage and builds your strength. In accepting your emotions, you are also accepting the truth of your situation—a base from which to fashion a successful response.

Accepting emotion also negates the exhausting and futile effort involved in denial and affords you the opportunity to examine and get to know a part of your experience. Knowledge is power. Self-knowledge is self-empowering.

Finally, accepting a negative emotion lessens its destructive potential. Caught in a riptide, your best move is not to resist but to let the current take you out to sea. Soon, the current will weaken and disperse, and you’ll be able to swim around it and back safely to shore.

Acceptance does not imply blind emotional obedience. Rather, the next step in proper emotion management is to decide what to do with the emotion data. Once you acknowledge that it’s raining, it is still up to you to decide how to act vis-à-vis that fact.

Emotions tend to be good consultants but lousy executives. We are well advised to consider their input but ill advised to let them take charge. Your emotions, in other words, should work for you, not the other way around. Luckily, emotional data are but one of multiple useful data sources to consult before deciding on a course of action.

Your best move is to seek diverse consults from sources other than emotion before making important behavioral decisions. Such sources include your goals, values, experience, logic, knowledge of self and world, Google, and more. Having entertained the varied inputs, you can then make a well-considered (rather than emotionally driven) executive decision about your most sensible path forward.

Consider an example: You’re driving to your daughter’s wedding when another driver cuts you off dangerously. Your anger flares, advising you to chase the driver down and retaliate. Your first correct move is to acknowledge your rage and its advice. Next, summon your other consultants: What’s your goal for this trip? What values are important for you to represent by your conduct? What are the odds for a productive highway confrontation? Then, make an executive decision about your best course of action.

Odds are that you’ll recognize the folly of letting a stranger hijack this important day, that you will choose to honor your values (such as, say, nonviolence), and therefore politely decline anger’s advice and keep on your way. Your anger will have long dissipated by the time you’re wowing the inebriated wedding party with your fancy footwork on the dance floor.

Tolerate Short-Term Pain to Avert Long-Term Suffering.

Which brings us to behavior, the domain where thoughts and emotions manifest most consequentially. The golden rule of healthy behavior management: Challenges exist. To be overcome they must be met. Enduring short-term discomfort is the necessary passport to long-term health and adaptation. Those who cannot tolerate acute temporary discomfort now condemn themselves to chronic suffering later.

Of course, avoidant behavior is sometimes warranted, even necessary. It’s best to dodge, rather than confront, the oncoming train. But when avoidance is motivated by distorted thinking, emotional mismanagement, or our innate, dated distaste for delayed gratification and long-term calculations, then indulging it will prove destructive.

Behavioral engagement, facing fears and challenges, is usually the better approach. It helps in several ways. First, it allows us to improve our understanding of the terrain and hone our skills. Many things we first perceive as difficult are not inherently hard but merely effortful because they’re new, and hence under control processes. Practice makes competence. And practice requires engagement.

In addition, behavioral engagement tends to bring you into regular, productive contact with others, which may strengthen community ties and shore up your social support network. Human beings are social creatures. We thrive only in coherent, well-coordinated groups. Social connectedness is among the most powerful predictors of health, happiness and longevity. Engaging with others is a wise investment in your own well-being.

Moreover, recent research by Mark Bouton, Michelle Craske, and others has shown that, unlike avoidance, the process of facing one’s fears lets new coping responses compete. It overrides earlier maladaptive habits when feared catastrophic predictions get refuted by actual benign experiences.

Finally, behavioral engagement is useful because action begets emotion. Contrary to popular belief, the emotion-behavior link is reciprocal. At times, our actions may be emotionally driven. But other times, emotions are action driven.

Just as feeling lusty may beget a couple’s make-out session, so will making out likely beget heightened lust (do try this at home). Our emotions often line up behind our actions. This is why, as David Ekers and others have shown, the practice of behavioral activation—intentionally engaging in activities one associates with positive memories and feelings—is an important part of effective treatment for mood disorders. The fastest, most reliable way to change how you feel is by changing what you do.

In sum, doing basic mental health right entails practicing accurate thinking, emotion management, and behavioral engagement, while learning to tolerate short-term discomfort in the service of meaningful long-term goals and deeply held values. Such practice requires considerable effort and commitment, as do all things that matter. But the trouble is worth it because, to paraphrase my mother, at the end of the day, all you’ve got is your mental health.

Original Post: Laws of Emotional Mastery

Copyright belongs to the original author.

情绪掌控法则

Noam Shpancer Ph.D. | 2021年5月4日 | 最后审阅于2022年8月16日

生活，就像俗话所说的，像钻石一样——坚硬而美丽。如今，许多人正深刻体会到它的坚硬，以压力、恐惧和疲惫的形式显现出来。在应对这些困难时期时，我们成功与否很大程度上取决于我们的心理健康。

人们可能会把心理健康想象成一个可以到达的地方，或是一个拥有的宝藏。但心理健康既不是一个目的地，也不是一种财产。相反，它是一种行为——正确心智管理的实践。

你的心智很像一辆汽车：两者都充满能量；两者都能带你到达不同的地方；但两者也都可能偏离轨道，带来毁灭性的后果。最重要的是，它们的有用性在很大程度上取决于你如何处理它们。

良好的驾驶是一种不断适应的过程，它以高度的应变能力为特征，并需要掌握众多特定技能：如何转弯、融入车流、或安全变道。同样，健全的心理健康是一种不断适应的过程，它以心理灵活性为特征——即能够识别和调整你的心态和行为，适应不同的情况，不至于冷酷地伤害自己或他人，并且在面对干扰和障碍时，依然能体现你的价值观，追求有意义的目标。

像驾驶一样，心理健康的过程也需要一套特定的技能。在这里，这些技能是帮助我们妥善管理心智产物的能力——我们的思想、情感和行为。心理学为此提供了一些有用的指导。

准确思考

晚上躺在床上时，你听到楼下传来一声突如其来的“砰”声。你有什么感觉？你会做什么？你接下来的情绪和行动取决于你对这声响的解释。如果你认为“这只是屋顶上的雪掉下来了”，你可能会毫不在意地继续睡觉。但如果你认为“有小偷在窗边”，你可能会心跳加速，拿起手机或者枪，具体取决于你的观念。

过去几十年的认知心理学研究表明，我们的想法——信念和主观解释——会引发我们的情绪和行为。换句话说，思维对我们的情绪状态非常重要。

一种常听到的建议是“要积极思考”。积极思考的确有它的好处，适量时是有用的。正如心理学家Martin Seligman和其他人的研究所示，乐观能帮助我们度过艰难时期，增强希望感，改善情绪。

然而，尽管内容不同，积极思考的过程却与消极思考相似：它们都是偏见，都会掩盖和扭曲真相。基于任何非真相的反应都存在巨大的风险。如果你正在坠落，告诉自己学会飞行是没有用的。由真相和事实引导的决策更有可能成功。健康的心理状态需要精确的思维。

思维就像病毒一样。错误的思维一旦进入你的系统，可能会造成伤害。糟糕的想法——例如种族主义——比病毒造成的伤害还要大。而且它们更难根除。

精确思考相当于非正式应用科学方法——根据证据对不同的真相主张进行裁定的过程。为了培养精确思维的能力，我们必须首先认识到大脑的运作依赖于两个核心过程：控制过程和自动过程。控制过程是缓慢的、费力的，且极易受到干扰；它们需要集中注意力和全神贯注。自动过程则快速、抗干扰，不需要注意力或集中精神也能成功运作。

学习驾驶是一种控制过程——费力且要求严格。但十年后，你的驾驶已经变成自动化的——毫不费力且无需集中注意力。这种自动化操作具有重要的进化意义：它们解放了能量，让有限的注意力资源能够集中于新的事物，帮助我们应对现实中的动态条件，从而更好地生存和发展。

习惯是无意识中运行的自动化过程。这一事实有两大含义。首先，如果你没有意识到某件事，你就无法很好地描述它。过程越自动化，我们获得的关于其运作的信息就越少——这就是为什么伟大的运动员往往不是伟大的教练。他们反复做的事情已经自动化，他们不再清楚地知道自己是如何做到的。其次，你无法改变你没有意识到的东西。一个处于运行中的习惯会继续保持下去。

我们一生中形成了许多“思维习惯”——对世界和自我的自动化思维方式。功能性思维习惯——比如良好的饮食、睡眠或驾驶习惯——帮助我们高效且安全地运作。但扭曲的思维习惯——如糟糕的饮食、睡眠或驾驶习惯——随着时间的推移，会导致心理痛苦和适应不良。

例如，如果你形成了认为“任何不完美都是失败”的思维习惯，那么你很可能会经常评判自己为失败者，从而体验到心理上的痛苦。你真正的问题不是不完美——不完美只是全人类的普遍状态，除了碧昂丝——而是那个扭曲的自动化信念：认为完美是唯一的成功形式。

扭曲的思维习惯通常并非随机形成的，也不是由于某种思维异常而产生的，而是因为它们在形成时曾有过有用的作用。例如，经过多年开车去上班的经历，你不需要注意路况。这条路线已经自动化，允许你在通勤时让思绪自由飘散。这是一个很好的适应性习惯。

但如果你的办公室突然搬到城镇的另一端，那么同样的旧习惯就变得不再适应。你将需要努力，集中注意力，并使用控制过程来学习新的路线。

健全的心理维护同样需要识别并改变过时和无效的思维习惯。做到这一点需要几个步骤。首先，你需要意识到自己的思维习惯。换句话说，你需要思考自己的思维，以便检测到反复出现的模式。你可以通过问自己一些问题来做到这一点，比如：“我现在在对自己说什么？”或“在这种情况下我有什么想法？”

第二步是要认识到，在某个特定情境中的初始想法只是旧习惯的作用，而不是被揭示的真理。一般来说，想法不是世界事件，而是心智事件。它们不是事实，而是假设，是对可能发生或不发生事情的推测。因此，你可以以一种超然的、好奇的态度观察它们，并选择是否参与其中，或让它们像天上的云一样飘过。这种超然的觉察有时本身就能中和那些困扰性思维的腐蚀性影响。

意识到一个扭曲的思维习惯也使你能够改变它。然而，仅有觉察是不够的：意识到某个地方存在并不会让你自动到达那里。你不需要知道习惯是如何产生的，但要替代它，你需要积极地挑战和对抗旧的思维习惯。

为此，你需要首先生成几种替代性思维。问自己：“还有其他什么可能正在发生？”、“还有其他什么可能会发生？”、“在这里我还可以对自己说些什么？” 然后，根据证据来评估这些不同的想法。（问自己：“如果必须的话，我愿意拿命来赌哪个想法？”或许会促使你寻找证据。）最后，选择那个由最佳证据支持的想法。然后不断对自己重复这个想法，并根据它采取行动。

精确思维就像买眼镜。你不会随便拿起第一副眼镜就买。而是会检查商品，试戴几副，选择几个合适的候选，基于证据（如合适度、价格、款式、品牌等）进行比较，最终选择最适合你的那副。你的眼镜如此，你的想法亦然。最好在“购买”之前检查和评估“商品”。

既不否认也不服从——接受情绪

情绪对我们的生活有极大的影响，为我们的经历增添了色彩和味道。但需要记住的是，情绪和思想一样，都是心智事件，而非世界事件，这意味着我们在调节情绪方面有很大的自主权。

科学尚未完全解开情绪体验的本质、结构和起源。但我们知道的是，从实用的角度来看，情绪是一种数据，通常在应对世界时非常有用。一定程度的情绪激动可以帮助我们学习新事物并记住重要事件。婴儿的哭声有效地吸引了看护者的注意。恐惧则让你远离悬崖的危险边缘。

然而，正如任何数据一样，情绪体验也面临着两个重要问题：首先，这些数据是否可靠，或者它们是否在某种重要方面不完整、被破坏或歪曲？其次，鉴于这些数据，最好的回应是什么？

心理学家David Barlow等人的研究表明，心理痛苦往往不是由情绪体验本身引起的，而是源于情绪调节的错误——也就是处理数据的错误。第一个常见的错误是“否认”，即抗拒、拒绝或回避情绪。这发生在你告诉自己不允许感受某种情绪时。例如，在一个重要演讲前感到紧张时，你责备自己不该焦虑。

否认情绪的冲动，尤其是负面情绪，是可以理解的。负面情绪不令人愉快，我们常将它们与负面的事件和结果联系起来，并希望避免或忘记这些情绪。事实上，George Vaillant等人的研究表明，一定程度的有意识情绪抑制——选择不去参与或讨论令人痛苦的情感——常常是一种有用且健康的应对机制。然而，这种抑制需要意识、接受，并且不惧怕面对情绪。

另一方面，否认则意味着一种对情绪的恐惧和不愿感受。试图否认情绪是无效的，原因有很多。首先，我们的内在结构中有一条规律：无论你告诉自己不允许感受或思考什么，你已经在感受和思考了。抗拒情绪因此是徒劳的，就像逆着强流游泳一样不明智且令人疲惫。

此外，将某种情绪标记为“禁忌”、“不可容忍”或“危险”可能会让你对正试图否认的情绪保持高度警觉。对即将到来的负面体验的持续警惕本身就变成了一种负面体验。

最后，否认负面情绪的习惯可能会随着时间的推移演变成“体验性回避”，即一种回避困难内心经历的普遍倾向。 Steven Hayes等人的研究发现，体验性回避是许多心理病理学的潜在因素，有多个原因导致这种现象。

即使在最好的时候，生活也是一场障碍赛。保持方向并实现有意义的目标需要愿意面对和克服逆境。如果你面对困难时的唯一反应是退缩，你最终将逃避整个生活。无法忍受艰难情绪会让你的心理生活变得贫乏。

回避之所以吸引人，是因为它能迅速带来缓解。人类大脑倾向于偏爱短期计算和即时满足。摆在我们眼前的奖励比遥远的后果更为吸引人。一桶油炸薯条就在我面前，这使它更具诱惑力，而未来几年后的心脏病发作则是模糊的、难以想象的。难怪我会伸手去拿那桶薯条。

在我们这一物种的早期环境中，生活是短期的，不稳定的。优先考虑即时奖励是适应性的。而现在的生活——如果幸运的话——是长期的，需要长期策略。在水下屏住呼吸可以在短期内让你活下来，但对于长时间潜水来说，这不是有效的策略。同样，回避的习惯在短期内有效，但随着时间的推移就会变得不适应。

回避不会教会你如何应对，反而会让你学会更多地逃避，因此回避行为会随着时间的推移而扩散。你回避得越多，你就变得越不称职、越缺乏知识和自信，你能真正体验到的生活也就越少。

处理情绪时的第二个常见错误可以称为“情绪服从”。我们假设情绪代表着真相、全部的真相，并且必须驱动我们的行为：“我害怕，所以我必须逃跑。” “我生气了，所以我必须战斗。”

这种情绪驱动的行为是有问题的，因为研究表明——通过自我反思你也会确认——我们的情绪往往提供的是扭曲的、片面的、带有偏见的信息。坐过山车时的恐惧可能是真实的，但实际上并没有真正的危险，除了可能弄乱了发型。我们更害怕的东西（比如飞机、陌生人）往往比我们不那么害怕的东西（比如汽车、家人）更安全。你喝醉后坚持自己状态良好、可以开车就是一个明显的例子。

即使情绪讲述了一个真实的故事，它们也很少能展现事情的全貌。你对买房子的感受固然重要，但在选择住所时，这并不是唯一的考虑因素。预算、家庭规模、社区、市场状况以及其他可选方案都同样重要，往往更重要。

要恰当地调节情绪数据，我们必须避免否认情绪或服从情绪。相反，有一个简单的两步过程。第一步是接受。情绪在某种意义上是内在的天气，我们对待情绪的态度应该像对待天气一样，接受它们的真实和事实。如果你感到焦虑或悲伤，最好的第一步就是承认并接受你的情绪：“我是人类，人类有情绪。这种情绪是我目前体验的一部分。”

接受带来好处。它是一种面对事实的方式，就像诚实地描述一件困难的事件。这样做可能很难，但它展现了你的勇气，并增强了你的力量。通过接受你的情绪，你也接受了你所处情境的事实，这为你成功应对提供了基础。

接受情绪也消除了否认情绪所需的使人疲惫不堪的、徒劳的努力，并为你提供了机会去审视和了解自己的一部分经历。知识就是力量。自我认知就是自我赋能。

最后，接受负面情绪减少了它的破坏性潜力。陷入激流时，最好的做法不是抵抗，而是让水流把你带到海里。很快，水流就会减弱并散去，你就能绕过它安全地游回岸边。

接受并不意味着盲目服从情绪。相反，情绪管理的下一步是决定如何处理情绪数据。一旦你承认下雨了，还是由你来决定如何应对这个事实。

情绪往往是好的顾问，但却是糟糕的执行者。我们应考虑情绪的建议，但不应让它们掌控一切。换句话说，你的情绪应该为你服务，而不是你为情绪服务。幸运的是，情绪数据只是多个有用数据源之一，我们可以在做出行为决策前参考其他数据。

在做重要决策前，你的最佳做法是从情绪以外的来源寻找多样化的建议。这些来源包括你的目标、价值观、经验、逻辑、对自我和世界的了解、以及谷歌等等。在吸收了多种意见后，你可以做出经过深思熟虑的（而非情绪驱动的）决策，找出最合理的行动路径。

举个例子：你正在开车去参加女儿的婚礼，这时另一辆车危险地从你面前插了进来。你的愤怒情绪燃起，建议你追上这辆车报复。正确的第一步是承认你的愤怒以及它的建议。接着，传唤其他顾问的：你这次旅行的目标是什么？你希望通过自己的行为表现哪些价值观？高速路上的对峙有多大可能是有效的？然后，做出关于最佳行动方案的决策。

你很可能会认识到让一个陌生人劫持这重要一天的愚蠢之处，选择尊重你的价值观（例如，非暴力），因此礼貌地拒绝愤怒的建议，继续前行。等到你在舞池上用华丽的舞步让醉酒的婚礼宾客惊叹时，你的愤怒早已消散。

忍受短期痛苦以避免长期痛苦

这就引出了行为问题，这是思想和情绪最能展现影响力的领域。健康行为管理的黄金法则是：挑战存在。要克服它们，就必须面对它们。忍受短期的不适是实现长期健康和适应的必要通行证。那些现在无法忍受短暂的急性不适的人，最终将自己置于长期痛苦之中。

当然，回避行为有时是合理的，甚至是必要的。面对迎面而来的火车，最好是躲开，而不是迎面相对。但当回避行为是由扭曲的思维、情绪失调或我们与生俱来的、已经过时的对延迟满足和长期规划的厌恶所驱动时，纵容这种行为将会带来破坏性后果。

行为上的参与，即面对恐惧和挑战，通常是更好的方法。它的好处有很多。首先，它让我们更好地了解环境并磨练我们的技能。许多我们最初认为困难的事情，并非天生就难，而是因为它们是新的，因此需要控制性过程来完成。练习带来能力。而练习需要参与。

此外，行为参与往往能让你与他人保持定期、富有成效的接触，这可能会加强社区联系并巩固你的社会支持网络。人类是社会性生物。我们只有在协作良好、组织有序的群体中才能茁壮成长。社会连接是健康、幸福和长寿的最强有力的预测指标之一。与他人的互动是对自己健康的明智投资。

此外，Mark Bouton, Michelle Craske等人的最新研究表明，面对恐惧的过程让新的应对反应得以竞争。当人们预测的灾难性后果被实际的良性体验所推翻时，它会取代早期的不适应习惯。

最后，行为参与之所以有用，是因为行动能产生情绪。与普遍看法相反，情绪与行为的联系是双向的。有时我们的行为是由情绪驱动的，但在其他时候，情绪是由行为驱动的。

就像感受到欲望可能会引发情侣的亲热行为，而亲热行为反过来也可能会增加欲望一样（确保是在家中尝试确）。我们的情绪往往会跟随我们的行为。正因如此，正如David Ekers等人所展示的那样，“行为激活”实践——有意识地从事与积极记忆和感受相关的活动——是有效治疗情绪障碍的重要部分。改变情绪最快、最可靠的方法就是改变你的行为。

总而言之，正确的心理健康实践包括准确思维、情绪管理和行为参与，同时学习忍受短期不适，以实现有意义的长期目标和深植于心的价值观。这种实践需要大量的努力和投入，正如所有重要的事情一样。但这种努力是值得的，因为，借用我母亲的话来说，到了最后，你所拥有的就是你的心理健康。

原文链接: Laws of Emotional Mastery

版权属于原作者，本翻译仅供学习用途。