A failure mode for this is that when someone is faced with strong negative emotion, they are unable to think about the problem rationally. Their brain gets hijacked by negative emotion with no capacity to actually go through the correct steps.
A potential solution to that is putting things into the broadest perspective by asking yourself whether this is even a big deal at all (will it matter in a week? two weeks? a year?). Most problems don’t. But it can be hard to do even that. So you must change your entire mindset to recognise most problems as being not a big deal. You could go through past situations when faced with problems which you had a strong negative reaction to and recognise with the benefit of hindsight that they weren’t such a big deal after all. Then, when faced with a new problem, you can wedge in the broadest perspective trick before spiralling into negative emotion and that perspective will have strong prior evidence of being true which increases the likelihood of it working.
I think the broader point I am trying to make is that whatever rational technique you use for dealing with negative emotion is going to be out of reach when actually faced with strong negative emotion. So one has to, by whatever means, eliminate/attenuate the negative emotions enough to get the neocortex back online such that one can then go on to use the right techniques. The best elimination/attenuation techniques ideally would engender a mindset change such that the frequency and severity of strong negative emotions is reduced.
A failure mode for this is that when someone is faced with strong negative emotion, they are unable to think about the problem rationally. Their brain gets hijacked by negative emotion with no capacity to actually go through the correct steps.
No logic is helpful in the moment, for sure. The idea is to practice it enough outside the stressful moment that the automatic negative thinking is overwritten by a similarly automatic productive thinking. The best one can usually do while in the moment is notice the unhelpful thought, but rarely resist acting on it.
A failure mode for this is that when someone is faced with strong negative emotion, they are unable to think about the problem rationally. Their brain gets hijacked by negative emotion with no capacity to actually go through the correct steps.
A potential solution to that is putting things into the broadest perspective by asking yourself whether this is even a big deal at all (will it matter in a week? two weeks? a year?). Most problems don’t. But it can be hard to do even that. So you must change your entire mindset to recognise most problems as being not a big deal. You could go through past situations when faced with problems which you had a strong negative reaction to and recognise with the benefit of hindsight that they weren’t such a big deal after all. Then, when faced with a new problem, you can wedge in the broadest perspective trick before spiralling into negative emotion and that perspective will have strong prior evidence of being true which increases the likelihood of it working.
I think the broader point I am trying to make is that whatever rational technique you use for dealing with negative emotion is going to be out of reach when actually faced with strong negative emotion. So one has to, by whatever means, eliminate/attenuate the negative emotions enough to get the neocortex back online such that one can then go on to use the right techniques. The best elimination/attenuation techniques ideally would engender a mindset change such that the frequency and severity of strong negative emotions is reduced.
No logic is helpful in the moment, for sure. The idea is to practice it enough outside the stressful moment that the automatic negative thinking is overwritten by a similarly automatic productive thinking. The best one can usually do while in the moment is notice the unhelpful thought, but rarely resist acting on it.