Finding emotional equilibrium in today’s turbulent world
If you’re seeking to improve your experience of work, advance in your current role, or make a career pivot, I’d love to support you. Check out my services, book a free intro call, or send me a message.
What is emotional inflammation?
Hello from Belgrade. It’s one of those odd spring days where I bundled up in my raincoat for my morning walk to the office (of the local NGO I work with here) and by the time I leave this afternoon it’s supposed to be 70 and sunny outside.
I’ve been reading a new book, “Emotional Inflammation”, by Stacey Colino and Dr. Lise Van Susteren, and I’m fascinated by the exploration of how our current world crises affect our mental, emotional, physical and spiritual well-being and health. The authors talk about how the climate crisis, human rights violations, war, fear of mass shootings, fake news, and rise in the cost of living and unemployment (among other things) are directly influencing our society’s levels of anxiety, depression and unease.
Navigating emotions in a post-pandemic world
It’s not so much surprising as it is alarming to me how much we’ve seen an increase in the rates of anxiety and depression over the last decade, especially among youth. How many people have chronic sleep problems, suffer from hyper-reactivity and persistent grief or anxiety, and constantly worry about the future. With the rise of attention paid to mental and emotional health, it’s talked about, but not enough and not often from the perspective of a root cause.
When I think of emotional inflammation, I imagine an inflamed brain, full of fears and anxieties that are making us sick physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. What does it mean to be spiritually sick? I think for me it’s about the loss of hope or trust in something larger than ourselves. I think it’s about the loss of hope or trust in possibilities for the future, both of our world and of mankind. There’s a deep grief and pain that comes with this sense of resignation, it’s a perspective that leaves us cornered and feeling like nothing we do will ever make a difference. And it’s not all that surprising that many of us feel this resignation, at least in some areas of our lives, because the post-pandemic world we live in is a tumultuous one.
Join the newsletter club for more like this
Sign up with your email address to receive strategies, insights, and tips to navigate your emotions more effectively.
Understanding the impacts of technology on society
This is one of the reasons I find the authors’ description of emotional inflammation so interesting. We talk about the impacts of technology on society, but we don’t often acknowledge the true costs of our daily, habitual use of tech and social media. We rarely question whether the nonstop news cycle is healthy for us until someone else mentions maybe we should take a break. We feel helpless, hopeless, and stuck in work and life, and at the same time confused as to why.
Probably because it’s not one thing we can pin-point. Probably because it’s much larger than we even realize and our near constant media exposure keeps us in a cycle of reacting to the crises in our world, while our bodies and minds struggle to respond to the overload of stress we face daily at work and at home. And, as the authors explain, with emotional inflammation our bodies aren’t able to settle down and switch off the fight-or-flight response after the source of stress has gone away, so we end up stuck in a hyper-vigilant state of anxiety, worry or fear.
Individual and collective well-being
While I believe the problem is ultimately systemic, I also believe we have to start somewhere. From my perspective, we need to start with the individual. We need to prioritize individual well-being and resilience as a cornerstone of collective well-being and resilience. Yes, it’s a systems problem, but a first step can be deepening our own awareness and understanding of self, whereby we can restore our own emotional equilibrium and cultivate greater personal resilience.
I’m sure you’ve heard the saying before, “you can’t pour from an empty cup.” So, keeping with that, we must first learn to refill our own cup so that we can give to and support our family, community, organization and world. While we can’t control the chaos and crises around us, we can take radical responsibility for our own health and well-being. We can actively work to increase our own sense of resilience, and thereby create more space for collective transformation.
How to regain emotional equilibrium
The authors offer a beautiful acronym (RESTORE) for taking responsibility for your emotional equilibrium. While I invite you to read the book if you have time, I’ll leave you with a few key takeaways that have helped me personally and are a core part of my coaching practice.
Recognize your feelings
Evaluate your triggers
Steady your body’s natural rhythms
Think yourself into a safe space
Obey your body
Reclaim your natural gifts
Exercise your power
The first two components, “recognize your feelings” and “evaluate your triggers”, are foundational aspects of both my own personal growth and my coaching work. Regardless of what you’re working on shifting in your personal or professional life, you must learn how to identify, unpack and learn from your emotions and become aware of what sparks an emotional reaction in you.
Emotional nuance
Why? Because we can only change what we can see. So often we only go as far as saying we feel “bad, mad or sad” about a situation or the state of the world. But we lack a nuanced understanding of what’s below our “bad” (e.g. disgust, disapproval, humiliation, guilt) or “mad” (e.g. anger, frustration, irritation, resentment) and we miss the opportunity to understand the message behind the specific emotion we are feeling. It’s only once we understand what we are actually feeling that we can truly begin to understand what caused us to be thrown off balance and what might help us to regain a sense of emotional equilibrium and moderate our reactivity in the future.
Creating healthy boundaries with social media
There’s also something to be said about creating healthy boundaries around social media use and your engagement with the news cycle; however, I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits all approach. I believe the best way to set boundaries that work for you is to first notice and name how you feel when engaging with news and social media (e.g. I feel anxious when I look at CNN first thing in the morning, I feel angry when I read about the latest sexual misconduct scandal), and where things don’t feel good, identify what you might shift or change about your current habits or behavior to feel calmer and more grounded.
I’d love to know, does this idea of emotional inflammation resonate with you? Have you experienced it? And what helps you to deal with it and regain a sense of balance?
There’s a better way to navigate life’s stressors.
Develop tools to navigate life’s stressors, understand your emotional triggers, and cultivate lasting resilience—both at work and in life—with my 1:1 coaching support.