Have you ever felt like you were emotionally spiraling?  It’s a helpless feeling and can be exhausting, disruptive, and affect the people around you.   Whatever the type of feeling, whether sad or angry or worried, it seems to grow and build in intensity in a way that feels out of control.  Today’s post is about a tool from a form of therapy called Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) that emphasizes techniques for managing our emotional spirals, balancing being aware of and accepting our experience with using skils to regulate them (hence the dialectic) .  (Can you tell I am doing a DBT Training?)

While spirals seem to come out of nowhere, they actually develop from a series of choices and responses.  Spirals are made up of feedback loops between our thoughts, feelings, and our behaviors.  For example, if you’re feeling depressed, you tend to see the word in a negative light and have thoughts such as “nobody cares” and that you are “unworthy.” These thoughts and feelings lead to staying home and isolating yourself, which then confirms and reinforces your loneliness.  Being home alone, you might overeat or indulge in alcohol as a way of numbing the painful feelings, which then leads to more self critical judgments and depressed feelings.

The “Opposite Action to Emotion” technique, also known as Opposite Action or O2E, takes advantage of our emotions as motivators to action, but directs our behavior in a manner that  breaks the chain of a downward spiral.  The first step in O2E is to identify and acknowledge the emotion we are experiencing and the action urge associated with it.  For example, when we’re scared, we may have the urge to escape or avoid what is making us anxious.  If we’re angry, we may have the urge to attack or go on the offensive.  

The next step is to ask ourselves if the emotions we have identified fit the facts of our situation and if the action we feel the urge to engage in will be effective in resolving the situation.  Sometimes our emotions and/or the intensity may be out of proportion for the situation we’re in.  For example, being afraid and running away is a helpful emotion and action when encountering a bear, but being afraid and running away may not be a good career move for the presentation we have to give at work.

Once you identify how your emotions may be fueling actions that are unhelpful, you take control by actually doing the opposite action instead.  For example, if you’re feeling sad because your romantic relationship has ended, you might have the urge to stay at home and cut yourself off from the world.  Instead, you choose the opposite action, and choose to do something outside of the house, like going for a hike or buying a gift for a friend at the Farmer’s Market. In this way, going out and being with others breaks the cycle of the downward spiral.  

O2E is not about ignoring or denying emotions.  In fact, the point is to actually work to label and identify what you’re feeling and how it’s affecting you and then to be proactive in managing it.  Rather than passively letting it spiral, O2E is about gaining awareness of your feelings and then actively putting some separation between these feelings and how you behave.

Like most skills, Opposite Action to Emotion is a tool that takes some practice to implement, but you must also start with a willingness to try it.  Some people actually find it can be a fun challenge to try to think of a behavior that might be counterintuitive to what they’re feeling.  Like how about signing up for the Open Mic night when you’re home obsessing about that work presentation or asking that  neighbor you worry doesn’t like you to go out for coffee?  Now wouldn’t that put a halt to your spiral?  If nothing else, you’ll build your confidence at taking risks and not letting yourself be controlled by your fears and feelings!  The ultimate power of O2E is to highlight the ability we always have to choose how we respond to our feelings – it’s the ultimate tool for psychological de-spiralizing.

The good news is you finally made a change after a long period of hard work.  The bad news is you have to keep it.  Sometimes you can get so caught up in getting over a hurdle to reach a goal, that when you finally get there, you feel a let down and an overwhelm.  As change is a process, you don’t just stay changed!  It takes long term commitment and effort to change and then keep it, and this can be frustrating.  But recently I came across an idea by a researcher named Robert Eisenberg that gave me some inspiration about how to keep the momentum when making a change.

Eisenberg called his theory “Learned Industriousness” and it states:  If an individual is rewarded for putting a large amount of effort into an activity, the sensation of high effort takes on secondary reward properties that lessen the effort’s general aversiveness.  In response, reward for high effort involving one or more activities increases the subsequent effort exerted in other activities.  

Yeah, what?  Let me make it simpler.  If you work hard at something you are more likely to achieve a better outcome than if you don’t.  So then, we associate working hard (what Eisenberg calls industriousness) with success and improvement, which makes it easier to work hard at other things because we feel good about our effort having the possibility of success.  The act of working hard itself has a reward component to it; we feel good about our effort and therefore are more likely to stick with it, again reinforcing success.  It is a positive feedback loop of sorts.

This concept of Learned Industriousness is basically the opposite of a theory you may have heard before, and I have written about in the past, called “Learned Helplessness.”  It was posited by Martin Seligman as a theory of depression many years ago.  In summary, if a person experiences aversive conditions in which they have no control or way to stop it, the person learns to stop trying and gives up.  Their failure to have impact generalizes so that they assume that in other areas of their life they will have no ability to make a difference.  In other words if people can’t achieve something, they stop trying, and assume that they are not capable of making any changes at all.  The idea of helplessness becomes reinforced, because the less they do, the less they achieve.  

So, how does this help us with change?  If you combine the theories of Learned Industriousness and Learned Helplessness, you can see how important it is to set goals that are both hard to do and yet, achievable.  If we choose a goal that is too easy, we will lose the reinforcement of the hard work that becomes associated with the effort and discipline required to do it.  If we pick goals that are too difficult, we can easily become dejected, feeling that no matter how hard we try, we will fail, so why bother.

Take weight loss for example, as it’s a challenge most all of us can relate to.  Many people begin a journey of weight loss setting their dream weight as the goal.  Inevitably they hit plateaus and some setbacks, making the dream weight feel unachievable.  How many times have you given up on your eating plan because you tried really hard and after days and days of logging your food and watching your calories, you felt so far away from your goal weight?  You started to feel that no matter what you did, you would never be able to reach your desired weight.  You felt helpless and powerless and give up, as it seemed more painful to try with no result than to not try at all.

In contrast, if you set goals that move you in the direction you want to go and give you accomplishments as you get there, you feel a sense of success.  And the more varied your goals, the more ways you can experience success.  For example, instead of focusing on your dream weight, you set the goal in several areas that will be a moderate challenge, such as losing 5 pounds, running a 5 k, and eating more fruits and vegetables.  In this way you give yourself the opportunity to achieve success and thus associate your industrious effort with a rewarding sense of accomplishment.  It makes it much easier to stick to your plans because you feel a sense of control and associate your hard work with a positive outcome that increases your motivation to work at it.

In thinking about this continuum of goal difficulty versus the effort required to have some success, it makes me think about all the ways it can be applied.  As teachers, parents, or in any role of leadership, setting people up with the right amount of challenge is an important element of supporting motivation and effort.  But also within ourselves, having goals that stretch us to grow but don’t overwhelm ourselves is important.  When we have unrealistic expectations, we set in motion a chain of learned helplessness.  But when we acknowledge our successes, we reinforce the effort we put into getting there.  So, the next time you reach a goal and feel challenged at the idea of going further, remember that just by making a change you have reinforced the process and made it way more likely to keep it up.  So celebrate and acknowledge the effort it took to achieve your success.  Enjoy your hard work and it will make it easier to work hard again.  Now just look at you, you industrious little go getter!