Regulating Our Emotions at Work

06.11.2017

In most ordinary working days, most of us are confronted with a number of challenging situations: disagreements with colleagues, frustrating managers, unproductive employees, among various kinds of work dissatisfaction. In the face of these, our emotional reactions can sometimes be unpredictable.

As we mentioned in our previous post on routine, many of us respond to adversity by trying to institute greater control over our working day. But that can be to the detriment of our wellbeing, as it turns out that struggle for control can paradoxically diminish the very thing we’re trying to control – our sense of being free and creative. When we learn to regulate our emotions, a natural consequence of being more mindful, then that need for control diminishes.

Battling emotion

When it comes to regulating our emotions, a common mistake is to try and suppress them. A person feeling angry at work – and knowing they shouldn't make a visible scene – tries to battle that anger into submission. But this act makes a demand on our cognitive resources. We think and mull over our anger, and become consumed by angry thoughts that reinforce each other. It’s not that uncommon lose some of the ability to focus on our work because we still feel slighted over something that might have happened a day, a week or even a month ago.

As the psychologist Richard Chambers writes:

“Mindful emotion regulation represents the capacity to remain mindfully aware at all times, irrespective of the apparent valence or magnitude of any emotion that is experienced. It does not entail suppression of the emotional experience, nor any specific attempts to reappraise or alter it in any way. Instead, [it] involves a systematic retraining of awareness and nonreactivity, leading to defusion from whatever is experienced, and allowing the individual to more consciously choose those thoughts, emotions and sensations they will identify with, rather than habitually reacting to them. In this way, it erodes the automatic process of appraisal that gives rise to disturbing emotions in the first place.”

Emotional awareness

Research has shown that many office employees suffer from mild alexithymia, where people struggle to recognise, express, and understand emotions. It's not hard to see that offices that fail to tackle this issue become uncomfortable places.

One of the key factors in regulating emotion is to recognise what emotion it is in the first place. Mindfulness training can really help. When we feel upset at work, mindfulness helps us to take a step back – to take a deep breath – and identify what we feel. Understanding the difference between frustration, anger or sadness makes it easier to navigate through it. Once we understand our own emotions, it's easier to recognise them in other people.

Self-referencing

A study run by the University of Toronto found that mindfulness training helps us to detach our personal experiences from our understanding of emotion. The experiment showed that those without mindfulness training relied more on their personal experiences to recognise emotion. Those who received training were able to detach themselves more from the emotions they felt.

Alongside trying to be more mindful, consider keeping a journal. It will give you time to consider and dissect what you're feeling and why. Rather than spending all week consumed with an emotion try to study it and understand it.

To find out more about mindfulness training at work, contact michael@mindfulnessworks.com, or call (+44) 01223 750660.