For example, if you realize that you are going to be furious, you may want to say something that will make you regret, and do something that will make you regret. So what should you do?
1. The golden rescue period
At this time, you must act quickly, every second counts, and don’t miss the golden rescue time.
The first is to breathe deeply. Breathing is originally unconscious and spontaneous, but now it is necessary to intervene with consciousness;
Secondly, mobilize the five senses, color, sound, fragrance, taste, touch, look into the distance, listen to the birdsong, sniff the sachet, eat a piece of chocolate, touch necklaces, beads and other accessories. The specific methods vary from person to person, anyway. Just to keep the five senses busy.
why? Because humans have three brains, the physical brain, the emotional brain, and the rational brain. The emotional brain and the physical brain are more closely connected than the rational brain and the physical brain. The emotional brain will “hijack” the physical brain, and people will have various “symptoms.” , Rapid breathing, increased blood pressure, accelerated heartbeat, etc., it is these symptoms that damage health.
If the rational brain can detect the emotional attack in the first time, control the physical brain before the emotional brain, and let the physical brain busy accepting its own instructions but has no time to accept the emotional brain’s instructions, then the injury will not occur. This is like occupying the communication frequency channel of the physiological brain, so that the emotional brain cannot hijack the physiological brain. (See ” Let go of the child, let me go ” above)
Take a deep breath and mobilize the five senses to keep the physical brain busy. After being hijacked by the perceptual brain, quickly find a good friend to “talk therapy”. This is the fastest and most effective method, but not everyone has this condition every time, good friend Not enough, or everyone is busy, you can go for exercise at this time.
Exercise is also a good way to block emotions. It is difficult for you to get angry while running. It is like pressing two keys, one is pressed and the other jumps up. It is impossible to press them simultaneously. You can go out and walk a few kilometers, or run a few kilometers, or dance square dance, or practice a basket of balls (often at this time, you can practice the feeling of precision and force, I don’t know why).
In short, after exercising and sweating profusely, you will find that you have almost forgotten the reason for your previous anger, and you have to think about it before you can catch it. If you still get angry, take a deep breath and repeat the process.
2. Your emotions are not you
After blocking the emotional episodes through a series of methods such as mobilization of the five senses, “talk therapy”, exercise, etc., the next step is to immediately activate the rational brain and conduct the following thinking:
1. Emotions are just biochemical reactions. From this perspective, a person is like a bag of chemical substances, and various chemical reactions occur at any time;
2. The duration of a certain biochemical reaction is short, especially a strong reaction. The stronger the thing, the less durable it is. You will not continue to be angry or depressed like this forever. Don’t be afraid, this moment is not Represents all of your existence;
3. Since it is a biochemical reaction, it is easy to be manipulated. For example, if you give a person who is thunderous or in grief to eat some XXX right now, he will be happy. It’s just an analogy, don’t do this, drugs are too harmful to the body. So if there is a medicine, it will only make people feel happy, without side effects?
In 1932, during the Great Depression, Aldous Huxley published the dystopian novel “Brave New World”, in which “happiness” was regarded as the most important value. The basis of politics is not elections and police, but A synthetic drug called Soma, this drug does not affect health and productivity. Everyone takes this drug every day and they feel very happy.
In the book, the world is unified, ruled by a unified government, no matter what the living environment, everyone is happy and satisfied. Wars and revolutions are unthinkable, and even strikes and demonstrations are completely impossible to happen.
This is of course science fiction, but it illustrates the truth that human emotions are too easy to be manipulated. Until today, mankind has not invented Su Ma, but Protac has been invented to treat depression.
People who are depressed will not be depressed if they take enough Prozac. However, he will not feel happy anymore, because Prozac has inactivated all the feelings, instead of selectively and accurately inactivating, there is no way, the current biotechnology can only do this step.
What do these three points show? Explain that you are definitely not your emotions, or your emotions must not define you, because the biochemical mechanisms that produce emotions are so changeable and so easy to be manipulated, how could it be you? Saying that you are the bag of chemicals is like saying that you are your cells. However, the cells of the human body are constantly renewing. In the entire human body, 100 million cells die every minute.
Nail cells have a lifespan of 6 to 10 months, liver cells have a lifespan of 150 days, taste bud cells have a lifespan of 10 days, intestinal mucosal cells have a lifespan of 3 days, and some leukocytes in the blood can only live for a few hours.
Just as your nails are not you, your face is not you, your arms are not you, your liver is not you, your lungs are not you, your heart is not you, and your emotions are not you.
Romanticism appeared in Europe from the late 18th century to the early 19th century, emphasizing intuition, imagination, and feeling. It believed that life is to feel and experience, and encourage everyone to feel all kinds of emotions and experience all kinds of experiences as much as possible.
However, in a sense, it is not you experiencing emotions, but emotions experiencing you. A person generates 16,000 to 18,000 thoughts every day, most of which come and go without a trace. The process of biochemical reactions is too complicated and subtle to explain accurately. The Buddha and the demon thought.
3. After you manage your emotions, you can think normally and correctly
Just as you accepted your face and gave it the necessary care, you should also accept your emotions, face your emotions, and actively manage your emotions. For thousands of years, people have tended to ignore and belittle emotions, believing that emotions are the legacy of human animality and are lowly things. However, more and more brain research results show that sensibility is as important as rationality, if not more important. if.
Many people don’t have the courage to face their emotions and try to replace them with rational thinking, only to get lost in their own thinking. Increasing stress and anxiety will greatly weaken our ability to think. Unstoppable anxiety leads to lack of sleep, makes people become more and more angry, shrinks, and may even stop people completely.
When strong or persistent stress and helplessness occur at the same time, people are often hit hard. The nervous system wants to operate fast but not able to operate, which puts us in a stagnant and frozen state. I couldn’t fight, and I didn’t know how to escape, so I froze there. The time of rigor can be long or short. The shortest time may be a few seconds to restore the state of pressure balance, and the longest time may be months, years, ten years, or even decades.
A dream of Yangzhou in ten years. A person (mainly a woman) may be trapped in a traumatic relationship or marriage for more than ten years or even decades without waking up. They put themselves in a virtual cage and suffer real pain and waste their time. When she woke up, the goddesses had become witches. The pain of losing a child has made countless people completely lose the strength to live. They cannot accept this painful emotion and will be trapped there forever, unable to move.
Only when you face up, value, and manage your emotions, can you think normally and correctly, and make wise life decisions. If you don’t face, value, and manage emotions, emotions will not disappear automatically. If you ignore and suppress them, it will pounce on you like a blocked scourge, exhausting all your mental energy, and razing your life to ruins.
4. Raise the “discomfort threshold” and dance with wolves
Sometimes the survival instinct formed by evolution is our enemy. The survival instinct can make us feel uncomfortable with many things, events, and situations, so as to increase the body’s vigilance, respond appropriately in time, and increase the probability of survival. However, when our “discomfort threshold” drops lower and lower, to an unreasonable level, our life becomes unbearable, we will fall into a bad behavior pattern, and even affect the health of ourselves and those around us. Life has a devastating effect.
The living conditions of modern humans are getting better and better, and the factors that make people feel insecure and uncomfortable are getting fewer and weaker, leading to lower and lower discomfort thresholds for human beings, and more and more man-made disasters. More and more tragic. The driver of the bus and the passengers quarreled, so they drove the bus out of the bridge and rushed into the river, killing all the people in the bus. The captain of the plane was demoted, failed to stock market and wanted to commit suicide, so he let the plane head to the ground and let everyone on board buried with him.
All animals have three stress response modes: fight, escape, and freeze, but human beings, as the primates of all things, have also evolved a fourth mode, and. Coexist peacefully with uncomfortable things, people, things, and situations, dance with them, overcome each other, form a balance, and make them a part of your life.
For example, there are many diseases that are impossible to eradicate completely, only survival with the disease. Treating illnesses to save people, curing illnesses are the means, and saving people is the goal. It cannot be done as “the operation was successful and the patient died.” Don’t try to eliminate things that are actually impossible to eliminate. Life is the same. Don’t resist. The more you resist, the more serious the problem.
Turn off the struggling switch, accept the fact that “life is unsatisfactory”, accept your normal appearance, accept your explosive temper, accept your not good enough son, accept your not gentle wife (or love your husband not enough) )…More importantly, accept the fact that all of this may be worse, and it may disappear in an instant.
5. Meditation and Buddhism
The premise of recognizing stress overload and managing emotions is to increase emotional awareness and feel our own feelings, and meditation is a good way to help us do this.
Meditation was originally an ancient religious practice with the purpose of alleviating suffering. Now ordinary people’s meditation is a secular practice without religious colors. It relaxes the body, quiets the mind, and turns the focus to inner experience, helping us to have a more keen observation and awareness of ourselves.
Meditation allows us to remain calm and focused when we feel threatened, so that we can better control ourselves, stop losing control and become demons, say hurtful things, and do hurtful things; in this way, we can let others do more. Feel our kindness and love and see our best state.
It is said that studies have shown that long-term meditation can change the structure and wiring of the brain, making you a wiser person. Meditation is a major method of Buddhist practice. The Buddhist understanding of the human brain seems to be more than 2500 years earlier than modern brain science. Someone joked that when science climbed up to the top of the mountain, he found that the Buddha was already sitting on it.
Modern brain science tells us that human emotions are only the result of biochemical reactions, erratic, unpredictable clouds, not yourself, don’t take it too seriously; Buddhism has long told us that color is emptiness, emptiness is color, not just color is emptiness. The five aggregates of form, feeling, thought, action, and consciousness are all empty, and everything is illusory. Why do you bother yourself in pursuit of or escape from illusory things?
According to Buddhism, the universe has three basic realities: everything is constantly changing (all impermanence); everything has no eternal essence (all dharmas have no self); all emotions are suffering and nothing can be satisfying forever (All leakages are bitter).
Even if you can explore the universe, the Milky Way, the solar system, the earth, the human brain, and brain cells, even if you can explore everything, you will not be able to find eternal things, eternal and fixed essence, and never get eternal satisfaction.
The reason why human beings feel pain is because they always feel that there is an eternal essence somewhere, and as long as they can find it, they can be satisfied forever, and suffer for a lifetime. For example, many people pursue eternal love (especially young people who are influenced by the romantic literature of the 19th century in the West), but they fail repeatedly, and finally they have to say “at least those experiences belong to me”. In fact, in a sense, it’s not that those “passing” belong to you, but you are being passed through.
Only by understanding the principles of impermanence, dharmas without self, and all omissions are suffering, can we reach the state of “Nirvana and Silence”, which is the “Four Seals” of Buddhism. Of course, the Hinayana Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism have very different interpretations of the “Four Dharma Seals”, so there is no distinction here.
Most people allow events in the external environment to affect their mood, like a piano played by external forces; positive psychologists say this is unwise. Of course, you cannot control what happens in the external objective world, but you can control you. Subjective feelings about things that happen objectively, the objective world is illusory, subjective feelings are real; Buddhism has a higher realm, and it is unwise to emphasize subjective feelings. Your subjective feelings are also illusory, not just your feelings. Unreal, your thoughts, actions, and consciousness are all unreal.
So the ultimate way to get away from suffering and happiness is not to feel, not to think, act, or know, to completely cut off the source of stress stimulation, unplug the power source, and stop playing this game. For example, Li Shutong, a prosperous monk for half his life, let go of his thoughts, and he was calm. He became a monk at 39 and passed away at 62.
When Master Hongyi was seriously ill, he told the masters around him: “When you were helping me in reciting, you saw tears in my eyes. This is not to miss the world, or to miss my relatives, but to remember the regrets of my life.” The last thing left to the world is the four words-“the intersection of sadness and joy”. After 23 years of practice, it seems that he has not been able to enter the state where the five aggregates are all empty. It may be because of his passing too early.
His abandoned Japanese wife returned to Japan with two children, but was abandoned by her parents (the parents thought it would be bad for her to run away with Li Shutong). She worked as a nurse in Okinawa to raise her two children incognito, and missed him every day. Zhong lived to 106 years old.
Most people should not be able to become a monk, and there is no need to be a monk. To hide in the world, hiding in a Buddhist temple is not a skill. The real skill is to practice in this rolling red dust, to realize and see the Bodhisattva in this rolling red dust. , If you travel in a deep boat, you will see that the five aggregates are empty and save all suffering.
