What is Emotional Agility?
In a time when everything is felt so intensely - the grief, the fear, the sadness, the connection - it can be easy to be led by our emotions and our inner monologues. However, being led by our thoughts and emotions can lead us to feel quite unstable - think about how often your emotions change throughout the day. We are trying to adapt to this new lifestyle, and wondering what is the best way of doing this.
When we are so led by our thoughts and feelings, it often feels like there is no space between stimulus and response, meaning that something happens and we react immediately - someone says something and we shout back without thinking. Emotional agility helps to create that space between stimulus and response, allowing us to take the driver's seat again.
What is it?
Emotional agility was a term coined by Susan David, a psychologist at Harvard, and is our ability to experience our thoughts, emotions, and experiences in a way that doesn't drive us in negative ways instead encourages us to be the best version of ourselves. It is about being driven by our values, not by knee-jerk responses to emotions. When we are emotionally agile, we are able to recognise our thoughts and emotions for exactly what they are; thoughts and emotions. We own our emotions, they don't own us.
Emotional agility is about being in that sweet spot between running from and burying our emotions, and wallowing in and getting stuck in our emotions. It is about noticing our emotions, acknowledging and naming what they are, and then moving forward with them (or despite them).
In fact, an emotion only lasts in the body for 90 seconds. Dr Jill Bolte Taylor found that "When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there's a 90-second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop."
I know what you are thinking; easier said than done. And yes, it is easier said than done, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. As with all things psychological, it takes practice and training. We have lived our whole lives a certain way, and these ways of thinking are so ingrained into our brains that they take some time to untrain and retrain. But it is like going to the gym, we don't just go once and expect to be our best physical selves. It takes time to train physically, and so we must expect that it will take time and effort to change mentally.
Here are four key concepts of emotional agility to help you on this path.
1. Showing up
Be curious about your emotions when they arise. Don't judge yourself for having them. Emotions are neither good nor bad, they just are. Judging yourself for having emotions is like throwing petrol on a fire. If you feel angry at something, and then get annoyed at yourself for feeling angry, you are just doubling that 'negative' emotion. If you see anxiety as a weakness, you will find that you are anxious about getting anxious.
Use your emotions as data to figure out what is going on. Be curious about why you are frustrated, what is it telling you is important to you, what is it telling you about what you value? If you are frustrated that you can't see your extended family or friends, for example, your frustration is telling you how much you value community.
2. Stepping Out
Stepping out is becoming detached, unhooked, or defused from your thoughts and emotions. It isn't about burying them, it is about being able to take a step back to be able to look at them. When we take that step back, we are able to see that our thoughts and emotions are just a small part of us, they aren't the whole of us - and we can choose what to do with them.
Susan David explains that a quick way to detach from our thoughts and feelings is to preface them, in our heads, with the phrase; “I’m having the thought that…” or “I’m having the feeling that…” So, “I’m so angry” becomes “I’m having the feeling that I am angry”., and instead of "I am useless" we can say "I'm having the thought that I'm useless".
These sentences can sound quite ridiculous and needlessly long when we first start doing this, but straight away you can see that you are not your emotion, you are having an emotion.
In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) there is a very similar concept called Defusion. Dr Steven C. Hayes, one of the creators of ACT, provides this beautiful analogy in his book A Liberated Mind:
“Imagine that you are sitting in a chair watching a movie. You’re quite engaged in the film but then you notice down in the corner of the screen a tiny little window showing a parallel film. This other film is about the screenplay writer as he or she creates the lines of dialogue in the main film. It’s a film about authoring a movie, not the story being authored. When you hear dialogue in the main movie you can focus on that drama, but you can also turn your eyes to that small authoring film within the film and watch the writer doing the work.”
This is a shift from seeing the world through the lens of our thoughts and feelings, to looking curiously at the process of thinking. This detachment increases your autonomy over your actions and decisions.
3. Walking Your Why
This stage of emotional agility is about what is driving us; our emotions or our values. Being driven by our emotions is quite a natural way to be for most of us, but it is incredibly unstable in that it is forever changing at a moment's notice; we are happy so we hug a family member, we are sad so we eat half a chocolate cake, and so on.
Being driven by values is much more stable. Values are much less changing and changeable than our emotions and our thoughts. Our core values are fundamental to who we are; we are loving, or we are generous, or we are driven by fairness, or financial stability, or greed, or health. (I never said all values were positive!). We can be driven by multiple values at any one time.
Our core values are fundamental to who we are as a person, and although we can develop them, build them, work on them, they are generally more stable than our emotions. Our emotions will still come and go, and we may still be impacted by them, but we are more grounded in our own identity, and less likely to make rash decisions based on a mood swing.
If you aren't sure what your values are, or you are worried that your values are negatively impacting you, then it might be worthwhile spending some time working on them. You can use your emotions to discover your values; why am I angry when person X does Y? Why does it make my heart swell when I see Z?
4. Moving On
Moving on involves making small, deliberate, and purposeful tweaks to your mindset, motivation, and habits, to align with your core values. Once we know what our core values are, we can start living our lives in a way that is aligned with them; we can start implementing small things into our daily routines that feed those values. Habits are best kept when they align with the way that we identify, rather than when they align with what we think we should do.
We can start to ground ourselves in the idea that courage is not the absence of fear, but courage is about noticing your fear, compassion, and curiosity, and then doing what matters in your life. Ask yourself questions such as “what are some courageous steps that I can take, even with my fear?” or “what is something that I can do today even though I’m feeling anxious?”. It’s not about doing away with fear, anxiety, sadness, or grief. It is about noticing them, being curious about them, and moving forward even though they are still there.
Finally, remember that to embrace changes, we need to be able to adapt. We cannot expect the same rules or actions to be applicable across the vast changes that we are experiencing today. Life is calling on each of us to move into a place of wisdom within ourselves; not judging or overthinking, but compassion, vulnerability, quiet strength, and community.
If you would like some support to increase your emotional agility and resilience, head to our Therapist Profile page to find someone who can support you on this journey.
