Emotional Instability – How to have emotional stability?

Hello friends!

This week I received a very interesting question from a reader about a topic that was already on our list of new texts. The doubt, in a nutshell, was how to have a life with more emotional stability, that is, what to do to not vary so much in emotions and not have so many ups and downs? In this text, I will try to answer this question, through a general concept of emotions and the concept of identity of a very interesting French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur.

In psychology, there are several theories of emotions, theories of affects, of libido. We would go very far, in space and time, if we were to enter this very rich field of research. For didactic purposes, we must understand emotions as movement. Etymologically, that is, by the origin of the words, we will also find the same meaning: emotion comes from move, from Latin e + movere. In short, move out (e or ex).

So emotion means moving, it means movement. Therefore, to a certain extent, it is nonsense to think of a stable emotion, since stability tends towards the absence of movement. Stasis means standstill.

But, obviously, what the reader wanted to say was how to manage to maintain the same type of emotion, throughout the day, week, month. How to stop switching between emotions of joy and sadness, anger and boredom, love and passion, hurt and laziness? Of course, if this is possible, we will want to maintain an emotional stability of positive emotions, such as peace, tranquility, happiness.

How to have emotional stability?

When I was studying psychology at the faculty, I had a colleague – from the faculty of economics – who, whenever I asked him how he was doing, he would say: “I’m stable”. And to outsiders, his answer was the absolute truth. He was always stable, he was always the same. All the other freshmen were excited about their new life, moving to another city or region, eager to learn, sometimes sad about high school breakups, in short, with feelings on the surface. And this guy always said: “I’m stable”. The contrast was very evident.

How did this colleague of mine have such emotional stability?

Well, the first answer we can get is that people are different. Therefore, if two people live an experience, each one will have an emotion. If we are going to think about long periods, we talk about personality, which remains identical in the way the person acts, speaks, thinks, etc.

As I said at the beginning, one of the most fruitful concepts for thinking about personality is the philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s concept of identity. Although the concept of identity and the concept of personality are not synonymous, they have an intimate relationship.

Identity is what we are or what we think we are. If I ask you who you are, you will necessarily have to tell a story. For example, if I were to answer the same question I would have to say: I am a psychologist, I currently live in São Lourenço, I have a daughter, etc, etc. Identity, therefore, is inseparable from history, from personal narrative. Okay, we have Ricoeur’s concept of narrative identity.

As he is a philosopher, thinking remains thinking. How can this concept embrace changes and permanencies? Are we like a river, always changing, or more like a rock, which (at least to the naked eye) stays the same all the time?

Not eight, not eighty. It is true that we change and it is true that we remain. Ricouer then expands the concept of narrative identity and includes a clipping: we have the identity idem and the identity ipse🇧🇷 In other words, within the concept of identity we see an interweaving between remaining (idem identity) and changing (ipse identity).

And what does all this have to do with emotions and emotional stability or instability?

Well, analyzing a personality, an identity, we can see that a person remains relatively identical over the years. This colleague of mine, stable in his emotions, remained very similar until the end of college (the last time I saw him). So for five years he remained emotionally stable. This is his personality, his idem identity, the identity that doesn’t change.

So let’s find people who are like a “rock” and seem not to feel it. And we will also find the “melted butter” people, who are fickle, inconstant as the wind and sometimes they are happy and bright with the sun and sometimes they are sad and gloomy. This last type of personality is, paradoxically, the one that remains the same, that is, while certain people are stable and this is their personality, others are unstable and instability, in turn, represents the facet of their personality that does not change. Saying it this way, it’s even funny: what doesn’t change in a person is change…

Well, then, to answer the question of the stability of emotions, we can start with personality and identity. Now, is it possible to change one’s personality, is it possible to approach what Ricoeur calls ipse identity and achieve greater change and greater self-awareness?

I think so, although the path may be tortuous. How to control emotions? How to curb the inner urge to move? After all, if emotion is moving outwards, we can find various types of movement, right? And if the objective is to maintain the same movement – ​​how to maintain the emotion of peace – how to do it?

Imagine a lake with calm waters. If you throw a stone, a wave motion is created. Depending on the intensity, the movement can be higher or lower, shorter or faster. This is a good image, a good metaphor for emotions. An emotion is like a vibration that is activated from a stimulus. If there is a stimulus, there is an emotion. But with us it is not like the stone in the water. Because we have consciousness and will, we can control understanding of the stimulus, how we are affected, and maintain or change the emotion that follows.

For example, if a person says something unpleasant – like an insult – there is an auditory stimulus, the sound, which reaches the ears and is taken to the brain. The brain turns this sound into a sense, recognizing it as unpleasant. The body as a whole immediately begins to feel sensations of displeasure and it is against these sensations that we fight, retaliating against the offense, feeling hatred, revulsion, disgust or another close and negative feeling.

The path could be different. External sound could be heard, recognized and cause no disturbance. A sound is just a sound, a noise, a noise. How would we react to hearing an insult in Chinese? An offense in Chinese is just a sound. In Portuguese, too. A sound wave that soon disappears…

This is just one example, among many others that we could give, of how we can control our emotions and have and maintain stability, as long as we manage to understand how emotions work and as long as we manage to have self-awareness.

Finally, I would like to mention an excellent technique described by NLP. NLP researchers discovered a woman who also had great emotional stability. Even through the most traumatic and painful events, she remained calm. When asked what she thought and imagined when something bad happened, she explained: when something bad happens, I imagine myself as if I left my body, I see my soul floating upwards, in the place where I am and quickly I am floating higher and higher, I can see the city, then the state, then my country, until I’m so far away I can see the whole land. When I can see the whole earth, I try to see the problem, the bad situation that is happening, and there, from above, the problem becomes something so, so small, that it cannot reach me.

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