Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
Turning the volume down on a feeling in front of the wrong audience is not being fake. Being annoyed with your manager and raising it mildly is a skill, and it keeps you employed.
There is a version of honesty that costs people jobs and friendships. What you feel and how much of it you show are two separate decisions, and the second one is allowed to depend on where you are standing. Keep the full version for somewhere safe, later, with someone who wants it. All of this is genuinely harder if you feel things at a higher volume to begin with.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'who restrain their anger and pardon people' (Quran 3:134). Restraint appears there as a quality, not as dishonesty.
ٱلَّذِينَ يُنفِقُونَ فِي ٱلسَّرَّآءِ وَٱلضَّرَّآءِ وَٱلۡكَٰظِمِينَ ٱلۡغَيۡظَ وَٱلۡعَافِينَ عَنِ ٱلنَّاسِۗ وَٱللَّهُ يُحِبُّ ٱلۡمُحۡسِنِينَ
who give, both in prosperity and adversity, who restrain their anger and pardon people- God loves those who do good
Qur’an 3:134read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis of 306 experimental comparisons found that emotion regulation strategies vary a great deal in how well they work, and that reappraising a situation and pushing a feeling down lead to quite different outcomes. That is a real caution. Dampening the display is useful in the moment and it is not a way of dealing with the feeling itself. These were experiments rather than difficult meetings.
Webb TL, Miles E, Sheeran P. (2012). Dealing with feeling: a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of strategies derived from the process model of emotion regulation.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
How much of a feeling you show can be chosen separately from how much of it you feel.
When not to
If you are holding everything in everywhere and never getting to the full version anywhere, that is suppression rather than skill.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Put something small at stake and you turn up more. Groups that charge a token amount get better attendance than free ones, and the same trick works on yourself.
A wave across the road, a joke with the man in the shop, asking someone how they are and meaning it. These unplanned seconds count for more than they look like they should.
The intensity that makes you exhausting on a bad day is the same intensity that makes you good company. Enthusiasm and impulsiveness run off one engine.