How to Regulate Your Emotions and Mental Chatter When Bad Things Happen | Maya Shankar

Overview

This episode explores practical strategies for navigating life's inevitable challenges and emotional turbulence. Cognitive scientist Maya Shankar shares insights from her personal experiences and research, offering tools to manage change, regulate emotions, and break free from mental spirals like rumination and catastrophic thinking.

Notable Quotes

- You can still find your why in other places when the world takes your what away from you. – Maya Shankar, on redefining identity after loss.

- Denial can have grace; it’s nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle. – Maya Shankar, on the short-term utility of denial.

- Change can upend us, but it can also reveal really important things to us about who we are. – Maya Shankar, on the transformative power of adversity.

🎻 The Impact of Life-Altering Events

- Maya shares two pivotal experiences: a career-ending violin injury at 15 and years of struggles with infertility. Both events deeply challenged her identity and sense of self.

- She emphasizes the importance of building a more expansive identity by focusing on the why behind passions, rather than the what. For example, her love for emotional connection through violin evolved into her work as a cognitive scientist and storyteller.

- Loss often reveals how much we anchor our self-worth to specific roles or dreams, prompting a reevaluation of what truly drives us.

🧠 Cognitive Biases and Emotional Regulation

- The Illusion of Control: Many of us overestimate our ability to influence outcomes, which can make unexpected changes feel especially destabilizing.

- The End of History Illusion: We often believe we’ve stopped evolving, underestimating our capacity to grow and adapt after major life events.

- Maya reframes adversity as an opportunity for revelation, where new perspectives and values emerge, often leading to personal growth.

🌀 Breaking Free from Rumination

- Techniques to escape mental spirals include:

- Affect Labeling: Naming emotions (e.g., frustration, envy) to reduce their intensity.

- Mental Time Travel: Reflecting on past resilience or imagining how current challenges will feel less significant in the future.

- Cognitive Reappraisal: Reinterpreting situations to alter their emotional impact, such as viewing panic as an evolutionary survival mechanism.

- Awe: Seeking experiences that inspire wonder, which diminishes self-focus and fosters connection to a larger whole.

🛠️ The Utility of Distraction and Denial

- Distraction, often dismissed as avoidance, can be a healthy short-term strategy for coping with emotional overwhelm. Activities like exercise, hobbies, or even reality TV can provide relief.

- Denial, while risky long-term, can serve as a psychological buffer, allowing individuals to process trauma at a manageable pace.

🌟 Redefining Possible Selves

- Maya discusses how change can limit our imagined futures, but also offers tools to expand our sense of possibility.

- By challenging societal and cultural norms, she redefined her identity beyond motherhood, finding fulfillment in a potential child-free life.

- She highlights the importance of detachment, a concept rooted in Buddhist philosophy, as a path to freedom and resilience.