Read Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life Online
Authors: Margaret Moore
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In the next chapters, after Dr. Hammerness explains further each of the six Rules of Order, I'll show you how you can specifically adopt these principles of organization as your own. You can also adapt this sample vision grid and tailor it for your own useâor use it as a template to create a vision of how you're going to conquer the organizational challenges in your life.
C
ONTROL YOUR EMOTIONS OR THEY WILL CONTROL YOU”
are the words of a famous Chinese proverb. We begin our Rules of Orderâour first step toward getting our lives better organized and more in controlâby working to better manage our emotions.
We are human because of our capacity to feel and to experience an emotional life. But, right from the beginning, emotions can block the entrance to our path to becoming better organized. Emotion and cognitionâfeeling and thinkingâmust be integrated in order for us to function at our best. In this chapter, we discuss the remarkable neuroscience of emotional control and how achieving a balance of feeling and thinking is a fundamental prerequisite for the organized brain.
Emotions are as varied as we are: the so-called “primary” emotionsâanxiety, sadness and angerâare, like the primary colors, basic and inviolable. But just as on the artist's palette primary colors can be combined into dazzling new creations, so, too, can our emotions meld together to form every hue imaginable.
Because of the great range of feelings, some theorists have organized emotions around two set dimensions, each encompassing a broad range of feelings: valence (pleasant to unpleasant) and arousal (calm to excited).
Others, like the famous psychologist and author Richard S. Lazarus, separated human emotions into several distinct categories. There were the “nasty” emotions (anger, envy, jealousy), the “empathic” emotions (gratitude, compassion), “existential” (anxiety-fright, guilt, shame), and those provoked by life conditions, both favorable (happiness, pride, love) and unfavorable (relief, hope, sadness, depression).
No matter how you categorize them, emotions take many names and come in many forms: worry, panic, tension, stress, sadness, despair, frustration, irritation, exasperation. Emotions can be felt, and emotions can be voiced. Emotions can take the form of a sudden surge of anxiety or a frustration that grips us in a moment. Emotions can be experienced as quiet ruminations others don't see. Sadness, anxiety, angerâthe blue, yellow and red of our emotional color schemeâcan be interrelated, can feed off each other and can take turns in disrupting your organized plans, your organized brain. To extend the artistic metaphor, these emotions can take the orderly hues and shapes of your life and make them look like a Jackson Pollock canvas.
For those who feel disorganized, overwhelmed or caught up in a frenzy, those “basic colors” of the emotional palette are typically their root emotions. While we're all familiar with themâperhaps all too familiarâI thought it might also be useful to include their definitions:
How do these common emotions manifest themselves in the situations that we're dealing with in this book? You can feel anxious about the implications of your disorganization (“What is losing that important document going to mean when I get into work next week?”); sadness about the impact on your apparent inability to change (“Why can't I stop losing things?”); anger about the challenges at hand (“I'm going to have go back and redo hours and hours of work because I was so stupid!”). I've had patients who have exhibited all three and who, in their respective quests to get a better handle on their lives, have had to wrestle with these basic emotions. Anxiety, sadness, anger.
Let's meet one of them.
CASE STUDY IN ANXIETY: THE ONLY THING WE HAVE TO FEAR IS FEAR ITSELF (AND MAYBE XBOX, TOO).
The woman in her late thirties who walked into my officeâfifteen minutes late for her appointmentâwas clearly distraught. Her eyes were red, she looked as if she had been crying and her face was careworn. She appeared as if she hadn't been getting enough sleep. Her primary care physician had referred her to me, apparently with good reason.
“So,” I asked, as she sat in the chair in my office, eyeing her surroundings warily, “did you find the office without any problems?”
“Not really,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I'm sorry I'm late. I made a wrong turn in Central Square and practically ended up in Somerville.” She laughed ruefully. “It's just another example of the shambles my life is in these days.”
I waited a beat, but she said nothing further. I tried to gently prod her.
“Can you elaborate on that?” I said. “How so?”
She sighed deeply and then related a tale of unhappy events. Eileen, as we'll call her, had been divorced a year ago. Her son, the product of that marriage, was twelve years oldâa “tween” as the demographers now call these early middle-school-aged kids because they are between their childhood and teenage years.
The son, to hear her side of it, was struggling: in his first year of middle school, he had a heavier workload, and a bulging backpack to go with it. He had band practice, baseball practice, tests to study for, homework to do, friends he wanted to hang out with and video games he wanted to play. It sounded, to me, like a fairly typical schedule for a sixth grader these daysâschool, music, the arts, sportsâbut instead she told me they were one step away from everything falling apart, it seemed, almost every night.
“The other night, he was late to his baseball game,” Eileen said. “It was because I was behind on some of my reports at the office, and I got home a few minutes late from work. But then I couldn't drag him off the Xbox game. This had happened a couple of times already, so the coach said he couldn't start that night, and he had to sit on the bench most of the game.”
I started to interject, but she was already off on the next of what became a litany of catastrophes: There were problems keeping up with his schoolwork. There were problems at her work (she was a physical therapist). There were problems with other members of her family and with her ex in-laws (or as she preferred to call them, “the outlaws”). She wasn't whining; she just sounded weary and overwhelmed.
She went on to tell me how she had responded to some of these crises: she talked to her son's teachers. She got a tutor to help him with math, which seemed to be his most challenging subject and was not her strong suit.
I had a sense that she and her son often worked things out reasonably well, but she still seemed to be operating in constant crisis mode. “What does your son say about all this?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes again. “He says, âMom, stop stressing out.' Easy for him to say.”
I had a feeling her son is right. I was hearing disorganization here, yes, but I was also hearing anxiety and worry, and I was glad that her son had articulated it. I jumped on that.
“Why do you think he said that?”
She pondered the question a couple of seconds. “I guess I overreacted to getting to the game late,” she said. “I told him that because of his video game he'd be thrown off the team, and so I told him no Xbox for a month. But I also called the coach and told him it was totally unfair to bench my son anyway. He's been playing really well, and so what if he was late a few minutes a couple of times. Who isn't? I mean the traffic aloneâ¦.”
Then, striking a mildly defensive tone, she sat up straight in her chair and added, “And in fairness to me, I
do
have a lot to be stressed about. And isn't that normal in this day and age?”
“Well, it's not about what's ânormal'; it's about what's right for you,” I said. “And as you've been talking about how disorganized your life is, it does sound as if your stress level has been equally high.”
She nodded her head in agreement. (This was importantâI was glad to see her acknowledge the emotion.)
I continued, “So you're feeling disorganized and you've also been really stressed and anxious. One of the important questions at a given moment or during a given day is what comes firstâ¦the disorganization or the anxiety?”
She raised her eyebrows as she pondered that. I went on.
“They can fuel each other. You might see that one precedes the other or one makes the other much worse. For example, if you hadn't felt soâ¦what was the wordâ
panicked
?â¦about him continuing to play the video games even after you'd arrived home lateâ¦or to his being benchedâ¦you probably would have found a better approach in dealing with both him and the coach.”
She nodded. “I guess soâ¦maybe.”
“What I'd like you to start doing is keeping track of this balance or imbalance of stress and disorganization,” I said. “Take a reading of your stress, day to day. Think about when you're stressed, how often it happens, what you are feeling and what you are thinking at the time, and see if you can identify patterns. The first thing we might need to do is get a handle on that stress and anxiety. I suspect that will give us a better starting place to work on organization.”
This was just a small start. As with any patient, all of this would require work; there were other issues, and I don't want to imply that one appointment made all the problems in her life go away. However, this was an important first step in tackling her sense of feeling overwhelmed and disorganized and that her life was in “shambles.” Eileen's reaction to these situations was part of the problem. It wasn't that she got “stressed out” because everything was in total shambles; she got stressed out first and, very often, disorganization followed and increased from there.
It didn't have to be that way; getting a handle on her emotions was the first stepâand I'm happy to say, she has made great progress in doing exactly that.
THE FEELING BRAINâ¦THE THINKING BRAIN
Sometimes it may seem, as it did to Eileen, that we are totally ruled by our emotions. Not true. Your brain has spent a lifetime evolving and has the inherent capacity to handle your frenzy. It can allow the emotions to enrich our lives and not wreak havoc on them. Remember that the human brain has developed from a very rudimentary organ, with primitive reactive abilities, to one that is stunning in its complexity and in its ability to think and to feel and to manage both. Remember,
also, that the primitive human brain wasn't designed to deal with a barrage of tweets and text messages. Its first job was to keep you alert and alive. Over millions of years, that basic, primitive brain has been built upon with layers of complexityâfrom the primitive brain to the emotional brain to the rational or intellectual brain, but one that can still feel, love, imagine and dream. Indeed, the brain may be continuing to evolve right now. Perhaps it will eventually adapt to the increasing levels of stimuli around us and form additional ways to better process it (which means that instead of reading this book and trying to better organize yourself now, you could wait a millennium for the human brain to evolve into some sort of “post-distraction” design, where it can process digital tweet-like squirts as easily as the modern brain can process language and writing).
You could think of the brain as a committee of experts, all the parts working together but each with its own special properties. As is the case with most committees, there is a chairperson and a hierarchy; each of the members is assigned their respective duties. In your brain's “committee,” at the bottom of that hierarchy, are its primitive areas (also known ignominiously as the hindbrain), such as the brainstem. Here, basic vital functions occur, including the support of breathing and heart rate. If you ever wanted to get in touch with your inner caveman, here he is: the hindbrain supports our animal instincts, involved in simple “flight or fight” primitive reactions to the environment. When the heart rate is going, blood is pumping to our legs and providing energy to run away as fast as those legs will carry you. (This may help explain why when we are overwhelmed at work our first instinct is often “I've got to get outta here!”)
The more sophisticated aspects of the brain evolved over and around these basic areas. The middle area, developed over the brainstem, is a complex areaâa key emotional and information center. Areas within
this region include the hypothalamus, thalamus, hippocampus, cingulate cortex and basal ganglia. In the 1930s, James Papez, an American neuroanatomist, proposed the idea that emotions were created through a circuit, connecting various parts of the brain. The Papez circuitâor limbic system, as it has come to be knownâenvisions a “mechanism of emotion” to describe the way in which our feelings are created and the subsequent pathways of communication and activity: emotional processing, emotional memory, and complex hormonal and motor reactions.
The amygdala (pronounced
a-MIG-da-la
) is a critical area in this emotional circuit. Long described as central to fear conditioning and response, as well as processing of positive information like reward, the amygdala evaluates information that is relevant to us and is involved in directing our response. Unlike our prehistoric ancestors, we no longer rely on the amygdala to help assess whether a saber-toothed tiger is lurking in the woods outside our cave. But we can benefit from a brain that is still vigilant and alert to the more sophisticated, subtle threatsâand opportunitiesâin our modern surroundings. For example, Dartmouth College's Whalen Lab, where some of the country's leading-edge research on the amygdala is done, has found that facial expressions produce “robust activation” of the amygdalaâmeaning that this part of the brain is seen as active and switched on based on blood flow to the area or its use of the brain-food glucose. The scientists theorize that frowns, sneers, smiles or furrowed brows are “conditioned stimuli”; that is, such facial expressions have predicted certain outcomes in the past (the brain remembers the smiling face of the person who handed over your bonus check; that the nervous-looking visage, unable to make eye contact, announced the downsizing at your job).
While the brain areas and circuits that produce emotions may be as well-ordered as a municipal power grid, we all know that emotions can be messy. Modern-day neuroscience supports what is intuitiveâthat
these emotional areas of the brain can interfere with even simple cognitive tasks. For example, a 2010 study at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, found that people who feel anxious while doing math problems can have trouble completing a task as simple as counting past five. This experiment shows that emotion can interfere with rudimentary brain processes.