Laws of Emotional Mastery

Noam Shpancer Ph.D | 4 May 2021

Mental health doesn’t just happen. Like physical fitness, it takes effort. Three principles spell the difference between just surviving and outright thriving.

Life, goes the saying, is like a diamond—hard and beautiful. Many are experiencing the hardness of it quite acutely these days, in the form of stress, dread, and fatigue. Much of our success in navigating these difficult times depends on our mental health.

People may visualize mental health as a place one arrives at or a treasure one possesses. But mental health is neither a destination nor a property. Rather, it is something you do—the practice of proper mind management.

Your mind is a lot like a car: Both churn with energy; both can take you places; both can veer off course to devastating effect. Most important, the usefulness of both will depend in large part on how you handle them.

Good driving is a process of constant adaptation characterized by high responsivity and requiring myriad specific skills: how to take a turn, merge into traffic, change lanes safely. Likewise, sound mental health is a process of constant adaptation, characterized by psychological flexibility—the ability to recognize and adjust your mindset and behavior to various situations so as not to callously hurt yourself or others, and so that you may continue to represent your values and pursue worthy goals in the face of distractions and obstacles.

Like driving, the process of mental health requires its own set of specific skills. Here, the skills in question are those that let us manage well the products of the mind—our thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Psychological science provides some useful instructions for that purpose.

Think Accurately.

Lying in bed at night, you hear a sudden “thud” coming from downstairs. What do you feel? What do you do? Your subsequent emotion and action will depend on what you tell yourself—your interpretation of what the noise means. If you think, This is just snow falling from the roof, you’ll likely turn back to sleep unbothered. But thinking, A burglar is at my window, will get your heart racing and have you reaching for your phone or gun, depending on your politics.

Cognitive psychology research over the past few decades has shown that our thoughts—beliefs and subjective interpretations—give rise to our emotions and behavior. Thinking, in other words, is important for our emotional state.

One oft-repeated axiom of advice is that you should, therefore, strive to “think positively.” Positive thinking gets good press, and in proper doses it can be useful. Optimism, as the work of psychologist Martin Seligman and others has shown, can help us endure periods of hardship, bolster a sense of hope, and improve mood.

Alas, positivity, while differing in content, is similar in process to negativity: Both are biases, and both obscure and distort the truth. Basing a response on anything other than the truth carries grave risks. If you’re falling, there’s no use in telling yourself that you’ve learned how to fly. Decisions guided by truth and facts are more likely to prove successful. Sound mental health is served best by accurate thinking.

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