The Balanced Life, Huntsville Alabama

During the holiday season, we can often be pulled in two opposite directions, which causes inner conflict and stress even among the calmest and optimistic people. This past week, for example, has been a time of both being thankful and of wanting more- for less! 

 

We want to be able to relax and enjoy time with our family and friends, but there can be tension and drama when so many people come together all at once. We want to take vacation time and travel, but we’re working long hours to help us pay for Christmas presents and party clothes. We want to sample all the good food and workroom treats, but we want to watch our weight and prepare for making our New Year’s resolutions. 

 

Ultimately, it can be a time of peace and one of conflict. Balance is the key. 

 

If we’re lucky, we are trying to choose between two things we really like… like deciding which holiday party to attend when we want to go to both or deciding between pumpkin or apple pie. 

Sometimes, however, we feel caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place and when that happens we tend to get emotional – which makes it hard to think straight and come up with viable solutions. It can be like a mental version of the Chinese finger trap where we languish in all-or-nothing or black-and-white thinking and even the simplest of solutions can escape our detection.

 

An intense, emotional reaction that makes it hard to think is often referred to as being emotionally hijacked and was actually developed throughout the evolutionary process as a way of keeping us safe and protected.

 

Being hijacked by your emotions is something that Daniel Goleman talks about in his book Emotional Intelligence and he calls it amygdala hijacking because literally the amygdala (small part of your brain that is in charge of your fight-or-flight response) determines that there is an immediate threat and floods your body with things like adrenaline and cortisol which disables the thinking part of your brain. This can be helpful when confronted with life-threatening situations but these days we can be emotionally hijacked by an email, a traffic jam, a difficult conversation with someone we love, or a CHOICE that somehow makes us feel stuck and unable to choose because we want both … or neither. 

In problem solving these conundrums, we actually can find a way to have both… or neither. 

 

We could go to both parties, for example, but for a shorter amount of time or we could have smaller pieces of both pies! 

 

When we don’t like either option, we can find a compromise somewhere in the middle by imagining those two options as two ends of a spectrum (like a single line from point A to point B) and then come up with as many different options as possible (or points on the line) so that we are more likely to come up with a solution, or compromise, that we like and feel we can implement. 

In order to move past this emotional brain freeze and problem solve effectively, balance is the key and the two most important things to have in balance are our emotional mind and our logical mind. In Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), we call that being in our wise mind, or walking the middle path. It’s about recognizing that we are getting emotional and holding that side of ourselves in check (emotional regulation) so that we can still analyze and size-up the situation carefully and accurately. 

 

In fact, dialectics is a method that is all about digging into inner conflicts, conundrums or contradictions and finding SOLUTIONS. 

 

Sometimes, it only SEEMS like there is a contradiction. For example, we can be grieving AND healing at the same time. We can be both happy AND sad. We can be doing our best AND still be able to do better in the future when we know more and have more practice. We can work AND play. We can be thankful AND want more. 

 

Balancing can be as simple as becoming aware that we’re feeling stuck and emotional and asking ourselves two questions: 1) What do I want? and 2) How can can I make it happen?

From now until the end of the year, it may seem that the world is moving faster and many of the people around us are more emotional- all the more reason to stay in our wise minds as much as possible by continuing to place our focus squarely on what we want and how to make it happen. And when we get distracted (which we all will), we can REFOCUS and … REPEAT.  If you need help finding balance in your life, feel free to contact Maggie at 256-258-7777 x 103 or maggie@thebalancedlifellc.com.