How to Stop Letting Emotions Control You | Sam Harris & Dr. Andy Galpin
In a Nutshell
Emotions and reason are neurologically inseparable; feelings like doubt or certainty are required to make rational decisions effective. Negative emotions like anger and fear provide useful signals, but their utility drops rapidly, so mindfulness lets you notice the trigger without staying hijacked by the emotion itself. The real skill is shortening how long you remain in an emotional state and converting raw energy (like adrenaline) into focused action without the cognitive overlay of fear or rage.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
The disjunction between emotion on the one hand and reason on the other is not neurologically real. Reason requires a certain kind of emotional tone to be effective. The feeling of doubt is a feeling. The feeling of confidence or certainty is a feeling. The feeling that you just spotted an error in a chain of reasoning is a feeling. If you don't have any of those feelings, and if given the requisite brain damage, you actually can't make certain actual true beliefs behaviorally effective.
People with a certain kind of orbital frontal lesion can know the right strategy in a gambling task but can't actually implement it because they can't actually feel the implication of not implementing it. The idea that we have just reason on the one hand and emotion on the other and that these are two different things is not true.
It is true that in our common way of speaking there are certainly emotional experiences that are antithetical to thinking clearly about anything. You're not reasoning clearly about your life, your relationship, or the logical connection between what you just said and what you're now saying if you're filled with rage, if you've just been humiliated, or if you're trying not to observe certain things about your relationship or your reputation. If you're hijacked by emotion, for most people that's the opposite of thinking clearly, and that's not the state you want to be in in order to think clearly.
The goal is not to ever think of cancelling specific negative emotions for all time. There is no anticipation of a time where one would never feel fear or anger or anything. All of those negative emotions are salient signals about the state of the body, the state of the body in the world, or the state of events socially speaking. If you feel anger, if you feel fear, it's information. It's telling you that something's just changed and it requires your attention.
The question is: in this next moment, how useful is that emotion? For virtually every experience, the utility of fear and anger and any other negative emotion diminishes very quickly. Whatever problem you just noticed is almost never best solved in a state of fear or anger or impatience. What mindfulness allows you to do is just let the ordinary half-life of any of those emotions run its course and get off that particular ride. You're no longer driving the wheel works of anger. You're paying attention to the thing that made you angry, but you're paying attention to it in a state that is not anger. You might be concerned, you might be focused, but you're not merely hijacked by anger.
The change you want is not to say that you suddenly become a stranger to all the human emotions. You can feel anger and sadness and whatever it is. But you have this other degree of freedom: how long do you want to feel this way? Is it worth still grinding your teeth over this thing that just provoked this moment of rage in you, or is there something else you need to be thinking about? Is there some other perspective you need to be taking on board?
Even if it's just a stark emergency and adrenaline is the fuel you want right now, on some level the energy of adrenaline is no longer the energy of fear in that moment. It's just energy. You can just use the energy and it doesn't necessarily have the cognitive valence of I'm afraid. It does give you a degree of freedom in that respect.
Meditation obviously allows you to get on the right side of the bifurcation between emotion and clear thinking whenever you want to.
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