Manipulating our own emotions

The two disorders most commonly treated in the field of mental health are anxiety and depression.  Depression is always a disorder;  there is no degree of depression that is healthy or beneficial in any way.  Anxiety is different in that respect.  High levels of anxiety, especially in the absence of any real threat, is clearly dysfunctional.  Very low levels of anxiety, however, are not healthy either.

For instance, walking down a dark alley at 2 am jingling your keys and whistling blithely is probably not in the service of survival.  We need some anxiety to make us wary and watchful. In the absence of any anxiety at all, it would be easy to forget to make sure your doors are locked at night, or that you have changed the batteries in your smoke-detector.  A small amount of anxiety can "motivate" you, or at the least trigger your attention to potentially difficult situations.

We use anxiety to push ourselves (in the absence of cognitive motivation) to take precautions against over-spending on unnecessary items or not paying our income taxes.  We make ourselves mildly uncomfortable to get ourselves out of our comfort zone and take action when it is useful.  We do this by imagining potential problems in the near future, which triggers an anxious reaction.  For instance, we tell ourselves that if we spend too much, we won't be able to make the car payment and that the dealer will repossess it.  That thought arouses our anxiety, and we then make a plan to do something about it, and as a result our anxiety decreases. Or we might tell ourselves that having too much to drink at the office party might result in behaving badly enough to affect our employment, so we decide to limit ourselves to one drink.

Recently a patient told me that when she hasn't had any fun or excitement for a while, she begins to get restless, and thinks about "going  shopping", which is always fun for her.  Her income is extremely limited, and she is aware that if she spends much money she could have a serious problem in meeting her bills and rent.  So she tells herself something like the following:  "It doesn't matter if I spend too much, I can always work it out somehow.  It will be fine! Stop worrying!  Nothing bad will happen!".   As a result her anxiety drops.  Since she has always used her anxiety to control herself (instead of cognitive decision-making) there is now nothing to stop her, and she spends recklessly.  

Most of us use our anxiety to limit and control our behavior, so when we drive our anxiety down through denial and rationalization, we lose our limits and our willingness to control our behavior.  The more we rely on emotion and "motivation" to control ourselves, the more unsafe and unwise our behavior can become when our anxiety is too low.  Of course there are other ways to lower anxiety below the useful point:  we can drink too much or use drugs.  Even under these latter conditions (drugs and/or drink) we have used self-talk to deny the negative possibilities resulting from drinking or using drugs, so our anxiety-provoked defenses become non-operative.

An alternative is to make cognitively-based decisions.  These are decisions reached through rational and non-emotional thought.  They require data-based information and accurate appraisals of possible outcomes.  When we need to make a decision, we can set our emotions aside and consider the real issues and potential outcomes, not just what we want to imagine. We can take  a longer view of possible outcomes and consider them as well.

I remember telling my children when they were in the early years of adolescence that the time to make a decision about sexual behavior was at home in the afternoon and sitting in the living room, not in the back seat of a car after kissing and fondling for an hour or when under the influence of alcohol.  Emotion-based decisions are always remarkably short-sighted. That's fine when you're choosing a movie to watch or a flavor of icecream.