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Hi again, and welcome to another episode of calm your caveman. We are going to talk today about a specific situational strategy. But before we get into that, we're just going to talk a little bit about situational strategies in general. Now as you remember, we talked about two foundational strategies that are really important for your anxiety mastery. The first was find your why. The second was know your context, which really has to do with understanding the degree of your emotional distress, the degree of your anxiety so that you can understand which techniques are appropriate for what level of anxiety you're experiencing. But once we have established these two foundational strategies where you've identified your purpose, you've identified what's most important to you, you know where it is you want to go. And also once you understand how aspects of your context, specifically the level of your emotional distress, will affect which strategies you can or cannot use in a given situation, once you have those two foundational strategies down, then we're going to get into building your toolbox now of tools from all of these different for families of strategies that we talked about. So going back to thinking about that process model of emotion generation from Dr. James Gross. And we talked about how you have a situation that is filtered through your attention and then appraised for its bearing on your wellbeing, and then an emotional response has generated. Which then cycles back to change the situation and it continues on. So we have that process model. Remember. And that process model shows us what the different families of strategies are for regulating emotions. We can choose to modify our situation. We can choose to influence how our attention is allocated. We can choose to work on our appraisal of the situation and we can choose to work directly on our emotional response. So we're going to talk for the next few episodes about a couple of different situation related strategies. But as we talk about. Strategies from each family, we're always going to be relating these strategies to where they fit into the process model. Because that really will help you to understand how each technique will influence your appraisal, whether it influences it indirectly or directly. And it also helps you to know where in the emotion generation process you should use this particular tool. Whether it's a proactive tool, a tool that you should use before your anxiety levels are high, or whether it's a reactive tool, a tool that you can use once an emotional response has already been generated and is in full force. So we'll always be talking about whether the strategies are proactive or reactive, whether they're high or low cognitive load. And we'll also be talking about ways to practice it always.

So moving on, we're going to be talking about situation related strategies in the next several episodes, but I just want to talk for a minute about the situation category in general. So there are two types of ways that you can work on the situation. You can select situations that you want. And you can also modify an existing situation. So we have situation selection and situation modification strategies. I just want to clarify upfront though, what it is that I mean when I'm talking about your situation. When we're talking about focusing on the situation, the situation refers to the context that you are in. And that context has both internal and external aspects and it has physical and spatial and temporal aspects. So I'll give you an example. I like to use musical examples because I'm a musician. So let's imagine a musician is in a situation. And this situation includes that the musician is in a practice room. There's a spatial aspect of the situation. That's where they are in space. They're in a practice room and they've been practicing for three hours already. So there's a temporal aspect of the situation. They have been practicing for three hours. And they might be feeling tired. Uh, there's a physical aspect of the, of the internal situation. And they might be feeling anxious about a performance that they have in three weeks time. The feeling anxious is another physical aspect of that internal situation. And then the performance that's three weeks away is another temporal aspect of the situation. So just want to show you all the different aspects that we're including when we're talking about situation. We're talking about internal, external, spatial, physical, and temporal aspects of the circumstance, that context that you are in. So when we were talking about strategies that are going to select and modify the situation, we are including all of these different aspects of the context that we're talking about. So just wanted to make that clear first so that we're all on the same page about what it means to modify a situation.
Now, second of all, I want to emphasize that when we are working on situation focused strategies, we are not directly determining our emotions. We talked about this initially in some of our first podcasts, we talked about how it is not the situation itself that will determine your experience, your emotional experience, because we know that the same situation can produce different emotions in different people. So it's not the situation itself that determined those emotions, rather it's the persons evaluation of the situation, it's their appraisal of the situation. It's the story that their brain is telling about how this situation will affect my wellbeing. That's what determines the emotion. All regulation is essentially centered on appraisal. It's on changing that story that your brain is telling, but we can indirectly change that appraisal by interfering in one of those other points on the, on the emotion generation process. And one of them is we can interfere in the situation. How does that change the appraisal? Well, it can change the appraisal because it changes the a situation, which is being appraised. It is an indirect method for influencing, changing your appraisal and thus changing your emotional experience.

But it's also important to point out that research has repeatedly shown. That people are notoriously bad at predicting how they will feel and imagined future situations. How we will appraise those situations once they become real. And this is true, both for positive and negative emotions. And here's a good quote that sums it up from an article in journal of personality and social psychology by Lench et al. It says "people try to make decisions that will improve their lives and make them happy. And to do so they rely on an affective forecasts-- predictions about how future outcomes will make them feel. Decades of research suggests that people are poor at predicting how they will feel and that they commonly overestimate the impact that future events will have on their emotions." So we tend to overestimate how happy or how sad we will feel based on certain situations.

There's a few examples that I'll just bring up quickly. Most of these examples I got originally from a course, which is put out by Dr. Laurie Santos who is a professor of psychology at Yale. She teaches a course to students, undergraduate students at Yale on the science of wellbeing. And this course has been made into a free online course at Coursera which I opted to do some years ago. And she brings up several studies, which are really interesting. She talked about how often people think, well, if only I could lose weight, if only I found the right person and got married, if only I had finan, financial success. Then I would be happy. And she talks about studies that study each of these different things and how it didn't turn out the way that people um, Anticipated. There's one study studying overweight people in the UK. Data from almost 2000 of them. And they studied those who were, who lost weight, who gained weight and who were stable out of these 2000 participants. And they actually found that those participants who lost weight had more depression than the other groups and lower well-being. They had to conclude that weight loss didn't necessarily have psychological benefits in and of itself. Another study, stretched over 15 years with over 24,000 individuals tried to study how people reacted emotionally to marriage. And they found that on average, people, although they were happier for a couple of years, once they got married, pretty soon, their happiness levels returned back to baseline after that. So it wasn't an enduring change like they thought. There were some exceptions to this, there were some people who had long lasting satisfaction, but on average, that's how it worked. Another study examined the relation between the goal for financial success, and attainment of that goal and then satisfaction with various life domains. And especially analyzing two life domains that are, that are strong predictors of overall life satisfaction, which include your satisfaction with your family life or your relationships, and also your satisfaction with your own job. They found that the more financial success people had, the lower the satisfaction that they had with their family life, and it also tended to have lower satisfaction with their job itself. So attaining financial success didn't necessarily lead to satisfaction in these important life domains like relationship and satisfaction with your job itself. And this also has been shown to happen in the reverse, in the negative where people predict uh, that they will feel a certain way in response to some negative news, like testing positive for HIV, like failing your driving test, like failing to achieve tenure, or having a breakup, or having negative personality feedback or learning about a child's death. In all of these different scenarios, different studies examined, people in general overestimated how long their distress and their disappointment and their sadness would last in regards to these things happening. And what they found was that in general, people did not have as much negative affect for as long as they thought they would. So these are just to illustrate that we are often wrong about how we think something will make us feel. We think that we'll be extremely happy if we have a certain change in our situation, or extremely devastated with a certain change. And although that may be initially true, we tend to overestimate how much it will impact how we feel.

So it's important to remember this when we're talking about situation modifying strategies, because we need to remember that it is an indirect tool for modifying our appraisals. What really will determine our emotional experience and our emotional processes is our appraisal. That is the direct method for change. Although we can indirectly change our appraisals by changing the situation that we are appraising, but sometimes it changes things in ways that we don't anticipate. So we just need to keep that in mind. That situation related strategies can miss the mark. And that they are indirect. But if we understand this indirect influence that situation modifying can have on appraisal then it can be effectively leveraged as one of the many tools available for influencing our appraisal. So I just want to introduce situation modification and situation selection with that caveat. All right. So we're going to talk about situation related strategies. In some ways we can think about them as preventative strategies because they preemptively alter our appraisals by changing the situation that we're going to appraise. Remember on that process model, that situation comes before the appraisal, right? And so in that sense, it is a preventative strategy.

We're going to talk briefly today about one important situation related technique, which I call staying within your energy envelope. And I want to just introduce it by describing a little bit about this energy envelope and how I became aware of my own energy envelope. Unfortunately it was through three years of chronic fatigue, which was one of the things that I experienced when I had long COVID. Chronic fatigue is an illness where patients have to become really aware of their energy budget, their energy envelope. Because there isn't a cure for chronic fatigue per se. And so we just have to learn to manage it. And I had to become really aware of the fact that my body was not good at producing energy currently. I had apparently some kind of malfunction in my mitochondria, in the energy producing organelle of my cells and so I wasn't, I didn't have a very big energy budget. What happens when you have chronic fatigue is that you have the specific energy budget. If you spend that budget completely and take it down to zero and actually go into the red where you're in the negative, it doesn't just take, putting some deposits in there in your body to bring it back up to zero. It's a lot harder than that. If you're careless with your energy budget, when you have chronic fatigue and you take it down below your zero and you go into the red, then your body will actually kind of act like a bank that gives you an overdraft fee, and will maybe even charge you interest on the money that you have, quote, unquote, borrowed your, your energy that you have borrowed from nowhere, that your body doesn't have, and it will take you maybe even maybe several days, maybe even weeks to recover from that over expenditure, because you are overcharged for the amount that you withdrew. And so I had to get really good at being aware of my energy budget. I started to think of it kind of like a video game. And I have these points on the screen, these bars that represent how much energy I had. And I had to be aware all the time that everything that I did was going to spend that energy down a little bit and that I had to stay within that energy budget. Otherwise if I went into the red, I would be in trouble and it would take me a long time to get back to positive. Thankfully I was able to finally recover from chronic fatigue after three years, but it taught me something important and that is that we all have an energy budget. We may not all be conscious of it all the time, but let's face it, we're all mortal. We all have limits. We only have so much energy, so many resources in our bodies. And when we overspend, when we take our resources down close to zero, Or if we overspend then our brains are acutely aware of that. We're always aware, unconsciously most of the time, but we're always aware of the resources that our body has.

One thing that Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett likes to say is that our brain is constantly running a budget on our body and it is constantly aware of all of these different needs that our body has and the different resources that we have to meet those needs. So when we run that budget down, To zero or close to zero that is when our resources are low, whether we're aware of it or not. When our resources are low, that will affect the way that our brain will appraise stress. Going back to our episode where we talked about stressful situations are where our brain appraises our resources in relation to the demands of the situation. When our resources are low, it's going to be really hard for our brains to appraise our resources as up to the demands of a lot of different types of situations. If you want to make it a lot harder for your brain to generate challenge appraisals, then run yourself down to the wire, run yourself down close to zero. When you take your workload so high, when you're short on sleep, when you have health issues and you're sick, all of these things are influencing your brain's appraisal of your resources, whether you're aware of it or not. And if you're feeling a lot of anxiety, take a look first at your overall energy envelope and ask yourself, am I daily spending my budget way down, close to zero. If I'm spending it close to zero almost every day, or even down into the red, then my brain is going to have a really hard time generating challenge appraisals because my resources will feel very depleted. So I just want to point that out how important it is to take care of your body's resources, the sleep that you need, the exercise that you need, the recreation that you need, the social interaction that everyone needs. Even those of us who have social anxiety, we do have social needs. Eating well, being outside, all of these things will affect your body's resources, whether you are conscious of it or not. Now, some of us have a hard time saying no to things. We have hard time saying no to other people. Whether it's at work, whether it's in our community, whether it's in our family. But we need to be aware of these energy bars that we have in this video game of life. We need to be aware of our specific energy budget, and we need to be aware that everything that we do makes withdrawals on that budget. And we need to be aware of where our energy budget is, how we're feeling as far as overall health and overall physical wellbeing. Because when we take ourselves down close to zero, as I said before, It becomes really difficult for our brains to generate challenge appraisals, and we will move into threat appraisals. And we know what happens, we've talked about this several times . What happens when we move into threat is that we move beyond that thinking threshold. Our brains get less oxygen, less blood flow. We can't think as well, we can't solve the problems that come up because our brains aren't getting the resources they need. We end up with stress hormones that that can exacerbate inflammation. They can make it difficult for us to, to recover even once the stressful situation is over. We're not able to approach the challenges. We feel more like av, avoiding stressors. And our cognitive performance is debilitated. So we need to always keep in mind the cost of each action that we choose, of each thing that we choose to do in our daily life. Because if we overspend then we are basically putting our brains in a situation where we are defaulting toward threat appraisal, that's going to be hard not to end up in a threat appraisal. I think all of us know we've probably all experienced when we're short on sleep, how difficult it is to feel like you can handle the things that come up. And that's your brain generating threat appraisals over and over and over again. And if you want to give yourself that best foot forward, to modify your overall life situation so that you can handle stressors better,. so that you can generate challenge responses, be aware of that energy budget. And here's a quick quote from a book that I liked called the upside of your dark side by Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Deiner. He This is the quote. "Whether we're involved in love, work or play, we need to be kind, but we also need to be selective. We simply do not have the luxury of giving ourselves fully to everyone. Time and energy are limited resources that we must spend wisely." So in a sense, this is a little obvious. We all know we have limited resources. But are we really conscious of our personal limits? That's what I want you to spend a little time thinking about. What are my limits? Notice when you start to get more anxious, and try and see if it has some correlation to your energy budget, if you are overspending your energy budget, if you are accepting too many responsibilities and too many stressors in your life, that are putting you in a situation where you're not able to take care of your body in the way that it needs.

Now of course. The way that we do this, we have to, has to be oriented by our sense of purpose, by our why. Because the specific situations that we select and say yes to, and the others that we say no to will have to depend on what is most important to us overall in our lives. Selection is difficult and that has to be performed in accordance with our values in accordance with what is most important to us overall in our lives. But I would encourage you this week to think about the fact that your time and energy are limited, and this necessitates selection. Because you cannot give yourself fully to everything. And think about what is most important? What are your priorities are for selecting? But also think about the consequences of not selecting, the consequences of simply accepting everything that is, that is suggested, that is asked of you from all sides and how that will affect your performance. How that will affect how you're able to help those around you, who are asking for help. Think about the way that you spend your energy budget and how that influences your anxiety and try and watch for a correlation there. So, what we're trying to do here is we're, we're trying to avoid those situations that are specially difficult to appraise as challenges. And select instead situations where the demands are kept manageable in comparison to our resources. And that is really facilitated when you're taking care, taking care of your physical bodily resources, as obvious as that may sound. Again, this is not a direct determinant of your appraisal. it is. possible to be overspent and in an, a dire situation physically and still generate a challenge appraisal. And you can see that from examples like Viktor Frankl and others who have faced extreme stressors and been able to appraise those as challenges rather than threats. But it is one way to modify your situations on a general scale in your life to reduce the amount of anxiety that you will feel by making it easier for your brain to appraise situations as challenges rather than threats . We're all for making things easier for our brains, so that we can save energy for those things where we really need to spend energy. You may find situations that you really need to spend that energy to reappraise. But it may be a lot more energy efficient to simply take care of your body and make it easier for your brain to appraise things as challenges.

So there's a simple bite size concept for you to think about this week. Just be aware. Just be aware of the way that you care for your bodily budget and your energy budget, and the way that you are selecting to spend it and its influence on the way that your brain will appraise your resources as compared to your demands.