Smooth Out the Curves

A lot of our emotions look like this over time:

Peaks and troughs of confidence, certainty, anxiety, happiness – you name it – that rise and fall with the circumstances we face on a given day.

Somewhere this might sound familiar is with our work. One moment, we’re riding the highs of positive feedback from a peer, success on a high-profile project, and a strong relationship with our boss. Then, someone sends us a nasty email, we realize we forgot to do something important, and it all comes crashing down. We go from feeling like a rockstar to feeling like a failure.

Another, if we’re being honest, is with our relationships. Sometimes we really connect with our family, or our friends, and other times we don’t. Sometimes we’re confident in how much we’re liked and loved by the people we like and love, other times less so.

These peaks and troughs don’t serve us well. They cause us to make mountains – I suck at my job – out of molehills – I messed up this one meeting. Not to mention the toll that such emotional unpredictability takes on us, when a single phone call from Mom or traffic on the morning commute is liable to turn our day from good to bad, our mood from sweet to sour.

One goal, then, is to smooth out our curves. To be steady in our emotions, knowing that neither extreme highs nor extreme lows can last forever. To realize that something equally good could happen once we get through this traffic jam and into the office, and that since we’re here for a long time, we’re better off with this:

Than this:

Another goal is to zoom out. To realize that the phone call from Mom was one of many – it doesn’t define the relationship. With enough space, we can see whether an individual moment is representative of the larger picture, or whether it’s just a blip:

There’s no magic formula for any of this. I’ve found that journaling – recording my emotions and the events that cause them – helps me to visualize my own curves like the ones above. Outside of that are two questions I like to ask:

  1. Am I reacting appropriately to this single event or am I blowing it up into something larger?
  2. What evidence do I have that this moment is the norm and not the exception?

Armed with perspective, it’s easier to respond to a single event with a single response – not some sweeping generalization like “I need a new career.” As Maria Popova puts it, it’s easier to do the “next right thing”:

The best we can do is walk step by next intuitively right step until one day, pausing to catch our breath, we turn around and gasp at a path. If we have been lucky enough, if we have been willing enough to face the uncertainty, it is our own singular path, unplotted by our anxious younger selves, untrodden by anyone else. 

Not saying it’s always easy.

– Emmett

What I’m Reading:

Why Do We Ignore How the Other Half Lives? – NY Times
“My urban, elite milieu has far too much reverence for itself. We pay too much attention to the interests and actions and political demands of people who occupy the top percentiles of American life and far too little to the people who, well, don’t.”

Amazon Outage Disrupts Lives, Surprising People About Their Cloud Dependency – WSJ
“Steve Peters of Los Angeles couldn’t tell his Roomba robot vacuum to clean up the blueberry-muffin crumbs that landed on his kitchen floor during breakfast. He relies on an app on his phone to beckon the machine.”

32 Things I Love to Read, Listen To, Eat and Carry With Me – Ryan Holiday
“He is a great man who uses earthenware dishes as if they were silver,” Seneca wrote, “but he is equally great who uses silver as if it were earthenware.” 

What I’m Listening To:

Patrick Radden Keefe: The Opioid Crisis – Peter Atia Podcast

How Blue Cities Became So Outrageously Unaffordable – Ezra Klein Show
“People who are broadly supportive of things like public transit become very opposed to the idea that it could ever be properly put inside the community that they reside in.”

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Semi-regular thoughts on the good life and personal growth.