Your life won’t get substantially better by scheduling weekly massages and taking more days off from work. The stress you think you feel from the outside world is coming from within.
The world is not responsible for your emotional distress. It’s showing you what you have inside. Your emotional distress is always operating in the background. It is only activated by any unwanted or uncomfortable experiences.
When you can’t feel a sense of homeostasis hours or days after disappointment, you cannot self-regulate. You look for someone or something to blame for your emotional distress.
Treating yourself with extra kindness is important in times of stress. But, it is insufficient to change how you experience the world. Relief is short-lived.
Childhood Interrupted
Most patterns people live with represent their childhood notions about themselves and their environment. They have outdated concepts that helped them navigate the world as a child but are impairments in the adult world.
When your heart is not at peace, discontent is easily triggered. Everything feels personal because your mind never stops seeking validation or comfort.
You talk back to the television commercials if you don’t like the product. You feel insulted at a dinner party that doesn’t cater to your preferred cuisine. You feel betrayed when someone you care about disagrees with you. You constantly look for the world to cater to you.
You can call yourself a diva, high maintenance, or extra, but dysregulation by any other name is an emotional burden. Expecting or needing the world to cater to you shows emotional dysregulation. The inability to maintain homeostasis for an extended period is a marker of unresolved trauma, often from childhood.
Developing a Worldview
If you were raised in an optimal environment, you likely do not have issues with self-regulation. Unfortunately, according to the CDC’s research on adverse childhood experiences, less than 40% of adults in the United States had an optimal childhood experience.
Most adults have had an ongoing childhood experience that likely distorted their view of themselves, others, or the world. An adverse childhood experience steals youth. Instead of a life steeped in innocence and protected vulnerability, children take on adult responsibility or behavior.
Circumstances force them to become aware and attend to their external environment. They may become protectors of younger siblings, caregivers of parents, or premature providers of the family.
Children adapt to adverse experiences to feel loved, accepted, or, sometimes, fed. They don’t know what childhood “should” be like. They recognize their reality as “normal.” Even egregious experiences such as sexual or physical abuse are likely to be normalized to survive. However, what gets normalized on the outside is not optimized on the inside.
While resilience shows on the outside, the inside is a different story. The response to the world may be high achievement to obtain approval, gracious etiquette that guarantees safety, or exceptional talent that distracts from chaos.
The internal response is a psychological attachment to survival ideas. There is acceptance only in achievement, safety only in conformity, and peace only in the identity related to your talent. These are just a few survival beliefs that get carried into adulthood.
The child grows into an adult with little mental flexibility. Yet, mental flexibility is a foundation of well-being. You need it to self-regulate. Otherwise, your mind tries to fit round pegs into square holes.
Self-Regulation
Self-regulation is emotional independence that provides psychological well-being. How your brain processes information determines self-regulation.
Most experiences that don’t end in your favor are neutralized without distress. You can achieve challenging tasks without feeling distressed. Criticism or negative responses do not cause distress. If these things are true, your brain is shielding you with self-regulation.
Put the Emphasis on “Self”
Having healthy self-regulation requires you to focus on yourself, which is contrary to a survival need to focus on your environment.
If you had to find a way to impose yourself on your environment to get your needs met as a child, you wouldn’t know when to do things differently as an adult. We tend to use the same patterns to meet our adult needs as we did when we were children.
If you exhaust your physical and emotional resources trying to get your needs met through the environment as an adult, you will struggle with self-regulation. As an adult, controlling the internal environment is more important than vigilantly monitoring the outer environment.
Your Brain, the Computer
Every message your brain receives is processed like a computer. As I’m typing, my computer processes every keystroke as input. When I finish typing and ask the computer to close the file, I will get a message. “Would you like to save changes?” If I respond yes, I must identify where I want to store the file.
The difference between our brain and the computer is that our brain doesn’t ask us for permission. It makes a vast amount of decisions on our behalf every day. It uses all the data from our conscious and unconscious past to make decisions.
By default, your brain only makes decisions based on your past. It doesn’t change patterns because you age. It will continue the same practices until it receives reprogramming.
Most people like Microsoft Word because it has the most features to create effective messages. It red flags or auto-corrects potential grammatical errors. It allows you to format your document and can handle images, charts, and graphs.
We want our brains to process incoming and outgoing messages with equal flexibility and efficiency. Self-regulation is the premium programming to efficiently process and store information.
