Why situations don’t cause emotions

Yesterday I talked to my mom about my book, which she just started reading last week. She started the conversation by saying, “Let me get my notes,” which surprised me as I wasn’t expecting her—or anyone, really—to jot down thoughts on a piece of paper while reading! I was flattered that she has been taking her time to really think about what she’s reading, and intrigued about what she wanted to discuss.

She asked a question that I thought was worth answering here. She said, “It doesn’t make any sense to me why the same trigger leads to a different response on different days.” She went on to say that sometimes she might experience a trigger and be able to “blow it off” but on other days, the same trigger erupts into a big feeling.

It’s a great question, and I don’t think I answered her very well in the phone call, so I’m hoping to rectify myself on this blog.

My mom was referring to the model of emotion generation I presented in Chapter 2 of my book, which is focused on emotional awareness. The idea, which was developed by excellent scientist and truly nice person Dr. James Gross of Stanford University, is that emotions are generated in a cycle.

First a person experiences some kind of situation, which I call a “trigger” for two reasons. First, situations that are the catalysts for emotions are sometimes internal, like anticipating a future event, or thinking about the past. They aren’t always observable situations, events, or things in the environment. Second, not all thoughts or situations result in emotions, so I wanted to use the word “trigger” to convey the start of a process, just like turning the key in your car triggers a series of processes that usually result in the engine coming to life.

After a trigger is experienced, a person must attend to some aspect of the trigger, and then interpret what they pay attention to.

I cannot overstate how important the attention and interpretation elements are for the generation of an emotional response.

Stated differently, it is not the trigger that generates the emotion, it is how we attend to that trigger and interpret the trigger. The answer to my mom’s question lies in these two elements.

Consider a common situation that you might encounter fairly regularly, like standing in a line. People tend to hate waiting in lines, so it might make sense to think that waiting in a long line causes frustration, for example.

But it’s not the trigger that causes the response, its how you think about the trigger. And, how you think about the trigger will depend on which aspect of the trigger you’re paying attention to.

Think about a long line at the grocery store. If you attend to the four people ahead of you in line with overflowing carts and the slow cashier, you might think, “I picked the absolute worst line, look how many items have to be scanned and how slow this person is. What a waste of time, I could be doing something else!” You are likely to feel annoyed and frustrated. These types of thoughts will be more likely if you’re already irritated, if you haven’t had enough sleep or food, or otherwise low on psychological resources.

But if you experience the same length of long line at the grocery store, and you instead attend to what kinds of items are in the carts in front of you and make a game out of trying to learn something about them (e.g., “Are the cans of cheese dip and slices of watermelon because this person is having a summer party?” “Why is this person buying every single variety of fizzy water and twelve cans of Hamburger Helper?”), you will likely feel curious rather than frustrated.

Much of the time, we human beings aren’t really tuning into what aspects of a situation we’re paying attention to, or how we’re interpreting situations. Our thoughts run by in a blur. Or thoughts don’t seem like thoughts at all, but like facts. But these processes of attending and interpreting are happening pretty often “under the hood,” just like turning the key of a car, sends a signal to the starter and does a bunch of other stuff with the battery and the pistons. (Can you tell I don’t know anything about cars?) The point is that turning the key starts a process, it doesn’t directly start the engine.

Just like experiencing a trigger doesn’t directly generate a feeling, but starts a process.

To really understand your feelings, you have to tune into what your attention is drawn to, and—most critically—how you are interpreting the situation. Bonus: learning how to shift your attention and re-interpret the situation are also very practical and effective ways to change your feelings, too!