Free Stress: How to De-Stress without Doing Less by Kate Middleton Page A

signal there is something you need to pay attention to.I like to think of them as emotion sparks – you can see them at the top of figure 8. Sparks of emotion are not optional. They are designed to grab our attention so that we address the potentially significant thing that is going on around us. They act a bit like smoke alarms, warning us that there might be something serious going on. Once we have realized that, they die out – they have done their job.
    The trouble is that many of us are dealing with something quite different – emotional fires. Emotional fires start when we move into the bottom half of the diagram – when that initial spark of emotion seems to ignite something else and start a much bigger reaction.

    Figure 8: Emotion sparks and emotional fires
    How do emotional fires start? In essence, they happen when something about the kind of person we are and the way we approach the world makes us more prone to certain unhelpful ways of thinking (these are covered in detail in Chapter 10). Remember, a key part of an emotional experience is the thoughts that it triggers – thoughts that start us off analysing what caused the emotion in the first place. Too often, however, the initial thoughts linked with the emotion spark can then trigger a load of other, less helpful thoughts. Imagine your brain triggers an emotion to alert you to the fact that you have not yet finished a report due in tomorrow. You feel anxious and find yourself thinking about the report, how it needs doing, what might happen if you cannot get it finished in time. But often these anxious thoughts can then trigger others. What about that other project you have to work on? What if you end up late with that one too? What if your boss just thinks you are totally useless? Remember how you did that report last week and he thought it was dreadful? What if that happens again?
    Sometimes these thoughts can trigger weaknesses in what you think of yourself (see Chapter 11 on self-esteem) – ‘I’m so useless, I can never get anything done on time!’ or ‘I always make a hash of these things!’ – or beliefs and pressures that we put on ourselves – ‘I must get everything right or I am not good enough!’ or ‘I should be able to get this done without any help.’ The key thing is that these kinds of thoughts are a bit like kindling. If you are prone to thinking in certain ways, then it is rather like lighting a match in the middle of a dry forest in a hot summer. One tiny spark of emotion can easily set fire to these thoughts, creating a much bigger emotion that is more difficult to deal with.
    Looking at the spark/fire model of emotions, we can quickly see that there are two ways in which emotions could start to become problematic and leave us vulnerable to trying to suppress them. The first is if there are just too many – if our brain is triggering too many sparks. This can happen if something about the way we live our life means we have a lot of rules or goals that our brain is trying to keep track of. They may be things we believe about ourselves or things that are related to the world around us, but they mean our brain is constantly having to grab our attention, resulting in a lot of emotion sparks. The second problem is if emotion sparks are then building up into emotional fires. This happens if, again as a result of what life has taught us so far, we tend to think in certain ways or hold certain beliefs about the world that act in a negative way, building up blazes of negative emotion. We’ll look at this in more detail in Chapter 10.
    Understanding our emotions enables us to start the journey of changing the way stress affects us. Ultimately though, the key to managing our emotions is to learn to treat them as what they are: useful warning flags that alert our attention to things and help to colour our judgments. But we are always going to struggle with this if our emotions