Emotional Dispersion and Patience
Abstract: Emotional Dispersion is an emotion-regulation technique that focuses on accepting emotions as they are and letting them be to lessen their control over the person feeling them. Patience is not a resource that gets depleted over time, but rather a choice that one makes in every moment.
Preface
I have done a good bit of searching to see if anyone else has come up with this idea or if it already had a name, and came up short. I am a little hesitant to name it, considering I might have simply failed to find someone talking about this exact concept, but since I still find use in giving it a name, I am.[1]
It's worth mentioning that I don't have any special qualifications pertaining to emotional sciences or therapy. This is 70% me trying to describe my method and 30% me believing that it will be useful to other people.
To talk about myself a little— I am, by most conceivable metrics, significantly different from 'normal'.[2] I experience emotions in a way that I think most people find abnormal or weird (like my tendency for them to affect me physically).[3] I'm very rarely overpowered by my emotions, the only exceptions being when I'm particularly excited about music/anime/This-Cool-Thing that I just found, or the rare moments when I'm overstressed and about to punch a wall (and break my fingers in the process).
This is all to say that, if what I'm about to say sounds like utter nonsense, it's probably due to the above reasons.
What do I mean by 'Emotional Dispersion'?
Emotional Dispersion is an emotion-regulation technique that I recently realized I use. Originally, I thought of it as another way of conceptualizing patience, something that allows me to appear endlessly patient (confirmed by anecdotes given from friends). But upon thinking about it more deeply, and trying to define the actual process occurring, I noticed that it covered a larger range of things than just 'being patient'.
You may or may not be familiar with the idea that emotion-regulation happens in four ways; changing the kind of emotion held, when they're had, how they're expressed, and how they're experienced. This technique is the latter-most of those options, aiming to change how they feel to someone.
Emotional Dispersion is about not denying or trying to fight emotions. The idea is to accept the emotions as they are, and then let them become less powerful from there.
When I'm practicing Emotional Dispersion, I imagine my feelings as a cloud, or a ball of mist, sitting wherever I feel physical tension within my body. Usually this ends up being my chest or gut. Then, I imagine the mist/cloud being dispersed and becoming diffuse throughout my body. The result is that I feel a literal, physical release of tension, even when I didn't realize I had any.[4]
As for the mental sensation of Emotions Dispersing, it feels like coming to terms with my current state of being. Terms that come to mind are things like "Riding the wave"[5] "A weight off [my] shoulders/back" "Releasing steam" etc. Any of these ideas are (mostly) in alignment with the feeling and concept I'm trying to convey.
In case it is more helpful to have a less abstract visualization, some more concrete ones are:
- Envisioning water running off the side of an object,
- Taking off the lid to a pot of boiling water and watching the steam dissipate,
- Wringing a rag dry of water (although this one still leaves the rag damp at the end so I don't like it).
This technique is pretty natural applied in situations with a need for patience. But it can be applied in a much broader range of situations.
Recently, I had a Pretty-Awful-Realization. I was lying in bed, thinking about the things that happened that day. And it made me Pretty Awful. I felt sadness knotting up in my chest, similar to how my stomach feels empty when I'm hungry. I applied the technique, and imagined the emotion dispersing throughout my body. It went from the innermost part of my chest, out to the edges of my skin. It moved through my body like a gas, filling in the gaps as it expanded.
Once I stopped fighting how I felt, when I let myself feel that way with my whole body and mind, it started to feel less intense. A sense of control swept back over me. I'm still sad, but I can think more clearly, and I can control my body now.
Patience is not a resource.
As I briefly mentioned earlier, this article was originally going to be about what I thought was a novel way of thinking about patience. (It's not that novel apparently.)
Patience is not a resource that can be depleted. Rather, patience is a choice. At every moment that you have to put up with fools, you have the option to choose to be patient, to not interrupt their ramblings. You can feign losing your temper with them if it will result in a better outcome, but no matter what, it is always better to be capable of continuing to put up with them. And when you reframe patience as a choice, that becomes possible. [6]
This idea of patience being a choice is in opposition to the idea of Ego Depletion. As defined by Wikipedia:
Ego depletion is the idea that self-control or willpower draws upon conscious mental resources that can be taxed to exhaustion when in constant use with no reprieve.
Either Ego Depletion doesn't exist, I don't experience it, or I haven't been in annoying enough situations to experience it. But I have never felt that I couldn't possibly continue to choose patience, despite having bad executive function (lol).[7]
A much more similar concept of patience would be something like Willpower Distraction:
... and "willpower depletion" might be nothing more than mental distraction by one of these processes. Perhaps it really is better to think of willpower as power (a rate) than energy (a resource).
If that’s true, then figuring out what processes might be distracting us might be much more useful than saying “I’m out of willpower” and giving up. Maybe try having a sip of water or a bit of food if your diet permits it. Maybe try reading lying down to see if you get nap-ish. Maybe set a timer to remind you to call that friend you keep thinking about.
But I still believe this definition to be lacking. I don't feel like I have to increase the power output of my patience battery to continue putting up with people, because patience isn't something that's being drawn from in any capacity. It's something I'm doing.[8]
- ^
Although I've named it 'Emotional Dispersion', Emotional Diffusion would be a more accurate name. I went with dispersion instead to avoid associations with AI.
- ^
I have been repeatedly told before that I am weird/different/abnormal, so even though I think I'm only slightly different from most people, I'm compensating and assuming that I'm quite different from most people.
- ^
I'm trying here to avoid falling into either the Typical Mind Fallacy or the Atypical Mind Fallacy, although I'm not confident that I'm succeeding.
- ^
Some guided meditations have a similar idea of trying to relax the body to also help relax the mind.
- ^
"Riding the Wave" is a similar idea to Emotional Diffusion. People are told, especially in contexts with drugs involved, to just Ride the Wave, and let the feelings you feel run their course. This is a little different to Emotion Diffusion, as you are not actively seeking and feeling the emotions inside of you, but rather just trying not to interfere with them at all.
Emotional Diffusion could pretty accurately be considered a more-powerful version of Riding the Wave, if that made it more intuitable or conceptualizable.
- ^
A friend of mine told me that they visualize patience as a block of wood that they give to other people. Patience being depleted is like the wood block being chipped, sometimes burned, etc. What I find interesting about this is how, unlike more common visualizations, the block of patience is different for each person, instead of being one central bucket/battery that gets drained.
- ^
Here is an interesting post that has helped me in my search to improve my executive function.
- ^
Maybe this then isn't a problem about patience, but rather one about a lack of self-control? I'm skeptical on this front though, as I have bad executive function.
Discuss