Can We Actually Control Our Emotions?

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This week, a listener of the podcast has submitted a question I think will make a good basis for this week’s edition. We’ll call this listener Jimmy. Before Jimmy’s question, this week’s edition has a sponsor 😮, so you’ll need to endure a bit of commercialization before getting started.

And now, onto Jimmy’s question…

I’ll start with a commentary on what I think is the very misunderstood notion of emotional “control” in Stoicism.

The ancient Stoics were clear that we get to choose how we feel. However, I don’t know that it’s incredibly clear what that means — or what limits there might be to such a claim.

Today, we know that one cannot control whether or not one’s hormones create an emotional state well beyond our ability to choose. If we have a hormonal event (an imbalance due to, for example, having recently given birth) that causes a feeling response of depression and deep sadness, we cannot simply choose to disappear that response.

The ancient Stoics didn’t know about hormones, of course. They did, however, have something that might account for them: proto-emotions (or primal emotions). Proto-emotions were base emotional responses. An example of this sort of emotion would be the “shit-your-pants” fear response we would experience if a bold of lightning hit the ground a few meters from where we were standing.

The ancient Stoics were clear that that this wasn’t a sort of emotional response we could control — we could only respond to them. Using our rational faculty we could sooth and, hopefully, retard them, preventing them from growing in scope and effect; from exploding into full-blown passions (pathos).

But this sort of management seems more like wrangling and subduing a wild horse against its will than it does controlling anything.

Today, in service to Jimmy (and to you), I’m going to expound on the “control” of emotions envisioned in Stoic philosophy. I’m going to do that through the lens how I think we ought to frame our understanding of that control.

Choosing Emotions vs. Choosing Outlooks

The human brain (as an organ, not as “the self”) has many involuntary functions. One of those functions is the production of certain hormones which greatly influence how we feel.

The word “feel”, and specifically its meaning(s), is the target of the nuance I’m hoping to inject into this edition of Practical Stoicism.

When I say “feel”, I’m conveying one of two distinctly different things:

Type 1 Feeling (T1F): The physiological, we could say “body feeling,” sort of feeling. This is the sort of feeling that we feel when, for example, our “blood is boiling”, our chest is “aching with sadness”, or our heart is “singing with joy.”

Type 2 Feeling (T2F): The intellectual, we could say “thinking,” sort of feeling. This is the sort of feeling we’ve opted to adopt as an intellectual position. For example: We can feel (T1F) embarrassed that someone has just pulled our pants down in public, as a prank, exposing our Mickey Mouse boxer shorts — but we could, at the same time, choose to stake out the intellectual position that we are not embarrassed because this indifferent scenario is not actually an embarrassing thing.

The Dichotomy of Feels

Imagine we’ve been at work all day and we feel (T1F) anxious, but we also feel (T2F) that there’s no reason for us to beanxious.

Our “physiological self” is anxious, while our “intellectual self” is attempting to convince our physiological self that those feelings are not logical. We feel anxious and, at the same time, we feel that being anxious is an incorrect state for us to be in.

It’s how we feel vs. how feel about (something).

This means, hormones not being “ours to choose” (as our body, in its entirety, to include its physical and physiological condition, is not ours to choose), that we cannot choose how we feel (T1F).

This also means, our thoughts being absolutely “ours to choose”, that we can choose how we feel (T2F)

The consequence of being we can only ever choose how we think about our feelings, and that we can never choose whether (or how) we feel our feelings.

Since we can choose how we think about our feelings (T2F), we have a method for overcoming how we feel our feelings (T1F). This is why we can decide, when feeling anxious (T1F), do a bit of yoga when we get home and find, having done that yoga, we no longer feel anxious.

Our T2F feelings enable us to frame our T1F feelings, and this allows us to “control” our feelings. However, in truth, we’re doing no such thing. Instead, we are only ever choosing how we think about (and regard) our feelings and then habituating that outlook through various actions/behavior (like yoga) until we have successfully cured ourselves of our irrational passion, negative feeling, or vicious emotions.

The takeaway being: We cannot choose our emotions, ever. We can only choose our outlooks and then, having done so, choose to behave or act in an emotion-soothing fashion until our problematic emotions loosen their grip on us.

What should Jimmy do?

I think Jimmy needs to show their partner this article.

There’s no way I can think of that one can say to their partner, “I think you’re too emotional. I know you always come around in a couple days, but I wish you could come around a bit faster than that” and elicit the hoped-for result, which I imagine would the partner responding, “I think you’ve got something there! Thanks for bringing it to my attention!” and then marked improvement being fast in coming.

I find that most people prefer to address their shortcomings in private, and definitely not on demand or in front of the person who is claiming to be negatively impacted by those shortcomings. I also find that time is needed for any progress to be made by anyone, and that direct confrontation tends to communicate an urgency that works against the start of any progress.

But I also think Jimmy, himself, needs to do some reflecting

I’m certain Jimmy is a great guy. No one would seek relationship advice from me if they weren’t looking for something more than what any of the dime-a-dozen “internet influencers” could provide in any number of the 60-second “Stoic” Instagram Reels or TikTok videos flooding the internet on a daily basis.

And also because I think Jimmy might have missed something: he’s not choosing to adopt an outlook of appropriate sympathy and understanding in concerns to his partner — which means he’s not working to habituate actions or behaviors that help his T1F feelings of mistreatment disappear. It also means he’s assenting to the impression that his partners behavior is anything more than an indifferent to his pursuit of Virtue.

The sage would see Jimmy’s partner as a fellow human being. One with whom, regardless of that fellow human being’s “Stoic-ness”, the sage would feel the kinship of brotherhood or sisterhood!

What is Jimmy doing to accept the imperfect moral character of his partner, and to judge it no more harshly than he judges his own imperfect moral character? What is Jimmy doing to enforce the feeling and understanding that this other person is in need of the same patience and love that he himself is in need of as he walks a chosen path toward improvement?

If Jimmy’s partner is on a different path, or a few years behind Jimmy’s present position on that same path, what does this matter to someone who is both a Prokoptôn and, no doubt, someone who now understands their partner is a bosom-companion, a fellow traveler, out in the same unforgiving and treacherous world as them, trying their best to do what they believe is appropriate for them to be doing?

Forward this edition to your partner, Jimmy. Once you’ve done so, focus on how you can choose to adopt an outlook of compassion for a person you care a lot about but who has chosen to travel through the world differently than you.

Thanks for reading.