You can Control Your Emotions!

Gg

We want to teach you how you can stop being impulsive in your day to day life. What we intend you suggest need seriousness but if you apply it effectively, it will make you control your impulsive behaviour.

This blog is in this context only.

The morning event:

For the past two days, we have been in pain because of our non-social behaviour. We are today 60+ and still feed odd when talking to people. This issue was on my mind and so, today in the morning pages hour, the reference of Victor Fankle, a psychologist and his teaching about the 'stimulus-response relationship' get into the mind. We wondered whether the experience that he had in the Nazi concentration camp regarding S-R relationship applies in my case also.

He was a zew, captured by Nazis and torchered heavily. During this state of torture only he had some intuitive learning which helped in finding changed relation between the stimulus and the response

Victor Fankle redefined the S-R relationship:

We first learned about Victor Fanckle when reading 'seven habits of highly effective people' by Stephen Covey. In his book, he admired Victor for his wonderful work. Victor was a psychologist, captured and put for three years in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau, from 1942 to 1945. In the camp, all his relatives were tortured to death but he survived because he evolved a new way of viewing life.

Frankl survived the experience of a concentration camp because he realised that there was an important task he personally needed to complete: it was the completion of a manuscript he had been working on. So he wanted to add the experiences of concentration camps in the book. In other words, when he was tortured then he decided to observe this experience of torture to share with the students in the class. So he changed the response.

Your re-defining S-R relationship pay:

What actually Victor was doing then? Like anyone, he also knew the S-R relationship issue. Here he noticed that when Nazis were torturing him then this torturing was in the role of a stimulus that he needed to control by responding differently than feeling the pain. Then he realised that he may had control over his response to the torture by seeing it in a classroom context. So, instead of allowing it be the response of pain (caused by stimulus), he decided that it should be a response of teaching-experience for sharing in the class later.

Consequently, he declared that between stimulus and response, there is a space. We can extend this gap. It is this space that empowers us to choose our response. In other words, if we want we may use this to power us for our growth and freedom.

We adopted to solve our unwanted behaviour?

We have adopted his teaching to resolve our non-social issues. If you understand what Victor did in the concentration camp and so, he survived, you can help your impulsive behaviour easily. In my case, it was my non-social behaviour. Say we know that to check this non-social behaviour we simply need to speak to people. We know that this problem is not big and we can easily fix it.

But whenever we tried to speak to one another, something stops. We don't know further but the ultimate result was no social action on our part. Here, the social action is defined by my speaking to one of my choices (ie Stimulus to that person) and the result will be other people's response to my initiative (ie Response to my stimulus). Here are Two things:

1. When I intend to talk to anyone, some fear, hesitation, anxiety, etc comes and checks me from speaking. Here Stimulus leads to conditioned fear which is stopping me from speaking .

2. As per Victor'a teaching, there is a space between S and R and we should use this space to decide our response of our choice. So we replaced R with 'feeling of happiness because we had spoken Ist time 

You can check impulsive behaviours:

You can transfer this learning for checking your any impulsive behaviour as well. Your impulsive behaviour is your tendency to act without thinking. This is more visible in non-serious type people. Such people are in the tendency to do something without a plan and act randomly as per their wish and will. They are more impulsive and largely do things without knowing.

One reason for this impulsive behaviour is conditioning. So you can check your impulsiveness by checking your conditioning and this may be by applying the teachings of Victor Frankl as follows:

1. Normally when you create a stimulus, response results. This is natural. In other words, both are conditioned behaviour as the stimulus is always backed by conditioned response.

2. Frankl's teaching asks to contradict this practice. It asks that when a stimulus is created then you take time to decide and exhibit a non-conditioned response. So your response to the stimulus should be decided by you, not by the conditions or situations.

3. For example, suppose the moment your boss calls, you feel fear meaning this stimulus (calling by the boss) is leading to a conditioned response (fear in this case). Instead of this, the moment a boss calls you decides your response differently (say, pleasure for here is a chance to communicate and impress the boss with your work, etc).

In a similar vein, you can help yourself in other areas. The only condition is that you should be serious, self-concerned and willing to help hiselves…

Dr. GP SINGH. India.