As the year goes on, and my workload ebbs and flows between frantically trying to meet deadlines and merely managing to stay afloat, the office gets increasingly messy. While tidying yesterday, I reorganised some of the photos on my wall, including a set of staff photos at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington.
As I wandered down memory lane, I was reminded of a colleague who knitted during staff meetings. This led me to think about one of the tales of the recent Olympics – Tom Daley, the most successful British diver ever. Daley was a literal splash in the pool, but also went viral for sitting in the stands knitting.
Why? Well, he looks like he knows what he’s doing and that means he’s going to have a neat “Paris 24″ jersey when he’s done. But he also explains it helps ground him during the stresses of competition as well as daily life. It’s a form of mindfulness; being in the moment and focusing on one thing.
Mindfulness has been the rage for a while and, in general, it’s a good thing to try. It doesn’t work for everyone (men may get a little less out of it) and it doesn’t help with all of life’s problems (it can make some people undergoing unpleasant medical treatments worse off), but it’s worth a go if you’ve not tried it. The Mental Health Foundation website has a solid “how to” if you’re interested.
Although there is empirical evidence to support the general utility of mindfulness, the same can’t be said for all of the strategies that stressed or angry people have tried over the years. Venting, for example. Thanks, Freud, for popularising the notion of catharsis, a word that literally means “cleansing” ourselves of problematic thoughts and emotions by expressing them. It’s an intuitively satisfying idea – you release the steam by opening the valve, right?
On one hand, a lot of current scholarship says that avoiding your emotions doesn’t work well. The cause of those emotions doesn’t necessarily go away just because you’re trying not to think about them, and people often find that the things they’re trying not to think about become increasingly intrusive – they pop into your head more frequently. So, venting must be good?
On the other hand, how you express those emotions is also important. According to a just-published review of studies on regulating anger, Ohio State’s Sophie Kjærvik and Brad Bushman state rather bluntly, “Popular wisdom suggests that venting reduces anger and aggression, but it does not.”
It can even exacerbate anger. The reason, they suggest, is that just like concentrating on knitting one, purling one makes you focus on what you’re doing, venting is a short step from ruminating. Ruminating is bad and can maintain whatever unpleasant emotion you’re feeling for longer. Anger, in particular, has a very short half-life; it’s hard to keep it up without trying, and venting seems to be one way to do that.
Kjærvik and Bushman give us hope, though. If venting doesn’t down-regulate anger, it’s not neuroscience as to what does. The clue there is in the “down-regulate” part. What do you feel when you’re angry? Tension, often in the fight/flight bits of your body. Elevated heart rate and breathing. These are signs of physiological arousal, so do things that reduce that arousal. Hmm, mindfulness. Yes, they show that meditation works, but so do yoga and breathing exercises.
I particularly like breathing slowly to a count of 10. Not only does the breathing reduce your arousal, but because anger has such a short half-life a 10-count is usually enough to ride out the wave.
Hmm, I wonder if my colleague knitted during staff meetings because they made them angry?
