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DR JOHN DEMARTINI - Updated 9 months ago
Until you learn how to manage your polarized emotions, don’t expect to manage your life.
In all likelihood, you have experienced a wide variety of polarized emotions at varying intensities. Sometimes you may perceive that you are “moody”, that your emotions are all over the place, and perhaps you perceive that you have little control over your emotions and that sometimes you may perceive that your polarized emotions seem to control you.
If you would love to manage and master your polarized emotions, there are some key steps you can take right now.
Before I move on to the specific steps that may be valuable on your journey to mastery, I’d like to clarify what I’m referring to as polarized versus.
Synthesized feelings are gratitude, love, inspiration, enthusiasm, presence and certainty, I call these the transcendentals and they arise from balanced perceptions. The many other feelings are polarized emotions that arise from polarized perceptions involving the subcortical brain which includes the amygdala.
I’d like to also emphasize that you are designed to have both polarized emotions and synthesized feelings and that they serve a valuable purpose in your life.
Polarized emotions are there to let you know when you're in survival mode, which is not the wisest way to live in most settings. Synthesized feelings are there to let you know that you’re being authentic.
In essence, a polarized emotion is due to a polarized perception. Positive emotions tend to occur when you are more conscious of the upsides of someone or something than you are of the downsides. This often leads you to be drawn towards them, attracted, almost impulsively, resulting in infatuation and a desire to be with them or to have it.
Conversely, you also have negative emotions. In these instances, you tend to be more conscious of the downsides and less conscious of the upsides. This creates an instinct to withdraw, repelled from, and avoid the person or situation.
Both positive and negative emotions are prey seeking and predator avoiding survival responses.
Imagine yourself as an animal in the wild searching for prey. When you're infatuated with something, you may see it as prey to consume.
On the other hand, when you deeply resent something and are mostly conscious of the downsides, you are likely driven to avoid it and escape its presence as you would a predator.
Polarized emotions are therefore designed for seeking what you desire and avoiding what you resent. They play a significant role, especially when you're in survival mode and in true emergencies.
There are also varying degrees of emotions you experience. For example, you may perceive an individual in an extremely positive light, seeing only the positives and ignoring any negatives. This can lead to a biased and radical perspective, almost bordering on addiction. Conversely, you can perceive someone in a negative light, seeing only the bad and dismissing any positives and your bias can lead you to repulsion.
In other words, highly polarized perceptions most likely result in highly polarized emotions and reactions towards or away.
This leads me to my next point, which is about learning to manage, master and balance your emotions so you can become neutral, cbentered and objective instead of reactive, subjective and being run by your emotions and the world around you.
In other words, when you're able to perceive both the positive and negative aspects of an individual or situation, simultaneously without being infatuated or resentful, you have begun to truly master your life.
Let's consider infatuation as an example. When you're infatuated with someone, it tends to take time before you start to see any of their downsides. However, as time goes on, you tend to begin noticing things you like and dislike about them. This is when you have the opportunity to gain the wisdom of ages by acknowledging both sides of them – their upsides and their downsides. This knowledge prevents you from being overly vulnerable, gullible, or excessively infatuated.
This is a wiser way to interact with others where you have a balanced perspective, embracing both sides of them equally. This is the true nature of love.
The same principle applies to resentment. Becoming aware of both sides of an individual or situation helps to bring your emotions into balance so you can become less like an animal in the wild that is in constant survival and fight or flight mode.
You have the capacity within you to bring balance and achieve neutrality.
You can learn to see both sides of people because the truth is that all people, including you, have both positive and negative traits.
When you carefully observe someone and genuinely see both sides of them, you can function beyond being impulsively gullible or skeptically cynical. Instead, you can be present and engaged. This allows you to let go of the fear of loss (of that which you’re infatuated with) or fear of gain (of that which you’re resentful of) and simply be in the present moment.
When you achieve this neutral perspective, you gain self-governance. With self-governance, you can effectively manage your polarized emotions.
Now, here's an insight into the functioning of your brain that you might find interesting.
It consists of two types of thinking systems.
- Systems 1 thinking refers to the polarized emotional reactions that occur before conscious thought. This is a survival mode response, characterized by polarized perceptions. It involves the sub-cortical region of the brain which includes the amygdala.
- On the other hand, Systems 2 thinking involves thinking before reacting. It allows you to pause, consider both sides, and act with reason. This is the part of the brain responsible for synthesized perceptions and synthesized feelings and it is associated with the prefrontal cortex.
When you engage in System 2 thinking, you don't rely on polarized emotions but instead on rational thought. Reason likely triumphs over polarized emotions in this regard.
For most people, polarized emotions tend to run first, and they only tend to realize the imbalance afterward. Reason kicks in afterward. It's how most people tend to operate. It’s also why most people tend to stay victims of their history instead of masters of their destiny, because they remain stuck in Systems 1 thinking where they are run from the outside in, instead of self-governed from the inside.
If you reflect on some of the perceived challenges you've faced in various areas of your life, you may realize that many of them arose because you were not self-governed or in control and didn’t know how to effectively manage your polarized emotions.
However, the executive center of your brain, the forebrain, also known as the medial prefrontal cortex contains transmitters that calm down the impulses and instincts of the amygdala, the more primitive and reactive part of the brain.
Your executive center helps to balance your perceptions, bringing them into objectivity, and awakens reason. It allows you to think clearly and make rational decisions.
So the question is, how do you access your executive center and live more frequently with self-governance than emotionally with your amygdala?
A very important aspect in human behavior is an individual’s hierarchy of values. Let's tie that in here.
Everyone has a unique set of priorities or values, intentions that are most to least important in their life. When you live congruently and in alignment with your highest values consciously, several significant outcomes occur. Not only do you experience an increase in self-worth, but you also develop greater visions for achievement. You also tend to feel spontaneously inspired to take action.
Blood flow, glucose, and oxygen are also directed toward your forebrain, activating the medial prefrontal cortex or your executive center. This allows Systems 2 thinking, characterized by reason and objectivity, to calm down any overreactions and offer a balanced and neutral perspective, in comparison to a more subjective survival view (systems 1 thinking), which is based upon a distortion of reality.
In my experience as a specialist in human behavior, many of the events you may label ‘problems’ in your relationships, likely arise because of imbalanced perceptions and the accompanying overreactions or underreactions.
You may find yourself entrenched in an opposing viewpoint, where you and your partner each think your own perspective is right, and judging one another for your reactions.
It is wiser to pause, step back, and genuinely understand what is happening.
You are more likely to be able to objectively do this when you are living congruently with your highest values, living by priority, and sticking to what is truly important to you. In doing so, you gain more self-governance over your polarized emotions and your subcortical amygdala.
A few ways you can begin doing that in the coming days:
- Mindfully prioritize your daily actions and focus on the most important tasks.
- Stay clear and focused, saying no to distractions that aren't aligned with your priorities.
As you accomplish your tasks one by one, you'll likely feel a sense of accomplishment, feel resilient and adaptable, and feel a sense of gratitude. In fact, the executive center is sometimes referred to as the gratitude center.
However, if you let the outside world and its numerous distractions control you so you perceive you are constantly putting out fires throughout the day, you'll likely feel overwhelmed and unfulfilled. Blood, glucose and oxygen then flow into the amygdala, the lower desire and survival center of the brain, where you are most likely to react and overreact.
You have the choice to live according to design or duty. You also have the choice to master your life from the inside instead of being run by your polarized emotions and the world on the outside.
As I mentioned in the movie The Secret many years ago, when the voice and vision on the inside are greater than all opinions on the outside, you begin to master your life.
Alternatively, you can live in your amygdala, becoming a victim of history and let the world around you control you.
It’s one of the key reasons why I developed my signature 2-day program, the Breakthrough Experience program, nearly years ago – a program I run online almost every week. In this program, I teach people how to identify what is truly valuable to them, because this alone can completely transform the trajectory of your entire life.
Interestingly, determining your values is not always easy for individuals – not because the process is hard but because although they may think they know what their values are, after conducting hundreds of thousands of evaluations over 45 years, I've discovered that very few people truly understand what is genuinely important to them.
They tend to have internalized societal ideas about how their lives should be, clouding their clarity on what truly matters. As such, they struggle to live by their priorities.
In the Breakthrough Experience, I guide individuals in determining their true values and show them how to prioritize their lives accordingly. As a result, they learn to surround themselves with people who can assist with lower-priority tasks and delegate effectively, freeing themselves to generate more income, center themselves, empower themselves, and ultimately create more wealthy and fulfilling lives.
In the Breakthrough Experience, I also introduce the Demartini Method, a method I have been developing for over 50 years since I was 18. This method helps dissolve the emotional baggage stored in your subconscious mind, including past wounds and fantasies.
Managing your polarized emotions is not only about letting go of wounds but also about releasing the fantasies and comparisons to an idealized life that you perceive you “should” have.
By helping you stop comparing your current reality to a fantasy about how you perceive your life “should” be, you can achieve more poise and presence in your day-to-day life.
The Demartini Method also teaches you to clear the noise that often clouds your mind so you can focus on your priorities. In many cases, this “brain noise” stems from comparing yourself to others and trying to emulate them, thinking they may have a better life.
Your true magnificence lies in embracing your authentic self. So in, the Breakthrough Experience using the Demartini Method, I help you recognize those individuals you have placed on pedestals, but who through your misperceptions, you’re hindering your ability to recognize your own magnificence and presence.
You are here to be first at being yourself, not second at being someone else.
If I can leave you with a single takeaway from today, it is this: there is nothing to hold you back from living an inspired life, but to do so, it is wise to learn to manage your polarized emotions.
Your polarized emotions serve as feedback mechanisms guiding you toward authenticity. When you interpret and manage them wisely, you empower yourself to live a magnificent and authentic life, where you are more inspired each day.
To sum up:
- Until you can manage your polarized emotions, don't expect to manage your life.
- Emotional reactions occur primarily because of imbalanced perceptions of your reality.
- Polarized emotions do though serve a purpose in your life. They are feedback mechanisms to let you know that you’re not being mindful nor seeing the complete picture. Instead, you’re likely to be reacting instead of acting, and biased instead of objective and neutral.
- To put it another way, your polarized emotional reactions are feedback responses to help guide you back to authenticity, if you know how to interpret that feedback wisely. They are letting you know when you have an imbalanced perception.
- When you balance your polarized perceptions and their corresponding emotions, you awaken your executive center instead of your amygdala, allowing you to use the external world as a feedback to govern or master your life.
- Living congruently with your highest values and priorities helps you gain self-governance over your emotions, allowing you to make more spontaneous and inspired actions and manage your life effectively.
- By understanding and managing your emotions, you can lead a more inspired, balanced, and fulfilled life.
- The wisest way I have found to learn to see both sides of life and to balance your perceptions is by asking quality questions. In this way, you are more able to bring your mind into balance, so you're objective, centered and neutral, instead of opinionated, subjective and reactive.
- The most powerful questions you can ask, which I've outlined and put together in the Demartini Method that I present in the Breakthrough Experience, are the ones that allow you to see what you're unconscious of.
- When you’re actually inspired by what you do, are living by priority, delegating lower priority actions, and are really engaged in what you're doing, you wake up the executive center and are more likely to be governed from within instead of reacting from without.
Are you ready for the NEXT STEP?
If you’re seriously committed to your own growth, if you’re ready to make a change now and you’d love some help doing so, then book a FREE Discovery call with a member of the Demartini Team so we can take you through your mini power assessment session.
You’ll come away with a 3-step action plan and the foundation to empower your life.
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