Engineered Emotion

 Which of the two words in this title do you most identify with? Are you someone who gets nervous when your body gets very aware of an an upcoming situation?.. or does your initial thought go to anticipation of something exciting and invigorating? Subconscious Response -> Conscious Decision Our bodies will subconsciously respond. When we see any conditions forming that mean something consequential is about to happen, our subconscious brain has a programmed response. This initial response to a trigger condition is consistent for each of us and it's pretty difficult for us to control. For me, I admit that 90% of the time when my body starts responding to a future event my feelings turn to nervous anxiety rather than excited anticipation. Others I know will more often respond with excited anticipation as a default response. Every person has a different subconscious nature. This response mechanism happens relatively often as I live my life. Certain conditions will just trigger a fe...

  Being an engineer has taught me important analytical skills to sort ideas and concepts into categories. This black and white approach is compellingly simple, but can it be sustained. Binary Thinking: So much of my world view is rooted in a framework of truth. Things are either in or they're out. The laws of classical physics are in, and books of science fiction, may be fun to think about, but are clearly not in the truth framework. Early in my life these things were categorized on my behalf and for the most part I didn't question them. When life became complicated my framework became much less stable. Over time there was a growing third category of things that I couldn't easily figure out. My assumption was that each item in this 3rd category of things is actually in or out but I haven't quite figured out which one it is. Not knowing how to categorize something is quite stressful and thinking about it consumed a tremendous amount of energy. A big part of my mental hea...

  So let's say that this weekend you decide to get some exercise and go for a bike ride with a few friends. Maybe the trail gets a little more adventurous than you anticipated and your front wheel hits a big tree root that crosses your path. Your bike loses control and you fly through the air. Next thing you know, the emergency room doctors are sending you for x-rays to check out the massive pain you have in your arm. The expectation is that you've broken one of the bones in your arm. What happens next? You probably know this part if you know someone who's broken a limb. You would probably get some pain medication, they would set your bone to ensure it heals properly and then your arm would get put in a cast to prevent another break before it heals. It's interesting that when a limb breaks we all instinctively know what process can get us back to normal. Unfortunately when our brain starts functioning in a destructive way we still struggle with what the right course of ...

  I was watching my son's baseball game once and it was his turn to step up to the plate in a difficult game where the team was struggling to get points on the board. I watch him take a few pitches and then he hits an amazing high ball to right field where it drops to the ground just out of the fielder's reach. He runs like the wind rounding first and sliding safely into second.  I'm cheering with pride when I hear the umpire call him out... My young boy's breakthrough moment has just been shattered and I start shouting at the umpire from the little league stands. He was clearly safe. Everyone saw it. Why would the umpire not open his eyes and pay attention? It's at times like this that my emotions start generating reactions that I'm not thinking about. All of a sudden I'm yelling when I'm normally a pretty quiet guy. As I reflect on my behavior later it's clear that my feelings and actions, however justified and appropriate they felt at the time wer...

My journey to wholeness started abruptly with a 3 month leave from the world I knew and mostly understood at work. The world where deliverables were the highest metric disappeared and I was now in a void, face to face with my own body and emotions. I was about to learn things about myself that I hadn't paid attention to before.  The first big lesson for me was to redefine my value and identity. Initially I felt a huge urgency to get well and become productive again, yet each therapist I talked to was in no hurry to move things along. They were all very aware that this was a long game and I was frustrated with that in a big way. When the therapists tried to slow me down I decided to take it on myself to start learning from books, videos, podcasts and any other source of information I could find. What started to become obvious was that I needed to be ok with deconstructing the way I saw myself and rebuilding in a new way. When I got impatient I was told more than once: "How'...

One morning in the office on a pretty normal day in November 2010, I was overcome by an urge to cry out in frustration, literally. This wasn't the first time it happened but it was the tipping point. This wave of emotion was happening more often recently and it was not making sense. There were tears coming to my eyes and I had to duck into an empty office to shut the door so my colleagues wouldn't see me break down. No one had yelled at me. I wasn't in physical pain. At the heart of it, I just couldn't put together the energy to tackle the issues on my desk that day and it felt like I would miss important deadlines because my brain couldn't think.  I'd be ok again in about 30 to 60 minutes but I had no idea when this heavy emotion would hit me again. This new reality is very unsettling for a structured and analytical mind that doesn't enjoy surprises. So much of my success rested on my brain's ability to cut through chaos quickly and identify new options...

The first week of November 2010 changed my life dramatically. There was no car crash. No one died. I had no catastrophic relationship breakdown, except the one  with myself. My behaviour had developed organically without a lot of attention to my own body or feelings and that would need to change. I graduated with an engineering degree long ago and the process of problem identification, analytics and rational solution finding had become a way of life by 2010. In fact I was the leader of a very technical engineering team at Bell Canada because of these abilities. My life's reference framework was pretty black and white. There was reality and there was fluff. I preferred reality.   During that notorious week in 2010 I came to realize that what I was doing wasn't working. This one realization took me on a long journey of discovery. I'm more than 10 years into it now and a lot of things are much clearer. What hasn't changed is the need for further discovery of who I am and h...