Comment by trabant00 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trabant00 | Hacker News Reader

Standard guardian infomercial about standard pseudo science book that will blow your mind and hack your life. I really think they have a standard recipe for these by now:

Take some facts that are commonly known and accepted. In this case the body state (food, sleep, exercise, illness, etc) influence your state of mind/emotions. This is the hook that establishes trust.

Conclude what is obvious but completely unhelpful: you have to live a balanced life. No shit?! But present it in a long and pretentious manner that will make your readers have a ridiculous Eureka! moment.

Then add the twist. The completely unproven and unsupported theory that sounds good:

> instead of saying “I’m scared,” she blurted out: “I’m experiencing high arousal from uncertainty.”

> “Anger” is a cultural concept

Choosing different wording and expressions for emotions will not change how you feel or how you act. It will only make communication difficult with other people.

EDIT: a rose by any other name...

> Choosing different wording and expressions for emotions will not change how you feel or how you act.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) tries to do that.

> CBT focuses on challenging and changing unhelpful cognitive distortions (e.g. thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes) and behaviors, improving emotional regulation, and the development of personal coping strategies that target solving current problems.

I fail to find "wording" in that quote. CBT deals with thoughts, not the exact words used to describe them.

> Choosing different wording and expressions for emotions will not change how you feel or how you act.

It might change how you perceive emotions, which might change how you feel or act.

First of all, a theory full of "might" is not exactly useful. Secondly, even if it does who says it will change it an correct direction?

You can easily non-scientifically argue that that’s just a form of repression and the blow back will be magnificent.

I’m not sure I follow, perhaps I’m missing some context. Can you elaborate?

> Choosing different wording and expressions for emotions will not change how you feel or how you act.

Actually, having more nuanced vocabulary about negative feeling helps a lot in thinking about what you feel, why and dealing with emotions.

If you use anger for large group of feelings (like fear, threat, uncertainty, pressure, stress) you cant look for proper solutions nor properly communicate to others what your issue is. The result is random blowups and aggression. If you can say that "this feels like threat", then you can analyze why it feels like threat and act more rationally.

Let me repeat: what you just said sounds good and logical, but is in fact unsupported by actual science. Another completely opposed theory that sounds just as good and logical is that you can call a thing whatever you want it is still the same thing.

It is what helped me personally to deal with situations. The moment where I personally realized the name for emotion I felt was the moment where I was able to think about situation differently and solve what was causing it. It both made it easier to pretend calm in the moment and to find to correct response toward people I was dealing with.

It is not like emotions were something special here. Having names for things helps to analyze, talk and think about those things in general. That is why patterns book was useful originally.

In fact, psychologists strive on wording, asking angry people why they are "irritated" and such, so there's nothing new in influencing attitudes through language.

Trying to present it as a mighty self-administered hack is probably still quackery.

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