How fast is emotion triggered?

120 milliseconds, (millisecond is .001)

Hummingbird wingbeat: .02 seconds

Blink of an eye: .025 seconds

In my new book Tough Transitions I write about our initial response when we find ourselves catapulted into a tough transition. I call these initial experiences Responding because that is what we do, whether we really want to or not. We respond to the event and often not in our best behavior. But our reactions are so normal, as you will read in the excerpt below. These paragraphs come from the chapter called Responding in Tough Transitions. After I describe the ways we Respond, I include an excerpt from the book containing a couple of positive things we can do during these initial experiences of a tough transitions. You’ll find many more examples of positive things to do in the complete chapter.

Excerpts from Responding Chapter of Tough Transitions

You’d think that we humans would be wired to begin problem-solving immediately when a disrupting change occurs in our lives. But instead we are wired to react with our emotions. The triggering of our emotions can do us a world of good if we need to run to get out of the way of a fast-moving bus, but they can cause a problem when we need to make well-thought-out decisions or step back from a situation and get our bearings. Our emotions exist, of course, to help us stay alive. Scientists tell us that there is always some part of us—our emotional center–that is trying hard to keep us “in a positively regulated life.” They tell us that this regulation, in fact, is “a deep and defining part of who we are.” Emotions exist to keep danger away or to help us take advantage of opportunities. They help us “maintain the coherence of [life’s] structures and function against life-threatening odds.” (more…)

Sometimes we are blessed with
the gift of a new question.
–Richard Foster

In my new book Tough Transitions: Navigating Your Way Through Difficult Times, I talk about a variety of things we can as we dealing with the chaos of change that almost always accompanies transitions. Here is an excerpt from the book about the simple act of making lists.

The act of making a list is deceptively simple—after all, we’ve been making lists since we went to the store to get our school supplies. But List Making, in this time of Reviewing, can be something so much more than a mundane activity done to jog our minds. The ancient meaning of list came from the Old English word hylsnan which means to listen to. So when we make lists during Reviewing who are we listening to? We are listening to ourselves. We are eavesdropping on our own conversation. List Making works like dropping a bucket down into a deep well, a well of memory, desires, experiences. Lists we make reveal things to us, surprise us, remind us. When we make lists, we can explore the unexamined interior of ourselves and discover things about ourselves that we didn’t even know we didn’t know.

Once I was in a meeting where the leader asks us to list all the telephone numbers we knew from memory. Our home telephone number was the first I put on my list. Then my husband’s mobile, my office number, our fax number, my sister’s number in Tennessee, my aunt’s number in Georgia. First of all, I was surprised at how few numbers I knew. Then I realized that the one person in my immediate family whose number I did not have memorized was the number of my brother Frank. This amazed me, given that I have only 2 people in my family of origin who are still alive—my sister and my brother—and I didn’t know his number. Oh, we emailed almost every day and talked on the telephone occasionally. But what the list making revealed to me was that I don’t talk to my brother enough on the phone to have memorized his number. And I wanted to change that. So when I got home, I copied his number out of my data base and taped it under the telephone where it could stay until I had committed it to memory. This is the power of the simple act of List Making.

Ilene Segalove and Paul Bob Velick have written a very good book called List Your Self: Listmaking as the Way to Self-Discovery. Here are few lists they suggest that I think might be useful when we are experiencing Reviewing while navigating a tough transition:

List the things you think you can’t live without.

List all the prayers, sayings, and chants you’ve been taught that make you feel better.

Think of your own lists…a good/bad list about a time in the past; a list of those things in the past that you’d like to bring forth in the future in a new form; a list of things you assumed before this tough transition happened. Make these lists and see what you discover.

Let me know if you decide to make some lists this month. I’d love to hear what you discover.

Have a great May!

We all know that music can be relaxing, uplifting, memory-stirring, and energizing. But music as a health tonic? Science now tells us much about the power of music to heal our bodies, lessen anxieties, and relieve stress. This last month I read about a new hospital recently built in Lafayette, Colorado, that has music designed into every part of the medical complex…from birdsongs or wind sounds when you leave the parking lot to soothing piano music in the reception area to an Irish harp piece in the emergency room. Every piece of music—and there are 9000 of them in all, so that you never hear the same piece during the day—has been specifically chosen for the part of the hospital where it is heard and for the time of day it is heard. This hospital is in the forefront of a revolution in health. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2004 released a report covering 600 studies that showed that design in hospitals—including sound and light—can have a dramatic effect on how fast and how well patients recover from illness.

I say that what is good for patients and visitors in hospitals is good for us at home…why not design our own environments with sounds that help relieve our anxieties or speed recovery from a cold? What about Mozart’s Violin Concertos when we feel blue? What about Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings if our blood pressure elevates? What about the CD “Mozart on the Go” when we want more pep and stimulation? This music can be adjuncts to the other things we do to take care of ourselves…and what a pleasurable antidote!

Mozart’s music, in particular, offers something for just about every ailment or need we might have, according to research. For anxiety, the recommendation is Mozart’s “Laudate Dominum.” For waiting time, Mozart’s String Quartets. For getting started in the morning, Mozart’s “Andante, Symphony #17.” Three Mozart CDs which we have had in our home for years and play over and over are Music for The Mozart Effect CDs: Vol. 1, Strengthen the Mind; Vol. 2, Heal the Body; Vol. 3, Unlock the Creative Spirit.

When I was writing Tough Transitions, my new book that will be out in June, I wondered why music seemed to be so helpful when we are going through hard times. Here is what I wrote in Tough Transitions:

How does music help? I’m sure we could read all sorts of sophisticated explanations, but I settle for something quite simple. This is something I learned from one of my early music teachers: that when you press down a key on the piano, you think you are hearing one note, but you are really hearing the key you have pressed plus all its overtones. These overtones—higher and higher sounds on the piano—that you hear at the same time you press the key down produce the note you hear just as all the colors in the spectrum produce the color white you are seeing when you look at a cloud. And what was so amazing that I remember it to this day was my teacher’s assertion that the overtones of a note in music are mathematical, that they occur in specific ratios, that they always occur in the same progression, and that they never change because they are a part of the physical universe. What the ancients called the music of the spheres is related to these set-in-nature harmonics.

So, in my amateur understanding of why I feel better after I listen to Barber’s Adagio for Strings is that I’ve heard order. I’ve heard the natural harmonics of notes and overtones. I’ve heard sound which conforms to a progression of ratios set in the universe. And somehow, in listening to this music, I am returned to balance, to internal order, to a sense of more harmony in my own life.

Music also helps me when I’m spent during times of tough transitions by taking me out of my verbal rational world into a creative, symbolic experience. Beethoven once said that music is the mediator between the life of the spirit and the life of the senses. So here I am trying to figure out how to get my aged parents to pick up meals at the community senior center, and I sit down to listen to Beethoven’s 9th. I am transported to another realm of experience. The music lifts my spirits. I am in this moment cavorting with my imagination, my intuition, my wordless self.

Then there’s the power of the emotion in songs I listen to when I’m disconcerted and trying to find solid earth to stand on. When Emmy Lou Harris sings, “I would walk…from Boulder to Birmingham…just to see your face,” and I’m grieving for a relationship that can be no more, there’s a correspondence, a fit. When I’m despairing over the challenges of a career change and listen to Elvis sing “I Believe,” I am quickened by hope; and when Barbra Streisand sings “We Are Standing on Holy Ground” I am touched by grace. I find a place for my emotions in these singers’ emotions. I experience recognition, relationship, and a deep sense of release.

National Geographic magazine recently wrote about a new documentary called “The Story of the Weeping Camel.” In this film nomadic Mongolians who have a camel that has rejected her newborn bring in a musician. This musician plays a song that brings tears to the mother camel’s eyes and results in her taking care of her new calf. One of the filmmakers says, “The nomads have ways of communicating with their animals by singing and playing instruments. Music can convey emotions and show affection, things an animal can sense.” Animals, human beings…we are all touched and changed by music. (From Tough Transitions: Navigating Your Way Through Difficult Times. You can preorder at Amazon.com now.)

So, on these early April days, may I suggest that we all brew a lovely cup of fragrant tea, sit, and listen to music that will uplift, heal, and invigorate us. Goodbye, winter. Hello, spring.

Love,