Reasonable mind and emotion mind can control your life. Here’s how to find a middle ground.
Do you have moments where you are as cool as a cucumber, some in which you’re as hot as a Carolina Reaper, and others where you feel the calm of a person who finally has their shiitake together? This week, we're going to explore the 3 states of mind and how they affect your life.
Savvy Psychologist is hosted by Dr. Monica Johnson. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Do you have moments where you are as cool as a cucumber, some in which you’re as hot as a Carolina Reaper, and others where you feel the calm of a person who finally has their shiitake together? This week, I’m going to talk to you about the 3 states of mind and how they affect your life.
Welcome back to Savvy Psychologist, I'm your host, Dr. Monica Johnson. Every week on this show, I'll help you face life's challenges with evidence-based approaches, a sympathetic ear, and zero judgment.
One thing that you may or may not remember about me is that I am an expert in Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT. Today, I’m going to talk you through a concept known as the 3 states of mind and how they affect both your subjective experience and your environment.
In DBT, one of our main objectives is to seek the middle path. What we find is that living in extremes often leads to more problems. However, in life, many of us swing back and forth like a pendulum. It’s very much a “grass is always greener on the other side” mentality, but what if you could simply find your own unique shade of green for yourself?
The 3 states of mind we are going to review are reasonable, emotional, and wise mind.
First, let’s discuss reasonable or logic mind. You might think it sounds like this would be a great state of mind, and it definitely has its perks. A person is in reasonable mind when they approach things intellectually and empirically; however, one thing to realize is that emotions don’t exist in reasonable mind. Now don’t get me wrong, we need to be able to plan and be calculating. It’s how we got to the moon and why Six Flags isn’t a death pit. There were a lot of people who tapped into their logical powers and followed through with the tasks to make these things happen.
But when you’re in this state of mind, you can only attend to empirical facts and will often ignore emotions. If you’ve ever met a person who defaults to this state of mind, you might describe them as an intellectualizer or just plain insensitive. That’s because empathy is impaired in this state and those in logic mind will forgo anything emotional in favor of being practical or rational in a situation. When decisions and actions are solely controlled by logic, that can lead to very real ramifications. It can turn your life or the experience that others have of you into a very drab and distant existence. I sometimes like to think about reasonable mind like an extremely uncomfortable chair. Yes, it serves all the functions of a chair, I am technically able to sit on it, but wouldn’t it be nice if it had soft cushions and maybe if it was a color that I found aesthetically pleasing.
On the more extreme side, staying in reasonable mind can lead you to ignore your human needs and those of others. Many of the people I interact with tell me stories about how they had parents who were great providers financially, but they don’t have a good relationship with them because there was no emotional connection. While reasonable mind doesn’t always seem like such a bad idea on the surface, the outcomes of it in the real world aren’t typically favorable. I have yet to meet a person who wants their life to be like the beginning of the movie Pleasantville—gray and disconnected, we want the vibrancy of color in our world whether that be pastels or neon.
Next up is emotion mind. Wanna take a guess if this is where all your emotions reside? I find that most people tend toward emotion mind, which makes sense given that we are as humans are emotional and social creatures.
You’re in emotion mind when your thinking and behavior are dictated primarily by current emotional states. In emotion mind, thoughts are hot—it’s where we get the term “hot-headed”—and logical thinking is difficult if not impossible. Moreover, facts are often distorted or amplified by your emotional state.
For example, have you ever been angry and approached a situation at 10/10 intensity, only to calm down later and think this situation just wasn’t that serious? Because there is no thinking involved, emotion mind can lead us to behave in ways that don’t fit the facts of the situation at hand. This can lead to more emotional problems because we likely feel guilt and shame from our reactions. Additionally, it can lead to feeling isolated because our social environment may be wary of us.
Similar to reasonable mind though, emotions have their perks. You wouldn’t be able to walk into a museum and be mesmerized by the art, go see your favorite DJ and feel their beats in your bones, or look at your child and feel your heart swell if you didn’t have emotion mind. Life would be the beginning of the movie Pleasantville, it would all be a bit dull and gray.
So, what do you do if too much logic doesn’t work and too much emotion overwhelms you?
The answer to that question is to tap into and expand your wise mind. Wise mind is our middle path. It is the synthesis of emotion mind and reasonable mind and it’s also so much more because it adds intuitional knowledge to your emotional experiences and analytical natures. Some people like to think of it as bringing your left and right brain together. In doing so, you get the perks of reasonable and emotion mind while minimizing the downsides of these extreme states.
What I tell my patients about wise mind is that your goal isn’t necessarily to live there, but you want to be neighborhood adjacent. You want to have access to more than one train to get to wisdom city in case one of them is broken down. For some people, noticing when they are in wise mind can be difficult. Many folks describe it as a sense of calm knowing or an aha-type sensation. I can assure you that you do have a wise mind, even if it’s a little seedling that needs some watering and sunlight.
One thing you can do is explore what your cognitions, emotions, and action urges are like when you are in reasonable or emotion mind. Now, emotions in reasonable mind may feel distant or you may notice that you feel numb. Meanwhile, you may notice that in emotion mind, it’s extremely difficult for you to think straight. The more you understand how you experience these states, the easier it will be for you to not act out in the wrong state of mind.
While you are new at this, your best defense it to be able to label when you’re in one of these other states. I tell my patients that if you know you’re in emotion mind, what you know is that what you’re thinking, feeling, and wanting to do is likely not beneficial to you or anyone around you. This will cue you in to put yourself in time out and engage in self-soothing activities like going for a walk, journaling, or taking a hot shower to allow you to calm down and get closer to your wise mind.
As a bonus, coming soon I will walk you all through different mindfulness meditations, all of which will help you clarify your wise mind and help to reduce stress among other things. Do you have any requests for types of meditations you’d like to explore? What’s one way that reasonable or emotion mind has gotten in your way? Let me know on Instagram @kindmindpsych. You can also reach out to me via my email at psychologist@quickanddirtytips.com, or leave a voicemail at (929) 256-2191.