How to Deal With a Year's Worth of #2020 Emotions

At this point in the year, nearly everyone has sighed, rolled their eyes, and muttered, "2020." While we might think the big events of the year are enough to have pushed our coping mechanisms to their breaking points, the real answer isn't so simple.

Stress is additive, and emotions are complex. Beyond big events and big emotions, small events and minor emotions are likely to have consumed our reserves. Taking a moment to understand how these small events and emotions eat away at our reserves can help us start 2021 with greater control over our environment, restored energy, and reduced feelings of being overwhelmed.

First, we need to understand the accumulation of stress over the year. The Holmes-Rahe Stress Inventory lists 43 life events and assigns a point value to each event. That point value corresponds to the amount of life change caused by the event.

It is important to note that on this scale, there are both positive and negative events. This means that change, even a positive change, requires adjustment and therefore is a stressor. Our bodies respond to all stressors in the same way—including hormonal responses that increase blood pressure and promote weight gain. As changes add up, so does our stress load.

An example that many people can relate to right now is working from home. Working from home is accompanied by many changes—some good and some bad. For example, people may find that they no longer have a long commute to work, which is a positive change. However, they may also find that the physical environment is harder to work in.

You might think that these changes would cancel each other out—the positives resulting from less commuting and the negatives resulting from a new work environment should even out and leave a person with no overall increase in stress. But that isn't how stress works. Because both experiences represent changes, both require you to adjust, and both stress your system. This is how stress is additive—all changes contribute to your overall pile of things to which you need to adjust.

Second, once you acknowledge the stressors in your life, both good and bad, you can begin to label your emotional experience. Labeling our emotions is the first step in controlling our responses to those emotions. For example, anger (and its close cousin, outrage) has physical consequences—it leads to increased heart rate, increased heart output, and even increased skin temperature and conductance. This is why people may feel "more alive" when they are angry—and that feeling can be addictive.

Research shows that labeling emotions, giving them the right names, reduces that physical response. For example, when people are able to name their emotional experience as anger, their heart rate falls, and their other physical symptoms decrease. There's a reason why rage is called blind—and once it is labeled, even brain functioning improves.

This is even more true when complicated emotions are named. We can feel multiple emotions at the same time, and these emotions can mix to form new emotions. A number of tools can help identify emotions. Plutchick's wheel of emotions describes how emotions vary in intensity. For example, at its greatest intensity, anger is "rage," and at its least intensity, it is "annoyance."

It is important for the intensity of the emotional response to match the event in magnitude. While rage makes people feel powerful, not all negative events call for it. Anderson's table of emotions describes how emotions combine, and this table provides a great list of words that may describe your emotions. When people feel both anger and joy, they experience pride, while anger and surprise lead to outrage. Surprise might come from an opinion expressed by a friend or family member or by unexpected world events, and anger may come from a dislike of that opinion or event.

Research shows that if you take a moment to try to understand the emotions you are experiencing in response to an event, such as a friend's Facebook post or a work request, you can break the cycle of mindless reaction to those events. Understanding that your desire to bang on your keyboard and send a belittling email comes from feeling a lack of trust in the other person and anger at the situation can help you find a more productive way to resolve the problem. We like to direct anger at something, even when there is no nearby target for that anger or outrage—stopping to consider actual sources can help us find useful responses.

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As we head towards 2021, now is a great time to review the experiences of the year. First, acknowledge all that you have already adjusted to—and the adjustments that everyone else has had to make, too. And be aware that good events in 2021, such as news about COVID-19 vaccines and the return to public life, will also be stressors. Then identify your emotional experiences and the causes of those emotions.

While acknowledgment of stresses and emotions does not change the difficult situations in which we find ourselves, research shows that labeling does reduce the physical effects on our bodies and health.