Articulation and Regulating negative emotions

Articulation

 

Articulating yourself is an extraordinarily useful thing to do. You could also think about more comprehensive way, as the goal of safe psychotherapy and personality transformation. A lot of what's happening as you mature and develop as a personality is that what you are, whatever that means, I guess it's your behaviors and your potential, and I don't know exactly what potential is, but your behaviors and your potential can be increasingly organized and articulated at a high level of consciousness.

Articulation is a funny word because partly it means joint articulation. Your hands are very articulated, and that's why you can do a lot of things with them. Hands and speech are very tightly related, which is why most peoples speech centers are in the same hemisphere as their dominant hand. Anyway, articulating yourself makes you able to do many more things with yourself. It also seems to quell your negative emotion. Partly because it's clarifying you. The more you leave things muddy in your life, the less defined things are around you, and the more active your stress response systems are. Because if things are murky and undefined, your stress systems basically assume that there are alligators and snakes and predators hiding in all that fog and gloom, and that you're in a very dangerous environment. But if you clarify that with careful attention and articulation, you can clear away the fog and the gloom. And that only leaves you with your actual problems which, once define carefully, you might find manageable. An example of that would be, when you go into your room, and you haven't done your homework for a while, and there are piles of papers and junk on your computer. Then you'll have a very powerful tendency to avoid that. You don't even want to look at it. Because that's chaos. It's sort of growing in your environment. There's a specific part of your brain which evolved to detect snakes, and that deals with such little chaotic piles of undone business. The more of those that are around you, psychologically or physically, the more negative emotion you experience, the less hope you experience, and larger your stress response chronically. That's not good. Because if your stress response is chronically elevated, that suppresses your immunological function. It makes you overweight, it predisposes you to diabetes and cancer, it makes you age faster, it increases the probability that you'll have anxiety disorders and depression. So clarifying who you are and what you're doing is a good thing, unless you want to all those other things to happen.

 

 

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* Reference

2014 Personality Lecture 01: Introduction and Overview (youtube.com)