And here you are, standing in the middle of a meeting, your heart and breath are trying to escape your chest, your throat is dry, and a strange ringing starts in your ears. And you don't understand why all these people can't grasp such simple, rational arguments that fit so smoothly into your worldview. Your inner voice screams: — "And why do such obvious things have to be explained to someone here!!??!? Who am I even working with!"
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In this article, I would like to delve into why emotions are an inseparable part of being in IT, and what to do about it all.
For that, one needs to descend to a lower level.
When our brain encounters negative emotions, like criticism or denial, it perceives these as threats. With a threat, something must be done, so a command is given to produce the stress hormone cortisol. In general, stress was developed by evolution more for survival than for engaging in intellectual conversations with an opponent. Therefore, the two main strategies we resort to in a stressful situation are:
- attack (if attacking the emerging opponent makes sense to our internal feelings)
- run (if the overall mass of a tiger in the bushes looks more convincing than a programmer's muscle mass).
Accordingly, under the influence of cortisol, rational thinking is inhibited, control is handed over to the emotional System-1, where a defensive mode is activated in preparation for conflict, which manifests itself in an appropriate emotional backdrop. The situation appears in a much gloomier light than it actually is.
The person from the scene described above at the rally is somewhere at this point. There is a chance that he currently feels an emotional cocktail of anger, loneliness, helplessness, etc. There is also a chance that he is accustomed to thinking of himself as a rational and typically unemotional being, so he simply cannot see what is actually happening and what to do next, as the problem lies far beyond the rational plane. Often, in order to get closer to reality and look at the situation with a clear perspective, a break is necessary. It gives everyone the opportunity to weather the stress and try to convey the main points of the presentation to each other later, when everything settles down.
Cortisol is a long-lasting hormone, and it takes some time before its effects diminish. Quite the opposite is true for positive iterations. Dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin — these feel-good hormones are produced when we interact in a positive environment; they enhance our communication, interaction, and ability to help others. These hormones also aid in processing events at the System-2 level, the rational part of the brain. In general, this is what is needed for productive work and normal human communication. Unfortunately, happiness hormones, unlike cortisol, dissipate significantly faster, so their effects are not as prolonged and have less substantive impact. As a result, negative moments easily outweigh positive ones in significance. Therefore, to compensate for one negative episode, significantly more positive iterations are required, about four times as many.
This is roughly how it works at the hormonal level. At the emotional level, we are either just feeling down and don't want to talk to anyone, or we are aggressive and ready to 'tear apart' if it is something positive, it could express as joy, or even simple programmer affection, etc.
Have you heard about robo-rats? These are laboratory rats that have electrodes implanted in their brains to teach them to perform tasks that not all humans can efficiently do, such as finding victims under rubble or disarming explosives. By sending electrical signals through the electrodes to specific areas of the brain, scientists essentially control the rats. They can make them go left or right. Or even do things that rats generally dislike in everyday life, like jumping from a height. When certain centers are stimulated, the brain generates a corresponding hormonal and emotional background, and if you were to ask this little rat why it went left or right, it would probably rationally explain why it decided to go this way or that. Are they forced to do something they don't like? Or do they enjoy what they're programmed to do? How different is our brain, and would the same methods work on humans? So far, for ethical reasons, scientists apparently do not conduct such experiments. But evolution on planet Earth is the same for all. And freedom of choice, to be honest, is quite an elusive concept. Do you have any understanding of what and why you will choose for lunch today? Yes, you can choose what exactly you will eat, whether it will be pizza or fries; you will probably choose what you want today. But do you have a choice in wanting what you want to want?
Unfortunately, the Soviet past has cast a rather unfavorable shadow on the residents of the post-Soviet space in terms of understanding the internal processes occurring in the minds of ordinary people. This is regarding those who today are someone's grandmother, grandfather, father, mother, etc. Distorted settings and patterns are naturally transmitted from generation to generation from parents to children. Therefore, it is not surprising that among those born in the USSR (up to the present), a closed type of thinking predominates, where emotions are placed at one of the last positions on the list of human needs, and it seems easier to deny them than to acknowledge and live in harmony with evolutionary principles. Once, I had to shake myself up and start noticing my surroundings from a slightly different perspective. And when one begins to understand the human world more fully, new possibilities and paths open up that were previously just invisible. If earlier one could hit a wall and wonder about questions like: why are colleagues at work promoted while I constantly remain on the sidelines? Why can't I finish what I've started? Why do relationships with bosses fail? Why does my voice carry no weight? etc. The answers are often beyond the rational System-2, and without understanding and awareness of the whole picture and the presence of the emotional System-1, they simply cannot be seen.
The language of 'Emotion' is that ancient programming language of the past, present, and future on which we all—and most living organisms on our planet—are written. Understanding the principles of its operation greatly facilitates the perception of life and existence in the social environment of human beings.
Thank you, that's all for now.
More about System-1, System-2 .
Source: habr.com
