4. Thinking and perception
Each and every person’s emotions affect how they interpret things and what kind of things they observe in their environment or themselves. Because emotional instability involves such high emotional fluctuation, it has a significant impact on thinking and sensory functions as well. A person can influence their own thinking and perception by learning emotional regulation and consciousness skills.
Emotional instability involves various malfunctions related to thinking and perception. They typically last from a few minutes to a few hours. Examples of cognitive and perceptive malfunctions include dissociation, black-and-white thinking and suspiciousness. These symptoms can be alleviated with sufficient attention and care.
The video below provides more information on how emotional instability can affect a person’s thinking and perception.
Thoughts and perception
Dissociative symptoms mean that a person’s thoughts, emotions, actions, memories and identity do not combine into a cohesive whole. Mild dissociative symptoms are very common: for example, when a person gets lost in thought while driving, their actions, perception and thinking partially separate from each other.
Dissociative symptoms often occur on the verge of sleep, in stressful situations, in connection with the loss of a loved one, under the influence of substances and in connection with an intense emotional experience.
Emotional instability somewhat often involves dissociative symptoms during psychological stress. Examples of what the symptoms can be in practice include a momentary loss of sense of time or memory gaps, or feeling like the person is not themselves or like they are watching themselves from the outside.
The person’s environment or own body may feel strange and they may experience brief hallucinations, particularly in connection with an experience of abandonment. These experiences can feel frightening, but fortunately, dissociative symptoms ease with treatment as the person’s emotions even out.
One underlying cause of strong mood swings and relationship challenges occurring in emotional instability is usually black-and-white thinking. This means that the person sees people, things, items or situations as completely good or bad, successful or unsuccessful, right or wrong.
Black-and-white thinking makes interpreting situations more difficult and makes the person prone to jumping to conclusions. The person’s mind categorises and valuates the situation very quickly, unable to take into consideration that things have a wide variety of aspects and perspectives. For example, if someone does something wrong, the person sees them immediately and completely as an evil or bad person instead of considering the fact that everyone makes mistakes.
During intense emotions and psychological stress, emotional instability can cause suspiciousness and distrust towards others. The person may see hostile and malicious intentions even in actions aiming to help. They may feel that others are hostile towards them or following or stalking them, causing them to have problems such as difficulties with trusting the people treating them.
Like many other psychological difficulties, emotional instability involves challenges with attention, concentration and memory. These cognitive challenges occur early on in childhood and youth, manifesting themselves as problems such as slow learning.
A person’s emotions have an impact on their memory: intense emotional experiences leave a strong and detailed imprint on their memory. Emotional instability tends to highlight negative emotions, so even the person’s strongest memories may have an unpleasant tint to them. An intense emotion also narrows the person’s attention, whereby they may only notice the object of that emotion in their environment.
Memory plays a special role in the construction of a person’s identity, and without memory, the person’s notion of the world and themselves would only be an unstructured stream of observations. When memories are built over a long time around fear, anxiety or other difficult emotions, the person’s notion of themselves, other people and the world can also become very frightening, untrustworthy or bad.
On the other hand, rapid emotional fluctuations can also cause notions and memories to become conflicting and inconsistent.
You can influence your own thinking and perception. You can focus your consciousness or perception like a flashlight to illuminate the things that you want to notice. Everyone has the capability to undertake such focusing, but some need more practice with it.
With mindfulness skills, you can learn about your own thinking and perception, to adopt a new approach to your experiences and to use this ‘mental flashlight’ in a flexible manner.
Mindfulness skills develop your ability to be consciously present. This means a special way to be present, in which you are completely focused on the present moment, noticing and accepting your own emotions, thoughts and bodily sensations.
When you are consciously present, you can perceive your own experiences as momentary, acceptable, interesting and human. You can take in all experiences as they are – not as your stressed and frightened thoughts are saying that they are.
The video below provides more information on mindfulness skills.
Mindfulness
Test whether you are consciously present right now
Do you notice what sounds there are around you?
Do you notice what colours and shapes you see around you?
Do you notice how your body is feeling at the moment?
Do you notice what thoughts are stirring up in your mind right now?
Are you able to notice these things without judgment and valuation?
Are your observations, bodily sensations and thoughts allowed to be in your mind exactly as they are?
Distancing yourself from your experience through mindfulness skills
Mindfulness skills help you calm the storms in your mind – or distance yourself from them, to be more precise. Metaphorically speaking, you can get out of the eye of the storm to see the lightening, the rain and the gusts of wind from a distance. This way, you can learn to see that you are not your emotions and thoughts – instead, your emotions and thoughts come and go, but your self stays.
Distancing yourself from your emotions and thoughts like this is a useful skill. Particularly in emotional instability that involves highly intense emotions with a major impact, learning mindfulness skills can increase your wellbeing significantly. Form a distance, your emotions may not appear as crushing and frightening.
Getting distance does not mean avoiding emotions
On the contrary, the purpose of mindfulness skills is to accept and make room for all emotions. All emotions can be felt and are allowed. But at the same time, the aim is to see emotions as ‘mere’ emotions, as opposed to facts.
Thoughts and emotions are real but not facts
Emotional instability may cause a person to have a tendency to either invalidate their own emotions or interpret them as facts. Invalidating one’s own emotions means seeing them as wrong or not taking them into account at all in decision-making.
Conversely, one example of taking emotions as facts is that when you are angry at someone, you perceive that person as infuriating and bad. Or when you feel disappointed after a failure, you may see yourself as an utterly bad and failed person.
All thoughts and emotions are real and allowed. However, taking judgmental thoughts as the truth and your own emotions as facts that represent the situation can make you feel lousy.
By learning mindfulness skills, you can learn to distinguish what is objectively true and what is an interpretation of your own mind. At the same time, you can learn to approach all of your emotions with compassion and acceptance.
You can practise mindfulness anytime, anywhere
Mindfulness means perceiving the current moment with acceptance and without judgment. It means conceding that “this is how things are now, and that’s OK.” Above all, it means noticing things. When practising mindfulness skills, you pay attention to all the thoughts that stir up in your mind, all the emotions that arise in you and your bodily sensations. What is key in practising is that you do not judge, criticise or try to change them.
Whatever you do, you can do it consciously. As such, mindfulness or conscious presence is not something that you do separately, but a way of being and experiencing. On the other hand, it is like muscle strength or balance – an ability that can be developed through active practice but can never be completely mastered.