Despite what our cinematic and literary archetypes often suggest, being tough doesn’t mean being emotionless—it doesn’t even mean never revealing or expressing emotion. A true absence of emotion would mean a non-functioning human being incapable of survival. As Laurence Gonzales explains in his book Deep Survival, emotion is the fundamental and powerful compeller of immediate action—it functions independently of cognition and its relatively slow, clumsy work of analysis, reason and conceptualization to allow quicker reactions.[i] Emotion is the physical response of the body to environmental cues—everything from flinching in response to being startled, to the knot in our stomach we can’t explain with our rational mind in response to an imminent but unclear threat.
If we can bypass any (unwarranted but common) embarrassment about the topic, we’ll admit that emotion is what truly provides meaning to life. We can point to more tangible or concrete things like family and enjoyable experiences like athletic pursuits or outdoor adventures as what we derive meaning from, but ultimately what we appreciate about these things is the way they make us feel—we’re not pleasurably overwhelmed with analytical thoughts about the concepts they represent, we’re flooded with indescribable sensations in response to them. Those sensations are what we all seek, consciously or not, and provide purpose to our existence. Emotion exists for good reason—but so does cognition.
The two systems—emotion and thought—simply need to be balanced in a way that allows each to operate properly, which empowers us as a whole to function optimally in any situation. Neither emotion nor rational thought can be accurately described as “better” than the other—either can be more critical at a given moment for a given task, and either can be excessive and disruptive. We can be overwhelmed by emotion and make errors in judgment, and we can be paralyzed by over-analysis and miss opportunities or fail to act when necessary. That said, the conditions in which most of us live day to day demand very little of the kind of survival-related instant primary emotional reactions that have the power to keep us alive in the appropriate situations—aside from occasionally jumping back out of the way of rapidly oncoming traffic after stepping off the sidewalk without looking, we don’t encounter these kinds of situations commonly.
Instead, we’re more often dealing with secondary emotions—a more extensive array of emotions influenced by “cognitive appraisal.” These are emotions created through the combination of primary emotions with some degree of cognition informing the interpretation—this allows us to recognize the difference between bungee jumping and falling off the side of a mountain in a climbing accident, for example. In both cases we experience a secondary emotion with a foundation of fear—and the immediate physical reaction with the primary emotion may be identical—but the overall experience is completely different because of the additional input from the rational mind—in one situation, we’re intentionally creating the experience for a thrill and know it’s a controlled environment with safety systems in place; in the other, we’re very aware that we’re out of control and may be about to die.
Protracted or unchecked secondary emotions are what more commonly wreak havoc on our lives. If we’re startled at home by our spouse suddenly walking around the corner, we immediately appraise the situation and relax. Our instantly elevated heart rate may take a minute to return to baseline, but there’s no persisting effect—we don’t spend the rest of the day being overwhelmed by stress hormones coursing through our blood and influencing our behavior or thinking.
On the other hand, secondary emotions like anger, resentment, shame and jealousy tend to linger and have persistent and growing influence on our thinking and behavior. This is where control of our emotions through self-awareness and our rational minds becomes imperative. Experiencing an emotional reaction is human and expected; immediately recognizing it as such, evaluating the circumstances critically, and imposing our rationally motivated will on our actual response to the situation is tough. An experience may very naturally produce anger, for example—but we have the ability to make rational calculations regarding not just our behavior in response to that emotion, but ultimately the way we think consciously about it and the precipitating event. That emotion is not stepping in through a faster neurological pathway than cognition in response to a sudden threat to save our lives—we have the ability to choose what to do with it rather than simply allow it to impose its own control.
Marcus Aurelius wrote, “It isn’t manly to be enraged… A real man doesn’t give way to anger and discontent, and such a person has strength, courage, and endurance—unlike the angry and complaining. The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength.”[ii] We can substitute tough for manly to improve the utility and clarify the universality of this idea—in truth it has nothing to do with masculinity or gender, and has everything to do with our inherent but uncommonly employed power to keep our emotions in check and working for us rather than against us. Being consumed by any emotion is a condition we allow, either by choice or neglecting to make one. It’s an absolute failure of self-control at the most fundamental level, and it’s an often disheartening exposure of our actual character.
Outside of the kinds of instant emotional responses the body produces to keep us alive in sudden or imminent emergencies (over which we have no control in the moment anyway—we’ll discuss how we can influence these reactions through training in the Capacity section), allowing emotion to dictate our behavior invariably creates problems. We have to be capable of experiencing an emotion naturally—feeling it, recognizing it, accepting it and appreciating it—without becoming a victim or slave to its influence. It’s easy to see the consequences of allowing our thoughts and behavior to be dictated by anger or hatred, but even positive emotions create problems if we allow them to overwhelm our rational control of our lives. We don’t have to look any further for illustrations of this than incidents of people’s lives completely falling apart as they allow themselves to become slaves to love (or at least what they perceive to be love)—being consumed by what would be universally considered a positive, beneficial emotion has led many times to everything from unemployment, divorce, school dropouts, unintended pregnancies, to the commission of crimes and deadly accidents. Even more potent fusions of emotions like love and rage lead to behavior like retributive murder and suicide.
Being truly tough demands we maintain control of our responses to people and circumstances—not eliminate emotion, which is a fool’s errand, but establish a level of self-awareness and self-possession that precludes unchecked emotional reactions from harming us, immediately or in the future. It means never allowing our circumstances to prevent our making intelligent decisions that align with our character and goals, whether that means a failure to respond appropriately in a stressful situation or emergency, an unconsidered and harmful reaction to someone else’s words or behavior toward us, or spending extended periods of time bathing in an emotion that interferes with our judgment.
This kind of awareness and self-control requires practice and time. We can’t simply decide to no longer experience the emotional responses inherent to our nature, although the most critical step in the process is making the initial decision to institute control. We need to habitualize through practice and reflection the quick recognition of the presence of significant emotion and the immediate evaluation of the situation to determine the most appropriate response. We’re essentially working to create a more refined (and even faster) version of Thomas Jefferson’s classic advice: “When angry, count to ten before you speak. If very angry, a hundred.” That is, we’re establishing a buffer between the initial emotion and our outward reaction—a defensive zone that provides us the time and opportunity to disrupt and alter the course of an undesirable response before it’s able to harm us.
Early on, there’s nothing wrong with literally counting to ten (or whatever figure reflects the intensity of the emotion) to establish the protocol of imposing rational thought in the presence of overwhelming emotion. As this process is exercised increasingly over time, it will naturally organize and streamline itself until becoming nearly instantaneous in most cases. Eventually, the habit will become so well ingrained that it will be, as we intend, an integral part of our character.
[i] Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival (New York: Norton, 2017), 31, 33
[ii] Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Edinburgh: Black & White Classics, 2014), 11.18.5b
