Life sometimes feels like it is speeding back up. Sudden acceleration may occur for various reasons. Young adults coming home from military deployment face the stressors of re-entry into civilian life, sometimes with damaged bodies.
Workers may feel pressured by management to return to pre-COVID office practices. Mandating five days a week in the office, when remote work suits some workers just fine, means families are back to juggling travel and work schedules.
Moms might feel pressed by the kids’ return to school in the fall. Anxious feelings may intrude as Mom faces chauffeuring several children to various locations for band practice, choir rehearsals, and social events each week, often at the same time.
Dad puts in increased overtime hours. That change is a result of recent furloughs that have increased the workload for the workers left behind.
The reasons for feeling as they do vary from person to person. What is the same for everyone is the truism that life sometimes brings too much of a good thing. While being busy with productive work is good, being too busy leads to stress and anxious feelings. When anxiety happens, people need a tool to reduce stress. They need anchors to brace them in the storms of life. They need emotional anchors.
Emotional Anchors Help Stabilize Inner Turmoil
Every human has emotional anchors. Emotional anchors work by a concept known as triggering. That is, emotional anchors react to a certain stimulus (or spur) that then triggers an emotional response. The emotional anchor tells the subconscious mind to replay specific experiences and emotional states saved in the person’s memory.
Emotional anchors come in three basic types:
- Visual
- Auditory
- Kinesthetic
Visual anchors are pictures and images that stimulate a specific emotional response. Marketing professionals know all about the importance of colors, logos, emblems, and design elements in generating a positive and long-lasting response to products. Humans perceive the following as visual anchors:
- Accessories – unique jewelry, fancy hats, canes, or gloves, for example
- Hairstyles – baldness or wigs
- Scents – cloying floral perfume or pungent body odor
- Styles – elegance with neutral colors or flamboyant self-expression
- Facial features – scars, prominent nose, no eyebrows, cleft chin
As you can imagine from this list, every person evokes unique visual images in another person’s mind. Each visual image then provokes various associations and emotional responses. Their images become anchored to those associations and responses.
Auditory anchors are as prevalent in the human mind as visual anchors. Commanding and dominant, auditory anchors trigger the subconscious mind. Sometimes, people may perceive auditory anchors as annoying sounds (nails on the blackboard), and other times as pleasant (think of a haunting melody).
When it comes to speech, auditory anchors fall into five groupings:
- Timbre – a unique and distinguishing quality of sound
- Pitch – how high or how low the sound is
- Tone – the attitude or emotion in the sound
- Intonation – the rise and fall of the voice
- Pronunciation – how words are said (accents, for example)
Emotional associations explain why memories of the booming voice of that 8th-grade football coach still send shivers down the spine. It is why the theme song from “Dallas” brings you running to the living room years after the TV show ended.
Kinesthetic anchors are the most powerful of all, but they are also the most difficult to identify and perceive. Kinesthetic anchors include but are not limited to:
- Sensations – hot, cold, sweaty, goose bumps
- Taste – sweet, salty, sour
- Smell – citrus, putrid, chemical, and
- Touch – friendly, polite, loving, sexual
For example, the smell of freshly cooked popcorn suggests happy family weekend camping trips, popping corn around the campfire. On the other hand, an eerie sensation of being watched recalls painful college memories of a stalker.
All emotional anchors fall into one of two categories. Their classification may be either negative or positive, depending on whether they draw out a pleasant memory and a desire to relive the event, or a memory of a devastating event that causes anxiety.
Either category whisks the person instantly out of their current reality and severs control of their memories. The goal of anchor therapy, then, is to restore internal balance to a person’s emotional life.
How Emotional Anchors Happen
Understand that every human mind comprises emotional anchors. The mind creates some of the anchors spontaneously. Spontaneous anchors either produce negative or positive reactions. People may create other positive anchors on purpose.
Since everyone has emotional anchors, people must learn how to control them. A person must learn how to weed out the negative anchors and develop ways to maintain the positive anchors. The best way to do that is to learn how they form in the first place.
The process to create an emotional anchor starts with identifying a unique stimulus. Something as simple or common as a handshake is not an effective trigger. The stimulus must be unusual, rarely used, and based on a strong memory. Examples of effective stimuli are loud noises, certain smells, yelling, or anger.
Creating the emotional anchor must occur at a moment of maximum intensity. That means that the matching of the positive anchor to the unique stimulus must occur at the exact moment that the stimulus is at its strongest. The goal is to attach the anchor to a specific emotional state at the point where it is solidly in place and stable.
The anchor must provide a single emotional response to the desired emotional state. The anchor must not elicit a secondary emotional response of a different emotional state. A second response would make the anchor useless for its purpose.
Self-Regulation Using Emotional Anchors
Self-regulation is the process of managing one’s emotions to bring balance to life and relieve stress. Self-regulation promotes appropriate responses to emotional challenges.
Emotional anchors are one set of tools a person may use to self-regulate negative emotions. It works like this. First, a person creates positive anchors using triggers. Those triggers must relate to specific emotional states that, in turn, bring back positive memories. Then, the person accesses those anchors to self-regulate when they feel stuck in stressful situations. Anchors help a person deal with negative emotions (anger, anxiety, or extreme sadness) that may otherwise overwhelm the individual.
How Emotional Routines Help Create Emotional Balance
Emotional routines are another set of tools that help to create emotional balance. For adults, emotional routines refer to activities that are structured to engender stability as well as a healthy emotional personal life. The routines may include daily exercise, deep breathing, prayers, and healthy social interactions. The goal is to design routines that help manage stress and promote self-awareness.
Emotional routines for children have a somewhat different focus. Routines make them feel safe and secure. Routines foster independence. Children thrive on repetition and flourish with set schedules for meals, bedtime, homework, and waking up. Emotional routines help children reduce stress and eliminate arguments with caregivers.
Transition Tools Help Emotional Transitions
Emotional transitions happen when an adult’s or child’s emotional condition alters due to an external event. The changes may result from the separation from a parent, stimulus overload, frustrations caused by communication problems, or unexpected changes in locations or schedules.
The following transition tools are suggestions that may help smooth emotional transitions. Transition tools that may prove helpful (some of which prove especially effective with children who exhibit ADD and autism) include:
- Activity schedules that use visual clues to predict daily routines reduce anxiety levels. These clues may take the form of pictures or icons that show the next activity.
- Timers and warnings that count down by showing decreasing numbers teach the passage of time and prepare a person for approaching changes.
- Visual cue cards that show an upcoming activity allow children to prepare for schedule changes.
- Stories that introduce new routines or schedules so that people know what to expect.
- Transitional objects, such as security blankets, help provide a sense of familiarity and thereby reduce anxiety.
- Sensory breaks or calming spaces to help regulate sensory overload.
- Journaling and other self-care activities.
Taking the Next Step
If you or someone you know seeks professional advice dealing with life’s anxieties and building emotional anchors, contact us today. Schedule a consultation with one of our experienced therapists to review your situation. Your therapist will show you how Refinery Counseling Services can help you take control of your emotional life.
Refinery Counseling Services stands ready to prepare a personal counseling plan for you based on your goals and needs. The practice provides individual or group therapy on topics such as anxiety, depression, trauma, emotional regulation, and social anxiety.
Founded by a black, disabled, female Veteran, our firm has a practical grasp of the issues impacting military families, women, and members of societal minorities. Our approach is faith-integrated with a Christ-centered lens. We treat the whole body, mind, and spirit.
