Finding Freedom in the Space Between
When you find yourself in a tense situation, its adrenaline effect creates a gap between your action and reaction. A minuscule second that’s barely noticeable, yet large enough to cause either an impulsive reaction or a pensive action. Holocaust survivor and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl, quotes, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."
This gap – the space that separates your action from your reaction – is key to freedom.
When you think of freedom, what do you see? Is it the choice to do what you want and when you want it – to elect the president of your choice when socioeconomic situations get dicey, to hop on a plane to Bali when you're feeling wanderlust, or maybe, to have a cheeseburger when the craving sets in?
But what if, as Frankl suggested, freedom is actually internal? What if freedom is the ability to think and feel the way we want when we want, even in the most tense or deprived situations?
Psychologist Rollo May calls out the “capacity to pause in the face of stimuli from many directions at once and, in this pause, to throw one’s weight toward this response rather than that one.” He then further elaborates on this, highlighting that “this pause is especially important… For it is in the pause that we experience the context out of which freedom comes. In the pause, we wonder, reflect, sense awe, and conceive of eternity. The pause is when we open ourselves for the moment to the concepts of both freedom and destiny.”
So how do we “pause” in the heat of an argument, an accident, or a spontaneous incident that throws our emotion into overdrive? How do we separate the space between action and reaction?
In a study by the University of California Los Angeles, a group of researchers placed study participants in a spontaneous situation to give a speech to strangers, an (often anxiety-inducing) scenario many of us can relate to. Participants were then divided into two groups: Half of the students (named the “affect labelers”) were told to assess their sensations, while the other half were instructed not to process their sensations and feelings at all. The affect labelers described sensations and emotions such as, “I feel tightness in my chest, I feel angst in my throat, or I feel heat in my palms.” Ultimately, the study revealed that this emotion-labeling process led to notably less physiological arousal, lessened amygdala activity (the brain region linked to fear), and among those who labeled a more positive affect subjectively reported feeling more relaxed during their speeches. The unlabeled group, on the other hand, felt a higher level of anxiety.
The study shed light on the power of affect labeling, the act of identifying and verbalizing emotions, even if you do in simple terms (e.g., angry, sad, embarrassed). Practicing affect labeling will help you to:
Better contain and manage even the most difficult emotions
Take responsibility for those emotions and prevent spillover of negative emotion to others
(surprise!) Separate the space between action and reaction
Labeling your emotion slows your body down, giving you time to pause, and the opportunity to choose the response you want – not based on external pressure, but based on internal desire. It is in that choice, made in a now-warped miniscule second, that you can find real freedom.
References:
Frankl, Viktor Emil. Man’s Search for Meaning. 1946, lifemanagement4filipinos.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/0/6/12062185/mans_search_for_meaning_-_viktor_e._frankl_1.pdf.
Lieberman, Matthew D., et al. “Putting Feelings Into Words.” Psychological Science, vol. 18, no. 5, May 2007, pp. 421–28, doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x.
May, Rollo. “Rollo May on the Courage to Create.” Media and Methods, Jan. 1974, eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ102492.