Mishaps often come without warning. They knock on the door when we least expect it, turning our day upside down and sometimes our world. Unfortunately, in life, we can’t always anticipate problems, avoid conflicts, or work around difficulties; but we can create an emotional buffer zone that allows us to minimize the impact of stressful situations.
What is Emotional Buffering?
Decades ago, when psychologists began studying the effects of stress, they realized that there is enormous variability in individual reactions to major negative life events, such as illness, loss of a loved one, or unemployment.
Some people are severely affected and end up developing depression, anxiety or PTSD, while others are less affected and recover fairly quickly. Researchers also discovered that one of the keys to better coping with life’s shocks is emotional buffering.
An emotional buffer is a psychological resource that reduces the impact of stressful and difficult situations in life, thus helping us to protect our mental balance . Not only does it help us mitigate the negative effects of stressful or traumatic events, but it also helps us recover from trauma faster.
Emotional buffering protects us from stress
When we are faced with a stressful or distressing situation, our brain activates a “fight or flight” response, which deactivates when the threatening factor ceases. The intensity with which the response is triggered is called “stress reactivity” and is an important indicator of our physiological and psychological functioning, as well as our subsequent ability to recover.
Naturally, a certain level of responsiveness is essential to be able to respond to environmental threats. Dimmed responsiveness would put us in danger and prevent us from reacting adaptively to threats. However, hyperreactivity to acute stress is harmful in most cases because it not only affects our emotional well-being, but also makes us make worse decisions and reduces our performance.
In fact, a study conducted at University College London found that dysregulated responses to everyday stressors can accumulate and cause “wear and tear” in the body which ends up manifesting itself through psychosomatic pathologies. Thus, reduced responsiveness and faster recovery are the most “adaptive” response pattern to a stressful situation.
Emotional buffering serves precisely to reduce the impact of stressful situations, preventing us from hitting rock bottom emotionally and helping us recover faster. Emotional intelligence, for example, is essential to building that emotional buffer zone.
An experiment conducted at the University of Worcester revealed that emotionally more intelligent people had less emotional reactivity to stress, their mood deteriorated less when faced with stressful situations, experienced less physical discomfort and pain, better preserved their cognitive abilities and they recovered faster after the stressful event.
Another study done at the Universitat Jaume I found that more emotionally intelligent people coped better with the psychological effects of the pandemic and recovered more quickly.
But emotional intelligence is just one of the emotional buffers. In reality, the psychological buffer zone is a broader concept because it encompasses all the psychological resources we have to build a space of inner balance promoted and guided by self-awareness.
How to create an emotional buffer zone?
Imagine for a second that you are like a glass. Water, on the other hand, is your emotional states, such as stress, tension, latent conflicts , frustration or anger. If the glass is empty, it may contain some stress or frustration. But if he’s already full, any stressful situation, no matter how small, will be the last straw.
Tension, discomfort, anguish or frustration are emotions that build up over time and absorb our energy. If we don’t get rid of it, if we don’t make sure to empty our “emotional glass”, it is not strange that the slightest mishap ends up blowing us up or that any problem seems like a dead end in which to get lost.
To build an effective psychological buffer zone, we need to make sure we purge the “ emotional junk ” from time to time. It is about restoring our emotional balance and recharging our psychological energy by letting go of all those emotions that harm us and keep us in a permanent state of anxiety, as well as the negative thought patterns that distress us.
A small exercise to prevent the accumulation of negative emotions is called “Catch, Map and Release”. For example, when you are immersed in a stressful situation, such as a very tight deadline, waiting for the results of a medical exam or an interpersonal conflict, you should stop for just a second to simply do this:
- Get it. Pay attention to your emotions and feelings. What part of the body are they projecting into? How are you experiencing them?
- Map it. Identify the thought that crosses your mind that is causing or fueling that emotion that is making you feel bad.
- Let it go. Test that thought. Sure? Recognize that what you are hearing is probably your interpretation, it is not real.
In general, everyone should find those activities that allow them to relax and find their balance point. For some it may be meditation, for others practicing physical activity or relaxing daily routines that allow them to get rid of the negativity of the day. Making sure you get better sleep to allow your brain to rest and relax, as well as spending more time in nature, can help you develop your emotional buffer zone.
Ask yourself what you can do each day to feel more relaxed, enjoy life more, and counter tense moments throughout the day. It could be as simple as enjoying a leisurely breakfast each morning or a warm bath each evening. If you discover something energizing or relaxing that you can do every day or week, you can recharge your psychological battery and develop an “emotional buffer” that will help you face the most difficult moments.
