The Dalai Lama / Ekman Model

The best tool I can teach you comes from a joint project by the Nobel Peace Prize winning Dalai Lama and the psychologist Paul Ekman. Their Three Step “Timeline of Emotions” model helps us find a pattern in the oodles of emotional journeys we are stimulated to participate in each day, hour, minute and second. Almost all the stimulations in our environment trigger an experience of an emotion, and often a concatenation of emotions we sometimes have difficulty interpreting the meaning of in real time. How we react to such triggered experiences has a huge impact on the way we live.

Source: How the ‘Great Migration Troll’ Hacks Our Minds: Trigger, Experience, Reaction (I)

Step 1: Something in your environment triggers your emotions. Step 2: You experience a feeling / feelings with a certain (set of) qualities: anger, fear, disgust, sadness, or enjoyment. Step 3: You react in a particular way, either reflexively (automatically) or carefully, to that feeling. I want us counter Disinfolklorists to embed this way of modelling a mental routine we experience a thousand times a day into our minds: Trigger, Experience, Reaction.

Source: Trigger, Experience, Reaction (I)

Three steps, five emotions: anger, fear, disgust, sadness, enjoyment. Every emotional journey we take — scrolling a timeline, reading a newspaper, watching the news — passes through these three stages. The key to Counter Disinfolklore is separating experience from reaction: once you feel the emotion, pause before you act.

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