Feeling Heard Calms the Brain Faster Than Fixing the Problem
There’s a reason advice given in the thick of things can so often miss the mark. Understanding the neuroscience of it can quietly revolutionize your approach to the people in your life.
There’s a particular type of frustration that comes from feeling overwhelmed and having someone immediately offer you a five-step solution. That five-step solution may well be excellent, but something about it fails to reassure you, leaving you more alone at the end of the conversation than you were when you began. I believe that to be the result of something deeper, more neurobiological, happening underneath it all
Why the Brain Needs to Feel “Understood” More Than Fixed
When you’re feeling particularly low, the question most pertinent to your nervous system is “Am I safe?” Even if the threat is not physical, the part of the brain responsible for deciding that anyway (the amygdala) needs to be reassured that it is not in danger. Unfortunately, the amygdala cannot be reassured by getting fixed; it can only be reassured by being heard.
When people reflect what you’re feeling back to you, that triggers a soothing cascade in your brain. It lowers regions associated with emotional processing and heightens the regions needed to engage in rational thought. The brain begins to calm down, not because it’s accepted that it’s safe again, but because it now realizes that it was in danger in the first place. That makes it much easier to fix the problem, because the brain now feels safe to consider fixing the problem. Advice, on the other hand, misses that step, jumping straight to the “fix the situation” part and skipping the part where the brain has a chance to relax.
The Difference Between Problem-Solving and Emotional Validation
Emotional validation is not inherently opposed to problem-solving; it’s just that the two serve fundamentally different purposes. When you’re in distress, the best thing you can do is have someone recognize your emotions and empathize with you, not immediately jump to solutions.
While problem-solving addresses the situation, emotional validation addresses your relationship with that situation. Once you’ve been reassured that your feelings are valid, you can begin exploring the best ways to fix the problem, which is where emotional validation serves as a kind of emotional prerequisite to problem-solving.
If you feel understood when things are going badly, your brain emits a sort of chemical message saying, “It’s safe to think about this rationally now;” and that opens the door for engaging in problem-solving. This makes validation an important tool for any kind of emotional support, particularly for people in distress.
How to Actually Validate, According to Neuroscience
If you’ve ever tried to express feelings to someone in the past, you might have gotten the sense that people don’t really know how to talk to you when you’re hurting. Some might tell you that they’re not sure what to say, while others might try to immediately fix the situation without acknowledging what you’re going through. People tend to get the validation part wrong a lot.
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The thing is, validation doesn’t mean giving someone what they want to hear; it means recognizing that the way they feel is reasonable and expected given what’s happening. It doesn’t mean agreeing with everything they say, but believing that they’re seeing things honestly from their own perspective, even if that perspective is limited in some ways.
To validate someone is to say, “It sounds like this hurts you in a certain way, and that makes sense given the circumstances”
It means giving someone a space to feel however they’re feeling without judgment or pressure. In practice, this can mean asking a clarifying question before jumping to a solution, or giving someone the space to express their feelings before you do anything else. Sometimes it can simply be listening rather than saying anything at all when the alternative is jumping immediately to a solution because it feels better for you, but it’s not better for the person who needs to process it.
The same principles apply to how you can learn to emotionally validate yourself, too. There’s a part of you that immediately wants a solution whenever something bad is happening, but jumping to solutions without giving yourself space to feel the emotions associated with the problem will always lead you to the same place, in emotionally validating yourself, I find it helps to use the same language I’ve used to validate other people. “This is hard, I know; I can see why you’re upset about this” can be just as effective when directed at yourself as when directed at someone else, particularly when you’re struggling to get through a rough situation.
Why It’s So Hard to Emotionally Validate First
Many of us find it difficult to validate others because, to us, it feels like we’re doing nothing at all
Helping people can be an instinctual impulse for many of us; we feel compelled to immediately fix other people’s problems whenever we see them. There’s also the fear that by simply listening and empathizing, we may do nothing at all to actually help people. Unfortunately, those instincts are often reinforced by the fact that validating people first helps both the validator and the validatee, because other people’s emotions can activate our nervous system in much the same way that our own emotions do.
When it comes to validation, the solution isn’t to change who you are fundamentally, but rather to change a single behavior. Before you try to fix other people’s problems, ask yourself whether the people you see as capable of fixing other people’s problems actually felt heard in the moment first. Ask yourself if there’s a point where the person already had the resources to fix their own problems, and the only thing stopping them is their distress.
Bringing It All Together
None of this is a particularly difficult concept to understand at a basic level; it’s just a matter of applying the principles in practice.
When faced with a situation where you have the opportunity to help someone, reflect their emotions back to them with as much honesty as you can muster before leaping to any conclusions or jumping to solutions. See how they react before you begin solving the problem, and give them an opportunity to engage in rational discussion.
When people try to offer you solutions but you’re struggling to get anywhere, you can let them know that you don’t need help solving the problem right now; you simply want to talk about it. In the meantime, you can use some of the principles mentioned above to help you learn to emotionally comfort yourself whenever you feel like jumping to solutions whenever something bad happens.
I hope that these insights may serve you well in your own personal development, and that they might help you develop a kinder relationship with yourself and the people around you. When it comes to support, validation is something that should be prioritized above most other approaches, as it often serves as a kind of emotional prerequisite for engaging in problem-solving in the first place.
Still Mind Club makes things you can wear and live with that hold onto this kind of thinking when it’s easy to forget, simple phrases and calm reminders that cue you to slow down before you solve. If that sounds interesting to you, you should definitely check out what’s available at the shop.
