Emotional Fire Alarms

Emotional Fire Alarms (Fear, Anger, Sadness, Guilt, and now Depression) were given to us (by God or nature, take your pick) to let us know that something is wrong, i.e., we're doing something with violates our values, we're not achieving our goals or expectations, we're in a dangerous place or we've lost something we value.

Whatever the reason, our Emotional Fire alarms make a loud noise to let us know something is wrong and that we need to take some kind of action--FAST!

We all know that when there is a fire, we exit the building--IMMEDIATELY!. We don't sit at our desks and finish reading our emails. We don't call a doctor to get him to stop this loud ringing in your ears. We TAKE ACTION to get ourselves to safety. An sure enough, as soon as we're outside and safe, the ringing in our head stops.

The truth is, we were NEVER designed to live with constant Fire Alarms going off in our heads. Our performance suffers. Our bodies suffer. We're not even designed to digest our food properly when we are under the stress of an Emotional Fire Alarm.

The problem is that in our society, we've gotten too accustomed to living with Fire Alarms going off in our head. We try to eat and work and learn and love with this CLANG, CLANG, CLAG... going on in our heads. How can anyone live like that and maintain their sanity?

Something we teach both parents and children at the Learning Center is to recognize a Emotional Fire Alarm as soon as it goes off, find the source of the Alarm, and take whatever action is needed to make the alarm stop. This is our Sanity Clause.