Emotional Growth: A Gardening Analogy

Emotional growth means growing in our emotional abilities. This means not only getting better at managing our emotions, but also in the ability to evoke emotions of our choice.

We do not have complete control over our emotions. If we did, we’d all decide to be happy, and live happily ever after. But we do have considerable influence over what sort of emotional environment we create for ourselves.

Emotional growth occurs similarly to how produce grows in a garden

To understand this relationship, let’s look to an analogy in the natural world.

A gardening analogy for emotional growth

Gardening, like so many things in life, has an element of luck to it. Sometimes those little buggers just don’t produce, and other times they give us more than we asked for.

I have a friend with a green thumb. Every year, he plants a variety of seeds — squash, zucchini, tomato, etc., according to season. He diligently tills and waters the soil. Every year, something goes wrong. One year he yields a mountain of squash and little else. The next year, it’s tomatoes.

That’s nature — we can’t will a vegetable to grow.

We also can’t will emotions into being. We can’t tell ourselves, “I’m gonna feel happy now” and expect that to work, either.

The best we can do, in both cases, is to create an environment that allows for a reasonable chance for our desired outcome. After that, it’s out of our control. So . . . we wait.

When gardening, we can create this environment by planting seeds at an optimal time of year, in a nurturing soil, and giving the seeds proper care in the form of water and sun. Many times, this is enough. But not always. That’s why gardeners plant a whole lot of seeds — they understand that some won’t cooperate, for whatever reason, and accept it with equanimity.

Our thoughts and behaviors create our internal emotional environment

The way that a gardener approaches gardening is a great way for us to approach our mental health.

In this analogy, seeds are like our emotions. They are the thing we want to grow, but we don’t have direct control over. The factors that we can control are our thoughts and behaviors. They are the environment in which our emotions grow.

Thoughts, behaviors, and emotions all influence each other. Therefore, to give ourselves the best chance of growing the emotions that we want to feel, we can focus on making positive changes to our habits of thought and behavior.

Thoughts and behaviors are the tools for emotional growth — The interconnectivity between thoughts, behaviors, and emotions

Thoughts influence emotions, emotions influence behaviors, behaviors influence thoughts, and vice versa all the way back. Together, they combine to create our human experience. Of the three points of this triangle, emotion are usually the one we are most interested in changing, and it is also the one we can’t directly change.

Like a seed’s growth, we don’t have control over our emotional growth, any more than a gardener has control over her plants. The best we can hope for, then, is influence over our emotions.

We can create an accommodating environment for the emotion we’d like to experience. Being intentional with thoughts and behaviors is a big part of creating that environment.

Creating emotional experiences with emotional engineering

emotional-growth — We can engineer our environments to help us feel things like, in this case, fear.

Here’s an example: Say you want to be scared. You might try watching a horror movie alone, at night, in a dark room. These are intentional behaviors to create a specific mood. They also may lead to certain thoughts (“What if there’s an ax murderer outside my window!?” ) that also fosters the mood you want to experience. There’s no guarantee you’re going to feel scared, but the chances are probably going to be higher than if you chose to watch a comedy with your friends in the afternoon.

That’s the power of environment.

Just as successful gardening has a few reliable factors — getting the season, soil, and water right — so does mood management.

Nurturing emotional growth

If you’re suffering from anxiety or depression, there are a number of reliable factors you can employ to give yourself the best chance of feeling better. These are the tools for growing the emotions you want to experience.

From the behavior side of things, we have the usual suspects:

daily exercise
eating well
getting a good night’s sleep
spending time in nature
sharing time with friends and loved ones
ending relationships with toxic people

For thoughts, you want to make yourself aware of cognitive distortions. Among the more common are (links go to full articles):

Whatever our emotional experience is, there is most likely a very logical and natural reason for it, and this reason can often be found in the environment we are creating for ourselves with our thoughts and behaviors. A healthy environment leads to positive emotion growth. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. Unhealthy mental and behavioral habits can lead to negative emotional experiences, up to and including anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues.

So, we can play with these factors in the same way one would experiment in the gardening bed (or, the same way you’d tinker with a recipe).

If you’re hoping to feel better, but aren’t willing to experiment with your environment, you’re like a gardener who plants her seeds in winter, or even worse, you’re holding the seeds in your hand and yelling at them to grow.