Are You Overreacting?

Along with three quarters of a million other people, I’m a member of r/AmIOverreacting, a forum on Reddit devoted to the problem of potentially freaking out too much. It’s a thriving community that’s full of surprises. Recently, a woman posted a screenshot of a text-message exchange with her boyfriend in which he appeared to be accusing her of sabotaging the mayonnaise in their refrigerator. “Funny how all the Hellman’s is liquid,” he writes. “Ideas?” When she expresses confusion about what, exactly, he’s implying, he clarifies, “Thus far you haven’t been able to poison me.” Is she overreacting to this bizarre conversation? The consensus, across nine thousand responses, is that she is “NOR”—not overreacting. “This guy is so obviously unstable,” one poster replies. “You need to get as far away from this dude as possible.”

I haven’t done a quantitative study, but my sense is that the members of r/AmIOverReacting rarely conclude that their fellows have overreacted. Maybe they’re all following the lead of an overreactive age, in which everyone can seem to be on a hair trigger about what everyone else does or says. My own intuition, though, is that the opposite is true. If anything, r/AmIOverreacting is a kind of reactivity buffer zone—a place where reactions can be mediated, and so slowed down. In that sense, it’s part of a larger, society-wide effort. In an increasingly provocative world, many of us seek to manage our emotions. Bros immerse themselves in Stoic philosophy; parents-to-be take mindfulness classes. Online life offers both a forum for our reactions and a way of channelling them. If somebody does something crazy in real life—maybe it’s a rude customer, or a “Karen” from the homeowners’ association—you can pull out your phone and coolly record the exchange, then upload it so that others can react in your stead. Reaction is postponed; restraint in the moment is rewarded with likes later on.

Mindfulness is another way of managing one’s reactivity. Broadly speaking, mindful minds seek to replace the question “Am I overreacting?” with the neutral observation that, yes, a reaction is happening. In the pre-baby mindfulness workshop I attended, our instructor told us to imagine our emotions as locomotives. “You can watch the train leave the station without getting on board,” she said. She encouraged us to react to our reactions with nonjudgmental attention: by this method, a mother in labor might cope with pain by cataloguing its aspects, and an impatient father might notice and even study his own exhaustion. Be present. Breathe. Move on. These strategies are now unremarkable enough to be taught to kids in schools.

I learned a lot from my mindfulness workshop, but found the approach a little too low-temperature. The psychologist Ethan Kross, who directs the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan, is more my speed. In his forthcoming book, “Shift: Managing Your Emotions—So They Don’t Manage You,” Kross argues that, in addition to observing our emotional lives, we ought to actively modify them, using “shifters”—internal or external cues that reroute our trains onto more desirable tracks. He recalls one morning when his young daughter was sad before soccer practice, for some childhood reason she wouldn’t share. During the drive to the game, listening to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” transformed her mood. If you’ve crafted a workout playlist, you’ve employed a shifter.

Kross doesn’t believe that you should always shift yourself away from strong or bad reactions. On the contrary, the more shifters you have—from bathroom-mirror pep talks to ambition-kindling lunch dates—the more you can direct the power of your emotions toward your own ends. “Envy can motivate us to work harder,” Kross writes. “Anger can help us respond to a threat and correct an injustice.” Our job is to shift ourselves in thoughtful ways, arriving at the right balance of “approach” and “avoidance,” even for such emotions as guilt, anger, jealousy, grief, and fear. Kross recommends scrutinizing the duration and intensity of our reactions to find out whether we’re on the wrong track. If we “explode with rage at our child’s soccer coach for benching them” or find ourselves ruminating about a weeks-old office-party faux pas, we might sense the need for a shift. This puts the problem of overreaction in a new light. Some of us are prone to underreacting, or to reacting in confused or counterproductive ways. (Perhaps, instead of flying into a rage, we should find more time for kicking the ball around on weekends.) Instead of asking, Am I overreacting?, or seeking not to react, you might ask, Am I reacting as usefully as I can?

Reactions aren’t purely psychological—they are also social, artistic, political, economic, and so on. When we buy stuff online, we do it by reacting to algorithmically generated lists of choices. When we decide what to read, watch, or listen to, we frequently react to bundles of recommendations presented to us by software. We peruse the comments, or watch reaction videos, because we enjoy seeing how other people have reacted to what we’ve experienced, and then contribute our own reaction to the thread. We enjoy podcasts in part because of the ceaseless performative reactions—“Wow,” “Whoa,” “No way!”—of their hosts. (A newspaper is never so surprised by what it reports.)

Our imaginations now roam in a rich space of hypothetical reactivity. The online world sometimes seems to revolve around stressful scenarios—road rages, animal attacks, cliff jumps, political debates—that demand our response, or at least our contemplation of one. What would Jesus—or Jocko Willink, or Beth from “Yellowstone”—do?, we ask. There’s a fun aspect to the theatre of reaction: standup comedians impress us with their crowd work, and we like seeing how members of the audience stay cool, or don’t. A reaction-driven political world, though, is grim and dour: the right expresses itself through fantasies of swift and extreme outward reaction—Don’t Tread On Me, Fuck Around and Find Out—while the left enacts tepid, insular dramas of provocation and cancellation. On YouTube, home-brew commentators run from-the-basement news shows on which they react to clips of politicians talking to “corporate media,” telling us what everyone should have said. The eighteenth-century philosopher Denis Diderot joked about what we now call the esprit de l’escalier—the comeback you think of only after you’ve left the party and are at the bottom of the stairs. Today, as in an Escher drawing, the stairs find a way of circling back around to the top.

Life wasn’t always this dense with reactivity. In his book “On Browsing,” the poet and critic Jason Guriel remembers taking the train all the way into the city to poke around in some book and record stores, hoping to find something remotely interesting. “How hoary the old pathways look to us now, like ruts left by a stagecoach,” Guriel writes. “What elaborate workarounds and wastes of time we’d evolved to find the content that now floods our phones.” He remembers going to one bookstore, where he’d thumb through a printed guide to great albums, before ambling across the street to a record store to see if they had anything he wanted in stock. “The sheer legwork of it all!” he recalls. But “we needed that long subway trip downtown. . . . We needed the sobering disappointments and sporadic victories. . . . Mostly, we needed wind resistance. It took effort to cultivate our enthusiasms in a desert, but it’s clear now that we took the desert’s role for granted.” Reactions are more meaningful when they’re scarce.

I don’t feel that I overreact, in the sense of habitually responding with too much intensity or duration to specific situations in my life. But I do feel that I’m over-reacting, in the sense of being too frequently poked and prodded into feeling something by someone or something else. The other day, taking my kids to the library, I passed a car festooned with bumper stickers; one of them—“Donald Trump Matters”— caught my eye, and I thought about it on and off for the next half hour, as my son made a Christmas ornament at a craft table and my daughter tried to stand using a beanbag chair. It’s easy for such moments of provocation to chain together, so that a day becomes ensnared in little ringlets of reaction. I often want to break the chain.

For a while now, I’ve owned a little device called a Brick—a magnetized gizmo attached to the fridge. When I tap it with my phone, apps I specify get blocked. No Web browsing, YouTube, or e-mail; just maps, messages, and music, at least until I tap the phone again. If I Brick my phone on Monday, and succeed in keeping it that way until the following Monday, then I have a less reactive week. Or, more accurately, I have a week that’s reactive in different ways, in which I respond to different provocations. It’s not that I want to unplug entirely but that I want to have more control over what I approach and avoid. The Brick shifts me away from the restless, aimless, troubled feelings I have when I get pulled into the world of mediated online reaction.

Still, the world is intrinsically provocative (thank goodness), and people react to the world, almost definitionally. In “Ulysses,” James Joyce imagines Leopold Bloom strolling around Dublin. Bloom looks idly at passersby and wonders about them; he’s prompted by the contents of the newspaper into memories and reveries; he wanders into a drugstore and fantasizes about the exotic lands in which the toiletries are made. It’s 1904, and there’s not a screen in sight. And yet Bloom’s quaint, daydreamy reactions are prompted by what, in Joyce’s time, was understood to be a new and overwhelming urban modernity, a kind of attentional bombardment. Even the “old pathways” conjured by Guriel were once spectacular. Borders: a sprawling multimedia utopia. Tower Records: a gleaming consumerist bazaar of genres and styles. It’s not really possible to become purely an actor, rather than a reactor; no one is entirely the prime mover of his thoughts or emotions. But a worthy goal might be to win a kind of limited freedom—the freedom to react not as part of a mass, but as oneself. ♦