Unflappability: Our next big goal?

The value of inner stability in a loud, unfocused world

There are certain things that, without fail, elicit disproportionately large, negative, and emotional — or perhaps, more precisely, visceral — reactions from me. Arguments with loved ones, highway driving, blood draws, the awareness that I’ve let someone down, willfully hostile people. If planted in a scenario involving any of these, something unbidden rises in me — an acceleration of the pulse, a creeping heat, a full-body, inescapable discomfort.

What’s unique about these feelings, in comparison to many others, is their thorough unwantedness. In many situations, I feel that I can muster some distance between myself and the emotion. Through sheer will, I can widen the gap between the self that seems to sit behind my eyes and the feelings that flit across it. But these feelings are often untamable. They seem to emerge from some dark corner of the mind, where the lid is usually firmly intact, untouchable — until it’s opened by the handful of things that set it alight. By this point, it often feels as if nothing can stop its momentum. Volcanic pressure building to an eruption, a neuron’s action potential pushed past its arbitrary firing threshold.

It’s why we use words like trigger, ignite, set off to describe the knee-jerk, subjectively unstoppable reactions that emerge from us. These terms absolve us of agency, render us mercurial objects at the mercy of a largely chaotic environment. They describe our inadequacy in the face of our unique sources of irritation, frustration, fear, and aggression. They convert us not just into mere objects, but into volatile, unstable objects that cannot be trusted or depended upon for fear of unintended explosion.

And, evidently, such a way of living is not conducive to a stable, healthy society with all its inevitable disappointments and indignations.

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Lifting the finger off the trigger

This brings me to a persona that has become increasingly popular in the last several years — that of the calm, meditative, unflappable individual. Someone who can weather the onslaught of their idiosyncratic frustrations and fears with a graceful stoicism.

And while here I’m using the term stoicism colloquially to refer to a certain uncomplaining nature, the much broader philosophy of Stoicism is really what’s at stake here. Though it’s often misconstrued, a core tenet of Stoicism is to acknowledge that much in this world is beyond your individual control. To grow frustrated and angry over all the myriad ways things can go wrong in this world is, then, a waste of time — or at best, a misplaced use of energy.

In contrast, the unflappable person, who necessarily experiences the same fears, frustrations, and inconveniences, is able to move through them, retaining their own sense of inner calm, an enviable equilibrium. It’s a state that, for many, requires practice to cultivate. That practice is often a meditative one, a daily investment into the wellspring of the self.

It’s worth reinforcing that there’s nothing alluring or motivating about the act of meditation. Its entire purpose depends on clearing away all the bright, attention-snatching clutter for a few minutes and instead zeroing in on the quiet, unassuming things the present moment holds. It’s a method of striking balance, reminding ourselves that life is a perpetually unfolding internal process — one that we’re all too fond of relegating to the baser parts of ourselves that feed happily on festered anger, hurt, and fear.

Whether a traditionally Eastern meditation practice or a Stoic habit of releasing that which we can’t control or the more modern therapeutic suggestion of reframing situations to understand how our personal, intimate feelings might distort the innocuous and render us unreliable narrators — each is its own way of wedging a gap between you and the irrepressible feelings that fill you up.

It’s through these practices that we come to find ourselves as unflappable. An enviable trait composed of tranquility, focus, stability, and self-control. To be sure, it doesn’t mean unemotional or uptight or boring. The unflappable person simply recognizes that their core self cannot be found in all their fringe and unpredictable moods and emotions. These are fleeting and replaceable and driven by evolutionary forces that no longer serve their best interests. It’s not worth investing in each one. As the saying goes, if they won’t care about it in a year, they don’t spend more than five minutes worrying about it.

Though I’ve used the term liberally here, I don’t love what “unflappability” describes. It’s a negative term, suggesting a lack of a quality, rather than the presence of one — merely a contrast to the ubiquitous “flappable” person who simmers in their temper, lashes out, feels emotionally adrift, worries constantly. “Unflappable” sounds binding, claustrophobic, stiff — while the flappable person is free to move and react and metaphorically flap their wings.

Perhaps the preferable alternative is flexible. Instead of a void or lack, it suggests the lithe, open, relaxed nature of the healthy mind. A mind that unproblematically adapts to its surroundings, that doesn’t depend on rigid, unlikely conditions for its satisfaction, that pauses and assesses its feelings before readily absorbing and identifying with them.

Emotion regulation may not sound particularly flashy or flexible — but it’s at the heart of the unflappable person’s ability to detach and ground themselves in our shared reality, rather than a distortedly self-absorbed one. As thinking, rational beings, it’s up to us to rely on our higher order reasoning to keep the more incendiary parts of ourselves in check.¹ It’s why children and those with dementia and those with damage to the prefrontal cortex can’t be blamed for their big, unruly emotional displays. Their dysregulation is an unavoidable result of their current brain state.

However, our degree of unflappability shines through most noticeably in how we handle the small, mundane disappointments. The spilled milk, the missed bus, the misplaced keys. Case in point: The other day, when attempting to move a salmon filet from the baking sheet to the plate, I carried it too far and watched it slip and splatter on the floor. It was a moment of pure frustration. The waste, the loss, the mess. I wanted to scream and would have if not for a well-timed deep breath, the reorientation, a reminder of my good fortune and availability of dinner alternatives.

In the moment, I was reminded of a video I once came across (and can no longer place) that discussed the value of a high tolerance for inconvenience². It’s stuck with me since because I think it’s one of the hallmarks of the unflappable individual. Even in the supposed pockets of convenience-driven paradise throughout the industrialized world, a day can be littered with nagging inconvenience. Stubbed toes, slow internet, clumsy drivers, spoiled leftovers, throbbing headaches. A high tolerance for inconvenience looks like a quiet, but radical, acceptance that things will never fully go our way. That living in a chaotic, indifferent universe comes with some measure of disorder and frustration. That our minds will be much warmer, more hospitable places if we don’t get bogged down in the things that inevitably drag us down.

Perhaps some will mistake this approach for one of cold unemotionality, distance, avoidance, repression — any number of coping strategies that preach shutting down and turning away from ourselves. But I don’t see it this way. I see unflappability and meditation and Stoicism and inconvenience tolerance as ways to invest in the self by stripping it of the clutter that often clouds it. An emotion is merely an experience, a physical reaction that emerges from a specific set of circumstances. By seeing each one as something more mystical or meaningful, you give it undue power over yourself. You render yourself a reaction machine (which we very well may be, but it’s best not to cater to that worldview too carefully.)

So, where does this leave us? Well, I believe with the charge of developing our own high tolerance for inconvenience, cultivating a degree of unflappability so as not to be buffeted by all the many forces outside our control. A tall order — but one worth keeping at the back of our minds as we wade through a world incentivized to elicit big reactions and even bigger emotions.

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1. In preparing for this article, I was reminded of David Hume’s famous line “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions,” which seems to contradict what I’ve laid out here. To Hume, the “passions” are goal-generators; they motivate us, point our compass in the right direction. To snuff them out would be a grave mistake.

I don’t disagree. Our emotions are vital and can signal very important things. What I’ve tried to capture here is the futility of getting swept up in them. Losing control, flying off the handle, slipping down to their mercy. More to come on the intrinsic value of healthy, balanced emotion.

2. It ought to be said that what is merely an inconvenience to one person might be something much graver to another. I trust that each reader will understand the difference and make that judgment individually.