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New
Neuroscience Reveals 5 Secrets That Will Make You
Emotionally Intelligent How
are you feeling? These
days it seems like there are only two answers: “Fine”
and “Busy.” After all, if
you did say everything that’s on your mind,
you’d get strange looks
from that barista for the rest of your life. And it’s no
better at work, where
the room for legitimate emotion can be measured in
microns. We’re
perpetually squashing feelings and playing roles
everywhere. It’s only 2
minutes into a rant that you realize you’re angry. Only
after you unclench the
muscles in your shoulders do you notice you’ve been on
edge for hours. As
recently as the 1980’s even many psychologists
felt emotions were things
that just got in the way. Cognitive noise. Stuff you had
to ignore, get over
and stop whining about. Yeah, back in the 1980’s BFE
(Before Feelings Era)
there wasn’t a concept of “Emotional Intelligence.” That
didn’t exist until
1990 PFE (Post Feelings Era) when Salovey and Mayer
published their landmark
paper on the subject. Cliff’s Notes version: we all have
feelings, they affect
the majority of what we do in life, they’re not going
away and they actually
provide useful information if we pay attention to them. They
defined EI as: “the ability to perceive
accurately, appraise, and
express emotion; the ability to access and/or generate
feelings when they
facilitate thought; the ability to understand emotion
and emotional knowledge;
and the ability to regulate emotions to promote
emotional and intellectual
growth.” And
subsequent studies showed the multitude of benefits high
EI provides. From
Permission to Feel: Among
adolescents, higher emotional intelligence is associated
with less depression
and anxiety and may be a protective factor against
suicidal behavior…There is
also data suggesting that emotional intelligence is
related to higher SAT
scores, greater creativity, and better grades among high
school and college
students…The benefits don’t go away once we reach
adulthood. Individuals who
score higher on emotional intelligence tests tend to
report better
relationships with friends, parents, and romantic
partners…Research has also
linked emotional intelligence to important health and
workplace outcomes,
including less anxiety, depression, stress, and burnout
and greater performance
and leadership ability. But
30 years out from that first paper on EI and, if
anything, we’ve gotten worse
at it. From
Permission to Feel: According
to the 2019 World Happiness Report, negative feelings,
including worry,
sadness, and anger, have been rising around the world,
up by 27 percent from
2010 to 2018… According to a Stanford University study,
more than 120,000
deaths annually may be attributable to workplace stress,
which accounts for up
to $190 billion in health care costs…our research at
Yale revealed that high
school students, teachers, and business professionals
experience negative
emotions up to 70 percent of the time they are in school
or at work. Alright,
no more ignoring the valuable info and benefits feelings
can provide. We gotta
tear this one down to the studs and get to the science.
Because if we can
harness the power of emotions — both good and bad —
we’re gonna live much
better lives. You feelin’ me? So
who knows this stuff? Marc Brackett is the founding
director of the Yale Center
for Emotional Intelligence. His book is Permission
to Feel and it has a simple system we can use to
build real Emotional
Intelligence skills. Let’s
get to it… More Than A
Feeling Feelings
can make us smarter and sharpen real world
skills. But we often hit the
snooze button every time the feelings alarm goes
off. We take good
emotions for granted and try to ignore or eliminate the
bad, never really
paying attention to what they mean or how we can
leverage them. And then we
wonder why our performance is so inconsistent, happiness
is elusive and our
relationships are unsatisfying. Feelings
(even negative ones) direct our attention and focus our
thinking, often in
helpful ways. From
Permission to Feel: Pessimism
can make it easier for us to anticipate things that
could go wrong and then
take the proper actions to prevent them. Guilt acts as a
moral compass. Anxiety
keeps us trying to improve things that a more generous
mood might be willing to
accept. Even anger is a great motivator—unlike
resignation, it drives us to act
and perhaps to fix what made us angry in the first
place… Feelings
have an enormous impact on our decision making — but we
rarely realize it. From
Permission to Feel: In
an experiment we conducted at Yale, teachers were
divided into two groups. One
was told to remember and write about positive classroom
experiences, and the
other was assigned to recall a negative memory. Then all
were asked to grade
the same middle school essay. The positive-mood group
marked the essay a full
grade higher than the negative-mood group. When we asked
the teachers if they
believed their moods affected how they evaluated the
papers, 87 percent said
no. Your
emotions have a major impact on your health. From
Permission to Feel: Negative
emotions have been associated with hypertension,
increased heart rate,
constriction of peripheral blood vessels, unhealthy
blood lipids, and decreased
immune system function… In one study, laughter caused by
watching a comedy film
increased the flow of beta-endorphins, which enhance our
mood, and stimulated growth
hormones, which repair our cells. And
do I even need to mention the effect feelings have on
your social life? No?
Thank you. I’m
not saying you’re gonna study Emotional Intelligence and
develop super mutant
mind powers that will bring you unrelenting waves of
orgiastic happiness.
That’s for infomercials. But if you improve your EI
skills even a tad,
you’ll have a better idea of how you’re feeling, what
you’re emotionally
missing, and what you need to be thriving in life.
You’ll be able to ask those
you love to help you get exactly what you need
when things get
challenging. Marc
lays out a 5-step process. Remember the acronym RULER: Recognize,
Understand,
Label, Express and Regulate. First up… 1) Recognize We’ve
all had days where the world is “awful” and only later
do we realize it’s just
a crappy mood and Earth has not undergone major changes
overnight. It’s like
the scene in the war movie where the person doesn’t
realize they’ve been shot
until they look down and see the blood. You
need to check in with yourself. You can’t address
bad emotions or increase
good ones if you don’t take the time to recognize your
emotional state. From
Permission to Feel: We
need to pause—to physically stop whatever we’re doing,
check in with the state
of our minds and bodies, and ask ourselves: At this
exact moment, what is my emotional
state? Am I feeling up or down? Pleasant or unpleasant?
Would I like to
approach the world or steer clear? Next, let’s check for
physical clues. Am I
energized or depleted? Is my heart racing, am I
clenching my fists, is there a
knot in my stomach, or am I feeling balanced, cool, and
at ease? Make
it a habit. Tie it to something you already do, even if
it’s only a couple
times a day. This
isn’t a test. There’s no right or wrong answer. You want
to be an emotion
scientist here. Examine, don’t judge. Getting
angry about feeling angry is
rarely helpful. You’re
recognizing. Awesome. Now you’ve got something to work
with. Next step? 2)
Understand It’s
all about the word “why.” Why are you feeling this way?
Don’t ask it in a
rhetorical, judgmental way. Be a sincere and curious
emotion scientist. Why
this feeling? Why now? What’s causing it? What
happened before it? What
events, associations or memories could have triggered
this feeling? You
may not have a big epiphany but this is the first step
on the path to
self-understanding. Just one little data point but, with
time, you’ll start to
see connections and patterns. You’ll start to make more
accurate emotional
predictions. You’ll be able to prepare effectively: to
avoid, to cope or ask
for help. It’s
deceptively simple but keep doing this and you’re on the
path to emotional
self-authorship. Done
playing detective? Good. Now we’re gonna zero in and
really start building
those EI skills… 3) Label Neuroscience
studies by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA have shown the
incredible power of
labeling to help us control and dampen powerful
emotions. When we put feelings
into words we get our “thinky brain” (prefrontal
cortex) on the case and
put the brakes on our “wet yourself in fear and punch
people brain”
(amygdala). Gotta name it to tame it. From
Permission to Feel: …participants
who were identified as having extreme fear of
spiders—arachnophobia—were placed
in a room with a caged spider. Some subjects used
emotion words to describe
their feelings in that situation, while others used
emotion-neutral words to
simply state the facts. The result? Members of the first
group were able to
take more steps closer to the cage than the other
participants. Additionally,
greater use of words such as “anxiety” and “fear” during
exposure to the spider
was associated with reductions in those emotions. Ironic
as it might seem, saying the word “anxiety” reduces
anxiety. And if we
take the time to broaden our emotional vocabulary — to
think about the
different things we feel and give them distinct
names — we can better
regulate our emotions and get the most out of them. We
need to take those big
emotional buckets like “happy” and make them more
granular: are you happy
or joyous or ecstatic? From
Permission to Feel: …participants
who were deemed granular were better able to
differentiate their emotional
experiences. Subjects who were low in granularity—called
clumpers—were less
skilled at differentiating emotions (e.g., angry,
worried, frustrated). When
the two groups were compared, she reported, granular
individuals were less
likely to freak out or abuse alcohol when under stress
and more likely to find
positive meaning in negative experiences. They also were
better at emotion
regulation—moderating their responses in order to
achieve desired outcomes. The
clumpers, on the other hand, scored worse on those
counts, tending to be
physically and psychologically ill at a higher rate than
the granular crowd. Imagine
if the only diagnosis a doctor could give was “sick” or
“not-sick.” No
cancer or flu or multiple sclerosis, just “sick.” How
useful would that be? “Ah,
I’ve found the problem: you’re sick.” That’s what
most of us are like with
our feelings. But if you understand on a
fine-grained level what you’re
feeling, then with time you can discover the best way to
address it, dampen it
or amplify it. Maybe
you feel “stressed.” More granularly, is it anxiety
about an
uncertain future? Or fear of what you assume
will happen? Or pressure
because of too many responsibilities? This level of
understanding allows
you to solve the problem. Now the doctor can say
“contact dermatitis” instead
of just “sick.” Once
you start regularly playing emotion scientist you can
realize that when you’re sad
you need to distract yourself, when you’re melancholy
you need to see
friends, and when you’re unfulfilled you need to
attack some personal
goals. All
this wordplay may sound crazy but it’s not. Other
cultures have whole emotions
you’ve never delineated and therefore never experienced. From
Permission to Feel: Iktsuarpok
is the Inuit word that describes the anticipation you
feel when you’re so
impatient for a guest’s arrival at your home that you
keep going outside to
check… Kvell is the Yiddish word that describes the
feeling of overwhelming
love and pride you get when you see what your child can
do… In Mandarin, there
were more than one hundred different shame-related
terms… Don’t
accept emotions off the rack; custom-tailor them. Break
out the thesaurus next
time you’re feeling something and start playing wine
connoisseur. Is this a
“bold, supple distress with an aftertaste of
hopelessness”? Or perhaps “an
unbalanced and stinging longing with a regret finish”?
Direct your descriptive
powers toward your inner life, not toward fermented
grape juice. With
time, you’ll develop A Field Guide to Yourself.
And then you can share
these insights with others. How much easier would it be
to help loved ones
understand what you need if your self-knowledge was this
rich and
detailed? I’m lucky enough to have people around me
who can distinguish
between “Eric’s peeved, better change the
subject” or “Eric’s angry,
better talk this out” or “Eric’s gone quantum
dumpster fire again,
evacuate a three-mile radius and call the National
Guard.” And
it’s not all about negative emotions either. If you
understand the difference
between pleasant and joyful you can
learn what it takes to
get yourself to that next rung — and what it takes to
extend it. Okay,
it’s time to deal with the scary stuff… 4) Express No,
I’m not telling you to run around “venting.” Don’t go
all emotion grenade
at work or at home saying the blogger-man gave you
permission to act on every
impulse. No, the blogger-man most certainly did not. But
nor do you want to suppress all those feelings.
“Surface-acting” takes its
toll. It’s correlated with burnout, lower job
satisfaction, and even
increased anxiety and depression. Jamie
Pennebaker is a psychologist at the University of Texas
at Austin and he’s done
work showing that bottling stuff up makes you sick. On
the flip side, converting
emotions into words improves health. When people talk
about their problems or
write them down, research shows a drop in doctor visits,
lower blood pressure,
less absenteeism, higher grades and a long-term
improvement in mood. So
we should just open up and express our emotions, right?
Ah, if only it were
that easy… Here’s
the part where I’m supposed to say it’s okay to
express emotions
everywhere at any time and nobody will think you’re
crazy or weak… And I will not
be saying that. We’re afraid of expressing our emotions
to others for damn
good reasons. Some people will say you’re weak.
Some will say you’re crazy. You
gotta be choosy about where, when and with whom you open
up. This is why
psychologists talk about “display rules.” Those
are the “unwritten but
widely agreed-upon guidelines for how, where, when, and
in whose presence we
may express our feelings.” You need to test the
waters and build your
personal display rules. Take your time and slowly
discover your safe people and
safe zones. When
you open up and are vulnerable with someone, it’s about
as intimate as you’ll
ever be. That’s how real relationships are forged. Last
one. How do we regulate difficult emotions, in the
moment, when they suddenly
hit us? 5) Regulate We
all have methods for regulating our emotions. Babies
suck their
thumbs. (No, I’m not recommending that during work
meetings.) Which
strategies do experts recommend? 1)
Positive Self-Talk Yeah,
you’ve heard this one before. Here’s the new twist,
courtesy of neuroscience: always
do positive self-talk in the third person. From
Permission to Feel: In
one experiment, subjects were shown neutral and
disturbing images or asked to
recall negative moments from their own lives. By
monitoring their emotional
brain activity, the researchers found that the subjects’
distress decreased
rapidly—within one second—when they performed self-talk
in the third person
compared with the first person. Saying,
“Eric, everything is going to be fine” tricks
your brain. It’s like a
friend reassuring you. You’re being empathetic… with
yourself. 2)
Reframing Deliberately
choose to see things in a way that generates fewer
negative emotions and
assumes others have good intentions. From
Permission to Feel: Students
who were asked to think of pretest anxiety as being
beneficial performed better
on exams than a control group. In another experiment,
reframing anxiety as
excitement was found to improve negotiating and
public-speaking skills. When
someone yells at you don’t assume they hate you; assume
they’re having a bad
day. Believing that will make you feel better, you’ll
respond compassionately
instead of harshly, and even if it isn’t true it will
certainly make the
situation better rather than worse. 3)
The Pause When
you feel a negative emotion rising, pause. Don’t do
anything. Take a deep
breath. Pausing helps you refrain from making a
permanent decision based
on a temporary emotion. Then ask yourself one
question: “What
would my Best Self do next?” Take
another deep breath. And then be your best you. Okay,
we’ve covered a lot. Time to round it all up and learn
the fun thing that can
put all of the above on “Easy” mode… Sum Up Here’s
how to increase emotional intelligence. Remember
RULER:
So
how do you make RULER easier? By taking care of
yourself. Getting enough sleep.
Exercising. Seeing friends. From
Permission to Feel: Spend
time with family and friends, pursue passions and
pastimes, get in touch with
your spiritual side, immerse yourself in nature, read a
good book, watch a
funny movie. We build up cognitive reserves that way,
which will help us when
emotional turmoil inevitably strikes. When
you’re fully charged, it’s easier to follow the steps
above. But when you’re
not getting enough rest or not having any fun, you’re
gonna have a very short
fuse. Get
to know yourself. Become the author of your emotional
life. And share your
findings with those you love… And
so I ask you again: How are you feeling? “Fine”
or “busy” won’t cut it with me. I’m hoping more
for: “Flamboyantly
serene with crisp silky notes of optimism and a hint
of buttery enthusiasm.” |