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Self-awareness is not an attention that gets carried away by emotions, overreacting and amplifying what is perceived. Rather, it is a neutral mode that maintains self-reflectiveness even amidst turbulent emotions.
equanimous
Self-awareness, in short, means being “aware of both our mood and our thoughts about that mood,” in the words of John Mayer, a University of New Hampshire psychologist who, with Yale’s Peter Salovey, is a coformulator of the theory of emotional intelligence.
But Mayer finds that this sensibility also can be less equanimous; typical thoughts bespeaking emotional self-awareness include “I shouldn’t feel this way,” “I’m thinking good things to cheer up,” and, for a more restricted self-awareness, the fleeting thought “Don’t think about it” in reaction to something highly upsetting.
Mayer finds that people tend to fall into distinctive styles for attending to and dealing with their emotions:
emotional life is richer for those who notice more.
emotional sensitivity means that for such people the least provocation unleashes emotional storms, whether heavenly or hellish, while those at the other extreme barely experience any feeling even under the most dire circumstances.
Gary’s emotional flatness exemplifies what psychiatrists call alexithymia, from the Greek a for “lack,” lexis for “word,” and thymos for “emotion.”
The clinical features that mark alexithymics include having difficulty describing feelings—their own or anyone else’s—and a sharply limited emotional vocabulary.
belie
phenomenon known in psychiatry as somaticizing, mistaking an emotional ache for a physical one (and different from a psychosomatic disease, in which emotional problems cause genuine medical ones).
Squandering
The intuitive signals that guide us in these moments come in the form of limbic-driven surges from the viscera that Damasio calls “somatic markers”—literally, gut feelings.
The key to sounder personal decision-making, in short: being attuned to our feelings.
vacuity
axiom
The physiological beginnings of an emotion typically occur before a person is consciously aware of the feeling itself. For example, when people who fear snakes are shown pictures of snakes, sensors on their skin will detect sweat breaking out, a sign of anxiety, though they say they do not feel any fear. The sweat shows up in such people even when the picture of a snake is presented so rapidly that they have no conscious idea of what, exactly, they just saw, let alone that they are beginning to get anxious. As such preconscious emotional stirrings continue to build, they eventually become
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Emotions that simmer beneath the threshold of awareness can have a powerful impact on how we perceive and react, even though we have no idea they are at work.
Take someone who is annoyed by a rude encounter early in the day, and then is peevish for hours afterward, taking affront where none is intended and snapping at people for no real reason. He may well be oblivious to his continuing irritability and will be surprised if someone calls attention to it, though it stews just out of his awareness and dictates his curt replies. But once that reaction is brought into awareness—once it registers in the cortex—he can evaluate things anew, decide to shrug off the feelings left earlier in the day, and change his outlook and mood. In this way emotional
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When emotions are too muted they create dullness and distance; when out of control, too extreme and persistent, they become pathological, as in immobilizing depression, overwhelming anxiety, raging anger, manic agitation.
There is much to be said for the constructive contribution of suffering to creative and spiritual life; suffering can temper the soul.
It is not that people need to avoid unpleasant feelings to feel content, but rather that stormy feelings not go unchecked, displacing all pleasant moods. People who have strong episodes of anger or depression can still feel a sense of well-being if they have a countervailing set of equally joyous or happy times. These studies also affirm the independence of emotional from academic intelligence, finding little or no relationship between grades or IQ and people’s emotional well-being.
throes
vanquishing
dispiriting.
Machiavellian
scowl.
intransigent;
“catharsis”
The longer we ruminate about what has made us angry, the more “good reasons” and self-justifications for being angry we can invent. Brooding fuels anger’s flames. But seeing things differently douses those flames. Tice found that reframing a situation more positively was one of the most potent ways to put anger to rest.
Endangerment can be signaled not just by an outright physical threat but also, as is more often the case, by a symbolic threat to self-esteem or dignity: being treated unjustly or rudely, being insulted or demeaned, being frustrated in pursuing an important goal. These perceptions act as the instigating trigger for a limbic surge that has a dual effect on the brain. One part of that surge is a release of catecholamines, which generate a quick, episodic rush of energy, enough for “one course of vigorous action,”
another amygdala-driven ripple through the adrenocortical branch of the nervous system creates a general tonic background of action readiness, which lasts much longer than the catecholamine energy surge. This generalized adrenal and cortical excitation can last for hours and even days, keeping the emotional brain in special readiness for arousal, and becoming a foundation on which subsequent reactions can build with particular quickness. In general, the hair-trigger condition created by adrenocortical arousal explains why people are so much more prone to anger if they have already been
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confederate
snide
Timing matters; the earlier in the anger cycle the more effective. Indeed, anger can be completely short-circuited if the mitigating information comes before the anger is acted on.
irate
at high levels of rage it makes no difference because of what he calls “cognitive incapacitation”—in other words, people can no longer think straight. When people were already highly enraged, they dismissed the mitigating information with “That’s just too bad!” or “the strongest vulgarities the English language has to offer,” as Zillmann put it with delicacy.
It still stands as a model of the second way of de-escalating anger: cooling off physiologically by waiting out the adrenal surge in a setting where there are not likely to be further triggers for rage. In an argument, for instance, that means getting away from the other person for the time being. During the cooling-off period, the angered person can put the brakes on the cycle of escalating hostile thought by seeking out distractions.
indulging in treats such as shopping for oneself and eating do not have much effect; it is all too easy to continue with an indignant train of thought while cruising a shopping mall or devouring a piece of chocolate cake.
incendiary
Far more effective was when people first cooled down, and then, in a more constructive or assertive manner, confronted the person to settle their dispute. As I once heard Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan teacher, reply when asked how best to handle anger: “Don’t suppress it. But don’t act on it.”
Worry is, in a sense, a rehearsal of what might go wrong and how to deal with it; the task of worrying is to come up with positive solutions for life’s perils by anticipating dangers before they arise.
amok.
virtuoso
Worries typically follow such lines, a narrative to oneself that jumps from concern to concern and more often than not includes catastrophizing, imagining some terrible tragedy. Worries are almost always expressed in the mind’s ear, not its eye—that is, in words, not images—a fact that has significance for controlling worry.
somatic, the physiological symptoms of anxiety, such as sweating, a racing heart, or muscle tension.
swamped
ration
a long reverie of worry,
medley of distress.
