More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Borkovec discovered some simple steps that can help even the most chronic worrier control the habit. The first step is self-awareness, catching the worrisome episodes as near their beginning as possible—ideally,
Worriers also need to actively challenge the worrisome thoughts; failing this, the worry spiral will keep coming back. So the next step is to take a critical stance toward their assumptions: Is it very probable that the dreaded event will occur? Is it necessarily the case that there is only one or no alternative to letting it happen? Are there constructive steps to be taken? Does it really help to run through these same anxious thoughts over and over?
Bereavement
stifling
unnameable
enervation,
“fidgety
bespeak
despondency.
That may partly explain why Tice found the most popular tactic for battling depression is socializing—going out to eat, to a ballgame or movie; in short, doing something with friends or family. That works well if the net effect is to get the person’s mind off his sadness. But it simply prolongs the mood if he uses the occasion just to mull over what put him in the funk.
priming
This, she proposes, may at least partly explain the fact that women are diagnosed with depression twice as often as are men. Of course, other factors may come into play, such as women being more open to disclosing their distress or having more in their lives to be depressed about. And men may drown their depression in alcoholism, for which their rate is about twice that of women.
Cognitive therapy aimed at changing these thought patterns has been found in some studies to be on a par with medication for treating mild clinical depression, and superior to medication in preventing the return of mild depression. Two strategies are particularly effective in the battle.16 One is to learn to challenge the thoughts at the center of rumination—to question their validity and think of more positive alternatives. The other is to purposely schedule pleasant, distracting events.
ponderous
“Thoughts are associated in the mind not just by content, but by mood. People have what amounts to a set of bad-mood thoughts that come to mind more readily when they are feeling down.
The idea of a “good cry” is misleading: crying that reinforces rumination only prolongs the misery. Distractions break the chain of sadness-maintaining thinking; one of the leading theories of why electroconvulsive therapy is effective for the most severe depressions is that it causes a loss of short-term memory—patients feel better because they can’t remember why they were so sad.
By the same token,
Tice found that eating was three times as common a strategy for soothing sadness among women than men; men, on the other hand, were five times as likely to turn to drinking or drugs when they felt down. The trouble with overeating or alcohol as antidotes, of course, is that they can easily backfire: eating to excess brings regret; alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, and so only adds to the effects of depression itself.
One of the most potent—and, outside therapy, little used—antidotes to depression is seeing things differently, or cognitive reframing. It is natural to bemoan the end of a relationship and to wallow in self-pitying thoughts such as the conviction that “this means I’ll always be alone,” but it’s sure to thicken the sense of despair. However, stepping back and thinking about the ways the relationship wasn’t so great, and ways you and your partner were mismatched—in other words, seeing the loss differently, in a more positive light—is an antidote to the sadness.
“Praying, if you’re very religious, works for all moods, especially depression.”
unflappables.
perennial
feigning
Davidson’s study took advantage of the fact that (in right-handed people) a key center for processing negative emotion is in the right half of the brain, while the center for speaking is in the left. Once the right hemisphere recognizes that a word is upsetting, it transmits that information across the corpus callosum, the great divide between the brain’s halves, to the speech center, and a word is spoken in response. Using an intricate arrangement of lenses, Davidson was able to display a word so that it was seen in only half of the visual field. Because of the neural wiring of the visual
...more
To his surprise, when Davidson measured activity levels in their prefrontal lobes, they had a decided predominance of activity on the left—the center for good feeling—and less on the right, the center for negativity.
equanimity,
foreboding
powerful negative emotions twist attention toward their own preoccupations, interfering with the attempt to focus elsewhere.
Working memory is an executive function par excellence in mental life, making possible all other intellectual efforts, from speaking a sentence to tackling a knotty logical proposition.2 The prefrontal cortex executes working memory—and, remember, is where feelings and emotions meet.3 When the limbic circuitry that converges on the prefrontal cortex is in the thrall of emotional distress, one cost is in the effectiveness of working memory: we can’t think straight, as I discovered during that dread calculus exam.
arduous
doggedness depends on emotional traits—enthusiasm and persistence in the face of setbacks—above all else.
Sanford Dorenbusch, a Stanford sociologist who studied more than ten thousand high-school students, found that Asian-Americans spent 40 percent more time doing homework than did other students. “While most American parents are willing to accept a child’s weak areas and emphasize the strengths, for Asians, the attitude is that if you’re not doing well, the answer is to study later at night, and if you still don’t do well, to get up and study earlier in the morning. They believe that anyone can do well in school with the right effort.” In short, a strong cultural work ethic translates into
...more
And to the degree to which we are motivated by feelings of enthusiasm and pleasure in what we do—or even by an optimal degree of anxiety—they propel us to accomplishment. It is in this sense that emotional intelligence is a master aptitude, a capacity that profoundly affects all other abilities, either facilitating or interfering with them.
There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse. It is the root of all emotional self-control, since all emotions, by their very nature, lead to one or another impulse to act.
squelch
a plethora of efforts,
acted on whim.
This suggests that the ability to delay gratification contributes powerfully to intellectual potential quite apart from IQ itself. (Poor impulse control in childhood is also a powerful predictor of later delinquency, again more so than IQ.
while some argue that IQ cannot be changed and so represents an unbendable limitation on a child’s life potential, there is ample evidence that emotional skills such as impulse control and accurately reading a social situation can be learned.
infelicitous
His finding underscores the role of emotional intelligence as a meta-ability, determining how well or how poorly people are able to use their other mental capacities.
stale
The anxious are more likely to fail even given superior scores on intelligence tests, as a study of 1,790 students in training for air traffic control posts discovered.12 Anxiety also sabotages academic performance of all kinds: 126 different studies of more than 36,000 people found that the more prone to worries a person is, the poorer their academic performance, no matter how measured—grades on tests, grade-point average, or achievement tests.13
piqued
The mental resources expended on one cognitive task—the worrying—simply detract from the resources available for processing other information; if we are preoccupied by worries that we’re going to flunk the test we’re taking, we have that much less attention to expend on figuring out the answers. Our worries become self-fulfilling prophecies, propelling us toward the very disaster they predict.
Good moods, while they last, enhance the ability to think flexibly and with more complexity, thus making it easier to find solutions to problems, whether intellectual or interpersonal. This suggests that one way to help someone think through a problem is to tell them a joke. Laughing, like elation, seems to help people think more broadly and associate more freely, noticing relationships that might have eluded them otherwise—a mental skill important not just in creativity, but in recognizing complex relationships and foreseeing the consequences of a given decision.
Hope, modern researchers are finding, does more than offer a bit of solace amid affliction; it plays a surprisingly potent role in life, offering an advantage in realms as diverse as school achievement and bearing up in onerous jobs. Hope, in a technical sense, is more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all right. Snyder defines it with more specificity as “believing you have both the will and the way to accomplish your goals, whatever they may be.”
From the perspective of emotional intelligence, having hope means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challenges or setbacks. Indeed, people who are hopeful evidence less depression than others as they maneuver through life in pursuit of their goals, are less anxious in general, and have fewer emotional distresses.
Some sportswriters were touting Biondi as likely to match Mark Spitz’s 1972 feat of taking seven gold medals.
Optimism, like hope, means having a strong expectation that, in general, things will turn out all right in life, despite setbacks and frustrations. From the standpoint of emotional intelligence, optimism is an attitude that buffers people against falling into apathy, hopelessness, or depression in the face of tough going. And, as with hope, its near cousin, optimism pays dividends in life (providing, of course, it is a realistic optimism; a too-naive optimism can be disastrous).22
