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While chronic hostility and repeated episodes of anger seem to put men at greatest risk for heart disease, the more deadly emotion in women may be anxiety and fear.
Studies done over two decades involving more than thirty-seven thousand people show that social isolation—the sense that you have nobody with whom you can share your private feelings or have close contact—doubles the chances of sickness or death.37 Isolation itself, a 1987 report in Science concluded, “is as significant to mortality rates as smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, and lack of physical exercise.”
Indeed, smoking increases mortality risk by a factor of just 1.6, while social isolation does so by a factor of 2.0, making it a greater health risk.
Having people to turn to and talk with, people who could offer solace, help, and suggestions, protected them from the deadly impact of life’s rigors and trauma.
The quality of relationships as well as their sheer number seems key to buffering stress. Negative relationships take their own toll. Marital arguments, for example, have a negative impact on the immune system.
“It’s the most important relationships in your life, the people you see day in and day out, that seem to be crucial for your health. And the more significant the relationship is in your life, the more it matters for your health.”
There are hundreds of studies showing that how parents treat their children—whether with harsh discipline or empathic understanding, with indifference or warmth, and so on—has deep and lasting consequences for the child’s emotional life.
The three most common emotionally inept parenting styles proved to be:
Whether or not a child arrives at school on the first day of kindergarten with these capabilities depends greatly on how much her parents—and preschool teachers—have given her the kind of care that amounts to a “Heart Start,” the emotional equivalent of the Head Start programs.
people who have greater activity in the left frontal lobe, compared to the right, are by temperament cheerful; they typically take delight in people and in what life presents them with, bouncing back from setbacks as my aunt June did. But those with relatively greater activity on the right side are given to negativity and sour moods, and are easily fazed by life’s difficulties; in a sense, they seem to suffer because they cannot turn off their worries and depressions.
other words, the protective strategy backfires by depriving timid toddlers of the very opportunity to learn to calm themselves in the face of the unfamiliar, and so gain some small mastery of their fears.
Some obese people are unable to tell the difference between being scared, angry, and hungry, and so lump all those feelings together as signifying hunger, which leads them to overeat whenever they feel upset.40
observed that these girls “have poor awareness of their feelings and body signals; that was the strongest single predictor that they would go on to develop an eating disorder within the next two years.
neuropsychological study of sons of alcoholics who at age twelve showed signs of anxiety such as a heightened heart rate in response to stress, as well as impulsivity, found the boys also had poor frontal lobe functioning.56 Thus the brain areas that might have helped ease their anxiety or control their impulsiveness brought them less help than in other boys.
Over the last decade or so “wars” have been proclaimed, in turn, on teen pregnancy, dropping out, drugs, and most recently violence. The trouble with such campaigns, though, is that they come too late, after the targeted problem has reached epidemic proportions and taken firm root in the lives of the young. They are crisis intervention, the equivalent of solving a problem by sending an ambulance to the rescue rather than giving an inoculation that would ward off the disease in the first place. Instead of more such “wars,” what we need is to follow the logic of prevention, offering our children
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“Anyone, adult or fifth grader, needs some help being a self-observer when they’re so upset,” Vargo points out. “Your heart is pounding, your hands are sweaty, you’re jittery, and you’re trying to listen clearly while keeping your own self-control to get through it without screaming, blaming, or clamming up in defensiveness.”
“When we teach about anger, we help kids understand that it is almost always a secondary reaction and to look for what’s underneath—are you hurt? jealous?
Another emphasis is managing emotions: realizing what is behind a feeling (for example, the hurt that triggers anger), and learning ways to handle anxieties, anger, and sadness. Still another emphasis is on taking responsibility for decisions and actions, and following through on commitments.
learning to be a good listener and question-asker; distinguishing between what someone says or does and your own reactions and judgments; being assertive rather than angry or passive;
A teacher seeing three first graders pushing to be the first in the lunchroom line might suggest that they each guess a number, and let the winner go first. The immediate lesson is that there are impartial, fair ways to settle such pint-size disputes, while the deeper teaching is that disputes can be negotiated. And since that is an approach those children can take with them to settle other similar disputes (“Me first!” is, after all, epidemic in lower grades—if not through much of life, in one form or another) it has a more positive message than the ubiquitous, authoritarian “Stop that!”
The newborn’s repertoire of feeling is primitive compared to the emotional range of a five-year-old, which, in turn, is lacking when measured against the fullness of feelings of a teenager. Indeed, adults all too readily fall into the trap of expecting children to have reached a maturity far beyond their years, forgetting that each emotion has its preprogrammed moment of appearance in a child’s growth.
child’s sense of self-worth depends substantially on his or her ability to achieve in school. A child who fails in school sets in motion the self-defeating attitudes that can dim prospects for an entire lifespan.”
Among the essentials for profiting from school, Hamburg notes, are an ability “to postpone gratification, to be socially responsible in appropriate ways, to maintain control over their emotions, and to have an optimistic outlook”—in other words, emotional intelligence.
first grade students sit in a circle and roll the “feelings cube,” which has words such as sad or excited on each side. At their turn, they describe a time they had that feeling, an exercise that gives them more certainty in tying feelings to words and helps with empathy as they hear others having the same feelings as themselves. By fourth and
We show them the futility of violence while replacing it with concrete skills. Kids learn to stand up for their rights without resorting to violence. These are lifelong skills, not just for those most prone to violence.”
knowing what you are feeling or how to handle impulse or grief is as important for violence prevention as is managing anger.
As family life no longer offers growing numbers of children a sure footing in life, schools are left as the one place communities can turn to for correctives to children’s deficiencies in emotional and social competence.
There is perhaps no subject where the quality of the teacher matters so much, since how a teacher handles her class is in itself a model, a de facto lesson in emotional competence—or the lack thereof. Whenever a teacher responds to one student, twenty or thirty others learn a lesson.
In short, the optimal design of emotional literacy programs is to begin early, be age-appropriate, run throughout the school years, and intertwine efforts at school, at home, and in the community.
Situation, Options, Consequence, Solutions—a four-step method: say what the situation is and how it makes you feel; think about your options for solving the problem and what their consequences might be; pick a solution and
EMOTIONAL SELF-AWARENESS
One item on this list demands special attention: emotional literacy programs improve children’s academic achievement scores and school performance. This is not an isolated finding;
The bedrock of character is self-discipline; the virtuous life, as philosophers since Aristotle have observed, is based on self-control. A related keystone of character is being able to motivate and guide oneself, whether in doing homework, finishing a job, or getting up in the morning. And, as we have seen, the ability to defer gratification and to control and channel one’s urges to act is a basic emotional skill, one that in a former day was called will.
Being able to put aside one’s self-centered focus and impulses has social benefits: it opens the way to empathy, to real listening, to taking another person’s perspective. Empathy, as we have seen, leads to caring, altruism, and compassion. Seeing things from another’s perspective breaks down biased stereotypes, and so breeds tolerance and acceptance of differences.
Great spiritual teachers, like Buddha and Jesus, have touched their disciples’ hearts by speaking in the language of emotion, teaching in parables, fables, and stories. Indeed, religious symbol and ritual makes little sense from the rational point of view; it is couched in the vernacular of the heart.
The beliefs of the rational mind are tentative; new evidence can disconfirm one belief and replace it with a new one—it reasons by objective evidence. The emotional mind, however, takes its beliefs to be absolutely true, and so discounts any evidence to the contrary. That is why it is so hard to reason with someone who is emotionally upset: no matter the soundness of your argument from a logical point of view, it carries no weight if it is out of keeping with the emotional conviction of the moment. Feelings are self-justifying, with a set of perceptions and “proofs” all their own.
in the mechanics of emotion, each feeling has its own distinct repertoire of thought, reactions, even memories. These state-specific repertoires become most predominant in moments of intense emotion. One sign that such a repertoire is
EMOTIONAL SKILLS • Identifying and labeling feelings • Expressing feelings • Assessing the intensity of feelings • Managing feelings • Delaying gratification • Controlling impulses • Reducing stress • Knowing the difference between feelings and actions
