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September 6, 2023
Our mood at any given moment is expressed in the signals we send out. If we’re feeling joyful and open and expansive, it will make us confident and accepting of others. If we’re feeling down on ourselves, it will color how we relate to other people—or if we connect at all. We tell people what we want from them by the messages we send, whether warm and hoping for a response in kind, or off-putting, when all we want is distance.
People feeling compassion see greater common humanity with strangers. They punish others less, are more generous and cooperative, and are willing to sacrifice for others. Research shows that high-powered individuals tend to be less responsive to the emotions of people around them.
This dynamic rules much of human interaction—when we need emotional support most is when we’re least likely to receive it.
EMOTIONS AND HEALTH
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Emotional sickness is avoiding reality at any cost. emotional health is facing reality at any cost. —M. SCOTT PECK
Our emotions are linked to physiological reactions in our brains, releasing hormones and other powerful chemicals that, in turn, affect our physical health, which has an impact on our emotional state.
Researchers studying this region of the brain have found that early-life exposure to mild, everyday stressors enhances our future ability to regulate emotions and confers lifelong resilience. But exposure to extreme or prolonged stress does just the opposite—it induces hyperactivity in the HPA axis and lifelong susceptibility to stress.
The difference between good stress and bad stress mainly has to do with duration and intensity.
“Stress leaves you in a fight-or-flight state in which your body turns off long-term building and repair projects,” said Robert Sapolsky, a professor at Stanford University, in his book Behave. “Memory and accuracy are impaired. You tire more easily, you can become depressed and reproduction gets downgraded.”
In one study, people who scored low on positive emotions were three times as likely to become sick after exposure to a virus than those who scored higher.
Crying is soothing because it carries stress hormones out of our bodies.
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Feelings of gratitude increase oxygen levels in our tissues, speed healing, and boost our immune system.
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Being in love was found to raise the level of nerve growth factor, a hormonelike substance that restores the nervous system and improves memory.
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EMOTIONS AND CREATIVITY
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Rational thoughts never drive people’s creativity the way emotions do. —NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
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Whenever we make a decision or face a challenge, we have an opportunity to be creative—to respond to the moment in a way that doesn’t just repeat what’s always been done before (and perhaps always failed before too). Daily, each of us has many chances to be creative, to act in new and thoughtful ways. It’s what makes life an adventure.
Without innovation, societies stagnate and die.
Effective performance is as much a part of creativity as the initial, animating idea.
Kyung Hee Kim, a professor at the School of Education at the College of William & Mary, made extensive studies of creativity among schoolchildren and found that it has been in decline for the past two decades.
“Children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle.”
In fact, modest levels of stress have been found in some cases to significantly improve creative performance compared with no stress at all. Even emotions such as anger and distress can serve as motivation for creative thinking and enhance creativity.
“Emotions are both the spark that fires the engine of creativity and the fuel that keeps the firing burning when other people try to douse it, or the kindling runs low.”
3 How to Become an Emotion Scientist
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Scientists refer to intelligences as hot or cold, hot being the emotional one and cold, of course, the rational one.
You could be brilliant, with an IQ that Einstein would envy, but if you’re unable to recognize your emotions and see how they’re affecting your behavior, all that cognitive firepower won’t do you as much good as you might imagine.
When we are making a decision, there are two kinds of emotions: integral and incidental.
For example, anxiety is a signal that we feel something important is beyond our control. Fear or uneasiness can make us risk-averse. That can be a positive thing—it may steer us away from taking foolish chances.
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when our “body budget” is running low and we feel distressed, our brains search around for things that might be wrong in our lives to make sense of the distress.
And we can all increase our emotional intelligence, which Salovey and Mayer defined 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.
Emotional intelligence doesn’t allow feelings to get in the way—it does just the opposite. It restores balance to our thought processes; it prevents emotions from having undue influence over our actions; and it helps us to realize that we might be feeling a certain way for a reason.
In the RULER framework, the first three skills—Recognizing, Understanding, and Labeling—help us to accurately identify and decode what we and others are feeling. Then, the two remaining skills—Expressing and Regulating—tell us how we can manage those emotions to achieve desired outcomes—our ultimate goal.
We know for a fact that no matter how smart you are, your emotions will have an influence—positive or negative—on your rational thought processes.
An emotion—happy, sad, angry—arises from an appraisal of an internal or external stimulus.
Finally, emotions mobilize us into action—to approach or avoid, fight or flee.
A feeling is our internal response to an emotion.
We often have more than one emotion at the same time.
We can even have emotions about emotions. We call them meta-emotions.
In addition to emotions, feelings, and moods, there are emotion-related personality traits. This feels like who we are, at our core—our predisposition to feel, think, and act in a particular way. We’re optimists or pessimists, we’re take-charge types or fatalists, we’re introverts or extroverts, we’re calm or hyper. To be sure, personality traits can change over time, but when they do, it happens gradually.
On the road to becoming emotion scientists, we need to avoid the temptation to act as emotion judges.
Where emotion scientists operate with open minds and good intentions, emotion judges are afraid of hearing something dreadful. They come prepared to deny, defend, and blame.
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.
PART TWO THE RULER SKILLS
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4 R: Recognizing Emotion
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HERE, AGAIN, IS THE key question: How are you feeling? This time, before you answer, stop and don’t think. Just sense it. Feel it.
until we can recognize our own emotions, we can’t learn the skills necessary for regulating them.
Even when we are not aware of how we are feeling, our emotion system is continuously monitoring our surroundings for changes that may be relevant to our goals, values, and well-being.
the better we are at reading facial expressions, the more we’ll know about the intentions of the people around us.
We are more likely to detect anger in men’s expressions of emotion but sadness in women’s.
It’s human nature to pay more attention to negative emotional information than positive.
The recognition skill improves only with practice. And because it relies on nonverbal information, we have to be sensitive to the sensations and nuances of emotions, our own and those of other people. If you overthink it, you’re doing it wrong.
