3 Secrets to becoming Emotionally Intelligent

A hot topic for sure.....

And a deeply significant one.

It's long, so I'm putting in excerpts. It's a write up in the 'Time' by Eric Barker, based on the book 'How emotions are made: the secret life of the brain'  by Lisa Feldman, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School. Italics is quotes directly from the book:

" Emotional Intelligence. It’s everywhere. They won’t shut up about it. And yet nobody seems to be able to explain what it really means or how you develop it.

Face it: you don’t even know what an emotion is. Most people would say an emotion is a feeling. And what’s a feeling? Umm… an emotion? Yeah, nice work there, Captain Circular.

And it turns out the latest research shows that the little we know about emotions is actually all wrong. And I mean really wrong.

Your fundamental emotions are hardwired and universal, right? We all have a crayon box with the same set of colors: anger, fear, happiness, sadness, etc.

And the latest research says that’s all wrong. W-w-w-w-what? You heard me. Actually, some cultures don’t have the full crayon box of emotions. 

And other cultures have crayon colors you and I have never seen before.

Utka Eskimos have no concept of “Anger.” The Tahitians have no concept of “Sadness.” This last item is very difficult for Westerners to accept… life without sadness? Really? When Tahitians are in a situation that a Westerner would describe as sad, they feel ill, troubled, fatigued, or unenthusiastic.

Norwegians have a concept for an intense joy of falling in love, calling it “Forelsket.”

Gigil (Filipino): The urge to hug or squeeze something that is unbearably adorable.

The Japanese emotion concept “Arigata-meiwaku” is felt when someone has done you a favor that you didn’t want from them, and which may have caused difficulty for you, but you’re required to be grateful anyway.

Where emotions and the autonomic nervous system are concerned, four significant meta-analyses have been conducted in the last two decades, the largest of which covered more than 220 physiology studies and nearly 22,000 test subjects. None of these four meta-analyses found consistent and specific emotion fingerprints in the body.

There is no set crayon box. Emotions aren’t hardwired or universal. They’re concepts that we learn. 

Let me ask you a question: would you mistake “regret” for “heartache”? Would you confuse “disappointment” with “mourning”?

I didn’t think so. Could you call them all “sad”? I guess… But would that feel remotely accurate to you? Again, I doubt it.

Fago, litost, and the rest are not emotions… to you. That’s because you don’t know these emotion concepts; 

If you had been raised somewhere different, you might feel something different. Emotions vary between people . And they vary dramatically between cultures.

When we experience a sensation, an emotion concept is triggered like a memory and actually constructed by the brain. It’s nearly immediate and you’re largely unaware of the process.

So now you know how emotions work. And that leads us to how we can develop that fabled “emotional intelligence” . So what’s the first step?

1) Emotional Intelligence Starts With Emotional Granularity

If the only emotion concepts you recognize are “me feel good” and “me feel bad” you’re not going to be very emotionally intelligent.

I see red, blue and green. An interior decorator sees periwinkle, salmon, sage, magenta and cyan. (And that is only one of many reasons you don’t want me decorating your house.)

The more time you take to distinguish the emotions you feel, to recognize them as distinct and different, the more emotionally intelligent you will become. This is called “emotional granularity.”

So, a key to EI is to gain new emotion concepts and hone your existing ones.

Emotionally intelligent people don’t say “me feel good.” They distinguish between happy, ecstatic, joyful and awesome.

They’re like the oenophiles of emotions: This sadness is bittersweet, with fine notes of despondency and an aftertaste of lingering regret.

…...if you could distinguish finer meanings within “Awesome” (happy, content, thrilled, relaxed, joyful, hopeful, inspired, prideful, adoring, grateful, blissful.. .), and fifty shades of “Crappy” (angry, aggravated, alarmed, spiteful, grumpy, remorseful, gloomy, mortified, uneasy, dread-ridden, resentful, afraid, envious, woeful, melancholy.. .), your brain would have many more options for predicting, categorizing, and perceiving emotion, providing you with the tools for more flexible and functional responses.

And the people who won’t shut up about the importance of EI are right. Having lower emotional granularity is associated with a lot of bad things — like emotional and personality disorders.

People who have major depressive disorder, social anxiety disorder, eating disorders, autism spectrum disorders, borderline personality disorder, or who just experience more anxiety and depressed feelings all tend to exhibit lower granularity for negative emotion.

More importantly, when you’re able to finely discern what you’re feeling, you’re able to do something constructive to deal with the problems causing them.

If the only negative emotion concept you have is “me feel bad” you’re going to have a difficult time making yourself feel better. So you’ll resort to ineffective coping methods like, oh, bourbon.

But if you’re able to distinguish the more specific “I feel alone” from merely “me feel bad” you’re able to deal with the problem: you call a friend.

And having a higher level of emotional granularity leads to good things in life.

Higher emotional granularity has other benefits for a satisfying life. In a collection of scientific studies, people who could distinguish finely among their unpleasant feelings— those “fifty shades of feeling crappy”— were 30 percent more flexible when regulating their emotions.

2) Emotional Intelligence Is In The Dictionary

If you don’t know what “ennui” means, you’re not going to be able to distinguish it. Learning more emotion words is the key to recognizing more subtle emotion concepts.

You’ve probably never thought about learning words as a path to greater emotional health, but it follows directly from the neuroscience of construction. Words seed your concepts, concepts drive your predictions, predictions regulate your body, and your body determines how you feel. 

Therefore, the more finely grained your vocabulary, the more precisely your predicting brain can calibrate to your body’s needs. In fact, people who exhibit higher emotional granularity go to the doctor less frequently, use medication less frequently, and spend fewer days hospitalized for illness.

Now being a Scrabble champ, by itself, doesn’t necessarily make you emotionally intelligent. You still need to sit with your emotions and spend the time to distinguish them and label them.

So are you angry, furious, or just cranky? Recognize your emotions. Make the feelings distinct.

But what if the dictionary ain’t cutting it? What if no word does justice to something you feel on a regular basis?

No problem. Emotions aren’t hardwired. They’re concepts. And that means something really, really cool: you can make your own…

3) Create New Emotions

I know, sounds crazy. But Lisa Feldman Barrett says this is another excellent way to increase emotional intelligence. And it’s not as hard as you think.

Ever feel “out of it” or just “off”? You had sensations but no concept bucket that “fit” them. So your brain shrugged and threw it in the “miscellaneous” pile.

So give those feelings a name. That dread you feel on Sunday night knowing you need to go to work tomorrow? “Sunday-nitis.” Or that special something that you feel around your partner? “Passion-o-rama.”

Those are unique sensations. Give them an emotion. Learn to distinguish them from the other forms of dread or elation.

Yeah, it might feel a little silly at first but don’t let that hold you back. In Japan they have “age-otori” — “The feeling of looking worse after a haircut.” We’ve all felt that. 

Happiness and sadness and even “age-otori” are all constructed concepts. They become real because we have agreed on them with others. Dollars are just green paper rectangles — until we all agree they have value.

Add new colors to your emotional crayon box and you can draw a better emotional life for yourself and others.

Sum Up

Here’s how to be more emotionally intelligent:

Emotions are concepts: They’re not hardwired or universal. They’re learned.

Emotional intelligence starts with emotional granularity: If your doctor came back with a diagnosis of “you’re sick”, you’d sue the quack for malpractice. Doctors need to be able to distinguish between “chancre” and “cancer.” And you need to know the difference between “sad” and “lonely.”

Emotional intelligence is in the dictionary: You can’t feel Fremdschämen if you don’t know what it is. So learn new emotion words so you can feel new emotions and increase your emotional granularity.

Create new emotions: We could all use a little more “passion-o-rama” in our lives. Name those unnamed feelings you have and share them with others to make them real.

For those who might want to read the full article, here's the link: 3 Secrets to becoming Emotionally Intelligent 

Thanks for sharing Thomas....the 'huggly' you sent it with sure showed me you aren't just reading :)