Emotions Aren’t What You Think: A Short Guide to Building Emotional Intelligence
Author: Meg Heinicke
How are you feeling right now? Your response will be something you are conscious of, in the moment. Maybe you are feeling calm, agitated or hungry. What if I asked you about your present emotions? Your answer could be happy, sad, nervous. You might consider the latter as more subconscious, more of an involuntary reaction to stimuli. What if emotions are not as reactive as we might believe? This is an important question for any of us who would like to improve our emotional intelligence (which is all of us!). Our emotional intelligence (or EQ as it is also known), is the ability to effectively manage and understand our emotions (and those of others). People with high EI generally have better interpersonal skills and better relationships. If we want to improve our EI, we must first understand the power we have over our emotions.
For a long time, scientists believed that emotions were caused by dedicated brain circuits. A trigger would elicit a response such as fear, anger, happiness etc. and the brain and body would react. But what if the emotions are not happening to you. What if the response is not reactive as we might assume? Psychologist and neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Feldman-Barrett has spent decades researching the nature of emotion in the brain. She has discovered that emotions are actually constructed by the brain. The brain is predicting not reacting, and these “guesses” are made so rapidly that it feels like an uncontrollable reaction. In fact, says Dr. Feldman-Barrett, the emotions are created by you. You have more control over those guesses that you might think.
In books, podcasts, TED talks and lectures, Dr. Feldman-Barrett is essentially trying to tell us - emotions are not what we think they are. It might feel like emotions happen to you, that you react to something. However, the research shows that we are not born with innate emotional circuits. Rather, emotions are built by your brain in specific situations from a set of basic ingredients. We have a predicting brain, a body that causes you to feel affect, and a set of shared concepts that are absorbed into your brain as it develops throughout your lifetime. Why is this useful to know? If we understand that emotions such as anxiety and trauma are built by the brain, then we have power to control them. It was eye opening to me to look at research that validates the idea that emotions are the result of predictive activity based on what we remember about the past - including any trauma. These responses might be highly automatic, but with practice, we can better manage them. Like training for an athletic competition, we can build the muscles that interpret emotions. I find this concept both empowering and challenging, but ultimately it reveals our agency. Challenging life events can cause crippling emotional pain. Relationships (past or present) can sweep us up into emotional turmoil. As Dr. Feldman-Barrett says, “You are responsible for changing something not because you are to blame, but because you are the only person who can”.
Imagine this scenario: you are asked to give a speech to a room of 100 people. Perhaps you loathe public speaking, but you can’t decline the request. You find yourself minutes from go time, waiting off stage clutching your papers with sweaty hands. Your heart is racing and so is your mind. In this moment, your brain is sifting through a lifetime of experience, making thousands of guesses at the same time, weighing the probabilities, trying to answer the question, what is this most like based on my past experiences? This is happening in the blink of an eye. Your brain is not reacting to this situation, but rather it is using past experience to predict and construct your experience. The racing heart is part of the affect or feeling part of your experience. The emotional part of the experience is the story our brain is telling us. What if we change the story? What if we tell ourselves that we are not experiencing a frenzy of fear but a frenzy of passion and excitement? It’s not nerves, it's healthy adrenaline! This is perhaps even harder than CBT style reframing (focusing on what will go right, not all the things that could go wrong), because the emotions are so closely tied to the physical reaction. It comes down to interpretation. You would have the same arousal symptoms if say, you were about to get down on one knee with a ring box in your hand. The story that your brain is telling you there, based on context, would be one of excitement and joy. I find this an empowering concept - that we need not be at the mercy of an emotional reaction; we have the power to construct it. As Dr. Feldman-Barrett shares in an anecdote, “Get your butterflies flying in formation”. I can’t think of a better analogy.
Understanding the mechanisms behind emotions can be helpful not only for our own emotional regulation but it can help us understand the emotions of people around us. Dr. Feldman-Barrett’s work shows us that we have the ability to cultivate emotional intelligence. In her words, emotions are built, not built-in and we are the architects of our emotional experience. What will you start building today?