Neuroscience Reveals 3 Powerful Ways to Reduce Stress and Anxiety, and Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is clearly important. As my Inc. colleague Justin Bariso says, it makes sense that the better you understand and manage your emotions, and the emotions of people around you, the greater your chances of success.
Research backs that up. Developing greater emotional intelligence can lead to higher performance and pay as well as better professional and personal relationships.
But what if you feel your EQ is relatively low? Here are a few neuroscience-based simple ways — not necessarily easy, but simple — to significantly increase your emotional intelligence, especially in terms of managing your own emotions.
Because after all: If you can’t understand and manage your emotions, it will be even harder to understand and influence the emotions of the people around you.
1. Accept the emotion.
Accepting negative emotions rather than trying to change them — or, worse, judging them — can be surprisingly effective. A series of studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that accepting negative emotions — what psychologists call habitual acceptance — leads to better mental health.
Overall, these results suggest that individuals who accept rather than judge their mental experiences may attain better psychological health, in part because acceptance helps them experience less negative emotion in response to stressors.
The last sentence is key since eliminating stressors is impossible. Stuff inevitably happens. Eliminating every negative emotion is impossible. You can’t always control how you feel.
But you can control how you respond. The first step is to stop judging yourself for feeling angry, for feeling hurt, for feeling disappointed or upset or “emotional.” Not only are those feelings natural, but they’re probably also rational. (Who wouldn’t be upset if a big customer suddenly pulled their work?)
Don’t beat yourself up over how you feel. Accept it. Embrace it. Then decide what you will do in response. Maybe you’ll reframe the situation (more on that in a moment) so you can gain greater insight not into why you feel the way you do — because at this point, you just do — but the circumstances that caused you to feel this way. Maybe you’ll turn that emotion into fuel to spark a change in a situation, an approach, or a relationship.
Do that, and you’ll be much more likely to turn a negative (emotion) into a long-term positive. As the researchers write:
Habitually accepting mental experiences broadly predicted psychological health: psychological well-being, life satisfaction, and depressive and anxiety symptoms.
Acceptance helps keep individuals from reacting to — and thus exacerbating — their negative mental experiences.
Another key last sentence. While it sounds mad, getting mad at yourself for being mad only makes a bad situation worse. Getting frustrated with yourself because you feel frustrated only makes a bad situation worse. Judging yourself for having a natural emotional response makes you feel even worse.
Accepting your emotions will not only make you happier, it will let you turn your focus toward making a bad situation better.
2. Identify the emotion more specifically.
Let’s dig deeper into stress. Say you feel stressed. (Who doesn’t?)
“Stressed” has meaning, but it’s too vague. Most of the time, you’re stressed about a specific version of the future. Or about a certain decision you think may come back to haunt you. Or about an upcoming presentation, a conversation you dread having, or the like.
In short, you’re stressed about what neuroscientists call granular emotions.
This is a good thing because the more specifically you identify an emotion and the more granular you make it, the better. As Marc Brackett writes in Permission to Feel: The Power of Emotional Intelligence to Achieve Well-Being and Success:
Participants who were deemed granular were better able to differentiate their emotional experiences. Subjects who were low in granularity — called clumpers — were less skilled at differentiating emotions (e.g., angry, worried, frustrated).
When the two groups were compared … granular individuals were less likely to freak out … when under stress and more likely to find positive meaning in negative experiences. They also were better at emotion regulation — moderating their responses in order to achieve desired outcomes.
The clumpers, on the other hand, scored worse on those counts, tending to be physically and psychologically ill at a higher rate than the granular crowd.
While it might sound odd, especially since conventional wisdom says we’re better off moving past our emotions, taking the time to think about the reasons why you feel the way you feel will help you better deal with the way you feel.
The same is, of course, true where others are concerned: helping someone who feels “upset,” “stressed,” or “anxious” identify the specific source of an emotion helps them better manage that emotion.
3. Reframe the emotion.
Approximately 75 percent of Americans say they regularly experience physiological and psychological symptoms caused by stress. Research shows that Generation Z in particular is much less able to manage and deal with stress: feelings of fear, trepidation, and hesitance keep them from performing as well as they could.
Many of those people feel that’s just how they’re made.
But they’re wrong. As Lisa Feldman Barrett writes in How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain:
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.
In short, early on we learned — from the people around us, from the culture (and micro-culture) we grew up in, etc. — how to process what our bodies felt.
Which means we can work to unlearn and relearn some of our emotional responses.
Take stress. For many, stress is a negative. But it doesn’t have to be, especially if you reframe your initial emotional response.
A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that when people reframed their stress response as helpful — that their body’s natural response to stress, like increased heart and respiration rate, signaled their body was rising to a challenge — their blood pressure didn’t rise. In fact, their physiological profiles looked like what McGonigal describes as what happens in “moments of joy and courage.”
Nervous about an important sales demo? The fact you feel nervous is a good thing, because it means you have the chance to win a major account. Anxious about whether you can deliver an order on a tight schedule? That’s a good thing, because it means your company has the chance to be a hero for your customer.
If you don’t feel pressure on at least a semi-regular basis, that’s a problem. Pressure should be something you want to feel. Pressure means you’re in a position to achieve something meaningful, something important, something that truly matters to you. Otherwise, you wouldn’t feel stressed.
Accept the emotion you feel. Make it granular. Then reframe it. If you feel nervous, that’s a good thing, because it means you care. If you feel pressure, that’s a good thing, because it means you’re in a position to make things happen.
Not only can’t you always control certain emotions, but science says you don’t want to always control certain emotions. What you want to control, at least to some degree, is the way you manage and respond to what you feel.
Then you’ll not only be more likely to be successful, but you’ll also be a little happier.
