14 Tools for Better Work and Relationships from the Neuroscience of Emotions
My cheatsheet for applying techniques from the bestselling book, “The Emotional Life of Your Brain” by Dr. Richard J. Davidson
A few weeks back, I attended a seminar on “Educating the Emotions.” I’m involved in a non-profit tackling leadership and character formation of young people. Educating the emotions is a key part of that formation.
I was also personally interested. I’ve gone through lots of ups and downs in business. Part of the game has been to tame the hunter-gatherer in me, that part of my mind which overreacts to business threats as if it were 10,000 BC, fighting for survival as a tribesman in the jungle.
I’ve written in the past about 3 techniques that worked for me:
I would add sleep, nutrition (including fasting) and exercise to these set of tools. When these are on point, I am less perturbed by the setbacks and surprises of entrepreneurship.
One exercise stands out. Lifting barbells near or over the limit of my strength works like magic. Here’s my theory. Under the barbell — near or at your max — your body thinks it is going to die, all systems are on red alert, and it has no time all other concerns. Then your body celebrates your survival and physical activity by flooding your brain with happy hormones.
(If you want to explore strength training with barbells, I recommend this essay, program and app: Stronglifts 5x5. If you like it, go deeper with this book: Starting Strength.)
How could we use neuroscience to influence our mental and emotional states?
The molecular biologist who first taught me how to lift was also in the seminar. After exchanging some bro science, we went on and looked at the science of emotion.
He recommended this book: “The Emotional Life of Your Brain” by Richard J. Davidson. It explains the neuroscience behind emotions and ways to influence it toward specific states.
Here are the behavioral extremes of the book’s framework. Even if you don’t find yourself (or the person you are trying to help) in these extremes, they give you an idea on what kinds of emotional defaults the tools listed here are useful for.
- It takes you too long to recover from sadness, anger, anxiety, envy, insecurity and other unwanted emotions
- It takes you way too fast to recover from these emotions, and you’re like a robot lacking empathy
- You’re too pessimistic to get anything done
- You’re too optimistic and can’t anticipate and plan out for setbacks
- You find it hard to read people
- You care too much of what people may say that it is paralyzing
- You’re not sensitive enough to your emotions that you are sometimes surprised by explosions of anger and other unwanted emotions
- You’re too sensitive to signals from your body and emotions that you get paranoid about illnesses or you get panic attacks
- You react out of context (eg, laugh when it is inappropriate or have overreactive fears)
- You adjust yourself too much to whoever you are with that you lose your identity
- You don’t know how to focus and thus have very low productivity
- You cannot turn off your focus and sometimes lose the bigger picture
Below, I summarize the science, then I list and explain the tools the book recommends for the situations above. All quotes are from the book.
The science of emotions
After brain imaging technology got invented, scientists started correlating emotions with brain activity. Their findings point toward certain parts of the brain specializing in producing specific emotions. More interestingly, each of us has a default configuration (as usual, influenced by both nature and nurture) on the intensity of each of these emotion-producing parts of the brain.
This is similar to age-old categorization of personalities — from Galen’s four temperaments to the Big Five — but now based on measurable biological signals.
The book lists six dimensions in this model of personality. In each dimension, we have a default tendency set in our brains. Here is a random example I got from Googling. You can make a graph for your self by completing the test in chapter 3 of the book. The tools listed below are for nudging these default settings to the left or right.
I’ll explain each of these dimensions in relation to the tools below.
11 Tools to Influence Your Emotional Defaults
1 and 2. Too slow to recover from setbacks? Try mindfulness meditation and cognitive reappraisal training.
If it takes you a long time to bounce back from sadness, anger, anxiety and other unwanted emotions, you probably fall nearer the “Slow to Recover” side of the Resilience spectrum.
What’s the neuroscience behind this? “The brain signature of being Slow to Recover from setbacks is fewer and weaker signals from the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala, as a result of either low activity in the prefrontal cortex itself or too few or less-functional connections between the prefrontal and the amygdala.”
“To cultivate greater Resilience and faster recovery from setbacks, I recommend mindfulness meditation.” Good thing that the most popular meditation apps like Headspace, Calm and Waking Up are based on the traditions of mindfulness meditation or Vipassana. Meditation has shown to increase the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.
“In this form of mental training, you practice observing your thoughts, feelings and sensations moment by moment and nonjudgementally, viewing the simply as what they are: thoughts, feelings, sensations; nothing more and nothing less.”
The book recommends mindfulness training from the University of Massachusetts Medical School: https://www.umassmed.edu/cfm/
The other technique recommended by the book is “cognitive reappraisal training.” It is a reframing technique, also called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). “Instead of thinking the mistake reflects something consistent and fundamental about you, you consider the possibility that you made the mistake because you were having a bad day, or didn’t get enough sleep the night before, or because everyone is fallible.” The book suggests getting help from a professional, a skilled cognitive therapist.
3. Too fast to recover from setbacks? Sorry, not enough research at this time, but you can try this.
Greater resilience is better for most cases, but there may be professions that benefit from staying longer in the dark realms. Perhaps an emo song writer? Also, recovering too fast may blind you to the emotions of other people. Sometimes sadness or anger is the appropriate emotion to experience.
Unfortunately, the books says that there is very little research on how to move toward the Slow to Recover end of the Resilience spectrum, or weakening the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. However, it recommends focusing “intently on whatever negative emotion or pain you are feeling as a result of a setback.”
4 and 5. Want to make your outlook more positive? Delay gratification and try well-being therapy.
Most work require a mix of positive outlook and negative outlook. You need some positive outlook to envision and work toward a better future. You need negative outlook to manage risks, a key part of execution.
Is your default setting Little Miss Sunshine or Eeyore? It turns out that this configuration is set in your nucleus accumbens, located in the ventral striatum, and in the prefrontal cortex. The higher the activity in these areas, the more positive your outlook.
How do you increase activity in the prefrontal cortex? Delay gratification. “When you find yourself in a situation in which you are tempted by an immediate reward but you know the smarter, safer, healthier, or otherwise better choice is to wait for a future reward of higher value, pause and focus on the more valuable future reward.” Start with the little things. The more you do this, the better you become at it, even with the big things.
“Another way to strengthen connections between the prefrontal cortex and the ventral striatum is a technique called well-being therapy, developed by Giovanni Fava, of the University of Bologna in Italy.” Official website: http://www.well-being-therapy.com
6. Want to make your outlook more negative? Practice risk management.
An extreme level of positive outlook makes you complacent. To reach your goals, you need to anticipate obstacles and plan for them. In the profession of Project Management, this is done in systematically:
- Identify risks
- Score risks (prioritize based on probability and impact)
- Plan mitigation
- Plan contingencies
7. Design your environment to move you towards the outlook you need
The book suggests surrounding yourself with upbeat images and reminders of happy memories to make your outlook more positive. Change the images frequently, as often as weekly, to not get habituated with them.
“If you’d instead like to dial down your Positive Outlook, you might fill your home and work space with reminders of threats to your well-being, such as descriptions of natural disasters or news about environmental or economic threats.” Or just spend more time in Twitter.
8. Want to increase your social intuition? Practice reading people and do mindfulness meditation using social signals.
If you are like most people, you’d want more social intuition (exception below). According to the book, “research on emotional and social intelligence argues that greater skill in these areas presage better success in love, work, and life in general.”
“The brain of someone who falls at the Puzzled end of the Social Intuition dimension is characterized by low activity in the fusiform gyrus plus high activity in the amygdala.”
To increase fusiform activity, the book recommends first to practice in paying attention what is (socially) going around you: tone of voice, body language, facial expression. You can do this by putting more focus on the people around you, guessing what they are saying with their body language, then try confirming your guess.
The book also recommends this social intuition / microexpression training from renowned psychologist Paul Ekman: https://www.paulekman.com/micro-expressions-training-tools/
9. Overwhelmed by social signals? Use focusing techniques toward objects and the future, instead of people in the present.
People whose social intuition is too high may feel overwhelmed and get paralyzed by social signals. The book suggests the following: “Avoid looking at people’s eyes. Use your Attention training to pull your focus back from intense concentration on people’s body language and tone of voice.” (See how to train Attention below).
10. Design your social interactions to fit your desired level of Social Intuition.
“There are a few ways you might alter your environment to accommodate your degree of Social Intuition. If you are at the Puzzled end of the dimension and content to stay there, arrange your routine so you spend relatively little time with people, particularly strangers. That will limit the situations in which you misread or are puzzled by social signals. Working from home can achieve the same thing.”
“If on the other hand, you are at the high end of Social Intuition and easily distracted by social cues, limit your social interactions to specific times of the day when they cannot knock you out for a loop. Interacting with people during scheduled work breaks and meals, rather than off and on throughout the day, can limit this kind of disruption.”
Too Self-Aware? Try cognitive-behavioral therapy and mindfulness meditation. (Tools 1 and 2 again).
The book defines Self-Awareness as sensitivity to ones body and emotions. Like the other dimensions, there is debilitation in the extremes.
Too much self-awareness overwhelms one with signals. Examples in the book are hypochondriasis (irrational paranoia of being sick) and panic attacks.
According to the book, “individuals with high levels of Self-Awareness (emotional or physical) have greater activation in their insula, while those with little Self-Awareness have decreased activation.”
I turns out there has been a lot of research on panic disorder, and the “best validated treatment for panic disorder is cognitive-behavioral therapy. In this approach, patients learn to reframe or reappraise the significance of internal bodily cues.”
“An alternative to becoming less Self-Aware of your body, thoughts, and feelings by decreasing insula activity is to decrease the rest of the brain’s reactivity to the insula’s signals.” One way is to do this is to reduce activation of the amygdala and orbital frontal cortex (part of the prefrontal cortex). A proven way to do this is mindfulness meditation (see 1 and 2 above).
Not Self-Aware enough (Self-Opaque)? Mindfulness meditation also helps.
The other side of the spectrum of Self-Awareness also has its downsides. “Being blind and deaf to what your body is trying to tell you is a good way to miss important signs of illness, whether a fever that signals infection or a tightness in the chest that means a heart attack.”
“Being Self-Opaque has consequences for relationships, as well: If you cannot tell that your blood pressure is rising and your heart rate is increasing because you are angry, then you do not have a chance to walk it off before you have a crucial meeting, attend a conference with your child’s teacher, drive home during rush hour, or do anything else that anger can cause to go off the rails.”
“Paradoxically, one of the most effective strategies for increasing activity in the insula, and thus becoming more Self-Aware, is to also practice mindfulness meditation.” It turns our mindfulness has a regulating function in the mind, preventing extremely low and extremely high activity in the insula — extreme self-awareness and extreme self-opacity.
Want greater focus? Mindfulness meditation helps (again).
Similar to the spectrum of outlook, you’d want to control your level of focus depending on the work you need to do. Getting things done requires focus. Creative thinking requires letting go of focus — to be open to what is beyond your current worldview.
Here’s the neuroscience. “The Focused extreme of the Attention dimension is the result of enhanced activation in brain regions, including the prefontal cortex and parietal cortex, that constitute a circuit for selective attention. The prefrontal cortex is critical to maintaining attention, while the parietal cortex acts as the brain’s steering wheel, pointing attention to particular places and thereby focusing attention on a specific target.”
To improve focus, Dr. Davidson again recommends mindfulness meditation.
11. Want lesser focus? Try open-monitoring or open-presence meditation
“If you feel that your attention is excessively focused and wish to broaden it in order to take in more of the world, then open-monitoring or open-presence meditation can nudge you toward that end of the Attention dimension. In open-monitoring meditation, your attention is not fixed on any particular object. Instead, you cultivate an awareness of awareness itself.”
3 Tools Based on a Different Theory
Here’s a book based on a different theory of emotions: “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain” by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
I have not read it yet, but here’s an interesting video about it:
Emotions are not simply outputs from signals from different parts of the brain. To create emotions, the mind instantaneously constructs meaning from bodily signals based on past experiences. The video quotes from Dr. Barrett:
you are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. If you did not have concepts that represent your past experiences, all you sensory inputs would just be noise. With concepts, your brain makes meaning of sensation, and sometimes that meaning is an emotion.
Here’s a follow-up video that focuses on the application.
The video recommends these 3 for improving mood:
- Cold exposure
- Heat exposure (eg, sauna use)
- Reduce inflammation (get enough sleep; get enough exercise; keep a healthy weight; don’t spike your blood sugar; cut out refined carbohydrates, sugar, processed vegetable oils, transfats and artificial sweeteners).
This theory also highlights the importance of tools #1 and #2, mindfulness and cognitive reframing.
