Emotions are a vast subject, but there’s one statement that holds true for everyone. The most desirable emotional state is happiness. Even though happiness is a mental state, the body is deeply affected by our moods. Chemical messages tell every cell how you feel. In its own way a cell can be happy or sad, agitated or content, joyous or despairing. The super genome amply confirms this fact. If your stomach has ever tightened from fear, the “gut brain” is eavesdropping on your emotion, and when depression afflicts several generations in a family, epigenetic marks may be playing a key role. Most polls find that around 80 percent of people describe themselves as happy, and yet other research indicates that at best around 30 percent of people are actually thriving, while rates of depression, anxiety, and stress continue to rise.
It is highly unlikely that a “happiness gene” will ever be discovered. The new genetics tells us that in complex diseases like cancer hundreds of separate genetic mutations are likely involved. Emotions are much more complex than any disease. But we don’t need to discover the happiness gene. Instead, we should give as much positive input to the super genome as possible, trusting it to produce positive output. Science may take decades to correlate the complex gene activity that produces happiness; in the meantime, the super genome connects all the input that life brings us.
Let’s contrast the kind of input that promotes beneficial gene activity with the kind that creates damage. Both lists contain items you are quite familiar with by now, but it’s good to see everything gathered together.
Meditation
Love and affection
Satisfying work
Creative outlets
Hobbies
Success
Being appreciated
Being of service
Healthy food, water, and air
Setting long-range goals
Physical fitness
Regular routine free of stress
It’s hard to imagine that someone whose life contains these things on a daily basis wouldn’t be happy. By the same token, the things that the super genome reads as negative must be avoided.
Stress
Toxic relationships
Boring, unsatisfying work
Being ignored and taken for granted
Constant distractions during the day
Sedentary habits
Negative beliefs, pessimism
Alcohol, tobacco, and drugs
Eating when you’re already full
Processed foods and fast food
Physical illness, especially if painful
Anxiety and worry
Depression
Unhappy friends
The two sides of human experience constantly vie for our attention, and it must be admitted that for most people, the scars of negative experience are hard to heal. Adding positive input certainly helps—if you were unloved as a child, being loved as an adult makes a huge difference. But happiness will never be bioengineered. Until we reach Part III, on consciousness and the genome, the mystery of emotions will remain a mystery. The lifestyle choices we offer are all worthwhile. Make no mistake about that. But the trail of clues leads farther.
Reading the menu: As in every section on lifestyle, the menu of choices is divided into three parts, according to level of difficulty and proven effectiveness.
Part 1: Easy choices
Part 2: Harder choices
Part 3: Experimental choices
Please consult this page in the diet section if you need a refresher on what the three levels of choice are about. You should make one change per week total, not one from each lifestyle section. Remember that whatever choices you make are meant to be permanent.
• Write down five specific things that make you happy. On a daily basis, consciously do one of them.
• Express gratitude for one thing a day.
• Express appreciation for one person every day.
• Spend more time with people who are happy and less time with people who aren’t.
• Set a “good news only” policy at mealtimes.
• As you go to sleep at night, take a moment to mentally review the good things that happened that day.
• Fix a weekly date night with your spouse or partner.
• Do one thing a week that brings someone else a moment of happiness.
• Make leisure time creative; go beyond watching TV and surfing the Internet.
• Set a worthy long-range goal and pursue it. Best is a lifelong goal (see this page).
• Find something to be passionate about.
• Cut back on exposure to bad news in the media—make do with one news program or reading one story online.
• Use the positive and negative input charts (this page) every day.
• Whenever a situation makes you unhappy, walk away as soon as you practically can.
• Don’t unload your negativity on others; seek sympathy and compassion instead.
• Do one thing a day that brings someone else a moment of happiness.
• Learn to deal with negativity after you calm down, not in the heated or anxious moment.
• Write down your personal vision of a higher life.
• Find one self-defeating habit and write down a plan to overcome it.
• Explore the time in your past when you were happiest and learn from it.
• Set out to improve your emotional intelligence (see this page).
Well-being depends upon happiness, yet most people don’t really make this connection. Instead they allow their emotional state to drift. Deepak was recently consulted by a woman in her late fifties who insisted that she led a lifestyle carefully groomed to eliminate the wrong food. She exercised regularly, and she was a high achiever who owned her own business and loved the work she did. So why was she afflicted with aches and pains, along with chronic insomnia, exhaustion, and a faintly depressed mood all the time?
It took half an hour to itemize all the particulars of her lifestyle, and then Deepak asked a simple question, which revolved around the woman’s insomnia. It was obvious that getting only six hours of sleep at night was causing almost all of her problems.
“What have you done to make your sleep better?” he asked.
“Nothing, really,” she replied. The woman had already revealed that her husband snored, the dog greeted dawn by jumping on the bed, and the slightest noise outside woke her up. Deepak pointed out some simple remedies, but she was barely listening.
“Wait a second,” Deepak said. “Do you think it’s important to take care of yourself?”
She hung her head. “I know I’m not good about that.”
“But you’re meticulous about so many things, like your diet.”
She looked even guiltier. “I do that for my family. Without me, they’d eat anything.”
Now the picture was clear. She was a person who burdened herself with everyone’s well-being but her own. Self-sacrifice was woven into her personal idea of happiness. The problem was that she had carried it too far. She forgot herself along the way and would carry any amount of stress because this fit her conception of being a good wife and mother.
The solution in the short run was to get her to do something about her insomnia. The solution in the long term was harder, though. She had to retrain herself to believe that her own happiness mattered. She had allowed her emotional state to drift, and therefore she wasn’t really connected to any real state of well-being. Her good marriage and high achievement were being undermined, and so were the positive lifestyle practices she attended to so carefully.
All of us put up with significant pain in our lives without trying to make changes. That’s why our easy choices are about turning your attention to what makes you happy, and actually thinking about specifics every day. You need to experience what it’s like to appreciate another person, for example. Appreciation, like love, isn’t theoretical. The actual feeling must register in the brain, and once it does, the mind-body feedback loop has something real to process.
When you take a moment at night to revisit the good things that happened to you during the day, you reinforce every positive experience. By consciously reminding yourself, you retrain your brain. A kind of filtering process is taking place. You select only the things you wish to reinforce, filtering out the mundane, irrelevant, and negative things. Once this becomes a habit, you will begin to experience a real shift in your personal reality. It will amaze you how much has been overlooked or taken for granted. Life isn’t good by itself; you must respond to it as good.
In the harder choices, we ask you to go deeper into what makes you happy on the inside. We all receive a barrage of media trying to convince us that consumerism leads to happiness, but very little messaging that points in the right direction, toward happiness as an inner state. This is another reason for making conscious choices—no one will do it for you. Only you can wean yourself off the twenty-four-hour news cycle, which inundates us with negativity. Only you can find something to be passionate about.
Unconsciously, you’ve cluttered your mind with years and years of experiences that deposit memories of tragedy, disaster, disappointment, and frustration. In the Vedic tradition (India’s ancient wisdom tradition) these memories reside in Chit Akasha (literally, “mind space”), and it’s in your Chit (consciousness) where you build a self. There is no separate compartment for thoughts, memories, and experiences that are objective, impersonal, and therefore selfless. Like a sand dune gathering a billion grains of sand, the winds of your life have deposited particles of experience in Chit Akasha, where they’ve become part of you. A sand dune has no choice but to be a passive collector of any debris that blows its way, but you can choose not to expose yourself to experiences that constitute negative input—refer back to the chart on this page.
Worthy goals: On a day-to-day basis, the most valuable choice on the menu is probably the recommendation to consult the lists of positive and negative inputs. Reminding yourself to maximize the positive and minimize the negative goes a long way. Yet we place a great deal of importance on being happy for life, and that depends more than anything on setting a worthy goal that can be fulfilled over a long time span. Momentary pleasure doesn’t have nearly the impact of a goal that you spend years to achieve, with every step adding more meaning and purpose to your existence.
What is your worthy goal going to be? This is a unique and important decision. For some people, raising a child toward a fulfilled adulthood is deeply satisfying, or developing a passion for charitable works. There are goals as lofty as reaching higher states of consciousness or as practical as building a family-owned business. You don’t have to decide once and for all. Your goal can and should evolve. The key to finding a goal that will sustain you for a long time is to be self-aware. Lasting happiness is tied to knowing who you are and what you are here to do.
No one is capable of being all things. In India, the one pursuit that will allow you to thrive in your life is known as Dharma. Dharma comes from a root word that means “to uphold.” If you are in your Dharma, the universe will uphold you, so it is believed. But each of us must test this theory out for ourselves. Modern people are fortunate to have the freedom to find their own Dharma; in the Indian tradition, the choice was basically limited to the work your father and mother did. But the principle remains the same: seek inner fulfillment and the path will be smoothed. The opposite is to put so little value on our happiness that you settle for lack of fulfillment. No one who settles can expect life to bring them much support; dissatisfaction only magnetizes more dissatisfaction to itself.
Dharma can be broken down into smaller compartments. Let’s do that now. Think about your worthy goal. For Deepak, it is service—call this an umbrella term, a single word or phrase that embraces many smaller, specific things, such as giving freely of your time, thinking of what others need, sympathizing with someone else’s problems, acting unselfishly, and so on. Rudy’s umbrella term is positive transformation—with the goal of leaving this planet a healthier and happier place than when he entered it. You can pick your own umbrella term. Among the possibilities that may inspire you are the following:
Love and compassion for all
Bringing peace and reducing violence
Improving education to decrease ignorance and lack of knowledge
Pursuing creativity
Protecting the weak and dispossessed
Promoting culture and tradition
Exploration and discovery in an area rich for those things
Being of service without judgment against anyone
Most people can find a worthy goal within these categories. Choose a goal without worrying that it must be permanent. Sit quietly and center yourself. Take a deep breath, exhale. Another deep breath, exhale. Now a third breath, exhale.
In your calm, centered state, think about the goal you want to achieve. Let’s say that you want to be of service. Ask yourself the following questions:
Am I already living my goal, even if it only occupies part of my time?
Is this activity really enjoyable to me?
Does it come easily and naturally?
Does it energize me rather than take away my energy?
Does it make me feel more like the person I want to be?
Am I in the right situation to keep pursuing my goal?
Do I have a sense that this activity is allowing me to grow?
These seven questions are critical for finding your avenue of greatest happiness, your Dharma. When you can answer yes to them, you are perfectly in your avenue of success. There are other things to learn and more skills to perfect, but you have done something invaluable: You have made success a living reality, an activity that will allow you to thrive today and tomorrow, not some distant day in the future.
The new genetics comes at an opportune time, because from a psychological viewpoint, happiness is at a crossroads. As a science, psychology and psychiatry have spent most of their history trying to heal mental disturbances; in other words, curing unhappiness. By now, though, most people have heard about the field of positive psychology, a name that sounds quite optimistic. In reality, some of the most publicized findings in positive psychology are pessimistic. They include the following:
• People are bad predictors of what will make them really happy. After getting more money, a bigger house, a new spouse, or a better job, they aren’t nearly as happy as they wanted to be.
• Happiness tends to be accidental and short term. An experience falls out of the sky that makes us happy for a while, only to vanish or feel stale and boring.
• Permanent happiness is a fantasy. If you are very fortunate and almost everything goes your way in life, you may achieve a kind of steady-state contentment, but it will fall short of being happy all the time.
• There is a set point for happiness inside each of us that we can change only temporarily. After any strong experience, whether positive or negative, we return within six months to our set point, and attempts to change it will most likely prove futile.
These are discouraging conclusions, but fortunately they are all provisional. Human nature is too complex to be reduced to a few hard-and-fast principles. The saving grace of positive psychology is that it sets happiness as a normal goal that we can train ourselves to reach. Despite your emotional set point, which returns you to your normal state of happiness or unhappiness, it’s estimated that 40 percent of a person’s happiness depends on the choices he or she makes.
We believe this number is too low, because it doesn’t take into account the new understanding of epigenetics and how experience gets marked down in our genes, not to mention how the epigenomes of our parents and grandparents affect us. Even less understood is how the microbiome is related to happiness, but at least we know that the “gut brain” is constantly sending an enormous amount of input to the brain itself.
We’ve described how stress can lead to epigenetic modifications that are detrimental. Fear can also cause epigenetic modifications to the genome. An intense fear reaction, sometimes paralyzing, takes place when someone has a phobia. Whatever induces the state of panic—spiders, heights, open spaces, the number thirteen—isn’t germane. It’s the brain’s response that creates the phobia. Recent studies suggest that the phobic response can be addressed at the level of gene activities. Researchers in Australia have identified which mammalian genes are modified when someone feels overwhelmed with fear. As with complex diseases like cancer, the picture is complex. In rats, nearly three dozen separate genes undergo epigenetic modifications in response to anxiety-provoking conditions. As a result of these studies and others like them, we now have a good idea of the genes that control the fear response in humans. Can these same genes be therapeutically targeted to alleviate phobias? The future will tell.
On the other side of the coin, positive emotions, especially love, can also change gene activity. In the animal kingdom, many species mate for life, including wolves, French angelfish, bald eagles, and even parasitic gut worms. One such creature is the tiny prairie vole. But when researchers investigated it closely, they were surprised to find that when prairie voles mate, gene activities change to trigger monogamous behavior.
In species that favor monogamous behavior, including our own, couples are likely to build homes together and share parental responsibilities. A specific neurochemical, oxytocin (popularly called the “love hormone”), has been associated with bringing on monogamy. As it turns out, when prairie voles mate, they turn up the activity of the gene that makes a protein in the brain that inserts itself into the surface of the nerve cell and serves a receptor for oxytocin. Such receptors bind with neurochemicals so that they can elicit their effect on the cell. In other words, even when oxytocin isn’t increased or less is available, it is more likely to have an effect on nerve cell circuits now that more receptors exist to bind with it.
The act of prairie vole mating accomplishes such changes by altering gene activity. Further studies have shown that epigenetics are at play in male prairie vole behavior. In these studies, genes for the oxytocin receptor, as well as the genes for the receptor for another neurochemical called vasopressin, were turned on to make more receptors. Vasopressin is known to make male voles spend more time with their mates and more aggressively protect them from other males. However, when the same genes were artificially turned up with drugs, the voles didn’t undergo these genetic changes or become monogamous. The desired results could be obtained artificially only if the males and females were allowed to spend six hours together in the same cage before the drug was given. The implications of this study are profound—instead of seeing brain chemistry as a one-way street, with a hormone like oxytocin dictating behavior, it turns out that brain chemistry needs the right kind of behavior in place as well.
Animals bond while human beings love. Different as those behaviors are emotionally, is the epigenome playing a critical role in both? In prairie voles, the oxytocin receptor gene was turned up by removing methyl marks from the gene. This leads to the desire for monogamy, and endocrinologists link it to feelings of love between a human mother and her newborn baby. In stark contrast, oxytocin receptor genes with too many methyl marks, which turn them off, is associated in human beings with autism. (In addition, specific mutations in the oxytocin receptor gene have also been associated with autism.) All in all, epigenetics has a profound effect on the oxytocin receptor, and if the prairie vole offers clues to human behavior, oxytocin helps us to become monogamous.
Clearly lifetime coupling can’t be genetically induced by the act of making love in humans. But is there a bond at the genetic level? Perhaps it requires first getting to know each other, as with the voles. Many neuroscientists already accept that oxytocin and vasopressin are necessary for people to bond with a mate and feel love. Certain neurochemicals stimulate areas in the brain used for getting pleasure as a reward, which creates a desire for more reward. This mechanism is involved in the action of cocaine, which stimulates dopamine receptors, potentially leading to a cocaine addiction.
There are people who describe themselves as being addicted to love. Besides the direct chemical effect of oxytocin, as pleasurable feelings are recalled and desired through the oxytocin reward center, love can indeed become an addiction.
But pleasure, in all its forms, can’t be equated with happiness. If you put food in front of a hungry animal, it will eat, and brain scans will show that the pleasure center in the animal’s brain has been activated. In a human being, emotional responses complicate the issue. When cranky two-year-olds refuse to eat, they can be very obstinate about it. In restaurants some people are extremely picky about what they choose from the menu, and depending on our mood, we can refuse food out of grief, distraction, anger, worry, and frustration. Human reactions depend on chemical messages, but there are so many of these that no one has found a simple chemical formula for happiness. We are the only creatures who respond to stimulus X with any response you can imagine. Brain chemicals serve the mind, not the other way around.
Happiness is a very new branch of genetic research, and there are ethical reasons why human subjects can’t be subjected to extreme emotional states. Our menu of choices is based on the best science available. Bringing positive input into our life is a major step and, fortunately, your mood is very likely to be improved when you address all the other lifestyle choices. Indeed, if a lifestyle change doesn’t make you feel happier, it won’t stick around for long.
But we are brought back to the mystery of emotions and the fact that unlike animals, merely feeling pleasure isn’t enough to make us happy. What is enough? Twenty years ago there was a fad for a newly discovered kind of intelligence, measured not by IQ (Intelligence Quotient) but by EQ, for Emotional Quotient. The key finding was that a person’s IQ is separate from their ability to handle emotions intelligently. Although some best sellers emerged that urged the importance of emotional intelligence, there’s no accepted standard for this. The most commonly accepted test for emotional intelligence, given to 111 business leaders, didn’t correlate at all with how their employees saw them. Thus the link between EQ and superior leadership ability—or superiority in any field—is up in the air.
We think a stronger argument can be made for emotional intelligence and happiness. Consider the following desirable emotional traits:
1. They have good impulse control.
2. They are comfortable with delayed gratification.
3. They can see how someone else feels.
4. They are open to their own emotions.
5. They know how emotions work and where each one leads to.
6. They successfully feel their way through life instead of thinking their way though.
7. They meet their needs by linking with someone who can actually fulfill them.
All of these traits would allow you to process your experience in a happier way, and it’s the processing that counts. You can process any event—a new baby, winning the lottery, moving to a new house—as a source of happiness or unhappiness. Human emotions don’t follow rules, which is why we are both creative and unpredictable. But within each person, there must be a way to comfortably relate to how you feel. To us, that’s the great benefit of emotional intelligence.
Let’s see how each desirable trait might apply in your own life.
Consumerism would collapse overnight if people didn’t act on impulse. Unthinking choices lead us to stop off at McDonald’s instead of eating a home-cooked meal that we know in advance will be more satisfying and healthy. On impulse we eat, drink, and spend too much. Like anything else you train your brain to do repeatedly, impulsiveness becomes a habit, and once entrenched, it’s very hard to supplant.
The root of impulsive behavior is lack of control. Most impulsive lapses are harmless, because we all like to lose control once in a while. But beyond that, losing control means that your impulses control you. Past lessons are never really learned if you can’t apply them the next time you have an irresistible urge. People with high EQs are the opposite. They learn from the past, and the primary thing they learn is that impulsive behavior is mostly self-defeating.
This is a lesson they actually feel. Their memories don’t go blank when it comes to how bad a hangover feels, or being overstuffed after a meal, or finding out that a time-share was a worthless purchase. In fact, having an emotional memory, which most people avoid, is something they are proud of. The memory bank of impulsive people is filled with terrible decisions they prefer to forget; the memory bank of people with a high EQ is filled with good choices that reinforce the next good choice.
What to do: Delay your impulsive action by waiting five minutes. If you still feel impulsive, take a piece of paper and write down the pros and cons of your impulse. Be sure to include how it felt the morning after you indulged in your last impulsive behavior.
Older people are often heard decrying that the young want instant gratification, but the key is to know which pleasures should be delayed and which can be enjoyed right now. It’s gratifying to move out of your parents’ house, get your own place, and support yourself. Going to law school or medical school delays this gratification for years and burdens you with considerable debt on top of everything. Society makes it easier to make such a choice because it holds out the promise of prestige and higher income after you graduate.
As we alluded to before, it’s largely the small choices where people find it hard to deny instant gratification. That’s why we find ourselves
Eating between meals
Overindulging in alcoholic beverages
Snacking while we watch TV
Sitting at home instead of getting some exercise
Stopping off for fast food
Loading up on sugar
Spending hours online instead of relating to real people
Blurting out things we later regret
Going on bad dates instead of waiting for someone better to come along
As with impulse control, which is closely related, people with a high EQ don’t seize on instant gratification. They aren’t motivated by an intellectual notion that this is good for them, or not entirely. They feel better when they postpone their pleasure under the right circumstances. They are flexible enough to lay down no hard-and-fast rules. Being flexible comes with a high EQ. When faced with a momentary temptation, they don’t say, “I’ll give in just this once. What can it hurt?” which is naked rationalization. Instead they say to themselves, “Is this really the best I can do? Let’s wait and see.”
What to do: Take a good look at your life and ask if you have been making problems by seeking instant gratification. Do you waste money on pointless purchases? Is your closet crammed with too many clothes? Is impulsive spending lowering your bank account? Is your freezer full of food you never get to?
If you see a problem, address it one activity at a time. When you are being tempted by a new pair of shoes, for example, or an extravagant purchase like a full-scale home gym that will soon be gathering dust, write down something further off that would bring you even more pleasure. Instead of the shoes, you can save for a vacation. Instead of the expensive gym, you can learn to play tennis and use public courts. Until the delayed gratification is brought to mind, it can’t compete with instant gratification.
It comes naturally to see how someone else feels. We’ve all had this ability since infancy, when our feelings depended heavily—sometimes solely—on how our mothers felt. Families are the schoolhouse for everyone’s emotional education, and of course some children are much more fortunate than others. They don’t learn bad habits that must later be unlearned. If you can’t easily see how someone else feels and know why, somewhere along the way you blocked an ability you were born with. Either you had a teacher, like a closed-off father, who motivated you in the wrong direction, or you made up your own mind that emotions aren’t a positive aspect of life. In any case, you no longer empathize.
People with a high EQ do. It gives good doctors a naturally comforting bedside manner. It makes people come around to a sales pitch, because they feel that their needs are being understood. At some level none of us can be fooled by insincerity and hypocrisy; we have extremely sensitive emotional gauges. With a high EQ, you find it easy to read someone else, looking beyond their words to how they actually feel.
What to do: To empathize with someone else, you have to want to. With people we love, this is easy—when our children hurt, we hurt. Extending this response to someone we like is also fairly easy. Knowing that you have the seed of empathy inside, you can choose to let it flourish. Listen to a stranger or a coworker as if they were friends. Notice how well they respond, then check your own response. If extending sympathy doesn’t feel good, there is resistance somewhere inside you. Perhaps you feel that other people’s problems impose a burden of responsibility on you. You might feel compelled to help or to worry about them.
Emotional intelligence is about coming to terms with these obstacles and turning them into virtues. It’s good to help others, but you don’t have to help everybody. It’s empathic to listen to another person’s story, but not over and over. Once you start to make these distinctions, you’ll find that empathy is a wonderful gift, not something to shun or be anxious about. There’s a happy medium between the extremes of being too soft hearted and too hard hearted. Set out to find the balance that works for you.
Being completely open to our own emotions is rare. Inside everyone is a desire to be seen in the best light, so we avoid exposing negative emotions, even to ourselves. But there is another force inside that counters this desire, a voice that reminds us of our guilt, shame, and bad deeds. Constantly telling yourself how good you are is just as far from reality as constantly telling yourself how bad you are. People with a high EQ have confronted the best and worst about themselves. As a result, they find self-acceptance at a much deeper level than most people.
Because we are so defensive about the parts of ourselves that provoke guilt and shame, finding self-acceptance isn’t easy or instantaneous. “Love yourself” is the goal, not the first step. Even to say “I am worthy of love” can be quite difficult for some people. They don’t have a foundation as well-loved children, which is how we adopt our ingrained sense of self. It’s helpful to realize two truths. First, having an emotion you don’t like isn’t the same as acting on that emotion. Nonetheless, guilt and shame don’t see any difference. They want to punish you just for having a thought. In reality, thoughts come and go; they are transient visitors, not aspects of your core self.
Second, you are not the same person that you were in the past. Guilt and shame don’t believe this—they constantly reinforce the message that you haven’t changed and will never change. In reality, you are constantly changing. The real issue is whether you want to reinforce who you are today or who you once were. People with high EQ find vitality in being themselves here and now. They don’t haul in withered selves from the past.
What to do: Anytime you have a guilty or shameful thought from the past, stop and say to yourself, “I am not that person anymore.” If the feeling returns, say the words again. Sometimes such recurrent thoughts are very stubborn. In that case, as soon as you can find a moment alone, sit with eyes closed, take a few deep breaths, and center yourself. We aren’t minimizing that wounds from the past can have a powerful influence over the present. The key is to realize the falseness of applying old hurts to new situations. With this conviction in mind, you can move toward self-acceptance day by day. Entering fully into the present moment is the best way to find self-acceptance, and vice versa. The more you accept yourself, the richer the present moment will become. Make this truth work to your advantage.
All actions have consequences, including emotions. As far as your brain is concerned, generating the neurochemicals that give you the feelings of anger, joy, fear, confidence, or any other feeling, is an action. Your whole body reacts to these chemical messages; therefore emotions can’t be seen as passive. Even a stoic who bottles up every unwanted emotion is doing something active. In this book we have been focusing on system-wide choices that bring benefits to mind and body together, using the super genome as their vehicle.
Once you know that negative emotions are harmful to you, your viewpoint changes. It’s no longer a free ride to attack someone else, feel envy, act out of spite, and fantasize about revenge. Each of these emotions rebounds on you, right down to your genes. True well-being isn’t possible when negativity is undermining it. People with a high EQ have come to terms with this truth, even if they don’t know about epigenetic modifications. Other people have certainly experienced how a parent’s anger or worry caused their children to suffer. On that basis alone, you can grasp that emotions always have consequences.
What to do: You can’t stop our negative feelings from having an effect, both on you and on your surroundings. When this fact sinks in, taking responsibility for your emotions is the most important step. There is no longer a valid reason to vent your anger at others, to make them afraid of you, to intimidate, bully, or dominate out of selfish motives.
No one is asking you to become saintly. Knowing that emotions have consequences is meant to benefit you. Open your eyes and watch how someone’s anger or anxiety changes the atmosphere for the worse. Feel it in yourself. Then ask if this is the effect you want to have. Emotions are alive. You have to negotiate with them, and when an emotion sees a benefit in changing, it will—you will.
Because so many people distrust their emotions and, particularly with men, try to hide them, it’s a shock to hear that feeling your way through life works better than thinking your way through life. In fact, this notion is so alien that we feel the need to point out some strong psychological findings as support for it.
First, researchers have discovered that emotions are part of every decision we make. There is no such thing as a purely rational decision. When you try to eliminate feelings from the equation, you are repressing a natural aspect of yourself. Do you spend more when you are in a good mood? You may not think so, but studies prove that good moods loosen up the pocketbook. Will you pay too much to feel more important, to look better in a salesman’s eyes? Many people will.
One of the most intriguing findings in this regard focused on an auction where subjects were asked to bid on a twenty-dollar bill. There was some confusion and laughter over this game. It seems obvious that nobody would bid more than twenty dollars for a twenty-dollar bill. But they did. Especially with males, winning the auction and beating out the other guy were more important than rationality, and so the bidding went higher and higher until someone gave up. Of course, the “winner” had made a ridiculous purchase, but emotion was able to override reason.
People with a high EQ don’t shirk from the emotional component of decision making. They are in touch with how they feel, and thus they tap into the deeper aspects of intuition and insight. Once you let your emotions comes to light, you don’t have to act upon them (which is the chief fear of repressed people who can’t bear the thought of letting their emotions get away from them). The next step is to realize that emotions possess intelligence, and beyond lies a deeper trust in intuition. Emotions unlock whole departments of consciousness that most people are unaware of. For every “gut feeling” that turns out to be right, there are countless other signals being sent to us every day that we need to feel, not analyze.
What to do: If you are already used to feeling your way through a situation, everything we’ve just said seems obvious, but that’s not true for someone who distrusts emotion. Learning to be guided at the feeling level means taking one small step at a time. To get started, think about all those times when you pushed your gut feeling aside and went with your head, only to say later, “I knew that would happen. Why didn’t I go with my feeling?” This isn’t a rhetorical question. The reason you didn’t go with your gut feeling is that you haven’t trained yourself to.
The next time you’re conflicted between all the reasons to do something and the simple fact that your emotions tell you not to, write down what each aspect of yourself is saying. Then act, following your head or your gut. When the situation resolves and you’ve found what the outcome is, go back and consult what you wrote down. This works best with people, because we all have some interaction—going on a blind date, working for a new boss, talking to a car salesman—in which feelings can’t be ignored and could make the difference between success and disappointment. If you note in writing what you felt, it becomes much easier to trust your intuition the next time. Repetition is the key, as well as looking with open eyes at how often your feelings turn out to be right.
When you have a need, who do you go to? Let’s be specific. You struck up the courage to say something difficult, and the person you talked to shot you down. You are hurt and discouraged. The sting of their words rings in your ears. What you need at that moment is solace and sympathy. If you go to a friend who listens politely, murmurs a platitude or two, and quickly changes the subject, you’ve turned to the wrong person. You wouldn’t go to a donkey for milk, so why did you do the equivalent in emotional terms?
The answer is complicated, but it involves emotional intelligence. When they hurt, most people are so desperate to unload their pain that they turn to the next nearby person. If they happen to be married, they will almost certainly turn to their spouse. But someone with a high EQ will know who is a sympathetic listener and who isn’t. They will turn to the one and avoid the other.
Consider a deeper need, the need for love. When this need is fulfilled in childhood—a critical part of having emotional intelligence—being loved has come from the appropriate source, one’s parents. But parents can be withholding and unloving, which creates emotional confusion. You grow up not knowing who can actually give you the love you need, and then what happens? You experiment rather randomly, going from one person to the other without being able to see who is capable of love. When you find someone who isn’t, who has a bit of love to give, but not very much, you are likely to choose that person anyway. A combination of insecurity, neediness, and emotional wounding leads you into relationships that turn out to be frustrating, disappointing, and in the worst cases, toxic.
Finding the right person to fulfill your needs is so basic for people with a high EQ that they are baffled when someone doesn’t. But the sad truth is that wounded people mostly seek out other wounded people or even people who are likely to hurt them. They are often made anxious by the behavior of someone who is emotionally healthy, because it threatens the isolated, closed-off emotional existence they are so accustomed to. Yet the effort must be made; otherwise, we stumble through life feeling enormously unfulfilled.
What to do: Most people find themselves somewhere between dating, courtship, marriage, and divorce. The gap between having a need and getting it fulfilled is something they understand. In all relationships, you can’t ask someone else for something they don’t have to give. We find ourselves doing that anyway, asking for sympathy from someone who is indifferent, for understanding from the self-centered, for love from the emotionally stunted, and worse.
Yet the steps to solving this dilemma aren’t as difficult as you might suppose. When you feel a need, turn to the person who you are certain is able to fulfill it. Who is that person? You can only know if you’ve seen them respond in a similar situation. Don’t guess. Don’t take a stab in the dark. People who are kind, loving, emotionally generous, and understanding don’t hide those traits. They live by them.
You will soon find that most people want to be there for you. Who hasn’t found a pleasant stranger on an airplane who winds up listening to our family situation, romance, work, and even our deep secrets? There’s an impulse to hold back, naturally, out of fear of rejection. But it’s not hard to first detect a sign of openness and then to take it one step at a time. A little openness leads to more, and if you see that the other person has no more to give—no more time, advice, sympathy, or interest—you will take the hint.
The only caveat is this: even someone who has love, sympathy, compassion, and understanding to give also has the right to say no. We realize how hard this is to accept. Rejection is the biggest reason that most people shy away from encounters that contain any emotion. It’s easier to share your trouble with a familiar friend or family member who sits there like a blank wall. Blankness is better than no. But needs are meant to be fulfilled, and you must develop the courage to find the right people, even though you risk being sent away.
The chances are that you won’t be, however. Not every need is for undying love. The most common need is to be listened to, followed closely by the need for sympathy and the need to be understood. Validation is the common thread. Once you’ve discovered that you can be validated—and deserve to be—you will be stronger inside. Then asking for love becomes much easier.
Emotions evoke powerful responses, and all the needs we’ve talked about lead to changes in the body. Science lags behind wisdom in this area. As a species we’ve had thousands of years to become wiser, an achievement not to be disparaged because everyone plays the fool at times. We look forward to the day when genetics finds the magic combination of genetic modifications that lead to wisdom. For now, the best guide is our emotions, which may keep ahead of science no matter how much genetics tries to catch up.