Your Emotional Styles
THE FOLLOWING THERAPEUTIC suggestions address the six dimensions of emotional style that Dr. Richard Davidson has identified in his research. Full descriptions of these practices and the neurological structures associated with each emotional style, which in some cases include changes in living and working environments, can be found in The Emotional Life of Your Brain, by Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley.
Resilience (from slow to recover to fast to recover): Being slow to recover might keep you engaged with a difficult emotion for a possibly uncomfortable amount of time, whereas being fast to recover might speed you through an emotion so quickly that you won’t actually gain much emotional depth or the capacity to empathize with others. Richardson suggests traditional Buddhist mindfulness meditations (especially the empathy-focused form called tonglen meditation) if you’re a little too fast to recover, and cognitive behavioral therapy if your recovery is slow enough to provoke uncomfortably extended periods of emotional activation.
Outlook (from negative to positive): Richardson doesn’t glorify a positive outlook, because it tends to interfere with people’s ability to plan for the future, learn from their mistakes, and delay gratification. However, he does note that staying in a continually low mood isn’t an optimum situation either. To bring balance to an overly positive outlook, Richardson suggests learning to plan for the future and think things through more carefully as you learn to delay gratification. (I suggest that you request some assistance from your healthy anxiety and your healthy shame as well.) To bring balance to an overly negative outlook, Richardson suggests intentionally identifying positive things about yourself and others, expressing gratitude regularly, and complimenting others so you can create healthier social connections based on warm and caring interactions.
Social Intuition (from socially intuitive to puzzled): People who are socially puzzled also tend to be low in empathic awareness. In order to address people at the puzzled end of this dimension, Richardson suggests a number of different sensitivity-raising and social-interaction exercises to help people become more aware of faces, bodies, nuances, gestures, and social signals. To help people on the opposite end of this dimension relieve their intense social awareness, Richardson suggests reducing social interaction and eye contact, managing overstimulation, and working in the Resilience dimension to move toward the fast to recover pole.
Self-awareness (from self-aware to self-opaque): If you’re too self-aware, you might be so attentive to every change in your body, in your thoughts, and in your emotions that you lose track of the external world, or you might become uncomfortably emotionally activated about every change you sense. On the other hand, if you’re too self-opaque, you might continually miss important cues about your health, your emotions, your thoughts, and your preferences. Richardson suggests Buddhist mindfulness meditations for both situations, as they may help you become more aware of your inner world in the case of self-opaqueness and more able to calm your reactivity in the case of overactive Self-awareness.
Sensitivity to Context (from tuned in to tuned out): Being insensitive to context can make people socially inappropriate—they can miss a lot of nuance and become unable to modify their emotional responses in differing situations. There is not a lot of research on this dimension, and Richardson suggests deep breathing and a form of exposure therapy to help people distinguish between different contexts and different levels of emotional activation. For people who are so sensitive to context that they lose track of themselves in social interactions, he suggests that they work in the Self-awareness dimension in order to become more familiar with their own authentic emotions, thoughts, and preferences.
Attention (from focused to unfocused): Davidson suggests two forms of meditation to address people’s capacity for Attention. If people tend to be unfocused, he suggests mindfulness meditations that train them to focus on specific objects for increasing periods of time. However, if people are overly focused and unable to see the big picture or attend to more than one thing at a time, he suggests a meditation practice called open monitoring, which helps people open up their focus and become aware of their very awareness itself.