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Emotional Intelligence is Overrated. Aim for Emotional Fitness Instead.
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What Emotional Fitness is
It's the idea that in order to lead healthy, happy emotional lives we need consistent habits and exercises that support our mental health and wellbeing.
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The Benefits of Emotional Fitness
- Decreased stress: you learn to manage your triggers.
- Better communication in relationships: it helps you to tolerate and manage difficult emotions and then find more productive ways to work through difficulties.
- Decreased anxiety: you train your mind to stop fearing its own emotional reactions.
- You stick with your goals: you learn to deal with emotions like anxiety, shame, regret.
- Increased self-awareness: you learn to build a better relationship with your emotions.
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Get to know your emotions
- Emotional clarity: Taking the time to deliberately reflect on our emotions, to observe and label them.
- Emotional myth-busting: Eliminating myths and misconceptions floating around people’s minds about emotions.
- Emotional tolerance: Learning to resist short-term gratification and instead invest in long-term values.
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Cultivate better mental habits
- Mindfulness: practicing mindfulness means building the mental muscle of awareness and attentional control.
- Cognitive restructuring: learn how to modify the content of our thoughts.
- Mental minimalism: just like we need to be good stewards of the stuff that we let into our lives, we also need to be good stewards of the stuff that we hang on to in our mental lives.
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The 'assumption of healthy normality'
There is an assumption that emotional pain and suffering is a deviation from a default happy baseline. However, it's incorrect. Psychological pain is everywhere.
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Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT)
The goal of ACT is not necessarily to reduce one's problematic thoughts and emotions. It is to help people effectively function while they are distressed and to promote more flexible and value-driven behaviors.
In other words, the primary goal is to promote 'valued living.'
Valued living
Valued living is going about your daily life in the service of values you find important. Engaging in these actions creates a sense of meaning and purpose.
The symptoms of psychological suffering are problematic when they are linked to behaviors that draw us away from valued living.
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The social foundation: emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence (or E.I.) is your ability to be aware of your own emotions, to recognize emotions in others and use that information to guide your behavior.
When you develop you...
The general categories of E.I.
- Self-awareness: Do you get anxious in loud environments? Self-awareness is knowing these things about yourself.
- Self-regulation deals with your ability to manage your own emotions.
- Motivation: You know how to motivate yourself and create or continue projects because you choose to.
- Empathy: It means recognizing the emotions of others.
- Socialization: It is your ability to navigate social situations, including conveying your ideas to co-workers or dealing with a conflict in a relationship.
Constructively confront someone
Our own fears keep us from confronting others. We fear that we'll lose something, hurt someone we care about, or that it will accomplish nothing.
- Recognize that fear in yourself and identify the real issues that led to the conflict.
- When you are able to discuss the issue, instead of firing accusations, describe your behavior using "I" statements: "I feel hurt that .............................."
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Emotional clarity
It means that we have a good understanding of how we feel emotionally.
Label your emotions
Use plain language. The more fluent you are with real emotional language, the more clearly you will be able to think about how you’re feeling.
Clarify your emotions
Get used to the idea of emotional complexity. When we feel upset, we're not feeling one single emotion. We are usually experiencing a blend of many emotions.
Training ourselves to look for and see this emotional complexity is key to better understanding ourselves when we’re upset and moving on in a healthy way.