Search Inside Yourself: Increase Productivity, Creativity and Happiness [ePub edition]

Emotional intelligence is trainable, even in adults. This claim is based on a fairly new branch of science known as “neuroplasticity.” The idea is that what we think, do, and pay attention to changes the structure and function of our brains. A very interesting example of this comes from drivers of traditional black cabs in London. To get a license to drive that cab, you need to navigate the twenty-five thousand streets of London and all its points of interest in your head. This is a difficult test that can take two to four years of intense training to prepare for. Research has shown that the part of the brain associated with memory and spatial navigation, the hippocampus, is bigger and more active in London cabbies than in the average person. More interestingly, the longer someone has been driving a cab in London, the larger and more active her hippocampus.

One very important implication of neuroplasticity is that we can intentionally change our brains with training. For example, research by my friend and fellow Search Inside Yourself teacher Philippe Goldin shows that after just sixteen sessions of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), people with social anxiety disorder are able to increase activity in the parts of their brains associated with self-regulation, linguistic processing, and attention when working with their own negative self-beliefs.

Think about it, if we can train our brains to overcome even serious emotional disorders, just imagine the possibility of using it to greatly improve the quality of our emotional lives. That is the promise of the science and practices described in these pages.

A fascinating example of the application of neuroplasticity comes from the work led by Christopher deCharms.

DeCharms had people who suffer from chronic pain lie inside a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner and, using real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (rtfMRI) technology, he showed each participant an image of a fire on a video screen. The greater the neural activity in the parts of their brains associated with their pain, the greater the fire became. By using that visual display, he could get people to learn to up- or down-regulate that brain activity and, with that ability, participants reported a corresponding decrease in their levels of pain. He calls this “neuroimaging therapy.”

Brain. Trainable. Good.

Train Attention

How do we begin training emotional intelligence? We begin by training attention. This may seem a little counterintuitive at first. I mean, what does attention have to do with emotional skills?

The answer is that a strong, stable, and perceptive attention that affords you calmness and clarity is the foundation upon which emotional intelligence is built. For example, self-awareness depends on being able to see ourselves objectively, and that requires the ability to examine our thoughts and emotions from a third-person perspective, not getting swept up in the emotion, not identifying with it, but just seeing it clearly and objectively. This requires a stable and clear, non-judging attention. Another example shows how attention relates to self-regulation. There is an ability called “response flexibility,” which is a fancy name for the ability to pause before you act. You experience a strong emotional stimulus, but instead of reacting immediately as you normally would (for example, giving the other driver the bird), you pause for a split second, and that pause gives you choice in how you want to react in that emotional situation (for example, choosing not to give the other driver the bird, which may save you a lot of trouble because the other driver may be an angry old man with golf clubs who turns out to be the father of the woman you’re dating). That ability depends again on having a quality of attention that is clear and unwavering.

To quote Viktor Frankl, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.” What a mind of calmness and clarity does is to increase that space for us.

The way to train this quality of attention is something known as “mindfulness meditation.” Mindfulness is defined by Jon Kabat-Zinn as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”

The famous Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh defined mindfulness very poetically as “keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality,”

which I really like, but I found Jon’s definition easier to explain to the engineers, and I like the engineers. Mindfulness is a quality of mind that we all experience and enjoy from time to time, but it is something that can be greatly strengthened with practice, and once it becomes sufficiently strong, it leads directly to the attentional calmness and clarity that forms the basis of emotional intelligence.

There is scientific evidence showing that improving our ability to regulate our attention can significantly impact how we respond to emotions. An interesting study by neuroimaging researcher Julie Brefczynski-Lewis and colleagues revealed that when expert meditators (those with ten thousand or more hours of meditation training) were subjected to negative sounds (for example, a woman screaming), they showed lesser activation in the part of the emotional brain called the amygdala compared to novice meditators.

Furthermore, the more hours of meditation training the expert had, the lower the activation in the amygdala. This is fascinating because the amygdala has a privileged position in the brain—it is our brain’s sentinel, constantly scanning everything we see for threats to our survival.

The amygdala is a hair trigger, which would rather be safe than sorry. When your amygdala detects what looks like a threat to your survival, such as a saber-toothed tiger charging at you or your boss slighting you, it puts you in a fight-flight-freeze mode and impairs your rational thinking. I find it fascinating that, simply with attention training, you can become good at regulating a part of the brain as primitive and important as the amygdala.

Another set of studies comes from the UCLA lab of Matthew Lieberman.

There is a simple technique for self-regulation called “affect labeling,” which simply means labeling feelings with words. When you label an emotion you are experiencing (for example, “I feel anger”), it somehow helps you manage that emotion. Lieberman suggested the neural mechanisms behind how that process works. The evidence suggests that labeling increases the activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC), commonly associated with being the brain’s “brake pedal,” which in turn increases the activation of part of the executive center of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), which then down-regulates the amygdala.

Another related study by David Creswell and Matthew Lieberman showed that for people strong in mindfulness, the neural process just described works even better and an additional part of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) gets recruited as well. It suggests that mindfulness can help your brain utilize more of its circuitry, thereby making it more effective at managing emotions.

Train at the Level of Physiology

Once we develop strong, stable, and perceptive attention, what do we do with it? We focus it on our bodies, of course. This again seems a little counterintuitive. What have our bodies got to do with developing emotional intelligence?

There are two very good reasons to work with our bodies: vividness and resolution.

Every emotion has a correlate in the body. Dr. Laura Delizonna, a researcher turned happiness strategist, very nicely defines emotion as “a basic physiological state characterized by identifiable autonomic or bodily changes.”

Every emotional experience is not just a psychological experience; it is also a physiological experience.

We can usually experience emotions more vividly in the body than in the mind. Therefore, when we are trying to perceive an emotion, we usually get more bang for the buck if we bring our attention to the body rather than the mind.

More importantly, bringing the attention to the body enables a high-resolution perception of emotions. High-resolution perception means your perception becomes so refined across both time and space that you can watch an emotion the moment it is arising, you can perceive its subtle changes as it waxes and wanes, and you can watch it the moment it ceases. This ability is important because the better we can perceive our emotions, the better we can manage them. When we are able to perceive emotions arising and changing in slow motion, we can become so skillful at managing them, it is almost like living that cool scene in the movie The Matrix, in which Keanu Reeves’s character, Neo, dodges bullets after he becomes able to perceive the moments the bullets are fired and see their trajectory in slow motion. Well, maybe we’re not that cool, but you get the point. Unlike Neo, we’re accomplishing our feat not by slowing down time, but by vastly upgrading our ability to perceive the experience of emotion.

The way to develop high-resolution perception of emotion is to apply mindfulness to the body. Using anger as the example, you may be able to train yourself to observe your mind all the time and then to catch anger as it arises in the mind. However, in our experience, it is far easier and more effective to do it in the body. For example, if your bodily correlate to anger is tightness in your chest, shallow breath, and tightness in your forehead, then when you’re in an awkward social situation, the moment your chest tightens, your breath shallows, and your forehead tenses up, you know you are at the moment of arising anger. That knowledge gives you the ability to respond in ways of your own choosing (such as leaving the room before you do something you know you will regret, or choosing to allow the anger to bloom if that’s the right response for the situation).

Essentially, because emotion has such a strong physiological component, we cannot develop emotional intelligence unless we operate at the level of physiology. That is why we direct our mindfulness there.

Last but not least, a useful reason to develop a high-resolution perception of the body is to strengthen our intuition. A lot of our intuition comes from our body, and learning to listen to it can be very fruitful. Here is an illustrative example from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink:

Imagine that I were to ask you to play a very simple gambling game. In front of you are four decks of cards—two of them red and the other two blue. Each card in those four decks either wins you a sum of money or costs you some money, and your job is to turn over cards from any of the decks, one at a time, in such a way that maximizes your winnings. What you don’t know at the beginning, however, is that the red decks are a minefield. . . . You can win only by taking cards from the blue decks . . . The question is how long will it take you to figure this out?

A group of scientists at the University of Iowa did this experiment a few years ago, and what they found is that after we’ve turned over about fifty cards, most of us start to develop a hunch about what’s going on. We don’t know why we prefer the blue decks, but we’re pretty sure, at that point, that they are a better bet. After turning over about eighty cards, most of us have figured the game out and can explain exactly why the first two decks are such a bad idea. But the Iowa scientists did something else, and this is where the strange part of the experiment begins. They hooked each gambler up to a polygraph—a lie detector machine—that measured the activity of the sweat glands that all of us have below the skin in the palms of our hands. Most sweat glands respond to temperature, but those in our palms open up in response to stress—which is why we get clammy hands when we are nervous. What the Iowa scientists found is that gamblers started generating stress responses to red decks by the tenth card, forty cards before they were able to say that they had a hunch about what was wrong with those two decks. More importantly, right around the time their palms started sweating, their behavior began to change as well. They started favoring the good decks.

There may be a neurological explanation for why intuition is experienced in the body. Matthew Lieberman’s review of research showed “evidence suggesting that the basal ganglia are the neuroanatomical bases of both implicit learning and intuition.” The story behind basal ganglia is, once again, best told by our friend Daniel Goleman:

The basal ganglia observes everything we do in life, every situation, and extracts decision rules. . . . Our life wisdom on any topic is stored in the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia is so primitive that it has zero connectivity to the verbal cortex. It can’t tell us what it knows in words. It tells us in feelings, it has a lot of connectivity to the emotional centers of the brain and to the gut. It tells us this is right or this is wrong as a gut feeling.

That may be why intuition is experienced in the body and the gut, but it cannot be easily verbalized.

From Mindfulness to Emotional Intelligence

Our approach to cultivating emotional intelligence begins with mindfulness. We use mindfulness to train a quality of attention that is strong both in clarity and stability. We then direct this power-charged attention to the physiological aspects of emotion so we can perceive emotion with high vividness and resolution. The ability to perceive the emotional experience at a high level of clarity and resolution builds the foundation for emotional intelligence.

And we live happily ever after.

In the upcoming chapters, we will explore this approach in more detail and then build additional skills on top of it to develop all five domains of emotional intelligence.

Mindfulness in Two Minutes

Most evenings, before we sleep, my young daughter and I sit in mindfulness together for two minutes. I like to joke that two minutes is optimal for us because that is the attention span of a child and of an engineer. For two minutes a day, we quietly enjoy being alive and being together. More fundamentally, for two minutes a day, we enjoy being. Just being. To just be is simultaneously the most ordinary and the most precious experience in life.

As usual, I let my experience with a child inform how I teach adults. This daily two-minute experience is the basis of how I introduce the practice of mindfulness in introductory classes for adults.

In learning and teaching mindfulness, the good news is that mindfulness is embarrassingly easy. It is easy because we already know what it’s like, and it’s something we already experience from time to time. Remember that Jon Kabat-Zinn skillfully defined mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.” Put most simply, I think mindfulness is the mind of just being. All you really need to do is to pay attention moment-to-moment without judging. It is that simple.

The hard part in mindfulness practice is deepening, strengthening, and sustaining it, especially in times of difficulty. To have a quality of mindfulness so strong that every moment in life, even in trying times, is infused with a deep calmness and a vivid presence, is very hard and takes a lot of practice. But mindfulness per se is easy. It is easy to understand and easy to arise in ourselves. That ease is what I capitalize on as an instructor.

In my classes, after explaining some of the theory and brain science behind mindfulness, I offer two ways to experience a taste of mindfulness: the Easy Way and the Easier Way.

The creatively named Easy Way is to simply bring gentle and consistent attention to your breath for two minutes. That’s it. Start by becoming aware that you are breathing, and then pay attention to the process of breathing. Every time your attention wanders away, just bring it back very gently.

The Easier Way is, as its name may subtly suggest, even easier. All you have to do is sit without agenda for two minutes. Life really cannot get much simpler than that. The idea here is to shift from “doing” to “being,” whatever that means to you, for just two minutes. Just be.

To make it even easier, you’re free to switch between the Easy Way and the Easier Way anytime during these two minutes. Any time you feel like you want to bring awareness to breathing, just switch to Easy. Any time you decide you’d rather just sit without agenda, just switch to Easier. No questions asked.

This simple exercise is mindfulness practice. If practiced often enough, it deepens the inherent calmness and clarity in the mind. It opens up the possibility of fully appreciating each moment in life, every one of which is precious. It is for many people, including myself, a life-changing practice. Imagine—something as simple as learning to just be can change your life.

Best of all, it is something even a child knows how to do.

In the next chapter, we will take a deep dive into mindfulness.