If you've ever wondered why you can't think when you're feeling emotional, or why going for a walk seems to calm you down, there are real answers. They all come down to how your brain is built.
The good news is that you can learn to activate your intellectual brain while you're in an emotional state. It's literally a series of steps. Here's the neuroscience of emotional intelligence.
The Emotional Limbic System
The emotional brain is one of the three main brain systems proposed by neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean, who coined the term limbic system: a collection of brain regions that affect emotions. Two regions are most tied to emotion. Other limbic regions are tied to memory and learned response, which play a role in interpreting whether events warrant emotions.
Amygdala Controls our instantaneous emotional responses and encourages acting without thinking.- Thalamus Responsible for emotion processing such as fear, sadness, disgust, happiness, and pleasure.
Human beings have disappointed themselves for eons trying to control their emotions. Here's the secret: you can't. We have emotions, we don't control them. The limbic system sits on top of our brain stem, so we experience limbic arousal before the thinking part of our brain ever activates. What you can control, to some extent, is your response.
When one part of your brain is very active, it uses most of the blood flowing into your brain, and other areas get less. When you're highly emotional, the limbic system shows a lot of increased blood flow and electrical activity, while your thinking brain measurably powers down. That's why it's hard to think clearly when you're emotionally elevated.
Your Thinking Brain
The part of your brain that experiences conscious thought is the prefrontal cortex. It's responsible for decision-making and executive function, including the ability to weigh conflicting thoughts and suppress actions that could lead to bad social outcomes: a good thing to have when you're highly emotional.
“The prefrontal cortex is only about 4% of your brain, but it's the most energy-hungry part of it.”
Neuroscience of executive function
What You Can Do About It
The good news is that activating any other part of your brain de-energizes the limbic system, the same way your limbic system de-energizes the rest of your brain. That's why going for a walk when you're upset actually works: the motor cortex activates and your emotions de-energize.
One tool we use in our Emotional Intelligence workshops is a 3-step process designed to activate your prefrontal cortex before you decide on an action:
- 1. Name the emotion Stop and name the feeling you're feeling. This activates your brain's language centers, slightly de-energizing the limbic system, and makes sure you're dealing with the emotion instead of suppressing it.
- 2. Ask a question Questions start and direct thinking, which is exactly what gets your thinking brain working. Pick one to memorize in advance, like: what information am I leaving out, or what reasonable explanation could this other person have?
- 3. Ask what you'll be proud of later With your prefrontal cortex back online, you can make a genuinely intelligent decision instead of one you'll regret later. The best decisions are the ones you're still proud of after the emotion has passed.
Next time you find yourself in the emotional danger zone, try the three steps. You'll probably fumble it the first few times, and things will still turn out better than they would have otherwise. That's the feeling of wisdom.
Want your team making sharper decisions under pressure?.
This is exactly what we teach hands-on in our emotional intelligence workshop.
Explore the Gravity workshop: "Neuroscience of Emotional Intelligence"
