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Emotional Intelligence

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Daniel Goleman Introduces Emotional Intelligence | Big Think

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Mindfulness Dissolves Thoughts — Attention Is What’s Left Over, with Jon Kabat-Zinn | Big Think

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The mind is like an untrained puppy with its favorite toys that it likes to grab onto and vigorously shake, and that it never tires of running after," writes Donald Altman. He offers a practice to tame our inner puppy mind.

Can you think of an example in which your inability to focus or think clearly adversely affected your life? If you normally focus on the negative during stressful times, it may surprise you to know that you have a choice. Skillfully using the mind's faculty of attention can not only make life more tolerable, but also enhance it with greater joy, meaning, and hope.

One wonderful illustration of the power of attention can be found in the life of the brilliant mathematician and economist John Nash, whose struggles were chronicled in the film A Beautiful Mind (Goldsman and Nasara 2001). Nash was tormented by delusions that were so real that they skewed his reality and made daily living extremely hard. Eventually, he came to recognize that his mind was not always playing fair, because it often depicted illusion-actually, delusion-as fact. Near the end of the film, Nash is asked if the imaginary individuals who were part of his psyche are still with him. Nash pauses and then wisely answers that although he still sees these individuals, he chooses to ignore them. In his own way, Nash learned the essential lesson that thoughts in the mind-even the most compelling and persistent ones-are not necessarily truth. While John Nash's story is an extreme one, it points out what can happen when you take your own thoughts too seriously.

The thing is, we all have the tendency to take our thoughts more seriously than we would the thoughts of another because they come from within our own heads! While this is a natural tendency, it doesn't need to be an enduring one.

Are you ready to explore you own inner world of thoughts? As you take on the experiences that follow, keep in mind that your thoughts are not necessarily facts-no matter how critical the thoughts might be. You can observe them in a neutral way, just as a detective looks for clues.

What's Rattling Around in There?

The good news is that your brain is already wired to attain mindful awareness. This ability to know what you are thinking and feeling is centered in the part of the brain located just behind your forehead and eyes-known as the prefrontal cortex. When you align your awareness, you will be activating and lighting up the circuits, the easier it becomes to notice thoughts in a more neutral and impartial way so that you can examine them more easily.

Let's do a short practice to begin training and taming your mind's attention. I like to call this "training the puppy mind," because the mind is like an untrained puppy with its favorite toys that it likes to grab onto and vigorously shake, and that it never tires of running after. It takes a lot of training and consistency to teach a puppy to come when you call its name, as well as to get it to sit and heel at your side as you walk. This takes many repetitions and a lot of time. So, too, with puppy mind.

Practice: Training the Puppy Mind

For the next three minutes, get up and walk around the room or space that you are in. Do this without any particularly goal in mind. Go wherever or do whatever attracts your attention. If you need to attend to a task you've been thinking about, go and do that. When time is up, come back to the book, with a pad of paper and a pencil.

Congratulations on letting your puppy mind wander free. Now, using the pad of paper, try to track all the places your puppy mind visited when you let it run free for those three minutes.

Write down as many thoughts as you can recall. Don't worry if there are some (or many) that you can't quite put your finger on. Thoughts often fall into the following categories. Use this list to jog your memory of thoughts you engaged in over those three minutes:

Thoughts about the future

Thoughts or memories related to the past

Thoughts about potential conversations with others

Thoughts related to physical sensations, such as hunger, craving, pain and so on

Fantasies that provide a feeling of pleasure or escape

What was it like to try to pinpoint all the thoughts that you have bouncing around in your head? Don't judge yourself harshly if you couldn't remember all your thoughts. Also, don't be critical if your thoughts were not what you thought or hoped they would be. Just know that as you move forward, you will become more proficient at recognizing your thoughts, as well as determining what you would like your well-trained mental puppy to pay attention to. Congratulations on taking this important first step!

The Joy Compass: 8 Ways to Find Lasting Happiness, Gratitude & Optimism in the Present Moment, Donald Altman (2012). Excerpted and used with permission by New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

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Tame Your Inner "Puppy Mind" for Less Stress - Mindful

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The mind is like an untrained puppy with its favorite toys that it likes to grab onto and vigorously shake, and that it never tires of running after," writes Donald Altman. He offers a practice to tame our inner puppy mind.

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Excited Bichon Frise Dad Playing With His Puppies

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Video: Sniffing hands, post-handshake

(Image: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

You won't believe you do it, but you do. After shaking hands with someone, you'll lift your hands to your face and take a deep sniff. This newly discovered behaviour - revealed by covert filming - suggests that much like other mammals, humans use bodily smells to convey information.

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We know that women's tears transmit chemosensory signals - their scent lowers testosterone levels and dampens arousal in men - and that human sweat can transmit fear. But unlike other mammals, humans don't tend to go around sniffing each other.

Wondering how these kinds of signals might be exchanged, Noam Sobel and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel turned to one of the most common ways in which people touch each other - shaking hands. "We started looking at people and noticed that afterwards, the hand somehow inadvertently reached the face," says Sobel.

To find out if people really were smelling their hands, as opposed to scratching their nose, for example, his team surreptitiously filmed 153 volunteers. Some were wired up to a variety of physiological instruments so that airflow to the nose could be measured without them realising this was the intention.

Take a good sniff

The volunteers were filmed as they greeted a member of the team, either with or without a handshake. The researchers recorded how often the volunteers lifted their hands close to their nose, and how long they kept them there, the minute before and after the greeting.

Before the greeting, both men and women had their hand near their nose 22 per cent of the time, on average. Airflow in the nose more than doubled at the same time, suggesting they were smelling their hands.

After shaking hands with someone of the same sex, on average volunteers sniffed their shaking hand more than twice as much as they did before the handshake. If the person was of the opposite sex, they smelled their non-shaking hand twice as much as before the handshake. This usually happened once the experimenter had left the room.

The team also carried out the experiment with people wearing sterile gloves. The chemicals the gloves picked up from the experimenter's hand included squalene and hexadecanoic acid, both of which are involved in social signalling among dogs and rats.

"People constantly have a hand at their face, they are sniffing it, and they modify that behaviour after shaking hands. That demonstrates that the handshaking is a chemosignalling behaviour," says Sobel.

Just like rats

It may seem counter-intuitive that the volunteers smelled their shaking hand more when they encountered someone of the same sex, but that's the wrong way to think about it, says Sobel. "We tend to think of social chemosignalling as a cross-gender story but it's not." There are plenty of instances where signalling happens within the same sex, he says, such as women synchronising their menstrual cycles or rodents sniffing out dominance. The behaviour could also be context-specific, he suggests. In a bar, for example, the pattern might be reversed.

"I am convinced that this is just the tip of the iceberg," says Sobel. "This is just one more instance where chemosignalling is a driving force in human behaviour." One surprise was just how much the volunteers were smelling their hands. "When we were coding the videos we would see people sniffing themselves just like rats. It's like blindsight - you see it all the time but you just don't think of it."

Charles Wysocki at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia agrees. "It fits with the general idea that there is a lot more chemical communication going on that we are unaware of".

As well as trying to work out exactly what sort of information might be transmitted, Sobel's team is now looking at how chemosensory signalling through handshaking might be affected in behavioural conditions such as autism spectrum disorders.

Journal reference&colon; eLife, DOI&colon; 10.7554/eLife.05154

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After handshakes, we sniff people's scent on our hand

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Video: Sniffing hands, post-handshake You won't believe you do it, but you do. After shaking hands with someone, you'll lift your hands to your face and take a deep sniff. This newly discovered behaviour - revealed by covert filming - suggests that much like other mammals, humans use bodily smells to convey information.

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As shown in the How Smell Works section of the site, upon detecting a smell the olfactory neurones in the upper part of the nose generate an impulse which is passed to the brain along the olfactory nerve. The part of the brain this arrives at first is called the olfactory bulb, which processes the signal and then passes information about the smell to other areas closely connected to it, collectively known as the limbic system.
The limbic system comprises a set of structures within the brain that are regarded by scientists as playing a major role in controlling mood, memory, behaviour and emotion. It is often regarded as being the old, or primitive, part of the brain, because these same structures were present within the brains of the very first mammals. Knowing this helps us to understand why smell plays such an important role in memory, mood and emotion.

Smell and Memory

The sense of smell is closely linked with memory, probably more so than any of our other senses. Those with full olfactory function may be able to think of smells that evoke particular memories; the scent of an orchard in blossom conjuring up recollections of a childhood picnic, for example. This can often happen spontaneously, with a smell acting as a trigger in recalling a long-forgotten event or experience. Marcel Proust, in his 'Remembrance of all Things Past', wrote that a bite of a madeleine vividly recalled childhood memories of his aunt giving him the very same cake before going to mass on a Sunday.

Smell and Emotion

In addition to being the sense most closely linked to memory, smell is also highly emotive. The perfume industry is built around this connection, with perfumers developing fragrances that seek to convey a vast array of emotions and feelings; from desire to power, vitality to relaxation.

On a more personal level, smell is extremely important when it comes to attraction between two people. Research has shown that our body odour, produced by the genes which make up our immune system, can help us subconsciously choose our partners - read more here. Kissing is thought by some scientists to have developed from sniffing; that first kiss being essentially a primal behaviour during which we smell and taste our partner to decide if they are a match.

It is likely that much of our emotional response to smell is governed by association, something which is borne out by the fact that different people can have completely different perceptions of the same smell. Take perfume for example; one person may find a particular brand 'powerful', 'aromatic' and 'heady', with another describing it as 'overpowering', 'sickly' and 'nauseating'. Despite this, however, there are certain smells that all humans find repugnant, largely because they warn us of danger; the smell of smoke, for example, or of rotten food. This is explored in more detail on the Danger! page.

The Psychological Impact of Smell Loss

Given that our sense of smell clearly plays an important part in our psychological make-up, in addition to it being one of the five ways in which we connect with the world around us, its absence can have a profound impact. Anosmia sufferers often talk of feeling isolated and cut-off from the world around them, and experiencing a 'blunting' of the emotions. Smell loss can affect one's ability to form and maintain close personal relationships and can lead to depression. An important issue here is the fact that smell loss is invisible to all but the patient; how would you know that you had met an anosmia sufferer unless they themselves told you? This is one of the reasons, alongside the general lack of understanding of the impact that smell has on our lives, why anosmia has never received much attention - you really do not know what you have got until it is gone.

Going back to the points made about the strong connection between smell and memory, it can be seen that losing one's sense of smell can result in the loss of an important sentimental pathway to memories.

Research has shown that loss of olfactory function can be an indicator of something far more serious. Smell loss occurs with both Parkinson's disease and Alzheimers, and studies have indicated that a diminishing sense of smell can be an early sign of the onset of both conditions, occurring several years before motor skill problems develop.

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As shown in the How Smell Works section of the site, upon detecting a smell the olfactory neurones in the upper part of the nose generate an impulse which is passed to the brain along the olfactory nerve.

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We often avoid tough conversations because we fear being judged. Here are three way to communicate more openly.

I've developed a theory that the biggest driver of mindlessness at work comes from lack of communication. Most times, this is connected to the conversations we're not having about our values, or the boundaries we set (or don't set) around how we live, honor, and uphold these values at work.

You know the type of non-conversation I am talking about: the really uncomfortable one, where you know what you need to say is going to be awkward and might disappoint another person. Think about it-have you ever edited a response because you felt uncomfortable revealing your thoughts concerning a certain topic?

This might look like:

Not sharing that you don't agree that the redesign plan is the best choice.

Going along with the excitement around a new initiative even though you have serious doubts about its viability.

Keeping silent about how uncomfortable it makes you that your boss brings her dog to the office every day-and it ends up in your space most of the time even though you really don't like dogs.

So we halfway share, putting off the conversation we know is coming at some point. And, of course, the longer we avoid having it, the more uncomfortable the conversation can become.

3 Mindful Tips for Tough Conversations

Each day we encounter situations where we halfway communicate what we want to express, request, or need. In many cases, we do this because we fear being judged. Here are three way to navigate awkward conversations:

1. Offer context

It isn't just about assigning blame. It is about creating dialogue around toxic and disruptive issues, so all involved can feel heard and choose to create a different reality. Offer context as to what the issue is, and, ideally, why it's actually an issue for you. Done in a nonjudgmental way, this kind of sharing builds compassion and allows everyone to get on the same page. It's when we don't offer context that the discomfort grows.

2. Invite options

If someone is making a request that isn't possible, say so and invite a conversation about what is possible. It's important to ask how that might work for the person making the request. Explaining, offering another solution, and inviting dialogue increases the sense of sharing and collaboration.

Explaining, offering another solution, and inviting dialogue increases the sense of sharing and collaboration.

3. Be sincere

Say what you mean with grace, respect, and as much authenticity as possible. When you speak from the heart, even if others don't like or agree with the message, the energy behind the intention comes through. Odds are strong that your honesty will help things to shift.

Transforming Communication

The collective impact from having uncomfortable conversations can be truly transformational. Its effect goes beyond communication in the workplace; it can transform communication in every situation.

The path to navigating this territory with ease starts with awareness. Begin to notice when you are withholding, closing down, or not speaking up. Write about it in a private journal if that's helpful. Then, with that awareness, begin to experiment with expressing your thoughts, needs, and desires one conversation at a time using the following tips to push through the discomfort.

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How to Have Tough Conversations at Work - Mindful

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We often avoid tough conversations because we fear being judged. Here are three way to communicate more openly. I've developed a theory that the biggest driver of mindlessness at work comes from lack of communication.