By Carmine Coyote on Jun 17, 2008 in Science and Nature | comments(0)
Maybe all the injunctions to show your emotions and let it all hang out aren’t as sensible as their proposers claim
As a British person living in the United States, I quickly got used to all the stereotypes about cold, stuffy, screwed-up and up-tight Brits (doubtless wearing bowler hats and carrying rolled umbrellas) versus the open, emotionally-balanced, well-adjusted Yanks.
While I can see the benefit to some people of talking about their problems openly, I still nursed a basic aversion to telling perfect strangers about my troubles and deluging friends and family with raw emotion.
Now I have some scientific support, reported in the British magazine The New Statesman, but produced by Dr. Mark Seery of the University at Buffalo. Continued
By Carmine Coyote on May 16, 2008 in Decisions, Science and Nature | comments(2)
Here’s an interesting set of questions raised by Dr. Tian Dayton in The Huffington Post (“Living on the Edge: Achieving Emotional Sobriety”).
Has excess become the new norm? Are we losing a sense of what it means to lead balanced lives? Are we living too much on the edge for our own good, overextending not only financially but emotionally, psychologically, and physically as well? Are we just too stressed out emotionally for our own good?
People like to think of themselves as fairly rational, but it’s not true. Most decisions are taken emotionally — then justified afterwards by the use of some kind of reasoning. Emotions impact how we think far more than thinking affects how we feel. So if we spend much of our time on ‘red alert’, with our emotions stirred up to boiling point by stress, haste, and anxiety, it won’t be surprising if we become attuned to living on the edge: either elated or depressed, with nothing in between. Continued
