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.18
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.19
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.