MBTI & Emotional Health (1/3)

Cognitive functioning and emotional functioning are distinct, though they interact and influence each other in complex ways. There are many theories of emotion and no space to cover them all here, which speaks to the difficulty of understanding what emotion is and what role it plays in human psychology. Emotion is intimately tied to your perceptual and decision-making processes, so it is important to untangle the concept of emotion from type stereotypes in order to understand yourself better.

The concept of emotional intelligence attempts to translate emotional life into a skill that one can learn to DO better, which implies that EI is mostly learned, not innate; it is something that anyone can improve if they are willing to put in the effort (barring neurological dysfunction). Why is it important to develop EI? Emotional regulation is a vital life skill that is required for: dealing appropriately with loss or disappointment, understanding what really motivates human behavior, communicating well, succeeding in social environments, developing depth of relationship, handling conflict and disagreement, etc. Without enough EI, you are likely to have a poor understanding of yourself and others, which can severely hamper your efforts in personal and social development. Many mood disorders and self-control problems stem from poor emotional regulation.

1. The Ability to Perceive Emotions

• Are you aware of emotions when they arise?
• Are you aware of how the emotion was triggered and why?
• Can you accurately recognize emotions in others?
• Can you accurately anticipate emotions in others?

2. The Ability to Manage Emotions

• Can you correctly identify and accurately label emotions?
• Do you have a strategy for handling elevated emotional states?
• Can you express an appropriate emotional response to situations?
• Do you know how to meet emotional needs (yours/others)?

If we evaluate EI in the above way, it is obvious that emotional regulation is less related to type and more related to overall psychological development. Environmental influences can also be significant, for example, some people are trained to believe that displays of emotion are a sign of weakness, which can severely limit proper emotional awareness and expression. Whatever your history or relationship to emotional life, the key point is what you choose to do NOW to improve your EI.

When humans gather information about the world, it first gets filtered through the lower survival-related areas of the brain. This filtering is largely unconscious because it must happen instantaneously, otherwise you would have a tough time reacting quickly to things that threaten your physical well-being. Therefore, the evolutionary value of emotions is to motivate survival-positive action; emotional instincts push us to respond to the world in a timely manner. However, as the brain evolved to include the slower and more deliberate cognitive abilities of the upper cortex, the relationship between emotion and decision making gradually became more complex.

Since emotional processing begins in the unconscious, it is difficult to be aware of emotions until they get translated into more conscious feelings. Emotions, at their root, are physiological reactions to stimuli; they are simple communicative messages that tell you when something seems not right with the world. For example, when you see a snake, you are likely to get an instant pang of fear that sends you into fight or flight mode. There is no “controlling” these kinds of emotional reactions because the body has certain instincts for survival and self-preservation. However, things start to go awry when these instincts hijack the mind, sending emotional signals that are unwarranted or unjustified, which can cause problems if you act on them without fully understanding where they came from or what they mean. Because emotions are a strong motivational force, it is tough to ignore them even when you know rationally that there is no cause for concern.

Emotion often reaches conscious awareness through bodily cues such as increased heart rate or sweaty palms, therefore, bodily awareness is an important part of building emotional awareness. When the rational part of your mind becomes aware of an emotion, the process of “interpretation” begins as you try to make sense of what is happening. You interpret emotions and start to label them as “feelings” - feelings about something, caused by something, or provoked by something. Perhaps the emotion triggers a past memory or image, or perhaps the emotion triggers a chain of complicated thoughts and feelings. Emotion, feeling, and thought can feed each other in complicated cycles, eventually leading to mood dysfunction.

As emotions trickle into consciousness, there is a very small window of time where you have the freedom to choose how you are going to interpret that incoming information, before it becomes a full-fledged “feeling” in your mind that is associated with a million other thoughts and images. For example, when you see a snake, you feel instant fear, but then upon further inspection you realize that it was just a picture of a snake, so there is no need to interpret that emotion any further. This is a very simple example, however, real-life emotional turmoil (that comes from disappointment or bad circumstances) is harder to manage this straightforwardly because, oftentimes, the original emotion is long gone and all you have left is layers upon layers upon layers of interpretation, i.e., convoluted thoughts and feelings and images which swirl around and cloud your mind. These layers become a thick cognitive framework that you use to interpret future situations, almost like wearing color tinted glasses. If you had a bad experience in the past, it is likely to color your perception of similar situations in the future since emotion and memory are closely linked.

When you do not possess good emotional awareness, the small window of time to choose how to respond to an emotion is unavailable to you. This is why many experts advocate a form of mindfulness to remedy emotional dysfunction. It is difficult to calm yourself if you are not aware that you are feeling bad until it is too late and the emotions have already escalated to an extreme level. Mindfulness is essentially self-monitoring in real-time but it is not always easy if there is a lot happening in your environment. Mindfulness training gives you more pause and slows you down, it makes you go through the motions of life with greater presence so that you can actively prevent emotional hijacking.

People with low EI often blame their emotions on external stimuli, which basically implies that they believe emotions are not their own. If you feel pissed off, do you immediately channel the emotion into blame, accusation, or vindictiveness? If you feel sad about something, do you think it is because the world is not cooperating with you? When you believe that your emotions do not belong to you, you disown responsibility for them, then you are more likely to act out impulsively because you believe that doing something to the external trigger will alleviate the negative emotion inside. However, what “triggers” an emotion is not the same as what “causes” an emotion.

Although emotions can be triggered by external stimuli, they ultimately come from you and your judgment. For example, let’s say that someone ate your lunch out of the fridge at work. How would this situation make you feel? Many people would feel irritated or angry. What would you do with that feeling? If you believe that your feeling of anger is caused by the person who stole your sandwich, you will likely want some form of payback or revenge for the “wrongdoing”. However, what is the true cause of the emotion? For many, what angers is the IDEA that people should not steal from each other or that it is common courtesy to respect people’s ownership. But if you did not possess such ideas/beliefs, would you still be angry? What if the person was your close friend who assumed you wouldn’t mind helping them out as they forgot their lunch and had no time to procure another, would your anger be lessened? These questions reveal that the true source of the anger arises from your interpretation of the situation rather than the situation itself. Locating the cause of an emotion in some external trigger is misguided because it prevents you from taking responsibility for how your own thinking led you to the strong emotional reaction. Managing emotions well requires that you take responsibility for emotions because they belong to you (as you were the one who created them).

This is not to say that having your lunch stolen from you does not warrant a response; eating is necessary for survival, so it makes sense to care strongly about this problem. However, if your decision to take action on this situation is based on being emotionally hijacked by anger, are you going to solve the problem in the most effective way? If you were mindful of your emotions, you would not act upon them until you had a chance to calm down and give your rational brain time to come up with the right action to take. For example, if you took enough time for reflection, you would perhaps realize that going on a rampage to find and punish the culprit is probably not going to net you as good of a long term result as coming up with a better “fridge system” to prevent the problem from happening again. The first option could potentially damage your reputation and a relationship whereas the second option would make you feel proud and competent in not sweating the small stuff.

The immediate emotional reaction of frustration is perhaps unavoidable in this situation but your subsequent interpretation is firmly within your power to control. For example, instead of interpreting the situation as “theft” or a “violation”, you could choose to interpret the situation as “helping” a colleague who was clearly quite hungry and did not have a lunch to eat - you could exercise some cognitive empathy for the person even if they did not choose the right method of satisfying their need. While this situation can be an inconvenience for you, if you calm yourself and interpret the situation in a less negative and less personalized way, you will be better able to find the most appropriate solution.

The human mind learns well but the side-effect of learning is that we often build up an entire messy system of thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and values that becomes a lens through which we interpret the world’s events. This cognitive framework often goes unexamined and unquestioned, operating below consciousness, driving and influencing behavior from a dark and unknown place. When some event triggers the cognitive framework of how you understand the world, you can react emotionally even when it is completely unnecessary; repressed emotions from old situations can hijack your mind in new situations because you are using the same old interpretations even when those beliefs are outdated. Managing emotional situations well the first time around is important because failing to do so means that you did not learn what the emotion was trying to teach you, thereby making you more likely to repeat whatever mistake was made before. For instance, if you sent out an angry email to the entire office morally chastising the person who stole your sandwich, it would likely cause some blowback for you and you did nothing to prevent the problem from happening again.

Cognitive function theory is an attempt to understand the cognitive frameworks that people use for interpreting reality. For example, if the person discovering the missing sandwich was Ni dominant, they would probably react very poorly because the situation violated their Ni expectations. By contrast, if the person was Se dominant, they might have a more flexible attitude, perhaps feeling momentarily irritated but then shrugging it off and turning the situation around into a good opportunity to grab a better lunch at the restaurant down the street. When different people react to the exact same event so very differently, it becomes painfully obvious that feelings and emotions come from the inside, not the outside. Cognitive frameworks are efficient in that they help us understand the world and make decisions more quickly, however, they should be examined and adjusted when they lead to poor judgment and/or dysfunctional behavior. The next section examines the relationship between type and emotional triggers.