emotional intelligence

When we feel stressed, anxious, irritated, or angry, one of the things that happens to the mind is that it shrinks down and zooms in on the challenge at hand—the stressful moment, the emotion we don’t want to feel. There’s a researcher, Andrew Huberman at Stanford, who calls this “the soda straw view” of the mind. This is the view of stress. When

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The short version is that you definitely have emotions…and not understanding them makes it very hard to understand your own behaviour.

Let’s say someone has both a high-functioning theory of mind and an overflowing well of compassion. What then? Well, this is what Hoffman calls “empathic over-arousal.” A person will feel so worn down by the intensity of other people’s emotions that it wears them down — it turns their distress into my actual distress. This might not seem like a bad... See more