Tricycle: How does understanding the brain help us manage stress?

Daniel Goleman: There are several ways that understanding some brain mechanics and having basic neural tools at hand can help us manage stress. First of all, we have to realize that there’s no escaping stress completely; this is the nature of life. Some of what’s called samsara is what other people call “stress”. When we’re stressed the part of the brain that takes over, the part that reacts the most, is the circuitry that was originally designed to manage threats—especially circuits that center on the amygdala, which is in the emotional centers of the brain.

The amygdala is the trigger point for the fight, flight, or freeze response. When these circuits perceive a threat, they flood the body with stress hormones that do several things to prepare us for an emergency. Blood shunts away from the organs to the limbs; that’s the fight or flee. But the response is also cognitive—and, in modern life this is what matters most, it makes some shifts in how the mind functions. Attention tends to fixate on the thing that is bothering us, that’s stressing us, that we’re worried about, that’s upsetting, frustrating, or angering us. That means that we don’t have as much attentional capacity left for whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing or want to be doing. In addition, our memory reshuffles its hierarchy so that what’s most relevant to the perceived threat is what comes to mind most easily—and what’s deemed irrelevant is harder to bring to mind. That, again, makes it more difficult to get things done than we might want. Plus, we tend to fall back on over-learned responses, which are responses learned early in life—which can lead us to do or say things that we regret later. It is important to understand that the impulses that come to us when we’re under stress—particularly if we get hijacked by it—are likely to lead us astray.

It’s extremely important to widen the gap between impulse and action; and that’s exactly what mindfulness does. This is one of the big advantages of mindfulness practice: it gives us a moment or two, hopefully, where we can change our relationship to our experience, not be caught in it and swept away by impulse, but rather to see that there’s an opportunity here to make a different, better choice. I think that understanding the basic neural mechanisms involved is an aid to mindfulness because it tells us we don’t have to get swept away.

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I thought about Skippy when I read the headlines about the verdicts in the tragic bullying of Phoebe Prince, the 15-year-old from Ireland who hanged herself after being hounded by a small group of classmates—especially Kayla Narey, the girlfriend of Sean Mulveyhill, a popular senior Phoebe had briefly been romantically involved with.

There are three general types of bullying: troubled kids like Skippy, “mean girls” (and, of course, boys) in teen cliques like the one that victimized poor Phoebe Prince, and the garden variety of teasing and put-downs that pass among most all kids.

From another perspective, bullying falls into a broader category of impulsive, ill-conceived actions children and teens are vulnerable to because of a quirk in how their brains develop.

The brain is the last organ of the body to become anatomically mature, not reaching its final form until the mid-20s. And the circuits for emotional and social skills, including impulse control, are the very last to mature.

During the ages that bullying is frequent, the brain’s circuitry for emotional impulse outstrips the development of the “executive centers” where good sense, patience, and maturity reside. Most critically, the strip of circuits that can stop, think through consequences, and “just say no” to impulse are still immature.

In general, bullying is most prevalent in grammar school and declines as children grow. Still, a report from the Institute of Education Sciences found that about two-thirds of middle and high school students report being bullied at least once or twice over the year; ten percent reported being bullied once or twice a week, and 7 percent were bullied daily.

The advent of Facebook, Twitter, and texting plays right in to the development gap for impulse control. Research finds that in the online world the combination of anonymity and a lack of direct feedback of suffering from victims unleashes cruel impulse more freely. And so the surge in cyber-bullying.

The fact that a youngster’s impulse-control circuitry has not ripened does not give a “pass” for bullying or any other misbehavior. But it does mean that adults need to play a more active role in helping youngsters learn how to do the right thing.

Brain science tells us that a child’s brain is designed to absorb these lessons, and that when they are repeated, they actually shape the child’s brain. The more a child learns to delay acting on impulse or to stop and think before acting, the stronger the underlying circuitry for becomes. So bullying, or any other misbehavior, presents a potential teachable moment, a chance for the child to learn to get it right next time.

The good news: remedies for bullying of all kinds are known and have been proven to work. These teach children the neural lessons they need to make good decisions in life, to get along better, to empathize, and to manage their own inner world in an effective way. The best programs focus at many levels, including teaching kids emotional and social skills, and fostering a caring school climate. These programs are called “social-emotional learning,” or SEL.

A recent mega-study of 270,000 students found that SEL programs increase cooperation and good behavior and decrease misbehavior like bullying an average of 10% (more in the schools that need it the most)—and increase academic achievement scores by 11%!

The SEL programs that have the most powerful impact on bullying:

• Train parents, as well as teachers and students
• Increase adult alertness and supervision
• Make explicit school rules against bullying
• Change the culture, e.g., through school assemblies about bullying
• Encourage students to include peers easily left out
• Teach students how to intervene effectively and tell an adult.

Bystanders play a pivotal role in a bullying episode. If they do nothing, they tacitly support the bullying. But research finds that if a bystander says something that makes the bullying seem “not cool” or otherwise intervenes, in half the cases the incident ends within 10 seconds (this does not guarantee an end to the bullying, of course, which makes the intervener all the more courageous).

In SEL anti-bullying lessons, students role-play what they might do if they saw someone being bullied, or were bullied themselves. Such rehearsals make it far more likely that a kid will react effectively.

What does not work might be a surprise: harsh, zero-tolerance policies, added security equipment and patrolmen—in the absence of the other interventions like changing the school climate and getting kids to practice positive interventions—do little or nothing, and sometimes actually increase rates of bullying.

I recently heard that at a well-known, posh private school in Manhattan, some middle-school girls had become “mean girl” bullies under the leadership of one particularly angry girl. She would boss the others around, write on them with felt pen, scribble on their homework. And her special target was Eleanor: the bully would tell the girls where to sit in class, being sure to isolate Eleanor in a dead zone.

Bella, one of the other girls, had known Eleanor since first grade. One day as the girls were coming into class, when the bully bossily told Bella not to sit near Eleanor, Bella said evenly, “You can’t tell me where to sit.”

Then Bella went over and sat next to Eleanor. And she repeated that act of defiance the next day and the next.

A few days later, the bully ordered this clique of seventh grade girls to come into the bathroom so they could rate each other on their looks—inevitably a humiliating exercise for some.

When one of these girls told Bella she should come into the bathroom, Bella said, “Are you going to rate each other? I’m not into that.”

At that, the other girl, usually cowed by the bully, said in a low voice, “I’m not either,” and they both walked off together.

Our emotions are the keyboard we play in tuning our brains. Here are some of the ways moods match to tasks at hand:

By allowing the brain to generate a greater fluidity of thoughts, our positive moods make us better at coming up with novel ideas, solving problems, and making decisions.

On the downside, though, upbeat moods make us a bit more gullible, by weakening our ability to detect the weaknesses in an argument someone is making. We are more prone to making snap decisions we might regret later. And we are less careful in paying attention to the details of tasks.

The upside of being down, or at least more somber: we can more easily focus on those details we missed or ignored while we were upbeat—we pay more attention even to boring jobs. The take home: get serious before you read that contract.

Some other benefits to sour moods: we’re more skeptical, and so less likely to take someone’s word for it—even an expert’s. We ask more questions and come to our own independent conclusion.

Then there’s anger. Aristotle wrote, “anyone can get angry—that’s easy. But to get angry in the right way, for the right reason, at the right time, and with the right person—that’s not so easy.”

So have an unfair charge on your credit card bill? Get angry—but in the right way. Anger—which can so readily get us to do or say something we regret later—has its virtues. If we can channel the anger, it raises our energy and focuses us on changing things for the better—persisting in complaining until we get that charge removed.

Some downsides of anger are obvious, like the toxicity it puts in the air for those around us. But some costs are more subtle: anger makes us pessimistic, and so more likely to give up rather than keep trying after some setback. We have a built-in negative bias toward everything we see, and so a negative spin in our judgments. And then there’s the problem that our emotions are contagious—so if we’re cranky at the office, we can not just ruin everyone else’s day, but also their effectiveness.

Emotional intelligence has four parts: self-awareness, managing our emotions, empathy, and social skill. There are many tests of emotional intelligence, and most seem to show that women tend to have an edge over men when it comes to these basic skills for a happy and successful life. That edge may matter more than ever in the workplace, as more companies are starting to recognize the advantages of high EI when it comes to positions like sales, teams, and leadership.

On the other hand, it’s not that simple. For instance, some measures suggest women are on average better than men at some forms of empathy, and men do better than women when it comes to managing distressing emotions. Whenever you talk about such gender differences in behavior, your are referring to two different Bell Curves, one for men and one for women, that largely overlap. What this means is that any given man might be as good or better as any woman at empathy, and a woman as good as or better than a specific man at handling upsets.

Let’s look at empathy. There are three kinds: cognitive empathy, being able to know how the other person sees things; emotional empathy, feeling what the other person feels; and empathic concern, or sympathy—being ready to help someone in need.

Women tend to be better at emotional empathy than men, in general. This kind of empathy fosters rapport and chemistry. People who excel in emotional empathy make good counselors, teachers, and group leaders because of this ability to sense in the moment how others are reacting.

Neuroscientists tell us one key to empathy is a brain region called the insula, which senses signals from our whole body. When we’re empathizing with someone, our brain mimics what that person feels, and the insula reads that pattern and tells us what that feeling is.

Here’s where women differ from men. If the other person is upset, or the emotions are disturbing, women’s brains tend to stay with those feelings. But men’s brains do something else: they sense the feelings for a moment, then tune out of the emotions and switch to other brain areas that try to solve the problem that’s creating the disturbance.

Thus women’s complaint that men are tuned out emotionally, and men’s that women are too emotional—it’s a brain difference.

Neither is better—both have advantages. The male tune-out works well when there’s a need to insulate yourself against distress so you can stay calm while others around you are falling apart—and focus on finding a solution to an urgent problem. And the female tendency to stay tuned in helps enormously to nurture and support others in emotionally trying circumstances. It’s part of the “tend-and-befriend” response to stress.

There’s another way of looking at male-female differences in EI: Simon Bar-On Cohen at Cambridge University says that there’s an extreme “female brain” which is high in emotional empathy—but not so good at systems analysis. By contrast, the extreme “male brain” excels in systems thinking and is poor at emotional empathy (he does not mean that all men have the “male brain,” nor all women the “female brain” of course; many women are skilled at systems thinking, and many men at emotional empathy).

Psychologist Ruth Malloy at the HayGroup Boston studies excellence in leaders. She finds when you only look at the stars—leaders in the top ten percent of business performance—gender differences in emotional intelligence abilities wash out: the men are as good as the women, the women as good as the men, across the board.

That echoes a discovery by scientists who study primates. When a chimp sees another chimp who is upset, say from an injury, she mimics the distress, a way of showing empathy. Some chimps will then go over and give some solace to the upset chimp, for example, stroking the other to help it calm down. Female chimps do this more often than male chimps do—with one intriguing exception: the alpha males, the troupe leaders, give solace even more often than do female chimps. In nature’s design, leaders, it seems, need a large dose of empathic concern.

If you’ve suffered a major failure, take the sage advice given by psychologist Martin Seligman in the HBR article “Building Resilience.” Talk to yourself. Give yourself a cognitive intervention and counter defeatist thinking with an optimistic attitude. Challenge your downbeat thinking and replace it with a positive outlook.

But, fortunately, major failures come along rarely in life.

What about bouncing back from the more frequent annoying screwups, minor setbacks and irritating upsets that are routine in any leader’s life? Resilience is, again, the answer — but with a different flavor. You need to retrain your brain.

The brain has a very different mechanism for bouncing back from the cumulative toll of daily hassles. And with a little effort, you can upgrade its ability to snap back from life’s downers.

Whenever we get so upset we say or do something we later regret (and who doesn’t now and then?), that’s a sure sign that our amygdala — the brain’s radar for danger, and the trigger for the fight-or-flight response — has hijacked the brain’s executive centers in the prefrontal cortex. The neural key to resilience lies in how quickly we recover from that hijacked state.

The circuitry that brings us back to full energy and focus after an amygdala hijack concentrates in the left side of our prefrontal area, finds Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin. He’s also found that when we’re distressed, there’s heightened activity on the right side of the prefrontal area. Each of us has a characteristic level of left/right activity that predicts our daily mood range — if we’re tilted to the right, more upsets; if to the left, quicker recovery from distress of all kinds.

To tackle this in the workplace, Davidson teamed with the CEO of a high-pressure, 24/7, biotech startup and Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Kabat-Zinn offered the employees at the biotech outfit instruction in mindfulness, an attention-training method that teaches the brain to register anything happening in the present moment with full focus — but without reacting.

The instructions are simple:

1. Find a quiet, private place where you can be undistracted for a few minutes — for instance, close your office door and mute your phone.
2. Sit comfortably, with your back straight but relaxed.
3. Focus your awareness on your breath, staying attentive to the sensations of the inhalation and exhalation, and start again on the next breath.
4. Do not judge your breathing or try to change it in any way.
5. See anything else that comes to mind as a distraction — thoughts, sounds, whatever — let them go and return your attention to your breath.

After eight weeks, and an average 30 minutes a day of practicing mindfulness, the employees had shifted their ratio from tilted toward the stressed-out right side to the resilient left side. What’s more, they said they remembered what they loved about their work — they got in touch with what had brought them energy in the first place.

To get the full benefit, a daily practice of 20 to 30 minutes works best; think of it like a mental exercise routine. It can be very helpful to have guided instructions, but the key is to find a slot for it in your daily routine. (There are even instructions for using a long drive as your practice session.)

Mindfulness has been steadily gaining credence among hard-nosed executives. There are several centers where mindfulness instruction has been tailored for businesspeople, from tony resorts like Miraval to programs in mindful leadership at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. Google University has been offering a course on mindfulness to employees for years.

Might you benefit from tuning up your brain’s resilience circuitry by learning mindfulness? Among high-performing executives, the impacts of stress can be subtle. My colleagues Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee suggest as a rough diagnostic of leadership stress asking yourself, “Do I have a vague sense of unease, restlessness, or the feeling that life is not great (a higher standard than “good enough”)?” A bit of mindfulness might put your mind at ease.

Daniel Goleman is Co-Director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University, co-author of Primal Leadership: Leading with Emotional Intelligence, and, most recently, author of The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights.

And now brain science shows that positive or negative, the way in which that review gets delivered can be a boon or a curse.

If a boss gives even a good review in the wrong way, that message can be a low-grade curse, creating a neural downer.

So I learned while reviewing recent scientific findings for an upcoming webinar that has got me rethinking the concept of emotional intelligence.

The neuroscientist Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin has found that when we’re in an upbeat, optimistic, I-can-handle-anything frame of mind, energized and enthusiastic about our goals, our brains turn up the activity in an area on the left side, just behind the forehead. That’s the brain state where we are at our best.

But when we’re feeling down, with low energy and zero motivation, even anxious, our brain has turned up the volume on the right side. That’s the zone where we punt.

And performance feedback that focuses on what’s wrong with us also puts this downer brain area on overdrive. We’re so preoccupied with the bad news (and our fantasies of this meaning we’ll lose our job) that we just don’t have the energy or can’t focus on working at our best.

Even the boss’s tone of voice can trigger one or another brain area. In one study, when people got positive performance feedback that was delivered in a negative, cold tone of voice, they came out of the session feeling down–despite the good news.

Amazingly, when negative feedback came in a warm, positive tone of voice, they felt upbeat and energized.

Of course a boss needs to give employees performance feedback. But too many are poor at giving feedback. The problem here takes two forms: being hyper-critical and focusing only on what’s wrong without balancing it with what’s right, or undermining even positive feedback with a negative tone.

Either way, the messages the boss sends activate the wrong brain zone. Inept manager feedback makes us inept.

The bad news: this is rampant. The really bad news: it hurts business. That’s the verdict of Samuel A. Culbert, a psychologist at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. He says annual reviews do more than create more stress for workers. They end up making everybody–those who get them and those who give them–less productive.

In theory, artful performance feedback improves our performance, setting us on the right track. Such feedback is best given on the spot (not months later in a formal review), and with a sense of trust and openness between the giver and receiver. It might take the general form of “When you do X, it does not help get to Y, because of Z.” The X and Z here should be a clear and specific–that is, actionable information.

But what happens when such on-the-spot feedback comes in the heat of the moment, when the manager is steamed and not caring the least about imparting X, Y, or Z? Managers have their emotional hijacks, too.

Then there’s the nightmare of the formal performance review. UCLA’s Culbert argues they are largely a sham–a charade carried out to justify decisions on promotion or pay. And even when they do reflect actual performance, the feedback tends to be hollow rather than giving you a healthy balance of what you do well with what need to improve on–and how. So Culbert suggests instead a performance preview, where a boss outlines how an employee can do even better.

But the neuroscience adds a crucial nuance: even positive news should come with a positive tone. So add to that feedback a dollop of emotional intelligence.

In the Forward I go on to explain that the misinterpretation stems from estimates that IQ accounts for around 20 percent of success in careers. This leaves 80 percent unaccounted for. But this does not mean emotional intelligence explains the rest of career success. As I wrote in Emotional Intelligence, a wide range of elements, from family wealth and education, to simple luck – including emotional intelligence to some degree –and many more factors are at play. Malcolm Gladwell’s recent book Outliers argues for chance opportunity as one such.

“Another common misconception,” I wrote in the Forward, takes the form of recklessly applying the importance of emotional intelligence to domains where it matters far less than IQ – academic achievement being the most obvious. When it comes to career success, the picture is more nuanced. IQ scores are the best predictor of what career rung we can manage. That’s what they were designed to do; IQ tests were first widely applied in sorting into the right specialty and rank millions of American soldiers during World War I.

But when it comes to predicting who among a talented pool of candidates within an intellectually demanding profession will emerge as an effective leader, IQ loses is predictive power. This is partly due to the “floor effect,” where in order to enter the top echelons of a given profession or large organization everyone has already been sifted for IQ. At those levels a relatively high IQ becomes a threshold ability – what you need to enter and stay in the game.

In my 1998 book Working with Emotional Intelligence I proposed that EI-based abilities more often than IQ-type abilities or technical skills are the discriminating competencies that predict who among a group of very smart people will lead most ably. This is a key point for anyone running an organization who must decide what abilities to look for in potential leaders.  One methodology used in industrial/organizational psychology to make this judgment is called “competence modeling,” which contrasts highly effective leaders with mediocre ones, and determines what specific abilities the stars display that the others lack.

Organizations around the world use the competence modeling method to make personnel decisions, performing independent analyses of their own employees. As I wrote in the Forward, if you scan these competency models, “you discover that IQ and technical skills drop toward the bottom of the list the higher the position” (though they remain stronger predictors of excellence in lower-rung jobs). Competence models for leadership typically consist of anywhere from 80 to 100 percent EI-based abilities.”

I inadvertently may have added to the confusion about EI as a factor in success when I summarized this competence data in ways that were misconstrued as claiming that EI (I generally don’t use the term “EQ”) is more powerful in predicting career success than IQ. Once I realized that people did not understand the limited context and correct basis of this statement, I gave more qualifying information. Still, some press accounts and other secondary sources continue to misrepresent my views, as Po Bronson has done here.

Another point relates to the contrast between executive function and emotional intelligence. Po Bronson seems to say that executive function and emotional intelligence are in some kind of competition as concepts. Actually I would argue they are partly overlapping constructs. My model of emotional intelligence elaborates four domains of ability: self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and interpersonal skill. The first two – self-awareness and self-regulation — are themselves elements of executive function, all of which are based in the operations of zones of the prefrontal cortex. Indeed, in writing about self-regulation in my 1995 book Emotional Intelligence I cite the work of Walter Mischel and his now-famous marshmallow test with four-year-olds, which assessed their ability to manage impulsivity and delay gratification – two key indicators of executive function. I would expect executive function and emotional intelligence (at least as described in my model – perhaps not with Salovey and Mayer’s) to correlate strongly with EF. That’s a question for further research.

Po also misrepresents curricula in social/emotional learning as a waste of time.  An article by University of Illinois psychologist Roger Weissberg and colleagues at the Collaborative for Social and Emotional Learning, now in press in the journal Child Development, reports on a meta-analysis of more than 200 studies comparing students who had the program with those who do not. The results, as presented in an earlier version of this paper: The programs reduce violence and other antisocial behavior by around 10% and enhance positive behaviors like paying attention in class by the same margin – and benefits are greatest in schools that need it the most. Most intriguing, academic achievement test scores go up around 11 percent. That sounds like a program anyone would want their children to benefit from.

Another odd notion put forward by Po is that Peter Salovey represents the academic side of emotional intelligence and I represent the commercial side. I do not sell any product or service related to EI. The sole exception: like Peter Salovey I have co-authored an assessment tool for EI (this is standard practice among psychologists; the various IQ tests embody differing theories of intelligence and how to measure it and are designed by the theorist). Our assessment tools are available only to professionals. Salovey’s is recognized as the flagship general measure of EI; mine is the ESCI, designed specifically for leadership development. Both Peter (I consider him a friend) and I are members of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, based at Rutgers. Our hope for the field is that rigorous research will more sharply define the EI construct, its correlates and its practical applications, all based on empirical data. That’s the way science grows and evolves. But good science takes time. Give it a decade, Po, and let’s revisit these issues.

So how did he get that way? Apparently, the same way you get to Carnegie Hall. Practice.

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Rinpoche a bit over the years, and always found him in good cheer. This meeting was no different. When I called him at his Manhattan hotel to arrange to get together before we were to discuss his new book, “Joyful Wisdom” at the 92nd St. Y, he told me he was in the middle of a shower – but not in the usual sense. The shower, he told me, had run out of hot water midway. When he called the front desk, he was told to wait several minutes and there would be more hot water. In this situation, I probably would have been peeved. But as Rinpoche told me this, he was laughing and laughing.

The only momentary glitch I’ve witnessed — a few years back — was slapstick: he sat down in an office chair with a faulty seat that suddenly plunged several inches with a thump. Once when this chair had done the same to me I cursed and groused about it for a while. But Rinpoche just frowned for a second — and the next moment he was his upbeat self again. Quickness of recovery time from upsets is one way science takes the measure of a happy temperament.

While annoyances like these are hardly life’s greatest tests, handling them gracefully takes a composure that few of us seem to have at our disposal.

Mingyur Rinpoche was not born into wealth and comfort. He spent his earliest years in a remote Himalayan village lacking even the most basic amenities. Nor was he a lucky winner in the genetic lottery for moods. In his book he recounts being extremely anxious as a child in Nepal, having had what a Manhattan psychiatrist would likely diagnose as panic attacks, and how he cured himself of this chronic anxiety by making his fears the focus of his meditation. He has had to earn his good cheer.

Rinpoche seems eclectic in studying paths to well-being, including Western recipes. A few years ago, he attended a five-day meeting at the Mind & Life Institute that brought together a group of neuroscientists and the Dalai Lama to discuss ways to overcome destructive emotions. He found that the Western scientific findings on emotions had much in common with his own approach to cultivating well-being.

But when it comes to his own pursuit of happiness, Buddhist theory and practice are Rinpoche’s chosen tools. He has done several years-long meditation retreats, under the tutelage of some of the most renowned Tibetan masters. Of course, what we mean by “happiness” can be elusive, what with the myriad varieties of good feeling running from ecstasy to equanimity. One flavor of happiness at which Rinpoche seems to excel has been well-studied by scientists specializing in how emotions operate in our brains.

Richard Davidson, who heads the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin, has found one distinct brain profile for happiness. As Davidson’s laboratory has reported, when we are in distress, the brain shows high activation levels in the right prefrontal area and the amygdala. But when we are in an upbeat mood, the right side quiets and the left prefrontal area stirs. When showing this brain pattern, people report feeling, as Davidson put it to me, “positively engaged, goal-directed, enthusiastic, and energetic.”

Mingyur Rinpoche came to Davidson’s lab as one of a dozen or so meditation adepts, each of whom had put in anywhere between 10,000 and 50,000 lifetime hours of meditation. Research on expertise in any skill shows that world-class champs have put in at least 10,000 hours of practice; these were Olympic-level meditators.
One of the first findings from the research showed that when these adepts meditated on compassion, activity in key brain areas increased up to 100 percent, notably more than was the case in a control group who were taught the same meditation practice. The more lifetime hours of practice, the greater the increases tended to be. All this seems to confirm the idea that in the realm of positive moods, as in nearly every endeavor, worldly or spiritual, practice matters.

So can we all get a taste of Rinpoche’s bliss?

Davidson worked with Jon Kabat-Zinn, a teacher of mindfulness meditation from the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, to see how a group of novices might gain from these methods. Kabat-Zinn, who has pioneered this contemplative method with medical patients to ease their symptoms, taught mindfulness at a high-stress biotech company; these beginners meditated for 30 minutes a day for eight weeks. Davidson’s measures showed that after the eight weeks they had begun to activate that left prefrontal zone more strongly — and were saying that instead of feeling overwhelmed and hassled, they were enjoying their work. So while the Calvinist strain in American culture may look askance at someone sitting quietly in meditation, this kind of “doing nothing” seems to do something remarkable after all.

Of course, there’s no guarantee of greater happiness from meditation, but the East has given us a promising path for its pursuit.

Another fruit of these spiritual practices seems to be a healthy dose of humility. When Rinpoche told my wife that he was being billed as “the happiest man in the world,” he laughed as though that were the funniest joke he’d ever heard.

Originally posted at the New York Times Happy Days blog.

There are at least three varieties of empathy, each with very different implications for spotting the right candidate. The first, cognitive empathy, means that we can understand how the other person thinks; we see his point of view. This makes for good debaters, sales people and negotiators. On the other hand, people who have strengths in cognitive empathy alone can lack compassion – they get how you see it, but don’t care about you. Psychologists speak of the “Dark Triad” – narcissists, Machiavellians, and sociopaths, who can be slick with their arguments but have a heart of stone (think Dick Cheney).

The next variety, emotional empathy, refers to someone who feels within herself the emotions of the person she’s with. This creates a sense of rapport, and most probably entails the brain’s mirror neuron system, which activates our own circuits the emotions, movements and intentions we see in the other person. This lets us feel with the other person – but not necessarily feel for, the prerequisite for compassion.

That requires empathic concern, the third variety of empathy. Empathic concern means we not only understand how the person sees things and feels in the moment, but also want to help them if we sense the need. A study of empathic concern in seven-year-olds found that those who showed least concern when they saw their mother in distress were most likely to have a criminal record two decades later.

All three varieties of empathy should be at play in the compassionate nominee President Obama seeks.

Does that point to a woman as the likely best candidate? Maybe. Converging data confirms that women tend to be more empathetic on average than men, especially when it comes to emotional empathy. On the other hand, Ruth Jacobs, who coaches executives to boost leadership essentials like empathy, has found that among those who perform in the top ten percent on business outcomes, the men’s empathy is as strong as the women’s.

Empathy can be strengthened – at least some varieties. Paul Ekman, the psychologist who inspired the TV series “Lie To Me,” developed a web-based training tool that lets anyone (at least, me, when I tried it) up their ability to read another person’s emotions from their facial expressions. You can learn to detect super-fast facial tics that reveal a person’s true feelings – a way to sense when they might be lying, or denying that something upsets them, or that they are really attracted to so-and-so despite their protestations to the contrary.

Then there are the studies on “mindsight” of Dr. Daniel Siegel, a child psychiatrist at UCLA, that suggest these are essential human abilities we should be teaching every child. Since empathy is the basis of concern and compassion, should it be just for Supreme Court Justices?

Originally published at Huffingtonpost.com