Module for emotional intelligence. while improving mindfulness is helpful as an intervention between our emotional cues and our reactions, it won't prevent us from feeling emotions or having angry thoughts at times. Nor is this desirable. In order to make effective use of the intervention that mindfulness provides, we need to better understand how we feel, why we feel and what to do with those feelings. Psychologists use the term emotional intelligence to refer to this understanding the purpose of emotions, you may have heard it said that all emotions are valid. While this is true, it doesn't mean that you're well within your rights to throw a temper tantrum whenever you don't get what you want.

The validity of emotions stems from the fact that emotions provide useful information about our internal and external environments. Imagine you lived in a time where giant saber toothed Tigers hunted human beings. Being able to feel an accept fear could mean the difference between dying food or living to a ripe old age of 32. All these days the stakes are usually lower than being prey to some wild animal. When you feel an emotion you need to pay close attention because that emotion is telling you something important. High Performance emotions.

While all emotions are valid in all emotions are helpful because they provide you with important information. Some emotions help you to perform better at your work. These high performance emotions are enthusiasm, confidence, tenacity and optimism. High Performance emotions increase our arousal levels while still maintaining a wide and open focus. For example, when you're at your most enthusiastic it's not uncommon for your thoughts to race. This indicates the high arousal and energy level involved in the high performance emotions.

Keep in mind, however, that not every emotion with a high arousal level is helpful to performance. The other key factor that marks the high performance emotions is the wider focus and this sense of openness Swing emotions. This one emotions are called that because they can be either extremely useful in improving your situation, or they can actually help make a bad situation even worse. The swing element comes from how you choose to make use of these emotions. Swing emotions are there to tell us that something is not right in our environment. This can mean a whole range of things.

The wrongness can reside in our thoughts about a situation or in the actual situation itself. The swing emotions are anger, frustration and anxiety. They are similar to the high performance emotions in that they involve high levels of arousal. When you are angry, anxious or frustrated, your thoughts tend to rise faster. The key difference between the high performance emotions and the swinging emotions however has to do with your focus. When you are angry or frustrated, your focus narrows and you become blind to other possibilities.

The key to making swinging emotions work in your favor is to identify the feeling and attempt to lower your arousal levels and widen your focus as you You can see this is where being mindful becomes extremely useful. When you focus on your breath and your level of relaxation, you tend to open up more and slow down a little. And it's in this state of being where you can truly make this swing emotions work for you. And the next two modules will examine some of the distorted thinking patterns that go along with emotions that narrow our focus. But first, something should be said specifically about the emotion of frustration. When you feel frustrated, this is a definite sign that something you are doing is not working.

Because your focus is narrowed. You might even think that what you're doing is the only way to approach a problem. Here's a helpful phrase you can use to widen your focus and reframe an unsolvable problem into one with the possibility of resolution. The real problem is not blank, the real problem is blank. This reframing of the problem allows you to open yourself up to a new range of possible solutions. Blue emotions, a third class of emotions.

The blue emotions. These emotions are marked by low arousal levels as well as a narrowed focus. Blue emotions include dejection, depression and disappointment. When you feel these emotions, it's a sign that you are low on energy and need to speed things up. This is why exercise is so often recommended for people suffering from chronic depression. Another way to address negative emotions is to widen your focus.

Just like with the swing emotions, blue emotions often include distorted thinking styles. When you become mindful of these distorted thinking styles you widen your focus, calmness and mindfulness are examples of low arousal emotions with a wide and open focus, which are helpful for analysis and reflection.