What is Emotional Intelligence?
Our emotional intelligence is used to measure our ability to understand ourselves and others. This is how we know and regulate our emotions. This can be more valuable than general intelligence due to the benefit it brings to your work and personal relationships!
We have broken emotional intelligence down into learnable bites. Using these can help you understand what motivates people’s actions and helps us to predict behaviour. One important part of this is knowing the biology behind our emotions.
If you’re ready to make improvements to your social skills take a look at our helpful guide to emotion.
Emotions
Our emotions are regulated by chemicals in the brain that our body releases in response to the situation we find ourselves in. A good example is when the body releases endorphins or ‘feel good hormones’. These act as antidepressants helping us to combat pain and stress. They are produced during exercise, when we’re very happy and when we think of those we love.
On the flip side, we produce stress hormones like cortisol when we think about anxiety-inducing situations. This ‘fight or flight’ reaction increases our heart rate, blood pressure, reduces our immunity and slows our digestive system. We become focused on the threat stressing us out rather than the physical effects of anxiety.
By changing this stress reaction we can avoid harming our health. Ultimately these chemicals tell our brain how we should feel appropriate to how we see our environment. This determines how our bodies respond.
Like anything else in life, everyone is different. We all have naturally different levels of these chemicals making some people ‘happier’ than others or more anxious than others. However, knowing how to influence these biological systems means can change this.
CBT
The best news is that psychologists have done this for you! The development of tools like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy has revolutionalised the way we can control anxiety and stress. Manipulate this information to our advantage teaches us how to control our emotions by getting us to think differently about things. This is your first step towards better emotional intelligence.
If you’d like to use the psychologists toolbox to your advantage, then get in touch with Birmingham Counselling Services now at: https://birminghamcounsellingservices.co.uk/