Psychological Health and Fitness

Hello Readers,

This post is for those of you who are curious about improving your psychological health and fitness (PsyHF).

If that describes you, you may already be aware of the benefits of PsyHF  some of which are listed below:

1. Providing a foundation for physical health and fitness¹Juvenal’s 1900-hundred-year-old cliche of “a healthy mind in a sound body” has been confirmed. The immune system provides the two-way link between psychological health and physical health.
2. Savoring (i.e., openness to daily moments of joy and wonder)
3. Pinpointing growth edges for psychological health and fitness
4. Enhancing psychotherapy.

The balance of this post will address:

The nature of psychological health and fitness

Goleman’s emotional intelligence as a model of psychological health and fitness

Skillsets of psychological health and fitness

The Nature of Psychological Health and Fitness

Although the concepts of psychological health and of psychological fitness overlap, they are not exact synonyms.

Psychological health connotes a lack of illness and all systems functioning as they ought.

Psychological fitness connotes a deliberate pursuit of a higher level of functioning beyond health alone.

In this post I will treat psychological health and fitness as a unitary concept.

Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence as a Model of Psychological Health and Fitness²A proper introduction with an in-depth understanding of emotional intelligence is best left to Goleman’s publications and talks. My intent is to provide an outline along with highlights that speak to me. The following discussion of emotional intelligence first appeared in a post from March 4, 2022, with one update; I have increased the list of basic emotions from 10 to 20 based on recent scientific findings.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize emotions in yourself and in others and then use that knowledge to enhance your life and your communities.

Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ, is a monumental achievement in psychological science. The book is one of the few found in both my hardcopy and virtual libraries. The  information is so dense that I have read the book many times. If you are a mental health professional or a layperson who wants to be an increasingly effective human being, Dr. Goleman’s book is essential. Here are the five components of emotional intelligence:

1. Self-awareness

Self-awareness has three aspects:

1. Acknowledging the primacy of emotional reactions in our psychological functioning
2. Recognizing what triggers the emotional reactions
3. Accepting the occurrence of the emotional reactions, i.e., not judging ourselves negatively for having them.

Here is one dictionary definition of emotion:

a conscious mental reaction (such as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling usually directed toward a specific object [event, person or situation] and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body.³“emotion.” 2022. In Merriam-Webster.com. Retrieved February 3, 2022, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emotion. (Author’s addition in brackets)

Emotions are complex, and what we label a particular emotion is the most prominent one mixed up with others. For this reason “emotional episodes” may be more descriptive than “emotions.” Emotional episodes evolved as templates of behavior over evolutionary time to aid animals and us to increase the odds of survival by reacting without thinking. The quality of self-awareness asks us to change without thinking to with thinking.

Here is a list of basic emotional episodes:

2. Self-regulation

Regulating emotional experiences means accepting the experiences and then behaving in an informed way to modulate them. When we can name an emotional experience, our actions and inactions either feed it or starve it.

Evolution by natural selection (EBNS) has resulted in numerous evolved psychological mechanisms (EPMs). Some of these are urges accompanied by mental and physical discomfort, sometimes extreme, if not acted on. Some EPMs such as an exaggerated fear of spiders or the urge to eat stale food rather than throw it away are silly. Other EPMs, such as the urge to take one’s own life when jilted by a lover or to go to war over national pride, are tragic.

Some common characteristics of emotional episodes:

• They have either an approach valence or an avoidance valence. Often, to our consternation, both valences operate simultaneously.
• They exist in a temporal context that may be eons old.
• They are about our beliefs and about our interactions with the environment.
• They can be occasions of great learning.
• They are our first response to challenges that violate our expectations.

Obstacles to self-regulation of emotional episodes

• Emotional episodes cannot be quickly turned off by will power. If they could, they would be useless.
• Emotional episodes are complex.
• Emotional episodes are like icebergs: They operate in the unconscious long before awareness.
• As a consequence of evolution by natural selection, an emotional episode can be in full operation before cognitive controls kick in.
• Our expectations are often based on a desire for coherence of belief rather than the truth.

Strategies for self-regulation of emotional episodes

• The regulation of emotional episodes is to prevent escalation of the episodes and not to stop them in their tracks.
• Live life daily in synchrony with your circadian rhythm.
• I referenced will power in the above bullet list. Although will power cannot turn off an emotional experience, it can be part of a preventive strategy limiting escalation, e.g., anger need not become rage.
• Engineer your life to reduce nasty surprises and to maximize joyful surprises.
• Know the valence of your emotional episodes and act oppositely. For example, anger is an approach emotion. When you feel angry, withdraw from the focus of the anger and observe the larger picture. Sadness is an avoidance emotion. When you feel sad, embrace the focus of the pain.
• Foster expectations of life based on accepting reality.

3. Internal Motivation

Internal motivation is the ability to act consistently in the best interests of yourself and of your communities even if your actions may be unpopular. Internal motivation is not deliberately contrarian; it is informed by foresight, the ability to see the beneficial effects of present behavior in the future.

Internal motivation is a skill set consciously sought after and built on a widely based experiential and academic learning. Acquiring and maintaining internal motivation is an active process.

Internal motivation is not closing yourself off from the voices of others. It means acting in accord with all the data available to you including knowledge received from others. In my view of emotional intelligence, internal motivation requires us to be a citizens of our communities. Cult leaders and their followers may have internal motivation to exploit the common good for their selfish purposes, but that brand of motivation is not emotional intelligence.

Motivation and self-regulation rely on each other.

4. Empathy

Empathy consists of two pieces: (a) the prosocial ability to recognize and distinguish emotional episodes in other people and (b) the ability to recognize how other people’s challenges relate to their emotional episodes.

A note on language: English in all its varieties has a confusing vocabulary around empathy. A few examples are sympathy, compassion, and empathic concern. Then there are the adjectives empathetic and empathic. I will leave it to linguists to sort through the semantics and the varieties of national English and ESL, and I will use empathy as defined above.

Empathy and morality

I subscribe to the school that empathy is the source of morality defined secularly.  Empathy is also the source of ethics. Societal institutions such as governments, political parties, and religions are corrupted by relying on persons with economic and cultural power for financing. The result is that governments often forego their Lockean duties to secure basic human rights for all its citizens. Similarly, followers of religion sometimes substitute professed beliefs and solidarity practices for the entirety of a moral code.

Empathy and forgiveness

I do not subscribe to the school that forgiveness is something to attain at all costs. Forgiveness, however, is a wonderful experience, and we should be open to it finding us. I have been able to forgive others when I have realized their capabilities have been taxed by the extraordinary demands often placed on them precisely because of those capabilities.

5. Socialization

We demonstrate socialization by contributing ideas to the conversation, by managing teams, and by working through conflicts. Ultimately, socialization is getting along with others and is the ultimate test of emotional intelligence. We prepare ourselves for socialization by cultivating self-awareness, self-regulation, internal motivation, and empathy.

Contributing to the conversation

• Intelligently. We learn to distinguish details; learn to distinguish important from unimportant detail; learn to focus on the important and set aside the unimportant; learn to compare and contrast; and finally learn to rank order.
• Humbly. We may or may not be the smartest person in the room. The smartest person is rarely smart enough anyway. All ideas stimulate other ideas until a viable plan emerges given the resources and time constraints.
• Generously: Knowledge is power: Give it away. Mentor others and let the credit go to them. Adam Grant details how doing so allows your communities to prosper and you along with them.

Managing teams

Managing teams is about letting the members work for each other and for you as a leader. Most humans are more motivated by peer relationships than by causes. Treating all the members of the team as fellow humans will contribute to repeated successes over time. I admire the principle of Stoic philosophy that teaches us to live each moment as a gift to ourselves and to others rather than focusing primarily on outcomes. Outcomes matter but they are secondary to each team member’s individual humanity.

Working through conflicts

Because evolution by natural selection (EBNS) has resulted in humans being easily inclined to intrasexual competition, conflicts are inevitable. Emotionally intelligent people utilize self-awareness to check their own urges to compete unnecessarily, and they utilize empathy to recognize urges in others to compete unnecessarily. Emotionally intelligent people are skilled in emotional regulation and in de-escalation when irrelevant urges to compete are felt.

Skillsets of Psychological Health and Fitness

Goleman’s model of emotional intelligence describes the attributes of people who demonstrate psychological health and fitness.

Describe, however, is the key word. Descriptions do not provide examples of acquiring and nurturing the components of PsyHF.

However, PsyHF can be broken down into a list of skillsets that provide operational access to PsyHF.

Below is a list of skillsets but first some cautions:

• The list is necessarily incomplete; human behavior is too complex to break down into a comprehensive list.
• The list is a tool just as 501 French Verbs is a tool for students of French.
• Each skillset assumes competence in multiple other skillsets.
• The list is not a checklist. Checklists can be traps by blinding us to things more significant.
• The list is for personal use only.
• The list is not for comparing ourselves to others. Humility is critical to PsyHF.
• Ultimately psychological health and fitness derives from competence in all five areas of emotional intelligence described in the section above.

A list of skillsets:

Endnote

The skillsets of psychological health and fitness will be topics for upcoming blog posts.

Very best regards,

Dr. Michael DeCaria

(About the featured image: Soon after sunrise on a May morning in Millcreek, Utah. Photograph by the author)

• 1
  Juvenal’s 1900-hundred-year-old cliche of “a healthy mind in a sound body” has been confirmed. The immune system provides the two-way link between psychological health and physical health. ↩︎
• 2
  A proper introduction with an in-depth understanding of emotional intelligence is best left to Goleman’s publications and talks. My intent is to provide an outline along with highlights that speak to me. The following discussion of emotional intelligence first appeared in a post from March 4, 2022, with one update; I have increased the list of basic emotions from 10 to 20 based on recent scientific findings. ↩︎
• 3
  “emotion.” 2022. In Merriam-Webster.com. Retrieved February 3, 2022, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emotion. (Author’s addition in brackets) ↩︎