Are You Too Emotional-health.usnews.com. health.usnews.com.September,6,2016http://health.usnews.com/wellness/articles/2016-09-06/are-you-too-emotional
Are You Too Emotional? When approached healthfully, strong feelings are remarkably functional. By Anna Medaris Miller
Susan David could have felt free: She was lounging in a work-expense hotel room with a lengthy list of TV channels and room service options at her fingertips. But the Harvard University psychologist felt a different emotion weigh heavier: guilt for being away from her husband and two young children. Fortunately, David's research on emotions helped her use that guilt to her benefit. Rather than trying to reason herself out of it or view it as rationale for quitting her job, she recognized it as a sign that she values time with her family, and considered life tweaks to help prioritize that. "The fact that I feel guilty may be important data to me, but it doesn’t mean that I am a bad mother and need to give up my job," says David, who often travels for her work as co-founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hopsital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and CEO of Evidence Based Psychology, a business consultancy. While "being too emotional" often gets a bad rap, experts say emotions serve many important purposes including helping us communicate with and relate to others, guiding us in making important decisions like what job to take and whom to ask on a date and, at the most basic level, making us human. "When people call themselves emotional, they'll often say things like, 'I don't want to be stressed,'" says David, whose book, "Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life," is out this month. "This is what I call a dead person's goal. Don't ever make the marker of yourself in life something that a dead person would do better than you." [See: 10 Tips to Lighten Up and Laugh.] Plus, consistently handling your emotions unhealthily – say, by bottling them up or ruminating – can backfire. "Both of these ways of dealing with emotions are really not in the service of our well-being and our health and our ability to make effective changes," David says. Some research suggests that, in extreme cases, suppressing your emotions can even lead to serious physical consequences like seizures, says Nicole Roberts, an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University who studies how culture and biology affect emotional expression. In general, she says, "expressing your emotions is a good thing." Still, certain times and places are more appropriate than others for feeling and expressing strong emotions, and emotions that are extremely intense and long-lasting can be more destructive than productive, says Maya Tamir, an associate professor of psychology at the Hebrew University in Israel, where she studies emotion regulation. "When emotions become very, very intense, then they tend to take over," she explains. "And when they take over, they leave little room for everything else." So how do you know if you're "too emotional?" Consider these expert tips: 1. Recognize that "too emotional" is relative. When Roberts lived in California, she was among the more solemn folks around. Later, as a Wisconsin resident, she stood out for being more expressive. "[Emotionality] is really this intersection of our genes and our immediate family environment and our culture," she says. There's also a range in how deeply people feel emotions. "Some people might be prone to get headaches, some people might be more prone to laugh and some people are more prone to cry," Roberts says. All can be entirely normal. Researchers have even identified a personality trait called sensory processing sensitivity to describe the 20 percent of people who process information and reflect on it more deeply. "Each and every one of us has our own emotional world and we learn what’s right for us," Tamir says.