Speaker #0Hi everyone, Malu speaking. I'm the author of Life's Notebook. Welcome to the Elevation Bridge. I speak about career, science and well-being. Okay, enough. Let's stop. Emodiversity is a capacity to experience a wide range of emotions, whether they're good or bad. positive or negative, you are able to be open to both of them. I think that today in the current culture, the Western culture, there is an emphasis on happiness. So you need to avoid negative emotions. That's the message, actually. Avoid negative emotions, only be in a non-interrupted bliss of happiness. and then everything will be fine. But I think that well-adjusted people are emotiverse in the sense that they can experience all the emotions, whether they're good or bad, anger and anxiety and boredom and tiredness, everything. And they try to figure out what they are experiencing so that they can be... reacting to it in a better way. I mean, if you're telling me I'm feeling generally, well, it's a bad day, I'm generally unhappy. So what? What does it mean, I'm generally unhappy? Am I angry? Am I obsessed? Am I feeling bored? Am I tired? This all has an effect on... on me getting straight again. I mean, in the sense of finding a solution to my feeling, my unease, my uneasy feeling. I know that if I'm angry, I have to pick up the phone, tell my husband, you know what, you pissed me off, and that's it. I'm not... going to let you get me down like this. So that's it. And I'm feeling much better. I'm definitely not an expert in emo diversity. That's why I started reading about it. Because until my 50s, I was really only driven by willpower. Willpower, why? Because I didn't want emotions. Emotions spell danger. They interfere with your life. They come, they go, they are transient. It's a real nightmare. Emotions, you never know. I ignored them. I always ignored them and put them under the rug and didn't look at them at all. And then when I was 50, the emotions popped up. all at the same time, unexpectedly, and I didn't know what to do with it. So I was really interested at the age of 50 to figure out what emotions are because I can't control them. And that's the problem. You can't control them. Emotions actually are the result of three factors. Number one, your body state. Your past experiences. and the current circumstances. According to Lisa Feldman Barrett, who is a neuroscientist, a renowned neuroscientist, that's the case. Three factors intervene. So obviously, and we will see that in a later post, that the traumatic experiences you have eventually had in the past. will also influence your emotions and can be a problem. So anyway, one bottom line is that take care of your emotions because if you don't, they will take care of you. That's what I had to find out that way, actually. I think when you can name, when you recognize the emotion and name the emotion, I think I said it earlier, you are much more able to manage them, actually, to get rid of them or find a way to get rid of a harmful emotion eventually. If you can say it's anger, it's, and I need to... You know, actually fear makes you change. Anger makes you act and sadness makes you accept. And if you know that, you have an action which you can take. So that's very helpful. And so I encourage you. It's a very difficult experience. It takes time and patience to be able to name. the emotions and recognize them to be able to act against them. It takes a long time, but it's really worth the time. Well, would I recommend readers to dissect their emotions in more depth? I definitely would because... It helps you to manage your life better. Had I known earlier that I have to manage my emotions and negotiate with them, I think I would have had a more peaceful life. And that's the reason also why I wrote about it early on, because I want to share with the world that it's important. It's not only willpower which will get you anywhere. It's also the fact that you need to let yourself to be a little bit compassionate with yourself, not to be very, very strict like my mother would tell me, which is strong. You have to... Your life is nice, your journey, which you can only live it once, why not live it well and in a peaceful way, rather than always being on the chase of something and finally... The importance is to be happy in life. You can achieve things, but at the same time, you also need to be happy. So emotions are important. So the physical consequences of trauma, it leaves a lasting impression on your mind and your body. Actually, your... autonomous system is really disturbed, is dysregulated chronically. So your stress response system, in other words, what I meant to say, is dysregulated chronically. You are in a hyper-alert state. All the time you are hyper-vigilant. All the time thinking something will happen, and that's the experience you have experienced in the past. The past will repeat itself. For example, I lost my mother very early in life at the age of 14 and then subsequently I lost my brother. And so for me it's kind of a routine now that these traumatic experiences of losing people in a row, I'm expecting the next one to happen. And this... has an impact on your physical ability, you're having recurrent pain and digestive troubles and you are having also problems to experience joy and intimacy because you know that you might lose a person again through a trauma event, through war, natural disaster. So... you know, losing a loved one. And so the brain has memorizes all these traumatic events and organize information in a way which makes mental association between your past trauma and your current life. So you are always expecting the worst. I think that the way to manage trauma, first of all, you have to know that you will not be able to manage it completely. It will always be in the background. It will be a background noise all the time. The way to manage it, the best way I found, is to find likewise like-minded people. who would be able to talk to me about my trauma and either my husband or my psychiatrist or my therapist and our friend and then you have kind of therapeutic moments which help you overcome a little at the time really a little at a time. And next time, it takes on average, for me, it took always five years to be able to experience again a little bit of joy, even if I had the opportunity to talk to people. But it's really difficult. So it takes time and you will never overcome it. I read in the New York Times, times the other day that Anderson Cooper who is a very famous journalist most people know he explained that it took him more than 50 years and he's still not over the death of his brother and his father and his mother died recently but 50 years it took it it took him and he's still not over it and I think I would share this observation that it's very difficult to overcome and it's not impossible but it's a background noise which always been there.
