To feel great joy we have to be ready to feel vulnerable. I found this counterintuitive. As Brené Brown shares, if we can't tolerate joy, if we're not open to being vulnerable, we can find ourselves dress-rehearsing tragedy — when things are at their best we might be telling ourselves that it won't last, we don't deserve it, something will go wrong. An antidote to this she says is to practise gratitude. Be thankful and appreciative of what we have.

For a lightweight intro to some of Brené Brown's work you could do worse than spend an hour watching The Call to Courage on Netflix.

Also see: Hope and Listening with passion

Joy and vulnerability

Climate anxiety is the background stress and dread caused by thinking about the state of the climate of the planet and where it's going.

While talking on a walk with our 9-year-old, he suddenly said, "Well, what does it matter anyway? We've messed up our planet and it's filling up with plastic." This is a mighty burden to bear for a 9-year old. With increased awareness and education across society, climate anxiety is real.

One good thing, however, is that one way to alleviate climate anxiety is to be taking action, and fortunately action is also what the planet needs, too.

One small action I take is a commitment to plant 5 trees each month with Eden: People+Planet for every person who supports me on Patreon at any financial level. A small contribution could also see you plant 60 trees a year. Together, I think we can make a difference.

Support me on Patreon and plant trees too.

Climate anxiety

There are both constructive and unproductive ways to argue. One classic unproductive style is what Philippa Perry, in The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, calls fact tennis. With fact tennis, the goal can seem more like scoring points over your opponent rather than actually finding a workable solution — facts are hit back and forth until one person wins when the other has no more reasons left to counter with. But of course the argument isn't resolved and the result is a hollow victory and a still frustrated loser.

For a more productive argument we can reframe from winning to understanding — we can seek to share how we feel about it, and to understand how the other person feels about the conflict and their point of view, and take that into consideration. When we have a greater understanding we can move forward together to find a workable solution. As Philippa explains "Finding out about differences and working through them is about understanding and compromise, not about winning."

Fact tennis

John Gottman and colleagues identified what he calls the four horsemen of the apocalypse for relationships. They are called this as, left unchecked, they can spell the death knell to a once healthy relationship. In fact, they found that by watching just 3 mins of a conflict conversation between a couple they could predict whether they would still be together years later with over 90% accuracy.

Criticism: framing problems as the partner's defect

Defensiveness: counterattacking, whining, being the innocent victim

Contempt: talking down from a position of superiority, insults, eye-rolling, name-calling — the most dangerous of all

Stonewalling: withdrawing from the conflict, refusing to engage

In my first draft of this sketch I left it at that, but it felt a bit negative to leave it hanging on everything we do that's wrong and harmful. Fortunately, there are antidotes to the four horsemen, the traits they saw the masters at relationships use instead. The Gottman Institute explains the four horsemen and their antidotes in more detail.

Watch John Gottman explain the four horsemen in his own words.

The 4 horsemen of relationship apocalypse

Ah, that satisfying, superior, at once gleeful and slightly sinful feeling when the aggressive driver that blazed past you a few miles back is pulled over by the police at the next exit. That feeling is schadenfreude (a nifty German word made up of “schaden” for damage, harm or hurt and “freude” for joy) to describe the act of taking pleasure in others’ misfortunes.

I hadn’t thought much of it before reading some excerpts from Tiffany Watt Smith’s book Schadenfreude. She makes a compelling case for the benefits of examining the moments when we feel superior at another’s expense as a small window into ourselves. A little twinge of joy when a colleague doesn’t get a promotion might reveal your jealousy of their situation or a deep-down resentment of unfairness. If the person who pushed in front of you in line drops their ice cream right after buying it, your secret twinge of joy might be a sense of justice and equity for obeying the rules when they didn’t. Schadenfreude can be a little boost to your own self-esteem or a valuable window into your own weaknesses.

For a mini-intro, try Tiffany Watt Smith’s TED Ideas article: Do you secretly feel good when others stumble? 5 ways to make peace with this very human emotion.

I revised this sketch for the book Big Ideas Little Pictures.

Schadenfreude

I hadn’t given much thought to hope, beyond it being a nice feeling to have, until I heard of CR Snyder’s cognitive model for hope which shed a new light on it for me. He proposed a model of hope where (paraphrasing) an individual may be hopeful if they have:

Goals they desire. If you don’t or can’t picture any future state you’d like then you won’t have a lot of hope.

Pathways. You need to see some ways that you may make step-by-step progress towards a goal.

Willpower or agency. You need to be motivated and believe that you have the ability to succeed at your goal.

With all of these you can imagine feeling hopeful. Without any one of them and you probably won’t so much.

The mountain is the Ogre, a wholly impossible looking peak scaled by Doug Scott and others for which I would have had zero hope to climb (no pathways, no willpower) and yet they remarkably did.

HT once again to Brené Brown in Dare to Lead.

Hope

When I look back at the LEGO sets of my youth compared to the LEGO sets of today, a few things are striking. Today’s is much cooler: the colours are better, the pieces are more interesting, and the sets are more clever (they also have a lot more weapons*). And the sets have their own characters: they’re not just nameless people in characterless towns—every set is full of people with names, expressions, backstories, personalities and goals. My observation, ahem, through our children, is that this makes it way more interesting to play with. It’s the characters and the story that make them so good now. A good part of that I think is also the shift in quality of expressions on the faces.

I am kind of in awe of LEGO faces. The number and variety and subtlety of expressions it’s possible to make with just a few small changes to a few small lines on a face I find truly astounding. This sketchplanation shows just a tiny bit of the variety from the LEGO Movies. Respect to the artists.

*5% of Lego boxes sold in 2001 contained Lego weapons. In 2014 that was 30% according to Bartneck C, Min Ser Q, Moltchanova E, Smithies J, Harrington E (2016) Have LEGO Products Become More Violent? PLoS ONE 11(5): e0155401.

LEGO faces

It turns out that in general, the intensity of emotion, or the affect, of our bad memories seems to fade faster than for our good memories. This means that, say, our happy memories keep us happier for longer and our bad memories don’t affect us as much in the future. It’s called the fading affect bias as the fading is biased more strongly for negative memories.

This is handy as it naturally gives us a more positive disposition. So, for instance, after some time has past, we may find we remember the good parts of a holiday — like an amazing beach — more clearly than the bad — like the mosquitoes at the beach. And thinking about the good parts keeps making us happy longer than thinking about the bad parts might make us sad. Brilliant!

PS: This is a different use of affect than the common affect/effect confusion.

Fading affect bias

The boss yells at the employee, the employee yells at their spouse, the spouse yells at the child, the child yells at their younger sibling, the sibling yells at the dog, the dog pees on the rug. The term emotional hot potato for this comes from Lawrence Cohen in Playful parenting. Funny how bad moods really can work like this.

Emotional hot potato

This is an adapted version of the Kubler-Ross model for the stages of grief from her work with terminally ill patients. I should caveat that this is overly simplified in several respects and people don’t necessarily go through all these stages, nor necessarily in this order. Though, when you look at it, it’s hard not to have the feeling that it could provide some value in understanding that complex and difficult situation. I find it interesting as a more generally applicable model of how people deal with change. I think it’s possible to relate to some of these stages at some points in life which have experienced major change.

Stages of grief

This is Robert Plutchik’s wheel of emotions. I like it because it tries to make sense out of the range of emotions we have by relating his 8 primary emotions to related ones where two primary emotions meet. For example, remorse is like feeling both disgust and sadness; awe is surprise and fear.

On opposite sides of the wheel are opposite emotions eg, Joy >< Sadness

Other versions of his framework go 3D and map the intensity of emotions as well, for example, rage > anger > annoyance, or ecstasy > joy > serenity.

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Category: emotions