Emotional hygiene is a phrase I coined about seven years ago when I was dealing with depression and a close friend of mine was dealing with anxiety. As it turns out, the two states aren’t very compatible!
My friend and I had been very close and emotionally in sync for many years, and we were very used to sharing emotions with each other. It’s nice, and I’d say you can’t have working relationships without the ability to share emotions. However, I became aware that it wasn’t healthy to share my depressed mood with my friend, because it resulted in too much anxiety.
Ooh, I just witnessed a beautiful example of emotion work and how it can surprise us!
I’m standing in line at the Target, and I’m three people back from the checker. Everyone is standing around trying not to look bored. I’m studying people like I always do.
The checker is a man in his 50s, slender but rather disheveled, with hair that needs cutting and a bit of a five o-clock shadow starting. I notice …
In her excellent 1983 book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, sociologist Arlie Hochschild described what she termed “emotion work,” or the way that our emotions and emotional states are a part of what we offer (and what is expected from us) in the workplace.
When people ask me what I do, I say that I’m a writer, researcher, and empath. This last title often makes people ask “What?” but it’s simple, really. An empath is a person who knows that they read emotions.
You’re an empath, too; you also read emotions – we all do, because empathy is our nonverbal and preverbal language. We all use our empathic skills when we socialize, listen to music, work with animals and babies, appreciate art, laugh at physical comedy, and read body language. We also use our empathic skills when we speak and when we decipher spoken language, because we actually can’t make sense of the world if we can’t use our emotions. The logical, mathematical, and linguistic parts of our brains are extremely important, but without the emotions, they simply can’t work properly. The emotions and the intellect are a boxed set. Empaths know how to look inside and outside of the box!
What does this video have to do with empathy? Find out!
