Whether you're getting amped up with anxiety or with excitement, you are draining yourself of your most important resource: energy. This emotion regulation itself requires additional effort. We need to use effort and emotion-regulation strategies from a different part of our brain, located in the prefrontal cortex, to calm ourselves enough to get our work done. We know from brain-imaging research that when we're feeling intense emotions, the amygdala is activated – that's the same region that lights up when we're feeling a fight-or-flight response. In other words, high intensity - whether it's from negative states like anxiety or positive states like excitement - taxes the body. Our heart rate increases, our sweat glands activate, and we startle easily. Because it activates the body's stress response, excitement can deplete our system when sustained over longer periods - chronic stress compromises our immunity, memory, and attention span. High-intensity positive emotions involve some of the same physiological responses as high-intensity negative emotions like anxiety or anger. Excitement, even when it is fun, involves what psychologists call "physiological arousal" - activation of our sympathetic (fight-or-flight) system. The problem, however, is that high-intensity emotions are physiologically taxing. This intensity is reflected in the language we use to discuss achievement goals: we get fired up, pumped, or amped up so that we can bowl people over, crush projects, or crank out presentations - these expressions all imply that we need to be in some kind of intense attack mode. Go get it, knock it out of the park, and muscle through. In a study we ran, for example, people wanted to feel high-intensity positive emotions like excitement when they were in a role that involved leading or trying to influence another person. When Jeanne and I ran a study to figure out why Americans value high-intensity positive emotions, we found that Americans believe they need high-intensity emotions to succeed - especially to lead or influence. East Asian cultures, on the other hand, value low-intensity positive emotions like serenity and peacefulness. In other words, Americans equate happiness with high intensity. Research by Jeanne Tsai of Stanford University, with whom I conducted several studies, shows that when you ask Americans how they would ideally like to feel, they are more likely to cite high-intensity positive emotions like elated and euphoric than low-intensity positive emotions like relaxed or content. And research shows that we - especially Westerners, and Americans in particular - thrive on high-intensity positive emotions. It often indicates a user profile.īut high-intensity positive emotions can also be taxing. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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