The Five Levels of Emotional Self-Awareness

to Facebook and to YouTube. And in this session, we're going to talk about emotional self-awareness. So you've probably heard people say stuff like, well, he's not really present, or she's not really authentic, or maybe even stuff like emotionally unavailable or emotionally shut down. Things like that. These are all judgmental terms that are describing our experiences with people who have varying states of emotional self-awareness. And what I want to do today is kind of take this all apart piece by piece and really look at what self-awareness, emotional self-awareness, is, and then also look at what you can do to develop emotional self-awareness within yourself. So I'm going to type in, first of all, where are you from? See if I get this correct. So where are you from? So if you're watching live, type in the, in the comment back where you're from. And right now I am broadcasting from Southern California, not where I live. But, um, so if you happen to be watching this live, let us know where you're from. And if you've got questions along the way, uh, my setup today isn't so great for answering questions. You can email me at Doug@dougnull.com with any questions. So let's get started. I'm going to shift myself around here and put myself down in the corner, and then I'm gonna kind of minimize the screen Can I do that? Probably not. All right, but I think I can do this. So emotional self-awareness. First of all, let's start off with a definition of what emotions are. Emotions are biologically based patterns of perception, experience, physiology, and action and communication that are culturally created in our brains. I could take this one definition and spend hours talking about it. I won't do that. A couple of just things to take away about emotions. Number one, we're not born with emotion. We're born with something else called affect, which we'll talk about in a moment. And two, emotions are what define culture. The emotions we have here in the United States, for example, in American English, may not exist in Finland and do not exist in Slovakia. Yeah, there are some basic emotions that transfer across cultures, but many of the more subtle emotions are different from culture to culture, and people in lands other than North America will have words describing emotional experiences that do not translate into English, and vice versa. So it's important to know that emotions are culturally created and that we are not born with them. The first concept when we're thinking about emotional self-awareness is a concept of interoception. And interoception is the brain's ability to receive, interpret, and act on signals from our gut, from our viscera, and from the outer periphery of our body, from our muscles and bones and nerves out there. And basically our brains receive all this data and then begin to interpret and act on it. This is called interoception. It's the first level of emotional self-awareness. And it's all based on what is known as the polyvagal system. The polyvagal system is based on a series of nerves called the vagus nerves, and here's a picture of what they look like. And basically, it's a bidirectional highway that links all of the organs together with the brain, and it basically— information can be transported, information can be transmitted from our various organs to our brain, independent of each organ, and our brain can send signals to each of our organs through this very complex neural network. Um, it's all interconnected to our facial, vocal, and middle ear muscles so that the polyvagal system also controls the way that we communicate in terms of tonality, speed, facial expressions, and our ability to hear. So for example, if we're in a fear state, we can't hear high frequency, but we can hear low frequency. Why? Because predators tend to be, have a lower frequency about them. So our ability to perceive the world changes as our polyvagal system reacts to our environment around us. And this is all part of the interoceptive system that we are all born with. So when we talk about gut feelings, These are also examples of interoceptive signals being sent from various parts of our body to our brain for processing, interpretation, and perhaps action. Affect is something different. Affect is the physiological change in the brain that's caused by interoception, and basically affect is the physical experience of pleasantness and unpleasantness, or pleasure and unpleasantness. We feel good or we feel bad. Now that's kind of a binary description. It's a little bit more subtle than that because we experience this affect physically, and you can see in this, these pictures, these are actual pictures of where the heat in the body is, heat maps of of a human experiencing different kinds of affect. And you can see that the blood distribution changes with each of the fundamental emotions. So for example, anger, you can see upper body, very bright yellow colored. Fear is much darker. And then if we look at disgust, it's darker, even a darker, darker than that. And over here you can see down on the dark side, you can see envy. But if you look for happiness or love, look at how much light there is with love. And look how much light there is with happiness. And these, these are really interesting studies that show how energy is just distributed around the body based upon the affective experience we're having in the moment. As I said before, we are born with affect. We are not born with emotions. And there are 9 basic affects divided into 3 categories or 3 valences. Positive, neutral, and negative. The positive affects include interest and excitement and enjoyment, joy, and happiness. The neutral affect includes surprise, startled. And the negative affect includes fear and terror, distress, anguish, anger, rage, disgust, dismell— that's the smell of spoiled milk, for example— and shame, humiliation. All these different affects are associated with different neural networks in our brain, and it is the combination of all of these affects that makes up what we call emotion. So when we are conscious of a physical feeling plus a a brain state, which we call an affect, we begin to experience emotion. So you can see emotion is fair, a fairly complex subject, and becoming emotionally self-aware really starts in early childhood because we learn emotions by creating a database of physical experiences with emotional words. And this starts at about 18 months to 2 years of age as the emotional centers of our brain come online. So with all of this information, we can say that emotional self-awareness is the ability to label the experience of interoception and affect into consciousness with a word that symbolizes that experience. So here's an example. Supposing something happens to me. I experience a mild negative affect of anger-rage, very mild anger-rage. I become aware of the sensation I'm experiencing. Maybe I feel my jaw tighten. Maybe my hands clench a little bit. I feel a tightening in my body. Reaching into my emotional database, I'm able to describe the sensation as frustration. So the word frustration describes the emotional experience of the interoceptive signals of muscle tightening, let's say clench jaw, clench fists, tightening of the back, and the affective experience of frustration, anger, annoyance, which is an affective experience in the brain. So I become aware that I'm experiencing the emotion of frustration. So we have interoception, which leads to affect, and the combination of interoception and affective experience leads to what we call emotions. So with all of this information, it's useful to know that there are 6 levels of emotional awareness, and I took this from a paper. You can see it below, the Schwartz Levels of Emotional Awareness. It's a 1987 paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Very useful. The first level— oh, before we get there, let's look at the hypothetical. You and your best friend work at the same department, and at the end of the year, your department gives a prize to the employee who performed the best. You both work very hard to win the prize, and in the end, your friend is the one who wins. How would you feel? So take a moment and just think to yourself, if you got a pad of paper, pen handy, Write out how would you feel if you lost the prize and your friend won the prize, your best friend. Okay, so here's how we look at emotional awareness through these 6 different levels. Level 1 is where there is no emotional awareness at all, and you— somebody might say, oh, losing the contest sucked, and they're not really talking about their feelings around all of this. They're just describing a situation. And in this level of awareness, there is no awareness. So there's no interoception going on, or at least we're not aware of the interoception. We're not aware of affect, and we're not aware of the emotional experience that we might be having. At level 2, we might become aware of bodily sensations, like I just felt a heavyweight drop on me. That would be an interpretation of interoception, how your brain is interpreting the data being received from the rest of your body. And that is one form of emotional awareness. And we call this interoceptive awareness. Level 3 is awareness of behaviors. I wanted to cry. So now we're starting to get into the aspect of affect. Where an affective experience is causing us to want to do something in response to that affect. So maybe it's sadness, maybe it's rage, maybe it's frustration, but whatever it is, it's causing us to want to engage in some kind of behavior. And what we call this is awareness of affect. Level 4 is awareness of an emotion, typically a very low-level emotion, such as anger. And so somebody might say, "I was pissed that I lost the contest." That would be awareness of an emotion, anger. And then Level 5, we start to get into more sophisticated emotional self-awareness called differentiated emotional awareness. And this is where you can start differentiating the different emotions that you might experience when you lose the contest. So you might say, "I was pissed, angry, frustrated, and disappointed that I lost." All of these are different emotions or different qualities of emotions. And so when we differentiate them and we're aware of the differentiation, we're gonna be aware that whenever we have an emotional experience, we have more than one just emotion in play at once. We're not just angry. We, we're angry plus a whole lot more. And then finally, we have what's known as blended emotional awareness. And this is where you're able to hold confluent conflicting emotions in your head, in your consciousness at the same time. I was pissed off, angry, frustrated, and disappointed that I lost, but I was very happy for Jill that she won. And this is the sign of emotional maturity, when you can hold conflicting emotions in your consciousness at the same time and be able to live with being angry and happy at the same time. That is when you have achieved emotional maturity, and that is when you are starting to develop high levels of emotional awareness. And that's the goal that we want to achieve because we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational as human beings. And it makes sense for us to master our emotional self-awareness because that's really who we are and what we are. And the problem, of course, we face is that our society and culture and educational system are all biased against emotions. And so things like I'm talking about today are never discussed. And the point of all this is to start discussing it and start having conversations about how important emotions are in our life. So if you want to refine your emotional self-awareness, the first step is to develop your interoceptive abilities. That means that you just wanna start paying attention to what your body is feeling. So what do you feel in your stomach right now? What's your breathing like? Can you feel your heart beating? When you feel air coming into your body, what does that feel like when you're breathing? What's on your skin? Do you feel any wind blowing on your skin? Do you feel any tightness in your body anywhere, or are you completely relaxed? Just paying attention to how your body is feeling and what signals it's sending to your brain is a critically important part of developing emotional self-awareness because all emotion comes from interoception. Pay attention to your subjective feelings, in other words, your affect, in response to events, memories, and situations. So you're in a meeting, let's say, and something happens, and, or maybe nothing happens. So what are you feeling at the moment? Are you bored? Are you excited? Are you tuned out? Are you engaged? Are you happy? Are you frustrated? Are you angry, irritated, annoyed? Are you sad? Do you feel like you're appreciated, or do you feel disrespected and ignored? These are going to change moment to moment to moment, all of these different feelings. And what you want to do is start developing the habit of being aware of these subjective feelings as they arise and try to bring them into your consciousness so that you're aware of them. This will come with practice, but it doesn't take a lot of practice. And then be aware of describing what's going on with no emotion, physical feelings, or behaviors. So if you don't feel any emotion and you don't have an urge to act and you don't have any feelings going on, be aware of that. What's going on? Am I, am I tuning this out? Have I shut down myself emotionally? Or is there just no data there and I'm in a completely neutral state? So try to distinguish between what it feels like to be shut down and what it feels like to be in a completely neutral state. And then the last step, and probably the most important practice you can engage in, is what's known as self-ethic labeling. So what you want to do is describe your subjective feelings and your emotional experience whenever you can. So if you're in that meeting, for example, you could say to yourself, oh man, I'm really bored. This is really frustrating and irritating, annoying that this guy's going on and on and on and on. Will he ever shut up? I can't believe how bored I am. I can't believe what a waste of time this is. I feel completely disrespected. You say all this inside to yourself as an inner dialogue. And as you describe what you're experiencing and what you're feeling, you'll be able to connect your emotional database tighter and tighter and tighter, and you will become more and more emotionally self-aware. And finally, look for conflicting emotions and express them in words. So if we go back to the example of losing the contest, I'm really frustrated that I lost, but I'm really happy for Jill that she won. You want to look for those conflicting situations. They happen all the time. Start paying attention to them and then label the conflicting emotions with words inside your head. You can do all this work silently if you have to. You can write it out and journal it, or you can, if you're in an appropriate place, you can talk about it. You can talk to yourself. All of this helps you get your prefrontal cortex to tune in to what's going in with the rest of your body so you can build very powerful emotional self-awareness. All right, I've got an online course that teaches you all about this stuff. It is called Listening Others Into Existence. The website address for the course to sign up for it is called, is at DougNoll.com/LP/listenothersintoexistence. Others-into-existence. And that course will teach you all of everything that I covered in this live streaming event, plus a whole lot more. And so if you really want to invest in yourself and really grow and develop your emotional self-awareness, check out the course. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.