Emotions, What Are They Good for? Navigating Cultural Integration
date: 2023-09-04
author: Ivana Mrgan

She gets annoyed easily. He is quite an anxious person. I can't cope so well.
This narrative about how we function has this fatalistic quality. Almost like it reflects our emotional hardware - we must be built that way, right? And we are at the mercy of these mysterious forces, reacting to specific triggers, situations, and people.
Well, the research of neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett tells another story. Our brains are not built to keep us happy or prevent sadness, their job is to keep us alive. They do that by predicting and fine-tuning our responses, ultimately constructing our experiences to manage life’s challenges in the most optimal way.
Although less romantic, this notion brings good news. We can prompt our brains to learn to be more nuanced observers of what is happening in the body and to label our experiences in a more precise, context-specific manner.
This is what we call having emotional granularity. Maybe that crappy feeling after work is linked with grumpiness of not having enough sleep or you might be getting hungry? Or maybe you expected a more productive meeting this morning as that deadline is closing in?
Mastering emotional granularity provides your brain with more options for forecasting and speculating which, in return, results in more options ensuring flexibility in your responses.
How to boost your emotional granularity? Experiment with some of these suggestions:
- Learn a new language as this expands your network of available concepts
- Try out a new hobby, go and travel, meet new people as this enriches your pool of experiences
- Read and immerse yourself in new realities, topics, or areas of interest
- Be mindful and regularly check in as this prevents automatic response
And, as always, stay quirky, mindful and authentic. Shared cultural identities should be nurtured, supported and celebrated, not ignored or questioned in an effort to reduce someone’s cognitive dissonance. Should you decide to work on your emotional granularity, it will support you in noticing the nuances of how emotionally safe you feel (or don’t) and then you can mindfully decide how to proceed. We are here to support you along the way.