A lot has been written about emotional intelligence, or EQ, and how to become better at it. But virtually no one mentions that the most important thing you can do to improve your emotional intelligence is to make sure that you eat well, and get enough exercise and sleep.
That’s because the purpose of the brain is not to make us happy or rational. The purpose of the brain is to make sure that we grow, survive, and reproduce. This is called allostasis, and Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett uses the metaphor of the body budget. Allostasis is “the process by which the body responds to stressors in order to regain homeostasis,” or balance.
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Key Takeaway
The purpose of the brain is to ensure that we grow, survive, and reproduce. This is why we need to look at the brain and body as a whole. And the brain works to keep your mind-body system in balance, so you can grow, survive, and reproduce. When your mind-body system is out of balance, your emotions will be more intense, even exaggerated. The primary and quickest way to restore your body budget is through diet, exercise, and sleep. No matter how else you try to increase your emotional intelligence, without proper diet, exercise, and sleep, your emotional intelligence will be compromised.
Everything we do, think, and feel affects our body budget. But eating, exercising, and sleeping are the quickest ways to influence your body budget. How you feel at any given moment reflects the sum of your body budget. In turn, your body budget affects how your brain interprets incoming stimuli and sensations. If your body budget is out of balance, your brain will make the wrong kind of emotional interpretations, and consequently, the wrong kind of reactions. That’s why it’s important for emotional intelligence to make sure that your body budget is in balance.
Your body budget is like a bank account. Withdrawals from the body budget need to be returned. Every brain region that’s claimed to be a home of emotion in humans is a body-budgeting region. This helps explain why, in mammals, the regions that are responsible for implementing allostasis or the body budget (the amygdala, ventral striatum, and medial prefrontal cortex, collectively called ‘visceromotor regions) are usually assumed to contain circuits for emotion. These are some of the most highly connected regions in the brain and are clearly multipurpose.
This means that the amygdala, which is often talked about with regard to emotional intelligence, is a body budgeting region. Anything you do to bring your body budget into balance will affect the amygdala.
When you’re experiencing a general low mood (psychologists call this low affect), it simply means that your body budget is out of balance. When you don’t know the cause of your low affect, you are more likely to treat it as information about the world, rather than your experience of the world. Can you see how this could lead to inappropriate, and potentially damaging, reactions?
If your body budget is out of balance, your emotions will be more intense, even exaggerated.
So your justified anger would be even more intense, and could turn into rage. Sadness could turn into depression, or even despair. Fear could become terror. Rather than mitigating stress, an unbalanced body budget could intensify stress. It could make you more, rather than less, defensive. Recovering from adversity would be more difficult. You could become more, rather than less, impulsive.
A simple, but common, example of an unbalanced body budget leading to an inappropriate reaction is someone who is “hangry.” You’ve probably heard of the expression and perhaps even experienced it yourself or been on the receiving end. Hangry just means that the person is angry because they’re hungry. They may not even be aware that they’re hungry; to them, they are just angry. But once they eat, their anger goes away, as if by magic!
How to restore your body budget
The primary and quickest way to restore your body budget is through diet, exercise, and sleep. Because the structures often assumed to be emotion regions (i.e. amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex, etc.) are also body budgeting regions. In fact, emotional intelligence requires that we have a healthy body. No matter what else you do, without proper diet, exercise, and sleep, your body budget, and hence your emotional intelligence, will be out of balance.
Research has already shown that a healthy diet can reduce anxiety and resolve depression, without any other intervention. Studies consistently show that the diets that improve brain health are those that are low in sugar and processed foods. Exercise is considered to be a Class A treatment for depression, and other research has found that it reduces anxiety. Inadequate sleep has a negative effect on a number of mood disorders and getting more sleep has been shown to improve mood. According to the National Sleep Foundation, we need 7 to 9 hrs of sleep per night. If you’re getting less than 7 hours, you may be compromising your emotional intelligence.
Are you ready to give diet, exercise, and sleep a chance to improve your emotional intelligence? Have you noticed that, perhaps, you’re angrier when you’re hungry or had a short night of sleep? Have you seen that your mood is better right after exercise? Please let me know your thoughts or experiences below.
Thank you for this great article. I have completely changed my mental and physical health doing the above. I have beat depression and feel my anxiety improving as the months go by. It’s been 8 months since I really cleaned up my diet. The sad thing is the doctor looked puzzled when I told her how I beat my long antidepressant prescriptions. I told her I am follow the inflammatory model through diet, exercise and sleep and also apply the information from the telomere effect book. She looked blank and confused. I couldn’t get out quick enough. I feel so proud and great to have taken full ownership of my mind and body. It helps having my husband as an enthusiastic partner in this and our children will hopefully be developing informed minds for good health and longevity now.
Thank you again 🙏🏻
You are very welcome Charlotte. I’m so happy for you. I, too, know from personal experience, that diet, exercise and sleep are crucial for mental health. And the science behind this is now overwhelming. Have you read Dr. Kelly Brogan’s book “A Mind of Your Own”? Dr. Kelly is a NY psychiatrist who treats depression through diet, exercise, and sleep!