How to Make the Most of Your Emotional Resources

Pick one: joy or sadness? Fear or security? Anger or peace? That first set is easy. Now try a harder pair. Surprise or boredom? Suddenly the choice isn't obvious. Surprise sounds like the better bet until you picture the kind of surprise that means you've been laid off or that your partner has been lying to you. At that point boredom starts to look like a mercy, even though nobody actually wants to be bored.

So what are emotions for? A useful starting point is that none of them deserves to be filed under good or bad. We tend to tag happiness as positive, but a happy event doesn't always lead somewhere worth going. Think about getting a promotion. You're thrilled, and the thrill makes you comfortable, maybe a little complacent about growing further. Compare that with getting pointed, honest criticism that stings for a day or two and then pushes you to sharpen your work. The praise feels better in the moment. The criticism is the one more likely to leave you a stronger version of yourself.

Emotions are signals that our senses have picked up something we need to respond to. A baby crying is, at the level of raw input, just a baby crying. What we feel about it varies: irritation, exhaustion, tenderness, concern. Temperament shapes a lot of that. A patient person may slide toward compassion while someone with a shorter fuse lands on frustration. Either way the feeling is telling us how to move. When the cry reads as hunger, the nurturing pull takes over and we feed the child. When the cry grinds us down to the point where our own self-control is slipping, that feeling is also information, and the right response is to step back and get help. Two very different emotional starting points, two outcomes that both work out.

Of course, those same scenes can go wrong. A frustrated caregiver might shut down or lash out. And sometimes a baby who has been fed, changed, and held keeps crying for no clear reason, which asks the adult to make a different call: maybe the child has learned that crying brings company, and what's actually needed is sleep, not more attention. Reading a situation that finely draws on a whole stack of perception, response, analysis, and a sense of where things might lead. Most of the time we run through that stack in seconds, much of it below conscious awareness. But building emotional intelligence, really tuning in to what we feel, is what sharpens the read.

The more tangled feelings are the ones that slow us down and force a reckoning. A lot of what get called moral emotions fall here: guilt, shame, pride. When one of those grips you, weighing your options can swallow your whole attention until you can't think about anything else. Emotional intelligence helps you move through that instead of getting stuck in it. Even the plainer emotions ask something of you. Can you shift from frustration at a crying baby toward patience and warmth? You can. But doing it reliably takes more than naming the feeling. It takes a real degree of skill and honest self-knowledge.

Daniel Goleman, the psychologist whose name is tied to the study of emotional intelligence, argues that being emotionally capable means holding a set of skills that let you develop as an individual, inside your relationships, and as part of a wider community. His work lays out which abilities matter for noticing emotions and turning them to good use. Dodging the so-called negative feelings is the easy habit, but those feelings only produce the results you steer them toward. Everyone has that capacity. With some effort and a bit of commitment, you can start using your emotions rather than only being carried along by them.

Start with self-awareness. Let your first reactions exist instead of arguing with them. You may not have room to deal with a feeling the moment it shows up, so note it down. Keep a journal. Talk it through with someone. Pay attention to how you make decisions too, because behavior is a window into what's actually going on underneath. Once you see why you do what you do, emotions get easier to name and the patterns linking certain feelings to certain actions start to stand out.

Next, learn to work with your emotions rather than be run by them. No person or event can reach in and make you feel something; your reading of what happened is what sets the feeling off, and your response is where anger actually forms. That part is yours to direct. Catch the loop of sour, repetitive thinking and interrupt it. When you feel yourself turning against something, remember it isn't the emotion itself that wounds you but the outcome you're bracing for. Get ready to convert a bad event into a lesson. Keep a few tools close for the flip: encouraging self-talk, slow breathing, a short gratitude practice.

Build self-motivation. Temperament nudges people toward optimism or pessimism, but those leanings are partly learned, which means they can be relearned. Your impulses are not beyond your reach. As you grow more confident in that, as you start to treat every event as a lesson or as one more step that brought you exactly here, you gain real command over your emotional life. Setting goals and giving yourself an honest assessment against them are good ways to get there.

Practice empathy. Step into someone else's position and feel what they feel. The ability to do that is central to your own development, and it shows up in concrete habits: listening well, handling conflict, treating people with respect.

Finally, tend to your relationships. Intimate ones, working ones, the looser ties that come with being part of a community, all of them. Taking responsibility for your connections is part of how a person grows. Paying closer attention to other people teaches you to pay closer attention to yourself, and that relationship, the one you have with you, is the one worth getting right.

Melissa Lavery, M.S. Sources drawn on here include work by Josh Clark; Leda Cosmides and John Tooby on evolutionary psychology and the emotions; Darling-Hammond and colleagues on feelings and learning; and Todd Kashdan writing on what emotions are really telling us.