H265-HEVC

Whilst conceptually health and happiness may mean very different things, especially to busy executives who don’t consider either terribly relevant to quarterly results, in practical daily life it’s virtually impossible to separate

health from happiness – the two are inextricably linked. When someone has the ‘giving-up–given-up complex’ (Engel, 1968) or experiences ‘the emotional eclipse of the heart’ (Purcell and Mulcahy, 1994), their gloomy expectation and negativity will facilitate a host of negative consequences – physically and mentally. Those that are more optimistic or are at least able to manage their emotions and use their feelings to initiate constructive action to solve their problems are almost always healthier and live longer, happier, more contented lives. That fact is unequivocal.

Interestingly, the scientific literature on the negative consequences of emotions is about 10 times larger than the evidence on the beneficial effects of positive emotions. Psychology and psychiatry, for example, are almost exclusively focused on dysfunction, studying it and treating it respectively.

In fact, for decades, it was widely considered ‘a career-limiting move’ or academically inappropriate to research happiness or elevated performance from an emotional perspective.

Thankfully ‘positive psychology’ has gathered pace over the last 30 years and we now realize that we can actively alter our emotional outlook, which in turn can enhance our immune system and increase our protection and resilience against disease and illness. We also now realize that positive emotions that make us feel happy, contented and confident can be learnt, practised and incorporated into our daily lives. For years we were told that happiness and positivity were largely genetic – we were either born optimistic or we were born pessimistic. It’s not true. Optimists may have won the ‘cortical lottery’ (Haidt, 2006) because they habitually look on the bright side and more easily find the silver linings, but this ability is open to all of us. Thanks to research giants such as Abraham Maslow, Aaron Antonovsky, James W Pennebaker, Tal Ben-Shahar, Dean Ornish, Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi amongst others, we now understand that our emotional outlook is not fixed as a permanent set point but rather that we each have a range. Whether we view the glass as half-empty or half-full can be significantly altered through emotional coherence and self-management so that we habitually operate at the top end of that emotional range.

When crisis strikes – and it does for everyone at some point in life – most people will deal with crisis in one of three main ways. They will get into action and fix the problem (active coping), reappraise the situation (engage in inner emotional and cognitive work to find the silver lining) or avoid the problem (engage in distraction tactics such as alcohol or drugs so they can forget or blunt the emotional reaction) (Carver, Scheier and Weintraub, 1989; Lazarus and Folkman, 1984).

In the 1970s Holmes and Rahe developed the stress scale as a way to correlate difficult, traumatic or stressful ‘life events’ so we could better under-stand the effects of these events on health and happiness. Of course it was also hoped that these insights would lead to a way to help people find the right coping strategy for crisis.

Holmes and Rahe found that if someone experienced several life events such as divorce, death of a loved one, redundancy or moving house, they would be more susceptible to physical illness, disease or depression. And this became medical ‘fact’. But the ‘evidence’ that proved this ‘fact’ also clearly demonstrated something else... Some individuals were experiencing a great many of these major life events and yet they were not adversely affected, mentally or physically, over the longer term. Clearly it was not the life event that predicted illness but rather the way the individual responded to those events and what they made them mean.

The active ingredient is what is known as post-traumatic growth – the ability to find something positive and beneficial out of even the most difficult experiences. This is not optimism or pessimism per se, but the ability to manage emotion and manage meaning. Social psychologist Jamie Pennebaker’s work has shown that the event isn’t the issue; what matters is what happens after the event and what the individual makes the event mean to them as a person and their future life (Pennebaker, 1997).

When people were able to express themselves emotionally and talk about what happened within social networks or strong relationships they were largely spared the damaging effects of trauma to physical and mental well-being. (Remember this when we explore the potent impact of positive relationships for personal and professional success in Chapter 6.) Those with greater emotional coherence were also better able to put a cognitive frame around the event that allowed them to make sense of what happened and move on.

How we view the world is not set in stone. We may not always have control over situations or events but we always have control over how we interpret them, what we do about them and what we make them mean.

From a business perspective it has also been found that those who are mentally healthy and happy have a higher degree of ‘vertical coherence’

among their goals and aspirations (Sheldon and Kasser, 1995). In other words they have dovetailed their short-term goals into their medium-term and long-term goals so that everything they do fits together and pulls them toward a future they want. I would go so far as to extend this definition of ‘vertical coherence’ to include coherence within all the areas of vertical development – especially, in this context, emotions.

Vicious cycles caused by mismanaged