Flex Your Feelings: Train Your Brain to Develop the 7 Traits of Emotional Fitness - Hardcover

Anhalt, Emily, Dr.

 
9780593717615: Flex Your Feelings: Train Your Brain to Develop the 7 Traits of Emotional Fitness
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593717619 ISBN 13: 9780593717615
Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

This is Atomic Habits for your mental health—a data-driven, practical, step-by-step plan for developing the 7 essential traits of emotional strength necessary to face all of life’s challenges and become the best leader, entrepreneur, and human you can be.

Can you train your brain for greater emotional health,
just like you train your body for better physical fitness?

We know how to push our bodies for peak physical fitness—but when it comes to our emotional health, many of us just wing it. What if you could coach your mind for greater satisfaction and success, just like you train your body to get stronger? That’s the promise of Flex Your Feelings, a data-driven, step-by-step plan for developing the 7 essential traits of emotional fitness necessary to become the best leader, entrepreneur, and human you can be.

Here’s the good news: emotional fitness can be LEARNED…even if you didn’t grow up with mentally strong role models, and even if you’re not sure how to do it. Dr. Emily Anhalt—psychologist to the Silicon Valley tech elite and founder of Coa, the “gym” for mental fitness—offers a prescriptive, 7-step plan to help you develop the emotional strength and flexibility to cope with whatever comes your way. As you progress in your career and through your life, she explains, emotional intelligence isn’t just a “nice to have” soft skill. It’s a vital talent that allows you to show up as your best self, in good times and during tough moments. In Flex Your Feelings, you’ll find a blueprint for building an emotional fitness practice that works for you—so you can live it, every day.

“This book is a necessary and essential addition to the world of mental health.” —Kevin Love, NBA All Star

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr. Emily Anhalt is a clinical psychologist and co-founder of the mental health startup Coa—the "gym" for mental health. She’s consulted for American Express, the NBA, Google, Spotify, and Salesforce, among other companies. She currently splits her time between San Francisco, CA and New York City.

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1Why Are High-Performing People Burning Out?Just a month into 2024, beloved Sesame Street muppet Elmo innocently posted on the social media site X: "Elmo is just checking in! How is everyone doing?" The response to this tweet was staggering: more than 200 million likes and 20,000 responses later, the online world had spoken. "Elmo I'm gonna be real I am at my f*cking limit," one user wrote, and another confessed: "Not gonna lie . . . I'm tired, Elmo. A lot's going on, little Red." In message after message, it was evident that the massive online trauma dump touched on something that we as a society brush under the proverbial rug: we all have issues.Emotional struggles are just part of being alive. But there is a stigma around prioritizing mental health-even as our awareness of its importance grows. Often, society frames us as either "mentally healthy" or "mentally ill"-a false dichotomy that ignores the vast majority of the population. Mental health is a spectrum that we are all on-and, in fact, most of us are in multiple places on that spectrum at any given time. We might have healthy relationships at work but not be our best selves in romantic relationships. We might feel mostly content with our lives but on some level know that we're not living out our purpose. Which means, ultimately, that we all have more work to do.Often, we just suck it up, hoping that things will get better in time. We minimize our struggles or stuff down what we feel. If someone notices that we seem off, we deflect or say we're fine, it's really nothing. But deep down, we know it's never really nothing. To truly achieve your goals and ambitions in life-strong and supportive relationships, a thriving career or business, peak physical and mental health-you need to stand on solid emotional footing.But if mental health is so important, why do we give it so little attention?I'm a clinical psychologist and therapist working in Silicon Valley. I work with some of the most high-powered, hard-charging, accomplished people in the world. These are people who can identify a massive work problem, devise a strategy, and deliver results. They've worked hard to achieve their success. But it doesn't mean they're content with their lives. It doesn't mean they don't struggle.The truth is: life is often uncomfortable, especially when you're aiming high. Unfortunately, our instinctive reaction to discomfort is usually to turn away. Give in to that impulse consistently, however, and you'll see a gap widen between where you are and where you want to be in life. It is usually when people realize that the gap has widened so much that they are at risk of falling down that hole that they show up in my office.But here lies the dilemma: if you wait to work on your mental health until the wheels start falling off your emotional life-if you don't pay attention to what's going on inside your head until it really starts affecting your body-all that stress, anger, and low self-esteem will wreak havoc on your relationships, your work, and your overall satisfaction in life.Unfortunately, many people don't realize that something needs to shift until it feels too late to change things. This way of thinking about mental health is entirely backward-it's like waiting until you're diagnosed with early signs of heart disease to start doing cardio. Instead, I encourage my clients to rethink mental health by addressing it more the way we now know we should be thinking about physical health: proactively. I realized that what people really need in order to keep their emotional life in shape is a proactive regimen for mental and emotional health, so that when they do hit the inevitable obstacles in life, they're able to move through them with strength, flexibility, and confidence rather than stumbling under pressure.Can we actually train our body for mental health, just as we do for physical health? The answer is yes.You Can't Succeed on Smarts AloneWhile I was in grad school for clinical psychology, I realized that the information I was learning was being gatekept within my campus and my textbooks. At the time, there were no "emotional intelligence" classes in high school or college. People weren't flocking to social media to talk about "healthy communication" or "setting boundaries" or anyone's "growth mindset." Meditation was still fringe. And the idea of prioritizing mental health was definitely not normalized. These concepts are more mainstream today, but back then, if you weren't getting a degree in psychology, there was very little information on how to navigate relationships in a psychologically minded way. People were supposed to possess fully developed emotional coping skills, yet they were discouraged from seeking support in developing those skills or even admitting to having trouble with them. This was especially true in the context of work, as I observed firsthand with my roommate at the time, Monica.Monica was struggling. The small-fish start-up she was working for had just been acquired by a big-fish company, and she was thrust suddenly into a massive corporate machine. From the outside, the company was well-run and highly profitable. It attracted top-tier performers, the hungry and smart, the motivated and the hardworking. The employees possessed the "right" traits typically considered important for success. In other words, they had all the hard skills to make it. But Monica would come home from work night after night to unload about what an absolute nightmare the place was, and I could tell she was overwhelmed and burned-out.Over time and a lot of takeout, we figured out the company had made several unforced but common errors: there was ineffective communication between departments, leadership seemed to be leaking their emotional issues all over the place, and there was a severe lack of empathy for employees inside and outside of work. It all came down to overlooking or undervaluing important soft skills (a term that wildly undercuts how significant and difficult these skills are). Everyone had the business acumen and product intelligence to drive sales and profits, but not everyone had the emotional intelligence to make the workplace a positive and collaborative environment. And leadership didn't seem interested in doing much about it, even as attrition skyrocketed and growth sputtered. Everyone blamed the company itself, but I saw the trees through the forest: to have a healthy organization, every individual needs to feel supported to show up as a healthy version of themself.The company was failing because the people who made it up were struggling. Even though they were intelligent. Creative. The "best of the best." They couldn't succeed on smarts or talent alone. And neither could the business. It's true in tech, and it's true in all industries and walks of life: we bring our emotional selves to work every single day whether we like it or not. So why does our society so often privilege hard skills over interpersonal intelligence?One big problem stemmed from the stigmas and misconceptions about emotions and mental health overall. At the time, therapy was a four-letter word, and people were discouraged from even mentioning their mental health unless they were in the throes of a crisis-and then, they were judged for having a crisis at all!As I supported Monica in navigating her frustrations with work, I started to wonder: What if people didn't wait so long to tackle their long-suffering inner demons and seek help? Could mental health be a more proactive practice? What if we didn't wait until things were falling apart to work on our mental and emotional health? Which led me to the next question: What if we treated emotional health the way we treat physical fitness? Could we shift our mindset about mental health care to look more like going to the gym and less like going to the doctor? And what would this look like in the workplace (where we spend about a third of our lives)?There's No Quick FixThe...

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Verlag
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593717619
ISBN 13 
9780593717615
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
270
Kontakt zum Hersteller
G.P. Putnam's Sons
https://www.penguin.com/putnam/

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