As discussed above, we need to learn to tolerate, control, and harness our negative emotions, not eliminate them. Also, without fears and self-doubts, we’ll have a hard time motivating ourselves to improve. “No fear” can lead to complacency.
What it Means for Your Achievement
Those of you low on Negative Emotions and high on Motivation have a personality makeup tailor-made for high achievement. You’re good at setting goals and working through the inevitable stresses you will have to face when trying to achieve them. You’re inclined to have high levels of self-esteem and the ability to cope with setbacks well. Failures are more easily seen as lessons learned, and you are less discouraged by them. You persist until you’ve overcome any challenges or setbacks.
If you are low on Negative Emotions and high on Extraversion, you tend to be optimistic and confident and simply enjoy life. Other people probably love being around you, given your positivity and high spirits. You may be rarely overwhelmed by problems and highly attuned to the good things in life. You tend not to look back or get stuck in the past, preferring instead to anticipate all the positive possibilities in the future. This optimism and positivity can help ease your path toward high achievement.
If you happen to have a strong tendency to experience positive emotions, a trait associated with Extraversion, you probably feel generally happy most of the time. Research indicates that our well-being or happiness levels tend to be stable across our lives, regardless of what happens to us. The good and bad things that happen to us affect us in the short-term, but don’t have much effect on our long-term happiness.12 13
Happiness is primarily related to our standing on Negative Emotions and Extraversion. Where you fall on Extraversion and Negative Emotions will generally determine your “set point” with regard to your sense of well-being and happiness. Of course, this set point is movable to a certain degree, depending on how hard you work. Many of the strategies in this series of books will help you move your set point on Negative Emotions a little lower and your set point on Extraversion a little higher.
Of course, happiness is much more than feeling free of negative emotions and feeling strong positive emotions. To be truly happy, you also need a number of other things. And in my opinion, the happier you are in the broader sense of the word, the more successful you will be in reaching your goals.
There are whole books and psychology labs around the world dedicated to studying happiness. The best model that I have found was developed by Martin Seligman, now considered the “father” of the sub-field of Positive Psychology. There were many before him that got little press, including Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May — all part of the humanistic human potential movement that began after World War II and took off in the 1960s. But it was Seligman who brought the study of human potential back to life and attempted to make it more of a scientific pursuit than a philosophical one. Seligman and others have found that what should be considered as happiness is really a combination of a number of factors.14 These factors make up the acronym P.E.R.M.A. and include the following:
Positive Emotions: Experiencing and focusing on positive emotions and having a realistic-to-optimistic outlook. This is primarily related to Extraversion.
Engagement: Being engaged in and absorbed by activities. This is often referred to as getting into “flow” or the “zone.”
Relationships: Social connections are important to everyone. Your standing on Extraversion and Agreeableness heavily influence your relationships.
Meaning: Living your life with a sense of purpose and meaning. This includes living your life in line with your values and is a major focus of the current book.
Accomplishment: Making and achieving goals, the focus of the last few chapters of this book. This is heavily influenced by your standing on Motivaton/Self-Control.
So you need a high level of engagement in the things you spend your time on in addition to experiencing positive emotions. When you are absorbed in what you’re doing, you are fully in the present moment. This can also be referred to as “flow” or being in the “zone.”
You also need meaningful relationships. You don’t need a ton, but most of us need to have at least some positive and meaningful relationships to be happy and successful. For those of you who are low on Extraversion and low on Agreeableness, getting and maintaining close and meaningful relationships will be somewhat more challenging and will take much more work on your part.
Seligman also notes that true happiness stems from having a sense of meaning or purpose in your life. You need a strong reason or set of reasons for why you do what you do. Otherwise, what’s the point?
You also need a sense of accomplishment. Having a sense of ambition and setting and achieving obtainable goals will give you a sense of accomplishment. Just working toward goals tends to increase a person’s sense of satisfaction. Once you reach your goals, you will feel proud and fulfilled, at least for a while. People feel most alive when they push themselves to do something bigger.
Concluding Thoughts
Those of you who are low on Negative Emotions will have the least need to work on some of the strategies in the upcoming books in this series. However, even if you are low, having a well-rehearsed arsenal of strategies to reduce stress or over-activation will be helpful when you face big challenges such as your debut at the Olympics or your pitch in front of your ideal investors.
Key Takeaways
The Basic Personality Tendency of Negative Emotions contrasts those more prone to worry, self-doubt, pessimistic thoughts, and feeling tense, stressed, anxious, and moody with those who are calm, patient, content, and rarely affected by stress.
This dimension is related to the neurotransmitter serotonin and to the activity of the limbic and sympathetic nervous systems that control the fight-or-flight response.
Because your standing on Negative Emotions can either make or break your success, you need to know where you fall on this dimension and work around or with it.
If you are high on this dimension, then you need to learn to tolerate, control, and harness your negative emotions if you want to reach your potential.
The key to success is not having very low levels of negative emotions. Anxiety and self-doubt can help you succeed if you harness what these offer you.
Your standing on Negative Emotions and Extraversion determines your “set-point” for your sense of well-being and happiness.
Many of the strategies in this series of books will help you move your Negative Emotions set-point a little lower and your Extraversion set-point a little higher.
True happiness in the broader sense is related to more than low levels of negative emotions and high levels of positive emotions. It is also related to your level of engagement in your life, the quality of your relationships, your sense of purpose and meaning, and your sense of accomplishment.
Resources
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt, Ph.D.: http://goo.gl/IkQ81S
Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment by Dr. Martin Seligman, Ph.D.: http://goo.gl/xz1LiM
The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D.: http://goo.gl/bu3C1q
The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live—and How You Can Change Them –by Richard J. Davidson, Ph.D.: http://goo.gl/PVSDbK
Chapter 5
Extraversion/External Stimulation Tolerance
Extraversion/External Stimulation Tolerance
I tend to be:
Extremely High Very High High
Extraverted/outgoing/social
More interested in doing things with people than alone
High energy
Attracted to excitement/stimulation from people or situations
Easy and quick to feel positive emotions
Enthusiastic
OR
&n
bsp; I tend to be:
Low Very Low Extremely Low
Detached
Reserved and serious
Most comfortable and interested in working alone
Even paced
Avoidant of too much excitement/stimulation from people or situations
Slow to experience and show lots of positive emotions
Less enthusiastic
People high on Extraversion are more interested in doing things with people than alone. They also tend to be outgoing, energetic, attracted to excitement and stimulation, and quick to feel positive emotions intensely.
This contrasts with those low on Extraversion who are more detached, reserved, serious, comfortable and interested in working alone, who avoid too much excitement and stimulation, and are slower to experience and show a lot of positive emotions.
If you are in the middle, then you are more “ambiverted.” You tend to feel most at home with controlled doses of excitement and stimulation, mixed with adequate time scheduled for solitude. You probably display some of the strengths and weaknesses associated with high and low levels of Extraversion described in this chapter.
High Extraversion
The Neuroscience Behind High Extraversion
If you are high on Extraversion, then you will need to match your day-to-day environment with your need for external stimulation. This trait has been found to be related to neurotransmitters in the brain such as dopamine. Extraversion appears to be highly related to the brain’s reward pathways. For example, multiple MRI studies have found that one’s level of Extraversion is positively related to the size of the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the brain that determines how rewarding external stimuli are. Similarly, it’s believed that dopamine makes things in your environment appear more attractive and thus more rewarding.15
In general, potential rewards in your environment like food, sex, social interactions, money, or other goals trigger the release of dopamine in the brain, which in turn produces positive emotions and attraction to these things. This motivates us to actively work toward obtaining these rewards. This is one reason why Extraversion is related to energy and activity levels. It’s theorized that those higher on Extraversion experience stronger positive emotions in response to things in their environment due to a stronger and more frequent activation of the dopamine response.
The cerebral cortex is the outer 2 mm to 3 mm of your brain that controls things like vision, hearing, bodily sensations, and movement, in addition to more complex functions like memory, language, abstraction, creativity, judgment, and attention.
Another, somewhat older and possibly overly simplified way of conceptualizing what it means to be high on Extraversion is to think of your cerebral cortex’s level of arousal or activation. You can think of this as analogous to a car engine idling. If you are high on Extraversion, then your brain is naturally revving too low. In other words, your cortex’s level of activation is likely low. When a car is revving too low, it’s at risk for sputtering out or stalling, so to speak.
While your brain won’t stall, low levels of cortical arousal can be experienced as boredom. The remedy for this is to give it a little gas. In other words, you need to seek out external stimulation (social or otherwise) in order for your brain to rev at a normal, comfortable level.
Think of High Extraversion in Terms of Needs
Sometimes it’s best to think of Extraversion in terms of needs. With a high level of Extraversion, you are going to feel most comfortable and satisfied when you get your high needs for external stimulation met either through your job, sport, hobbies, or family life. You will need to have a regular outlet for socializing, experiencing fast-paced, stimulating and exciting things, or expressing your positivity. If you don’t, you will be vulnerable to boredom and low moods.
Benefits of High Extraversion
If you are high on Extraversion, then you will feel at home in fast-paced, exciting, and social environments. You’re probably happy and this can be contagious. You are likely to be popular and perceived by others as more attractive than may objectively be the case, probably because you are positive and social. There is even research to suggest that you may even live longer, especially if you are also high on Motivation.16 17
Drawbacks of High Extraversion
But there are some things to be careful about if you are high on this dimension. You may have difficulty spending time alone, or be overly focused on the number of your relationships, rather than their quality. Sometimes, when your needs for external stimulation are not met, you may feel the urge to engage in attention-seeking behaviors.
You may also have a difficult time slowing down, and your energy levels may be difficult for your friends and family to tolerate or match. Although you’ll feel at home in leadership positions, you may also be at risk of coming across as being too pushy, bossy, or curt, especially if you are low on Agreeableness. You may also be prone to getting reckless with excitement-seeking activities, or being too optimistic and positive.
Low Extraversion
What Introversion Really Means
Those low on Extraversion are often thought of as having high levels of Introversion or are referred to as “Introverts.” Technically, this is accurate. However, I want to make clear here that what many books on the market today describe as Introversion and what I and personality researchers are referring to here are only somewhat related.
Many of these books describe “Introverts” as those with a combination of traits such as preferring to be alone, being shy, sensitive, intuitive, introspective, and having a rich and expansive inner life. The reality is most of these traits are actually unrelated. This depiction of Introversion is not supported by scientific research. Many of the traits described are actually a description of traits from a combination of 3 of the 5 Basic Personality Tendencies which are unrelated to each other. The description is of a combination of the traits associated with someone who is low on Extraversion and high on Negative Emotions and Openness to Change/New Experiences. So don’t confuse what I and personality researchers are talking about and what you hear pop-psychologists talking about.
The Neuroscience Behind Low Extraversion
If you are low on Extraversion, you likely have a less robust dopamine response in your reward pathways when faced with potential external rewards. As noted earlier, dopamine makes things in your environment appear more attractive and rewarding. So for those of you lower on Extraversion, potential rewards in your environment like food, sex, social interactions, money, or other goals likely don’t lead to the same significant release of dopamine as is experienced by those who are high on this dimension. This leads to a more muted emotional response and less attraction to these things.
Using the car engine analogy again, if you are low on Extraversion, you can think of your brain naturally revving high. Older research has found that people like you tend to have a high level of natural cortical arousal.18 Keep in mind that this is not the same thing as anxiety, although when overstimulated you may in fact feel anxiety. Anxiety is part of Negative Emotions.
If you are low on Extraversion, you rarely feel bored when alone or when doing things that may seem boring to an outside observer, especially someone who is high on Extraversion. If you get too much stimulation from external sources, you’re predisposed to feel uncomfortable or overstimulated. Your “engine” easily approaches or exceeds the red line when faced with a lot of external stimulation.
What this means for you is that you’ll likely need to be very careful with how much external stimulation you expose yourself to. If your sport or job is highly social, fast-paced, or highly stimulating, you’ll likely need much more down time off the court or after work to recover.
Benefits of Low Extraversion
Being low on Extraversion can be a significant advantage. If you are low on this dimension, you are less likely to be swayed by external things that many others find rewarding. So you are less likely to feel seduced by the latest trends
.
Likewise, you’re less likely to fall victim to “shiny object syndrome,” or the tendency to feel the need to get the latest gadget or product on the market. You’ll also rarely get bored and be comfortable when training, studying, or working in isolation for significant periods of time.
When Low Extraversion Can Hold You Back
In addition to becoming easily overstimulated, you may be at risk of becoming socially isolated. This can lead to problems such as a lack of social support. In order to achieve big goals, we often need the support of others. We also need others for feedback and encouragement, especially when things are not going as well as we hoped.
At big competitions or in business meetings or other social gatherings, you may be prone to feeling overwhelmed and irritated. As noted earlier, being over-activated due to being low on Extraversion is not the same thing as anxiety. You are more likely to feel annoyed or exhausted than anxious if overstimulated.
If you are low on Extraversion, you also may come across as unenthusiastic or uninterested, because you are more reserved, even-paced, or have a more muted expression of positive emotions. Similarly, you may be more likely to have a pessimistic outlook on things, especially if you’re high on Negative Emotions. If you have this personality pattern, you may often feel unprepared and quickly overwhelmed by the pressures of life. Many of the strategies outlined in the forthcoming books in this series will teach you effective ways to combat low levels of positive emotions and overly pessimistic thinking.
Achieve Page 5