What is Emotional Intelligence?

ChangeHappiness

Oct 5

You may have heard people throw around the term emotional intelligence without really knowing what it means. What do people mean when they refer to emotional intelligence? Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, use, and manage your emotions in positive ways, and it is directly tied to how we learn to process our emotions at different stages of our lives.

As a society, we have been conditioned to drink alcohol for every reason under the sun. That means, growing up, we’ve missed critical opportunities to learn about emotional regulation. Instead of using life experiences to actually understand and feel our emotions, we’ve been trained to reach for another drink.

This phenomenon is SO common, I’ve developed a new framework describing the three core reasons why we use alcohol to manage our emotions, and I’m super excited to share it with you! My framework will help you better understand your emotions and learn healthy strategies to manage them.

1. YOU need TO RELAX

The first reason people drink is that they need to relax. It can feel like we’re getting the message to “go, go, go, go, go” all day and, at the end of the day, we just can't wait to get home and turn off.

We get so productive and do so much that adrenaline courses through our bodies to help us keep up. That leaves us in a extremely high state—and not in a good way. In fact, what’s really happening is that our sympathetic nervous system is in overdrive. It’s releasing tons of adrenaline and tons of cortisol, and we don’t know what to do about it. We don’t know how to decompress. We need to switch over into our parasympathetic nervous system, but we never learned how. Instead, we've been taught to use alcohol as a way to destress.

So we come home from a stressful day at work, and we drink. Then we drink a few more. You might wrongly assume that alcohol does actually relax you, but it doesn’t. In fact, there are studies that prove that when we drink alcohol, we release even more cortisol and even more adrenaline.

Emotional intelligence is recognizing when you're stressed out and overwhelmed, and then using tools and modalities to decompress without alcohol. Remember, alcohol is not relieving your stress. It literally makes you more stressed out over time.

2. You want to have fun

The second reason why a lot of people drink is to have fun. It’s a different kind of energy. This time, you want to go out. You want to have fun. It’s Friday night, and you want some excitement in your life.

In this case, we never really learned to recognize when we’re bored or even a little unfulfilled, and we definitely didn’t learn to capture that boredom to do something productive and healthy.

When we were kids, we actually were pretty good at this. We learned to ride bikes, and we learned to go roller skating and climb trees. We harnessed that feeling of excitement with adventure. Then alcohol gets thrown into the mix in adolescence and early adulthood, and that alcohol supplants our entire idea of fun and excitement in our lives. We forget how to have adventures and induce feelings of joy, so we turn to alcohol.

In reality, there’s nothing exciting about alcohol. To the brain, it's just the same thing over and over and over again. Another huge part of this emotional intelligence piece that we're missing is recognizing that when we feel bored and reach for a drink, it doesn’t really work. It doesn’t do anything to fulfill you in a sustainable way. We just use it as a band-aid.

Emotional intelligence is knowing how to understand and manage your emotions in healthy and positive ways. When it comes to boredom, we need to learn how to recognize it and use it as a cue to create excitement and adventure. What does that look like as adults? That looks like getting out into nature, trying new hobbies, and doing the things that scare you.

3. You want to socialize.

The last big reason we drink is to socialize. True emotional intelligence teaches us how to connect with other people—to have empathy and be present with them. When we don’t know how to do this authentically, we try to bond over drinks. So, when we drink, it’s a social thing.

The thing is we’ve all been duped ever since we were teenagers—and some even younger than that. We think we need alcohol to socialize. We think that, if you don't drink, other people will think that you're not cool. You’re not part of the crowd. That couldn't be further from the truth.

The truth is, when we socialize while drinking alcohol, it becomes repetitive. It becomes monotonous, and we're not able to actually connect with other people in a close way. When people remove alcohol from their lives, on the other hand, they are able to be so much more present with the ones that they love and their relationships get better.

Emotional intelligence is recognizing that alcohol isn't helping you bond you with other people. It's actually sabotaging the friendships you could be making.

Why does this even matter? Why should you care? Because your emotions are trying to tell you something. We are meant to learn from our emotions. When we use alcohol to just shove our emotions down, we don’t learn from them.

I learned so much from my emotions when I stopped numbing them. I learned that I had these aspirations of writing books and traveling and and launching this incredible business that helps so many women. I was numbing all of that before. I was really bored because I didn't have enough challenge and excitement in my life.

Sometimes, I think emotional intelligence can be even more important than IQ—because our emotional intelligence is how we relate to other people and it's how we align our lives with our values. Intellect alone can’t do that. You can be the smartest person in a room, and you can still be pretty miserable and depressed and not do the things you really want to do. When we remove the alcohol, we begin to recognize that our emotions and intuition are pointing us to the next right step.

If you're really curious about how you can heighten your emotional intelligence—if you really want to learn how to take care of your emotions and use them and understand them in positive and healthy ways—I highly recommend you join me in my Become Euphoric program.

It's a 4-month experience to learn how to manage your emotions and use healthy rituals to express them and learn from them. There are guides teaching you to soothe and decompress. There are guides teaching you to use your boredom and transfer it into excitement and adventure in your life, and there are guides on how to socialize confidently. It's a really robust, incredible program that you can join to change your relationship with alcohol, uplevel your emotional intelligence, and learn what you really want in life. Hope to see you there!