The Heart of Emotional Fitness...

The Key to Mastering Emotions and Achieving a Flow State

One of Substack readers last week wondered where Emotional Fitness sits in my Fitnesses. It’s a great question, given the struggle so many people have with managing their emotions, which quite often spill over into violence.

I like to fold Emotional Fitness under Physical Fitness. Here’s my journey of discovery.

NLP emotional state

While studying NLP over 30 years ago, I was introduced to the idea that emotional state drives behaviour and outcomes. We also learned that we can control our emotional state and, ultimately, our outcomes.

Tony Robbins wrote that everything we do is to change how we feel, our emotional state. We are not after the red sports car but the feeling we think it will give us.

What if we could create the feelings at will? NLP describes the relationship between physiology, feelings and thinking and their interconnectedness. Change one, and the others change. Further, it says that changing your physiology is the fastest way to change your emotional state.

Nothing describes this as well as this famous Charles Schulz Peanuts cartoon.

However, most of us do not have the skills or training to make emotional management a lifestyle. We believe we are at the mercy of outside forces that make us feel and act a certain way.

Tony Robbins made it look so simple, but it’s not simple. It requires work. I may not have done the work back then, but I couldn’t un-know the fact that I am responsible.

Let’s get physical

About six years ago, my husband was diagnosed with permanent Atrial Fibrillation (irregular heartbeat) after a traumatic event. I started delving deeply into matters of the heart. I wanted to know everything. I stumbled on the science of the driver our emotions - the heart.

Forever, we’ve known that the heart is connected to our emotions. Our language is littered with references to the heart and emotions.

My research led me to The HeartMath organisation. It promised that you could regulate emotions and reduce stress using certain techniques, especially biofeedback. It only required 5 minutes, three times a day. Decades of significant research stand behind these claims. They work extensively with first responders, the military, and others in highly charged workplaces to assist them in managing their emotions.

Breathing is front and centre of HeartMath’s techniques and biofeedback. You can learn to change your heart rate rhythms to change how you feel and perform.

Instead of having to think about being depressed and figure out how to produce the emotion I wanted, I could use biofeedback to change my physiology, manage my overall state better and produce heart coherence. What is heart coherence, I hear you ask…

Digging deep into the science

According to my next teacher, Dr Alan Watkins, an Oxford-based Neuroscientist, coherence is the state of ‘stable variability’. It is the foundation of the ‘flow state, ’ the state of maximum efficiency and effectiveness—Emotional Fitness at the highest level.

And it all starts with shifting the heart into coherence. Why the heart?

The heart is the body’s main power station. It generates 40-60 times more electrical power than the brain. The heart already synchronises numerous functions, while the brain doesn’t. The magnetic field produced by the heart is 5,000 times greater in strength than the field generated by the brain.

This power of the oscillating heart can alter all other biological oscillators. This is called ‘entrainment’. A system with a repeating signal, pattern, beat or rhythm will always synchronise to the strongest beat.

Therefore if we can get coherence in the heart, other body systems automatically line up.

As I learned with HeartMath, conscious control of our breathing is the pathway to heart coherence and emotional management. Watkins says we can learn to control 12 different aspects of breathing. Still, only three are essential for coherence: rhythmicity, smoothness, and a focus on the heart.

He uses this diagram. The right side is the area of negative emotion, positive on the left. Breathing for coherence alone will get you to the centre line, the start of positive emotion, according to Watkins

Coherence by Alan Watkins

But there is more to this emotional journey. Watkins works with senior executives, helping them become coherent as the ‘most powerful oscillator’ to which their organisation will entrain. He or she sets the tone.

He also dispels as myth that relaxation is the state we are after. To fully engage with life and perform at our peak, the top left quadrant is what we seek - the elusive flow state.

Once at that mid-point, it is time to become emotionally literate or emotionally intelligent. He asks executives to keep a diary of their emotions for 24 hours. You can imagine how they react to that task! His logic is that our super-efficient limbic system is naturally focused on the bad stuff of life. It’s time to develop awareness and distinctions between emotions and, secondly, to take action to master positive emotions consciously.

Watkins developed an app, Universe of Emotions, matching the four-quadrant model above to help identify specific emotions. I have often used it to determine what emotion I may be experiencing and what quadrant I am in. The app also lets you track emotions you experience as you go about your day to increase your emotional awareness.

He also notes that our three ‘Big Es’ are eating, exercise, and emotion. Good nutrition and quality exercise contribute to physical and emotional fitness. However, according to Watkins, we only eat three times a day and exercise five times a week, but emotions impact us every second of every day and, therefore, are the most important of the three. Watkins notes that ‘mismanaged emotion is the superhighway to distress and disease’.

So, my journey to Emotional Fitness was deeply rooted in the Physical. It started with breathing to control my heart’s rhythm with HeartMath and continues with mastering positive emotions and the physiology required to produce those emotions.

I highly recommend Professor Alan Watkins’s 2014 TED talk:

Being Brilliant Every Single Day (part 1)

Being Brilliant Every Single Day (part 2)

A must-watch, easy-to-grasp explanation and demonstration of coherence and emotional management.

Then, dig deep into his book Coherence: The Science of Exceptional Leadership and Performance shows how our ability to lead (including personal leadership) is rooted in our biology.

And so I rest my case: Emotional Fitness is underpinned by Physical Fitness, beginning with Heart Coherence.

Favourite Substack Reads this week:

Proof You Can Do Hard Things by Nat Eliason

Got Shoulder Pain by Jorg Mardian

What Children Know by Susie Kaufman