It's Smart to Manage Your Feelings

Since the early 1990s academics have argued that your skills in self management directly impact your health and your career progression. Some recent studies have further affirmed both claims. Very exciting. Not only do they offer more ammunition for fans of the relatively new field of “emotional intelligence”, but they are more precise in explaining the physiology behind the results and so are perhaps more credible in their claims.

A recent study (University of Ohio) involved giving a bunch of people a blister (I don’t even want to think about how you give someone a blister). The researchers sought and found a significant correlation between speed of full recovery from the blister and how well the blisterees (if you will) processed anger. They specifically linked delays to higher level of stress hormones (interleukin-6). This result was consistent with previously published work (Archives of General Psychiatry) that drew a correlation between marital spats and slow physical wound recovery. A half hour fight with a spouse can cost a day in the healing duration of a minor wound!

Maybe this explains why I sometimes bemoan the presence of paper cuts, hang nails, bruises that never seem to go away!

Here’s one for you, another study showed that someone caring for a loved one with dementia heals more slowly from simple wounds (Dr Ronald Glaser, from Ohio State University College of Medicine).

Anyway, Steven Bloom, a professor at Imperial College London says, "Your body prioritizes and sorts one thing out at a time, so if you are stressed ... your body works through that before it gets on with the process of healing.”

Okay, so that’s the health part. What about career progress?

Harvard Medical School (led by Professor George Vaillant) has followed a group of 824 people over 44 years and currently claims that people go further in their career when they neither repress anger nor express it in an explosive fashion. The trick, apparently, is to process it in a healthy fashion. Fury doesn’t work; it is bad for your health and counterproductive. Staying quiet (repressing) is bad for your health. What works, in terms of career progression, is being assertive — expressing yourself (essentially, honouring yourself) calmly, standing your ground and asserting your stance. Presumably exhibiting this self management skill makes you more attractive to people with the power to promote you.

There you go.