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It’s normal to experience emotions at home or at work: frustration, anger, fear, excitement. But how you handle these feelings as a parent or leader can go a long way toward building—or destroying—your relationships. It’s essential to develop the ability to regulate your emotions, but perhaps not in the way you might think.

Take this example: A soccer team is playing in a critical game and is down by one goal. Just before half-time, a player gets fouled in the box and the team is given a penalty kick—a great opportunity. A leading player on the team steps up to take the shot. At first, it appears perfect as it soars to the corner of the net but then it rebounds off the goalpost. Defeated, he walks off the field to meet his team for their half-time meeting.

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To be alive is to feel. Travis, a veteran of the war in Iraq who was in my research study on yogic breathing for post-traumatic stress, shared with me at the beginning of the study that he was unable to feel emotions. He told me there had been a suicide in his family and that he had felt no emotions during the tragedy. After the study was over and his trauma symptoms eased, he came to share with me: “It’s incredible. I have feelings. I feel good, I feel bad, I feel!”

He was grateful to have all his feelings back the good and the bad. Trauma had numbed him from experiencing any feelings at all. He had lived in a sort of dead zone. Alive yet unable to feel.

Yet, we often prefer not to feel. Especially when it comes to negative emotions. Let’s face it, they can range from uncomfortable to outright painful. We know, for example, that loneliness registers similarly to physical pain in the brain.

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Push harder, further, faster. Sweat, blood, and tears. That’s the way to succeed, no matter what you want to do.

Or is it?

Emilia Lahti, a social activist and psychology researcher from Finland, knows a thing or two about grit. A survivor of domestic violence, she set out to personally experience extreme grit by running ultramarathons (50km/day) over 50 consecutive days across New Zealand.

People from the country of Finland, a country with a very harsh northern climate, have a special word for extreme grit and toughness: Sisu. Sisu is more than just grit, it’s “taking action against slim odds,” Emilia says. “Sisu is the embodied counterpart of mental toughness,” Lahti explains. “It stems from the Finnish word “guts.”

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It was a classic case to Dr. James Doty, neurosurgeon at Stanford University and Director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. A young, obese patient walks in complaining of back problems. Medical training would have a surgeon look at the MRI results, discuss surgery options with the patient, and pass her on to assistants to schedule surgery. Classical medical training has a huge blind spot: We forget to see beyond the charts and scans.

Dr. Doty says that if you looked at this young woman a while longer, behind the veil of hair that covered much of her face, something else revealed itself. She was obviously not comfortable making eye contact, too shy to even speak much. As she brushed her hair aside, her sleeve hitched up her arm, revealing dozens of scar marks near her wrist. She had clearly been cutting herself. She was not just a “classic” case of an overweight person with complaints of back problems. She was a human being suffering from pain far deeper than the eye could see.

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We live in a time of overpopulation on the one hand and extreme loneliness on the other. We crowd into urban areas, but still feel alone. Or we buy large homes and then wish they were filled with more life and laughter. Our national loneliness rate is staggering. A 2018 CIGNA study showed that loneliness is currently a public health crisis: Nearly half of Americans feel lonely. Loneliness has become so prevalent that pharmaceutical companies are even looking into creating a drug for loneliness. Research shows that loneliness can be worse for our health than smoking, obesity, and high blood pressure. It can lead to depression, anxiety, and premature death. In this time of hyper-connection, how can this be? And what can we do?

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We live in a time that seems increasingly close-minded and divisive—a world coming apart. However, if you look at religion (one of the most outwardly divisive forces of all) from inside the brain, the results can help you see the world from a very different perspective. A recent brain-imaging study at Yale University called “Neural Correlates of Spiritual Experiences” shows that the brain reacts in very similar ways to our diverse spiritual experiences—regardless of tradition, race, creed, or gender.

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Research generally shows that having friends at work can increase productivity and engagement. However, a recent study by Wharton researchers Julianna Pillemer and Nancy Rothbard finds that there can be a dark side to having friends at work, especially if what’s best for the friendship conflicts with what’s best for the organization.

Take this example: suppose two colleagues, let’s call them Lata and Andres, have worked on the same team for over five years and are close friends. They’ve supported and coached each other whenever work challenges come up for one of them. They get together with their families on weekends. And they both cherish having a close friend who is also a colleague.

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Do you find yourself compulsively trying to achieve and be productive? You hardly finished one task before your mind is on to the next one. You work hard to clear things off your to-do list, and then immediately fill it up again. You might be working on a presentation or article, but your mind is already on the topic you will cover in the next one. The problem is that research shows that approaching work in this manner—no matter how “productive” it might feel—is actually working against you.

Work addiction, unlike addictions involving alcohol or other substances, is rewarded by our culture with promotions, bonuses, praise, and awards—and therefore considered a good thing. However, what we don’t realize is that workaholism has a long-term negative effect, not only on our well-being, but also, ironically, on our productivity.

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A British author friend, Ruth Whipmann, author of America the Anxious, was shocked by something when she moved the US: everyone was so busy going to their mindfulness class and yoga class that they didn’t have time to spend with her — nor with their kids or their family.

The benefits of mindfulness — touted as a panacea for a myriad of problems from anxiety to chronic pain, has come under some debate. A few years back, a mindfulness research conference attended by the Dalai Lama and other scientists and celebrities came to a close with more of a loud bang than a quiet gong. A lot of questions and concerns were being raised about its benefits.

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We have all said yes when we knew better, and mostly the impact is as meaningless as eating an hors d’oeuvre just to be polite. But sometimes the impact is life-changing: saying yes to a marriage, a job, or a home that doesn’t feel right. Eventually, those mistakes become glaringly obvious. To others you can claim innocence. But in hindsight, if you are truly honest with yourself, you always knew better.

We have strong instincts when someone is not being forthright, for example. If the person you are speaking to is hiding their anger, your heart rate increases, research shows. Yet the problem comes when we ignore these instincts: We rely on our logical and reasoning mind instead. And the mind betrays us too easily. After all, you can talk yourself into anything, whether it’s an abusive relationship or a terrible deal on a car.

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As children, we were one with each moment — crying one moment, laughing the next — always intensely present and going along with the flow. As a result, we had an abundance of energy and enthusiasm. As adults, we stand amazed before the energy of children and attribute it to their age. While biological age may have something to do with their vivaciousness, their ability to remain in that total focus on the present, moment to moment, also does. After all, some adults have the same energy and enthusiasm as children, and those are the adults who can sometimes mystify everybody else. They too are able to remain in that flow. What is their secret?

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A 2009 study found that the average American consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information every day, certainly more than our ancestors ever handled—the iPhone had barely been out for 1 year, who knows how much information we take in today. We swim in an increasingly turbulent sea of information and stories: the ones we tell ourselves, the ones we tell others, the ones we hear on the news, and the ones we choose to watch on Netflix—and read in books, listen to on podcasts, and follow on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Research suggests these stories have powerful impacts on our well-being.

1. Understand What Information Helps You

Some forms of narrative are deeply nourishing. A study at the New School for Social Research found that reading literary fiction especially (as opposed to best-selling thrillers or romances) helps people develop skills they need in social relationships, like the ability to see from another person’s perspective. In particular, participants who read literary fiction were better able to read emotions in other people’s eyes—a critical skill for determining the state of mind of another person.

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My first experience giving birth without meds was crazy. I cried, I swore, I yelled, I called for my mom. The second time, thanks to a hypnosis training, I went into a deep relaxation between contractions. To the point that my midwife thought I was sleeping and decided to take a nap while I was on the verge of delivery.

While I experienced as much pain the second time as the first, my experience was very different. Instead of anxiously panicking (and wallowing in self-pity) at the thought of the next contraction, I completely stopped resisting. I rested instead of wasting my energy being anxious. It went by easier, smoother and much faster.

This isn’t an article about physical pain, though. I’m not saying you too should go au naturel when you give birth or shouldn’t get shots at the dentist (I definitely get numbed up at the dentist). The problem I’m addressing is that we freak out about our emotional pain the way we do about our physical pain and it’s stopping us from being happy.

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I often hear 50-year-olds saying, “I’m getting old” and see some of them practically hobbling along, as if in time to their own script. But then I know 70-year-olds who say, “I keep forgetting I’m not 16!”—like my mom, who bikes around a big city for miles, takes adult professional ballet classes for an hour and a half a day, and chainsaws trees down and repairs her rooftop on the weekend.

Certainly, genetics plays a factor here: Some people are born lucky. We also know that living through stressful life experiences—things we can’t control—can accelerate aging: Some people are unlucky.

But there’s an important caveat that has to do with how our luck—or lack of it—plays out over a lifetime. There is growing evidence that how some genes are expressed—for good or ill—has to do with how we choose to live. Meanwhile, how our bodies respond to stressful events turns out to have a lot to do with how we live—the things we can control.

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