Name: Destructive emotions
ISBN: 9780553381054

Destructive emotions

A dialogue between the Dalai Lama and a group of scientists and philosophers unites research in education, psychology, and neuroscience with Buddhist practice to discuss how to cope with, transform, and eliminate negative emotions.

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tailspin2019Dec 2021

Have you read "Destructive Emotions" which I think was a collaboration between Daniel Goleman and the Dalai Lama?

The title may sound off-putting to some but it was a great book for me, following on from Emotional Intelligence (I second your recommendation on that one).

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he11owMar 2021

There were a few milestone books, the kind that had such an outsized impact they spring to mind almost immediately:

1. The Goal/ E. Goldratt. I read this first when I was a teenager, and kept returning to it (and some of its sequels) again and again. Adopting a systems thinking mindset. When analysing problems looking for the bottleneck, then figuring out how to elevate that constraint.

2. Topics in Algebra/ I. N. Herstein. During the first summer at Uni I decided to read this book cover to cover and solve every single problem in it. Which I did. Sadly, twenty years on, my algebra game is poor. But that summer, of abiding in algebra, was a really spiritual experience. And it's left a mark.

3. The Orchid Thief/Susan Orlean. By my early twenties it was clear to me I enjoy non-fiction more than fiction. But I enjoyed it for the intellectual experience, it would never leave me rattled the way fiction can leave you. And then I read this book and my mind was blown. I was outraged that people in the world can write like that, and that I am not one of those people.

4. Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama/D. Goleman. I randomly picked up this book, it was lying around at this place I was staying at. This was my first intro to Buddhist analytical analysis and I came out of it a different person. Not a better one, sadly, but for sure one more determined to learn more, and to bring these principles into my own life. It's been a journey since, but that's where it started.

5. On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant/D. Graeber. It's kind of funny that this essay, which was tongue-in-cheek and deliberately provocative, would end up being like a real thing. But by the time I read it (and later, the full book) I was really questioning what was wrong with me that made everything feel so...meaningless. In his lingo, I had shit jobs and I had bullshit jobs, and I was really struggling to see how I can productively manage decades to come of work if these are the only two choices. But airing this problem in this way also helped me, eventually, walk down a path I was more comfortable with. It took a long time, but I finally like the path I'm treading.

6. Not an essay, a film. Searching for Sugar Man/ M. Bendjelloul. I don't even know where to start on this one. I mean, the story's pretty radical as non-fiction goes (see above), but there were moments in and around it, where it's like someone comes and slaps you in the face to wake up. And then the meta aspect, of the director's own sad story. I spent A LOT of time thinking about this film.

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brigandishJul 2020

> There's a lot of evidence that exercising is healthy and helps people improve their mental state so that analogy doesn't work.

There's actually a lot of research out there. Did you try to search for any? It's not scepticism to compare something you cannot believe because you haven't bothered to investigate, with well known falsities such as crystal healing.

Not only does the research support the existence of a nasal cycle where one nostril is dominant at different times, it also supports a different pathway to the brain and a different neurological response. On top of that, psychological research shows links between breathing patterns and emotional response, in both directions, and then there's the wealth of meditative research. This stuff isn't controversial.

From [Taste and Smell]:

> The FN model may also explain the observation by Sobel et al. [36] that, when performing an odor threshold test, humans sniff longer when using the nostril with the lower flow rate. (Subjects usually have different flow rates in their two nostrils because of cyclic changes in the size of their nasal cavities.)

From [Nature]:

> The flow of air is greater into one nostril than into the other because there is a slight turbinate swelling in one. The nostril that takes in more air switches from the left to the right one and back again every few hours

From [Stanford News]:

> Michael Leon, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at the University of California at Irvine said… [the] data suggest, that the olfactory system maximizes the ability of its distributed receptor neurons to encode differentially absorbing odors.

From [Measuring and Characterizing the Human Nasal Cycle]:

> Nasal airflow is greater in one nostril than in the other because of transient asymmetric nasal passage obstruction by erectile tissue. The extent of obstruction alternates across nostrils with periodicity referred to as the nasal cycle. The nasal cycle is related to autonomic arousal and is indicative of asymmetry in brain function. Moreover, alterations in nasal cycle periodicity have been linked to various diseases.

From [Hemispheric lateralization in the processing of odor pleasantness versus odor names]:

> These findings are consistent with previously demonstrated neural laterality in the processing of olfaction, emotion and language, and suggest that a local and functional convergence may exist between olfaction and emotional processing.

From [Respiratory feedback in the generation of emotion]:

> This article reports two studies investigating the relationship between emotional feelings and respiration. In the first study, participants were asked to produce an emotion of either joy, anger, fear or sadness and to describe the breathing pattern that fit best with the generated emotion. Results revealed that breathing patterns reported during voluntary production of emotion were (a) comparable to those objectively recorded in psychophysiological experiments on emotion arousal, (b) consistently similar across individuals, and (c) clearly differentiated among joy, anger, fear, and sadness. A second study used breathing instructions based on Study 1’s results to investigate the impact of the manipulation of respiration on emotional feeling state. A cover story was used so that participants could not guess the actual purpose of the study. This manipulation produced significant emotional feeling states that were differentiated according to the type of breathing pattern. The implications of these findings for emotion theories based on peripheral feedback and for emotion regulation are discussed.

I could go on.

As to meditative practices, there's been extensive research for nigh on 50 years now, and for the past 20 (at least, as far as I'm aware) they've been using fMRI scanners to provide objective results[Oser] on the link between meditation as a practice and mental state.

You just have to look.

[Taste and Smell] https://books.google.com/books?id=fuxS-p6bpuwC&pg=PA12

[Nature] https://www.nature.com/articles/46944

[Measuring and Characterizing the Human Nasal Cycle] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5053491/

[Stanford News] https://news.stanford.edu/news/1999/november10/smell-1110.ht...

[Hemispheric lateralization in the processing of odor pleasantness versus odor names] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12712833_Hemispheri...

[Respiratory feedback in the generation of emotion] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0269993014300039...

[Oser] https://www.lionsroar.com/the-lama-in-the-lab/ I include this as it's a personal favourite of mine and covered more extensively in Daniel Golman's book, Destructive Emotions.

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somberiOct 2016

Question: Do you ever feel angry or outraged?

His Holiness: Oh, yes, of course. I'm a human being. Generally speaking, if a human being never shows anger, then I think something's wrong. He's not right in the brain. [Laughs.]

Ref: Dalai Lama's website where it quotes his interview in the Time Magazine - http://www.dalailama.com/messages/transcripts/10-questions-t...

I found this book useful: "Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama" - http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26332.Destructive_Emotion...

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gerbillyDec 2015

Check these out:

http://people.duke.edu/~ojf/DestructiveEmotions.pdf

http://www.amazon.ca/Destructive-Emotions-Scientific-Dialogu...

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ahoyhereJan 2011

There's lots and lots of research out there that meditation increases insight, memory, improves sleep, reduces stress, reduces the physical perception of pain, improves, well, just about everything.

Useful refs:

http://www.amazon.com/Destructive-Emotions-Scientific-Dialog... (the Audio CD set is even better, imo, with actual dialog)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_on_meditation

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43006-2005Jan...

My favorite intros to secular meditation (that is, non-religious Buddhism):

http://www.amazon.com/Wherever-You-There-Are-ROUGH/dp/140130...

http://www.amazon.com/When-Things-Fall-Apart-Difficult/dp/B0...

http://www.amazon.com/Being-Nobody-Going-Nowhere-Meditations...

Doing what I learned in from three, plus the Destructive Emotions audio book, absolutely transformed my life. Like night and day. Now I'm one of the best-adjusted people I know, despite having gone through (and, in a few cases, done) some horrendous things.

What mindfulness meditation teaches you, above all physical side effects, is to accept things as they are. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to change them, if they're truly bad, but most people deny what is reality. As if that helps. (I sure did.) But denying just hurts more, doesn't make it untrue, of course, and denial makes it impossible for you to improve things.

I think most of the troubles in life are caused by denial.

And, bonus, the level of mindfulness makes it easy for me to spot user interface/process (and therefor product) opportunities because I almost never just "tune out" and work on autopilot.

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