Emotional Wellness
In a 2007 study in Current Biology, Matthew Walker's group at UC Berkeley kept 14 healthy young adults awake for about 35 hours, then showed them 100 pictures in an MRI scanner, ranging from neutral to increasingly disturbing. A comparison group of 12 had slept normally. In the sleep-deprived group, the amygdala, which scans for threat, responded about 60% more strongly to the aversive images. Its connection to the medial prefrontal cortex, which normally tempers that response, was weaker.
Sleep is scored under Physical, but the reaction it changed is scored under Emotional.
What it covers
Emotional wellness is a set of four skills. None of them requires being calm or happy all the time, and you don't have to think of yourself as a feelings person to use them.
Recognition
Noticing what you feel while you are feeling it.
Regulation
Having ways to respond when a feeling is strong.
Resilience
Bending under adversity and recovering afterward.
Use
Letting feelings inform decisions without suppressing them or being run by them.
Where I learned it
Like many physicians, I was trained to compartmentalize: stay objective, stay composed, keep moving. It stopped working when my Physical wellness faltered, and my emotional health followed. Poor sleep made me irritable and less patient. Illness drained my energy and narrowed my perspective. The worse I felt physically, the less I could regulate my emotions, and the less I could regulate them, the harder it was to sleep.
My epiphany was letting myself slow down enough to notice what I was actually feeling. It was not comfortable, but it was necessary.
What the research measures
Matthew Lieberman's lab at UCLA scanned 30 volunteers while they looked at faces, most of them angry or frightened. When people picked a word for the emotion on a face, the amygdala responded less than when they picked a name that fit the face's gender. Activity rose instead in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and the participants with the largest rise there showed the largest drop in the amygdala. The lab published the result in Psychological Science in 2007 as "Putting Feelings into Words."
We also borrow calm from each other. James Coan, working with Richard Davidson's lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, told 16 married women in a scanner that they might receive an electric shock. Holding their husband's hand reduced threat-related activity across several brain regions, and holding a stranger's hand reduced it less. In the 2006 paper, the higher a woman rated her marriage, the less threat-related activity appeared in her right anterior insula, superior frontal gyrus, and hypothalamus, but only while she held her husband's hand.
Listen and read
Podcast. Wellness, Rewired, Episode 2: The Emotional Dimension
Essay. Emotional Regulation. Building Resilience Across the Nine Dimensions
The Well-IQ assessment is free and takes about 15 minutes. It scores Emotional alongside the other eight dimensions.
Educational content, not medical advice.