Mental skills

[schneefink]

Help me win an argument, please:

Poll #25907 Mental skills

This poll is closed.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 74

View Respondents

Regulating one's emotions is a different skill set from intellectual problem-solving.

View Answers

Completely agree
58 (78.4%)

Mostly agree
16 (21.6%)

Neither agree nor disagree
0 (0.0%)

Mostly disagree
0 (0.0%)

Completely disagree
0 (0.0%)

Feel free to elaborate in comments.

Comments

[muccamukk]

Elaboration in comments: WTF!?

[schneefink]

Sometimes I manage to convince people of something, sometimes it's easier to make a poll and show them that everyone agrees with me ^^

[trobadora]

I don't even see how there can be an argument over this?!

[schneefink]

To be fair, brains are hard and feelings are difficult to talk about. (But I too think it's very clear.)

[sholio]

They're not even remotely similar?? What. I mean, I guess it's possible some people use a very similar skill set for both, so they feel connected for those people. But to me, they're so far apart that they're not even remotely the same.

[schneefink]

I think that some people think along the lines of "I know intellectually that it's irrational to feel this way, and if I was smarter I would be able to convince myself of that and then I wouldn't feel this way." Which, to be fair, is sometimes a tempting way of thinking, that it's possible to "solve" emotions via logic. As a side effect it often means that when they're having trouble regulating their emotions it makes them feel stupid.

[cahn]

Regulating emotion is in many ways a different skill set, especially at its base, than intellectual problem-solving; I have a child who is actually extremely good at intellectual problem-solving (in the sense of wins awards for it; kid is actually kind of scary good) and just terrible at regulating emotion (like, to the point where sometimes I worry that I might have to take her out of school).

I checked "mostly agree" because I do think there is some interplay in which intellectual problem-solving can aid in emotion regulation. For example, my whole life I've always just gotten really stressed out if I thought I was going to be late for something. A couple of years ago, I made the realization that getting stressed out isn't going to get me there any faster, and to a certain extent I've been able to "logic" myself into realizing that it's illogical to make myself more unhappy when it doesn't make any difference, whereas I think if I were a person that emphasized intellect and logic less that this could perhaps not be such a successful strategy. And also I know people who have different (less logic-based) approaches to basically the same problem that work equally well. And besides that, logic like this often *does not work* very well on the kid mentioned above for emotion regulation -- I think it will be useful when kid is older (I can see signs that it's getting rather more effective than it used to be), but I think she's got to have a baseline in there first.

So... I do think that intellectual problem-solving skills are skills that can (sometimes, not always) be used to help regulate emotion, but that's distinct from saying it's the same skill set. Does that make sense?

[schneefink]

So... I do think that intellectual problem-solving skills are skills that can (sometimes, not always) be used to help regulate emotion, but that's distinct from saying it's the same skill set. Does that make sense?
Yes, I agree. (And because it sometimes helps in small ways I can see how some people are tempted to think it should always work if only they were smart enough.)

[violsva]

I put "Mostly agree" because I was actually looking at it the opposite way: If one is in a stressful situation, a failure to regulate emotions can make one worse at intellectual problem solving (because most skills get worse when under stress).

And conversely as a master of avoidance I have used "getting distracted by intellectual exercises" as a method of regulating my emotions, or at least ignoring them.

[ursula]

And if you're trying to solve an incredibly hard intellectual problem, emotional regulation skills are key to keeping you going!

[myrdschaem]

I WISH I could disagree, my life would be 1000% easier.

[shewhostaples]

I think I'd draw a distinction between regulating emotion overall and doing it in the moment. In the moment, I think it's very difficult to logic yourself into or out of a particular emotion. But I do think there's an intellectual component to looking after my emotional wellbeing. To take a current, personal example, I knew that scheduling social commitments for myself three weekends running was going to leave me feeling pretty grouchy and depleted, and I could have made different choices (i.e. skipping one or more of them) to address that. But it's more 'foreseeing future problems' and averting them. Once I'm in the emotion, it's difficult to change it from within.

[primeideal]

*autistic laughter intensifies*

[melannen]

I am a person who is fairly good at logicking myself out of things like anxiety and anger, and sometimes even into hopefullness or cheerfulness. However there's a point where that fails - eventually you logic yourself into an existential crisis - and the fact that I'm so good at the logic part, from a young age, means I never really learned whatever that other skillset is. (I'm getting better at using problem-solving to route past that too -"I feel bad and logically I am going to have to continue to feel bad forever" can be routed into "go through this list of apparently-unrelated things that have worked in the past") - but that still feels kinda like a jerry-rigged workaround?

But also regulating your emotions internally ("I feel bad and I want to make it stop") and externally ("I feel bad but I want to express it in a helpful way") require two very different skillsets.

[cahn]

Ah, that's interesting. I feel like part of my intellectual-problem-solving-interacting-with-emotional-skills I've developed over the years has been logic / inference from previous experience / inference from others' experience (usually through books) that points out that I am a human being and therefore prone to behaving and feeling illogically, and I should take this into account when figuring out emotional things, like "I feel bad and my brain is telling me that this means I will feel bad forever, but I know from my reading that this is a fallacy and I should ignore my brain right now and do the apparently-unrelated things which my experience has told me have worked in the past."

So I guess if there are enough books or I can google The Thing (or know I can google it) it's okay, but I suspect people who are actually good at this kind of thing can figure it out without googling it? And then there's the thing where a necessary piece of emotional regulation for me is eating at very regular intervals, which I never actually figured out was a problem until my boyfriend (now husband), who has no trouble with this himself, pointed it out to me and started stashing granola bars in strategic locations; all the logic and intelligence in the world would not have helped me figure this out for myself.

Although I suppose one might argue that perception/self-perception is a kind of intelligence? But then one has just moved the goal-posts to "well, what does intellectual problem-solving mean anyway?"

[dhampyresa]

R U D E

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<3