Why Meditation improves Emotional Intelligence?

Mediation is often prescribed as a panacea for a healthier mind, and consequently a happier life. Apparently, if you silently focus on a thought or a thing for a few minutes daily, it can magically improve the “workings” of your mind in daily life. It’s easy to understand the relationship between meditation and getting better at tasks that require concentration and deep work. However, it’s not so straightforward as to how meditation helps with emotionally mature responses, or in other words, how it helps improve emotional intelligence (EI).

What is Emotional Intelligence?

A core capability of “Emotional Intelligence” is the ability to withstand the onslaught of emotions and not get completely swept away by them. Maintaining cool even in the heat of the moment, that’s emotional intelligence. Tempering your outwards response despite contradicting intrinsic emotions, that’s emotional intelligence.

So, how does meditation help with EI?

To be able to control your response to your emotions, a pre-requisite is that one is able to “observe” his or her own emotions. This “observation” implies a certain degree of third-person-ness towards one’s own emotions. This is necessary because unless one can “observe” their emotions, they can’t take steps to “control” their response to those emotions. And, that’s where meditation comes into the picture. Specifically, “mindfulness meditation”.

Mindfulness meditation is a technique of meditation in which, instead of focusing on a particular thing or sound or mantra, one just observes the myriad thoughts arising and ebbing away in the sea of mind. One does not make any conscious effort to focus on anything; instead, one just becomes a silent watcher of his or her own thoughts. By repeatedly practicing mindfulness meditation, one acquires the “pre-requisite” capability of EI ie. being able to “watch” your emotions rise in real-time in day-to-day life, even outside the meditation hours. Once this super-power of “self-awareness” has been acquired, one can move on to the next step ie. start controlling his or her response to this real-time wave of emotions. As to what technique can be used to practice that, I don’t know the answer. So, till then, let’s practice mindfulness meditation and at least get better at “step one”. Who knows, we might discover the answer in the white noise of our minds, if only we “looked”.