And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the Personal Development

podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you

can be.

I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols, and this is episode 203.

It's titled Emotional Intelligence.

And if you're ready, we'll start the show.

Hello, people.

Welcome to a new month. If you're a listener to my premium content through Patreon or you're a paid

subscriber on Apple Podcasts, you'd have heard me talking about developing empathy the other week

as a way of helping us to control our emotions. Empathy is quite useful if you want to help change

things like anger and resentment into understanding and

acceptance, like finding better responses to someone who maybe cuts into your lane when

driving. But sometimes, for whatever reason, people can feel too much emotion, even too much empathy, actually, so that if somebody

tells you about a problem that they've got, you feel pain and discomfort instead of tenderness and

concern. Or for a lot of folk, everything's just turned up a bit or turned up a lot. And if you could put a number on a, on a scale of 1 to 10,

then something that really only deserves you to feel at sort of a 3 out of 10 pokes you up to 8,

and it's overwhelming. It would be good to know how to handle those sorts of things. So,

first off, let's get into the basics of emotions themselves,

because there's this common idea, often spoken about by psychologists and neurologists,

that emotions themselves don't really exist. And I know that seems a bit strange,

but I can understand why academics keep finding reasons to

agree with it, because it's not impossible that an emotional response is created by our brain,

...