Lexie Carroll > Recent Status Updates

The brain creates visual maps of our world and our loved ones, tethering us to them (through images, etc) across time & space. It is a disorienting problem to be told that your loved one can no longer be located in time and space; it does not follow the rules the brain has used over the lifetime. Our brain assumes they are somewhere else & will be found later, like the infant brain learned about mother in childhood.

To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest against the homogenization of flavors & food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe. It is also a declaration of independence from an economy that would prefer we remain passive consumers of its standardized commodities rather than creators of idiosyncratic products expressive of our ourselves & the places we live.

As I learned from Sandor Katz and Sister Noëlla and Chad Robertson, and all the other fermentos I met, ***mastery is never more than partial or temporary***. (“Dude, I don’t make this beer, the yeast make the beer. My job is just to feed them really well. If I do that, they’ll do the rest.”)

We are all walking into worlds at once: the real world, and the map of our world inside our heads. If someone stole your dining room table in the middle of the night and you didn’t bump into it while getting a glass of water, you would find its absence strange because it still lives in your mental map. Likewise, losing a loved one doesn’t erase them from our mental map, leaving us confused & disoriented.

Employees say they feel inspired about 25% of the time when they have supervisors with low emotional intelligence, and about 75% of the time under managers with high emotional intelligence. That’s a huge difference. Think of productivity and all the creative ideas that will exist in the emotionally intelligent workplace, and now ask yourself why they don’t exist in more workplaces.

On the surface, all our workplace interactions are about work: planning a meeting, developing a product with a team, navigating a contract. But these interactions take place within relationships; everything that happens at work is, at heart, an emotional moment. Emotions shape our decision-making, especially in group settings. Even the emotions of 1 person can facilitate or derail the mood & effectiveness of a team.

In order for SEL to be truly effective and transformative in schools, it has to be integrated into everything and practiced by everyone, teachers & administrators as well as students. SEL practices can’t just be a seminar or a 10-minute morning meeting or a once a month lesson. SEL has to be integrated into leadership, faculty meetings, family engagement, hiring procedures and policies.

Chilling & disheartening report of lack of regard for emotions by school administrators- this excerpt from a letter from a head psychologist working for a network of private schools:

“I was told just yesterday by a principal that nobody in our network cares about a child’s confidence, emotional well-being, mental health, integrity, [or] overall success as a person… they only care about test scores.”

“A key job of a school is to give students new things to love…it reminds us that what teachers really teach is themselves- their contagious passion for their subjects and students. It reminds us that children learn from people they love, and that love in this context means willing the good of another, and offering active care for the whole person.”
- NYT Columnist David Brooks

The promotion of social emotional learning is not a shifting educational fad; it is the substance of education itself. It is not a distraction from the ‘real work’ of math&English; it is how instruction can succeed. It brings together a traditional conservative emphasis on local control & student character, and a progressive emphasis on the creative art of teaching & emotional needs of students.
-Aspen Inst. 2019

Another helpful strategy for families at home is making a Family Charter- you written document or packed that details how the family would like to feel. It’s created by asking 3 questions:
1. How do we want to feel as a family?
2. What things can we do to experience those feelings?
3. What can we do when we are not living the charter?
Make sure children are highly involved in making the charter.

The Meta-Moment: (collecting oneself)
1. Sense the Shift- notice that you are activated, through change in physiology or thinking.
2. Pause! - create a space before you respond. Breathe.
3. See your Best Self- imagine the best, wisest version of yourself. Think about values and adjectives that describe who you want to be (or seen as).
4. Strategize & Act- use other skills like positive self-talk to prepare to respond

Cognitive reappraisal (reframing) is an intelligent, helpful & persuasive strategy for emotional regulation. However, it sometimes fails as a long-term strategy in the face of repeated problematic situations.
Ask yourself: am I doing this simply to justify avoiding a difficult, sensitive problem?
As an emotion scientist, continue to check in with yourself honestly, evaluating short & long term results.

These [foods] are not just products- in fact are not really ‘things’. Most of what presents itself in the marketplace as a product is in truth a web of relationships, between people, yes, but also between ourselves & all other species on which we depend. Eating & drinking especially implicate us in the natural world in ways the industrial economy, with its long & illegible supply chains, would have us forget.

The economic and ecological lines that connect us to the distant others were now rely on for our sustenance have grown so long & attenuated as to render both the products and their connections to us & the world utterly opaque. You would be forgiven for thinking- indeed, are encouraged to think!- there is nothing more behind a bottle of beer than a corporation and a factory, somewhere. It is simply a “product”.

Too often we look for strategies that will shift people out of negative emotion spaces, but that’s not always possible (or necessary). A young schoolboy was sad about losing his pet, but his demeanor changed instantly when supported by the teacher& class. He was given support & affection to be more comfortable (less alone) in WHERE he was AT. Paradoxically, this will shift our movement out of [sad] emotions faster.

Emotion Regulation:
The process by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience & express these emotions.
- James Gross, Stanford Psychology Professor

Benefits of writing:
Keeping secrets can literally make us ill, but when we transform our thoughts & feelings into language, our health often improves.
In a study, students who wrote about emotionally significant issues reported feeling happier & had better immune system functioning months later, even though they felt somewhat distressed while writing. Expressing emotions (such as through writing) brings relief.

This plasticity and its effect on us explains why alcohol is so widely accepted as a recreational drug: intoxication is remarkably susceptible to cultural prescriptions & proscriptions, from Bolivia to Tahiti. It’s clear that societies are better able to channel & regulate the response of individuals to alcohol, making the drug more socially useful and less threatening than some others.

A funny thing about alcohol: almost anything you can say about it is true, and so is its opposite. The same molecule can make people violent or docile, amorous or indifferent, loquacious or silent, euphoric or depressed, stimulated or sedated, eloquent or idiotic. It affects many different neural pathways and so is plastic in its effects, person to person, group to group, even culture to culture.

(Regarding having mental illness while also being a practicing clinician):
The real dangers of course come about from those clinicians who are hesitant to seek out psychiatric treatment. Left untreated or unsupervised, many become ill, endangering not only their own lives, but the lives of others. Most physicians suicides are due to depression or bipolar, both of which are imminently treatable.

No amount of love can cure madness. Love can help, can make the pain more bearable. Madness on the other hand can and often does kill love through its mistrustfulness, unrelenting pessimism, discontents, erratic behavior, and, especially, through its savage moods.

There’s an idea, especially in kids, that happiness is the only acceptable feeling in public, and if we’re not happy at all times, we’ve failed.

We have a natural bias in favor of displaying positive emotions, especially in the US, which translates into a pressure on all of us to seem happy, no matter what. Which often backfires and makes us LESS happy.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (named for a pair of linguists) maintains that the language we speak determines our worldview and even how our minds work. This hearkens back to a 19th century idea that language expresses the spirit of a culture.

Depression’s typical presentation is more consistent with societal expectations of women’s behaviors: passive, sensitive, dependent & with limited aspirations.
Manic sessions however seem more the provenance of men: restless, fiery, aggressive visionary & impatient with the status quo. Anger & irritability in men is more tolerated & understandable- leaders are allowed to be more temperamental.

RULER Skill to be a skilled emotion scientist:

R- Recognize occurrence of emotion (change in body, thoughts, energy, facial expressions)
U- Understand cause & impact of emotions (how they influence our thoughts & decisions)
L- Label our emotions with accuracy & granularity
E- Express our emotions (discerning how & when to do so)
R- Regulate, ie monitoring/tempering how we express emotions, to help us reach our goals

Emotional intelligence as defined by researchers Peter Salovey & John Mayer, in a landmark 1990 paper on the subject:
Emotional Intelligence is:
- ability to perceive accurately, appraise, & express emotion
-ability to access and/or generate feelings when they facilitate thought
-ability to understand emotion & emotional knowledge
-ability to regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth

Five areas of life that emotion impacts the most:

1. Attention/memory/learning
2. Decision-making
3. Social relations (ie affiliate or distance)
4. Physiology & Health
5. Creativity/effectiveness/performance

Cheese that stinks of manure (or sex) offers a safe way for us to flirt with forbidden desires; even a cheese that stinks of death offers a perverse sort of pleasure. For, if the final fermentation that awaits us is too horrible to contemplate, perhaps a little preview of putrefaction on a cheese plate can, like a Gothic/horror movie, give us the little frisson of pleasure that comes from rehearsing what we most fear

Learning about cheese making- its skin of decomposed milk as a vibrant ecological community- emphasizes just what a weird & wonderful achievement cheese is: how our ancestors figured out how to guide the decomposition of milk so it might be arrested & then defended; deftly deploying rot against rot, fungus against fungus, to suspend milk’s inexorable slide into putrifaction just long enough to enjoy a tasty cheese.