The Cool Kids Will Live Forever
Calm, per se, doesn’t appear in the taxonomy of those who study personality and temperament. People we might colloquially describe as calm are classified as low on the scale of neuroticism — a scale everyone is measured on, to a greater or lesser degree.
How much neuroticism anyone gets is determined largely by genetics. But it is also within our control. Psychiatrists and psychologists talk about emotional regulation — the ability to manage neuroticism so that even the most nervous of people can go through life appearing and feeling more in control than those genetically predisposed to calmness. [...]
Efforts to classify temperament go back to the four humors of the ancient Greeks (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood) and run through modern self-help shelves and quizzes in women’s magazines. Today, those who study personality tend to rank people on several scales, often called the Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeability and neuroticism (some theorists identify them by different terms, but these offer the advantage of an acronym, Ocean). [...]
Of these, conscientiousness is often considered the least dependent on genes, and extroversion and openness the most. Neuroticism, the closest barometer of calmness, is also highly determined by inheritance. [...]
People tend to think that the confrontation produces the reaction; if you’re faced with an irrational rant, who can blame you for falling apart? But researchers in emotional regulation tease out a factor in between: how we think. Between the “a” of the antecedent and the “c” of the consequence, they argue, is the crucial “b,” for belief, which in the case of the person melting down might sound something like: my boss hates me, everyone hates me, I’m a total failure.
That is the opportunity for emotional regulation.
Professor Gross, at Stanford, outlines five methods. They are situation avoidance (steer clear of the boss); situation modification (turn your desk so you don’t have to look at the boss); attention deployment (when the boss invites you in for a chat, look at the wall, a picture, anything but his face); cognitive change (he’s a jerk anyway, what do I care what he thinks?); and finally, repression (concentrate on keeping your face still instead of blinking furiously or twitching in anger).
Link to The New York Times, The Cool Factor