Finally the new issue of the magazine LifeStyleVIEW has arrived! To give you a taste of the content you can read the editorial written by Claus Nybo. Enjoy!
Emotions!
Emotions are an essential part of our life. We simply can’t live without. They are what make our life colorful and worth living. Emotions underlie all our relationships, and most often we express them without even thinking about it. In face-to-face interactions with people, we express our emotions most strongly through: intonation, gestures, facial expressions, and body language. When talking to a friend on the phone we are handicapped by not being able to see our friend’s expressions, yet intonation can still tell us a lot. But when we write a letter, we lose even these auditory cues to emotion and misunderstandings can more easily occur.
But as our social lives move more and more online, we have learned to adapt to express our emotions even in writing, through communicating with “smileys”, or emoticons . And believe it or not, it actually works. Researchers have found that when we look at a smiley face 🙂 online, we activate the same part of our brain as when we see a real person smile. It can change our mood and even our own facial expression to match the emotion of the emoticon.1
When it comes to changing habits and making lifestyle-related choices, emotions are an important factor that we cannot ignore. Our emotions can aid us in accomplishing our goals, but they can also be what derails us and causes us to fail. Emotions can strengthen our relationships or they can destroy them. Can we develop our emotional intelligence by learning to identify and manage our emotions in positive ways? Can this help us relate better to other people, be more successful in the work place, and lead a more fulfilling life? And how can we enlist our emotions to empower lasting changes in our physical and emotional well-being? These are some of the questions that we will try to shed light on in this issue of VIEW. Enjoy reading 🙂
Claus Nybo
Executive editor