Breaking down the seven traits of emotional fitness

Emily Anhalt, PsyD, was working as a clinical psychologist near Silicon Valley when she was struck by a disconnect between the high-performing entrepreneurs she was seeing, and the surface-level hacks they were using to optimize their businesses and mental health.

More accurately, she was struck by the tools they weren’t using: Those of analytic psychology, an approach that taps into people’s unconscious values and desires to help them “become more whole and self-aware, not just more functional,” Anhalt explains.

“My entrepreneur-patients wanted progress and success and answers and metrics, and I realized there are all of these incredibly useful analytic concepts that get lost in the shuffle because they’re overly jargony,” said Anhalt, who studied analytic psychology in graduate school at The Wright Institute. “I really wanted to be a bridge between psychology and business, and I wanted to help high-performing people learn how to heal themselves in a long-term way versus just symptom management.”

Since then, she’s gone on to help employees and leaders at such companies as American Express, Google, and the NBA strengthen what she calls their “emotional fitness” to yield business success. She cofounded the online platform Coa, which offers therapist-led group classes and other services that aim to make taking care of your mental health a regular, proactive task like going to the gym.

Anhalt, who splits her time between San Francisco and New York City and recently published a book about the seven traits of emotional fitness, talked to APA about how her strategies can support clinical practice and beyond.

Early in my career, I did a big research project where I interviewed 100 psychologists and 100 entrepreneurs. I asked the psychologists questions like, “When you have a patient who goes from being less emotionally healthy to more emotionally healthy, what does that look like?” I asked the entrepreneurs questions like, “When you’re sitting across the table from an emotionally healthy leader, what does that look like?”

When I coded all these interviews for themes, seven emerged: mindfulness, curiosity, self-awareness, resilience, empathy, communication, and playfulness. Those are the things that emotionally healthy leaders and emotionally healthy people seem to be working on all the time.

What I consider fresh is the idea that you can start this work wherever you are—nothing has to be wrong. A lot of what we are taught about how to help people heal is like the medical industry waiting until people are sick and then telling them to go to the doctor. Emotional health is more like the fitness industry, which says, “If you get some workouts in now, you’re going to prevent a lot of problems, and here’s how you do it.”

One of the traits of emotional fitness is playfulness, and we can be more playful in our therapy. To me, that can mean creating a microcosm experience for the patient where they get to try things on.

I often say, “Therapy is not a court of law.” People get to try things on; they can say things out loud and decide that they don’t actually feel that way the next week. They can declare themselves to be a particular thing and then realize they’re not that particular thing. It’s this very playful, beautiful thing that a therapist can say, “OK, I’ll play in that space with you and it doesn’t have to last forever and it doesn’t have to be completely true. It can just be something we’re trying on.”

Learning how to suspend reality a little bit is powerful. Therapy is a space where everything can be real and not real at the same time, and then in doing that, you can help someone figure out who they are.

What these exercises come down to is finding areas of our life where we feel some discomfort and learning how to lean toward that discomfort instead of away.

So how do we help patients with their emotional fitness? It’s about helping them understand where in their life they are avoiding discomfort to their detriment. For example, if they’re uncomfortable having tough conversations, they don’t have them and end up resentful and in all kinds of difficult dynamics. But if they had leaned into the difficult conversation, they probably would have gotten somewhere better.

So, we can explore with our clients and patients: Where are your areas of discomfort in your life and how can you take small steps toward that discomfort instead of away? If they are uncomfortable with boundaries, then our work is often modeling and helping them practice taking small steps toward having better boundaries.

Therapists tend to be comfortable with a lot of things that other people are not comfortable with, like sitting in tension. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have our own areas of discomfort. I can sit with someone who is so sad, so depressed, so distraught. But I’m not as good at sitting with people who are extremely angry, and that’s because I’m not as comfortable with my own anger. So, I’ve had to really do the work of figuring out: How can I lean into my own anger so that I can be most effective and support other people with theirs?