Emotional Bandwidth Quotes

What are you watching? Is it comforting? I don’t have the bandwidth to give a fuck about anything not comforting to me most of the time. I know that’s “uncultured,” but also I don’t care because who are you, person challenging me? I want to watch Veep before bed because it makes me laugh, and I want to watch true crime documentaries, and I want to watch British actors in terrific costumes battling through emotions they weren’t even aware they had. That’s all. I’m tired. Find your comforting shit. Build your mental fort and hang out there.

The height of your hair illustrates the emotional bandwidth in which you may operate, which is why Chris Walken can emphasise the syllable which he deems appropriate rather than the one that might convey meaning.

One card read simply, “ God Bless Your Family,” in the painstaking and shaky handwriting of a very elderly person, and I marveled at the enormous and possibly painful effort a stranger across the country had made—to get the card and the stamp, to write the note, to mail it—just so I would not feel so alone. These were people with an emotional bandwidth, a depth and breadth of understanding, that had come from pain in their own lives.

Some things just take time to process, and one must have healthy boundaries of time and space in place in order to do so. Simply put: BOUNDARIES + PROCESSING = BUFFERING Buffering is that time you spend waiting for the pixels of your life to crystallize into a clearer picture; it’s a time of reflection, a time of pause, a time for regaining your composure or readjusting your course. We all have a limited amount of mental and emotional bandwidth, and some of life’s episodes take a long time to fully load.

It's always been implied that if you fail to succeed, you aren't passionate enough. But I no longer invest in work emotionally. It isn't worth it. I learned that every single person is expendable. None of it is fair or based on passion or merit. I don't have the bandwidth to play that game

One such trait is precisely this human ability to ferret out dishonesty. Although we take it for granted that we can immediately tell that that hot dog vendor seems a bit shifty, or that our child is lying about having walked the dog, a chimpanzee would be astounded by our mind-reading capacities—this would all seem like magic to them. Chimps seem capable of rudimentary mind-state signaling,56 but our ability to transmit an enormous bandwidth of thoughts, emotions, and character traits to one another through a slight raise of an eyebrow, tone of voice, or twitch of the mouth is absolutely unmatched in the animal world. It bears all of the hallmarks of being an extreme trait driven by an evolutionary arms race.

The ability to fulfill this desire is premised on what Overstreet calls “emotional overflow” — a confidence that one has psychological resources to spare. In contrast, the immature live metaphorically from “paycheck to paycheck” — beset by the perennial perception that they are overstressed and overstretched, they feel they only have enough time, emotion, and mental bandwidth to sustain themselves. To support the kind of emotional overflow that enables a generous heart, a person must cultivate a receptive heart.

Disappointment takes a toll on us and our relationships. It requires considerable emotional bandwidth. Researcher Eliane Sommerfeld explains that we come away from the experience of disappointment feeling bad about ourselves and the other person. Our negativity is tinged with astonishment and surprise, and, at the same time we’re trying to forgive, we’re concealing emotions. We’re trying to think positively and urging ourselves to move on. It’s exhausting.

I don’t know if I even have the mental capacity or the emotional bandwidth to deal with this right now.

Feeling a little lighter, the session had opened some space inside him. He had a little more internal bandwidth. However, he knew it wouldn't take long for the gap to be filled in again, like a hole dug too close to the ocean.

Now most Millennials and Gen-Zers struggle with some form of depression, anxiety, or other mental illness. Most of us have experienced trauma to varying degrees. This may make me sound like a dick, but that doesn’t give you carte blanche to do or say anything you want. It also doesn’t mean your partner has to support you. Your partner may not have the emotional bandwidth to tend to your needs. It doesn’t mean they don’t love you. Neither does it mean you’re “too much” in general, but it may mean you need to find someone who has a greater emotional capacity to support you.

Behavioral Warning Signs “I literally lost myself. I literally couldn’t recognize myself. I had acne, anxiety, panic attacks, depression, I had no idea what was going on.” –April When you’re in a narcissistic relationship, you lose sight of you—the things you used to do, the goals you used to set, the places you used to go, and the person you used to be. So much of your mental, emotional, and physical energy is devoted to managing the relationship, you no longer have the emotional bandwidth to explore your values, priorities, and purpose. Essentially, you’re living in an emotional war zone. Which means a lot of your attention and energy is focused on self-protection. And when you’re in self-protection, you don’t feel safe to be open, engaging, and social. And yet, many of our personal, professional, and life ambitions require us to be creative, imaginative, adaptable, expressive, resilient, dedicated, consistent, and motivated. Narcissistic relationships seep into your very being and threaten to change what you do and what you believe you can accomplish.

It’s easy to slip into guardedness and close ourselves off from the world when dealing with the messiness involved in navigating expectations, misunderstandings, and collaborative disagreements. This is especially true when we are busy or feel like we don’t have the time or emotional bandwidth to deal with the complexity of relationships.

I pause in my work. Before I develop a notation for aesthetics, I must establish a vocabulary for all the emotions I can imagine. I’m aware of many emotions beyond those of normal humans; I see how limited their affective range is. I don’t deny the validity of the love and angst I once felt, but I do see them for what they were: like the infatuations and depressions of childhood, they were just the forerunners of what I experience now. My passions now are more multifaceted; as self-knowledge increases, all emotions become exponentially more complex. I must be able to describe them fully if I’m to even attempt the composing tasks ahead. Of course, I actually experience far fewer emotions than I could; my development is limited by the intelligence of those around me, and the scant intercourse I permit myself with them. I’m reminded of the Confucian concept of ren: inadequately conveyed by “benevolence,” that quality which is quintessentially human, which can only be cultivated through interaction with others, and which a solitary person cannot manifest. It’s one of many such qualities. And here am I, with people, people everywhere, yet not a one to interact with. I’m only a fraction of what a complete individual with my intelligence could be. I don’t delude myself with either self-pity or conceit: I can evaluate my own psychological state with the utmost objectivity and consistency. I know precisely which emotional resources I have and which I lack, and how much value I place on each. I have no regrets. — My new language is taking shape. It is gestalt oriented, rendering it beautifully suited for thought, but impractical for writing or speech. It wouldn’t be transcribed in the form of words arranged linearly, but as a giant ideogram, to be absorbed as a whole. Such an ideogram could convey, more deliberately than a picture, what a thousand words cannot. The intricacy of each ideogram would be commensurate with the amount of information contained; I amuse myself with the notion of a colossal ideogram that describes the entire universe. The printed page is too clumsy and static for this language; the only serviceable media would be video or holo, displaying a time-evolving graphic image. Speaking this language would be out of the question, given the limited bandwidth of the human larynx.

If this had been last week, she would have taken a picture of this closet and then slumped into a chair and spent too much time composing a message to accompany it. Now, she had neither the time nor the emotional bandwidth to do it.

the pull on my emotional bandwidth, the sheer determination it takes to stay calm under pressure, and the weight of continuous problem solving and decision making.

something. I completely underestimated the pull on my emotional bandwidth, the sheer determination it takes to stay calm under pressure, and the weight of continuous problem solving and decision making. Oh, yeah—and the sleepless nights. My

I completely underestimated the pull on my emotional bandwidth, the sheer determination it takes to stay calm under pressure, and the weight of continuous problem solving and decision making. Oh, yeah—and the sleepless nights.

As long as the conversation is about golf, or basketball, or an upcoming game or match or recital or success, the parents will move heaven and earth to be there, but, when the conversation shifts to the children’s emotional needs or vulnerabilities, or simply the need for empathy, the parents do not have the bandwidth to provide that. This can establish a cycle of guilt and confusion in which the parents are ostensibly available and publicly appear to be cheerleaders, but the children grow up feeling deprived in terms of any emotional connection. The children grow up believing that their value is in what they do, rather than who they are.

Something I’ve long thought true, and which shows up constantly when you look for it, is that people who are abnormally good at one thing tend to be abnormally bad at something else. It’s as if the brain has capacity for only so much knowledge and emotion, and an abnormal skill robs bandwidth from other parts of someone’s personality.

Buffering is that time you spend waiting for the pixels of your life to crystallize into a clearer picture; it's a time of reflection, a time of pause, a time for regaining your composure or readjusting your course.We all have a limited amount of mental and emotional bandwidth, and she of life's episodes take a long time to fully load.

Unfortunately, trying not to do something takes a surprising amount of mental bandwidth

You know,’ a Guardian editor once told me, very early in my career, after she’d been waiting all day for me to tell her whether or not I could take on a certain assignment, because I feared I didn’t have the bandwidth, yet also couldn’t bear to disappoint her, ‘if you can’t do something, saying no right away usually makes it much easier for everyone.’ It was years before it struck me that this might have been one of the most generous things anyone had ever said to me. It helped me see that if trying so hard to manage other people’s emotions wasn’t even helping them, I had less to lose by abandoning the endeavor. And so I began to grapple with a truth that people-pleasers are prone to resist until it halfway kills them: that very often, the best way to benefit others is to focus on doing your thing.

But when people don’t read, you can’t just call it a problem. It’s not that straightforward. There’re so many reasons: being busy, having no emotional bandwidth or time. It’s because we’re living in such a suffocating society.

AI is amplifying speed, but human evolution demands stillness. Machines can multitask - but humans must multi-feel. As automation scales, emotional bandwidth becomes the defining leadership metric of the 21st century.

By the time we arrive at a point of conflict with a partner, we’re often already carrying so much—our emotional bandwidth is short, we’re cognitively overloaded, and that shrinks our capacity to be gentle with each other.