#1014 - Dr Marc Brackett - The Life-Changing Skill of Emotional Regulation | Modern Wisdom

Only one in five adults can name more than three emotions they feel regularly.

Why do you think that is bluntly?

I think it's because we don't have an emotion education.

We just ignore that aspect of our lives.

What does that mean?

What does an an emotion education mean?

It means that from preschool to high school and even when we're in the workplace or in college, we are building our emotion skills.

You know vocabulary, for example.

Just to give you one example, I'm going to ask you right now what's the difference between anger and disappointment?

Anger is fiery and feels like you're on the front foot.

Disappointment for me is the color of, and it's the color of red for me, orangey red. uh disappointment is sort of a blue gray like a dark purple blue gray and it is it's sort of closed and it feels like i'm on the back foot it feels like i'm sat in a very low couch um i'm aware that's not a particularly precise definition you're you're you're you're creative type that's for sure um and all beautiful kind of metaphors and and but like i really want to know like the psychological definition or difference between the two So what do you think?

I'll have that.

A psychological difference or definition between the two.

Functionally, anger is somebody has stepped over a boundary and you need to exclaim loudly enough to ensure that they know that they have crossed some sort of threshold.

It's kind of like being your own law enforcement in a way.

Disappointment is around hopes, expectations, and those not being met.

You got it.

That was much better.

That was great.

So, disappointment, you're on your verge of being an emotion scientist.

So, disappointment, unmet expectations, anger, perceived injustice.

And so I think a lot of people kind of look at my work and they're like you know whatever, who cares that you know the difference between anger and disappointment, or anxiety and stress, or pressure and fear.

But what we say in our research is that you have to name it to tame it.

You got to label it to regulate it.

And oftentimes, men in particular are going to come into our offices, our homes, and act one way.

They're going to behave one way, kind of a socially appropriate way of typically aggression with all emotions, whether it's disappointment frustration, fear or anxiety.

And the argument that we make is that until people really know how they feel and why they feel the way they do, it's impossible to support them in managing it.

Right.

Yeah, that does make sense.

Okay.

So what is emotional intelligence?

Like, is that a thing?

I remember there was this whole world of IQ, EQ.

What does emotional intelligence mean?

So, at its simplest level, emotional intelligence is using your feelings wisely to achieve your goals.

Using all of our emotions wisely.

But that's not specific enough.

And the model that I've worked on is called RULER.

So there are five skills.

The first is recognizing emotions in oneself and others, understanding the causes and the consequences of emotions, labeling emotions precisely, knowing how and when to express emotions with different people across cultures.

And then finally, the big R, which is my new book, which is regulating emotions.

What do you do with those feelings, both your own and other people's? it is functional.

That'll be one way to put it.

Like it has an outcome.

It's not just a thing that you're imbued with.

It's using your emotions to achieve.

Yes.

It's goal oriented.

Just like, I mean, you can have an IQ and not use it.

A lot of people don't.

But the same thing applies to your emotional intelligence.

The expectation or the idea is that you have this set of skills and you apply them to your life so that you make better decisions.

You make, you know, you have better relationships, you achieve your goals in life.

What I show in my research is that we like to think that our creativity and our general intelligence are the things that we need to achieve our goals.

But what I've shown is that there are a lot of obstacles in the creative process, a lot of obstacles in achieving our success in life.

And if we don't have the skills to manage the frustration or the anxiety or the disappointment, even the most creative among us don't really achieve the outcomes.

Yeah, I think a lot of people would see emotions and the utilizing of emotions as a vector for weakness, not one for expediting success.

Why should people tap into emotions at all?

How are they a performance enhancer in that way?

Well, I'm going to be provocative and say based on my research and the work I've done recently, I think that emotion regulation should actually be the new definition of success.

And meaning that we think of success as you get the fancy car, you get the big house, you have the big career, whatever it might be.

But truthfully, if you can't manage your emotions and settle your nervous system, if you can't manage or support other people as a leader, for example in regulating their emotions, oftentimes the company doesn't do as well as you might think it could do.

And oftentimes your own mental health suffers and your goal attainment suffers.

So I think that's a lot of people are fighting me on that one.

You know they think well.

You know.

Well, look at my.

I've done talks for big Fortune 100 companies.

And, you know, like, look at me, Mark, look at my office.

You think I really need emotional intelligence?

And the first thing I say to them is like well, I interviewed the five people who report to you and they don't like you.

They actually hate you.

So maybe you should develop some emotional intelligence skills and maybe the company could be doing even better than it is.

You said the definition of high performance is emotional regulation, not emotional intelligence.

So let's define terms.

What's emotional regulation?

So in the hierarchy of emotional intelligence, emotion regulation comes at the top, right?

It's like all these skills come together and then it helps you kind of to deal with your feelings.

And the way I define it is I have a little formula that kind of makes me feel smart.

It's ER.

Emotion regulation is a set of goals and strategies.

So think about that.

You can prevent an unwanted emotion.

Most people don't think about regulation that way.

They think of, oh, I'm stressed out.

I got to reduce my stress.

But no, if you're a kid in this classroom and you know you're going to be anxious on Thursday at the test, let's prepare now for the test so you're not anxious on Thursday.

If you're a sports person and you're going out on the track or out to do a match.

My other background is I taught martial arts for 25 years.

And so I think of all my martial arts students getting so anxious as soon as the opponent came on the mat.

And I would say to them like, that's not the time to regulate.

You got to regulate way before you even show up to the match.

You got to be preparing yourself to be present, to not be flustered.

So there's a prevention piece to it.

There's a reduction piece to it.

In the moment, you got to reduce the feeling.

Like if you get triggered, you get activated, you got to mark, take a deep breath, calm down.

I think another interesting piece of regulation is initiating emotions.

So, as someone who manages a large team, I'm always thinking to myself like what emotion is going to best serve the goal of this meeting?

Like, do I want people to be inspired?

Do I want them to be calm?

Do I want them to be kind of like serious?

And then it's my job to create the emotional climate that aligns with that to achieve the outcome.

I don't think people think about that very much.

The M in prime, this is an acronym, is maintain.

So it's like, I'm having a good day.

I'm in flow.

I'm writing my book.

And all of a sudden, I get that email or I get that phone call and it's like, no, stay away.

I'm really in a great place right now.

And then the E is kind of enhancing emotions.

So it's a long definition, but it's a complicated concept.

So prime is the goals.

Prevent, reduce, initiate, maintain, or enhance.

Then the S is strategies.

Thousands of strategies, right?

I mean walking in nature, taking a deep breath, shifting your thinking or reappraising, getting social support.

And so emotion regulation is G plus S.

But then there's another piece of it, which is that all of that varies as a function of the emotion you're feeling, because you need different strategies for different emotions, kind of your personality.

I'm an introvert.

I don't know about you.

You seem a little bit more outgoing than I am.

I'm just making that guess.

But you know, at the end of the day, like I had a, I had like a 12-hour day yesterday and it was like 9 pm.

I went to a yoga class to relax, but the yoga teacher was so chatty that I had to leave the class.

I mean, it's embarrassing to say.

I had to walk out of the yoga class because my brain needed – I was looking forward to that hot yoga class where I could just like disappear, and instead I had someone like talking at me for like 45 minutes.

I was like, this is not good for me.

So, you know, that's my personality.

I know what I need.

And that's going to help me choose.

So instead, I went for a walk around Central Park.

Much better.

So it's the emotion, the person, and the context.

Right now, if I'm getting anxious, for example during our conversation, I can't be like you know.

Hey Chris, you know what?

I'm going for a run.

Yeah, that's a little weird.

So anyway, I'll leave it there.

Yeah, it's a lot to think about.

It is a complex topic.

That's true.

Why do you think so few of us would talk ever taught emotional skills if they are as fundamental as you say even if there is fundamental functionally as you say you know meritocratic egalitarian i'm gonna go and get the thing in life why why are people not learning these if if they're so powerful yeah it's interesting i think it's historical I think that people kind of thought, especially in psychology, you know, emotions, it's not behavior.

So it's not objective.

It's like in your head and you can't really study it, which we've proven is not true.

But that's one big piece of it.

I think the other piece of it is that we tend to create feeling emotions with being emotional like hysterical.

And so we almost treat emotions as bad things to have, because they drive you to make bad decisions and they make you impulsive and idiosyncratic impulses.

Of course, it wasn't until the 70s and 80s in research.

People like Charles Darwin and other psychologists would say no no no, no.

Actually, your emotions ensure your survival.

Think about that.

Fear is an adaptive experience.

It's saying, there's a threat.

Stay away.

Protect yourself.

But it's interesting how it's taken so long for people to kind of value emotional intelligence.

Yeah.

Well, I suppose it doesn't have great branding.

I don't think like emotions, emotional intelligence.

I don't think.

I don't think when you, when you talk to people about it, they're thinking about the importance of being able to step into their body, work out what they're feeling uh uh, I think what most people, especially men in the modern world, would think about peak emotional capacity would be something much closer to suppression or ignorance, maybe.

Well, it's true.

When I interview and I do a lot of talks for businesses and I was doing one for a bunch of lawyers recently and I said define emotion regulation.

What is it?

And the first thing they say is controlling your emotions.

And then they're denying it, ignoring it, suppressing it.

And I'm like, no, no, no.

Go back to your groups.

Redefine it.

But that is the mindset.

The mindset is not to feel, which, by the way, is biologically impossible.

Which, by the way, the more you suppress, the more it's going to show up in stomach problems, in physical health problems, in mental health problems.

Suppression is never the answer.

Remember, it's about using our emotions wisely.

And your point is a good one because, you know, with men in particular, it's like can I really tell my wife, my partner, my colleague that I'm anxious?

You know there's no way I'm going to tell anybody I'm anxious, because they're going to think I'm weak.

As a matter of fact, a father, you know, I had a pretty rough childhood.

I had abuse, unfortunately, a lot of bullying.

And I'm, you know, I'm 56 at this point.

This is who I am.

I'm good with who I am.

And I'm feeling pretty safe and comfortable, you know, sharing my own story.

But it took me a while.

And these guys oftentimes at my talks.

One guy said to me Mark, there's no way I would ever be as vulnerable as you are in front of other people.

You're sharing about your bullying and your abuse and your anxiety about the pandemic.

And I'm like, well, did you feel those?

Did you have any anxiety during the pandemic?

He's like, yeah, of course I did.

And I said, well, what'd you do about it?

He's like, I didn't talk about it.

I drank alcohol.

And I said, well, maybe there's a better way.

And I really want to.

I'm very interested actually in the gender piece of this, because there is this like we have, men in particular have feelings about their feelings.

It's like they feel, they feel shame that they're anxious.

I don't know.

What do you think about that?

Oh, I could talk about this for the rest of my life.

I think what I've cold, second-order emotions, what you've probably got a much more official name for feeling bitterness at my resentment about my shame, about my anxiety, this infinite regress of thinking, about thinking, and my story that I tell myself about, the story that I told myself about the thing that I felt appears to happen a lot in the world of men.

And I think guys struggle to find a place where their emotions that aren't Very small number.

Maybe resentment is allowed.

Maybe anger is allowed Sadness would you would struggle with anxiety you would struggle with?

Grief you would struggle with.

Fear would be a real big, difficult one as well, because all of those kind of strike at the heart of the emotional mastery competence conquer, go after it and get it type thing that I think guys are feel like they need to lean into and, in many ways, do need to.

Um, and yeah, trying to blend those two worlds is um, i think i'm probably not a bad role model for the sort of uh, highly sensitive guy.

Uh, at least in my personal life, and i'm completely bought in i'm so, you know, i i can say now because it's been what?

Three days, four days, since I got back?

I did, do you know who Joe Hudson is?

Are you familiar with Joe?

Art of Accomplishment.

So he is the head of culture at OpenAI.

Oh, okay.

I do know what you're talking about now.

Yeah, I did Groundbreakers last week, which is 9 am till 9 pm, for seven days-ish of emotional work every single day.

And that was the most vulnerable difficult, intense thing that i've ever done.

Uh, by by, like quite some margin and um, it really reframed, i think, my perspective i already was halfway there, but this really reframed it even more my kind of viewpoint on what real strength looks like, sort of what, what.

Yeah, i think strength is maybe a good, a good descriptor for it.

Yeah, denying or suppressing your emotions is still giving them a lot of power over you.

You, you are saying this thing is so impactful and outside the bounds of my control.

And I am at the mercy of it so much so that I can't engage with it.

I think you could maybe make a similar sort of argument about somebody that has a substance abuse problem and And this person goes cold turkey hooray congratulations.

Like you've transcended your need for alcohol or nicotine or whatever it might be.

But truly like alchemizing.

That would be reintroducing the substance on your terms and only ever needing one of them.

It would be being able to use it again.

Does that make sense?

Do I sound insane?

No, it's great.

I mean, it totally makes sense.

I think you're getting at a lot of things.

Number one is kind of this like I'd rather endure the suffering internally than let anybody know how I'm feeling, to get the support I might need to have a better life.

Yes.

And it's why so many people get divorced, right?

It's why people don't talk to their bosses when they want to get a raise.

It's why friendships, because it's like I'm having this feeling, whatever it might be, and it's more painful for me to think about how I can tell you how I'm feeling and ask for your support or ask you to maybe change a little bit.

And I just, that is like beyond my imagination difficult.

And so I'm just not going to do it.

But of course the outcome is always worse because you would have a better relationship and better everything if you were more comfortable talking about it.

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Yeah.

So I think when it comes to the suppression thing, why...

Why is emotional suppression still seen as a strength?

What is it that's linked?

Well, I don't think it is.

I wouldn't say it's seen as a strength.

I would say it's easier.

And so people choose it as an option.

In my research what I find the top strategies that people use to not deal with their feelings avoidance, big one.

It's like, I'm just not going to have a difficult conversation.

I'm just not going to go home tonight and talk to my significant other.

I'm not going to tell my kids.

I mean, parents are even afraid to talk to their own kids about feelings.

It's crazy.

Because they're afraid they can't deal with what they're going to hear from their own kids.

So the point is that I'd rather not engage with the emotion, because the pain of what I was getting at is avoidance, a denial overeating, drinking too much alcohol, like you said, suppression.

All of these become what I would call our automatic go-to terrible habits for dealing with our feelings.

None of them lead to good outcomes for us.

They usually lead to more shame, more regret, more self-hatred, the list goes on.

And they never help us with our well-being or having good relationships or achieving the real goals we have in our lives.

But the new strategies, the helpful strategies, kind of what I write about, even doing a mindfulness exercise, which people sometimes roll their eyes at.

We know that our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems need support.

We need to deactivate that nervous system in order to be present, in order to have the access to cognitive strategies to deal with our feelings.

But, oh, that's fluff.

Breathing, you know.

I've been breathing, you know, since you came out of the womb, so it's probably a good thing.

The cognitive strategies.

I mean, think about how much gaslighting there is in our world right now.

I mean, let's be real.

People are endlessly gaslit in terms of you know, you're too fat, you're too skinny, you're too tall, you're too short, you're not big enough, you're not small enough, you're too masculine, you're too feminine.

You're too dark, you're too light.

I mean, it's endless.

And you know how many of us are taught when we're kids how to like.

Sift through that kind of judgment and say hey, wait a minute, You don't have the right to define my reality.

I actually like myself.

Stay away.

How many of us have learned how to sift through what people are saying about us to then have a more positive view of ourselves, as opposed to allowing other people to define our realities for us?

What happens if you don't express an emotion?

You mentioned it earlier on.

Let's say I hesitate to point the finger too much at repression, as if it's something that people chose to do and in some ways they they did, but it's not in the same way as you chose to push that person into open traffic.

It's more like i'm scared and wow, this is a lot.

And what about the world outside?

And what about the story i tell myself?

And that's uncomfortable to deal with, coping mechanisms and you know, it's a lot of stuff that's going on.

That doesn't feel quite like commission or volition.

It's just a desperate desire to try and survive.

But if somebody continues to do that, what happens if you don't express emotions?

Well, it's like a debt that keeps on getting bigger.

And it comes out somewhere.

It comes out, as I said earlier, in those maladaptive strategies.

It comes out in terms of avoiding your significant others.

It comes out in drinking too much alcohol.

It comes out in having gastrointestinal issues.

It comes out with anxiety disorders and depressive disorders.

I mean the list goes on because we're born to feel and we have to get those feelings expressed somehow or another.

And if we don't do it, they're gonna find their way out.

And unfortunately for most people, because they haven't had the emotion education.

It's easier we learn like.

I don't know about you, but my parents were not like the role models for emotional intelligence, You know.

So you know my father was a tough guy from the Bronx and he would say things like son, you got tough enough.

I'm like, dad, look at me.

You know, I'm about as far from a tough guy as you can get.

I have a fifth degree black belt, but I'm not a tough guy.

And, you know, he would say things like, I used to beat kids up like you.

Okay, great.

You know, they taught you that in parenting class, right, dad?

And my mom, on the other hand, was with a lot of anxiety and she would say things like and I can't take it anymore.

I'm going to have a nervous breakdown.

So here I am, this five-year-old kid, 10-year-old kid growing up in this environment.

What am I learning?

I'm learning anxiety is weak.

People lock themselves in their bedrooms when they're anxious, and you just sort of lose yourself in your anxiety.

And I learned get angry at everything.

And that's pretty much what I was until I got my PhD in psychology.

I was this anxious, angry person who just didn't know what the hell to do with his feelings.

Um, so anyway, let's say that somebody is, somebody resonates with that oh anxious, angry person who doesn't really know what to do with his feelings.

Like army of one listening here with the airpods in.

Uh, what is a good framework for them to follow to begin including integrating those emotions more healthily?

Great question.

So this is you know, what happened is I wrote this book many years ago.

It's called Permission to Feel.

And it was my argument that we have to give ourselves and everyone permission to feel.

And I'm proud that's been 30 languages now.

And, you know, a lot of people understand that.

Like we have the first step is we got to like give ourselves that permission.

It's like, it's okay to be anxious.

It's okay to be angry.

There's nothing bad about it.

Anger is real.

Anxiety is real.

Like don't judge it.

Just allow it to be.

If you're feeling it for too long and it's too intense, you got to do something about it.

And then the pandemic hit and I got trapped in my house with my mother-in-law.

So she came to visit from the country of Panama for two weeks around March 1st of 2020.

And little did we know that there would be a pandemic two weeks later, that she would stay with us for seven months.

And I'm like losing it.

For me, the morning is my precious time.

I like to have my really good cup of coffee.

I like to have my existential crisis, think about my purpose in life.

And I like to do that alone, not with my mother-in-law staring at me.

So it got really rough.

Anyway, we had this kind of meltdown in the house.

And she looked at me and she's like are you really the director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence?

And I'm like, not tonight, I'm telling you.

And so it's just like the whole thing blew up.

And I share that with you because here I was like supposedly like one of the world's experts in emotional intelligence and emotion regulation.

And I'm like, you know, rock bottom, like desperate, dysregulated.

But then I you know, when I went to bed that night, I thought to myself you know Mark, you actually are the director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence.

Like this is your whole career.

You've written 200 papers and books and all this stuff.

Like you got to show up.

You got to practice what you preach.

And in that moment, I decided to write a book on emotion regulation.

It was like I was walking down the stairs.

I'm like, nobody knows anything about this stuff.

If I don't know it, then nobody knows it.

And so this new book that I wrote called Dealing with Feeling is really the map.

And I wanted it to be super practical.

Step one is you got to shift your belief systems.

There's no such thing as a bad emotion, period.

There is no such thing as a bad emotion. are like the tide, they come and go.

Sometimes they're unpleasant, sometimes they're pleasant.

The second is you gotta build the vocabulary.

You gotta know the words.

Like, I'm gonna push you again.

So, anger and disappointment, we spent some time on that one a little earlier.

Let's go to the one that everybody says they're feeling, which is anxiety.

Everybody's anxious these days.

Which I don't believe, by the way.

I think people say they're anxious, but they're not actually anxious.

Anxiety versus stress versus pressure.

You're taking my little test of emotional intelligence.

Oh, you want me to define the difference between anxiety, stress, and pressure?

Yeah, I do.

Okay.

Anxiety, uncertainty about the future.

You're good.

Stress, a concern between our inner level of capability and the outer, uh demands that the society is placing on, or that the world is placing on us, an uncertainty, an uncertainty that we can deal.

I also get the sense that complexity is in there.

Stress is to do with lots of complexity.

That's going on velocity complexity um anxiety, stress.

What was the other one?

Pressure pressure oh obligation, feels like.

Feels like a sense of obligation as well.

You're pretty good.

I think you're using like ChatGPT or something.

So anxiety is about uncertainty around the future.

Yes, let's go.

10 out of 10.

Stress is having too many demands and not enough resources.

Yes.

Yeah.

I'm going to give myself 10 out of 10 again.

And pressure is something at stake is dependent upon your action or behavior.

Okay.

Yeah.

That was a little bit off on that one.

Cool.

It's all right.

That'll do.

But why?

Why would I want you to know, like here you are, this you know guru, you know.

Why do I want you?

Why would I want you to know the difference between anxiety, stress and pressure?

Why do I, why, why would I care?

Because we default to the most common emotion.

Uh, we, we often bundle together, um, different things into a single word.

And by doing that, lots of things sound like one thing.

So lots of things sound like anxiety when they might actually be stress or pressure.

Exactly.

And what you would do, so think about it.

I remember, when I'm anxious about something, I tend to say Mark, like you got no control over that right now.

Like you can think about that till tomorrow night and it's not going to change because you have no power over that.

You've got to look at it from a different perspective, you know, Rethink it.

That's what I do for anxiety.

For stress, it's either I get help or I take stuff off my plate.

I don't know what else to do.

I can take all the breaths in the world, but I'm still going to have too much stuff on my plate and not enough time to get it done.

And for pressure.

It's like I either got to talk to my boss and say hey, this deadline, it's killing me.

Interesting enough, I do a lot of work with college students because that's where I'm a professor.

Yesterday, I gave a speech to 1,500 high schoolers, which was, you know, a little bit challenging.

And I had done some research with them and they all said they're stressed out.

Everyone, I'm stressed, I'm stressed, I'm stressed.

But what my research showed was the number one emotion was, what do you think?

Pressure?

Envy.

Oh, okay.

None of the three.

They're thinking they're stressed, or they're saying that they're stressed, but what they're feeling is is that everyone's better looking than they are.

Everyone has better opportunities than they have.

Everybody studies for less time and gets better grades.

Everybody's parents have more connections than their parents have.

It's like this endless social comparison.

But they're calling that stress.

And so, what do you do with that?

You don't take deep breaths.

You don't do meditation.

And I tell them, you gotta switch from envy to gratitude.

Look at all of you.

You're in a great high school.

You're doing pretty darn good.

And you could just bask in that envy and you'll be paralyzed by it.

Or you can shift your thinking.

Because I don't know any other way to get out of the envy spiral until you kind of look at things from a new lens.

That's interesting.

Take me through your process of alchemizing envy.

Somebody looks at somebody else.

The comparison game is going on in their head.

Maybe it comes up as a bit of resentment, maybe a little bit of bitterness, maybe a little bit of fear as well.

But if they investigate themselves and they're truly, truly honest, they say something like I envy that person.

What is a way that they can integrate that emotion more effectively?

Yeah, I think the reality is if you're feeling envy, you're feeling envy.

I think that the question is, is the why behind it?

Is it going towards admiration or is it going towards resentment?

I envy a lot of people.

I look at people giving speech and I'm like, God, their timing is great.

That humor is amazing.

Their posture is great.

But I don't wish they weren't skilled.

I want to aspire.

And so I use it as a learning opportunity.

I'm like, okay, wow.

If I incorporate that into my speech, it's going to get even better.

So that's a reframe.

You see, that's a reframe.

Instead of being bitter and resentful, I'm thinking oh, I can actually learn from that person and apply that to what I do.

That's one way to do it, which I think is really important.

The gratitude piece is another whole thing, which is, you know, I teach at Yale.

I mean, let's be real.

It's a pretty good university.

And if you got into Yale, you got to be pretty darn smart. like when students are starting to get envious of the other valedictorians i'm like can we take a break here and just like look around like you're all right yeah exactly let's just like let's you know let's let's take a moment and like reflect on where we're at compared to many other people maybe you should just like wake up and say things you know think about three things that you're grateful for for being here and they're not taught to do that you know this is the problem it's not an Their automatic habitual response is like, they're smarter, they're better.

Not, oh, wow, look at me.

I've actually done pretty well in my life.

Or wow, I should be grateful that my parents worked their asses off to get me into this university and supported me, or whatever it might be.

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I have a question on this.

Again, my recency bias is like fucking weapons grade at the moment, right?

Because I've just come back from this big retreat, which was exclusively about emotions.

A couple of things to tell you.

When it comes to discerning between different emotions, what is this thing that is inside of me?

I really struggled.

I realized that I really struggled to distinguish between something like frustration or agitation and anger.

And that I was confusing a lot of the time.

I was angry.

But I was feeling it as frustration or agitation and I wasn't allowing myself because I didn't think the anger was safe to move through.

So I completely agree with it is important for us to be able to, like a nice sommelier, detect the different notes that are constituting whatever the emotions are that are inside of us, because you don't know how to deal with it if you don't do that.

You also end up sort of calling yourself, you self-label this thing as.

Oh, there's my anxiety again.

And you go, well, maybe it's not.

Maybe you're pattern matching four different things as anxiety when it's not.

One of the other things that happened throughout the week though, was a lot of work about actually getting into the body and allowing yourself to feel these emotions.

And one of the problems that I realized.

I've been kind of obsessed with emotions over the last 18 months.

I really wanted to be a less emotionally decapitated as I was referring to it.

Like emotions existed above the neck um and getting down and being like okay, what does this mean?

How does this feel?

Can I let it move through me?

Can I have more emotional fluidity in that sense?

Like can it come and it goes?

Can it come and it goes?

Um, how do you think about the limitations of trying to teach people this stuff through concepts and words that result in the um, like overthinker, just having more to think about?

You understand what I mean?

Like it's this sort of tactic, at least for me, until I spent more time getting below the neck results in just more aphorisms or mantras, or you know how.

Do you think about combining embodiment with with cognition?

Well, Our emotions are a product of that.

So you need both.

You need to be aware of what's happening in your body, in terms of whether it's heat in your body, whether it's the arousal or activation in your body.

The problem with that alone is that it's very misleading.

So, for example, for years I would like sit I'm a workaholic and I'd be like 11 o'clock at night and I'd be like you know, I'm anxious.

And my partner would say, you know, why are you anxious?

You're just tired.

Shut the freaking computer and go to bed.

And I'd be like, yeah, you're right.

I'm not anxious.

I'm just tired.

I was confusing the signals in my body because they felt the same as when I was anxious.

So it's important for people to know that.

We confuse our bodily reactions and experiences for emotions sometimes when they're not emotions.

They're just physical states.

The cognitive piece is important because it's the only way we can communicate.

If you're in therapy or if you're trying to communicate to your partner or your whoever what you're feeling.

You need language.

And I actually built this app that's free that you are going to love.

I promise you it's called How We Feel.

And I was proud to build it with the co-founder of Pinterest.

His name is Ben Silverman.

And he and our teams worked together for two years, got an award from Apple.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

We made it available for free on iOS and Android.

And it is this tool that we call the Mood Meter, which is based on your pleasantness and your levels of activation and your bodily awareness, and it breaks into four quadrants.

We've got yellow, red, blue, and green.

So yellow are high energy pleasant emotions.

I'm excited, I'm elated, I'm ecstatic, I'm jubilant, I am optimistic.

Green, I am calm, content, tranquil, peaceful, relaxed, blissful, I am serene.

Blue, I am down, disappointed, devastated, hopeless, despair, depressed.

Red, I am anxious, overwhelmed, I am angry, I am peeved, I am irritated.

So we've got the full range of emotions, but it's based on your appraisal of what's happening in the environment or in your head and your body.

And then we give you 144 words to describe those feeling states.

And the definitions of them so you understand the reason behind it.

And then we also give you an option to check in with your body and you can locate where in your body you're feeling this emotion.

And then you could track that over time and see if there's patterns between how you feel and where it shows up.

How I feel no, how we feel.

How we feel.

That has 25 000 reviews and it is five stars on the you know the app store and it's an editor's choice.

Dude, that's amazing congratulations, what a beautiful.

I mean.

Also, someone is definitely stealing it with how i feel uh, because it's the same profile.

So go and go and get them to uh for passing off.

Um yeah, that's wonderful.

I uh again.

My recency bias is fucking potent at the moment because I learned all of this new stuff and it's very exciting to me, but it also feels right.

I feel more aligned in that way.

Uh, and so I am, I'm completely on board even if, uh, even if it's through an app.

Yeah.

I mean, it's a it's a it's.

You know one thing about the app it's not like you have to use it for the whole, your whole life because nobody uses any app for their whole life but as a training ground it's building that awareness.

It's like, Oh, when I'm Before I walk into my office, I'm like, where am I in that mood meter?

What's causing me to have that feeling?

Oh, I'm feeling that way because of what happened at home.

I don't need to take that out on the person at work.

That's what I'm trying to get people to do.

But going back to the strategies.

So we've only gotten to two of the eight strategies, just so you know.

So the first step is, as I said, shift your mindset.

And the other piece of the mindset piece, by the way, is having kind of a growth mindset about your ability to regulate.

So my father, for example, he'd say, like, son, this is the way I deal with my anger.

You're going to have to learn how to deal with it.

Okay, dad, you know, I guess you're not willing to learn anything.

You know, that's a fixed mindset.

Like, this is my destiny.

You know, this is who I am, which is not true.

Everybody can learn to regulate better.

That's proven.

So you're not born that way.

So Mindsets, language, then you got another breathing pieces.

You got to be able to deactivate.

If you can't deactivate, you're toast.

Because if you get triggered and you can't bring it down, you're going to result in aggression or saying something you regret, or just blowing up.

That's the mindfulness breathing work.

But then the cognitive piece, as I shared earlier, is probably the most important in the end.

So many people just have such negative views of themselves.

They look in the mirror and I'm not good enough and I'm not smart enough and I'm not creative enough and nobody wants to be around me.

And that just creates a spiral into total despair.

I don't know where in our childhoods we're taught to be self-compassionate.

Not in a fluffy way, but literally saying, like, how do I say, Mark, you can get through this.

Mark, you're strong enough.

Mark, Guess what?

This feeling of terror that's going through your brain right now is actually impermanent.

You will not feel this way.

There are rainy days.

There are sunny days.

Today is the rainy day.

Tomorrow is going to be a sunny day.

All that cognitive work that we have to engage in to really help us have more positive outlooks.

The third or not the third, but whatever we're on now, I know them in terms of what they are, but is I don't think any of us should ever have to worry alone.

Why?

Why do we have to feel alone with our fears and anxieties?

Of course, if I'm traveling and I'm in the airport and the flight gets canceled, I'm pissed off.

Mark, you got to deal with this.

But in everyday life, we're built to be social creatures.

And so I've done a lot of research on this, actually.

Take a guess.

What are the top three characteristics of the people that we're just desperate to be around?

Ooh.

Hmm.

Can you give me an example of a characteristic that isn't in there, just so that I know this sort of Smart?

Right, okay.

Which is interesting that it's not in there.

Attentive or curious, something like pro-social, their attention is focused on us in a way.

Mm-hmm uh, regulated or peaceful, something in that kind of realm.

Uh the the, the person is uh, not volatile would be another way maybe to say it.

Um, third one i would have said smart.

I would have said smart so uh, i'll give you, i'll give you two, two of mine.

Interestingly enough, smart never shows up.

I've studied this with 25,000 people, maybe three people, four people.

In terms of the people that we want to be around, especially when it comes to being supported by them.

There's three core characteristics.

I've shown this now cross-culturally, both from the US to England, to Spain, to Italy, to Australia, to Hong Kong, to Costa Rica.

No cultural differences.

Number one, Non-judgmental.

Okay.

Yep.

Everybody's just kind of burnt out from the judgment in our society.

Can I just be myself?

Can you just let me be who I want to be?

Number two, good listener.

We're dying to be around people who just listen, but not listen to retaliate, but listen to kind of help you gain perspective.

And the third is just empathy and compassion.

Think about that.

I mean, imagine if we had a society where we were, kind of like, striving to have people who were nonjudgmental, who were good listeners, who showed empathy and compassion.

I mean, I don't know.

I want to live in that world, to be honest with you.

Yeah, it's... How funny that...

Those are all very soft skills, I think you would say.

Not in the typical form of the word, but they are soft traits, right?

Yeah, they're social and emotional.

Yeah, they're gentle, they're nurturing, they're reassuring.

And yet, when we look at what are the sort of traits that people try to develop, it's their charisma, their brashness, their wittiness, their quickness with words.

And that appears to not be the thing.

I kind of got obsessed with an idea similar to this from the School of Life, Alain de Botton's thing.

And he has this idea that some people are interesting, some people make us feel interesting and we tend to want to be around the latter more than the former.

It's just such a wonderful inverse charisma, you could call it, right?

Totally.

Other-oriented.

That's nice.

Yeah, here for hey, just there's room for you, there's room for you in this conversation like, bring it on, that's cool.

Exactly, i'm going to sit here, i'm not going to judge, i'm going to be with you, and this is really, really similar to the view framework that joe has from art of accomplishment.

That's vulnerability impartiality um, empathy and wonder.

So yeah uh vulnerability uh, saying what's true even when it's scary.

Impartiality, not trying to change the other person.

Empathy, sitting in the emotion without, without being captured by it.

And wonder uh, inquisitiveness without an outcome.

So, like curiosity, but not needing the answer, so to speak.

Yeah and uh, it seems to me like your 25 000 person cohort would.

Yeah, that would slot together with it's very similar pretty nicely, yeah.

What's interesting though, is the research that I do goes from childhood to adulthood.

And what I look at is, did you grow up with that?

Like did you grow up with someone in your life who created the conditions for you to be your true self?

And what I find is that only about a third of people say yes.

Two thirds of people say no.

There was nobody when I was growing up.

It was nonjudgmental.

So it's not like they learned this in childhood or something.

They didn't pattern match anything.

I once had a supportive parent and then I want that in adulthood.

Now, as a matter of fact, going back to the male-female thing of the people who say yes to they had the person.

Half of them say it was a parent.

So I could say a third, 17% say it was a parent.

Of that 17%, only 2% say it was their dad.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

Nobody's thinking about their dad's as a nonjudgmental listener.

I wonder you know me and a lot of the guys last week were talking about um whether there is going to be some sort of pattern shift from the boomer generation to sort of whatever millennial Gen Z parenting with the ascendancy of um podcasts and courses and embodiment work and emotional awareness and stuff like that, you know, breaking some of those well-trodden generational cycles of sort of how specifically men show up for their kids and the sort of community around them and stuff like that.

I would like to think that maybe if you were to do this again in another 15, 20 years, that maybe you'll start to see some pockets grow up of yeah dad was.

He did feel more comfortable about showing up in a non-judgmental way.

The fragile male ego had been alchemized somewhat.

But maybe not.

Maybe this is just fresh packaging on the same patterns, the same non-showing up patterns.

I don't know.

I mean, I'm working on it.

I do a lot of work in companies, but a big part of my career is doing this work in school systems.

So I have a program called RULER.

That's in 5,000 schools across the United States.

And I think I'm raising a bunch of.

I call them Uncle Marvin's because Uncle Marvin was my hero in my life.

And he was the person who gave me the permission to feel.

And so, what do we do to create a world filled with people who have these characteristics?

That's kind of my vision and hope.

But that's a piece of it.

And so we've gone from mindsets to language, to kind of deactivating our nervous system, to having the self-talk that's productive instead of destructive, to having these.

I call them emotional allies, meaning the people that we can share and talk, to talk our emotions with.

And then there is the piece that a lot of athletes are really knowledgeable about.

It's the sleep habits.

It's the nutrition.

It's the physical activity we know.

Those three things directly correlate with our ability to regulate emotions effectively.

And I think a lot of people misunderstand that.

They think, oh, it's about my health.

No, no, no.

If you don't get good quality sleep, you're going to lose it in the morning with your kid.

You're just not going to have replenished.

And emotion regulation takes effort.

And so if you don't have the time to rejuvenate, you're going to have a much shorter fuse.

And the final thing that I really help people do in my book is I want them to imagine that they have an identity as someone who is well-regulated.

And I stole this from a personal trainer.

And stealing it is not the right way, but I got the idea from him.

So during the pandemic, I decided I'm going to get fit again.

And I met this guy named Marco, an online fitness expert.

And, uh, and I, you know, I was never, I was a martial artist.

I was very athletic, but not a weightlifter.

I decided that I'm going to become a dude.

I'm going to lift weights.

And so this process of going from, you know, I'm a 50 year old psychologist.

Why am I doing deadlifts?

You know, like don't really, like I had so much negative self-talk.

I was like, this is ridiculous.

Like, why am I doing this?

Like I'm, I've been married for 27 years.

Who cares what my body looks like?

And that was the first phase of getting rid of the negative self-talk.

Then the second phase was, wow, I'm actually enjoying this.

I see a difference.

This is cool.

I've got some definition.

But by about two years into it, I could not not work out.

Even today, at this point, it's been five years now And I have a little app and I have to do my four workouts a week.

And I'm irritable and antsy if I don't get that workout in.

And I think it's because I now identify as someone who lifts weights.

It's part of my identity.

My vision is that we can apply that in our society to emotion regulation.

That if we had people walking around saying, I'm a master at managing emotions.

Think about if you were triggered by someone, it'd just be like the Yoda of emotional intelligence.

You can't harm me.

So that's my vision.

I don't know, what do you think about that?

I certainly think that when you begin to identify as something, it's a powerful route to reinforcing all of the habits that come below it.

I think, yeah, people identify with an emotion.

I am anxious person.

I am an irritable person.

I have a short fuse.

I tend to be really excitable.

I tend to be very enthusiastic.

I get sad quickly.

Um, but not the meta skill of i have emotional fluidity.

Emotions for me.

They come and go.

Uh, i am able to sit with them.

I'm brave with my emotions right, which is an interesting kind of meta skill.

To think about that.

That was the kind of bravery that you need.

To be able to actually feel an emotion is way more bravery than it takes to suppress one.

Correct.

And I like, you know, God, God, no, no.

Um, I like where you were going a little while ago, which is that, for somehow or another, we've accepted it in our society.

Like I'm an anxious person.

And then it's like, Oh, Oh, Oh, you know, I understand.

Firstly, that's not true.

Like you're not.

You know you're you're, you're whole, you know body composition and your dna is not an anxious person.

You know you're feeling anxiety.

It's an experience that you're having.

So that distance from the emotion is important because it will create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You know just you'll, just you'll.

Everything that you do in life, you will see through that lens.

Well, why don't we give people the skills they need and then they can identify as guess what?

You know yes, i'm going to have anxiety.

Yes, i'm going to have fear.

Yes, i'm going to feel depressed if i don't get the job i wanted, but It's not the end of my life.

It's not the end of the world.

I can reframe.

I can try this.

I can do this.

And I feel like we're just That's going to be.

It's a battle that I'm fighting right now in our society, because there are a lot of people, by the way, who don't think this should be taught.

They're thinking, keep this out of schools.

Keep this out of companies.

This is not something that should be discussed or talked about, which is also...

A huge issue for me.

Why do you think they say that?

I think it's a number of reasons.

One is that I think some parents believe that I should be in control of what my kid learns about feelings.

But not what they learn about maths.

Right, exactly.

Exactly.

And I think it's because there's a fear base that their kid is going to be told what their values are, or the kid is going to be told what they should be doing.

When the truth is in our work, which is, you know, again, in 5,000 schools, it's far from that.

It's you know.

I know from the research across all populations what works to help people regulate their emotions.

That's why I wrote a book on how to deal with your feelings.

And so that's not Mark's opinion.

This is research.

People always ask me, what do you think about this?

What is your opinion?

I'm like, don't ask me my opinion.

I'm a scientist.

Let me tell you what the research says.

Exactly.

I go back to the science.

I don't want to be blamed for my opinion.

To play devil's advocate for the parents.

There is something to do with a child's emotional fluidity and emotional regulation that feels closer to their sense of identity, who they are truly which is part of the lineage from parent to child that the way that they join the letter E to the letter S or the way that they do their five times table does not feel The same.

It does feel more sacred, more divine, more personal, more attached to that sense of self and identity.

And if it feels like you're fucking with the source code frankly, it feels like you're getting in there and fucking with the source code.

So I understand why there would be more trepidation about this idea.

I didn't have this when I was in school.

This wasn't something that was taught to me.

What if it changes and messes my kid up in some way?

You know, he's gone in and he's changed the bootloader programming.

You know, the kid can't turn on and it just keeps resetting and restarting or whatever.

Um, I think if you were to teach the parents and tell them these are the sorts of outcomes as soon as you get an education piece, I think a lot of that falls away.

Um, because the uncertainty is Hey, this is, you know high, high danger stuff that we're playing with here.

I'm happy to undo little Timmy's five times table being a little bit wrecked because the math teacher was off.

I don't like the idea of trying to reframe his relationship with shame because of what happened in that way.

If they had, I am reliably confident that this thing is going to be good for my kid.

I think that there would still be some pushback because like, stop fucking with the inner workings of my child um, but i think that that would be alleviated.

That, i think, is my like uh, um gracious uh, interpretation of why parents feel the way that they do.

And you know it's not all parents, it's some parents, but yes, and you know a lot of parents are like, thank god, you're doing this because i don't know what the heck i'm doing um, and by the way it, you know it makes it sound like kids don't have feelings in school, like they're anxious in math class or they get left out at, you know, at gym, or nobody wants to sit with them at the lunch table.

And we're just going to ignore that.

That's ridiculous.

The kid is experiencing life six to seven, eight hours a day.

Let's make sure that kid is aware of what they're feeling, has the courage to speak up and has the strategies to manage the frustration, the overwhelm, the scare.

I mean, that just, I can't imagine like that really makes a lot of sense to me.

Um, And I hear you on that.

You know, one thing I'll just I'll push back on your pushback as a little role play here is that, you know, given that anxiety in our society has gone up like 50 in the last 30 years, like just parents, like you're not doing such a good job.

Hey guys, show me the alternative.

You know, I didn't deal with my emotions and my son's not going to deal with his either.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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I'm interested.

What are the most challenging emotions to work with?

Does it vary from person to person?

I imagine it must do.

There will be some that are more sort of deeply seated.

Our genetic predisposition, our dopamine baseline predisposes us to whatever effect.

But generally are there certain emotions that are more difficult to work with and easier to work with.

I think in general, what we call the self-conscious emotions are the hardest to deal with, because when they are about you as a human being, like the shame kind of family, That's tough.

It's not like dealing with, I felt afraid of going to the park as a kid.

It's that I have diminished self-worth.

Someone has made me believe that I'm not worthy.

It's a lot more work to repair.

The jealousy emotions, the feeling that people confuse.

But what's the difference between jealousy and envy?

Oh, I think I should know this.

Jealousy is wanting someone to not have it.

And envy is sort of about wishing that you were where someone else is.

Is that right?

You get a B+.

Close enough.

So envy is just wanting what the person has, right?

Gosh, I wish I could have that.

Jealousy is fearing that somebody else getting it is going to take it away from you.

Hey!

I'm not bullshitting.

I've spent a lot of time trying to think about emotions, okay?

I'm really happy with my grades so far on this fucking pop quiz.

Wait, wait, wait.

This is not a pop psychology quiz.

This is a real... No, pop as in I wasn't prepared for it.

You fucking sprung it upon me.

There you go.

Okay, so the self-consciousness emotions.

So jealousy is a big one because... there's not a lot of control.

When you're jealous of that, mom is giving your sister, your brother, more attention than you and you feel like their relationship is stronger than yours.

That's a lot to work with.

There's a lot of layers to that kind of management.

And you really can't do it alone.

The same thing with the shame.

It's very hard to manage shame on your own.

Oftentimes we need other people to help us kind of regain our perspective.

Yeah, that's interesting.

Okay, i i'm interested if there is a distinction between feeling emotions and dealing with them and what the line looks like between those two things.

I imagine it must be difficult to uh regulate or deal with emotions without feeling them, but you presumably can feel them without dealing with them, and I don't know how much feeling you need to do in order to be able to do it.

How do you start to delineate the territory there?

Well, this is an interesting conversation around the language of emotion.

So there's feelings, there's emotions, there's moods, there's dispositions, there's mental illnesses, and they're all different.

So should we go there for a minute?

Sure.

Okay.

So an emotion is typically an automatic response to a stimulus that comes from something in our heads or something in our environments that causes us to have a shift in our thinking, in our motivation, in our expression, in our behavior.

That's rooted in our entire life.

That's the piece that I think people miss.

That when we're experiencing an emotion, it's not just from that moment.

It's coming from our entire life.

That moment, that's an emotion, a feeling.

Is it just a private subjective experience?

Yeah, i don't feel like talking to chris today.

I don't feel like going to the movies.

You know that i don't get a good feeling when i think about that person.

That could be in your body, it could be your head.

It's a little um more kind of this kind of subjective experience.

A mood can be based off of an emotion or a feeling, but it's different because it's longer in duration and less intense.

So like I'm irritable.

I don't know what it is, but I'm in a great mood today.

That's a mood.

You don't really know where it came from.

It could be the weather.

It could be lingering good news from yesterday.

A disposition is something we were kind of getting at earlier, which is, I tend to be on the anxiety spectrum.

I tend to be more sad in general.

I tend to be that kind of like everything's going to be great. that's more your disposition.

And then obviously, you know, depression, diagnosis, you know, those are diagnoses.

And so I think people don't really know that granularity, if you want to call it that in the language of emotion.

And that could be helpful for people to kind of just know.

I certainly think that there is a difference, a difficulty with people confusing the two feeling emotion and dealing with it.

It's like, I'm feeling my anxiety.

It's like, okay.

Yeah, I didn't get to answer your question yet.

Yeah.

So that was just my I mean kind of like being Mr Professor for a minute to give people like this kind of nuance and language for feelings, moods et cetera.

You were asking earlier about the difference between kind of feeling your feelings and dealing with your feelings.

And my point is that we don't have to deal with all of our feelings.

Sometimes they just, they're ephemeral.

Oh, hi, anxiety.

You're here for a minute.

Welcome.

See you soon.

No big deal.

We get a little frustrated in a meeting.

We're like, it's going to go away.

How much is this going to really impact me right now?

Let it go.

It's when we feel like the emotion that we're experiencing is going to interfere with our relationship, with our learning, with our decisions, with our performance.

That's when you really need to regulate.

Yeah, that's interesting.

I want to talk about shame.

I think that shame is a really interesting term. what do you, how'd you come to think about shame?

Is it a meta emotion?

Is it?

Is it in a unique category in some way, given that shame is often one of those second order things that I feel a thing and I have shame around it?

I would say that, as I I think shame what we would put in that in the category of a self-conscious emotion.

But I think the difficulty with shame is that we don't put shame upon ourselves for the most part.

We are shamed by people.

Someone else has decided that we're not worthy, and they do everything they can to convince us of that, and then we believe it.

And that goes back to the gaslighting piece.

I think most of the shame that we experience in life is because of other people gaslighting us.

Say a little bit more about the gaslighting thing.

You don't really feel that you shouldn't feel that.

Yeah.

Gaslighting is when essentially, the heart of gaslighting is that the reality that someone else has created for you is something that you now believe.

Could you give us an example in the world of emotions?

Yeah.

Uh, let's say you know.

You know Chris, you're just so sensitive, you know, have you ever have you realized like you're?

You're just too sensitive.

And then in the beginning, you're like, you know, well, maybe I am.

I don't think I am.

But after a while, I've convinced you that you start believing that you are too sensitive.

That's gaslighting.

What if it's true?

No one can be too sensitive.

Sorry about that.

Now that I am very interested in hearing more about.

I had highly sensitive people and what that means, and whether you've looked into that as something that I thought I wanted to talk about.

Give me more on that.

It's like having too much self-compassion.

There's no such thing.

All of this is about emotional intelligence, at least what I'm talking about here.

Yes, you may be prone to being sensitive.

I'm a very sensitive person, but my emotion regulation is Mark, without It being someone else's decision.

Do you think you're being too sensitive about this?

Do you think that, oh, okay, maybe this is an instance where I am being a little too overreactive.

Okay, I can give myself that.

But it can't be someone else's definition for you.

That's just not cool.

I think when people think about being too sensitive, what they mean is Your level of emotional reactivity is non-functional in the real world and puts you on the back foot.

Is that a fair assessment, do you think, of how some people think about it?

It is.

I don't think it's the right way to think about it.

I think what you're getting at is that that person can't regulate themselves.

They don't have the strategies they have allowed someone else that makes.

Yeah, i know exactly what you mean.

So um, you are too sensitive.

Is you seem to feel things and not be able to deal with them?

Not, you seem to be feeling things correct right, but if you are somebody that is of the highly sensitive persuasion, it's almost like um, it's almost like coming from a family of fat people or something like you have greater ghrelin release.

You have a bigger stomach, you have a lower BMR or whatever.

Uh.

You, my friend, unfortunately are going to have to do more work to stay in shape than person from skinny family with smaller stomach, less ghrelin, higher uh BMR.

Uh, do you see it kind of in that sort of a way that people who are more prone to sensitivity, I feel things more deeply, both up and down depth, um that there is.

Yeah.

You're going to have to.

No, I think sensitivity is just one example.

I mean, I have a friend who is a former tennis coach who has so much energy.

She makes me want to like crawl under a blanket, you know?

And it's like, calm down.

Hmm.

Your energy is killing me.

So she needs to know how to down-regulate because of her kind of endless need to be enthusiastic and excited about things.

I'm like, gosh, can you calm down?

I, on the other hand, am someone who you know.

I would rather go for a cup of coffee and sit at a wine bar.

And sometimes she's like, you know, Mark, come on, can we get a little energy here?

I'm like, that's not me.

However, as someone who presents a lot at conferences, I can't be talking like I'm in a coffee shop for an hour and a half on a presentation.

I've got to get myself out of my comfort zone and be the entertainer and tell the jokes.

And that's draining for me.

Whereas it's not draining for her.

She could do it all day long.

But she's draining for me.

It's about self-awareness and social awareness.

And so it's not that anything is bad.

I just think that's a bad way to think about it.

We are who we are.

People are people.

Unless you're being mean and cruel, then be who you are.

Unless you're self-harming, be who you are.

You have to learn that you have to navigate who you are in relationships and in leadership positions, sports teams, whatever it is.

And that's where the regulation piece comes in.

That's where it's like, oh, I'm aware that I'm talking too much.

Mark, shut up.

Calm down.

Yeah, i think you get what i'm saying.

Yeah no, i do, i do completely.

Um, we are who we are and sometimes the right amount of that is great and sometimes too much of it requires a little bit of uh, regression or progression to some other kind of like optimal mean, how we want to show up as best for ourselves, how it's good to show up for the people in the world non-judgmental empathetic, good listener, etc.

Uh yeah, and to also achieve the things that we want to.

If you're a performer on stage, you want to show up differently to if you're a poet that works in the woods or a woodworker that's just down the street.

I think the reason that I lingered on the highly sensitive people bit is that it seems to me kind of highly sensitive people are the hyper responders to the work that you're interested in.

If they are very sensitive, then they're going to feel emotions, which is the currency that you're trafficking in more than other people.

If you imagine whatever highly sensitive person is on one end of the spectrum and a highly insensitive person or whatever that that is on the other end of the spectrum, i have to assume that the tactics and techniques that you're talking about the sitting with emotions, the working with them, integrating them fluidity, regulation the insensitive person simply is feeling less.

The resolution with which they are feeling emotions is not as great as the person on the other end.

If that's 100 and and with that it means that you are, as a highly sensitive person, not burdened but a kind of obliged in a way.

If you want to show up fully, there is a, there are skills that you need to use, and and maybe more so than your insensitive friend.

So, to put it in like the language of personality psychology um, i am one of those people.

I have a high startle reflex.

You know, i'm like i have a fifth degree black belt and i'm walking down the streets and like there's a big noise.

I'm like you know, and everybody's like i thought you were the fifth degree black belt.

Yeah look, I am the fifth degree blah, but I'm just afraid of my shadow.

I can protect myself, but like my, I have a very high stutter reflex.

I'll fuck you up, but first I'm going to jump.

Exactly.

I'll gather myself quickly.

Don't worry.

But another piece of it is that I'm also high in a personality trait called neuroticism.

And so I am sensitive to my environment.

I am someone who is like a moody, then I'm fine, then a little moody, then I'm irritable, then I'm not irritable.

I just, I've been that way.

I'm 56.

It's proven this is my personality.

For 100 years, well, I'm 56.

For 35 of my life years of my life before I became an expert in this I assumed that was my destiny.

I assumed that my personality and my temperament was just that's who I am.

I'm a person who experiences these emotions and there's nothing you can do about it.

And then I did research on this and I found that there's zero correlation between that personality trait and emotional intelligence.

Why is that?

Because guess what?

Someone like me, I have a lot of opportunities to practice my skills.

Because I get a little worried before a meeting.

I'm like Mark, take your breath Mark, think this way.

Mark, you got this.

You've done 500 of these meetings.

I'm using those strategies and I enter that meeting not like this, but just like that.

Someone who is more on the resilient side, or someone who is less volatile, or steady, you might say, or emotionally stable is the word we use in psychology.

They're kind of more, even keeled.

The problem with those people is that shit happens.

And they may not have as much preparation as a person who's like me, the sensitive person.

So again, it's not a strength or a weakness.

It's just that you have to know who you are and be aware that the person who's more even keeled, all of a sudden there's a death in the family and they're just.

They've never really had a lot of emotions to deal with and all of a sudden it's like, oh my gosh, i don't even know where to go with this.

I can't deal with my grief or my sadness.

Does this, does this make sense?

Absolutely yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah, completely.

I would say look, one of the big things that i learned and it's cool, it's really serendipitous that i was talking to talking to you this week after the last week that i spent.

You know, this is a full week retreat and i ended up on a farm in sonoma county for nine days and it's been incredibly formative to me and, to be honest, i'm still trying to work out what the fuck it all means.

Um, and it's a different sort of language.

It's me getting below the neck, not not sort of above the neck um, but i realized and i've known for a while but was, i think, embarrassed to sort of admit it that i'm also.

I would put myself in the whatever is one in five highly sensitive people category.

Um, and i didn't like that.

I didn't like the idea of thinking about my sensitivity because i didn't see it as a strength.

I saw it it.

I grew up in the most blue collar working class town in the northeast of the UK.

It's state primary state, secondary state, sixth form college played a sport where you're around men working class men from the age of 12, 13 until I was 20.

There wasn't much room for that to come through.

I didn't have many role models of people who were integrating or regulating or being fluid with their emotions in a good way.

And I think It hadn't been rewarded by the environment and it's difficult to deal with.

So suppression for me was much easier.

And last week, having spent a lot of time, like just you know, staring into the abyss of my own emotions and the abyss staring back at me and sometimes punching me in the nuts.

I was really proud.

It's the first time, I think, in my life that I really saw the depth of my sensitivity and realized how proud I was of it.

Holy shit like, look at how, look at how it's enabled you to show up for people.

How not, how dare you?

Because that that's very judgmental.

But like, what a how unfortunate that you haven't realized what a blessing it is and how, what a shame.

And i grieved.

I grieved over the fact that i'd been mean to myself about my sensitivity.

It's like fuck, like you were so nasty to yourself about feeling stuff.

Like who says that you shouldn't feel stuff?

Who says that you shouldn't do that?

And um yeah I, you know for the.

I get the sense that this is the sort of podcast that attracts people who feel things pretty deeply.

Like why are you listening to 90 minutes on emotions?

If you are not someone that's like, what anxiety, I don't know what you're talking about.

Um, so yeah, I just.

It was a really enlightening experience for me to see fuck like that's a strength.

It's a real strength that I have um, and i shouldn't be ashamed of it.

So yeah i uh, i'm i'm very pro highly sensitive people at the moment.

Well, i think what you're really pro not to put words in your mouth is going back to permission to feel, like you're pro allowing yourself to feel, and maybe that will help you show up for other people in your life as non-judgmental, as a good listener, you know, and as empathic empathic and compassionate.

I didn't share with you the outcome of this though, so What I find in my research is that people who had that, Uncle Marvin, that permission to feel, in adulthood they sleep better, better mental health, better physical health, greater life satisfaction and greater purpose and meaning in life.

So for those of you who are thinking, oh, does this really matter?

Is this just these soft attributes?

No, actually you.

Providing the opportunity for people to grow up in an environment where they can feel and talk about their feelings and learn strategies to deal with them is producing people who are healthier, happier and more effective.

Is it possible to be too self-aware?

No.

Sorry.

Again, it all goes back to regulation.

It all goes back...

One thing that we didn't talk about yet is this idea of being an emotion scientist about your life.

And again, most of us are emotion judges.

We're not that self-aware.

We're like, I'm feeling fine.

I'm ignoring my feelings.

I'm thinking that this is who I am and I can't change.

But the emotion scientist is always kind of checking in.

Did how I regulate that work?

Did it not work?

What might I do differently next time?

The emotion scientist says, do I really know how I felt in that moment?

Or maybe I need to really think like get on that app and like plot the real feeling that I'm having.

So that endless curiosity is actually helpful, but it's not and this is a really I'm glad you brought this up because another one of the pushbacks remember the whole parenting thing we're talking about.

Well, another pushback that I get is Mark is trying to make a world filled with self-indulgent people.

And I'm like, There's a big difference between self-awareness and self-indulgence.

I do not want you or me or anybody checking in with their feelings 500 times a day.

That is unhelpful.

That will cause you to ruminate.

That will cause you to go nuts.

What I want us to do is I want us to look at our lives and think, how am I feeling in general?

That's a good question to ask yourself.

But throughout the day, there are strategic moments.

Like when you walk into your office, or before a podcast, or before you go home, or before you're making an important decision, just check in.

How am I feeling?

Is this feeling helpful?

Is it unhelpful?

What emotion would be most helpful to achieve my goal?

That's the goal of emotional intelligence.

That's great.

I wonder whether emotional regulation is sometimes a mask for people-pleasing.

I have to think about that one for a second.

Is emotion regulation?

Well, I think if it's an authentic regulation, right?

If it's, you know, yes.

But real emotion regulation.

You know the subtitle of my book is dealing with feeling.

Use your emotions to create the life you want.

And I think that's the key element here is that we deserve to have the best lives ever.

We can have all the money in the world.

We can have all the objects in the world and all the fame in the world.

But if we don't like ourselves, if I don't wake up and say, you know, Mark, you're a good guy.

And if I'm not trying to make the world a better place, whether it's in my career or in my office, and using strategies wisely to do that to me at least for me my life isn't worth living.

I think emotional regulation as a mask for people-pleasing is confusing.

Emotional regulation for compromising boundaries.

It's, oh, this thing has happened.

I'm going to allow the emotion to move through me and then it not be a signal for my action on the other side of it, that you almost neutralize the emotional signal.

So you could imagine somebody who does do emotional regulation as people pleasing.

Thing happens, I'm agitated, I'm frustrated, I'm angry, I'm upset, I'm whatever.

And you don't use that to say Hey, when you did that thing, it made me feel X or this is something that occurred and it's not going.

I don't want it to happen again.

If you start shouting, I'm going to leave the house and I'm going to come back in 15 minutes.

And if you're still shouting, I'm going to leave the house and I'm going to come back in 15 minutes.

Like emotional regulation.

I think is the concern around that and how it leads into people pleasing is to do the first bit but like to do the sensing bit but not to do the deploying bit.

Well, you're giving the example of poor regulation which is out of fear a partner in a relationship might say no, it's okay, honey.

It's okay.

I didn't mean it, but you did mean it.

And so that's an excuse for not actually dealing with your feeling.

It's actually not dealing with the feeling, because the real strategy for dealing with the relational issue is to have the difficult conversation.

But because you're afraid of the outcome of that, you decide to people please or suppress or deny.

Okay.

If someone who's listening... This is like my new test of emotional intelligence.

I like this.

Keep going.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, this next one should be a fucking straight down the center of the plate for you.

Someone that's listening realizes emotional habits are bad.

They're reactive or defensive or avoidant or whatever.

What is the first step to reshaping them? in your opinion?

I think the first step is, A, you've acknowledged it.

Just acknowledge the fact that the way I'm dealing with my feelings is not working for me to have the life I want.

Awareness is the first step.

I would ask people to maybe, they can read, they can download an app, just build knowledge.

You have to have knowledge.

You're not born with these skills and strategies.

You've got to learn the strategies.

I didn't know there was something called positive self-talk.

I just looked in the mirror and had self-hatred for so many years of my life.

And then all of a sudden said to me, Mark, you could think about this from a different lens.

You can reappraise, you can reframe.

I was like, wow, what the heck is that?

I never heard of that one before.

And so I think people just have to learn the skills, and then you got to practice them over and, over and over again.

Because this is, a lot of us have to unlearn.

Like you're telling me.

By the way, my research in the UK there was no cultural differences in the attributes, but only 18 of people said they grew up with someone who gave them permission to feel.

So other places, about a third.

The UK was 18%.

So we've got to push some love over to the UK.

That does not surprise me.

But I think awareness is the first step.

Build your vocabulary.

Just be curious about how you're feeling.

And then ask yourself is how I'm feeling, is how I'm dealing with my feelings, working for me or against me?

And I use different criteria.

I use things like, just generally, am I happy?

What's my well-being?

Am I making the choices that are best for me?

How are my relationships?

How are my goals?

Am I achieving what I want in my professional life?

And if the answer is no to any of those, then start looking for those patterns, as you said, and then learn the strategies and practice them for the rest of your life.

Because I thought, like I said, when the pandemic hit.

Like Mark, you're the director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence.

You got this.

And it was like, whoa, I don't got this.

And now, you know, five years later, I got it a little bit more because I wrote a whole book on it.

So the way I like, for me, the way I do, it is like I have to translate everything that I think I know into writing, because then I actually know what I'm talking about.

And now I feel like, oh, wow, I got more.

I really know this stuff now.

Am I good at it all?

Absolutely not.

It's going to take.

No way.

Talk to Mark Brackett, ladies and gentlemen.

Mark, you're great.

I really appreciate you.

I think your work's wonderful.

Where should people go?

They want to check out all of your stuff.

Yeah, I think they should go to my personal website, which is just markbrackett.com.

I'm on Instagram, LinkedIn, and my book is called Dealing with Feeling.

Heck yeah.

Mark, I appreciate you.

Thank you.

If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom reading list.

It is 100 books that you should read before you die.

The most interesting, life-changing and impactful books I've ever read, with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them.

And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillx.com slash books.

That's chriswillx.com slash books.

[Mastering Emotional Intelligence: A Blueprint for Emotional Regulation and Personal Growth]-[#1014 - Dr Marc Brackett - The Life-Changing Skill of Emotional Regulation]

📋 Summary

The Science and Practice of Emotional Intelligence

Label It to Regulate It

The RULER Model and Emotional Intelligence

Emotion Regulation: The PRIME Strategy

The Myth of Suppression

Transforming Envy into Growth

Building an Emotional Identity

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Mastering Emotional Intelligence: A Blueprint for Emotional Regulation and Personal Growth]-[#1014 - Dr Marc Brackett - The Life-Changing Skill of Emotional Regulation]

📋 Summary

The Science and Practice of Emotional Intelligence

Label It to Regulate It

The RULER Model and Emotional Intelligence

Emotion Regulation: The PRIME Strategy

The Myth of Suppression

Transforming Envy into Growth

Building an Emotional Identity

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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