The Science of Emotion Regulation: Strategies for When You're Anxious, Angry, or Comparing Yourself To Others | Marc Brackett

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27:57I just want to put a fine point on this part of the discussion. I'm always, and I don't know if this is a service that people actually need, but it's what I need as a person who's wired for selfishness. I want to put a self-interested top spin on everything we've been discussing. Sure. In my experience, if I had heard this discussion 10 years ago, even though I was already kind of interested in Buddhism and personal growth, I don't know that I would have understood why helping people savor their positive emotions or survive their negative ones would be in my interest. But I think to me, it kind of, well, there's the evidence base, which is what you referred to earlier with Bob Waldinger and his work at Harvard with the Harvard Study for Adult Development, which has shown over 80 plus years that the quality of your relationships determines the length and quality of your life.

28:50So there's that. And then I can also just say from an N of one perspective, having these skills to draw people out and be with them no matter what's happening has brought my life from black and white to color. I don't do it all the time. Once heard somebody on my team say that Dan practices what he preaches about 70 % of the time. So that felt pretty good, actually. It really has helped. you're making me think about not just about parent-child relationships, but colleague-to-colleague relationships. I work at a university where people are not so great at celebrating other people's success. I see couples all the time who feel inhibited sharing the good news they had because they feel like maybe their partner will feel like, well, I don't get the good news that you get.

29:40And so it almost is like this weird dynamic of power where I can't really share my pleasant feelings because I'm afraid that you can't handle the fact that I'm actually enjoying my life. Which is, we can do like a 17-part series. I think where we're going, just for my own sense of staying on track, is that the regulation of emotion oftentimes is focused on down-regulating unpleasant feelings. And we just had a little movement here around it's not just that. It's also about supporting other people and experiencing pleasant emotions and also upregulating our own pleasant emotions to enjoy our lives.

30:22And that matters a lot. We'll say more about that, upregulating our own positive emotions, because I don't think we've really touched on that. We've talked about how to get other people to savor theirs. But I think given the negativity bias that is so hardwired into the human animal, it can be very easy to move past the pleasant things in our day, the taste of our food, the quality of a tiny fleeting little interaction with your pharmacist or somebody at the barista or whatever, or big positive things, how do we draw those out and savor them more? Well, first we have to know what those things are.

30:59In our work, we have a tool we call the mood meter, which you may have seen before. It's this box of four colors, the yellow, the red, the blue, and the green. And we have an app now that helps people to use that more effectively. and so yellow emotions are the high energy pleasant ones the excitement the elation the optimism the hope the green emotions are those of calm content tranquil peaceful relaxed low energy pleasant feelings and then we got the blue and the red which are the unpleasant emotions the anger and the anxiety family and the kind of sadness and loneliness family so firstly like do you know what brings you into the yellow like what actually brings you into the yellow quadrant Like, what are the things that you'd like to do that when you're there or doing them, you feel joy and excitement?

31:46People don't reflect on these things very much. What are the things that bring you into that green quadrant, the things that make you feel content? It's funny, I live now in the countryside of Connecticut. We moved after the pandemic to like a very rural area. I've got lots of property and hiking trails. And people always say like, what do you love to do more? And I said, well, now that I live in the country, I love to hike. and people say, well, how often do you hike? And I'm like, I think I did two last year. It's like I don't make the time to do the things that I know bring me pleasant feelings because I'm busy working.

32:23So identifying those things in your life and planning them. For me, one thing that I do that I've never done before is I plan my well-being time. And so my calendar, I may look like a severely neurotic human being, but I schedule my workouts. I schedule my hiking time. I schedule my connection time because otherwise I'm not going to do it. My default is research and analysis and blah, blah, blah. Yes. You're reminding me of somebody on my team. She didn't give me permission to name her, so I won't name her, but somebody on my team who talks about her default mode being work robot. And so therefore has to put, go to the movies with a friend or take a walk on her calendar because otherwise it's just the slog.

33:11Exactly. So identifying those things that bring you joy is critically important and scheduling them really matters. I mean, I think that's just one thing. If everybody did that every week, twice a week or three times a week, just found those 15 minute blocks or one hour blocks and just schedule that, I think it would be a huge difference in people's lives. Okay. Let's dive more deeply into the book. You referenced your first book, Permission to feel the new book is called dealing with feeling. It's just packed with, as you say, research backed strategies for emotion regulation, which as we established at the top of this episode is a very important skill.

33:50And so number one, the first strategy you mentioned is quieting the mind. What do you recommend for doing that? I mean, this is your whole thing. I mean, I listen to you all the time. This is your practice, right? It's the breathing exercises. It's the mindfulness exercise. is it's the meditation. Writing a book on emotional regulation that has a chapter on quieting the mind was not easy, by the way, given there are 3 ,750 million books on this topic. And so I wanted to be really clear in terms of, I was very curious around the nuance in the research because, I mean, it's pretty obvious for most of us, breathing is going to deactivate our nervous system.

34:33Would you agree? Yeah, I think that's unimpeachable. It's the advice every mom gives their kid, you know, take a deep breath, but it's actually, it's, there's evidence for it. Exactly. Except it's not great when we tell people that. I've learned that the hard way. Fair enough. I mean, it really doesn't work. I'm like, everybody breathe. And they're like, that's a trigger mark. That's a trigger. Okay. But we do know it works. And it's the place where where you can build that space to deactivate. I make sure I'm clear that I don't think breathing is sufficient. I always joke when my mother-in-law got trapped with us during the pandemic, I would do a lot of breathing exercises and I'd be like, I'm even clear why she needs to go home.

35:14So, you know, yes, it does lower the temperature. It helps us to be able to access some of those cognitive strategies that I think are critically important, but it doesn't guarantee we're going to use them. obviously the mindfulness work is important, whether it be mindfulness exercises to be more present or to, as we talked about earlier, the compassion-focused ones. And so I think stating the obvious that we need to do that, the problem is that nobody wants to do it. We haven't sold it well. The best example I have for that is here I am, got a large amount of money from a donor to do a study with my undergraduate students to put them through different forms of mindfulness training.

36:01And we were going to pay these people and they didn't even need the money, but we paid them anyway to participate because we figured we'd get them to stick with their research. By the time the study was over, something like 70-something percent dropped out. So we couldn't even actually analyze the data because there was nobody left to actually study. And it was once a week, working together through the mindfulness exercise and they had their on-their-own-time practice. Zero percent practice on their own. The numbers were terrible. And when I interviewed the students afterwards, what do you think the number one reason why they didn't do it was?

36:40Not enough time. Not enough time. That's only a piece of it. It's deeper than that. It's a waste of their time. Huh. But you can't be productive while you're doing mindfulness and breathing exercise. Oh, I see. I see. I see. I see. To me, that seems like a problem with the pedagogy. I deal with a lot of people who have beefs with meditation. Usually, if I can bend their ear for five minutes, they're disabused of the notion that it's a waste of time because there's a ton of science to show that it's really good for you. and it's actually can make you more productive and focused and all that stuff.

37:25What I've found is that people aren't doing it because they don't have enough time. And habit formation is really hard. The same thing is true with exercise or sleep hygiene or eating a healthy diet. Like there's a reason why New Year's resolutions where we bail on them by February. You're right. But I think this goes back to, you know, I'm a prevention scientist and it sometimes fascinates me how unpopular prevention science is and how popular clinical research is or treatment research is. Because if we keep on treating people with anxiety disorders or depression or whatever it is, like the number of new kids or adults who fall into that system of the need for help is never going to diminish.

38:11It just makes no sense to me why we don't think, oh, my other background, by the way, is I taught martial arts for 30 years and have a strong background in Eastern philosophy and Buddhism myself. And I would teach five-year-olds really complex meditations and mindfulness exercises and they loved it. But I got them when they were young and they saw the connection between the breathing exercise and the mindfulness and their martial arts and their lives and I taught them that explicitly. But now, as a professor of college students, I have kids who are 18, 19 years old. They've gone through a system where the only thing that makes you successful is playing an instrument that no one ever heard or having something in your CV that sounds so special that it's like, wow, you went to a country that I didn't even know existed to volunteer.

38:58There's no reinforcement for having these kinds of practices. And so we're starting late, and so we have to work on that mindset, which is before, the way I talk about it in my book, is before we can get to teaching people, whether it's mindfulness or cognitive strategies we've got to get them to believe that all this matters yes they have to have that both that emotions are data and valuable sources of information and that it's a learnable skill because a lot of people think of this as something that's innate like yes i thought this way by the way i mean until i got a phd in psychology I just thought I was emotionally a basket case.

39:41You know, I had so much neuroses from my childhood, this complicated life, and I would have strong emotions. That's just part of who I am. And I just thought, okay, you got to live it out. And then I realized, wait a minute, there's evidence-based strategies to regulate emotions. There's actually a science to this, there's skills you can learn. And it's harder, not impossible, to do it as we develop. you know my big push is let's start this in preschool and teach it in a developmentally appropriate way across development and of course you know now at 56 i run a center at the university i've got 40 employees i've got political pushback on my work like i still got to regulate and i need new strategies but i have the muscle you know has already gotten that exercise that it needs to try a new technique well i agree with you about teaching them while they're young i totally agree with you about that.

40:36And I will say that the people listening to this show want to buy what you're selling. So this is a hospitable environment. The good news, it's never too early. It's never too late. The areas of our brain responsible for learning these skills are with us until we're in our nineties. I got a letter from a 90 year old man just a while back thanking me for teaching him this stuff. He said, I only wish I learned it earlier, but you're making the last years of my life better. So I promise everyone this is something you can learn today and make a difference. So the breathing and mindfulness work that we discussed, I have my favorites, and I think that's part of the work, is that I came from a Zen background.

41:18I learned Vipassana and other forms of meditation and mindfulness. But the one that stuck with me the most was the work from Thich Nhat Hanh. And I just related to him as a human. I liked the way he thought about the world. And so I like his mindfulness practices and they work for me. I've been practicing them for 40 years. I can tell you that I don't need 15. I need like two or three different ones for different purposes. And it really does its work for me. Okay, so strategy number one, quieting the mind. Strategy number two is about redirecting your thoughts or cognitive strategies. What should we know about that?

41:58this goes back to your point about the negativity bias we really have to fight that and because again we're not taught from a young age to sit through you know the way people are talking to us for me this is a big one because i grew up with very low self-esteem hated myself i was too jewish i was too chubby my nose was too big i was too feminine the world had a lot to say about who i was, and nobody really helped me sit through that and say, oh, wait a minute, who are you to define my reality for me? That's called gaslighting, by the way. And I don't accept that. I do think that most of our negative talk comes from gaslighting.

42:42I think that other people just feel they have the right to tell you who you are, and then you start believing it because no one else teaches you otherwise. And so going from that self-critic to the person who's self-compassionate is effortful. and we have to learn the strategies that work of positive self-talk and that distant self-talk of like Mark, take the high road like my favorite, because of my Zen meditation background, my favorite strategy for cognitive strategies is I say to myself consistently Mark, you know this feeling is impermanent and to me it's like I can breathe because I don't know about you but when bad stuff happens, little bad things like, you know, the flight gets canceled and you're stuck there freaking out or whatever, you're having a really rough day, you get news that something didn't work out at work and you just go into that ruminative state, which is my default.

43:39I take that breath, which gives me access to the cognitive strategies and I say, Mark, today's a rainy day, but it's okay. Tomorrow's going to be a sunny day. And recognizing that emotions are ephemeral and that that's kind of the law of physics is freeing for me. And I don't think many people take the opportunity to adopt that mindset around their emotions. They get stuck in it. The biggest challenge I'm seeing today, by the way, this is with a young teenager. I do a lot of work in high schools, and I can't tell you how many high school students come up to me. They don't want to say this in front of their peers, but they say it privately.

44:17and they say, Mark, I don't feel anxious. I am anxiety. They define their whole body and life by the emotion. And there's where the problem lies. They're not anxiety. You're not your emotions. Your emotions are experiences. Some of us have stronger experiences than others, and sometimes they're more intense or more frequent than others. But emotions are ephemeral. And if we can adopt that mindset and recognize that when we're experiencing the strong, unpleasant ones, life is going to be a lot better for us. You said this was your favorite strategy for interrupting rumination. Is the name for this strategy Distant Self-Talk?

44:56It is. Because Distant Self-Talk is just like literally having empathy for yourself and saying, Mark, you know this feeling is impermanent. Yes, Mark, it's true. Today, Mark, you know this is like that rainy day. it feels like a thunderstorm but tomorrow there's going to be a rainbow so it's okay and I have to say like again I repeat this I'm 56 I still get caught up in the rainy day is never going to go away I even take like a double step back Mark last week you had that really shitty experience and you were in that same spot and the next day everything was fine remember that? oh yeah yeah you're right okay it's work maybe I just need a lot more work than other people but from my exposure in the world I don't think so So, dude, yes, yes.

45:39I completely identify with what you're describing by yourself. And just to be technical here, you added on top of distance self-talk, temporal distance. That's another form of it, which is that's when you say to yourself, Mark, is this really going to be something that's problematic in a week from now? Does this really matter? I do a lot of that in my relationship. I've been with my partner for 31 years. and we have very different lives and different styles of being, and we have different values about buying things. Part of it is like, really? You really need that? And then I have to say, Mark, you're not your partner's father.

46:19Let it go. Or I have to say something like, is this really going to impact our finances? No. Let it go. So that forward-looking, forward-thinking strategy, very, very helpful. Reappraisal. Oh my gosh, how critical is that? instead of going right for the blame, can you just try to see it from a different lens or a different perspective for a minute? It may not be the right answer, but give someone the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they're not trying to sabotage you. Maybe they're not intentionally late because they don't respect you. Maybe they just really hit traffic. I want to talk about reappraisal in a second, but just to say on distance self-talk, which includes the kind of bonus level of temporal distancing.

47:04Just want to point out to the audience that the key move that Mark was making was using his own name. That is the way to distance yourself. Dude, bro, Mark, whatever you want to call yourself, it allows you to harness this ability we all have, underdeveloped, but there anyway, to give good advice when appropriate to children, mentees, friends, whatever. You can do that to yourself. Correct. You can be your Uncle Marvin. Well, by the way, I love that you just said that because a big part of my training now is because two-thirds of us didn't have the Uncle Marvin, a lot of people, and my research shows that if you have the Uncle Marvin, you tend to be more successful in life.

47:47You tend to have greater life satisfaction, greater purpose and meaning, better physical health, better mental health. You actually sleep better at night. Big benefits to having grown up with that Uncle Marvin. But then two-thirds of the people in the room thinking like, well, look at me. Like maybe that's why I'm so messed up. Like I didn't have the Uncle Marvin. And I have to remind people, you got to look in the mirror and be your own Uncle Marvin. Yes. I just think that's so important. We can, and I'm here for this to a certain extent, bemoan our life circumstances. And we've all got challenging ones, some of us way more than others.

48:21And that's all true. That we're trying to take that away from you or gaslight you. and you still have this opportunity right now to be your own supportive aunt or uncle. By the way, just for the research, plug a little bit of my research here that will help clarify what that means. Like it's being Uncle Marvin, like, okay, that sounds complicated. Like, what is that? My research shows three things that Uncle Marvins have. And by the way, they can be Aunt Maria's, they can be grandparents, they can be coaches. This is just people that we want to be around that are emotional allies, as I call it.

48:56Three things. Non-judgmental, good listeners who show empathy and compassion. That's it. And by the way, that shows up cross-culturally. There are cultural differences and strategies that people use to regulate or how people express emotions. But in terms of people reflecting on their childhoods and thinking about the people that created the conditions for them to have permission to feel, I have not found cross-cultural differences. People say non-judgmental, good listeners who show empathy and compassion. Write it down, people.

49:31Coming up, Mark talks about some tools for breaking out of rumination, the importance of gratitude when you're in one of those envy or social comparison situations on social media, for example, and how to regulate your identity and act from your best self. He'll explain what that means.

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53:01okay so reappraisal yeah another josephism don't side with yourself nice i love that the reappraisal piece for me i actually love reappraisal and i love teaching it because i think it's actually one of the most creative emotion regulation strategies there is and i love helping kids think about it like give me five alternative ways of thinking about that particular experience, and they love the challenge. And so this is where I think there's a beautiful intersection of emotional intelligence and creativity. Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein's longtime partner in crime in the meditation world, has this rap that she goes on sometimes about how we all think certainty is going to help.

53:47We crave certainty in a world in constant non-negotiable flux, which is scary. We find refuge, we think, in certainty. But actually, thinking we know how things are, that they're terrible and will never change, makes us feel worse. It's that, think of five different explanations. That's how uncertainty, actually, curiosity feels safer, actually, when you do it. 100 % agree with that. That's also the certainty, control. This is why we get anxious, because we can't make the prediction. And we want to make that, we want to be clear. The pandemic, I want to be clear. When are the offices opening? I want to be clear.

54:28When am I going to be taking off the mask? I want to be clear. All that kind of stuff. And for things that we have no control over, this is where all these strategies come into play. I remember my favorite one during the pandemic, remember that it was like maybe May and it was like nobody knew what the heck was happening. Everybody was freaking out and we're spraying our groceries with Windex. I mean, it was nuts. the stock market's crashing. I mean, it was just like, you're watching the news and it's like horrific. And I would just sit there thinking, I started singing songs like, we all go down together.

55:03You know, like, Mark, you're pretty selfish thinking like you're the only one who's suffering right now. You're actually doing pretty good. You got a good job. You have a home, a little home office. Actually, life is pretty good. How about some gratitude? And I switched from all the negativity to gratitude and it was eye-opening for me. And I actually did a study on gratitude during the time because I was very curious how people thought about gratitude during the pandemic. And the little results of that study were that people just rely on like, they think about, I'm grateful, I have a family, I'm grateful I have food.

55:33There was no real gratitude for things like the doctors and nurses who were putting their lives at risk to help people. The people who had to like have jobs where they're cooking for people in precarious waters or the delivery people. And I think that oftentimes Sometimes taking a moment is another strategy, right? A cognitive strategy of gratitude really does make a difference, as we know. Probably the strongest research is in the field of gratitude. Tell me about the how of gratitude. If we want to use that as a motion regulation strategy, what's the best practice? It's pausing. There's multiple strategies, I mean, techniques.

56:14One can be just doing the writing exercise. One little caveat about that, though, is that people tend to overdo it. And so this is the stuff that never gets published, but I won't mention the scientists on this, but years ago, I was part of a think tank of researchers doing stuff on this. And there's a sweet spot, because if you write 10 things you're grateful for every day, by the time Friday comes, you can't think of anything. And then all of a sudden, it's sort of like, I guess I have nothing to be grateful for, and it actually backfires and your happiness goes down. It's like all things. To me, it's like the Buddhist way, the middle path.

56:49All these strategies are a middle path. The breathing is the middle path. The cognitive is the middle path. Eating is the middle path. It's all kind of that way. But I think the writing of it is great. And I think just the pausing as a mindset shift. For me, I do it in the morning. I have some rituals that I do. And one of my other rituals in the morning is I say to myself, how wonderful it is that today is the first day of your rest of your life. And it's just like all that shit that was like, oh, yesterday, that's the past. I got the whole day. I got tomorrow. And I think we could all be more forward-looking in our lives, to be frank.

57:30It's like present moment with forward-lookingness. One other quick side about the gratitude thing, I think it's a beautiful antidote to a very popular emotion these days, which is envy. I know from my research with students, they say they're stressed, but the research actually shows that a deep feeling is envy and jealousy. But they don't have the vocabulary, so they say stressed. But when you get into the nuance, it's actually all about social comparisons, whether it's about body type or whether it's about studying for less hours and getting better grades or parents who have better connections in Wall Street or Hollywood.

58:08everybody's like just scanning the world for what's going to be better than me remember my formula i don't think just doing kind of mindfulness and breathing exercises alone is sufficient because when you're in a classroom of 300 people like mine and you're looking around thinking everybody else is better than you are you got to switch your cognitions if you don't shift here the way you see the world you're going to drown in the envy and if you take a moment and think, wait a minute, I'm actually a student at Yale University. Wow, I got a great freaking professor, whatever it is. But getting people to shift out and please just focus on three things that you might have gratitude for.

58:53And it just pulls them away from the rumination or the perseveration around their not worthiness or everyone else's betterness. And it gives them a bit more freedom. So just to put a fine point on this, I think what you're saying is to the listeners, next time you find yourself in a moment of social comparison, if you can catch it because it can be sneaky and subtle, but if you're in that moment and it's probably going to happen the next time you're on Instagram, if you're on Instagram or whatever social media death trap in which you find yourself, try to use that as a wake up, an alarm bell to pause for a second and think of three good things in your life to mitigate the pernicious effects of comparing yourself to other people's curated versions of their lives.

59:43Exactly right. Okay. I'm skipping around a little bit in your book. That's okay. One of the strategies you recommend is identity regulation. What does that mean? well what i mean by that it goes back to kind of our opening conversation about like why is this so important i got this idea by the way so one of the things i did for my own well-being while writing the book was i started doing a rigorous weightlifting workout i was always a physically active person with martial arts and other things i taught exercise in gyms during graduate school But you become a professor, you get a little dumpy. And if pandemic hits, you're eating too much Thai food.

1:00:28And I'm like, Mark, you got to work out. You got to get yourself in shape. So this is the positive benefits of social media. I was scrolling one night, kind of feeling disgusted. And I found this virtual trainer. And I decided it was a reasonable price to get me started. And I meet this person. His name is Marco. And he interviews me. He's like, I only really want to take people who are motivated. And I'm like, wow, that's pretty intense. Anyway, we had this long conversation. And he said, there's different phases to working out. The first phase is you're going to hate it. It's like, why am I doing this?

1:01:05This is ridiculous. Which, by the way, I went through for months. I would be doing deadlifts. And I'm like, I'm 50 years old. I've been with my partner for 30 years. Who cares? Nobody's looking at you anyway. All the negativity. I got through that. I was like, Mark, this is ridiculous. Take the high road. You know that this is what you want to do. And how all the self-talk worked. Then I saw changes. But the conversation that was the most interesting to me was that he said, just to make the parallel, I see myself as a martial artist. I have a 50-degree black belt in a style called Hapkido. If you ask me, do you consider martial arts an aspect of your identity?

1:01:45I'd say 100%. I feel like I operate as a martial artist in the world around. I'm scanning the environment. I feel confident in terms of protecting myself and other people. Do I feel like I have a black belt in emotional intelligence? Not so much. Do I identify? Do I see Mark Brackett as a highly regulated human? Not yet. And I feel like that's where people need to grow, that when we start identifying as people who got this, yes, I am the Yoda of emotion regulation. That's when our automatic, habitual, unhelpful reactions to stimuli become our automatic, habitual, deliberate, conscious, helpful ways of dealing with our emotional lives.

1:02:39and that's my whole life is striving for that. I mean, for helping people to see that, to identify that way. Isn't that a setup for failure? If you think you're Yoda, the next time you're a shitbag, like it's going to be devastating. Well, you're going to be Yoda with some humility, but for me, it's actually great because I'm very easily, for whatever reason, I feel strong emotions in the world around me and whether I'm getting a coffee and I feel like the barista is nasty or whether I'm online at the airport or wherever, or people challenging me in my public speeches, or students, for example, Professor Bracken, I've got a question, but I'm not sure you're going to know the answer.

1:03:19I'm thinking to myself, okay, yeah, this is going to be a winner. I use that as an opportunity. To me, it's like, Mark, I go into Mark the Yoda. Mark, you are the feelings master. Mark, you are the world's leading expert in emotional intelligence. Use that identity to solve this problem. And by the way, it works. And it's good research to support that. Okay, but let me press on that. What does it do to your identity in those inevitable moments when you are dysregulated and in a bad enough situation that dysregulation might last for a while? It might. And that's where you have to have the humility and the courage to either have some self-forgiveness or apologize to your partner, there's a lot of emotional regulation that goes into having the courage to say, I'm sorry, honey.

1:04:13I have to do that pretty much every week. I'm terrible at this, by the way. And just the other day, I was like, we went out for dinner with friends and I was triggered by something and we're walking home and of course, I'm like, don't say it, Mark. Don't say it. Of course I said it. And then I'm like, why did you do that? And then it was like a whole thing when we got home. The next morning, I woke up and I was like, I don't know what got to me that I needed to say that. And I'm sorry. And I'm going to really work on not doing that again. That's the best you can do. You reflect on it and you try to move forward.

1:04:48I think that 90 % of our divorces are because people can't regulate. They can't deal with their feelings in their relationship, whether it's telling someone about their discomfort or whether it's managing these moments. People just either decide they're going to cheat on them, they go to the gym for six hours, they compartmentalize, suppress, deny, repress, as opposed to approach. The approach takes courage, the approach takes skill. But I think the approach is what makes us healthier, happier people. You have this kind of order of operations in this section of the book under identity regulation.

1:05:27Sense, stop, see your best self, strategize and act. Walk us through that. Yeah, so that's a technique we call the metamoment. I cultivated this technique with a colleague of mine whose name is Robin Stern. And we came at this from a really fun perspective. She's a clinician who was dealing with patients. She was teaching them emotion regulation strategies. They go home and they would not use them. We just worked on this and you're a couple's therapy. be like, what's going on here? I was a scientist working on research and teaching people this, and I got all this resistance. And so we're like, nobody wants to regulate.

1:06:04It's not just about the strategy. Because you can do the breathing exercises, you can do the cognitive exercise that we've talked about and others. But if you don't actually see that my life is going to be better, my relationships are going to be better by applying these strategies to my life, then you're probably not going to do them because it does feel good to be dysregulated. I proved myself right that evening on that walk home. And it does feel good to say, go blank yourself and have that extra alcoholic beverage in the moment. These strategies don't tend to do well for you long term. With that said, we realized the missing link was something we've spoken about already, which is this idea of cultivating your best self.

1:06:49So we get the four-step process of the meta moment. Three of the steps are similar, right? The first step is you notice that something has shifted in your environment. I am triggered from feeling tense in my shoulders. I have that negative thought. I want to say something mean or hurtful. And then we do that pause button where we do that breath. But the critical and creative thing about the meta moment is this moment of seeing your best self. So what does that mean? Well, it's role-specific, but very simply, if I were to ask you, Dan, you're a father of an 11-year-old, you just said? Yes. Okay.

1:07:28So I'm going to put you through this exercise. You didn't sign the consent form, but it's okay. Dan, in your role as a parent, your best self, or you would say this to yourself, my best self, how I want my child to see me, how I want my child to experience me, how I want my child to talk about me to their peers. What are the three qualities that you would want them to have in mind? Well, I think number one is the Uncle Marvin role, just a safe place. I don't know that my son would have the vocabulary for this, but like a safe place to just express himself in his full range. So what's the trait or attribute that you would have?

1:08:08How about easy to talk to? Great. So you want to see yourself as a dad who's easy to talk to. Yes. Give me two more. Fun to be around. Like, I'm down to do his stuff, even though I don't really want to do it. Listen to him talk about video games as long as he wants to talk. Take him to sporting events. Another thing I also don't really want to do. But I play drums with him. I watch 30 Rock with him. We're working our way through that whole show. Cool. Which has a lot of inappropriate shit in it, but whatever. So, easy to be around. Fun. Easy to talk to. Fun to be around. Okay. Easy to talk to.

1:08:43Fun to be around. Give me one more. Aspirational figure, like I want to be like him. Say more about that. I don't believe as a parent in a lot of direct instruction of my child because I don't believe that will work. So I try to lead and teach through osmosis or example, you know, and so I want him to feel like, yeah, that's a dude I want to be like because he has rich relationships. He has work that he really cares about. He pays attention to his marriage. He's fit, you know, to the best of his ability. And I don't mean like looking a certain way. I pay attention to my fitness. I want him to look up to me in that way.

1:09:26So what's a word? What's an attribute? Role model? Yeah, but that's not specific enough for me. I want more specific. Is it passionate? Is it perseverant? Is it motivated? Is it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, passionate. Sure. Nice. So as a dad, I want my son to see me as someone who is... Easy to talk to, fun, passionate. Nice. So tonight, or wherever you are, if you're going to meet your child tonight at home, you can be forward-looking. I said I was a preventionist. Well, if we always are waiting for our kids to trigger us to then activate that best self, it's going to be harder. but you can be proactive about this.

1:10:14Can you, before you walk into your kitchen tonight for dinner or whenever you're going to see your kid next, just pause and set a goal and remind yourself, I've made a commitment that I want to be a dad who is. Easy to talk to, fun, passionate. Yeah. This kind of gets into the whole idea of intention setting, which I feel can metastasize in a very positive way throughout your life. In a Buddhist sense, I wake up in the morning, and this is Buddhist language, say that my job is to be of benefit to all beings. It sounds to me, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, that you're saying that we can just be tweaking our intention or our best self and setting that as a North Star in different contexts throughout the day.

1:11:05That's exactly right. And my best self as a husband is very different from my best self as a public speaker on stage, which is different than my best self as a colleague. And there's different attributes that come up for me. But how many of us really take the time like I did with you to just sit back and reflect on these things? And that's how you feel right now with your kid being 11. When they're 17 or 18, you might think of different attributes because of what's going on in both of your lives at that point. The real point of it is, like you said, it's the intentionality of it, but it's the granularity of it.

1:11:41Just saying I want to be a role model, it's kind of too broad. And so, for me, this joke in my book when I say, because my students call me the feelings master, is that I had to operationalize that. What does that mean exactly? It means he is beautifully creative at dealing with life's curveballs. That means that when I'm in a classroom and someone throws that curveball at me, I see myself as beautifully creative at solving those big challenges. And if I can bring myself into that place, I'm just going to be much better at managing it. And then you reflect on it. Because importantly, Dan, this is not about, you're never going to arrive there.

1:12:26This is going back to your thing, well, Mark, you're going to make mistakes and you're going to mess up. Of course I am. Then I have to look at the barriers. Then it's like, okay, so what was the reason? And I could say this publicly, I felt insecure about what my partner said in that dinner. And it was my issue. And so that was a nice reflection for me to have. Oh, so the reason why I really, the real deep down reason why I didn't live up to my best self was that I got insecure. Oh, okay, that's interesting, Mark. Sit with that for a little bit. Let's get curious about that. So oftentimes when we're trying to be our best selves, the things that are the barriers to that are where real, the real learning happens.

1:13:15We're almost out of time. So let me ask you the two questions I ask at the end of pretty much every interview. One is, is there something you were hoping that we would get to that we didn't? We covered a lot. We weren't linear, which is fine. I like over the river and through the woods. I think we covered a lot. You know, we didn't get into some of the other strategies, but that people can read about them in terms of the biology of regulation. You know, the way how food and sleep and physical activity all are supportive of that. That's an important thing for people to know. Because a lot of people, I'm trying to be my best self, but I can't.

1:13:50Then I just say things like, well, how much sleep did you get last night? Well, it's terrible. I'm like, well, there you go. There's the barrier. And so we need a budget. We need fuel to regulate our emotions effectively. But for me, I see it as really two big things. One is the attitudinal. It's the permission to feel piece. And by the way, the one thing we didn't talk about was to give ourselves permission to feel. We have to give other people permission to feel. and I want to recommend that people do this in public. Meaning, show up and let other people observe you being the non-judgmental good listener who's empathic and compassionate.

1:14:30Because it has a contagion effect also. So once we can give ourselves and everyone we love and even the people we don't love that much permission to feel, we can lean and figure out what to, well, even though I give myself permission to feel, there are certain feelings that are interfering with my success, with my goals. I need strategies to deal with them. And I think importantly that our society is so, like the quick fix thing is like, I was giving this speech for, I don't know, a couple thousand actually police officers. And like, they were very impatient with me. And they were like, dude, what's the one strategy that works?

1:15:08And I'm like, I'm sorry, it just doesn't work that way. They're like, I'm asking you right now, what's the one strategy? I'm like, all right, be kind to yourself. And my point in sharing that with you is that when we're regulating our emotions in real life, it's never just one strategy. It's using all the strategies that I write about. And you realize you're having a strong emotion. You take the deep breath. You walk out of the room. You gather your thoughts. You go back and you say something to try to rectify the situation. Or you take a break and you go look at nature. Or you go work out. Or you call a friend.

1:15:44And we need all of these strategies. They're a collective. And if we can help ourselves to see where our strength areas are and where our challenge areas are and kind of cultivate the challenge areas, we're going to be, I think, happier, healthier people. Well said. Final question. Just can you remind everybody of the name of your new book, your old book, any other books, any other things you do in the world, website, social media that we should know about? So my new book is called Dealing with Feeling. My first book is called Permission to Feel. I have a Dealing with Feeling podcast now where I interview the world's experts on emotions and emotional intelligence and learn about their ways of dealing with emotions, which is fun.

1:16:27I'm on Instagram, primarily on LinkedIn, which is my name. And my website is markbrackett.com. We will put links to all of those in the show notes for anybody driving or otherwise not holding a pencil. So, Mark, great job. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dan.

1:16:52Thanks again to Dr. Mark Brackett. Awesome to have him on the show. Don't forget to check out my new app, 10 % with Dan Harris. We've got a big meditation challenge coming up. It's coming up on March 23rd. It'll go for five days. And this challenge is pegged to the release of a new Audible book that I'm putting out with my co-author, 7A Selassie. The book is called Even You Can Meditate, and you can get it on Audible. If you want to join the challenge, which will be led by 7A, head on over to danharris.com to download the app. If you're already a subscriber, nothing you need to do. The challenge will begin on March 23rd, and there'll be plenty of notifications for you right there in the app.

1:17:32Last thing to say here, thank you so much to everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.