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

30:45and by doing that, lots of things sound like one thing. So lots of things sound like anxiety when there 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, you got no control over that right now. You can think about that till tomorrow night and it's not gonna change because you have no power over that. You gotta look at it from a different perspective, 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 there's not like i can take all the breaths in the world but i'm still gonna 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 you know like this deadline is it's it's killing me you know interesting enough you know 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 a little bit challenging.

31:43And 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 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.

32:23But 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, like you got to switch from envy to gratitude. Like, 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.

33:11But 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. you know um 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 i'm like god their timing is great that humor is amazing their the way their posture is great you know and but i don't wish they weren't skilled i want to like aspire and so i use it as a as a learning opportunity.

33:57I'm like, okay, wow. If I incorporate that into my speech, it's going to get even better. So, that's a reframe. Do 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. And so, when students are starting to get envious of the other valedictorians, I'm like, can we take a break here and just look around?

34:36You're all winners. Yeah, exactly. Let's take a moment and reflect on where we're at compared to many other people. Maybe you should just wake up and think about three things that you're grateful for, for being here. And they're not taught to do that. This is the problem. They're automatic, habitual responses 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. Manscaped just dropped a limited edition forged gold version of their Lawnmower 5.0 Ultra.

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35:50So make sure you get one while they're still about. Right now, you can get a 15 % discount and free shipping by going to the link in the description below or heading to manscaped.com slash modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom15 at checkout. That's manscaped.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom15 at checkout. 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?

36:28I 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 that 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.

37:07You 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. um 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 i've been kind of obsessed with emotions over the last 18 months i really wanted to be uh 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?

37:43Can 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? Sure. How do you think about the limitations of trying to teach people this stuff through concepts and words that result in the, like, overthinker just having more to think about? You understand what I mean? This sort of tactic, at least for me, until I spent more time getting below the neck, results in just more aphorisms or mantras. How do you think about combining embodiment 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.

38:44The problem with that alone is that it's very misleading. So, for example, for years, I would sit, I'm a workaholic, and I'd be like, 11 o 'clock at night, and I'd be like, I'm anxious. And my partner would say, 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 on 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.

39:21The 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 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 Silberman. 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.

40:03And 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, peace, relaxed, blissful. I am serene. Blue, I am down, disappointed, devastated, hopeless, despaired, 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.

40:41So, 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 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 because it's the same profile. So go and get them to cease for passing off.

41:21Yeah, that's wonderful.

41:25Again, 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. and so I am completely on board even if it's through an app. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, one thing about the app, it's not like you have to use it for your whole life because nobody uses any app for their whole life. But it's a training ground. It's building that awareness. It's like, oh, 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.

42:02I 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 to show you now. 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, 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 that's a fixed mindset like this is my destiny you know this is who i am which is not true everybody could learn to regulate better that's proven so uh 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.

43:13That'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.

43:57You 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 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 like deal with this. But in everyday life, you know, we were built to be social creatures.

44:37And so I've done a lot of research on this, actually. Take a guess. What are the top three characteristics of the people that were 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. Okay. Which is interesting that it's not in there.

45:03attentive or curious something like pro-social their their attention is focused on us in a way 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 a third one

45:31i would have said smart i would have said smart so uh i'll give you i'll give you two of mine interestingly enough smart never shows up i've studied this but 25 000 people maybe like three people four people in terms of the people that we want to be around in terms of like especially when when it comes to being supported by them. There's three core characteristics. And 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. We just, everybody's just kind of burnt out from the judgment in our society.

46:18Just, 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 are nonjudgmental, who are 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.

47:01Not 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.

47:47It's just such a wonderful inverse charisma, you could call it, right? Totally. Other-oriented. 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. 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 that would slot together with pretty nicely.

48:44What'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? 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, I once had a supportive parent, and then I want that in adulthood. No. 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.

49:26So I could say a third, so it's like 17 % say it was a parent. Of that 17%, only 2 % say it was their dad. oh wow yeah wow nobody's nobody's thinking about their dads as a non-judgmental i wonder you know me and a lot of the 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 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.

50:22I 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 nonjudgmental 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.

51:06And I think I'm raising a bunch of—I call them Uncle Marvins, because Uncle Marvin was my hero in my life. And he was the person who gave me the permission to feel. And so I'm like, 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 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 and stealing it is not the right way, but I got the idea from him.

52:47So during the pandemic, I decided I'm going to get fit again, and I met this guy named Marco, an online fitness expert. And I was never 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 like who cares what my body looks like and it was like that was the first phase of getting rid of the negative self-talk Then the second phase was, wow, I'm actually enjoying this.

53:39I see a difference. This is cool. That's 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. work at it. 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 the NR Society to emotion regulation. That if we had people walking around saying, like, you know, I identify, this is like, I'm a master at managing emotions. Like, think about if you were triggered by someone, it'd just be like the Yoda of emotional intelligence.

54:28Whatever. You can't harm me. Oh my God. 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 an 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. but not the meta skill of I have emotional fluidity. Emotions for me, they come and go, 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.

55:15That was something else that I learned last week. 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. Go on, go on. No, no. I like where you were going a little while ago, which is that for somehow or another, we've accepted 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, your whole, you know, body composition and your DNA is not an anxious person. You know, you are feeling anxiety. It's an experience that you're having.

55:54So that distance from the emotion is important because it will create a self-developing prophecy. 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? 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, 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.

56:36They're thinking, keep this out of schools, keep this out of companies, that 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, again, in 5 ,000 schools, It's far from that.

57:23I know from the research across all populations what works to help people regulate their emotions, 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. So 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.

58:14It 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 getting in there and fucking with the source code so i understand why there would be more trepidation about this 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 because the uncertainty is, hey, this is high danger stuff that we're playing with here.

59:07I'm happy to undo little Timmy's five times table being a little bit wrecked because the maths 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 uh reliably confident that this thing is going to be good for my kid i think that they would 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.

59:51And by the way, 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 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, and the overwhelm, the scare. I mean, I can't imagine, like that really makes a lot of sense to me. 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.

1:00:44show me the alternative right you know i didn't deal with my emotions and my son's not going to deal with his either yeah yeah yeah yeah this episode is brought to you by whoop i have been wearing whoop for over five years now way before they were a partner on the show i've actually tracked over 1600 days of my life with it according to the app which is insane and it's the only wearable I've ever stuck with because it tracks everything that matters, sleep, workouts, recovery, breathing, heart rate, even your steps. And the new 5.0 is the best version. You get all the benefits that make Whoop indispensable, 7 % smaller, but now it's also got a 14 day battery life and has health span to track your habits, how they affect your pace of aging.

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1:02:04I'm interested, what are the most challenging emotions to work with? Does it vary from person to person? I imagine it must do. There'll be some that are more sort of deeply seated, our genetic predisposition, our dopamine baseline predisposes us to whatever affect. 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'm a little, I felt afraid of going to the park as a kid.

1:02:48It'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, you know, 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 plus. Ah, close enough. So envy is just wanting what the person has, right? It's like, gosh, I wish I could have that. Oh, jealousy is fearing that somebody else getting it is going to take it away from you.

1:03:33Hey! Look, 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. It wasn't a word. Hey, wait, wait, wait, wait. This is not a pop psychology quiz. This is a real, you know. No, pop as in I wasn't prepared for it. you fucking like sprung it upon me um there you go okay so the the self-consciousness emotions why so like jealousy is a big one because like there's not a lot of control you know when you're jealous of you know that mom is giving your sister your brother more attention than you and you feel like their their relationship is stronger than yours that's a lot to work with There's a lot of layers to that kind of management.

1:04:22And 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'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 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. Like, how do you start to delineate the territory there?

1:05:08Well, this is an interesting conversation around like 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.

1:05:56It's coming from our entire life to that moment. That's an emotion. A feeling is just a private subjective experience. I don't feel like talking to Chris today. I don't feel like going to the movies. 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 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.

1:06:38It could be the weather 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, depression, diagnosis, 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 just know. I certainly think that there is a difficulty with people confusing the two, feeling an emotion and dealing with it.

1:07:21It's like, I'm feeling my anxiety. It's like, okay. Yeah, I didn't get to answer your question yet. So that was just my, I mean, kind of like being Mr. Professor for a minute to give people like this kind of nuance in language for feelings, moods, etc. You were asking earlier about the difference between 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'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.

1:07:56How 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 you know with our performance that's when you really need to regulate yeah that's interesting um i i want to talk about shame i think that shame is really interesting. How do you come to think about shame? Is it a meta emotion? 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 I think shame, we would put in the category of a self-conscious emotion.

1:08:51But 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.

1:09:19say a little bit more about the gaslighting thing you don't really feel that you shouldn't feel that yeah gaslighting is when essentially at 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. Let's say, you know, Chris, you're just so sensitive. You know, have you realized like 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.

1:10:01That'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. So give me more on that. Yeah, I mean, it's like having too much self-compassion. Like there's no such thing. all of this is about emotional intelligence at least what I'm talking about here so yes you may be prone to being sensitive I'm a very sensitive person but my emotional regulation is Mark, without it being someone else's decision do you think you're being too sensitive about this?

1:10:54do you think that, you know, 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.

1:11:09I 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 kind of like 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 they don't have the strategies they have allowed someone oh 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 seem to be feeling things.

1:11:56Correct. Right. But if you are somebody that is of the highly sensitive persuasion, 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. 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 BMR. Do you see it kind of in that sort of a way that people who are more prone to sensitivity, i.e. feel things more deeply, both up and down depth, that there is... Yeah, you can have to... No, I think sensitivity is just one example.

1:12:45I 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 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 like 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 like can we get a little energy here like can you like did i come i'm like that's not me however as someone who presents a lot at conferences i can't be like talking like i'm in a coffee shop for an hour and a half on a presentation right i've got to get myself out of my comfort zone and like be the entertainer and tell the jokes and like and that's draining for me whereas it's not draining for her she could do it all day long but but she's draining for me do you feel like we all it's like It's about self-awareness and social awareness.

1:13:45And 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 yeah 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 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, et cetera.

1:14:41And 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, you know, 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're 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 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.

1:15:33The resolution with which they are feeling emotions is not as great as the person on the other end. 100%. And with that, it means that you are, as a highly sensitive person, not burdened, but kind of obliged in a way. If you want to show up fully, there are skills that you need to use and maybe more so than your insensitive friend. So to put it in the language of personality psychology, I am one of those people. I have a high stardle reflex. I'm like, I have a fifth-degree black belt, and I'm walking down the streets, and there's a big noise. I'm like, and everybody's like, I thought you were the fifth-degree black belt.

1:16:14Look, I am the fifth-degree black belt, but I'm just afraid of my shadow. I can protect myself, but I have a very high stardle 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've been that way. I'm 56. It's proven this is my personality. For 100 years, well, I'm 56, for 35 years of my life before I became an expert in this, I assumed that was my destiny.

1:16:58I assumed that my personality and my temperament was just, that's who I am. I'm a person who 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. You know, because I get a little worried before I meet, I'm like, Mark, take your breath. Mark, think this way. Mark, you got this. You've done 500 of these meetings. You know, I'm using those strategies and I enter that meeting not like this, But just like that.

1:17:34Someone 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 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 you this week after the last week that I spent.

1:18:33This 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. And it's a different sort of language. It's me getting below the neck, not sort of above the neck. 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 it 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 uh it's state primary state secondary state sixth form college played a 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.

1:19:32I 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, uh, having spent, I 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. Um, I, I, I was really proud. It was the first time I think in my, in my life that I really saw the depth of, of my sensitivity and, and realized how proud I was of it.

1:20:11Holy shit. Like, look at how, look at how it's enabled you to show up for people. How, not how dare you, cause 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 you 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, that's a strength.

1:21:04It's a real strength that I have. And I shouldn't be ashamed of it. So yeah, 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. You're pro allowing yourself to feel. And maybe that will help you show up for other people in your life as nonjudgmental, as a good listener, you know, and as 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, you know, 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.

1:21:55So 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.

1:22:21Is it possible to be too self-aware?

1:22:28no sorry again it all goes back to regulation it all goes back you know one thing that we didn't talk about yet is this idea of being an emotion scientist about your life and you know again most of us are emotion judges you know we're not that self-aware you know we're like i'm feeling fine i'm you know 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 like 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 um 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.

1:23:21Well, 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?

1:24:05Is 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, if it's, yes. But real emotion regulation, the subtitle of my book is it's 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.

1:24:52We can have all the objects in the world and all the fame in the world. But if we don't like ourselves, like 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.

1:25:43So 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. Emotional regulation, I think, is the concern around that and how it leads into people-pleasing is to do the first bit, to do the sensing bit, but not to do the deploying bit.

1:26:18Well, 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. You know, I didn't mean it, but you did mean it, you know? 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.

1:26:54Okay. 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.

1:27:41You have to have knowledge. You can't, this is not like, 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 it was, had self-hatred for so many years of my life. And then all of a sudden said to me, Mark, you know, 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, you know, a lot of us have to unlearn.

1:28:17Like you're telling me, by the way, my research in the UK was there were no, 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 got to do some, we got to push some love over to the UK. That does not surprise me.

1:28:44But I think awareness is the first step. Build your vocabulary is the next step. Just be more, really 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.

1:29:27Because 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 know. I don't know. 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, you know, no way.

1:30:02Talk 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, M-A-R-C-B-R-A-C-K-E-T.com. I'm on Instagram, LinkedIn, and my book is called Dealing with Feeling. Heck yeah. Mark, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you. When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting.

1:30:36But there wasn't a list of them. So I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own. And then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found. and you can get that for free right now. So if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention just trying to get through a single page, go to chriswillx.com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die. That's chriswillx.com slash books.