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

Episode Date: November 1, 2025

Dr. Marc Brackett is a professor at Yale University, the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and author. Why is it so hard to actually feel our emotions? In a world that tells us to “be more vulnerable,” many of us don’t even know what that really means. Are we being unregulated when we express emotion, or are we finally being human? How can we reconnect with what we feel so we can actually understand ourselves better? Expect to learn why only 1 in 5 adults can name more than three emotions they feel regularly, what emotional intelligence actually is, why we were taught such few emotional skills, how we can tell the difference between real regulation and repressed emotion, if it is possible to be too self-aware, how you can learn to reframe uncomfortable emotions—like anxiety or envy—into signals instead of shame and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Get a 15% discount & free shipping on Manscaped’s shavers at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM15) Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Only one in five adults can name more than three emotions they feel regularly. Why do you think that is? Bluntly, I think it's because we don't have an emotion education. We just ignore that aspect of our lives. What does that mean? What does an emotion education mean? It means that from preschool to high school and even when we're in the workplace or in college, we are building our emotion skills,

you know, vocabulary, for example. Just to give you one example, I'm going to ask you right now, what's the difference between anger and disappointment? Ooh. Anger is fiery. Mm-hmm. And feels like you're on the front foot.

Disappointment for me is the color of, and it's the color of red, for me, orangey red. Disappointment. is sort of a blue gray, like a dark purple blue gray, and it is, it's sort of closed and it feels like I'm on the back foot. It feels like I'm sat in a very low couch. I'm aware that's not a particularly precise definition. You're your creative type, that's for sure. And all beautiful kind of metaphors and, but like I really want to know like the psychological definition or

difference between the two. So what do you think? A psychological difference or definition between the two. Functionally, anger is somebody has stepped over a boundary and you need to exclaim loudly enough to ensure that they know that they have crossed some sort of threshold. It's kind of like being your own law enforcement in a way. Disappointment is around hopes, expectations, and those not being met.

Maybe that's that. That was much better. That was great. So, disappointing, you're on your verge of being an emotion scientist. Yes. So disappointment, unmet expectations, anger, perceived injustice. And so I think a lot of people kind of look at my work and they're like, you know, whatever, who cares, that you know the difference between anger and disappointment or anxiety

and stress or pressure and fear. But what we say on our research is that you have to name it to tame it. You've got to label it to regulate it. And oftentimes, you know, men in particular are going to come into our offices, you know, our homes, and, you know, act one way. They're going to behave one way, kind of a socially appropriate way of, you know, typically aggression with all emotions, whether it's disappointment, frustration, fear, or anxiety. And the argument that we make is that until people really know how they feel and why they feel the way they do, it's impossible to support them in managing it. right yeah that does make sense okay so what is emotional intelligence like is that a thing i remember there was this whole world of iq EQ what does emotional intelligence mean so at its simplest level emotional intelligence is using your feelings wisely to achieve your goals using all of our emotions wisely but that's not specific enough and the model that I've worked on is called ruler so

their five skills. The first is recognizing emotions in oneself and others, understanding the causes and the consequences of emotions, labeling emotions precisely, knowing how and when to express emotions with different people across cultures, and then finally the big R, which is my new book, which is regulating emotions. What do you do with those feelings, both your own and other people's? Okay. So it is functional. That'll be one way to put it. Like it has an outcome. it's not just a thing that you're imbued with it's using your emotions to achieve yes it's goal oriented

just like I mean you can have an IQ and not use it a lot of people don't but the same thing applies to your emotional intelligence the expectation or the idea is that you have this set of skills and you apply them to your life so that you make better decisions you make you know you have better relationships you achieve your goals in life

you know when I show in my research is that, you know, we like to think that our creativity and our general intelligence are the kind of the things that we need to achieve our goals. But what I've shown is that there are a lot of obstacles in the creative process, a lot of obstacles in achieving our success in life. And if we don't have the skills to manage the frustration or the anxiety or the disappointment, even the most creative among us, don't really achieve the outcomes. yeah i think a lot of people would see emotions and the utilizing of emotions as a vector for weakness not one for expediting success uh why why should people tap into emotions at all how are they a

performance enhancer in that way well i'm going to be provocative and say based on my research and you know the work i've done recently i think that emotion regulation should actually be the new definition of success. And meaning that we think of success as you have the fancy car, you get the big house, you have the big career, whatever it might be. But truthfully, if you can't manage your emotions and settle your nervous system, if you can't manage or support other people as a leader, for example, in regulating their emotions, oftentimes the company doesn't do as well as you might think it could do,

and oftentimes your own mental health suffers and your goal attainment suffers. so I think that's a lot of people are fighting me on that one you know they think well you know well look at my I've done talks for big fortune 100 companies and you know like look at me mark look at my office you think I really need emotional intelligence and the first thing I say to them is like well I interviewed the five people who report to you and and they don't like you they actually hate you so you know maybe so you know maybe you should develop some emotional intelligence skills and Maybe the company could be doing even better than it is. Yeah.

What is, you said the definition of high performance is emotional regulation, not emotional intelligence. So let's define terms. What's emotional regulation? So in the hierarchy of emotional intelligence, emotion regulation comes at the top. It's like all these skills come together and then it like helps you kind of to deal with your feelings. and the way I define it is I have a little formula that kind of makes me feel smart. It's ER, emotion regulation, is a set of goals and strategies.

So think about that. You can prevent an unwanted emotion. Most people don't think about regulation that way. They think of it, oh, I'm stressed out, I've got to reduce my stress. But no, if you're a kid in this classroom and you know you're going to be anxious on Thursday at the test, let's prepare now for the test so you're not anxious on Thursday. If you're a sports person and you're going out on the track or out, you know, to do a match, my other background is I taught martial arts for 25 years.

And so, you know, I would think about all my martial arts students getting so, you know, anxious as soon as that, you know, the opponent came on the mat. And I would say to them, like, that's not the time to regulate. You've got to regulate way before you even show up to the match. You've got to be preparing yourself to be present to not. be, you know, flustered. So there's a prevention piece to it. There's a reduction piece to it. In the moment, you've got to reduce the feeling. Like if you get triggered, you get activated. You got to mark, take a deep breath, calm down. I think another interesting piece of regulation

is initiating emotions. So as someone who manages a large team, I'm always thinking to myself, like, what emotion is going to best serve the goal of this meeting? Like, do I want people to be inspired. Do I want them be calm? Do I want them to be kind of like serious? And then it's my job to create the emotional climate that aligns with that to achieve the outcome. I don't think people think about that very much. The M in prime, this is an acronym, is maintained. So it's like, I'm having a good day. I'm in flow. I'm writing my book. And all of a sudden, like, I get that email or I get that phone call and it's like, no, like, stay away. Like, I'm really in a great place right now. And then the E is kind of enhancing emotions. So it's a long definition, but it's a

complicated concept. So prime is the goals. Prevent, reduce, initiate, maintain, or enhance. Then the S is strategies. Thousands of strategies, right? I mean, walking in nature, taking a deep breath, shifting your thinking, or reappraising, getting social support. And so emotion regulation is G plus S, but then there's another piece of it, which is that all of that varies as a function of the emotion you're feeling because you need different strategies for different emotions,

kind of your personality. I'm an introvert. I don't know about you. You seem a little bit more outgoing than I am. I'm just making that guess. But at the end of the day, I had a 12-hour day yesterday, and it was like 9 p.m.

I went to a yoga class to relax, but the yoga teacher was so chatty that I had to leave the class. I mean, it's embarrassing to say. I had to walk out of the yoga class because my brain needed... I was looking forward to that hot yoga class where I could just disappear,

and instead I had someone talking at me for like 45 minutes. It's like, this is not good for me. So, you know, that's my personality. I know what I need, and that's going to help me choose. So instead, I went for a walk around Central Park. Much better.

So it's the emotion, the person, in the context. You know, right now, if I'm getting anxious, for example, during our conversation, I can be like, you know, hey, Chris, you know what? I'm going for a run. Like, yeah, that's a little weird. So, anyway, I'll leave it there. Yeah, it's a lot to think about.

It is a complex topic. That's true. Why do you think so few of us were ever taught emotional skills? If they are as fundamental, as you say, even if there is, fundamental functionally as you say you know you meritocratic egalitarian I'm going to go and get the thing in life why why are people not learning these if if they're so powerful yeah it's interesting I think it's historical I think that people kind of thought and especially in psychology you know emotions they're you know it's not behavior so it's not objective it's like in your head

and you can't really study it, which we've proven is not true. But that's one big piece of it. I think the other piece of it is that we tend to create feeling emotions with being emotional, like hysterical. And so we almost treat emotions as bad things to have because they drive you to make bad decisions in their make you impulsive and idiosyncratic impulses. Of course, it was until like the 70s and 80s in research, people like Charles Darwin and other psychologists would say, no, no, no, no, actually your emotions ensure

your survival. Think about that. Like fear is an adaptive experience. It's saying there's a threat, you know, stay away, protect yourself. But it's interesting how it's taken so long for people to kind of value emotional intelligence. Yeah, well, I suppose. It doesn't have great branding, I don't think. Like emotions, emotional intelligence. I don't think when you talk to people about it, they're thinking about the importance of being able to step into their body, work out what they're feeling. I think what most people, especially men in the modern world,

would think about peak emotional capacity would be something much closer to suppression or ignorance. maybe. Well, it's true. When I interview and I do a lot of talks for businesses and I was doing one for a bunch of lawyers recently and I said, define emotion regulation. What is it? And the first thing they say it's like controlling your emotions, you know, and then they're denying it, you know, ignoring it, suppressing it and like, no, no, no, go back to your groups, redefine it. But that's, that is the mindset. The mindset is not to feel, which by the way is biologically impossible. Which, by the way, the more you suppress, the more it's going to show up in stomach problems,

in physical health problems, and mental health problems. Suppression is never the answer. Remember, it's about using our emotions wisely. And your point is a good one because, you know, with men in particular, it's like, can I really tell my wife, my partner, my colleague, that I'm anxious? You know, there's no way I'm going to tell anybody I'm anxious because they're going to think I'm weak. As a matter of fact, a father, you know, I had a pretty rough. childhood. I had abuse, unfortunately, a lot of bullying. And I'm, you know, I'm 56 at this point.

Like, you know, this is who I am. Like, I'm good with who I am. And I'm feeling pretty safe and comfortable, you know, sharing my own story. But it took me a while. And these guys that, you know, oftentimes at my talks, one guy said to me, you know, Mark, there's no way I would ever be as vulnerable as you are, like, in front of other people. Like, you're sharing about your bullying and your abuse and you're like, you're anxiety about the pandemic. And I'm like, well, did you feel those? Do you know, did you have any anxiety during the pandemic? He's like, yeah, of course I did.

And I said, well, what did you do about it? He's like, you know, I didn't talk about it. I drank alcohol. And I said, well, maybe there's a better way. And I really want, I'm very interested, actually, in the gender piece of this because there is this, like, we have men in particular have feelings about their feelings. it's like they feel they feel shame that they're anxious what do you think about that oh I could talk about this for the rest of my life

I think what I've called second order emotions what you've probably got a much more official name for feeling bitterness at my resentment about my shame about my anxiety this like infinite regress of thinking about thinking and my story that I tell myself about the story that I told myself about the thing that I felt appears to happen a lot in the world of men and I think the guys I struggle to find a place where their emotions that aren't a very small number maybe resentment is allowed maybe anger is allowed sadness would you would struggle with anxiety you would struggle with grief

you would struggle with fear would be a real big difficult one as well because all of those kind of strike at the heart of the emotional mastery competence conquer go after it and get it type thing that I think guys feel like they need to lean into and in many ways do need to and yeah trying to blend those two worlds is I think I'm probably not a bad role model for the sort of a highly sensitive guy at least in my personal life and I'm completely bought in. I'm so, you know, I can say now

because it's been, what, three days, four days since I got back. I did, do you know who Joe Hudson is? Are you familiar with Joe? Art of accomplishment. So he is the head of culture at OpenAI. Oh, okay. I do know what you're talking about now.

Yeah, I did groundbreakers last week, which is 9 a.m. till 9 p.m. for seven days-ish of emotional work every single day. And that was the most vulnerable, difficult, intense thing that I've ever done by quite some margin. And it really reframed, I think, my perspective. I already was halfway there, but this really reframed it even more. my kind of viewpoint on what real strength looks like, sort of what, yeah, I think strength is maybe a good descriptor for it. Denying or suppressing your emotions is still giving them a lot of power over you.

100%. That you are saying this thing is so impactful and out. the bounds of my control and I am at the mercy of it so much so that I can't engage with it. I think you could maybe make a similar sort of argument about somebody that has a substance abuse problem and this person goes, cold turkey, hooray, congratulations, like you've transcended your need for alcohol or nicotine or whatever it might be, but truly like alchemizing that would be reintroducing the substance on your terms and only ever needing one of them. it would be being able to use it again.

Does that make sense? Do I sound insane? No, it's great. I mean, it totally makes sense. I think you're getting at a lot of things. Number one is kind of this, like, I'd rather like endure the suffering internally than let anybody know how I'm feeling to get the support I might need to have a better life. Yes.

And I, you know, it's why so many people get divorced, right? it's it's why you know people don't talk to their bosses when they want to get a raise it's why friendships you know because it's like i'm having this feeling whatever it might be and it's more painful for me to think about how i can tell you how i'm feeling and ask for your support or ask you to maybe change a little bit um and i just that is like beyond my imagination difficult and so i'm just not going to do it but of course the outcome is always worse because you would have a better relationship and better everything if you were more comfortable talking about it. In other news, Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce companies in the United States.

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that I use with Newtonic on Shopify. Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below. I heading to shopify.com slash mod wisdom, all lowercase. That's Shopify.com slash modern wisdom to upgrade your selling today. Yeah. So I think when it comes to the suppression thing, why is emotional suppression still seen as a strength? What is it? What is it that's late? Well, I don't think it is. I wouldn't say it's seen as a strength. I would say it's easier. And so it's, you know, people choose it as an option. And it's like, in my research, what I find, the top strategies that people are kind of used to not deal with their feelings,

you know, avoidance, big one. It's like, I'm just not going to have the difficult conversation. I'm just not going to go home tonight and talk to my significant other. I'm not going to tell my kids. I mean, parents are even afraid to talk to their own kids about feelings. It's crazy. Because they're afraid they can't deal with what they're going to hear from their own kids. So, you know, the point is that,

I'd rather kind of not engage with the emotion because the pain of what I'm sorry, what I was getting at is avoidance, a denial, overeating, drinking too much alcohol, like you said, suppression. All of these become what I would call our automatic go-to terrible habits for dealing with our feelings. None of them lead to good outcomes for us. They usually lead to more shame, more regret, more self-hatred, the list goes on. And they never help us with our well-being or having good relationships or achieving the real goals we have in our lives. But the new strategies, the helpful strategies, kind of what I write about, that even doing a mindfulness

exercise, which people sometimes roll their eyes at, we know that our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems right need support we need to deactivate that nervous system in order to be present in order to have the access to cognitive strategies to deal with our feelings but oh that's that's you know i'm not that's fluff breathing you know i've been breathing you know since you came out of the womb so it's probably a good thing um the cognitive strategies i mean think about how much gaslighting there is in our world right now i mean be let's be real people are endlessly gaslit in terms of you know you're not you're too fat you're too fat you're too skinny, you're too tall, you're too short, you're not big enough, you're not small enough,

you're too masculine, you're too feminine, you're too dark, you're too light, I mean, it's endless. And, you know, how many of us are taught when we're kids how to, like, sift through that kind of judgment and say, hey, wait a minute, you know, you don't have the right to define my reality. Like, I actually like myself. And like, stay away, you know. How do we, how many of us learn how to sift through what people are saying about us to then have a more positive a view of ourselves as opposed to allowing other people to define our realities for us. What happens if you don't express an emotion? You mentioned it earlier on. Let's say, I hesitate to point the finger too much at repression as if it's something that people chose to do.

And in some ways, they did, but it's not in the same way as you chose to push that person into open traffic. It's more like, I'm scared and wow, this is a lot. And what about the world outside and what about the story I tell myself? And that's uncomfortable to deal with. Coping mechanisms and, you know, it's a lot of stuff that's going on that doesn't feel quite like commission or volition. It's just a desperate desire to try and survive. But if somebody continues to do that, what happens if you don't express emotions? Well, it's like a debt that keeps on getting bigger. And it comes out somewhere.

It comes out, as I said earlier, in those maladaptive strategies. It comes out in terms of avoiding your significant others. It comes out in drinking too much alcohol. It comes out in having gastrointestinal issues. It comes out with anxiety disorders and depressive disorders. I mean, the list goes on because we're born to feel. And, you know, we have to get those feelings expressed somehow or another. And if we don't do it, they're going to find their way out.

And unfortunately, for most people, because they haven't had the emotion education, it's easier. You know, we learn, like, I don't know about you, but my parents were not, like, the role models for emotional intelligence. You know, so, you know, my father was a tough guy from the Bronx, and he would say things like, son, you go tough enough. I'm like, Dad, look at me. you know, I'm about as far from a tough guy as you can get. I have a fifth degree black belt, but I'm not a tough guy. And, you know, he

would say things like, I used to be kids up like you. Okay, great. You know, they taught you that in parenting class, right, Dad? And my mom, on the other hand, with a lot of anxiety, and she would say things like, and I can't take it anymore. I'm going to have a nervous breakdown. So here I am this, like, five-year-old kid, 10-year-old kid

in this growing up in this environment. Like, what am I learning? I'm learning like anxiety is weak. People lock themselves in their bedrooms when they're anxious and you just sort of like lose yourself in your anxiety and I learn getting angry at everything. And that's pretty much what I was until, you know, I got my PhD in psychology.

I was, you know, this anxious, angry person who just, like, didn't know what the hell would do with his feelings. So anyway. Let's say that somebody is, somebody resonates with that oh anxious angry person who doesn't really know what to do with his feelings like army of one listening here with the iPods in what is a good framework for them to follow to begin including integrating those emotions more healthily great question so this is you know what happened is i wrote this book many years ago it's called permission to feel and it was

my argument that we have to give ourselves and everyone permission to feel. And I'm proud that's been 30 languages now and a lot of people understand like we have the first step is we've got to like give ourselves that permission. It's like it's okay to be anxious. It's okay

to be angry. There's nothing bad about it. Anger's real. Anxiety's real. Don't judge it. Just allow it to be. If you're feeling it for too long and it's too intense, you've got to do something about it. And then the pandemic hit, And I got trapped in my house with my mother-in-law.

So she came to visit from the country of Panama for two weeks, around March 1st of 2020. And little did we know that there would be a pandemic. Two weeks later that she would stay with us for seven months. And I'm like, losing it. You know, for me, the morning is like my kind of precious time. I like to have my really good cup of coffee. I like to have my existential crisis, like think about my purpose and life. and I like to do that alone,

not with my mother-in-law like staring at me. So it got really rough. Anyway, we had this kind of meltdown in the house and she looked at me and she's like, are you really the director, the Center for Emotional Intelligence? And I was like, not tonight. I'm telling you that.

And so it's just like the whole thing blew up. And I share that with you because here I was supposedly like one of the world's experts in emotional intelligence and emotion regulation. And I'm like, you know, rock bottom, like, desperate, disregulated. But then I, you know, when I went to bed that night, I thought to myself, you know, Mark, you actually are the director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence?

Like, this is your whole career. You've written 200 papers and books and all this stuff. Like, you've got to show up. You've got to practice what you preach. And that's, in that moment, I decided to read a book on emotion regulation. It was like, I was walking down the stairs. I'm like, nobody knows anything about this stuff. If I don't know it, then nobody knows it.

And so, this new book that I wrote called Dealing with Feeling is really the map. And I just, I wanted it to be super practical. Like, step one is you got to shift your belief systems. There's no such thing as a bad emotion. Period. There is no such thing as about emotions are like the tide. They come and go. Sometimes they're unpleasant.

Sometimes they're pleasant. The second is you've got to build the vocabulary. you got to know the words I'm going to push you again so anger and disappointment we spent some time in that one a little earlier let's go to the one that everybody says they're feeling which is anxiety

everybody's anxious these days which I don't believe by the way I think people say they're anxious but they're not actually anxious so anxiety versus stress versus pressure

you're taking my little test of emotional intelligence. Oh, you want me to define the difference between anxiety, stress, and pressure? Yeah, I do. Okay. Anxiety, uncertainty about the future. You're good. Stress, a concern between our inner level of capability and the outer demands that the society is placing on, or that the world is placing on us.

an uncertainty that we can deal. I also get the sense that complexity is in there. Stress is to do with lots of complexity that's going on, velocity, complexity. What was the other one? Pressure. Pressure. Oh.

Obligation. Feels like a sense of obligation as well. You're pretty good. I think you're using like chat GPT or something. No, you're my answer. So anxiety is about insurgency around the future. Yes, let's go. 10 out of 10.

Stress is having too many demands and not enough resources. Yes, yeah. I'm going to give myself 10 out of 10 again. And pressure is something at stake is dependent upon your action or behavior. Okay. Yeah, that was a little bit off on that one. Cool. It's all right.

But why would I want you to know? Like, here you are this, you know, guru. you know why do I want you why would I want you to know the difference between anxiety stress and pressure why do I want to care because we default to the most common emotion

we often bundle together different things into a single word and by doing that lots of things sound like one thing so lots of things sound like anxiety when they might actually be stress or pressure. Exactly. And what you would do, so think about it. I remember when I'm anxious about something, I tend to say, Mark, like, you got no control over that right now. Like, you can think about that until tomorrow night, and it's not going to change because

you have no power over that. You've got to look at it from a different perspective, you know, rethink it. That's what I do for anxiety. For stress, it's either I get help or I take stuff off my plate. I don't know what else to do. I can take all the breaths in the world, but I'm still going to have too much stuff on my plate and not enough time to get it done. And for pressure, it's like I either got to talk to my boss and say, hey, you know, like this deadline is, it's killing me. You know, and interesting enough, you know, I do a lot of work with college students because I'm a professor. Yesterday I gave a speech to 1,500 high schoolers, which was, you know, a little bit challenging. And I had done some research with them. And they all said they're stressed out. Everyone, and 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 against better grades. Everybody's parents have more connections than their parents have. They're just like, it's like this endless social comparison. And so, but they're calling that stress. And so, you know, what do you do with that?

You don't take deep breaths. You don't do meditation. You got to, you know, and I tell them, like, you've 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, you know, shift your thinking.

Because I don't know any other way to get out of the envy spiral until you kind of look at things from a new lens. That's interesting. Take me through your process of alchemizing envy. Somebody looks at somebody else. The comparison game is going on in their head. Maybe it comes up as a bit of resentment, maybe a little bit of bitterness,

maybe a little bit of fear as well. But, you know, 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 I think that the question 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 the way their posture is great, you know. But I don't wish they weren't skilled. I want to like aspire. And so I use it as a learning opportunity. I'm like, okay, wow, if I incorporate that into my speech, it's going to get even better. So that's a reframe.

You see that's a reframe? Instead of being bitter and resentful, I'm thinking, oh, I can actually learn from that person and apply that to what I do. That's one way to do it, which I think is really important. the gratitude piece is another whole thing which is you know I teach at Yale I mean let's be real it's a pretty good university and if you got into Yale you got to be pretty darn smart and so like when students are starting to get envious of the other valedictorians I'm like can we take a break here and just like look around like you're always yeah exactly let's like let's you know let's

take a moment and like reflect on where we're at compared to many other people Maybe you should just like wake up and say things, you know, think about three things that you're grateful for for being here. And they're not taught to do that. You know, this is the problem. It's not an, their automatic habitual response is like, they're smarter, they're better, not, oh, wow, look at me. I've actually done pretty well in my life.

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that's manscape.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 15 a 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 this big retreat which was exclusively about emotions a couple of things to tell you when it comes to discerning between different emotions what is this thing that is inside of me I really struggled I realized that I really struggled to distinguish between something like frustration or agitation mm-hmm 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, you self-label this. thing as, oh, there's my anxiety again. And you go, well, maybe it's not. Maybe your pattern

matching four different things as anxiety when it's not. One of the other things that happened throughout the week, though, was a lot of work about actually getting into the body and allowing yourself to feel these emotions. And one of the problems that I realized, I've been kind of obsessed with emotions over the last 18 months. I really wanted to be less emotionally decapitated, as I was referring to it like emotions existed above the neck um and getting down and being like okay what does this mean how does this feel can i let it move through me can i have more emotional fluidity in that sense like can it come and it goes can it come and it goes true 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 like it's this sort of tactic at least for me until I spent more time getting below the neck

results in just more aphorisms or mantras or you know how do you think about combining embodiment with cognition well our emotions are a product of that so you need both

you need to be aware of what's happening in your body in terms of whether it's heat in your body whether it's the arousal or activation in your body the problem with that alone is that it's very misleading so for example for years I would like sit I'm a workaholic and I'd be like 11 o'clock at night and I'd be like I'm anxious and my partner would say

why are you anxious you're just tired shut the front of freaking computer and go to bed and I'm 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 body a bodily kind of reactions and experiences for emotions sometimes when they're not emotions so just physical states the cognitive piece is important because it's the only way we can communicate right 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 Silverman and he and our teams worked together for two years, got an award from Apple

and we now made it... 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 in your bodily awareness, and it breaks into four quadrants.

We've got yellow, red, blue, and green. So yellow are high-energy, pleasant emotions. I'm excited, I'm elated, I'm ecstatic, I'm jubilant, I am optimistic. Green, I am calm, content, tranquil, peace, relax, blissful. I am serene. Blue, I am down, disappointed, devastated, hopeless, despair, depressed. Red, I am anxious, overwhelmed. I am angry.

I am peeved. I'm irritated. So we've got the full range of emotions, but it's based on your appraisal. of what's happening in the environment or in your head and your body. And then we give you 144 words to describe those feeling states. And the definitions of them

so you understand the reason behind it. And then we also give you an option to check in with your body and you can locate where in your body you're feeling this emotion. And then you could track that over time and see if there's patterns between how you feel

and where it shows up. How I feel? No, how we feel. How we feel. That has 25,000. thousand 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. Yeah, that's wonderful. I are again, my recency bias is fucking potent at the moment because I learned all of this new stuff and it's very exciting to me. But It also feels right. I feel more aligned in that way. 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, when I'm, before I walk into my office, I'm like, where am I on that mode meter? What's causing me to have that feeling? Oh, I'm feeling that way because of what happened. and at home, I don't need to take that out on the person at work. That's what I'm trying to get

people to do. But going back to the strategies, so we've only gotten to two of like the eight strategies, just 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, like, son, this is the way I deal with my anger. you're going to have to learn how to deal with it. Okay, dad, you know, I guess you're not willing to learn anything. You know, that's a fixed mindset. Like, this is my destiny, you know, this is who I am, which is not true.

Everybody can learn to regulate better. That's proven. So you're not born that way. So mindsets, language, then you've got another breathing pieces. You've 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, you know, aggression, you know,

or saying something you regret or just blowing up. That's what the mindfulness breathing work. But then the cognitive piece, as I shared earlier, is probably the most important in the end. You know, 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, you know, total despair. I don't know where in our childhoods were taught to be self-compassionate. Not in a fluffy way, but literally saying, like, how do I say, Mark, you can get through this. Mark, you're strong enough. Mark, guess what? This feeling of terror that's going through your brain right now is actually impermanent. You will not feel this way. There are rainy days.

There are sunny days. is the rainy day, tomorrow is going to be a sunny day. All that cognitive work that we have to engage in to really help us have more positive outlooks. The third, or not the third, but whatever we're on now, I know them in terms of what they are, but is, I don't think any of us should ever have to worry alone. Why? Like, why do we have to be 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're built to be social creatures. And so I've done a lot of research on this, actually. Take a guess, what are the top three characteristics of the people that 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. attentive or curious something like pro-social their attention is focused on us in a way regulated or peaceful something in that kind of realm the the person is not volatile would be another way maybe to say it um third one I would have said Smart. I would have said Smart. So 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 it comes to being supported by them, there's three core characteristics. And I've shown this now cross-culturally, both from the U.S. 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. Can I just be myself? Can you just let me be who I want to be? Number two, good listener. or dying to be around people who just listen, but not listen to, like, retaliate, but listen to kind of help you gain perspective. And the third is just empathy and compassion. Think about that. I mean, imagine if we had a society

where we were kind of like striving to have people who were non-judgmental, who were good listeners, who showed empathy and compassion. I mean, I don't know. I want to live in that world, to be honest, with you. Yeah, it's how funny that those are all very soft skills, I think you would say, not in the typical form of the word, but they are soft traits, right? Yeah, they're social and emotional.

Yeah, they're gentle, they're nurturing, they're reassuring, and yet when we look at what are the sort of traits that people try to develop, it's their charisma, their brashness, their wittiness, their quickness with words. And that appears to not be the thing. There's this, I kind of got obsessed with an idea similar to this from the School of Life, Alandebotton's thing. And he has this idea that some people are interesting, some people make us feel interesting, and we tend to want to be around the latter more than the former.

It's just such a wonderful inverse charisma, you could call it, right? Totally. Other oriented. Other oriented. That's nice. Yeah. Here for, hey, just there's room for you. There's room for you in this conversation. Like, bring it on. That's cool. Exactly. I'm going to sit here. I'm not going to judge. I'm going to be with you. And this is really, really similar to the view framework that Joe has from art of accomplishment. That's vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, and wonder. So vulnerability, saying what's true, even when it's scary. impartiality, not trying to change the other person, empathy sitting in the emotion without being captured by it and wonder, inquisitiveness without an outcome. So like curiosity, but not needing the answer, so to speak. Yeah. And it seems to me like your 25,000 person cohort would that would slot together with. It's very similar. Pretty nicely. Yeah. What's interesting, though, is the research that I do goes from childhood to adulthood. And what I look at is,

is, did you grow up with that? Like, did you grow up with someone in your life who created the conditions for you to be your true self? And what I find is that only about a third of people say yes. Two thirds of people say, no, there was nobody when I was growing up. It was non-judgmental. 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. So I could say a third, so that's like, 17% say it was apparent. Of that 17%, only 2% say it was their dad. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Wow. Nobody's thinking about their dads as a non-judgmental listener. I wonder, you know, me and a lot of the guys. last week we're talking about 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. I would like to think that maybe if you were to do this again in another 15, 20 years, that maybe you'll start to see some pockets grow up of, yeah, dad was, he did feel more comfortable about showing up in a non-judgmental way. The fragile male ego had been alchemized somewhat.

But maybe not. Maybe this is just fresh packaging on the same, like, patterns, the same non-showing-up patterns, I don't know. I mean, I'm working on it. You know, I have, I do a lot of work in companies, but a big part of my career is doing this work in school systems. And so I have a program called Ruler that's in 5,000 schools across the United States. And I think I'm raising a bunch of, you know, I call them Uncle Marvin's,

because Uncle Marvin was my hero in my life. And he was the person who gave me the permission to feel. And so I like to, you know, what do we do to create a world, fill with people who have these characteristics. That's kind of my vision and hope. But that's, you know, 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, you know, our emotions with. And then there is the piece that a lot of athletes are really knowledgeable about. It's the sleep habits. It's the nutrition. It's the physical activity. We know those three things directly correlate with our ability to regulate emotions effectively. And I think a lot of people misunderstand that. They think, oh, it's about my

health. No, no, no. If you don't get good quality sleep, you're going to lose it in the morning with your kid. You're just not going to have replenished. And, you know, emotion regulation takes effort. And so if you don't have the time to rejuvenate, you're going to have a much shorter fuse. And the final thing that I really help people do in my book is I want them to imagine that they have an identity as someone who is well regulated. And I stole this from a personal trainer. And stealing it is not the right way. But I got the idea from him. So during the pandemic, I decided I'm going to, you know, I'm going to get fit again. And I met this guy named Marco and an online fitness expert.

And I, you know, I was never, I was a martial artist. I was very athletic, but not a weightlifter. I decided that I'm going to become a dude. I'm going to lift weights. And so this process of going from, you know, I'm a 50-year-old psychologist, just 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'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, well, I'm actually enjoying this.

I see a difference. This is cool. Like, got some definition. But by about two years, into it, I could not not work out. Like, even today, like, at this point, it's been like five years now, and I have a little app and I work, like, I have to do my four workouts a week. And I'm, like, irritable and, like, antsy if I don't get that work in and workout it. And I think it's because I now identify

as someone who lists 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 had done it. This is like, I'm a master at managing emotions. Like, think about if you were triggered by someone, it just be like the Yoda of emotional intelligence. Whatever. 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 I'm brave with my emotions right which is an interesting kind of matter skill to think about that. That 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. And I like, you know, we... Go ahead, go ahead.

No, no. I like where you were going a little while ago, which is that for somehow another we've accepted it in our society, like, I'm an anxious person. And then it's like, oh, oh, oh, you know, I understand. first of that's not true like you're not you know your your your whole you know body composition and your DNA is not an anxious person you know you're feeling anxiety it's an experience that you're having so that distance from the emotion is important because it will be created a self-fulfelling

prophecy you know just you'll just you'll just 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. They're thinking, keep this out of schools, keep this out of, you know, 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, like, I should be in control of what my kid learns about feelings. But not what they learn about maths or his... Right, exactly, exactly. And I think it's because there's a fear-based...

you know, that their kid is going to be told what their values are or the kid is going to be told what they should be doing when the truth is in our work, which is, you know, again, in 5,000 schools, it's far from that. It's, you know, I know from the research across all populations, what works to help people regulate their emotions, 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, what do you think about this? What is your opinion? I'm like, don't ask me my opinion. 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 the S or the way that they do their five times table does not feel the same. It does feel more sacred, more divine, more personal, more attached to that sense of self and identity. And if it feels like you're fucking with the source code, frankly, it feels like you're getting in there and fucking with the source code.

So I understand why there would be more trepidation about this. 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 somewhat he's gone in and he's changed the bootloader programming it can't turn on and it just keeps resetting and restarting or whatever 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. I'm happy to undo little Timmy's five times table being a little bit wrecked because the math teacher was off. I don't like the idea of trying to reframe his relationship with shame because of, you know, what happened in that way. If they had, I am reliably confident that this thing

is going to be good for my kid, I think that there would still be some pushback because like stop fucking with the inner workings of my child. But I think that that would be alleviated. That I think is my like gracious interpretation of white parents feel the work 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. And, by the way, it, you know, it makes it sound like kids don't have feelings in school, like they're anxious in math class or they get left out at, you know, at gym or nobody

wants to sit with them at the lunch table, and we're just going to ignore that. Like, that's ridiculous. us, the kid is experiencing life six to seven, eight hours a day. Let's make sure that kid is aware of what they're feeling has the courage to speak up and has the strategies to manage the frustration, the overwhelm the scare. I mean, I can't imagine that, 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 so you know show me the alternative you know I didn't deal with my emotions and my son's not going to deal with his either

yeah yeah yeah this episode is brought to you by whoop I've 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

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If you do not like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now, you can get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and that 30-day trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.com.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.comwop.com slash modern wisdom. I'm interested what are the most challenging emotions to work with? Does it vary from person to person? I imagine it must do. There will be some that are more sort of deeply seated, our genetic predisposition, our dopamine baseline, you know, predisposes us to whatever effect. But generally, are there certain emotions that are more difficult to work with and easier to work with. I think in general what we call the self-conscious emotions are the hardest to deal with

because when they are about you as a human being, like the shame kind of family, that's tough. It's not like dealing with, you know, I'm a little, I felt afraid of, you know, going to the park as a kid. You know, it's that I have diminished self-worth. Like 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 confused. By the way, what's the difference with 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. Oh, is jealousy's fearing that somebody else getting it is going to take it away from you.

Hey! I'm not bullshitting. I've spent a lot of time trying to think about emotions, okay? I'm really happy with my grades so far on this fucking pop-pop quiz. It wasn't a word of it. Hey, 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. Okay. Like, sprung it upon me. There you go. Okay, so the self-consciousness emotions. 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 when you feel like their relationship is stronger than yours, that's a lot to work with, right? There's a lot of layers to that kind of management, and you really can't do it alone. The same thing with the shame. It's very hard to manage shame on your own. Oftentimes we need other people to help us kind of regain our perspective. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, I'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, though? Well, 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. It's coming from our entire life to that moment. That's an emotion. A feeling is it just a private subjective

experience? You know, I don't feel like talking to Chris today. I don't feel like going to the movies. You know, that, I don't get a good feeling when I think about that person. That could be in your body. It could be your head. It's a little 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. It's so like I'm irritable. I don't know what it is, but I'm in a great mood today. That's a mood.

You don't really know where it came from. It could be the weather. It could be lingering good news from yesterday. A disposition is something we were kind of getting at earlier, which is I tend to be on the anxiety spectrum. You know, I tend to be more sad in general. I tend to be that kind of like everything is going to be great. That's more your disposition.

And then obviously, you know, depression, diagnosis, you know, those are diagnoses. And so I think people don't really know that granularity, if you want to call it, in the language of emotion. And that could be helpful for people to kind of just know. I certainly think that there is a difference, a difficulty with people confusing the two. feeling an emotion and dealing with it. I'm feeling my anxiety. It's like, okay. Yeah, I didn't get to answer your question yet.

Yeah. So that was just my, I mean, kind of like being Mr. Professor for a minute to give people like this kind of nuance and language for feelings, moods, etc. You were asking earlier about the difference between kind of feeling your feelings and dealing with your feelings.

And my point is that we don't have to deal with all of our feelings. Sometimes they just, they're ephemeral. Oh, high anxiety, you're here for a minute. welcome see you soon no big deal um we get a little frustrated in a meeting we're like it's going to go away like how much is this going to really impact me right now let it go it's when we feel like the emotion that we're experiencing is going to interfere with a 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 i I want to talk about shame. I think that shame is really interesting. What do you, 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, as I think shame, what we would put in that in the category of itself, emotion. But I think the difficulty with shame is that we don't put shame upon ourselves for the most part. We are shamed by people. Someone else has decided that we're not worthy and they do everything they can to convince us of that and then we believe it. And that goes back to the gaslighting piece. I think most of the shame that we experience in life is because of other people gaslighting us. Say a little bit more about the gaslighting thing.

You don't really feel that, you shouldn't feel that. Yeah, gaslighting is when, essentially, the heart of gaslighting is that the reality that someone else has created for you is something that you now believe. Could you give us an example in the world of emotions? Yeah. Let's say, you know, Chris, you're just so sensitive. you know have you realized like you're you're just too sensitive and then in the beginning you're like you know well maybe I am I don't think I am but after a while I've convinced you that you start

believing that you are too sensitive that's gaslighting what if it's true no one can be too sensitive sorry about that now that I am very interested in in hearing more about. I had a 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 emotion regulation is, Mark, without it being someone else's decision, do you think

you're being too sensitive about this? Do you think that, 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. I think when people think about being too sensitive, what they mean is your level of emotional reactivity is non-functional in the real world and puts you on the back foot. Is that a fair assessment, do you think, of 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 else. Oh, that makes, yeah, I know exactly what you mean. So you are too sensitive is you seem to feel things and not be able to deal with them, not seem to be feeling things. Correct. 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 grellin 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 feel things more deeply, both up and down, depth, that there is, if... Yeah, you can have to... No, I think sensitivity is just one example. I mean, I have a friend who is a former tennis coach

who has so much energy. She makes me want to, like, crawl under her blanket, you know? And it's like, calm their energy is killing me. So she needs to know how to downregulate. 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, is 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, 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 be the entertainer and tell the jokes and that's draining for me whereas it's not draining for her

she can do it all day long but she's draining for me do you feel like we all it's like it's about self-awareness and social awareness and so it's not that anything is bad I just think that's a bad way to think about it like we are who we are people are people you know unless you're being mean and cruel

then you know 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, you know, whatever it is. And that's where the regulation piece comes in. That's where it's like, oh, I'm aware that I'm talking too much. Mark, shut up.

Calm down. Yeah, I think. But do you get what I'm saying? Yeah, no, I do completely. 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 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. And to also achieve the things that we want to. If you're a performer on stage, you want to show up differently to if you're a poet that works in the woods or a, 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. The resolution with which they are feeling emotions is not as great as the person on the other end. And with that, it means that you are as a highly sensitive person, not burdened, but a kind of obliged in a way. If you want to show up fully, there 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 straddle reflex. You know, 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, you know, and everybody's like, I thought you were the fifth degree black bell. Look, I am the fifth degree block,

but I'm just afraid of my shadow. I can protect myself, but like my, I have a very high stator 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, that 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 of my life, years of my life before I became an expert in this, I assumed that was my destiny. I assumed that my personality and my temperament was just, that's who I am. I'm a person who experiences these emotions, and there's nothing you could 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 word before I mean, 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. Someone who is more on the resilient side or someone who is less volatile or steady, you might say, or emotionally stable is the word we use in psychology. they're kind of more even keeled. The problem with those people is that shit happens. And they may not have as much preparation as a person who's like me, the sensitive person.

So, again, it's not a strength or a weakness. It's just that you have to know who you are and be aware that the person who's more even keeled, all of a sudden there's a death in the family. And they'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 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. You know, this is a full week retreat, and I ended up on a farm in Sonoma County for nine days, and it's been incredibly formative to me, and to be honest, I'm still trying to work out what the fuck it all means.

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 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

I grew up in the most Blue-collar working-class town in the northeast of the UK, state primary, state secondary, state-sixth form college, played a sport where you were around men, working-class men from the age of 12, 13, until I was 20. There wasn't much room for that to come through. I didn't have many role models of people who were integrating or regulating or being fluid with their emotions in a good way.

And I think it hadn't been rewarded by the environment, and it's it's difficult to deal with so suppression for me was much easier and last week uh having spent a lot of time like just you know staring into the abyss of my own emotions and the abyss staring back at me and sometimes punching me in the nuts um i i i was really proud it's 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 holy shit like look at how look at how it's enabled you to show up for people how not how dare you because that that's very judgmental but like what a how unfortunate that you haven't realized what a blessing it is and how what a shame and i grieved

i grieved over the fact that i'd been mean to myself about my sensitivity it's like fuck like you were so nasty to yourself about feeling stuff like who says that you shouldn't feel stuff who says that you shouldn't do that and um yeah i you know for the i i get the sense that that this is the sort of podcast that attract people who feel things pretty deeply. Like, why are you listening to 90 minutes on emotions? If you announce someone that's like, what? Anxiety? I don't know what you're talking about.

So, yeah, I just, it was a really enlightening experience for me to see, fuck, like, that's a strength. It's a real strength that I have. And I shouldn't be ashamed of it. So, yeah, I'm very pro, highly sensitive people at that. moment well i think what you're really pro not to put words in your mouth is going back to permission to feel like you're pro allowing yourself to feel and maybe that will help you show up for other people in your life as non-judgmental as a good listener you know and as empathy 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 than meaning in life. So for those of you who are thinking,

oh, you know, does this really matter? Is this just like these like 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 healthy or happier and more effective. Is it possible to be too self-aware?

No. Sorry. Again, it all goes back to regulation. It all goes back. One thing that we didn't talk about yet is this idea of being an emotion scientist about your life. And, 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,

did I really know how I felt in that moment? Or maybe I need to really think, like, get on that app and, like, lot, the real feeling that I'm having. So that endless curiosity is actually helpful, but it's not, and this is a really, I'm glad you brought this up because another one of the pushbacks, remember the whole parenting thing we're talking about? Well, another pushback that I get is Mark is trying to make a world filled with self-indulgent people. And I'm like, there's a big difference between self-awareness and self-indulgence. I do not want you or me or anybody checking in with their feelings

500 times a day. That is unhelpful that will cause you to ruminate, that will cause you to go nuts. What I want us to do is I want us to look at our lives and think, how am I feeling in general? That's a good question to ask yourself. But throughout the day

there are strategic moments. Like when you walk into your office or before a podcast or before you go home or before you're making an important decision, just check in. How am I feeling? Is this feeling helpful? Is it unhelpful? what emotion would be most helpful to achieve my goal? That's the goal of emotional intelligence.

That's great. I wonder whether emotional regulation is sometimes a mask for people pleasing. I have to think about that one for a second. Is emotion regulation? Well, I think if it's in authentic regulation, right? If it's, you know, yes. But real emotion regulation, you know, 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 mind in the world, we can have all the objects in the world and all the fame in the world. But if we don't like ourselves, 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, you know, 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 the emotional signal so you could imagine somebody who does do emotional regulation as people pleasing thing happens i'm agitated i'm frustrated i'm angry i'm upset and whatever and you don't use that to say hey when you did that thing it made me feel x or this is something that occurred and it's not going i don't want it to happen again if you start shouting i'm going to leave the house and i'm going to come back in 15 minutes and if you're still shouting i'm going to leave the house and i'm going to come back in 15 minutes

Like, emotional regulation, I think, is the concern around that and how it leads into people pleasing is to do the first bit, but like to do the sensing bit, but not to do the deploying bit. Well, you're giving the example of poor regulation, which is out of fear, a partner in a relationship might say, no, it's okay, honey, it's okay, 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 okay if someone who's listening is like my new test of emotional intelligence I like this keep going yeah yeah no this this 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, like, just acknowledge the fact that my, you know, my, 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 your, you know, I would ask people to maybe, you know, they can read, they can download an app, just build knowledge. You 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. You know, I didn't know there was something called positive self-talk. I just looked in the mirror and had self-hatred for so many years of my life. And then all of a sudden said to me, Mark, you 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've got to practice them over and over and over again. Because this is, you know, a lot of us have to unlearn. Like you're telling me, by the way, my research in the U.K. 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 U.K. was 18%. So we've got to do some, we've got to push some love over to the UK. That does not surprise me. But I think awareness is the first step, build your vocabulary, is the next step, be, just be more, like, really be curious about how you're feeling. And then ask yourself, you know, 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 and what's my well-being? Am I making the choices that are best for me?

How are my relationships? How are my goals? Am I achieving what I want in my professional life? And if the answer is no to any of those, then start looking for those patterns, as you said. And then learn the strategies and practice them for the rest of your life. Because I thought, like I, I said when the pandemic hit, like, Mark, you're the director of the Center for Emotion

Intelligence, you got this. And it was like, whoa. I don't know that. 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, what I, 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 it. No way. Talk to Mark Brackett, ladies and gentlemen. Mark, you're great. I really appreciate you.

I think your work's wonderful. Where should people go? They want to check out all of your stuff. Yeah, I think they should go to my personal website, which is just Mark Bracket, M-A-C-E-T-T-com. I'm on Instagram, LinkedIn, and my book is called Dealing with Dealing. 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, but 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

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