Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - 3 Steps to Managing Your Emotions

Starting point is 00:00:00 I'd like you to ask yourself this question. Am I managing my emotions or are they managing me? What the emotional researchers have found is that we're not as unique as we think. You know, our emotions make us feel very unique as creatures, but we're not unique. And I'm going to talk about that. What we're unique in is the way that we use our emotions. I don't want you to have less emotion. I don't want me to have less emotion.

Starting point is 00:00:24 What I want you to understand is that you can manage your emotion such that it's not managing you, you're understanding it, it's working for you and not against you, and you're learning and growing as a result. Hi friends, welcome to office hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. I'm a behavioral scientist dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. This is a show about how you can do that as well. I'm a happiness teacher and I want you to be a happiness teacher as well. These are ideas that you can actually use to teach yourself to be a happier person, but also to make the world a better place. I teach the subject at Harvard University. I also write a column in the Atlantic called How to Build a

Starting point is 00:01:16 life. That's a column that comes out every Thursday morning about the science of happiness. 33 of my essays on happiness are in my new book, The Happiness Files. Pick that up. It might be a good stocking stuffer for this coming holiday season. If you have any comments about this show, if you're a regular watcher of this show and you have some ideas, please leave them in the comments wherever you're watching or listening to this show, we will see them when we take them seriously. Or you can write to us at office hours at arthurbrooks.com. We really appreciate the feedback. If you're new to the show, welcome. Please share it with millions of your friends. That's how we build a movement is through these ideas and the habits that change as a result

Starting point is 00:01:56 of these ideas. Well, what is the habit that I want to change today? In you and in others, I find that one of the greatest challenges to happiness is managing ourselves, managing our emotions. A lot of people feel out of control with their emotions. Now, one of the points I try to make in my work, and in this show, if you've watched it once or twice already, is that your life is kind of like a startup. It's an enterprise. You incorporated. It's the most important enterprise you're ever going to run. Now, maybe you're going to start a business, too. But, you know, that's just an adjunct to the business of your life. You're a real entrepreneur in the business of living. The currency that you're trying to accumulate, the fortune you're trying to create is love and happiness. Do you know how to

Starting point is 00:02:44 manage that enterprise? Do you know how to manage your most important employee, which is you? To do that, to manage yourself adequately to a fortune in love and happiness has one particular skill that you need to master more than any other. That's emotional self-management. Now, a lot of people don't realize that they can do that, but you really have two choices in life. You can manage your emotions or they can manage you. So let's start by asking. I'd like you to ask yourself this question. Am I managing my emotions or are they managing me? In a lot of cases, it's the latter. Well, in everybody's life, there's some of the latter. What I want to do is change the proportion of being managed. manage to managing our emotions.

Starting point is 00:03:31 And I want to show you in this episode about how to understand your emotions scientifically and how to manage them more proactively in a better, more effective way. If you're like me, you've got to be drinking when you're in the gym and you have to be drinking something clean without any calories that will actually give you your electrolytes and all the good stuff. For me, that's element. LMNT. Probably knew that already.

Starting point is 00:03:55 It's a great product that helps you stay hydrated without sugar, and a bunch of dodgy ingredients that are found in a lot of popular electrolyte drinks and sports drinks. No sugar, no junk, just for electrolytes that actually work. Give it a try. I like it. It's science-backed and made for athletes, fasting, keto, or happiness scientists like me, anyone who sweats. So, how do I use it? I use it in the morning, 4.45 in the morning. I don't like to drink anything with caffeine or anything that peps me up because I like to be real clear and I drink my caffeine later. Element is just the time. ticket that I need. Give it a try yourself. Right now, you can get a free sample pack with any purchase

Starting point is 00:04:33 at Drink Element. That's Drink, just like it sounds, LMNT.com slash Arthur. Try it risk-free. If you don't like it, they'll refund your order. No questions asked, but you're going to like it. Now, let's start off by talking about the relationship between emotions and happiness. Happiness is the topic of the show. A lot of people make, however, the erroneous assumption that happiness itself is an emotion. Happiness is a feeling. It's not. Happiness and feelings are related, like the smell of your turkey is related to your Thanksgiving dinner. Feelings are like the smell. The turkey is like the happiness. When you're having positive emotions, it's an indication of happiness itself. Now, again, it's contested how you define happiness. People have defined happiness in different ways

Starting point is 00:05:23 all throughout history. I'm using what I believe to be the best, most robust scientific definition of happiness, which is a combination of three phenomena, three macronutrients, if you will, that you can get better at accumulating. I've talked about this in past episodes. Happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, all of which takes skill to learn how to accumulate more effectively over the course of your life. And if you're doing it effectively, a lot of the times you have positive emotion, happy feelings. Now, happy feelings, or negative emotion as well, is what I want to talk about today, positive and negative emotions. How can you manage them more effectively? And to do that, I want to talk about what emotions are and what they aren't.

Starting point is 00:06:07 We already know one thing they aren't. They aren't happiness itself. But you won't be a truly happy person if your emotions are out of control. If your negative emotions are dysregulated, It's a matter of fact, if your positive emotions are dysregulated, you want to be a kind of a self-regulated person, a self-managing person. That might sound like it's too calculating and not spontaneous. It's not. That's not what I'm saying at all. You're always going to have appropriate levels of emotion. What you don't want is inappropriate levels of emotion. And that requires a lot of knowledge and a lot of habits. That what I'm going to tell you today has truly changed my life. It really has. in maybe in subsequent episodes, but certainly in the show notes to this episode, I'm going to give you

Starting point is 00:06:50 access to a test on my website about relative levels of emotionality. Your emotions fall into two different categories, positive and negative. I'll talk about that in a second. And you can be pretty intense or pretty weak in either or both. That puts you into a different kind of emotional profile. If you're very intense in both, if you're weak in one and strong in the other, if you're weak and both, these are the kinds of different kinds of people. And a lot of that is actually genetic. For me, I'm very intense in my emotionality and both positive and negative. You probably see that. You see, I'm into this. I'm into everything, as a matter of fact. That, frankly, can make me a little hard to live with, just ask Esther my wife. But the truth is also

Starting point is 00:07:36 that makes me in greater need of emotional self-management than a lot of other people. according to the data that I've calculated that I've used, that I've accumulated, that I've seen, the studies that I actually look at and the tests that I've taken, I'm at the 95th percentile in the intensity of positive emotion. It's great. I'm at the 90th percentile in negative emotional intensity. Not great. What that means is if I don't manage my own emotions, they're going to be managing me, and that's going to dramatically lower my quality of life. Even if I weren't so intense, It would be better for me for managing my emotions. You need to be able to do that.

Starting point is 00:08:13 You need these skills. And so do I. And learning these skills, as I mentioned a minute ago, has been a game changer for me. It's increased my quality of life dramatically. Okay. So to begin with, we know that feelings and happiness are not the same thing. So let's talk a little bit about how feelings work. And to do this, I want to go to a theory of the brain that kind of organizes the

Starting point is 00:08:38 brain in terms of functionality in a way that it's easier to understand if you're not a neuroscientist. Now, I'm not trained as a neuroscientist. I'm trained as a behavioral scientist, but I've had to learn a lot of neuroscience over the decades. Part of the reason for this is that a lot of psychology is biology. And when I was going through my PhD program, people weren't studying the brain very much. It was kind of out of fashion to study neuroscience. Not to mention the fact that neuroscience was way, 30 years ago, was not nearly where. it is today. That said, in everything in neuroscience today, given the fact that it's a pretty young discipline, almost everything is contested. So when I talk about neuroscience on the show,

Starting point is 00:09:20 keep in mind that there's always going to be neuroscientists who say, no, that's not the way it works, because this is not settled. I mean, to be honest, nothing in science is settled. Anytime somebody says, the science is settled, that means they don't understand science. But neuroscience in particular, if you get four neuroscientists together, they're going to have have 10 different opinions. And that's beautiful. That's a good thing. That means it's a healthy field, in flux, and it's growing. But it also means that when you come up with a theory or when you come up with a model that explains certain way about how the brain works, it's going to be contested by certain neuroscientists. So I say this with appropriate humility, number one, not as a neuroscientist,

Starting point is 00:09:59 but number two, recognizing that there's a lot of different ways that you can cut the functionality that I'm trying to describe in this episode. I want to talk about a theory of the brain. I want to talk about a theory brain that many neuroscientists really like, some don't, but I find it's a really useful way of understanding the brain nonetheless. It's called the triune brain theory. Now, this was propagated by the neuroscientist in the 1970s and 80s named Paul McLean. If that name sounds familiar, if you're a little older like me, it's because you saw the old show Cosmos, where Carl Sagan on his show about the universe and astronomy, he would occasionally look at the marvels of the universe closer to home, aka inside the cranium, he would look at a little brain science from time to time,

Starting point is 00:10:41 and he would rely on Paul McLean's theory, really his model, of the brain in three stages. Paul McLean, the neuroscientist, he hypothesized that the human brain is sort of stacked in three parts with respect to evolution. At the lowest evolutionary stage of the brain is the part of the brain that we have in common with lower animals. I say lower in terms of brain development or brain sophistication. He called it the reptilian brain evolved more than 40 million years ago. We have this in common with snakes and lizards. He called it reptilian brain because they did all these basic functions, the same thing that it does in animals that don't have our level of cognition or awareness. A snake or a lizard can do exactly these things like we can. It governs

Starting point is 00:11:26 functions that are automatic, autonomic, like breathing and blinking and heartbeat. And a lot of other functions that are gathering data below our level of awareness, you know, that the room temperature that is registering in our skin, the amount of light in the room, whether there are people around you, you're gathering all these data constantly. And you're not conscious of those stimuli, because if you were, you wouldn't be able to function in your ordinary life. You'd be completely distracted. Those data being collected by the reptilian brain are then sent to the second part of your brain, which is newer. That second part of the brain is called the limbic system. a.k.a. the paleo-mammalian brain because we have it in common to all the mammals.

Starting point is 00:12:09 Your dog has a limbic system. A squirrel has the limbic system. A mouse has a limbic system. And what that limbic system does is it takes all those signals from the most primitive parts of your brain, and it kind of converts them into emotions. Emotions are of universal language. We always talk about, what's the universal language? And many of us in the United States like to think it's English. It's not. It's emotions. Emotions are what we all feel. And, And what's really extraordinary, according to emotion researchers, I work with some of the best in the world at Harvard. Jennifer Lerner, who is my colleague at the Harvard Kennedy School, her work on emotion is just absolutely cutting edge. It's just fantastic.

Starting point is 00:12:47 And what the emotional researchers have found, I'll put one or two papers on the basic science of emotion and the show notes, is that we're not as unique as we think. You know, our emotions make us feel very unique as creatures, but we're not unique. talk about that. What we're unique in is the way that we use our emotions. So our emotions are, there's a limited number of positive and negative emotions. And that's kind of on board computing capacity for everybody on earth. It's like we're all equipped with the same kitchen and the same ingredients in the cupboards and then we all decide differently what to make of it in different parts of the world and in different walks of life. So that's the thing to keep in mind about the limbic system of the brain. It takes these basic signals and it kind of converts them

Starting point is 00:13:35 into basic emotions. Now, that emotional information is then sent to the third part of the brain. Triune brain means the brain in three parts, which is the most modern part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, the meaty bumper of tissue behind your forehead. That's brand new. It's in its current form. It's about 250,000 years old. And that part of the brain is the executive center of your brain. That's where you're making your conscious decisions. And you try to make those conscious decisions with proper data, with proper information. And where does that data come from? Well, among other things, it's coming from your limbic system.

Starting point is 00:14:11 You're sending emotional information, which is a reaction to what's going on, to your executive centers. And you say to yourself, this is how I feel. Here's probably why. And here's what I'm going to do about it. Now, this is going on all day long. It's actually incredible. It's a miracle. It's we're going all day long.

Starting point is 00:14:30 detection, emotion, decision, all day long, boom, boom, boom. Now, sometimes it breaks down. I mean, sometimes the system doesn't work right. You know, if you miss a signal from system one to system two of, you know, basic signals into emotions, it might be that you see out of your peripheral vision a car speeding toward you. And it doesn't register as fear in your limbic system. And so you don't jump out of the way.

Starting point is 00:14:54 You're going to have a bad day. This is what that comes down to. But that's probably not going to happen. Don't lose any sleep over that. a lot more common is when system two to system three breaks down where you have an emotion, but you don't actually register it consciously. And so therefore, you don't make a conscious decision according to what you want to do, but rather only what your limbic system tells you to do. That's when you laugh out loud about something even though you shouldn't. Or that's when you

Starting point is 00:15:22 yell at your child and then you feel horrible about it because you were reactive. That's when you burst into tears, even though you weren't intending to, perhaps at work. That's because your limbic system was actually sort of in charge, as a matter of fact. Now, that's not a breakdown, per se, but there are people who are extremely emotionally reactive, where they don't have very much voluntary management over their limbic systems. Their limbic systems are really managing them. That's why we call them reactive people, as a matter of fact. There's a whole class of citizens in our society that's enormously reactive. They can't really control their emotion. They're called little kids.

Starting point is 00:16:00 And there's a reason for that that the brain isn't fully synaptically wired until you're an adult, as a matter of fact. A lot of the, a lot of the connections between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex. It's not complete. It's not finished until you're grown up. That's what you want to encourage in young people is to develop these connections. That's why you say to a kid who's screaming over, you know, I mean, I live with my grandson and he's, He's really reactive. He's two. And I'll say, use your words, which is what I mean is don't be so limbic. It doesn't help. But the point of all this is that all of us can be better at managing our emotions. And the way that we do so is by figuring out a way to experience our emotions and move this emotional experience from the limbic system into the prefrontal cortex. That's the image of the images of an emotion moving from one part of the, the brain to a different part of the brain. What's really happening is the experiencing of the

Starting point is 00:17:00 emotion is moving and you're managing it with a different part of your of your brain, the part of the brain that makes conscious decisions. Now, as I mentioned, it doesn't happen completely until you're an adult. So what I want to talk about is what the primary emotions are that we're feeling and then the techniques that we can use to move the experience of those emotions into the prefrontal cortex so that we're managing them and they're not managing us. That's the trick. That's really what it comes down to. Now, I hope I've deepened your sophistication about what emotions are and aren't. Emotions are not there to give you a nice day and they're not there to ruin your day. Your emotions are there to say something is going on that you're

Starting point is 00:17:44 perceiving either as a threat or an opportunity, that you should either decide to approach or decide to avoid. Negative emotions are an indication that there's a threat, that there's something you should avoid of different types. I'll talk about that in a second. Positive emotions, the ones that you really want a lot of, say that there's something awesome out there and that you should approach that. It's an opportunity. It's great. But here's the thing. People say all the time, I want more good feelings and fewer bad feelings. I say there's no such thing as bad feelings. Without negative emotions, you'd be dead in a week. They're an alarm system. They're an alert to you that something's going on. You should be very grateful for all your emotions, what you

Starting point is 00:18:24 need is a system for understanding and managing your emotions and learning and growing as a result of all of your emotions. That's really what we're talking about here. That's what it needs to be a self-managing person. So let's start with an understanding of what the primary emotions are. Now, there's a little bit of disagreement about what the primary emotions are. Almost all emotion researchers agree on the negative emotions, but they disagree on what kind of the positive or neutral emotions are. The primary negative emotions are sadness, anger, disgust, and fear. Those are the basic negative emotions. Almost all emotion researchers agree that that's what we all feel on the negative side of the ledger.

Starting point is 00:19:06 Each one of those emotions involves a different part of the limbic system, a different element of the limbic system. And this is a really interesting. This is a cool thing, that the brain actually has different parts that are dedicated to different emotions. You have onboard hardware, to produce different emotions because each one of your emotions has a specific and natural function that's important to you. This might be really eye-opening. So, for example, let's take sadness. You don't want to feel sadness. Wouldn't the life be better if you were never sad? No, no, no, no. That would be really terrible, as a matter of fact. Sadness is the emotion that you experience after losing someone or something that you love, generally speaking. That's how we understand sadness.

Starting point is 00:19:54 if you never felt sadness, you would not be afraid to lose things in people. The result of that is that you would say things and do things that would leave you friendless, fired, and divorced within about a month, probably. You avoid sadness and therefore avoid behaviors that lead to sadness, and that leads you to have a pretty good, pretty well-organized life. You see what I'm saying here, right? I mean, the negative emotion is an incentive to you. The same thing is true with all of the negative emotions. So let's talk about them one by one. Then we'll go on to the positive emotions, and then we'll talk about how you can manage each one of these things.

Starting point is 00:20:36 And let's start with sadness. We were just talking about it. Sadness is a complicated business because it involves different parts of the brain, to be sure. But there's one particular part of the limbic system called the dorsal anteriorosingulate cortex. You don't have to remember that. You can look it up if you just Google D-A-C-C-E. you'll find that it's implicated in social pain. That's really kind of what it comes down to, especially the feeling of rejection. I'll put a paper in the show notes that talks about the

Starting point is 00:21:03 dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and how it works in this feelings of rejection, for example, which are very clearly implicated in sadness. That interesting little organ inside your limbic system is so critically important. Why? Because humans were, we were, we were developed in our ancestral environment to live in bands of 30 to 50 individuals. And they were hierarchical kin-based bands. You have an incentive, a biological incentive, an evolutionary imperative, of understanding the kin group and rising in the kin group hierarchically. That also means you need to have a real disincentive of getting kicked out. You know, 250,000 years ago, if you alienated everybody in your band and your 30 to 50 kin-based member band, you'd be walking the frozen

Starting point is 00:21:56 tundra and dying alone. You need to have a big incentive not to do that. You need to feel a lot of emotional pain at the prospect of being excluded. And that's what this little dorsal anterior singular cortex, among a few other parts of the brain, is dedicated to do, is to feeling that pain. So what do you do in response? The answer is you try not to actually let that happen. The problem is that sometimes you do lose somebody, not of your own volition, not because of your stupidity, but things happen. People die. Somebody doesn't, isn't in love with you. Somebody breaks up with you. Somebody excludes you. Somebody fires you. You're not right for something. And the result of that is that you actually feel sadness. Now, you need to understand when you feel sadness that it is the most

Starting point is 00:22:41 normal thing in the world. It's absolutely biologically appropriate for you to feel that. And that's your brain. It's not just some esoteric psychological phenomenon floating out in the ether someplace. This is your brain working the way it's supposed to work. Now, the second what I'll talk about here is, is let's put anger and fear together because anger and fear are pretty related. The biggest part of the limbic system that we talk about with anger and fear is the amygdala. And that's when you sense a threat to you and your amygdala is activated. That sends a signal through the hypothalamus of your brain to your brain. pituitary glands, and the pituitary gland stimulates your adrenal glands sitting above your kidneys,

Starting point is 00:23:22 which spits out stress hormones. So stress is a physiological response to fear. And the big stress hormones are epinephrine, noropenephrine, and cortisol. Cortisol keeps you alert for longer periods of time. The alarm one, in particular, is adrenaline, and your heart beats and you sweat and you shake a little bit. And by the way, this is an incredible thing, how fast your amygdala works. see out of the corner of your eye a car coming toward you when you're crossing in a crosswalk in a street, somebody who ran a light. And this hits the occipital lobe of your brain, which is registering what you're seeing instantaneously. And what registers in your brain is not, that's a Mercedes about to run me over. What registers in your brain is that's a predator that wants to kill and eat

Starting point is 00:24:08 me. Because your ancestral brain is still your ancestral brain. We don't have sophisticated enough brains to say Mercedes. We say, predator. That sends a signal that stimulates the amygdala, which then goes all the way through the hypothalibus and pituitary glands. And within 74 milliseconds, there's adrenaline that's actually pumping in your system. Cortisol is much later. That's when you have a sustained threat. But that's incredible, because before you even know what's happened, before your prefrontal cortex has time to react, you've jumped out of the way and are sweating and your heart is beating. You've flipped off the driver. Now, three seconds. or four seconds later when your prefolded cortex catches up, you say to yourself,

Starting point is 00:24:47 I shouldn't have flipped that guy off. Those aren't my values. Well, okay, fine. It's fine as far as it goes, but your amygdala just saved your life. The amygdala is what's implicated in fight or flight. And, you know, fight is on the anger side and flight is on the fear side. But that's kind of how they're related when you, when you perceive a threat. And that has saved your life over and over and over again. Can it be dysregulated? For sure, you can have an overactive amygdala that makes you feel fearful or angry all the time. And we see this a lot. People who have a hair trigger, people who have a real temper problem. There's even some literature that suggests that the amygdala is physically bigger in those people. You've got a jacked amygdala. And it's interesting

Starting point is 00:25:27 because a lot of these people experience what psychologists call amygdala hijack or something is just like, your amygdala is in charge, man. And that's when people act out in ways that later they're like, I don't know what happened to me. The problem is people who have these horrible tempers and are they get violent or something like that. These are the people who actually need these self-management techniques, uh, among other, uh, among other treatments to manage their limbic systems more actively. Last but not least is disgust and disgust is a super interesting emotion. Disgust is, is something that, that is revolting to you.

Starting point is 00:26:03 But what that is, but disgust is, is nature's way of saving you from pathogens. before the onset of vaccines and antibiotics, which are relatively new, all we had was basically our disgust system to alert us to the potential pathogen that could hurt us, kill us, poison us. That's one of the reasons that something that appears dead, something that smells rotten, those are things that are most likely to contain pathogens that could really, really hurt us, and that's why those things feel and seem and look disgusting to us. They stimulate this part of the brain, the insula or the insular cortex in the, in the limbic system, that's your disgust module.

Starting point is 00:26:41 And man, that will take over your brain in a big hurry because that's an alarm system that says, look out, stay away from that completely. Things that you're disgusted by are things that in the ancestral environment and probably still today are dangerous to you. Now, it's quite interesting that different animals are disgusted by different things. And a lot of scientists believe that that's because they have different defenses

Starting point is 00:27:01 against different pathogens. I'm sure your dog's a very good dog, but he's really disgusting. I mean, he licks things that you would never lick, I hope. And the reason is because, according to a lot of these theories and some empirical evidence, your dog has natural antibiotics and a saliva that neutralize things that would be a pathogen to you. You're not licking the floor. Your dog can lick the floor all day long and not get sick. And that's an important distinction. So you see why the dog doesn't get disgusted where you would get disgusted, which should give you kind of a wonder and awe at the machine and how incredible it works.

Starting point is 00:27:36 And it's just a beautiful thing. I hope I've actually made you more appreciative of your negative emotions. When people ask me about happiness, I usually outline four areas of life, faith, family, friendship, and meaningful work. But there's a fifth element that's also really important for well-being, something that I pay a lot of attention to myself. And that's your health and fitness. Every morning, my happiness routine starts with a workout. And it's not just because I'm obsessed with bigger biceps and abs, that chip is sailed. Well, unhappiness and getting a better quality of life.

Starting point is 00:28:09 Exercise and nutrition actually will do more for your well-being than most people imagine. That's why I love the Pump Club app. It's actually not about hacks and trends that promise a lot, but don't deliver very much, as we all know. The app, which was built by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is called the Positive Corner of the Internet, because it brings people together to become healthier, fitter, and create better habits in a more joyful life. As a listener of office hours, you can get 50% percent. off the monthly price and get an annual membership for just $79. That's just a little more than $6 per month for your health. Visit the pumpclub.com and use the code office hours at checkout. That's the type of investment that you want to make in your future.

Starting point is 00:28:52 Let's go over to the positive side. Now, this is more contested. What are the positive emotions? Everybody agrees that joy is a positive emotion. When people talk about joy and happiness is synonymous, that's not right. The reason is because, as I've defined it, happiness is not an emotion. Joy is the emotion that is often evidence that you have a lot of happiness in your experience. That's an important thing. And joy is this feeling of abulience that can come from a lot of different things. Your brain is incredibly thrifty. It can experience joy from a lot of different things.

Starting point is 00:29:25 Very similar experiences of joy, as a matter of fact. And there are a bunch of different sort of pleasure centers of your brain that are implicated in the experience of joy. the ventral striatum, the ventral tegmental area, there are other parts of the brain in the limbic system that do this. But you can get this experience of joy when somebody says, I love you, or from a big bump of cocaine, it's amazing how the brain works. And one of the things that's very interesting in addiction medicine, especially related to neuroscience, is that the use of illicit drugs often mimics the experience of love because of this. because it gives you joy that's indistinguishable from what you'd get from authentic love,

Starting point is 00:30:06 as a matter of fact. So you get the idea of kind of how all this works together. All I'm saying is that joy is a basic positive emotion that we like that signals that something's good for us or is mimicking something that's really good for us. It's an opportunity to thrive, which is great. Another basic positive emotion that most emotion researchers like to talk about is interest. And I talked about that in one of the prior episodes, why we love to learn as a species. And that's because interest is a basic positive emotion. We're a learning hominid. We, I mean, we're we're we accumulate knowledge. We we love to learn new

Starting point is 00:30:44 things and become more skilled and use our knowledge. It's extremely pleasurable. Some of you are enjoying my show, for example, because you're learning you're learning a lot. And, and that's touching this basic positive emotion in your brain. Now aside from that, people will put in, for example, surprise as a basic positive emotion. Surprise is an emotion for sure, but it's, it can be negative, as in I hate surprises. But most of the time you think of surprise as like, surprise party, or humor, all humor is based on the phenomenon of surprise. As a matter of fact, there's a part of the limbic system called the parahippocampal gyrus. That's the part of the brain that resolves a little bit of conflict, a little bit of surprise in the brain.

Starting point is 00:31:28 and it automatically makes you laugh a little bit. That's how, you know, stupid jokes, if they give you a little bit of surprise at the right moment, you'll laugh even if they're not that funny, even if it's kind of a dad joke. I mean, I'll give you an example, a dumb joke that does this. I think about dying a lot, you know, and I've decided that I want to die peacefully in my sleep,

Starting point is 00:31:51 like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers. I know, dumb, sorry. But the whole point is that I stimulated, I tweaked your parahypochapal gyrus, unless you've heard that joke before, in which case I didn't. But if you hadn't, you were imagining my father, my grandfather in his bed, peaceful, and then you imagined him behind the wheel of a bus or something. And that weird little juxtaposition of scenarios actually gave you a little bit of

Starting point is 00:32:18 surprise, and that was the essence of humor. So surprise can kind of go either way. And there are a few other that people will put in the list. But let's leave it at that so far, which is those basic seven. Now, what I want to talk about is mostly about the negative emotions. But if you want to be an elite self-managing emotional athlete, you want to be able to manage your positive emotions as well. So maybe I'll leave for a future episode how to manage your positive emotions. But I know most of you would like to be better at more self-managing on the negative side.

Starting point is 00:32:48 So that's what I really want to talk about. Now, I have mentioned in past episodes, and I'm going to focus today. on how to move emotions, the experience of emotions, from their limbic origins, to where you can manage them, decide what they mean and how to act, which is really a prefrontal cortex function. That's an executive function of the brain. How do you do that? And the answer is, well, to begin with, time. You got to give yourself time to catch up.

Starting point is 00:33:22 Now, you have heard, because your grandma told you, or your, you're not. your mom or somebody wise in your life told you that you should count to 10 when you're angry. That's what you should do when you're angry. I looked up the origins of that at one time. And as closest I can tell, that's Thomas Jefferson, you know, which kind of makes sense. I mean, he talked about the pursuit of happiness and the Declaration of Independence after all. And he said this.

Starting point is 00:33:42 He said, when angry count to 10, when very angry count to 100, what was he really saying? Don't leave the experience of anger just in your, in your amygdala. Let it get to your prefrontal cortex, where you can. can decide why and what you want to do as opposed to what you're actually feeling. Now, there is one paper. We go on the show notes, of course, that asks what's the right number, so you can save yourself a lot of embarrassment and heartache. And the answer is kind of 30. Count to 30. And then while you're counting to 30, imagine the outcome that would occur from doing that thing that you want to do, that your amygdala is telling you to do. So here's how to do it.

Starting point is 00:34:24 This is the first metacognition, putting time between your limbic system and your prefrontal cortex. Metacognition, side note, means thinking about thinking. That's really what it means. But practically speaking, metacognition involves giving your prefrontal cortex time to catch up and register what's going on with your emotions. That's really what I'm talking about here. Okay, back to the study. 30 seconds while thinking about the repercussions from doing what your amygdala, wants you to do. You're sitting in a meeting at work and somebody's really getting on your nerves.

Starting point is 00:35:01 I mean, somebody's treating you with great disrespect. And you're getting mad and you say yourself, you know what? I'm going to tell her she's a moron. But instead of getting, instead of doing that, I'm going to count to 30 and imagine the implications of doing that. So she makes me real mad and I start to count one, two, three. I imagine myself saying, you're a moron. five, six, seven. Wow, look at her face. She's shocked. Nine, ten. She's getting up. She's calling the boss. They're calling human resources. 17, 18. I'm going down to human resources for blowing up and insulting a colleague. Making my case, 21, 22. This is bad. By 30, you just saved yourself a trip to human resources. Congratulations. That's kind of how metacognition works in giving.

Starting point is 00:35:54 yourself time for your prefrontal cortex to catch up to what your limbic system is experiencing in the data that's actually sending up. That's how counting to 10 is an example of this particular technique. But that's not the only example. There are really three categories of techniques that you can use because what are we all about? We're all about being self-managing. I don't want you to have less emotion. I don't want me to have less emotion. What I want you to understand is that you can manage your emotion such that it's not managing you, you're understanding it, it's working for you and not against you, and you're learning and growing as a result. That's really what we're talking about. There are three ways for you to become more metacognitive systematically

Starting point is 00:36:37 beyond just count to 10 or 30 or 100. The three categories that metacognition fall into are knowledge, contemplation, and documentation. Okay, now first knowledge. That's everything. thing we've been doing here. I'm going to give an example of how knowledge is power and metacognitive power. I talked a minute ago about disgust. Disgust stimulates the insular cortex, aka the insula in the brain. And it's not just from smelling something rotten in the back of your fridge. That's amazing enough. You know, three weeks ago, the chicken in your fridge made your stomach growl and now it makes your stomach turn, which is why you say, oh, I forgot about that. You take it to the trash, right? Your insular cortex is entirely in charge of that, of that distinction. But your insular cortex can be stimulated,

Starting point is 00:37:25 not just by that, by by other people, about people. Let me give you an example. Let's think of your favorite, let's think of a politician who's controversial and bombastic that you like. Okay. Now, maybe you're, I don't know, a superior human. You're like, I hate them all or inferior human. I don't know. You decide. But I bet there's somebody, because you have opinions and so do I. that says the things that are kind of limbic for you and it's sort of satisfying to hear them say those things on TV and yeah, you got one of those, right? What they're doing for you

Starting point is 00:38:00 is that they're trying to stimulate your insular cortex against other people by convincing you that those people should be stimulating your disgust reflex. Anytime somebody says, those people are disgusting, those people, can you believe the terrible, disgusting thing that those people think they're trying to manipulate your disgust reflex. They're trying to manipulate your insula.

Starting point is 00:38:24 It's true. And there's a lot of studies that show this. There's a lot of research that shows that discussed language about other people does just that. And we see this throughout history. Dictators and demagogues always vilify other people by stimulating the disgust reflex in the population. During the Rwandan genocide in the 90s, the, the Hutus who were conducting a massacre of the Tutsis, They had a word for the Tootsies that meant cockroaches. Why? Because they wanted to refer to the Tootsies as cockroaches, thus dehumanizing the Tootsies and stimulating the disgust reflex of people who might have been on the fence.

Starting point is 00:39:00 The Nazis talked about Jews by calling them rats. It's the same thing that they're vermin who bring these pathogens into our society because they wanted to stimulate this primordial part of the limbic system of the brain. And so hijack the brain so that people could do otherwise. thinkable things to their sisters and brothers. Because you've got to make them think they're not sisters and brothers. They're pathogen carriers is the way that that works. Well, there's a milder version of that going on in American politics today or wherever you

Starting point is 00:39:29 live in politics, that's going on. But knowledge is power. Why? Because next time you turn on the television or read your favorite columnist who says those forbidden things that you secretly think and they try to stimulate your disgust reflex against a fellow human being, you're going to say, yeah, I know what's going on here. Hands off my insula, man. It's unbelievable.

Starting point is 00:39:55 You're going to see this because you're going to start to recognize this thing going on, and you're going to have more power. You're going to have more metacognitive power than you've had before. The same thing is true when you feel great sadness, even grief. You're going to understand that the dorsal anterior singular cortex is going because it's supposed to, or that your amygdala is working over time. That's the important thing that we're talking about here. This knowledge is so transformative.

Starting point is 00:40:20 It's also interesting, I hope, giving you basic positive emotion. But this has completely changed my life. I no longer feel like my insular cortex and my amygdala and my dorsal anterior singular cortex and all the other parts of my brain that are responsible for producing negative emotionality in intense quantities that those things are managing me because I have the information. I have the knowledge to understand what's really going on. And that per se is allowing my prefrontal cortex to be doing what is supposed to do.

Starting point is 00:40:53 The C suite of my brain to be making executive decisions. That's number one. Number two is contemplation. Contemplation is contemplative practices that allow you to understand your emotions in a different way. There's kind of two, as a matter of fact. Meditation is one. insight meditation. Often, some people call it the posseum meditation. It's a different word in many different Eastern contemplative practices. But it really is insight about yourself. It's the kind of thing

Starting point is 00:41:26 where, I mean, you don't have to go sit in an ashram to learn how to do this. You can sit quietly in the morning and say, Arthur's feeling a little sad and angry today. Why might that be? Well, it kind of makes sense. Arthur's worried about a couple of things and went to sleep or tried to go to sleep last night and didn't sleep well. And Arthur knows perfectly that when he sleeps less than five hours a night, his negative emotionality is turned up a little bit higher than it would have been otherwise. It actually makes perfect sense. Now, what am I doing? I'm analyzing myself. I have insight about myself in this contemplative way. And there are organized meditation traditions that do just exactly that.

Starting point is 00:42:08 Avail yourself of these things. Another way to do this, if you're traditionally religious, like I am, is prayers of petition. Why? Because you can't pray, put into words explicitly what's written on your heart without using your prefrontal cortex. You know, so I bring things to prayer every day because I have a religious practice that I engage in every single morning. And I'll have prayers of petition.

Starting point is 00:42:32 You know, I'll say, I won't say like, please take away my. negative emotionality, but I'll say, Lord, these are things that I'm feeling. These are emotional experiences that I'm having. And it just offer them up, offer these things up by observing them in the presence of the divine. And that in and of itself is a highly metacognitive experience. Whether you're religious or not, you have to recognize that I can't be saying those things without using my prefrontal cortex. So there's a range of contemplative experiences that you can engage in where you're observing yourself in a quiet, serious, and methodical way. That's what that gets down to. Now, the third is documentation. Write it down. You ever notice that when you write your feelings on a piece of paper,

Starting point is 00:43:19 they don't seem so threatening and weird. There's a reason for that. With the pencil, you have to use your prefrontal cortex. You can't write limbically. It's an executive thing because you're writing down letters. You're moving things to the most salient conscious executive parts of your brain when you're writing things down. So when you put things into words, when you journal things, you're exercising an extremely high level of metacognition. And that's why it makes you feel better. And the better you get at it, the better it's going to make you feel. I'll give you an example of something that I ask my students to do. And that's to keep a fear journal. Now, I've talked a couple of times in this show and I'll talk more in the

Starting point is 00:44:01 future about the concept of anxiety. Anxiety is something that a lot of people are diagnosed with, generalized anxiety. Anxiety is a clinical matter. And it's no joke, if this is something you're experiencing, you have to talk to your doctor about it. But as a definition, anxiety is really unfocused fear. Fear is something in the ancestral environment that, once again, indicates that there's a threat that you need to avoid. But among our ancestors, fear was, as far as we know, and any good anthropological study really shows this, Fear was episodic and intense. But episodic is the key word.

Starting point is 00:44:34 Most of the time, your ancestors weren't afraid. But when they were afraid, they were really afraid and reacted. That's the reason that the amygdala is a hair trigger. If you're walking across the savannah and a stick snaps behind you, the first thing you don't think is, huh, I bet that's a friend. No, no, no, you take off running. That's the reason that things startle you is because your fear reaction is stimulated. That's what keeps you alive.

Starting point is 00:44:59 But it shouldn't happen very often that a twig snaps and you take off running and climb a tree and look down and say it was it was either a leopard or my friend. That doesn't happen very often. Most of the time your ancestors were sitting around the campfire, shooting the breeze and sharing stories. The problem in the modern environment is that fear has become less intense because the threats are less intense, but has become chronic because of the stimuli that are surrounding us. You know, it's like bad emails and ringing phones and delayed flights and arguments at home. And pretty much everything in the news and everything times two on social media is kind of lightly scratching the amygdala with kind of a weak but constant signals to the hypothalamus to the pituitary gland, stimulating weakly the adrenal glands with a drip, drip, drip. And it's kind of ruining your life. a lot of the time. Anxiety is this unfocused fear. So here's one way to actually make anxiety better.

Starting point is 00:46:01 Don't try to wipe it out. I mean, doctors will try sometimes, even with pharmaceuticals to do so, but here's a way that you can right now make anxiety better. It's countertuitive. Turn it back into fear. Turn it back into fear. Turn it into what is supposed to be, which is very explicit and more intense, but more occasional. And here's how to do it using documentation in the third, metacognitive technique. You're stressed out. You're stressed out. I mean, you've got this like, your HPA axis is active and you're dripping stress hormones all the time. Let's think about the five things that are stressing you out the most, that are making you anxious. My guess is that they're inchoate. They're, they really are pretty unfocused, but there are fears underneath them.

Starting point is 00:46:45 So let's make them explicit. Let's make them explicit. Let's say that, you know, something's, something's not right and you went to the doctor and you're kind of waiting for a test. And you're not really afraid, but you're kind of afraid. Well, let's write that down. Let's write that down in your journal, document it. You've now moved the experience of it into your prefrontal cortex. And align underneath that fear of the fears. Like, I'm afraid because I don't know what my test, what's going to happen for my test.

Starting point is 00:47:12 I'm going to get my results back in a week. I'm afraid. I'm afraid of that. It's bothering me. Write down the worst thing that it could be, right? But also write down the best thing it can be and the most likely thing that it can be. And you know you're plenty of sophisticated to do that. And then subjectively, guess what the probabilities are of each of those things?

Starting point is 00:47:31 And my guess is in almost all the cases that the worst case, the nightmare scenario, is a really pretty low probability. The best probability might be small too, the most likely case. What is it? Put it down. Then under that, right, if it were the worst case, literally what would I do? What would I do? Now in the most likely case, what would I do?

Starting point is 00:47:53 what will I do? And write down what your strategy is. Now, what you've done is you've made it into a realistic scenario, kind of like what an insurance company does. An insurance company takes inchoate fear and it turns it into manageable risk. That's its whole gig. This is one of the reasons that the insurance industry is truly a happiness industry. It's transferring fear from uncertainty into risk that can be managed. That's the whole job of insurance. And they're doing that by saying, okay, okay, what are we worried about? What's the best case, worst case, most likely case? What are the probabilities and what are the strategies that happens? That's all insurance people and are doing all day long. Biostatisticians and all those people that are crunching the numbers

Starting point is 00:48:37 on that and then selling you policies. That's what they're doing. And that's one of the reasons that people are so much happier after they buy insurance. Well, this is your insurance policy vis-a-vis your prefrontal cortex. And that's all through documentation. That's all through journaling and it's a miracle. I promise you, my friends, this is going to be a game changer. Do that with number one and two and three and four and five and do it once a week and look at the fear journal every single day and you're going to sleep a lot better. You're going to sleep a lot better. Now, this is a beginning on this. This is not the last time I'm going to talk about these subjects. I'm going to talk more about emotional self-management because it's super important

Starting point is 00:49:14 and it's so awesome. So I'm going to come back to this in the later episode. Let's call this emotional self-management, part one. Later, I'm going to come back and talk about issues like, how do you repair negative emotions and memories? How do you do metacognition in reverse, for example? I'm going to talk about how to do joint metacognition, where the most powerful way that you can do it is with your partner, where you're jointly, metacognitively,

Starting point is 00:49:39 making explicit, powerful emotions that you're feeling together and together making them better than they ever could have been before and learning and growing together. So there's lots and lots of cool stuff that actually goes into this. But this has been the primer on it. And I hope it's been really useful for you. It really is something that's changed my life a lot. And if you take this stuff seriously, this is something that can change your life a lot too.

Starting point is 00:50:03 Okay. So that's future episodes. And there's more to come on this. And I hope you've enjoyed it. But in the meantime, I want to get to a couple of audience questions because this is stuff that I just enjoy so much actually seeing coming in from week to week. Here's one from Brad Williams, who wrote in at our, at our email address, office hours at arthur brooks.com.

Starting point is 00:50:21 I'm a Christian, Protestant, Southern Baptist. I hear a lot from evangelical pastors that happiness or contentment is based on faith. Is happiness and contentment based on faith alone? And the answer is no, it's not. Look, I'm religious too. I'm a traditionally religious person. There are lots and lots of people who are not, who are happy,

Starting point is 00:50:39 or pretty happy, I mean, who can get happier as a result of that. Now, let me make a distinction here. I'm not talking metaphysically about, you know, what some sort of cosmic truth is. I don't know. I have my beliefs and you have yours, Brad, and people who are watching us who don't have religious belief. They have their opinions about what's going on, their hypotheses about the world as well.

Starting point is 00:51:01 I'm not going to say who's right and who's wrong. But I will tell you as a happiness researcher that there are lots and lots of ways to get the benefits of religion, not from religion per se. This is called transcendence. the reason that religion is so highly correlated with life satisfaction, which it absolutely is, is predominantly due to the fact that religion, spirituality, it zooms you out on the experience of your ordinary life to greater verities, to the universe, to things that are bigger than you, which is super important. You know, left to your devices, you're going to think about yourself

Starting point is 00:51:39 all day long. You don't have to think about yourself all day long. You can zoom out to how the universe was created and the questions bigger than you. And religion is very, very good at doing that. So is the study of philosophy. So are many spiritual practices. But the bottom line is you need something. That's what the happiest people have in common is they have something religious or otherwise that fills this function of transcendence. Second thing that I want to say is that religion or faith or spirituality or philosophy is only one of the pillars, one of the practices of the happiest people. the others are family life, friendship, and work that serves others. Those are the big practices.

Starting point is 00:52:18 Faith, family, friends, and work. Those are the big practices. And the one that you talk about is one of those. So let's think big about this. And I'm glad that you've got your traditional faith, which is doing it for you. And I'm also glad that I'm sure that you believe that it is a fundamental supernatural truth, which is the biggest reason to practice faith. I'm not talking about faith as self-improvement.

Starting point is 00:52:39 Faith is faith. religion is religion for much bigger reasons than happiness, but it also brings a lot of happiness. Okay. Second from Katie Oberlin, I'm the mother of four boys, now men, and the grandmother of five. Congratulations, Katie. I'm a grandparent too. It's the best, isn't it? True secret to happiness. You talk about teaching happiness to others. Beyond passing on your material, she means my material, my newsletters, my books, my podcast link, and on and on, and doing my best to be a positive role model. What are some of the strategies for teaching happiness, especially to my kids, and even my husband? That's your, you have four boys. Now you've got five boys. You've got a

Starting point is 00:53:19 husband. You have a fifth child, right? Without becoming preaching. And the answer is the best way to be a teacher is to learn together. It's the best way to do it, especially when it comes to anything, it's really interesting way to say that I'm on a journey and then inviting somebody to learn with you, you've become the teacher. You're appealing to different authorities for sure. But there's all kinds of stuff that I'm learning with my wife and she has more expertise than me or I have more expertise than her. I'm more of a scientist than she is. She does a lot more theology and philosophy than I do. But we're really learning together. And especially with beloved family members, that's the way to do it. to go on a learning journey together.

Starting point is 00:54:00 And especially with your husband, by the way, because you've got time to do it, then make it your project to teach each other, to learn together, to remind each other. Iron sharpens iron. And when you're jointly learning, there's actually almost nothing more powerful. Having a learning partner is the best thing. So that's what I recommend. That's what I recommend. You want to be a teacher, actually be a student together with somebody else.

Starting point is 00:54:22 Last but not least from Luke Jebb. Also writing into the this week, we had all people. writing to us on the on the email office hours email that's great on based on your research what variables you recommend focusing on well considering a new job assuming your goals to live happier in your new role good now to begin with how do you decide on a new job there's a lot of gut that goes into that one there's one thing to avoid as you're thinking about a new opportunity your gut knows and that's this feeling of deadness you're almost on you're almost it's almost impossible that you're to find a great deal of life satisfaction in a new role if you feel empty inside when you think

Starting point is 00:55:02 about the new job no matter how much it pays. You need a combination of excitement and fear when you're going into something. I'll talk more about that because this is one of the gut rules that almost never steers you're wrong. So we'll do a show on gut rules going forward. But once you actually have the right combination of excitement of fear about your new opportunity, what should you be looking for? And the answer is two things. Great question. Two things. Two things are associated with you getting happier in your new job. One is what we call earned success and the other is service to others. Earned success is the feeling that you're creating value with your life and value of the lives of other people and is being recognized and acknowledged. That's why merit-based systems are king.

Starting point is 00:55:43 Everything else is garbage. Tenure-based systems are garbage. Loyalty-based systems are the worst, where you hang around long enough you get rewarded or if you kiss up to the boss. Those are horrible for morale. They're even horrible for the people who are prospering. And tenure, You know, tenure-based systems are, well, I'm an academic, so I've seen these things for a long time. And I understand why they exist, but they don't lead to the highest morale. Merit-based systems lead to the highest morale. And the way to think about merit is not just hard work and personal responsibility. It's creating value.

Starting point is 00:56:13 Now, that for whom? That leads to the second criterion. Others, people who need you, the essence of dignity in human life is being needed. Being unnecessary is the basis of despair. That's why so many of our systems, from poverty to the way that people, people raise their children are so bad. The policies that we have are so bad is because they treat people like liabilities to manage. And people know when they're not needed by society or by their family. It's horrible. It's despairing, as a matter of fact. Dignity comes from actually

Starting point is 00:56:43 being needed. That's how work brings joy by serving other people because you are actually needed. Look for something where you know who needs you, who knows what you're actually doing, and you have some exposure, direct exposure to those people. Those will be the most satisfying jobs. And even on the worst day, you'll go home and you'll say, somebody need to be. And that's really what you want. Earn your success and serve other people. Thank you for that question. And good luck on your new job. Well, friends, that's it for today. I hope you've learned a lot about your emotions right in. Again, let me emphasize one more time. I've talked more about the brain in this episode that I have in others. Everything in neuroscience is really tricky and really

Starting point is 00:57:23 contested. I'm going to provide links to all these things so you can learn more about this particular science, but remember that there's all different ways to consider these things scientifically. And so there's never the last word on this, and there's more that we can possibly learn. Don't worry if you see things that talk about things in a different way, that will just expand your knowledge in another direction. One way or the other, your emotions are something that you can understand, learn from, grow, from, and manage better, probably than you currently are. are. I hope you will. In the meantime, write to us at office hours at arthurbrooks.com. Make sure you like, you know, subscribe to the, subscribe to, you know, wherever you're listening or watching this

Starting point is 00:58:04 thing, pound the subscribe button and make sure to comment. I read your comments. I value your comments so very, very much. Your criticisms, all of it we want to know. And until next week, remember that your happiness doesn't have to be left up the chance. I want you to live a happier life and I want you to teach these ideas to others. See you next week.

Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - 3 Steps to Managing Your Emotions

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.