Short Wave - The science of emotional regulation — and how to do it better

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

Do you ever feel like your emotions control you instead of you controlling them? Maybe you lash out at someone after a long day at work or indulge to avoid a stressful situation. It’s called emotional dysregulation and don’t worry – we all experience it at some point. Luckily, there’s a better way of dealing with our feelings: building emotional intelligence. That may seem daunting, but Short Wave is here to guide you through everything from understanding the importance of emotions to how we can repair our relationship to them.Interested in learning more about your brain and your feelings? Email us your question at [e-mail]. We might cover it in a future episode!Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. It includes perks like bonus episodes, early access, archive access, curated playlists and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, ShoreWavers, Regina Barbara here. With an admission that sometimes I let my emotions get the best of me. But I'd like to think we've all been there, right? Like, work sucks one day, or we get into a fight with a loved one. And when those emotions rise up. We eat too much cake. We yell and scream at someone.

We avoid the difficult person at work who's going to make our lives challenging. We suppress, we smoke cigarettes if we smoke, we drink alcohol if we drink, we doomscroll. I mean, the list goes on. This is Mark Brackett. He's talking about what happens when we're emotionally dysregulated, and we have trouble managing feelings and reactions. I think most of us are disregulated in some instances. Mark is an emotion scientist and the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. For the past 25 years, he's been working to change people's relationship to their emotions.

A lot of people have mindsets that some emotions are good and some are bad, and we want to get rid of that mindset. There's no such thing as a bad emotion. Emotions are signals, their information, their guides. And emotions have a lot of power. They drive our attention, our decision-making, the quality of our relationships, our physical and our mental health, and our goal attainment. In case you want to write off Mark and say, well, easier said than done, you should know that emotions haven't always been easy for him. especially when he was younger. I didn't deal with my emotions very well.

I had abuse in my childhood and bullying in my childhood, and I didn't have anywhere to go with my feelings, and no one taught me what to do with those feelings, and I didn't have any good role models. Until his Uncle Marvin stepped in. He was a middle school teacher by day and a band leader by night. Uncle Marvin was developing a curriculum to teach kids about feelings, and he tested it out with Mark when he was a teenager.

Fast forward a decade or so later. I was in therapy trying to figure out what I'm going to do with my life. And I had an epiphany that I'm going to take all my conversations with my Uncle Marvin and my Uncle Marvin's curriculum and help make a program out of it. And now we have a program that has reached 10 million kids. And so the ruler program was born with a framework for using our emotions wisely, you know, sneakily building emotional intelligence, whether you're a kid or an adult. So today on the show, buckle up, your crash course to work. with your emotions instead of against them is about to begin. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

Okay, Mark, I think something that's tripped me up that might be helpful for our listeners is just plainly talking about the difference between emotions and emotional intelligence. Like, what is it? Well, emotions are a phenomenon. They're an experience. We experience emotions because of shifts in the environment or shifts in our thinking. So, for example, I live in the countryside of Connecticut now. And a while back, there was a bobcat outside my door.

And I just had an immediate emotional response, which was fear. And my talk in my head was, we're moving because I'm going to be dead by the bobcat. Now, of course, I'm about bobcats. I learned a little bit about them and I feel much safer now. They're pretty docile, right, to people. Yeah, I'm not taking my risk. but it's an automatic response to a stimulus. I see the bobcat.

My brain says, danger, I feel fear. Something happens that creates a shift in our brains. That includes thinking shifts. That shift includes chemical changes. That shift includes behavioral urges to change. That's an emotion. Now, emotional intelligence is learning how to use your emotions wisely. So when I see the bobcat,

Do I, you know, cry hysterically for three hours and sell my house without talking to my significant other? Probably not a good strategy. Emotional intelligence is, okay, A, what am I really feeling? B, is this emotion helpful or unhelpful for achieving my goal? If it's unhelpful, what am I going to do about it? Or what's my strategy for regulating it? So the emotional intelligence piece is working with your emotions to achieve the best outcome. Right, right.

Because, like, if you're scared of a bobcat, well, once and you like deal with it, that's way different for your body physically and mentally than just like avoiding dealing with those emotions for a really long time, right? Well, when we're not regulated, a lot of the damaging chemicals, our brain is floating around in them. And that's not good for brain health. For example, when you get triggered at work by someone who makes you angry, you get increases in cortisol. And, you know, short doses of that are okay. If you're in a room with the Zafire, it's like, I need adrenaline. I need. need cortisol to get out of there. But if you're kind of triggered three hours a day at work by the

same people and you're not dealing with it well, it's going to drain you. It's going to have an impact on your brain health and on your immune system. So if you have the option to get another job, go for it. If you don't, you have to learn how to have a different relationship with that person or with that trigger. And that's where the healthy strategies come into play. We can decrease that chance of those chemicals being there by knowing how to regulate and increasing the positive chemicals like serotonin and dopamine. Wow. Okay, fascinating.

And speaking of strategies, you've developed this ruler method for building emotional intelligence. And ruler is an acronym. What role does each letter play? Well, rule is a framework, and it starts with recognizing emotions. That's the broadest level. It's like, am I pleasant, am I unpleasant? Do I have a lot of energy?

Do I feel tired and depleted? That's the R in Ruler. Correct. Then the U is saying, all right, well, what's happening right now? I'm feeling high energy and pleasant. Why? Oh, because I'm having a cool conversation. That's the understanding and labeling of emotion.

So R you and L are all about self-awareness and also social awareness. The E and the R of R ruler are expressing and regulating. And this is thinking about, all right, now, I'm feeling this way. Do I have the need to talk about it? that's expressing. And then the regulating is saying, is this emotion helping me with my goal at hand, or is it getting in the way?

If it's helping, what's my maintenance strategy? And if it's not, what's my strategy to shift the emotion to the best emotion to help me achieve my goals? How do you study that skill? Like, if people have it, if it's getting better, that kind of stuff. We have tools that we use to measure it.

So, for example, we built a tool for emotion perception showing different emotion states. And the test taker has to observe those facial expressions and make their best guess as to what that person would be feeling. Oh, wow. So that's, you know, a more objective, what we call ability or performance-based test. There's vocabulary tests. So if I were to ask you, what's the definition of anger? It is what covers sadness.

Well, sadness is a different emotion. I know. I don't know. It's frustration. It's an expression of frustration. That's another emotion. I don't know. Again, most people don't.

Yeah. Don't feel bad. Frustration is when we have goals that are blocked. Okay. Like, I can't get this to work. Anger is perceived injustice. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's like, wait a minute.

That is not fair. You lie to me. That's anger. Okay. And so that's a big piece of it. So we want to know, do people actually understand and can they label emotions accurately? Oh, fascinating. Okay.

What happens when you gone through the ruler, like, I recognize it. I understand why I'm feeling that way. I labeled it as frustration or disappointment. And then I expressed in a way that I didn't want to express. So how do I regulate the guilt, the aftermath? Well, expressing and regulating go together. When you're frustrated, of course, you can express, like, I'm going to tell you one more time. I can't take it anymore. That's expressing. Yeah. It just doesn't get you very far. So you have to think, okay, so what's my communication strategy to not deny my feelings, to express my feelings, but in a way that the other person will listen, and together we can achieve the desired outcome.

Okay. Part of the work is being a scientist around your own strategy use. So you have to, like, monitor and kind of do a self-assessment because self-awareness doesn't come without practice. And we need opportunities to check in. Am I being overly apologetic? Okay, is that working for me or not for me? Okay, not for me. All right. Change the model. Yeah. I like that you said you're a scientist because it makes me think of like the scientific method, right?

Like you do this experiment and then you look at the results and you're like, okay, next time. Correct. So, Mark, I want to go kind of big picture now. There's some cultural norms around men in the U.S. that, you know, men shouldn't show emotions, that they don't have feelings. So to me, it's really remarkable that you as a man are working in the space, creating Ruler, more recently creating this app to do emotional check-ins. Do you feel that being a man makes a difference in your work, like helping normalize talking about emotions? I think it is important. I think we need more male role models for the value of talking about emotion.

It's interesting you ask about this because I've been doing a lot of podcasts for my new book, and I've been on the male bro podcasts. And these dudes, they're not actually wanting to talk to me about their feeling. What they really are asking me is, how do they optimize emotion to achieve, you know, longevity and life success? How do they win? Yes. And if that's the way in, I'll take it. But I'm going to let you know.

By the time we get to the end, you're going to be talking about your feelings. this goes back to the mindset work that men in particular grew up, I have to be the provider, I've got to be the tough man. But what does that do? Well, let's look at the suicide rates. They're significantly higher for men than for women. Let's look at alcoholism. Let's look at other things that are the unhelpful ways of dealing with emotion. And you see a lot more men experiencing those things than women. And the truth is, whether it's a gay couple or a straight couple, people, I think, want a partner with whom they can be their true selves. And if you have a partner who can't deal with emotion, then you really can't have an authentic relationship. Because we need

people in our lives that are, as I call it, emotion allies that can be there with us and for us to help us work through the difficult situations. And there are, going to be good days and difficult days. So I'm in a relationship for 32 years. And there are days, I'm like, Mark, you're the director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence. Okay, well, who cares? I'm going for the jugular tonight. And then, of course, I wake up the next morning thinking, like, really, Mark? Was that really necessary? So we're going to make mistakes. And as I say, we have to give ourselves permission to feel, and we have to give ourselves permission to fail and repair to. Because if we weren't flawed, we wouldn't be human. Exactly. And we can make fewer mistakes. And we can make

fewer mistakes. That's a good goal. Yeah. Mark, thank you so much for talking with us today about emotions. Thank you. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend. It really helps our show out. And it might help your emotional regulation or your friends. This episode was produced by a Rue Nyer. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and Tyler Jones Check the Facts. The audio engineer was Patrick Murray. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you so much for listening to Shortwave. From end. PR.