Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 520: Can You Really Trust Your Feelings? | Lisa Feldman Barrett & John Dunne

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

A common idea in the west is that our feelings or emotions should be viewed with suspicion, superseded or overridden by rational thought, and that your mind is a battleground between emotions and rationality. But on the show today, guests Lisa Feldman Barrett and John Dunne are going to offer a very compelling science backed argument that disputes the notion that thinking and feeling are distinct. Furthermore, they argue that understanding how emotions are actually made can be a life or death matter. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University with appointments at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Barrett is among the top 1% most-cited scientists, having published over 270 peer-reviewed scientific papers.  She has written several books, including How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, and Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain. Her TED talk has been viewed more than 6.5 million times.John Dunne holds the Distinguished Chair in Contemplative Humanities at the Center for Healthy Minds of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work focuses on Buddhist philosophy and contemplative practice, especially in dialog with Cognitive Science and Psychology. He earned his PhD from Harvard. This is part two in a series we’re calling The Art and Science of Keeping Your Sh*t Together. In each episode we bring together a meditative adept or Buddhist scholar and a respected scientist. The idea is to give you the best of both worlds to arm you with both modern and ancient tools for regulating your emotions. In this episode we talk about:Lisa’s scientific definition of emotionsJohn’s Buddhist contention that emotions, as a category, do not exist in Buddhism The difference between suffering and discomfortWhat we can do to master our emotions including understanding what Lisa terms as our “body budget” Becoming more emotionally intelligentMastering our feelings in the momentWhether or not pain is an emotion and how it worksHow and why to be present in the here and nowThe upside of unpleasant feelingsFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/lisa-feldman-barrett-john-dunne-520See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang greetings from Darum Sala India. I'm here in India to interview his holiness, the Dalai Lama, and that interview will become in your way at New Year's. Today though, we've got something very cool. And I don't actually know if it's silly or sublime that I'm about to invoke Whitney Houston

at the beginning of this rather serious and erudite episode, but here goes. Remember that song, How Will I Know, in which Whitney is confessing her love for a man and wondering how she can confirm whether he indeed loves her back? Occasionally throughout the song, as Whitney sings the words, how will I know her backup singers chime in

like a Greek chorus with the words, don't trust your feelings. I will not try to sing those words because I think we'd see a sharp drop off of listeners at that point, but anyway, don't trust your feelings. This is a very common idea in the West that our feelings or emotions should be viewed with suspicion

superseded or overridden by rational thought. But on the show today, you're going to hear a very compelling argument that this notion that thinking and feeling are distinct, that your mind is a battleground between emotions and rationality can really be disputed based on the scientific evidence. Moreover, you will hear it argued that understanding how emotions are actually made can be a life or death matter. My guests today are Lisa Feldman Barrett, who's making her second appearance on the show.

She's the university distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University with appointments at the Massachusetts General Hospital, my mother's alma mater, and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Barrett is among the top 1% most cited scientists having published over 270 peer-reviewed scientific papers. She's also written several books, including How Emotions Are Made,

and 7.5 lessons about the brain. My other guest is making his first appearance on the show. John D. Dunne holds the Distinguished Chair in Contemplative Humanities at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work focuses on Buddhist philosophy and contemplative practice, especially in dialogue with cognitive science and psychology. He earned his PhD from Harvard. This is part two in a series we're calling the art and science of keeping your shit together.

In each installment, we bring together an eminent scientist with a contemplative adept or scholar. And the goal is to give you the best of both worlds when it comes to handling these mysterious forces, aka emotions that govern so much of our lives. In this conversation, we talked about Lisa's scientific definition of emotions. John's Buddhist contention that emotions as a category don't really exist. The difference between suffering and discomfort, what we can do to master our emotions, including understanding our body budget, that's Lisa's term, and it's super interesting as she will explain, becoming more emotionally intelligent, and mastering our feelings in the moment.

We also talk about whether or not pain is in emotion and how it works, how and why to be present in the here and now, and the upside of unpleasant feelings. Okay, we'll get started with Lisa Feldman Barrett and John Dunn right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier

instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay. On with the show.

Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from, MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. What's up? What's up? Lisa Feldman Barrett and John Dunn, welcome to the show.

Happy to be here. Thank you. And Lisa's case, it's welcome back, John, you're a first time flyer. Happy to be here. Yeah, well I'm happy to have you here. So this is a bit of an unusual format for us, and I'm really excited to give this a try.

We're talking about these mysterious forces that govern so much of our lives emotions. So let me start with a really foundational question, and Lisa, I'll send it to you and then let John weigh in with his view after. Here's the foundational question. What are emotions and what aren't they? Well, the kind of classical view in the West is that emotions are these obligatory responses that you have, you know, that your brain born, your brain comes pre-wired with

circuits for anger, sadness, fear, you know, a handful of emotions, and they get triggered by something in the world. And then there's this obligatory response that you have. So your face moves in a particular way, your body changes in a particular way, right? So you see a snake, it triggers your fear circuit, you widen your eyes, you gasp, you feel terror, you might freeze or you might try to run away, your heart races. You know, there's this pattern of physical changes. That's the idea.

And that everybody in the world shares the same circuits, the same reactions, so they're universal. You might share them with other animals because maybe they're universal. You might share them with other animals because maybe they're ancient circuits in some very deep ancient part of your brain. And they're really indivisible, meaning they're really these like kind of basic unitary things. And the research coming from many, many, many different scientific perspectives suggests that that's a fiction. And that instead, you know, your brain is constantly trying to make sense of sense data from

the world and from your own body. So the sights and sounds and smells and so on. In the world and the tugs and gushes and aches and so on in your own body. And your brain knits them together using your past experience. So your brain is constantly trying to figure out well, what do the sense data in your body mean in relation to the situation that you're in? And it's the sense data in your body mean in relation to the situation

that you're in and it's using your knowledge, your past experience in order to knit them together into every waking moment of your life and some of those moments or emotions? So my brain is always scanning the environment internally and externally and notices that my uncle is doing that thing where he choose loudly at the table again. And I can notice that my body is starting to have some unpleasant tingling in my chest. And maybe my forehead feels a little heavy,

and the brain computes that at his anger, but there is no essential nugget of anger somewhere. Yeah, I might make a couple of tiny little adjustments there because- Oh, shock, shock. I'm going to be directed. Oh my goodness. But wait, but wait, you know, Dan, my recollection is I gave you an A last time when you asked me for a grade which I thought was very unbuttist of you.

But yeah, no, I mean, the thing is that there's an internal dynamic in your brain. It's trapped in a dark silent box called your skull. And so what would be happening is that your brain is in some state based on what just happened a moment ago. And then you'll hear a sound. And your brain will be like, what is that crunching sound? And your brain will be like, what is that crunching sound? That crunching sound could be many different things. Only one of which is your uncle making that weird noise. But based on the situation that you're in and the physical state of your body, your brain will make sense of that crunching noise as your uncle making that weird noise while he's eating and

Part of what your brain is constructing or is is using it's basically using past experience to try to make those guesses And that is what's creating anger anger is created as your brain knits together the meaning of these sense data Can we get better at constructing more as your brain knits together the meaning of these sense data. Can we get better at constructing more healthy and positive emotions rather than reverting to negative or difficult ones? Well, I'm sort of of the opinion that negative emotions are sometimes really useful. So I know we live in a world where, you know where being 10% happier is a good thing, but sometimes unpleasant feelings are useful feelings to have. So it's really about having flexibility in the emotions that you construct, and that

is you can take the same sense data and make sense of them in very different ways. And it's having the kind of repertoire, like a larger repertoire, to make sense of the sense data in a really flexible way in a specific situation. So for example, when you're feeling very jittery, we sort of automatically construct anxiety out of that. But that jittery feeling could be determination, like your brain preparing your body for a big effort, like something that you're going to try that requires a lot of energy or effort on your part, it could be anticipation, or it could just be uncertainty, like you're uncertain about something.

And the emotion that you construct, it's not just academic, what your brain is doing is it's preparing itself to do different things, depending on how it's making sense of those sense data. So if you constructed an instance of humor at your uncle's funny sounds, that would lead you to act in a different way than if you constructed irritation or even curiosity you might construct, right? So it's really all about prescriptions for action in specific situations. Yeah, we're going to pivot pretty hard away from the academic and into the super practical soon, but let's just stay for a beat or two on the academic or theoretical conceptual level. John, on the academic or theoretical conceptual level. John, we just heard an eminent research science

just talk about the modern scientific view on emotions. From your standpoint, how do you think about emotion? Well, if I put my Buddhist hat on, as it were, like one of those nice Tibetan hats, then I don't think about emotions at all because there isn't any word for that in classical Tibetan texts. And I also work as a translator and I've often struggled to convey what the emotions are exactly. So what that tells you is that actually as a category, emotions

do not exist in Buddhism, in classical Buddhist texts. And interestingly, therefore, because of the tremendous influence of Buddhism on Tibetan culture, you don't actually have a word in Tibetan culture either. That's the category of emotions. But if we set that issue aside for a moment and think about the kinds of things that we call emotions, like anger and so on, one way of thinking about this that applies across the board in different theoretical accounts in Buddhism is that emotions are in a sense not about what we are experiencing, but how we are experiencing. So for example, while you're hearing, you know, Uncle George chewing, you're aware of that sound. You're consciously aware of that sound.

You're attending to that sound. Your attention is on the sound. And that sound is being presented to you in a kind of frame. In other words, there's a context, you could say, in which that sound is being presented to you. And we hear we might even say a feeling, and in fact, this would then connect to the concept of a Vey de Nga or a sensation.

So like, it feels good or it feels bad, as the sound is coming in. In other words, along with the experience, there is what we can call in Western terms that affective frame that is presenting whatever content that is in a particular way. The way we interpret something is going to be caught up in what the context is, what we want to do, especially what's called in Sanskrit, it's called hau, but dea, which means

basically what you want to get and what you want to avoid. And so when we interpret our experience in terms of emotions, when we do that consciously and we say, I'm angry, as Lisa said, that implies a particular kind of behavior. It is pointing us to a particular kind of goal, a way of dealing with the situation. Your brain's most important job is not thinking or feeling or even seeing. It's regulating the systems of your body, keeping them coordinated and balanced in the service of your actions. Now we don't experience our lives that way.

We don't experience every hug we get, every insult we bear. I'm not experiencing consciously this conversation as having anything to do with my brain's regulation of my heart and my lungs and my metabolism, but actually that is what's going on under the hood. Your brain is constantly attempting to, in the most metabolically efficient way, coordinate the systems of the body and plan for the next action. And it's doing that by making guesses about what sense data mean for the purposes of the next action. We have a bunch of tasks all the time. So if we hear a loud sound, for example, suddenly we're going to pay attention to that sound. Why

do we do that? Because we have my old friend, David Meyer, used to call the task of life, like basically survival. And the loud sound is very relevant to us. We're going to pay attention to that. So we're constantly sort of walking around trying to make sense of our environment and at a certain baseline level, you could say, we're just trying to basically like make our way in some soda. Get the good stuff in the world of suffering and avoid the bad

stuff in the world of suffering. And on top of it, our whole conceptual system is really devolved, you know, comically, just to do that. I mean, that's what concepts are for in the end. Get the good stuff, avoid the bad stuff, and that's about it. Of course, what the Buddhists are going to say is that's, you know, if you want to be a Somsarak survivor, just have a little less suffering, then that's one option. But they are in some ways trying to, when this model is presented, the idea is that we're going to try to not get stuck in this survivalist mode, where it's all about just getting the good stuff and avoiding the bad stuff. You brought me to actually kind of where I was hoping to get reasonably early in this conversation. This question may sound a little flip, but I don't mean

it in a flippant way. So what? I provoked you to talk about what emotions are and what they aren't, and that's a bit of an academic discussion. But what does any of it have to do with how we do our lives? Why does it matter that things work this way? Why does it matter that you know that things work this way? Why does it matter that you have flexibility? And here's the answer because there's a difference between unpleasantness or discomfort and suffering, suffering in the Buddhist sense. Suffering in the Buddhist sense is physically bad

for you. It's not just that it's unpleasant. It's actually physically bad for you over the long run, meaning that you'll have chronic stress. But what is stress? Stress is literally your brain preparing your body for a big metabolic outlay it's expecting. And if you do that over and over and over again, and the big negative thing never comes, so you prepared needlessly, or you don't replenish what you spend by not sleeping enough, not drinking enough, not eating healthfully and so on. You develop a metabolic vulnerability that over the long term results in increased likelihood

of any metabolic disease, diabetes, heart disease, some cancers, depression, anxiety. So it matters. It matters to avoid suffering. And there's a difference between suffering and discomfort. Discomfort is something feels unpleasant. Like I had back surgery last year. Okay, there was a lot of discomfort there. But suffering adds something to discomfort.

It's like discomfort plus it's my fault. This says something about me as a person. I have to prove to myself that I'm not bad or I have to prove to myself that I'm worthy or shooting the second arrow. Yeah. One way, for example, there's a very, very active research program showing that when you teach people to deconstruct pain into the discomfort part, the feeling, the physical discomfort separately from the affect, the kind of like, I feel like I'm a bad person part, the suffering part. So you remove the suffering and all you focus on is discomfort. You can reduce people's opioid dependence.

So constructing emotions that are not well coordinated with your culture or with the most effective that you can be in a particular situation is physically potentially harmful for you over the long run. But also there are costs. Sometimes people's lives are at stake. For example, if a physician perceives a person's symptoms in the wrong way, you will not get the treatment you need.

And this is an explanation for why women die more frequently than men in emergency rooms after the age of 65 because they go in complaining of a set of symptoms that they and the emergency room doctor construct as anxiety. And actually, they have the beginnings of a heart attack. And the beginnings of a heart attack are not always easy to tell with tests. So for example, our colleague Jim Cohn is a neuroscientist and he has on his podcast Circle of Willis, he tells this story about how he almost died from a heart attack. And he basically had these physical sensations that he went to the doctor, you know, his chest was tight. And, you know, he was experiencing himself as anxious. And he went to the doctor,

they did a bunch of tests, they couldn't find anything wrong with him, but the anxiety, I'm putting in air quotes, the anxiety was getting worse and worse and worse. He had shortness of breath, he had tightness at his chest, he was having a lot of discomfort, and he one afternoon decided to lie down and take a nap. And as he's lying down, he said to me, I heard your voice in my head.

I had been on his podcast podcast and we had been talking about how emotions are made. And I was telling him the example of how women die after being in emergency rooms because they're sent home instead of being kept in the emergency room and then they go home and they die of a heart attack. And then I personally know three people whose mothers died this way. I mean, in addition to what's in the literature, and so he got up and he dragged himself to the emergency room and he said, you know, I know they're not gonna find anything.

I know that this is just anxiety, but I'm just gonna check it out because of what you said. So he goes to the emergency room, they check him out, they can't find anything wrong with him. And at that point, if he were a woman, they would have sent him home. But he's a man, and he said, but the pain is getting worse. The anxiety is getting worse. Something's wrong.

And they said, okay, just wait here. We'll go get the cardiologist. In walks the cardiologist. In walks the cardiologist, and in that moment, Jim has a heart attack that colloquially is called a widow maker. He had a massive heart attack right in the room. They had to actually do a procedure on him quickly without anesthesia to save his life, which they did.

But he would have died. I can give you other examples. There are examples of people losing their freedom or their lives in the courtroom. There are examples of people being denied opportunities in life because the assumption is in the classical view of emotion, that an emotion is out there, it's in your body, it's in your brain, and you, it's an objective thing, and we detect it. So I can look at your face, Dan, or look at, listen to your voice, John, and I can detect emotion in you. Like I'm reading emotion in your movements, and in the sound of your voice and so on. And that

gives us a false sense of confidence about our own perceptions rather than the idea that perceptions are constructed. They're just guesses about what's voices and the movement of faces mean. No, it gives us this really very, very strong set of confident feelings that we're right as John was saying before, and that can

determine the outcomes of people's lives in ways that are really unfortunate, where people can lose their freedom, they can lose their, literally lose their lives, because people use the wrong ideas about how emotions work, how emotions are made, and how they function. After the break, Lisa and John discussed some key strategies for doing emotions better, including understanding our body budget, which Lisa will explain and becoming more emotionally intelligent. We'll also have a fascinating discussion about physical pain after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai.

And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans form the free Brittany movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship,

Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other, and it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondering app. I think it would make sense to dive more deeply into how we can work with our emotions, having set the table as we've done. And as a framework, I'd like to use Lisa's advice from a chapter you wrote, Lisa, called Mastering Your Emotions. And the first pillar of the first of four pillars from that chapter has to

do with a body budget. Can you define that and talk about what a body budget has to do with keeping our shit together? Sure. So, earlier I said that, you know, a brain's most important job is not thinking and feeling. It's basically coordinating and managing the systems of your body. And from an evolutionary standpoint and from a sort of a metabolic standpoint, that is correct. The technical term for managing your body is allostasis.

And it means to predict or to anticipate the needs of the body and attempt to meet those needs before they arise. And so you have to anticipate the needs of the body and attempt to meet those needs before they arise. So you have to keep the whole drama inside your body going very, very efficiently. Because you've got millions, trillions of cells, and they all need oxygen and glucose and various things to keep you alive and well. Your brain is the coordinator of all of those systems. So the metaphor, it's a metaphor for allostasis for your brain's predictive regulation of your body is body

budgeting. And so instead of budgeting money, it's budgeting glucose and salt and oxygen and all the nutrients that keep you alive and well. And you can think about spending those nutrients the way you would spend a budget. So, for example, what's expensive? Well, learning something new is expensive, persistent uncertainty, like I don't know, in the, you know, a COVID pandemic. That's really expensive. Exercise is really expensive. So, you know, you can think about spending your resources. And you can also think about making deposits into your body budget, replenishing those resources. So drinking, water, sleeping, eating healthfully, you can think about getting a savings, right? So that's where other people partly come into play, it turns out that we're not just managing our own body budgets. My brain doesn't just manage my body budget. My brain is also making contributions to other people's body budgets.

I can make withdrawals. I can be like a tax, right? I could also be like a sale. Like I could make things easier for someone, make it cost less for their brain to do what they need to do. And in that way, you know, help,, help, make a deposit as it were. It's the metaphor for the metabolic underpinning of all the things we talk about psychologically. Learning new things, stress.

So stress is a big withdrawal from your body budget. Chronic stress is continuous withdrawal with no deposits to make up the deficit. And over time, you have this increasing deficit until your bankrupt. And that's depression is a bankrupt body budget. John, any thoughts on this from a contemplative standpoint? Well, body budgets aren't really a big thing in Buddhism,

actually. What I would say is't really a big thing in Buddhism, actually. What I would say is that they're first of all, part of what is important here, actually, from a Buddhist standpoint. And this kind of goes back to what Lisa was saying about our friend Jim's heart attack, is that to the degree that conscious experience does play a role in that body budgeting,

because we are gonna make choices, right? What we're gonna eat, are we gonna do this exercise or not? Or we're also gonna notice things, like, am I sitting here, ruminating about the pandemic in my uncertainty, whatever it may be. And so part of what's really key there is a kind of awareness that is granular.

In other words, the minute we categorize things, we kind of think, oh, no, I know what that is. And I don't really have to pay attention to it anymore. If it's an adequate category for my purposes, I think, then, you know, I'm done. It's like, oh, you know, that's hunger or that's anxiety. And that's anxiety again. Okay, that's how this works. I know the game of anxiety. And I can just play that out now because I know how it works. And that's because once we categorize in a sense, we sort of stop paying attention to what's actually going on. We could get caught up in the category itself and what that category tells us to do or how we should behave or how we are behaving. And the invitation from the Buddhist standpoint is to, hey, you know,

even noticing as this categorization is happening, saying, well, is that all there is to it? Let's go to the next level, so to speak, of our experience and see if there's something more than what that category is telling us. We apply a category, and we just think we're in that story. Instead of actually drilling down into experience itself and asking, okay, well, I can call it irritation. What is that? Is this the same as every other moment of irritation that I've ever had? And the claim would be, of course, as you start to do that, you begin to realize, no, this is not. This is a unique event in this moment.

Whatever's happening to me right now has never happened before and will never happen again. Now, the point is, I can't actually do anything, at least as an ordinary person, unless I do categorize. So it's not like we're just going to stop thinking. But the minute we start to do that, we then open up a whole new set of possibilities about how we interpret what's happening, because we're not just in a sense running on an automatic pilot. We're actually getting more granular, getting down into the finer features of our experience. And the thing that's key here, I think, is then what emotions do is they add stuff. They exaggerate the qualities.

So that sound of chewing, there's never been anything more annoying than that sound that you're hearing right now. You could not ever be anything more annoying. And therefore, it must be destroyed, you know, whatever, you know, and so because part of that is accusation, what it does is it really motivates behavior and it justifies behavior. So the invitation is not just to pay more attention to experience, but also to notice how we are in a sense kind of drawn into the exaggerations that our emotions invite, that they create for us. And I think pain is probably the best or maybe the most accessible example of this. Pain is considered by the scientific bodies that govern scientific investigation of pain as an

emotion. It's considered an emotion. So when you experience pain to you the way it feels is like you know there's some tissue damage or something wrong with your body, and you're perceiving this objective thing, this objective signal in your body, which is pain. Or when you see an apple, right? You're objectively observing this objective object in the world, which is separate from you, an apple. But painters know that if you want to paint an object, render a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional canvas,

you don't try to paint the object, you deconstruct the object into pieces of light, into little pieces of light, and you paint the little pieces of light on the canvas. And when you do that, you paint the little piece of light, you get what looks like a reasonable looking three-dimensional apple on a two-dimensional canvas. But you can do the same thing with your experience of pain.

The research shows that this is true, but I'm also telling you, for my own personal experience, just having had open backser, Jerry, year ago, that it is possible to instead of distracting yourself from the discomfort of the pain, you focus right in on the discomfort and you try to pick it apart. You try to focus in on it and you try to sort of pull it apart into different sensations. And if you do that, you can actually, surprisingly, reduce the intensity. Because what you're doing is you're trying to separate the signals of discomfort, which are called no-susceptive signals, from the panic feeling or the real suffering that you are constructing with those signals.

Basically your brain, as it makes meaning of the no-susceptive input that's causing the discomfort, it's also creating features that aren't really in those signals, like how much longer is this going to go on for? Why is this happening to me? I'm not sure that I can take this anymore. So instead, you sort of try to sweep those things away and be

curious about the sensations. And I know that sounds crazy, but it's just as crazy as seeing an apple and trying to unsee it to see pieces of light and then paint pieces of light on a canvas. It's really very, very similar. It's just really hard to do and it requires a lot of training to try to unsee or to try to experience an emotion and pick it into pieces so that it's more manageable for you to deal with. So just to say what you're describing does not sound crazy to me at all, these are just having done some meditation and worked with no small amount of physical discovery on the cushion. But let's move to the second of the four pillars in the chapter you

wrote called mastering your emotions. The second is become more emotionally intelligent. Can you say more about that? Sure. So the traditional view of emotional intelligence, you know, is that you learn to recognize emotions better in an objective way. And then you also learn to bring rationality to your emotions. So the idea is rooted in this very, very ancient Western idea that thinking and feeling are completely separate things. And your brain or your mind is a battleground between emotions on the one hand and rationality on the other and rationality has to master your emotions for you to be an effective person. And if your rationality doesn't master your emotions, either you didn't try hard enough

in which case you're a bad person or maybe you're culpable of harm that you've caused to people or you can't in which case you're mentally ill. But the science suggests something very different. The science suggests that emotions are not objective, they're not like separate from any person, they are constructed by people. And so that means that you can learn to construct your experiences in a much more granular fashion, meaning you can tailor them more specifically to the situation that you're in. So sometimes in anger, for example, your heart rate will go up and sometimes it will go down and sometimes it will stay the same.

It all depends on what you're trying to achieve in anger. So sometimes when you're angry, you're trying to remove an obstacle in your path. Sometimes when you're angry, you're trying to win a competition. Sometimes when you're angry, you're trying to bond with other people who are also angry about the same thing as you're angry about. Sometimes an anger, your goal is to punish somebody who has violated a norm or maybe harmed you or someone you care about. Right, there are all these different goals that you can have in anger and what you do physically, your actions will be different. And therefore, the internal state of your body will be different. The internal state of your body is very yoked to the actions that you're going to take, regardless of what emotion category you're talking about.

So the idea is that if you learn more emotion words, even emotion concepts that come from other cultures that we don't have in English, if you expose yourself to people who are different from you and you can learn something about the concepts that govern their experience. The more you practice, the more flexibility you'll have, and that's emotionally intelligent, because it lets you tailor your experience and your actions more to specific situations. And similarly, you learn that a facial movement or a vocal change doesn't speak for itself when it comes to emotion, right? That people who turns out in urban settings, scowl about 30% of the time when they're angry, that means that 70% of the time they're not scowling when they're angry.

They're doing something else with their face that's meaningful. And people also scowl when they're not angry. They scowl when someone tells them a bad joke. They scowl when they have gas. They scowl when they're concentrating really hard. Like my husband, when he's concentrating really hard, makes a full facial scowl, which is not the prototype of an anger expression. It's the stereotype, the Western stereotype.

It's a stereotype because most people don't scout. When is the last time you saw someone win an Academy Award for scowling in anger? It just doesn't happen. That's not how, right? It's unsuddle and not realistic. So being emotionally intelligent also means that you understand that your brain is making a guess about what somebody else is feeling based on their body posture, that you understand that your brain is making a guess about What somebody else is feeling based on their body posture based on their facial movements based on the sound of their voice And that allows you to dissolve the false confidence you have that you are Reading somebody else's interstate, you know that you have some privileged

thing, somebody else's interstate, you know, that you have some privileged access to their interstate by virtue of just what their faces look like or what they sound like, which you don't. And so that's a way to improve your emotional life. It's to be curious to try to broaden your vocabulary of emotion concepts so that you can learn to be more flexible in how you construct your experiences. And again, I will say this all sounds very deliberate and it is deliberate at first. Just like driving a car is deliberate or learning any skill is deliberate. I think if it is like an investment, really, and a healthier you in the future, right? Like exercise. like an investment really, and a healthier you in the future, right? Like exercise.

You can do this on the cushion, actually, for sure. I wanted to add, there's another kind of, maybe emotional intelligence or maybe even emotional wisdom, which is another feature of this that you're kind of pointing to, Lisa, but that is really important in the style of Buddhist practice that I'm most familiar with. And that is also seeing what emotions really are, like what is their true nature.

And as a practice, there's a well-known practice in this context that Matthew Ricard actually, I think, has written about, certainly it's translated in his book on Shubkhar. And what one does is deliberately sit on the cushion and then bring up, you know, informal meditation and you bring up some really intensely emotional memory. And if we go back to the chewing, that might not be adequate. But you know, if something that really gets you going and allow that emotion,

what we would call an emotion and even the categorization of it, like, let the categorization happen, like, oh, I'm angry. And feel the anger, like, get angry. And then look at the anger itself and say, what is it? What is this? Truly. What this starts to give us some insight into is actually, what is the nature of experience itself? Because those in very intense states of experience actually, you know They're intense and so I think you could say an aspect of emotional intelligence is actually the capacity to sort of see through What the emotion seems to be what it feels like and To see it as just an expression of consciousness itself.

Coming up strategies for mastering your feelings in the moment, the importance of being present and the many, many options we have for making sense of unpleasant feelings. Keep it here. So just in our remaining time here, the goal was to run through the four aspects of mastering your emotion that Lisa writes about. We covered the first body budget, the second becoming more emotionally intelligent.

I think within that, Lisa also talked about applying emotional intelligence to people around you, which isn't another of the pillars. So that leaves us this one. And let's say if we can cover it in our remaining minutes, which is mastering feelings in the moment. What do you mean by that, Lisa? Well, your brain is always regulating your body. Your body is always sending sense data back to your brain.

And you don't experience every sensory change that's occurring in your body due to your brain. And you don't experience every sensory change that's occurring in your body due to body budgeting. You don't experience every tug in your chest, every squish of cortisol, every, you know, like you don't experience those things directly. Your brain makes them available to you as a summary, feeling pleasant, feeling unpleasant, feeling worked up, feeling calm.

This is what scientists call affect. We've used that word or you might think of it as mood. These are features of consciousness. Your brain is always regulating your body. Your body is always sending sense data to your brain. You're always experiencing affective features of consciousness. That's not an emotion. We make emotions when those features, those affective

features are really intense often, but those are always with us. And they're really driven by our brain's efforts to regulate the body. And so if you change what you're paying attention to, if your brain alters what it's attending to, that will change its regulatory efforts, which will provide you with an opportunity to feel something different effectively. So one way to manage feelings in the moment, if you're feeling really unpleasant because you're running a body budgeting deficit, is to actually move your body. That provides different sense data to your brain, and that will change your affective feelings.

So go for a walk. If you physically change your context, that will change your affective feelings and how your brain makes sense of them. But sometimes we can't get up and take a walk. Like right now, for example, I can't stand up and take a walk. I'm in the middle of doing something. But then what I can do is I can be mindful. I can figuratively change my context by paying attention to different features of the world. Or I can try to focus

on my stomach or my back pressing against the chair or what have you. So when you're mindful of features that are there available to you, but you're not attending to them. But if you do attend to them, that's like changing your context, really. It's like changing your context in a metaphorical way. And that will also change your experience in the moment. It changes the prior experiences that your brain reassembles, that is, remembers, not consciously remembers, but that is affecting the body budgeting efforts, which you experience as the simple affective feelings.

And that, I think, also, there's a sort of Buddhist spin on this that you may or may not agree with Lisa, but when we conceptualize and say, oh, this is this is anger or this is anxiety or this is even pain, we're doing that because we want to do something about it. And this is especially true of what we call negative emotions. I'm pleasant emotions. You know, it feels bad and that feeling bad is telling you, oh, you got to do something different. You got to change this. You got to fix it. Fix it. Get do something. That means that you're not really in the present moment then. You're actually in the future. Also, probably in the past.

In other words, conceptualization involves what we call mental time travel. Yeah, this is what the neuroscientist Gerald Edelman called the remembered present. Yes, because he or you're not in a sense, you're not even in the present. You're in the past anticipating the future. And so also attending to what's happening right now can then lesson or even sometimes suspend that whole conceptualization process. So just be here now, not in the past, not in the future. There's nothing that needs to be done.

There's nothing that needs to be fixed. Just be here now. That itself can also be a way of letting go of that interpretation that maybe is driving us crazy. And I think there's another aspect here that is worth mentioning, which we skirted around and we came close to, but it's very, very important, I think, to realize about mastering your emotions in the moment. And that is that feeling unpleasant doesn't necessarily mean that something is wrong in the world or with you. So you know, John, you were talking about getting rid of the bad stuff, but unpleasant

affect that is feeling unpleasant in the moment can just mean that you're doing something really hard. It doesn't, I mean, suffering is bad from a Buddhist standpoint, but also from a neuroscience standpoint. But unpleasant affect, like discomfort, could mean that you're doing something hard. When you exercise after you're in it for some number of minutes, for some people, it's 20, 30 minutes for me, it might be 10 minutes.

You start to feel unpleasant. That doesn't mean that you should stop. It doesn't mean that something's wrong. It means that you might need to drink some water. It means that you might need to take a deep breath, but you can push through it. I love the saying from the US Marines, pain is weakness leaving the body.

It can be a cue that you're doing something really hard and that you have to replenish after the fact. Learning something new can be unpleasant, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it. Being curious, foraging for new information to plant the seeds of a better, healthier you in the future, a 10% happier person in the future, that can also feel unpleasant in the moment. So what you're doing in the moment is you're attempting to understand what those

feelings signify. And that's another way of managing your emotions in the moment, in a sense, because what you're doing there is you're not allowing yourself to construct anger or anxiety or, you know, any of these other sort of narratives or stories about the unpleasant discomfort that you're feeling that will lead to longer-term suffering. John and Lisa, thank you very much for coming on. We covered a lot of territory, enormous amount of useful information, and also just theoretically interesting discussion about concepts that are really urgently related to our moment-to-moment lives. So thank you both. Oh, you're very welcome. Thank you. Thanks again to John and Lisa. Thanks as well to everybody who works so hard on this show.

10% happier is produced by DJ Kashmir, Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justin Davy and Lauren Smith. Our senior producer is Marissa Schneiderman. Kimi Regler is our managing producer and our executive producer is Jen Poient, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.

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