Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Best of the Archives: How Your Emotions Are Made | Lisa Feldman Barrett

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is at the forefront of understanding human emotions: what they are, why humans evolved to have them, how they’re different from feelings, and what science says about how to manage them. She is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. She’s written several books, including How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. This episode explores how we can “deconstruct” our own emotions, and the overlap between her research findings and Buddhism.Just a note: This episode is a rerun from earlier this year, and the interview was recorded in March 2021. There are some references to COVID that might seem a little out of date, but the content remains relevant. Subscribe by December 1 to get 40% off a Ten Percent Happier subscription! Click here for your discount.See 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, hey, everybody. We're doing a rerun today. This is one of my favorite conversations of 2021. And in case you missed it, I thought you might want to hear it. I've often joked that as a man who is reasonably far along on the barbarian spectrum,

emotions have not always been the most appetizing subject for conversation. However, as I've learned the hard way, and repeatedly, emotions are there, whether you want to look at them or not, and if you choose the path of denial or compartmentalization, you will inevitably be owned by those neglected and overlooked

emotions. But what are emotions anyway? What's the difference between emotions and feelings? Why did we evolve to have emotions in the first place? And what does science say about how we can manage emotions skillfully rather than being yanked around by them all the time? My guess today in this rerun is at the forefront of understanding all of these questions

from a scientific standpoint. She is Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a university distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where my mom used to work, shout out to the MGH. Dr. Barrett has written several books, including How Emotions Are Made,

The Secret Life of the Brain, and seven and a half lessons about the brain. And in this conversation, we talk about how we can deconstruct that's her term, our own emotions. And we talk about the overlap between her research findings and Buddhism. As mentioned, this is a rerun. We first recorded it in March.

So you may hear some COVID references that feel just a tiny bit out of date, but the content itself is as relevant as ever. It is, as we say in the news business, evergreen. Before we get to Lisa, one item of business. If you're a regular listener to this podcast, you may have noticed that we've had a lot going on Over on the 10% happier app this fall from meditation challenges to the brand new 20% happier podcast There's never been a better time to join our community of meditators on the app to make sure you have a chance to try it out We're offering 10% happier subscriptions at a 40% discount until December 1st offering 10% happier subscriptions at a 40% discount until December 1st. We don't do discounts of this size all the time and of course nothing is permanent. So get this deal before it ends by going to 10% .com slash 40 that's 10% one word all spelled out .com slash 40 for 40% off your subscription.

We'll get started with Lisa Feldman Barrett 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. I'm a 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 time for my space? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast.

Lisa Feldman-Barrot, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. My pleasure. Let's just start with a little background. I'm curious how did you get interested in emotions? Uh-oh, she's laughing already. Is that a roofal laugh? A little bit. A little bit.

How did I get interested in emotions? I suppose I got interested in emotions because it was a perplexing problem. When I was in graduate school, I was doing research. I had my own little replication crisis when I was in graduate school and that I was in graduate school, I was doing research. I had my own little replication crisis when I was in graduate school, in that I was attempting to replicate published research findings, which is what you do as a graduate student at first. Before you conduct your own experiments,

you try to replicate experiments that have already been published peer reviewed and so on. And I wasn't able to replicate eight experiments in a row, which led me to think that maybe I was trying to have the wrong career. And there wasn't really cut out for science. But when I looked closely at all of the evidence, what I discovered is that the measures of emotion weren't functioning the way that they should have been functioning based on everything that I had read. And so the more I dug into it, the more I realized there were these really

interesting paradoxes in the emotion research literature that no one was paying very much attention to, and I found it super intriguing. but I thought really optimistically that I would just take a couple of months away from my main dissertation topic and kind of solve this emotion, you know, this emotion measurement problem, which is how I was thinking about it. And then I would get back to my main topic of my dissertation and then, you know, fast forward almost 30 years. And here we are. So. So the interest in emotions grew not out of some personal fascination they often say, research is me search. It sounds like it was quite a technical thing.

I, I will also trained as a therapist. And one of the things that I am really good at is detecting what people tell themselves isn't necessarily what the evidence from their own life indicates. So when there's a disconnect between what people tell themselves isn't necessarily what the evidence from their own life indicates. So when there's a disconnect between what people believe and what the evidence shows in their own life, I'm really always drawn to that. As a therapist, I was always drawn to it. As a person in my own life, I'm drawn to it. And as a scientist, I'm drawn to it. So really what happened was in the emotion literature, scientists were writing about emotion in a particular way, but then when you actually dug into the data,

it didn't match what the scientists were saying. And I found this to be really fascinating. And also, really, like perplexing is a scientific problem that there were these massive questions that were kind of unanswered that other people didn't even seem to notice for questions and this to me just seemed completely fascinating and I just was hooked. What were the questions that people were overlooking? Well, for example, pick up any introductory textbook in psychology or you pick up many, many popular books about emotion, many, many research papers, and it will tell you that every emotion has its own signature in the body, right?

That anger and fear and sadness and so on can be distinguished from one another by just looking at people's heart rates and they're, how much they're sweating and, you know, their respiration patterns and so on and that really that this Idea that each emotion category has its own fingerprint Comes from William James the great William James who is considered one of the founders of American psychology Well, when you go and you read William James He didn't say that in fact. He said the exact opposite of that. I Mean literally the exact opposite.

He said, there's no physical entity for anger. Anger can be many things. It can feel like many things. Your face can do many things. Your heart will do many things. So I mean, think about it, Dan, when you're angry, how often do you give that stereotypic scowl that's supposed to be the universal expression of anger. Do you scowl frequently when you're angry?

Well, I get angry a lot. That's one of my big emotional go-to's. Well, I remember from your book, but I'm just saying, do you, when you think about it, when you're angry, do you? Sometimes, but often I pretend it's not there and just revert to passive aggressive behaviors. Do you ever scowl when you're not angry? I think my resting face is pretty close to a scowl, so yes. Okay, so interestingly, the evidence shows that people scowl when they're angry about 30% of the time, which is more than chance,

and we'll get you a publication in a really good journal. But what that means is 70% of the time and we'll get you a publication in a really good journal. But what that means is 70% of the time people are not scowling when they're angry, they're doing something else that's meaningful with their face, and sometimes that might be smiling. Sometimes that might be crying or frowning. Sometimes that might be sitting silently and plotting the demise of their enemy.

And your heart rate or your blood pressure will go up or go down or stay the same in anger, depending on what physical action you're taking. So if you were looking at someone's face and their body and trying to predict whether they were angry or not, you would be wrong 70% of the time. And also, people scale when they're not angry. So my point is that not that what you do in anger is not reliable, but that you have many angers. You don't just have one. There's no entity there called anger.

You have a whole anger for you and for me, and for everybody else in the Western world, is a population of variable instances. And your brain is constructing anger in a particular situation for you to achieve a particular goal. And the expression of anger will be tailored to that goal. Sometimes anger is unpleasant, sometimes it's pleasant, sometimes anger is very high-resil, sometimes it's not. And so the idea that there's one set of features that defines anger in the face, in the body, in the brain, or what have you, is completely a myth. But if you were to

read most textbooks until recently, or most popular science books actually, you would be led to a very different story. And I found that really, really interesting. And it doesn't really matter whether you're looking, you're studying the voice or the face or the body or the brain, it's the same story over and over and over again. Verability is the norm. And that's just in Western cultures. That's actually just within a single person.

So the idea that there are these universal signatures is not the evolutionary story of emotion. There is an evolutionary story, but it's way more interesting and way more complicated and way more useful, actually. Can you tell us about it? The evolutionary story? Yeah, why do we have emotions? I was going to ask one of my questions was, what are emotions?

What's the difference between emotions and feelings? And why do we have them in the first place? Well, that's a really great question. So let's start with feelings first because it's so much easier for me to describe. So let's go all the way back in evolutionary time to the Edicarean period in the Earth's history when the Earth was populated with creatures that had no brains. These are really fascinating creatures and some of them are still alive today, because they are environment, they are niche, as it were, that's what it's called,

a niche, an ecological niche, hasn't changed very much, so they haven't changed very much. And these animals are interesting because they can move in sophisticated ways, but they have very few senses. They can't see, they have no eyes, no ears, no smell, very simple touch. Basically, if something like literally touches their skin, they're outside of their body, they would react to it.

They don't have eyes, they have an eye spot for light and dark. That's to regulate their circadian rhythm. And they don't have hearing, but they have one vestibular cell that lets them keep their bodies upright in the water, for example. But they can move, which means they have some kind of internal system

that keeps all the parts coordinated so that they can move under their own steam if they want to. And really what these animals do is they kind of plant themselves in the sand, like a living blade of grass, and they just kind of filter food until the food goes away, and then they eject themselves from the sand, and then they move themselves randomly to another spot where, probabilistically, there's just more food, and then they eject themselves from the sand and then they move themselves randomly to another spot where, probabilistically, there's just more food and then they plant themselves there. So they're kind of like these little worms, essentially, and they're not exactly worms

because they have little gill slits, but they're kind of like worms, either shaped like worms. But they have these internal coordination systems that help some move, like coordinate the parts of their body so they can move under their own steam. So when there's a looming darkness that happens really close to them or when something comes up and nudges them, that disrupts their internal coordination. So it's like they get a sense of the world for free. It's not a great sense because it doesn't tell them what's happening exactly and it doesn't tell them what to do about it exactly, but it just tells them, oh, something's going on out there that I need to care about because my internal coordination has been disrupted. And that means something outside in the world is happening. So if anything looms above it,

like a piece of shell or like a leaf or another creature, it doesn't really matter. The animal will react and move in a particular way, like an instinct kind of. So that's what it has, okay? But if you fast forward in evolutionary time, you see animals that have developed fairly large bodies. And because they have large bodies, now they have internal systems like a heart and lungs

and stuff like that, which has to be coordinated with each other, and they have a brain. Now they also have eyes. And so when they see something in a distance, if it disrupts their internal coordination, they don't know what it is, they just know it's important. If they've developed what's called a lateral line system to be able to sense things in the water because our field of touch actually evolved in the water as a distance sense. So they could feel a vibration and they won't necessarily know what caused the vibration, but they'll know, oh, something is disrupting

my internal coordination. That means something outside of me is important as happening and so on and so forth with all these distance senses. So now their environment has become not just this little shell around their body, but this like very large expanse by time because they can see at a distance and they can feel that some add is touch at a distance and our ability to hear comes from that lateral line system. So they can detect vibrations at a distance. And so many things at a distance can now disrupt their internal coordination system. So what do you feel that as?

You feel that as as affect as feeling. When your internal systems is disrupted, you feel that. You feel it as feeling pleasant, feeling unpleasant, feeling worked out, feeling calm. That's what you feel it as. So when you feel unpleasant, what does it mean? Well, it means something's wrong, but like what? Could be any number of things, really. So it's this really basic feeling that comes from this disruption of or synchrony of this internal set of systems that we have

in our bodies that have to be controlled. Now, why do we have a brain, you know, which I actually found to be really interesting question, like, why do we have a brain, which I actually found to be really interesting question? Like, why do we even have a brain? Because it's like a really expensive organ. So it's 20% of your metabolic budget. That's the most expensive organ that you have, Dan, is your brain. That three-pound blob of meat is like super, super expensive. So why do we have it?

And the answer is we have it because we have all these internal systems that have to be coordinated with each other. So, why do we have it? And the answer is we have it because we have all these internal systems that have to be coordinated with each other. So, the way I talk about this in my popular writing is to think about your brain as running a budget for your body. Your brain isn't budgeting money, it's budgeting salt and glucose and water and oxygen and so on, which are all the nutrients that are required to keep you alive and well. And your brain is budgeting for your body, kind of like running a supply chain in a way.

It has to make sure that the nutrients are where they need to be before they need to be there in order for the cells to use them so that you stay alive and well to perform your most important job, to pass your genes on to the next generation and make sure that generation lives to reproductive age. So regulating your body, the systems of your body is your brain's most important job and your body is constantly sending information back to your brain about how coordinated things are or how copacetic things are inside your body. And you feel that your brain makes that available to itself as these feelings of feeling pleasant, feeling unpleasant,

feeling worked up, feeling calm. These feelings are always with you, their properties of consciousness, they're always with you because your brain's always regulating the systems of your body and the body is always sending sense data back to the brain about its state. And you are always in a state of feeling, always. And sometimes, your brain has to make sense of the sense data that give rise to this feeling. So if you have a tug in your chest, what is it? Is it anxiety? Is it that you ate too much at dinner? Is it the beginnings of a heart attack?

I mean, what is that tug? Your brain has to make sense of what's going on inside your body in relation to what's going on around you in the world. And sometimes your brain makes sense of that orchestra of sensations as emotions. So let me see if I can restate this back. You just really so that I know that I got it. Feelings are like pretty simple in some way. They're the body or at least they evolved in a simple way.

Want this, don't want this. Safe, unsafe approach, run away or neutral. Emotions are what we evolved to layer on top of that, which are more complex reactions to the raw data of the Felix. Almost. I might make a couple of adjustments. So I would say, I got to see, I got to see from the professor there. That's fine. I'll take it. No, no, but maybe a beat, maybe a V-minus. No, I mean, what I would say is that your brain is always running a budget for

your body. So when I say it's running a budget for your body, what I mean by that is you can think about everything that you do in terms of deposits and withdrawals. Sleeping is a deposit. Eating is a deposit if you're eating healthfully. Exercising is a withdrawal because you're spending resources, but it's kind of like an investment because if once you replenish it,

you're actually gonna get something for what you've spent, you know, you get a healthier brain and a healthier body. Maybe you keep your memory a little longer, you know, working into act and stuff. You can think about learning something new as also an expense. It's an investment. It's like a workout for your brain, just like exercises. You can think about someone giving you a hug that you love as making things slightly cheaper for you

to do. You can think about someone who gives you a hug who you don't love and who you don't want touching you as actually making things slightly more expensive like you're paying a tax in a sense. And these little taxes can add up over time to a really big deficit.

So you're always having some state of feeling. The feeling actually just tells you that you're running a deficit, that there's some internal coordination which is off. It doesn't actually tell you what to do about it. It's not tied to action in any particular way. Even though creatures without brains have what we would call instinctual responses, the idea that humans have these simple instinctual reflexes and layered on top of that are these more complex emotions and layered on top of that is rationality or rational thought is that's also just a myth. The idea that

reflexes are these obligatory things that happen just like, you know, you see something or hear something and that triggers this automatic obligatory stereotype physical response like freeze or flee or what have you is also not exactly correct. Reflexes in a vertebrate are still very context driven. They're still modulated by the context.

And so what I would say is that what your brain is really doing is it has to guess at what the sense state of mean. Like when you hear a loud bang, what is that loud bang? Is that loud bang somebody slamming a door? Is that loud bang somebody dropped a box? Is that loud bang somebody back, their car back fired? Could it be a gun shot? I mean, that's actually a reasonable question if you live in the United States or in certain parts of the world. So, depending on what your brain believes, the meaning that it's making

out of that loud bang, that will dictate what the brain does, what it plans to do in order to keep you alive and well. That's always true, always true. Every waking moment of your life, this is true. Let me back up and say, where does the information come? Allow the brain to make meaning out of what that sound means. And the answer is it comes from your past experience. So your brain is using past experience to guess at what sense data means so that you can act in a way that will keep you safe. And what you experience about the world derives from that action plan. And that's true all the time.

It's just sometimes, whenever your brain is using past experiences of emotion to make that guess, then when it's doing is constituting an emotion in that moment. Which may or may not be appropriate. Well, appropriate may or may not be advantageous to you, right? So for example, this is an example I use a lot because I just think it's like,

I just one of my favorite examples that has real meaning. There's research behind it, but there's also real meaning there. You know, when things are uncertain or when there are multiple meanings that your brain could give to something, or when you're preparing for a big metabolic outlay, so you know, your brains preparing you to do something super hard, you have an increase in arousal. There are systems in your body that will increase arousal, there are systems in your body that will increase arousal. There are systems in your brain that will increase arousal.

You'll feel jittery. How do we usually make sense of that? We usually make sense of it as anxiety, sometimes fear. It's not a comfortable feeling, but you could make sense of it in other ways. When my daughter was 12 years old, she was a tiny little thing. But she was testing for a black belt in karate. With this 10th degree black belt, this guy is seriously a powerful guy. And she's testing amidst all these like big hulking adolescent boys, who she has to spar with.

Okay, and what does he say to her? He doesn't say calm down little honey. He says, Okay. And what does he say to her? He doesn't say calm down little honey. He says, get your butterflies flying in formation. And I was like, that's brilliant. And it turns out there's this whole line of research about people who have difficulty with test anxiety, who fail, not just fail tests, but they fail courses and they can't graduate. And that actually, a college graduation massively changes your earning potential over your lifetime. So we're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars over your lifetime. And if you learn not to reduce the arousal because you don't want to do that, you have

something hard you have to do. You have to do a test. But if you learn to make sense of it differently, instead of conjuring anxiety, you conjure determination, you can master those tests and you can pass those courses and you can change the trajectory of your entire life. Now, that may sound like Jedi mind tricks to you. If I wasn't a scientist, it might sound that way to me, but it isn't. And in fact, you can train your brain to make sense of your sensations very differently as emotions or sometimes deconstruct them into something that is not an emotion, but just is that simple feeling,

which is really, I mean, in a sense, what mindfulness meditation is attempting to do. Right. But I mean, the example I like to give is your audience, like our listeners can't hear me now, but I'll just show you, and hopefully they'll be able to simulate this. Like, if you pick up a glass of water, I'll jingle it so people can hear the ice. So you look at a glass of water. Now, to you, it so people can hear the ice. So you look at a glass of water. Now to you it looks like an object, a three-dimensional object. But let's say you

wanted to paint this on a canvas. When I tried to paint this on a canvas, I would look at this object and I would try to render this three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional canvas. And it would look like a pretty rendering of a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional canvas. But what a professional painter will do, an artist, will look at this object and deconstruct it into pieces of light. Like, oh, there's white, but there's blue, and there's a little green, and a little yellow, and gray, and then what the artist will do is we'll paint the pieces of light and poof you have a reasonable looking three-dimensional

object on a two-dimensional canvas unless you're me in which case it will still look f***ed. But the point is that what you've done is you've deconstructed the object and you've constructed it closer to what you might call the stream of experience. And mindful in this meditation is attempting to do something very similar to that, where you're attempting to not construct, not to grasp at perceptions and construct things out of them, but just to try to experience them in their most basic form, and one of the most basic forms is affect. So it would be, for example, waking up in the morning and feeling like crap, and not immediately trying to make sense of that as like, what happened yesterday with your spouse or what's going to happen today or no, it could just be you didn't get enough sleep. It could just be your dehydrated because it's the morning.

It could just be that maybe you're not a morning person and it's not your time of the circadian rhythm to feel a lot of energy. It could be that, you know, for example, throughout this whole COVID mess. A lot of times people would ask me how I'm feeling and I would say, my body budget is running a deficit today. And that's not just simple wordplay. That's me saying, well, I'm kind of feeling like crap today. But I'm not going to blow this up in making it meaningful psychologically in my life that would lead to me engaging in actions with people.

I'm not going to take this feeling as a sign that something is wrong with this relationship or something is wrong with not paying that bill or something is wrong with right. I'm just going to say, well, I'm running a body budget deficit. This is a really hard time. I'm paying a little extra tax. Bear with me today, because, you know, I'm not feeling quite at my best. And I think this is a very meaningful difference in how to architect your experience. Because you're not being yanked around by the sensations in your body and adding on top of it this whole story that can make everything worse. Yeah, I'm adding a different story. The different story is my brain is running a body budget and there are feelings that come from that body budget.

And my brain tries to make sense of those as emotions or perceptions or whatever to guide my action. And so the action that it's going to guide is that I'm going to go to sleep a little earlier tonight and I'm going to drink a little more. Maybe I might have a little more tea today than I might normally, because I need to use that caffeine to borrow a little energy from tomorrow, because I kind of really need it today.

Again, some kind of internal coordination thing is going on, right? I'm running a body budget deficit today. But what I'm not going to do is make sense of it as anger or as fear or as anxiety or as sadness, or as any of the other very easily unjustifiable emotions that would lead to different actions that I don't think are particularly productive in this circumstance.

But maybe it is one of those things. Maybe it is sadness that you've been told. No, it isn't. Well, there is no, maybe it really is because your brain is making it. I see. You know, so here's the thing. When you have a tug in your chest or there you have a tightness in your chest, you're at risk for a heart attack.

There's a real there there, okay? Because you really have a heart and your heart really does work in a particular way, okay? But when you feel a tightness in your chest and that tightness is caused by anxiety or I would say it's a sensation that you've made meaningful as anxiety, the tightness actually like when your brain is making sense of something, it's not just always that the sensation is there and then you make sense of it. Like based on what's going on around you in the world right now and what the state of your body is right now your brain Basically uses past experience to make a guess of what's gonna happen next and what is that guess that guess first is

It attempts to change your physical state and prepare you for an action and That's actually where your experience comes from. If there's a rustling in the grass and based on past experience, my brain predicts that it will be a snake. The first thing that my brain is doing is changing my physical state. It's actually changing the state of my body. So I will start to feel arousal, angstious. I'll start to feel like a worked up sort of feeling. And it's preparing me to run. And that prepares

me to potentially see a snake. These predictions are actually the brain changing the pattern of its own firing. It's changing its own neurons basically firing. So when anxiety is causing, in scare quotes, causing you to have a tight chest, there's no like there there. It's not like anxiety lives in your body somewhere and your brain is perceiving it accurately or inaccurately. It's that your brain is responding to the world and the body as it is to make a prediction about what's going to happen next. Those predictions are actual changes that your brain starts to execute.

So the tightness in your chest can be caused by your heart, but it can also be caused by your brain preparing you to feel anxiety. There's no real anxiety anywhere except the fact that your brain makes it. Like, when you go to the gym or you work out, do you sweat? Yes. Yeah. Do you feel that wetness? Is it real to you?

That wetness? Yes. Yeah. Sure, of course, right? But you don't have any wetness sensors in your whole body and your skin. So how is it that you feel wet with sweat when nothing in your skin gives you the feeling of wetness? And the answer is because your brain constructs it, because your brain takes temperature information because there are temperature sensors and your brain takes touch sensation because they are touch sensors and it combines them to completely construct

an experience of wetness that you take as normal. And that's what your brain is doing when you feel anxiety or anger or sadness or anything. So again, I would say your brain is constructing experience for you that you take as completely normal part of your life and you're completely unaware that your brain is doing it, but it is.

Like, your brain doesn't make itself aware that it's doing it, but it is. And that's the same thing with creating emotion. It's exactly the same thing. Much more of my conversation with Lisa Feldman-Barritt after this. Life is short, and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time, pure on earth?

And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is Short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions, like what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists,

and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times. But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering App. Are you saying that we can just choose to tell ourselves a different story so we may feel feelings again, these are physical sensations and instead of, for me, it's not a comment

to walk around with some tightness in my chest often produced, well, the story I've told myself is often because I'm writing a book and that feels anxiety producing to me. But I could choose to tell myself a completely different story. Is that where you're taking this? Yeah, I mean, choose is a hard word here because I'm making it sound like oh so much simpler than it actually really is in real life. But you never will have as much control over the stories that your brain tells itself as you would like. But you definitely have more control than you think that you do.

The control, though, doesn't really happen so easily in the moment. You have to really, I think, extend the horizon of control is what I would say. So, for example, if you're feeling worked up, you can try really hard to just talk to yourself differently and calm yourself down, and that won't work as you know, really. Changing actually your affect, the mood, or the simple feelings that come from body budgeting is actually really hard to do. It's not impossible to do, but it's not easy.

I mean, even just deep breathing, unless you're very practiced at it, deep breathing isn't going to immediately calm you down. I mean, it sometimes will, but it's really, you have to do it for a long time for that effect to be able to occur. But you can definitely make the sensations, those simple feelings, give them a different meaning. If you try to do it in the moment as it's occurring, it's going to be really hard for you because you have to give a lot of effort to it. It costs something metabolically to do it and you might not have those resources available. But if you practice doing it when you're not in those moments and you practice, it's like any skill you practice it and

You get automatic at it. It's like driving, you know At first when you learn to drive it's really hard and you have to give it all your attention and it's Metabolically expensive because you're doing something new and it's Metabolically costly but eventually if you practice enough it becomes a pretty automatic skill And then you don't even really think about it and it doesn't become very costly at all because your brain is predicting really, really fluidly and really, really easily. And so it's kind of like that. It becomes easier to do because it becomes automatic and that means your brain is predicting easiest, constructing the narrative, it's regulating the body just much more easily, it just takes some practice.

How do we, because you know, it sounds like, I mean, I'm going to imagine you have no small amount of practice here. And you talked before about how occasionally you're asked how you're doing and COVID times. And instead of telling yourself a big story about, or even repeating the story allowed about sadness, anxiety, whatever, you reframe it as the body running of the deficit. How is that a skill that we could develop? Well, there's really, really nice research to show that the more flexibility you have to make meaning of your sensations in multiple ways, the more resilient you are. And so the way that you develop this skill is that you practice making meaning of your sensations in different ways.

So for example, I have a set of things I do in the morning, every morning. You know, I wake up, I tell myself I'm not going to go to my computer and read my email, and then I go to my computer and I read my email. And then I tell myself I'm going to go downstairs and have a protein shake and get ready for my workout, which I do every morning. And so I go downstairs and I have my protein shake. I tell myself I'm not going to get engrossed in reading anything. I'm just going to scan, you know, the front page while I drink my drink. And of course that never happens every day, you know. And as I'm reading the newspaper, I would remind myself,

I would say, you're drinking something. And if you are stressed within two hours of eating a meal, it's like adding 104 calories to your meal. Because your brain will direct your body to metabolize that food in a less efficient way. So it's like the equivalent of adding 104 calories, which I think I talk about this in seven and a half lessons about the brain,

but this is one of these things that I find like, really interesting as a scientist and sort of horrifying as a person, right? And so I'd be telling myself, don't read the newspaper while you're drinking. And so in those moments though, I have increased arousle and that's a great opportunity to practice deconstruction right there. And so I would.

How does that go? So what does that look like when you're doing deconstruction? I might try to cultivate curiosity instead. So I might attempt to take the sensations and conjure curiosity. And so instead of being infuriated by something that happened or somebody who did something or didn't do something, I might be curious. And like honestly, like authentically try to be curious, or sometimes I might conjure determination to see what I could do to change things. And sometimes, you know, the only thing I could come up with was to bake my neighbor a loaf of bread.

But one small act of kindness does a little bit to change the world and make it a little bit better. Right, so sometimes it was only that. That was all I could muster that day. You know, one thing I often tell people is here's a practice that I still do. I still do this every day. But you know, I'm inherently a skeptical person. That's just me. So there was this emerging literature, you know, on gratitude and awe and how important it is in your psychological life, how beneficial it is. And in fact, one of my colleagues actually is very well not me.

You know, he's one of the people who's done this very excellent research on gratitude. But I am skeptical. And so I'm like, there's no way that awe and gratitude can have that kind of an effect on your life. I'm sorry. It's just like, no, I just don't believe it. I just don't believe it. And so I don't, and you know, but I'm reading the research and I'm like, as a researcher, if you ask me in general, I would say, I would always believe the data in a well-designed experiment over my own experience, because the experience of one person is not really diagnostic. So, you know, so I'm reading this like incredibly well-designed research. And I'm thinking, I don't believe this for once. I can totally doesn't match my experience. Well, I'm like, okay, fine. So, all right, I'm going

to try it. I'm going to try every day. Gratitude is easy. The hard one is awe for me anyway. So I thought okay every day for five minutes I am going to practice feeling awe. I'm gonna practice feeling like a speck for five minutes Because if you're a speck then your problems are a speck and then the burden on your body budget just goes right down Right, so I'm gonna practice this and I did and I still practice it or spec, and then the burden on your body budget just goes right down, right? So I'm going to practice this. And I did, and I still practice it. There are some easy ones, right? Like when I would drive to work every day along the mass pike, there was a billboard.

I talk about this in my other book, How Martians Are Made. There was a billboard of this totally adorable orangutan baby. Like you just want to eat this baby up. This baby is adorable. Actually the name for that emotion from the Philippines is called Geekle, which is that you just wanna squeeze something so cute. So that was easy to make awe at every day.

What I didn't anticipate was that my moments of awe would expand into the, you know, because I could start simulating or predicting, which is really like visualizing in your head the image of that infant before I even got to it. Because I knew it was coming up because I could, my brain could predict because I drive on this road all the time. And so my moment of awe would, you know, I'd be starting to smile like well in advance of reaching this.

So that's easy, but there are harder ones like you walk here on this sidewalk and you, I don't know if it's ever happens to you, but the tip of your shoe kind of catches on this sidewalk and then you kind of lurch forward a little bit and you sort of, you don't exactly trip, but you, you know, you like kind of lose your smooth gait and you try to look cool and you try to look like

it's not a big deal that you almost like tripped over your own feet, right? And you look down and then what do you see? You see this ugly, little, gnarly little weed popping out of a crack in the sidewalk that you just tripped on. And you can make a moment of a ha. You can look at that weed and you can see it as a thing of beauty, It is a thing of beauty, of grandeur, of the breathtaking power of nature that will not be constrained by human attempts to constrain it, to control it. And even now when I talk to you about this, I'm getting like little shivers. I know this might sound like psychological mumbo jumbo, but it's not. It's just you have to really practice it and you have to take it seriously.

Is there any danger that in the process of deconstruction you could stifle or stuff or compartmentalize in a way that would be deleterious to your psychological health? Oh, for sure. I mean, there is a whole diagnostic section of the diagnostic and statistical manual, the DSM that we use to diagnose mental disorders. Well, I say we, but I mean, I don't do that anymore, but you know, the people used to diagnose mental disorders. That's called somatization, which means not acknowledging the affective, well, they would call it emotional, but that's because they're mistaking emotion and affect, which people always do, that not acknowledging the affective significance of things and only experiencing

them as physical symptoms. And that's unhealthy. So, if I was, let's say, hypothetically having difficulty with my boss and I'm constantly experiencing this as a stomach ache and nothing else, that's not useful either because while it is true that you are experiencing a stomach ache, that stomach ache isn't telling you what to do differently. It's not helping you solve the problem. And it might be actually exacerbating the problem that you're not making a fuller psychological meaning of it. So I don't think that there's a right or a wrong answer here. I don't think that you should always make a mental meaning out of your physical sensations and I don't think that you should always not.

I think it really depends on... You have to understand that your brain is using knowledge from the past to predict your immediate future, which becomes your present. When it's doing that, it's not just constructing your experience, it's also guiding your actions, it's planning your actions. And learning how to use that knowledge is a skill. It's a skill like any other skill that you can build. And you want to build that skill so that your brain does it pretty automatically but that your brain has lots of options to choose

from because that gives you flexibility and that allows you to be resilient. And sometimes, it's better to have your actions guided by the physical sensation of a stomach ache and sometimes it's better to be meeting more productive for you, for your body budget, to make sense of those sensations as anger or as fear or as guilt or hunger. Sounds like art and science. You know, it's like there's a lot of science here, but the application of the skill involves some, you know, it's not black or white. You got to figure out for yourself when to apply and when to listen to your feelings.

Yeah, I mean, I would still see it as science. I guess I would say it's like personalized medicine, really. What it is, it's like there isn't one anger, there's a population of anger. For example, if I, if I, we published a study like this recently, if I instrumented you out Dan, like I measured all kinds of physical signals on you your heart rate your blood pressure your Respiratory rate and depth and maybe you're the electrical what's called skin conductance Which is just like how much it's really a measure of how much you're sweating Which is a measure of your sympathetic nervous system activity and let's say I measure your facial movements I'm just measuring all kinds of things about you and I'm measuring them. You're out and about in your day Okay, if your heart rate changes and you aren't moving, that means something psychological has just happened. Like something in your brain has

just shifted what it's predicting. And at that moment, you hear a little signal, you know, you're queued and you're asked to rate your affect and then label your experience. What are you feeling right now? And let's say I just did this across like two weeks hypothetically, because that's what we did. We did it for two weeks with people. And sometimes those labels would be anger and sometimes they'd be fear and sometimes they'd be sadness and sometimes they'd be gratitude

and sometimes they'd be happiness and sometimes they'd be whatever. Okay, and if you just look at one person and you just look at their physiology, you can see that the physiology, their reliable patterns there, your brain is returning your body to particular patterns of physiology over and over again throughout all of these days, weeks, whatever. And the labels that you give have a many to many correspondence with the patterns, meaning sometimes when you're angry, you're in one pattern, and sometimes when you're angry, your body's in another pattern, and sometimes when you're angry, your body's in a third pattern.

And a given pattern can be associated with more than one label. So what does that mean? What that means is that what's happening is that your brain is making sense of that pattern as a particular emotion and sometimes that that pattern can happen and your brain will make sense of it as a different emotion. And that sense making, you know, in air quotes, like what does it mean to make sense of? It means it's preparing your actions in a particular way that your brain has learned in the past, occurred in the past.

And that learning can be that you, yourself experienced it, or you watched a movie, or you heard someone tell you about it, or you, learned about it in a book. You might be thinking to yourself, well, it's not, my brain does this automatically, it does not always do it really productively. And that's because, well, your brain is usually juggling multiple

goals. And so, may not be productive for one thing, but it's definitely going to be productive for something else. Your brain doesn't spend metabolic resources, like frivolously. The things that we sometimes label as like not rational or unproductive, what that means is that there's some other set of prediction, some other goal that your brain is attempting to optimize, and you just have to figure out what that is if that's what you want to change. Much more of my conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett after this. We started on this word at the beginning, and I don't feel like I ever got it straight at least in my own head. The difference between feelings and emotion because I think they're often used interchangeably,

but if I'm here, you're correctly. Feelings are physical sensations. Emotions are the story we tell or the sense we make of those sensations. Yeah, so let me just say that scientists don't agree on how to define emotion. Okay. So, one scientist will tell you an emotion is an action. Like, when a scientist tells you, well, there is a circuit in your brain for fear. The translation is, there's a circuit in your brain for freezing behavior.

And the scientist has determined, has stipulated basically that freezing behavior is fear. They've defined emotion as a specific action. Okay. There are other people who define motions as feelings. The feeling of terror, the feeling of delight, the feeling of delight, the feeling of awe, the feeling of anguish. That's the emotions, the feeling. But you've said their feelings were physical sensation to start to jump in. Well, I'm talking about affect. I'm talking about simple feelings, of feeling pleasant, feeling unpleasant, feeling

worked up, feeling calm, like tranquil, quiet. Your body feels quiet. Your body feels worked up, feeling calm, it's like tranquil, quiet. Your body feels quiet, your body feels worked up. Your mind feels jangly, your mind feels like you can focus and pay attention. I'm saying those simple feelings, I'm not saying every feeling, I'm saying those feelings are very closely connected to your brain's modeling, the sensory state of your body. Your brain is making predictions about what's going on in your body.

Your body is sending sense data back to your brain. It does a calculus that creates those feelings, that these simple feelings affect or mood in the same way that your brain does a simple calculus, or maybe not so simple calculus, to create flavor or to create a feeling of wetness. It's creating a feeling that it doesn't have a sensor for. You don't have a sensor for feeling unpleasant or feeling uncomfortable. There's no sensor for that anywhere. There's no circuit for that anywhere either. Your brain is constructing it out of a combination of neurons firing in a particular pattern. So that's what I'm saying. When you see red, you're experiencing red. That's a feeling of redness. It's not like when you hear a loud sound, you're experiencing the loudness of it, you're

feeling it. I mean, so experience and feeling in general are words that are used interchangeably. What I mean by a feeling is, these simple feelings, feeling pleasant, unpleasant, or feeling comfortable, uncomfortable feeling, worked up and jangly feeling tranquil and quiet. They are simple feelings that come from your brains modeling the state of your body, the conditions of your body. There's a whole drama going on inside your body that you hopefully are unaware of. If you're aware of it, I feel really bad for you because it means something's wrong and

you're really uncomfortable. But most of the time we're not really aware of like all the Michigan's going on inside our own bodies. Instead, what evolution has provided us with is a brain that will make a feeling of feeling pleasant or unpleasant or you know, it's like a barometer for your body budget. Like how is your body budget doing? Okay, in the red, you know, that's what it's telling you basically and not much more. So then what are emotions? So emotions are, when your brain is attempting to make sense of that, what is it doing? It's using past experience to predict what to do next

and predict what you will see next and what you will hear next and what you will smell next and all of that. And that whole shabang is an emotion. The whole narrative, the whole thing is the emotion. So is it a preparation for acting in a particular way? Yes, it is. But that doesn't mean that fear is always preparing you to run or freeze. Because sometimes fear prepares you to approach something. Sometimes fear leads you to laugh. But what I'm trying to say is that, why are we calling it an emotion?

We're just calling it an emotion because the information the brain is using, the past experience it's using, our past experiences of emotion. There's nothing that's different about the construction of an emotional event in your life than there is about an event of belief or an event of thought or an event of rationality or an event of perception. Let's imagine I'm in my car, I'm driving a work, I have a passenger inside me, and out of my peripheral vision, I'm unaware, but my perutial vision, I can see a car about to drive into my lane and coming off. Just as I initially, my brain is basically detecting the most simplest like change in my

peripheral vision, it's making a set of predictions about what's going to happen next, what's going to happen next, and it's predicting, predicting, predicting. And so by the time I actually see that car consciously, I already have a flush of adrenaline already, because my brain sent it in preparation, and actually prepared me to see that car cutting into my lane. And I respond with, what an... That person is, we're doing that, right? And as if the

is in the person, right? It's like a property. Like so my negativity there is like a property of that person's Now you would say, what are you experiencing? And I'd be like, I'm experiencing that person isn't And an onlooker might say no no you're angry right there that's anger. Well who's right is that a perception of a person or is that anger and the

answer is it's a completely scientifically meaningless question because it's both because that event has a bunch of features. One of the features is this seeing a car cut me off. That feature is also constructed by my brain, but it's close to the sense data that are coming in from my retina. So we call it a property of the world, but really my brain constructed it. You see in your brain, you don't see in your eyes. And my brain is also constructing the experience

of my sweaty armpits in that moment because I don't have any sensors for wetness on my body and like anybody else, right? So my brain is constructing that feature. So my brain is constructing the feature of unpleasant feeling and my brain is constructing all of these features. And so is that an anger, instance, sure. Yeah, you could say that the word anger might come to mind in me or in you.

And so anger could be a feature of that event. And is it a perception of a person? Absolutely, it's a perception. There is also those features. I mean, basically, it's like a signal ground problem, like a signal foreground background problem. It's basically, you know, your brain is creating a set of features in that instance and people who study emotion want to call that an

emotion and people who study memory want to call that memory and people who study perception they want to call that perception but it's all those things and what it is for you is whichever feature is in the focus of your attention. So labels become tricky when you're trying to apply them to dynamic multivariate processes. You know, an engineer could not have said it better than you just did. I was looking for a better grade. That's all I'm doing. Yeah, no, I would say you're totally up. That actually gets you like, I would say an A, actually that was an A. Yeah. But then you can change the meaning.

You can ask yourself consciously, deliberately, if you must, but maybe if you've done it enough, it might automatically happen that your brain is predicting something different now because you practiced. You might say, maybe that person has to get their sick kid to a hospital, or maybe that person has to be somewhere really importantly to help somebody else, or maybe that person just didn't have enough coffee this morning and just didn't see you. Any of those things could be true if your brain is prepared itself. With enough variation and experience, you have options to feel differently, and eventually it will

affect your affect. First, it might just affect the story that you tell and whether the affect is prolonged by the actions that you take, but eventually it might actually affect the affect because you are always cultivating your past as a means of predicting who you will be in the future. And I'm saying that not as somebody who believes in mystical things, I'm saying this to you as a scientist who studies how the brain works. And as I understand it, well, you're not a practicing Buddhist,

you've done quite a lot of work with Buddhists. And there seems to be quite a lot of overlap between your research findings and 2600 years of contemplative practice and thought. Yes, I will say that I am a very big fan of philosophy in general, whether it's Western philosophy or contemplative philosophy, I think a philosophy is tools for living. And to some extent, I also think of science this way as well. And I've been very fortunate to have conversations

with people who are very learned scholars in contemplative traditions, including John Dunn, who actually works with Richie Davidson at the University of Wisconsin. And one of my formern, who actually works with Ritchie Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, and one of my former postdocs actually works with them as well. And so what I've learned through talking to various people, including John, is that, you know, there's an Abidarmic tradition, the Abidarma tradition in Buddhism that is very consistent with what's of what my scientific work aligns with. The self is a fiction and

that these fictions can interfere with your ability to experience the world authentically and that the world is made of dharmas. There are that experience, I should say, is made of dharma. But this is where things get a little tricky, because in the Abhidharmic tradition, there are dharma's for pleasantness, unpleasantness, for arousal, like so valence and arousal, these properties of simple feeling that I'm talking about. But there are also dharma's for anger and fear and so on.

And so that's where we diverge, I think, because I also think of these things as constructed. They're constructed with the knowledge that you have from your past. And we haven't talked at all about concepts. But what I understand the brain to be doing when it's making a prediction is to generating an ad hoc concept, basically, out of the past. And I can unpack that if we had more time. But what I will say is that interestingly, in Buddhist philosophy, there is also a revisionist version of that philosophy, which I think the key figure is Darmakirti, who I think lived in the,

I think it's second century or seventh century, sometime after the Buddha, who came along and said, no, these dharma's are not actual essences of true experience. They're just constructed by the human mind, with human concepts. And I was like, yes, that's totally consistent with what we're driving at with science that we do. So in every Western science, in physics, in chemistry, in biology,

and hopefully, someday in psychology, you see science moving from this very essentialist view of the world to this more constructionist or relational view. Right, so that's what quantum mechanics is. It's not saying that electrons don't exist. It's saying, well, this energy change that we measure, in the way that we measure it, we could describe as an electron. What exists is always in relation to whatever else is going on.

And that's very much a constructionist view of the brain and of the mind. And it turns out that you see this kind of trajectory in all of these Western sciences, and then you see the same trajectory in Buddhist philosophy, which is I think really cool, right? So you go from the Abhidharma where, yeah, sure, the self is constructed, but it's still essentialist

in assuming that the dharma's have essences and are real in nature, and then you go from that to Dharma Kirti, who says, no, no, even these things that we think of have essences and are real in nature. And then you go from that to, you know, Darmakirti, who says, no, no, even these things that we think of as essences, no, they're actually constructed to. You go to this really much more completely relational view of meaning. And relational view of meaning doesn't mean like what post modern, you know, like the stereotype of postmodernist views, right?

It's not like nothing is real and there's no meaning in anything. It's that everything is meaningful in relation to something else. And a lot of that meaning, which is real, comes from humans who impose that meaning together. We impose meaning, we impose functions on things that by virtue of their physical nature don't have that function, but we impose that function collectively and then poof, they have that function, like little pieces of paper serve as value, as carrying value for as money, because we all agree that those

little pieces of paper can be traded for material goods, and then when someone decides they can't anymore, then they don't have value anymore, you know, value anymore. So that's what caused the mortgage crash, right? In 2008. So much of what we do works that way for humans. And what I would say is there's no physical change in your body that is uniquely or distinctly meaningful as an emotion unless you make it that way. And why unless you make it that way. And why would you make it that way?

Because somebody taught you that that's the meaning that you should make. And that other people make that meaning too. So just in the same way that we impose a function on pieces of paper and then proof those particular pieces of paper have value as money, we impose meaning on the raise of an eyebrow or the curl of a lip or the, you know, beat of a heart. And then Poof, they have, they have real meaning as that. Maybe I'll close with one of my favorite quotes that comes to mind sometimes on having a discussion like this. I've probably said it before on the podcast, so apologies.

I'm keying in on the word real. There is a great Buddhist master who said to one of his students, once it's not that you're not real, you're just not really real. And I mean, so yeah, so things are, I mean, money's real, it's not really real. It's still on some level paper. And it kind of just depends on what angle you're looking at it.

For sure. For sure. And so is your name. And so is your reputation. And so is, yeah, exactly. So are my emotions. Yeah, I think the way I would say it is, your brain constructs everything you experience.

So when you experience redness, like an apple is red, your brain is constructing that experience of redness. It's not in your retina. Even the cones in your retina have to, three different kinds of cones have to work together in order to send the signal to the brain that will allow you to see red. It's not even a single cone. It's like always a cooperation of things. It's always a pattern.

So your brain is constructing the feature of redness. It's computing that feature for you to experience. Now, that feature tends to be really close to what's in the world, which is a wavelength of light at 600 nanometers. But then your brain also can construct features that are not so close to the world, like wetness, right? In the sense that there is something wetness in the world, but your brain isn't sensing

those sense data of wetness. Your brain's using other sense data to kind of conjure or put together a feature like wetness that you experience. So it's a little more distant from the actual world. And then there are some features that we just make up, we just make them up. But if we agree on them, then we can in certain cases make them real. So you and I can agree that we could walk through walls, but that actually doesn't mean that it can happen, right? We can't just make that happen. We can agree with each other that we can eat glass as food,

but that doesn't mean that we can, right? I mean, it doesn't change the physical reality constraints, the meaning-making, right? We could agree that COVID is not an incredibly contagious virus and that we don't have to wear masks, but a virus really doesn't care what we think. All it cares about, if you can say that it cares about anything, is that we have a nice wet set of lungs. But there are things.

We can say, you know what, this air space, this empty air between two buildings, we're going to call that air rights and I'm going to sell it to you and then you give me money and then you can build anything you want there. And then poof, if we all agree, then we can use one made up thing called money to get another made up thing called air rights that we can build something on and make it real. So all of this is what we call social reality. It is a kind of reality and it has a very direct relationship often to physical reality.

There's so much more to say about this, and we really have to wrap up. But social reality is constrained by physical reality, but it can also influence physical reality, and it does so all the time. And it does so when you make a stomach ache into an emotion because that dictates what you do next and that will influence not only your own body budget and whether or not you're paying a little tax that will leave you to be vulnerable

to a metabolic illness in 10 or 20 years from now but it also influences how other people treat you in that moment which then could set you on a very different trajectory. So how you make meaning of things is not just, like I said before, it's not, well, it is, it may be like a jet on my mind trick in the sense that it actually is real implications. It's not just a game. This has been delightful and so interesting. Thank you, thank you, thank you, really appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure, my pleasure. Thanks again, Delisa. As I said, that was one of my favorite conversations of the year. This show is made by Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Casimir, Justin Davie, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartell, and Jen Poehat with audio engineering from the Good Folks

at Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus from the meditation teacher named Joseph Goldstein and it's all about how not to be owned by your emotions, so that's coming up on Friday. Hey, hey prime members, you can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.

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