The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - How to Identify Your Negative Emotions

Episode Date: January 3, 2022

We need to pay attention to our negative feelings - since they are telling us important things which we should address if we are to be happier in 2022. But often we just can't tell different emotions apart or have the proper words to describe what we are feeling.Social worker and author Brené Brown joins Dr Laurie Santos to explain how we can more fully explore distinct feelings such as envy and jealousy - so we can tell them apart and work out how to change our lives so we feel them less frequently and less painfully.Brené Brown's new book is Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. As a professor who teaches about the science of well-being, I spend a lot of time thinking and talking and also podcasting about how to feel happier. But in spite of all that, I'm not exactly happy 100% of the time. I too still feel guilty and anxious. I get angry and sad and jealous. And with so many responsibilities, I often feel overwhelmed and frustrated. All this makes sense. I mean, experiencing negative emotions is part of what it means to be human. But actually having to go through all these bad emotions, that kind of sucks. If I'm being honest, I pretty much hate going through these negative feelings.

And so my first instinct is always to push them away. As soon as I start to detect that I'm feeling frustrated or sad or a little pissed at someone, I try to avoid the experience completely. I pretend it's not happening or distract myself or dive into my work so I don't have to experience that not-so-nice feeling. But the science shows this isn't the smartest strategy. There's lots and lots of evidence that suppressing and avoiding our negative sensations, is ultimately only going to make us feel worse in the long run. So my New Year's resolution for 2022 is to stop running away from all my difficult emotions. I want to allow and embrace,

and maybe even learn from, the yuckier sensations in life. But that's easier said than done. So I decided to call in some reinforcements. In this special new season of the Happiness Lab, I'll chat with an amazing group of experts about how we can learn from our negative emotions. Over the next few weeks, we'll explore strategies we can all use to navigate the feelings we'd rather not feel. We'll see how we can make peace with the emotions we hate, and we'll see that they may even have something important to teach us.

But learning from our worst emotions can be a challenge, even for the experts. I think I came from, you know, fifth generation Texan. I just came from a family that really perceived emotion in general as weakness and as threatening. We grew up with the belief that we are thinking, doing people who on occasion feel, and that can get us sidelined. And so obviously no neuroscientists in my family. This is five-time New York Times bestselling author Brene Brown. Brene is one of my idols. She's an internationally recognized expert on navigating emotions. And these days, she's begun helping people figure

out how to name their emotions too. Brene's new book is called Atlas of the Heart, mapping meaningful connection and the language of human experience. Her book has a huge number of important tips for understanding our complex emotional landscape, which is something Brene's been interested in for a really long time. Brene learned as a child that she wasn't supposed to talk about or even acknowledge her feelings. But she also discovered that she was surprisingly good at observing what other people were feeling, especially when it came to adults. It just became actually kind of a form of psychological safety for me growing up to know the relationship between behavior and language and thinking and feeling. I think today a therapist would probably just say an over diligent kind of hyper vigilant way of thinking about emotion and cognition. And I got really good at it to the point where I could

predict behavior. It was like a superpower. I had a swim coach who was really volatile. I mean, he just would lose his shit in really inappropriate ways. And everyone would always try to figure out who is he after? Who is he after? But it only took me a couple of practices to realize he didn't love the fastest kids. He liked the kids who tried the hardest. And he also had a penchant for backstroke. I think he was a backstroker in college. So I would just always get in the lane with the people who weren't the best swimmers, but who really tried hard, which was good because I wasn't one of the best swimmers. So it worked. And I never got in trouble. And I never shared with anyone what the secret was either because it was, you know, every person for themselves. Terrible. anyone what the secret was either because it was, you know, every person for themselves. Terrible. Experiences like this made Brene wonder, why couldn't her peers see what to her was so obvious? I spent a lot of time thinking to myself, holy shit, do they not understand what's getting ready to happen? Like, do they not see what's happening here? Brene's fascination with emotion and behavior led her on a path to becoming a social worker.

The research she eventually did on emotions helped her understand why her superpower was so rare. We asked people to make a list of all the emotions that they could recognize in themselves as they were experiencing them. And the mean number was three. Just three? Like one, two, three? Three. Yeah. Happy, sad and pissed off. I always call it the bad, sad, glad triad. And that was really shocking to me. Now they could list a lot of other emotions, but they couldn't recognize when they were in them. They just knew that those emotion feeling words existed. That got me thinking back to a quote that I came across when I was in

college by Ludwig Wittgenstein, that the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. And I just spent a lot of years thinking, what happens when our language is not as expansive as our human experience? What does it mean when we have to shove an experience of despair or disappointment into one of these three buckets? And I always knew that it completely crippled our ability to own and communicate. But I think it was probably four or five years ago when we started seeing some of the research on how language doesn't just communicate emotion, but shape it, that I started thinking, oh God, holy shit. We are individually and collectively in trouble if we don't have language. Yeah. I mean, part of our task is recognizing emotions in other people, but how on earth are we going to fulfill that task when we can't even recognize our own emotional experience when it's happening and

categorizing it? I mean, you know, it's one thing to think about not being able to recognize positive emotions, right? You know, the difference between, say, joy and awe and amusement. But it feels sort of different to not be able to recognize negative emotions. And I could think of a couple of reasons why, you know, people don't do that. You know, the biggest one is it just sucks to reflect on anything that's painful, right? We tend to avoid it. It's a deep part of human nature. If it sucks, just don't think about it. And so do you think that's part of it? I think it's probably the biggest driver. I mean, as someone who is like studied and written about shame for 15 years, I can tell you that no one wants to talk about it. You know, the bad news is the less we

talk about it, the more we experience it, but no one wants to talk about it. People will do just about anything to avoid pain, including cause pain. Right. I mean, so that seems to be part of it is that, you know, we're avoiding these negative emotions. But another, I think, is just a misconception about experiencing emotions, which is that if you look deep into the void, the void looks back at you, right? If we really dig into, you know, anguish and sadness and despair and all these things, that it won't feel good, or it'll amplify these emotions. So talk about why that's a little bit of a misconception, that labeling them can shape them, but maybe not in the way we often think. Yeah, no, it's a huge part of the mythology around emotion that if we look it in the eye,

it gives it power. When the reality is, if we look it in the eye and name it, it gives us power. And so I think it's to your point exactly. It's just human nature to avoid what hurts. It's just human nature to look into this, especially academically, things are much more complex than they might seem to lay folks. Yeah, I don't think there is a consensus on even the definition of emotion. In fact, I'm really careful in the book. The middle of the book is an exploration of 87 emotions and experiences. And I say emotions and experiences very purposefully, because I don't want to get into that kind of academic pissing match about what is an emotion

and what isn't an emotion, because I'm going to mix like terrible metaphors here, but there's bigger fish to fry. You know, one of the big questions that really comes up is this issue of like, how many emotions are there, which I think is, you know, something else academics fight about. And so, you know, what are some of the ideas you came up with? And what have you found in your own work in terms of the number? The way we came up with the 87 was really straightforward. It was a content analysis of comments from 70,000 people who took an online course that I did in partnership with Oprah Winfrey Network.

And we went in asking, what are the emotions people are struggling to name and identify? And when they do name and identify them, help them move through them. So then we came up with a collection of emotions and experiences. Then we brought in a focus group of therapists who spent hours kind of ranking around the same question.

These are critical for our clients to understand in order to heal and move through them or to experience more of it. And these are less critical and these are not critical. And this is the list we ended up with. And then I added a couple for comparative reasons, like Freud and Freud wasn't on the list, but Schadenfreude was just to compare. So when people say, how many emotions are there? My answer is, I have no idea. We're exploring 87 of the emotions and experiences we believe are helpful to be able to name to move through them. I think that's an awesome answer. And it gets at this cross-cultural issue,

because those are the 87 emotions that your, my guess is Western, mostly American participants, came up with, where you did do the same analysis somewhere else. It might be a different set of them, too. I mean, just as a shame researcher, man, English is one of the only languages that has one word for shame. And when we were translating into Spanish, there was a debate for three months about whether you should use the word for sin, for shame, pecado, like, no. And then is it vergüenza? You know, maybe, but it's in context because that can also mean embarrassment. You know, it's like, it's really tricky. Emotions happen in the context of culture. So this is the first book and all my books that I have really put my foot down. We're not allowing it to be translated. And that's, you know, that's hard

with your publisher, right? A lot of the books are translated into 30, 40 languages. And I didn't collect the data cross-culturally. Therefore, just because we can translate it using a computer program doesn't make it right. Does that make sense? Totally, totally. A bigger goal of the new book is really to do something that's important for all of us, but we rarely do, which is to kind of get into emotional granularity, right? Like really map out the tiny emotions and how they move through space. And so I wanted you to talk a little bit about this idea of an atlas, you know, and how you got to this metaphor of making a map. Yeah. When I interviewed cartologists, they said, when you build a map, a map is just a collection of layers. You first go and you get

the topography, then maybe you get where the water is and maybe where you get where the roads are. then maybe you get where the water is and maybe where you get where the roads are. And the story of a map is in the layers. And I really thought this is the right metaphor for this work, because the story of our emotional lives is in the layers, which is why I think, have you ever seen the movie Chef? No, actually. Oh my God, I really want you to watch it. Okay, I will go. I will go. And the next time we talk, we're going to talk. Part two on Chef. Well, there's this great scene where Jon Favreau, he's losing his shit. A critic is in his restaurant tasting his food and he's sticking his fingers in this guy's food. He's yelling at this guy. And it was such a great

example of if I just saw you doing that, like Laurie was doing that, I would say, oh, he's so angry. But is it anger? Because grief could present the same way, as could shame, as could humiliation, as could despair. And so I was really wrong about something. I have said probably a thousand times, we need to learn how to recognize emotions and self and others. And I actually, coming to the end of this process, don't believe that we can actually recognize emotion in others. And if anybody could, I think I would be somebody at least in the top hundred or so. I don't think we can read emotion in people. What I think we can do is get curious, connect with them deeply, as opposed to diminish, question, challenge, and listen. When we get back from the break, we'll hear more about this idea that emotions come in layers.

And how understanding those layers can help us get better at describing the things we're feeling. The Happiness Lab will be right back. I've been talking with social worker and best-selling author Brene Brown about how important it is to recognize and communicate our emotions, especially the difficult ones. But the language we use to talk about our feelings doesn't just shape us. It also influences our relationships. This idea that language doesn't communicate solely, it also shapes. It's like the metaphor that's come to mind is if you're baking cookies, you know, your grandma's best recipe,

and the flavor changes radically dependent on the bowl you use. I mean, that's the power of language. And so what happens if what you're experiencing is actually disappointment, but the only language you have available to you is sad. I can't, as your friend, call you and say, Lori, do you have a second? Sure. I'm so disappointed. If you and I both understand what disappointment is, somewhere in our conversation, we're probably going to get to the expectation that got betrayed, which because there's a relationship between disappointment and expectation. And that's where the healing is. That's where the learning is. I'll call you and say, I'm so pissed off. You know, like that's more my modus operandi. But it doesn't get to, wow, I set an expectation that I had no control over and I put a lot

behind it. And so you've given us a nice guide to kind of figure out how we can get that granularity, you know, what our kind of roads and elevation is in the emotions map. And this comes for your idea of the sort of four B's, as it were. I'm not sure if you call them the four B's. So walk me through some of the things that are kind of in the emotion map, these four Bs. Well, I think, and I don't know that they work in a linear way, biology, biography, behavior, and backstory. So I think biology, look, they call them feelings because our body's the

first to respond. I mean, this emotion is physiological. And so to be able to understand where in your body are you feeling this and what are you feeling, even just in a more, you know, kind of less granular, more chunky level, I'm triggered by something. Something's got me hooked. I'm in emotion. And then biography. You know, I was raised in a family where you don't feel, and if you feel anything, the only thing that's really okay to

feel is anger. Like we could be pissed, but we could never say my feelings are hurt because that would be too vulnerable and too weak probably. So what did I grow up understanding or believing or learning about this feeling? And then the next is behavior. How am I showing up right now? You know, like I'm coming out of my skin. I'd want to punch the wall. I just want to hide and cry. And then I think this last B is the one that really changed my mind about my belief that we can really understand what other people are thinking without stories, which is the

backstory. Like if I see you in tears, I can't assume that it's grief. I can't assume that it's disappointment. I can't, I need to be so other focused and so curious that I want to know what it's about. And so, yeah, I think they're complicated. And I think that we know enough now from neuroscience to know that unlike how I was raised, we are emotional beings. We do a lot based on emotion. And when we're feeling cognition is not even in the passenger seat. It's like hogtied in the trunk. You know, but part of the insight for me, and I think the insight for a lot of people reading this is first just realizing how little

they thought, carefully thought about their emotional landscape at all, like how very little they knew about the specific places. One of my favorite things about reading the book is that I like to think that I'm learning all this stuff. But then when you, you know, amazing social worker and five time bestselling New York Times author Brene Brown, when you're learning stuff about emotion, when you're getting it wrong, you know, that makes me feel really, really good. Or at least it makes me feel like I'm not like completely messing up. Yeah. I mean, you know, we bucketed the 87 into different families and different maps. And there's not a single grouping where I did not make at least two or three

mistakes in how I use language constantly. Like I didn't understand the difference between jealousy and envy. And I didn't understand that envy was wanting something someone else had. And that jealousy is the fear of losing something you have to someone else. Now I understand it, but I'm not going to stop saying jealous. So if you, because like, if you show me your vacation pictures, I'm like, Hey, Lori, like, how was Greece? And you're like, Oh my God, let me show you. And I'm like, Oh my God, I'm so jealous. I'm so jelly. You know, that's what I would say. And I've tried to figure out why I would never say, God, Lori, I'm really envious. First of all, that sounds terrible, right? Yeah, it sounds more like you're going after

my vacation or something, you know, something negative. Yeah. Well, I think that's because there's two types of envy. There's kind of benign envy, which means I want something you have and I'm so glad you had it. But there's also malicious envy where I want something you have and you're going down for getting it. One of the ones that was a life changing for me, to be honest with you, is comparison. To compare is to be human. Basically, we compare involuntarily.

It's just part of our wiring. I did not know that. And so where the inflection point comes, where the self-determination comes, is what we choose to do with the comparison. So the story I tell in my book is I swim laps a lot. And if I happen to sync up with someone in the lane next to me and we push off the wall at the same time, I'm racing them. And I don't care if it's a 25-year-old triathlete or an 85-year-old woman, I'm racing you. But now since doing this research, I'll say to compare is human,

to let go of it is divine. That's what I say to myself. So now I'll push off at the wall and then I just look at the person then underwater. I just say, have a good swim, friend. And so the intervention point is not to not compare because apparently we just do that as humans, probably related to like safety, right? Yeah, I mean, there's evidence, for example, that even non-human primates and animals compare if they see somebody else is getting a better, you know, you're only getting a cucumber for your work on some project, you know, you're only getting a cucumber for your work on some project. You know, you're doing some reward task and you get a cucumber, but somebody else gets a grape.

Even though a cucumber would have been, you know, a fine, delicious food to get. All of a sudden you're like mad that you're getting a grape. And so you can see monkeys like throwing the cucumber and rejecting and, you know, shaking, you know, the bars of their enclosure. You know, so it's not even like comparison is human. Comparison might be primate or maybe it's even mammal. We don't know. But it's deep. Yeah, like a social species thing. Oh, my God. I am the cucumber wielding monkey.

One of the, you know, ironically surprising ones for me was thinking about surprise. You talk about how we should pay attention to surprise because it's this really weird emotion because it has an incredibly short duration. You know, we wait for like sadness, you know, grief for a long time to dissipate. But surprise, one second, you realize what's happening and then it's over. So fascinating from like a cognitive science perspective that there's just one emotion that's just really short lived. It's like the shortest. And this also taught me something about myself. So it's very short. And then it's a bridge to other things, other cognitions and emotions that follow. Right. It's a bridge. I then it's a bridge to other things, other cognitions and emotions that follow, right? It's a bridge. I call it a cannon. Like you get shot out of this thing emotionally and it's over like that, but then you're in something else. The emotion that follows a surprise are normally exacerbated by surprise. You feel them more deeply what's happening.

So I hate surprises. Like even I'm a huge mystery reader and a huge mystery watcher. And I will read a plot or the back of a book before I start. And people think, God, what is wrong with you? Like, there's no joy in that. I'm like, well, there may not be joy in that for you. But for me to sit in a theater for two hours, not knowing what's going to happen, I can't. That's not fun for me. That's anxiety producing for me. So I can really enjoy the film if I understand who's going to die or who did it or who's the bad person or, you know, whatever. But now I understand better that it's not surprise that I mind so much. It's the fact that it heightens the emotions that follow. And I do not like heightened emotion. This was really clarifying for me because I'm with you, not for all films, but definitely for scary films. I'm really even I like love Halloween. I'm obsessed with Halloween, but I hate scary movies. And to watch one with my husband, I have to like go on Wikipedia and read the plot. So I know when the jump scares are coming so that I can like be like, it's coming. I'll be OK. I'll just be a little bit afraid. So it was nice to

hear that I'm not alone in that. So those are cases of like realizing more about these emotions, you know, surprises this cannon that shoots you into other things. I thought another deep insight of your book was all these cases where we just fail to tell emotions apart. You know, you mentioned this with jealousy and envy, right? Another one I love learning about was this distinction between worry and rumination. So talk a little bit about why those are so different. Man, I did not know a lot about ruminating and the dangers of rumination before I went into this. It came up as kind of the variable that predicts whether nostalgia is going to be healthy psychologically or dangerous. Because honestly, I think of nostalgia as a dog whistle for white supremacy most of the time, to be honest with you. Like, oh, back then, it was so good, soft comma,

when people knew their place, you know. And so I came into nostalgia like loaded for bear. I was like, there's nothing good about nostalgia. But I think it was Sandra Garrido who said in her research, nostalgia can be beautiful and wonderful, which is good because it gives me permission to feel nostalgic again about some things like a childhood smell or something that makes me feel warm and fuzzy. But it's the ruminating that makes it really psychologically unhealthy. And I think it can be dangerous collectively. After the break, Brené will walk us through even more of these emotions that we think we understand, but we kind of just don't. We'll also see that understanding the nuances of these emotions might be the key to breaking free from some pretty negative patterns of behavior.

The Happiness Lab will be right back. As a professor of psychology and host of this podcast, I had always assumed that I knew a lot about my own feelings. I'm not totally sure how many emotions I could have named before talking with Brene, but it was probably way less than the 87 she identified in her book. But Brene admitted that some of these emotions were pretty tricky for her to disentangle too. One of the cool differences between rumination and worry is kind of which direction they're pointing, which is something I'd never really thought about before. Your rumination is kind of pointing towards the past, whereas worry is pointing towards the future. I mean, both are bad,

but that means you deal with them in slightly different ways. Yeah. And how would you define ruminating? Yeah. I mean, I think of rumination as like, you know, a thought pattern that you get stuck in, you know, a lot like worry, right? Where you're kind of, you know, your thoughts are going back to this over and over again. You're not actually making progress in terms of dealing with it. But it was funny to realize that one of those thought patterns is about the future. You know, I tend to have a lot of health anxiety. So I'm like, oh, my gosh, you know, I see the symptom is it cancer? You know, like I'm worrying, worrying about the future. You know, I tend to have a lot of health anxiety. So I'm like, oh my gosh, you know, I see the symptom. Is it cancer? You know, like I'm worrying,

worrying about the future. But then you also have rumination, right? That thing that I did before, I can't believe I said that to that person. Like, I wonder how they're going to react and did it. Oh God. But it was funny to realize that the form of those feel so familiar and I would have used those words interchangeably, but they map onto totally different things, right? Like with worry, I need to deal with my anxiety or take control about the future or kind of allow that. With rumination, there's something about the past that I might need to deal with and get over and allow in a different way. And so it's sort of different paths forward with each of them. It's holding onto something different and then different paths out of them. Worry, I'm a worrier.. I can really worry with the best of them. But some of the mythology that worriers carry

felt like I felt like I was really being read. It was terrible because, you know, worriers believe that worrying is helpful. It's not. Worryers believe that they cannot change that about them. We can. And then how dangerous it is to worry about worrying. And so I have to dispel the mythology about worry because I do tell myself it's good. And I do tell myself that I can't help it when I can. I also, before I wrote this book, I use the word overwhelmed a lot. And I used it when I was actually just stressed. And I think when I tell my body that I'm overwhelmed, it has a protocol that it follows where that is just shut down protocol. I think it's Jon Kabat-Zinn that has this beautiful definition of

overwhelm where life is unfolding at a pace faster than my nervous system or psyche can manage. And so overwhelmed, I need to reserve that term for when I mean it. These are all cases where the act of not telling emotions apart allows us to miss nuance that's critical for kind of figuring out how to deal with these emotions. But there are other cases where we don't realize that two emotions are very close on a map, and that can help us miss cases where maybe thinking about emotions in that different way might help us. And so I thought about this in the context of anxiety versus excitement. I mean, you know, if you did like anxiety versus excitement, I'm like, you know, 100% excitement, you know, the heck with anxiety,

but like in emotional space on your atlas, they're kind of close. And that might give us some insights about how to kind of navigate anxiety that we didn't think about before. Yeah. I mean, I'll be honest with you. I'm still wrestling with this and I write about wrestling with it because I think when we think about the four B's in biology terms, I think our physiological response to excitement, anxiety can be very similar, kind of coming out of our skin a little bit, just that just, oh. And then what the research shows is that when we're torn between what we're feeling, but we label it anxiety, the outcomes are more positive. Then when we label what we're feeling as anxiety, it's more negative.

So I'm trying to figure out for myself what that means and when that's helpful without diminishing the fact that anxiety is a real thing. And when we're in it, just calling it something else doesn't make it go away. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. I mean, it suggests that we might be able to prepare ourselves better, you know, with the backstory ahead of time. You know, I'm going into this job interview.

And, you know, if you can work on the backstory to be, what a cool challenge to meet these new people. I'm so excited. That kind of backstory might lead to a different outcome than on the backstory to be what a cool challenge to meet these new people. I'm so excited. That kind of backstory might lead to a different outcome than if the backstory is, gosh, I need this job. You know, I'm worried that I don't have the right qualifications. That backstory, even though the biology is the same, right? Your fight or flight system is activated.

You know, your heart's racing. You can see it in these totally different ways. You know, so those are cases where, you know, recognizing these emotions are close. And if we just push one of the B's, you know, push the backstory or something a different way, it can help. But another one of the biggest insights I got from your book, perhaps the biggest insight is these cases where we just don't remember where the emotions are on an emotional map. And thinking about them differently can completely change the way we respond to them. And so you talked about one of the big insights you had in this domain when thinking about the emotion of

resentment. Do you want to talk about the kind of insight you got there? Resentment was living on the wrong continent in my life. Like, oh my God, this was real. This is still hard for me. The long story short is that I've struggled a lot with resentment. And I can really feel it. So I was interviewing Mark Brackett from Yale about his book. And before we went on the air, I said, Hey, can I just ask you a personal question, like for me personally? And he's like, Yeah, sure. And I said, resentment is from the anger family, right? And he goes, No, resentment is actually a function of envy. And then it was like time to go on. And I was like, oh, holy shit. And, you know,

we did this podcast. It was great. I called my therapist like on the way home. I said, I really need to talk to you. And as we started to unpack that, what I realized is the times when I was the most resentful is when I'm deep into burnout, I'm exhausted, and I don't think everyone else is working as hard as I am. And it turns out that I'm not mad because people aren't working as hard. I'm envious because they're taking care of themselves. And what's so surprising about that is then it gives you, like it plops in your lap a solution, which is not yell at them and be like, hey, you work more, you know, dang it. It's it's to say, actually, I need to set up my own boundaries. Like I'm what I'm jealous of that, you know, because as you talk about envy

has a kind of content in it, there's a thing that you're envious of. It might be those other people's boundaries or their, you know, time affluence, the fact that they have some space and time. And so that one was profound for me because it made me realize the way I go about solving that in my teams, in my life with family members, it's wrong, right? It's about me and the changes I need to make for myself rather than changes I need to make for the relationship. Yeah. And now when I feel envious, I don't say, what is this person doing to piss me off? Which is an easy question for me to ask. It's how I was raised. It's my biography. You know, now I ask, what do you need that you're afraid to ask for? And it's hard. No, it's just hard.

It's hard for me because it's very vulnerable. I'm tired. I need more joy. I need more play. I need more connection with Steve and my kids. It's all the stuff I'm really scared of. So disappointment was another one for me that kind of had this aha moment where, you know, I think it's about sadness, but the content of disappointment is that it's really about your expectations. It's a reaction to a violation of an expectation. And that felt like yet another one that maybe you could work on yourself, like, you know, because I control those expectations. So maybe there's a point where I need to update my expectations. You kind of had the same aha

moment when you were thinking about disappointment too, right? Yeah. I mean, Steve and I have been together for 30 plus years. Maybe the biggest threat to our marriage is kind of what I call stealth expectations. These expectations that I have, or he has, that we don't communicate with each other. But then we're just reeling in disappointment and blame and anger. And I mean, I tell a simple story in there about packing for Disney, you know, and I have five books in my carry on. And he's like, what are you doing? And I said, I'm just bringing all these books. And he's like, should we talk about that? And I said, no, I'm so excited. We're gonna be gone for a whole week. And this is so cool.

And he's like, we have seven kids at Disney World for six days. The only thing you're gonna read is you have to be this tall to ride. And I was like, what? And he goes, I just want to reality check these expectations with you. If that's what kind of time off we need, we picked the wrong place. And we ended up having a great time, but it wasn't just riddled with disappointment. And I think this is really the power of the book. You went through 87. We probably just had time to go through 10. But what we're seeing is like knowing where emotions are,

what other emotions they're near, making sure we're distinguishing them when they require distinguishing and kind of recognizing their definitions. This is really helpful for figuring out the kind of thing you need to do to make sure your Disney vacation is working in the way you want. Right. And so, you know, do you think that having this better map is really going to help us in terms of flourishing, not even changing our emotions, but just better understanding them can really help us navigate them? Yes. I think that we are really desperate to find our way back to ourselves and to each other. I think it starts with language and self-awareness and some deep breaths and just trying to understand that we're emotional beings.

And if we don't have the language that reflects our experiences, it gets really tricky to talk about how we feel and ask for what we need. And I do feel like there's some hope there. And what I hope is I hope that couples read it together and I hope friends talk about it. And I hope that there are some real conversations. And I think there are so many people out there, yourself included, trying to make a dent in a world that says how we feel doesn't matter when really nothing matters if we don't understand how we feel. Speaking with Brene really drove home the importance of trying to commit to recognizing and describing my feelings more precisely, especially when they're feelings

that I'd kind of prefer to run away from. So I hope you'll join me in trying to better map your emotions in the new year. The next time I'm having a bad day at work, I'm going to try to put my emotional thinking cap on and identify what's really going on. Whether I'm dealing with frustration or disappointment or overwhelm or boredom. I'm also going to try to more specifically notice what my body is experiencing and to see if there's some wiggle room in how I describe it. The next time my heart is racing before a big new project, I'll try to reframe that as excitement rather than anxiety. And if nothing else, I'm going to hold on to Brunet's wonderful metaphor that my feelings are part of a vast and layered and perhaps even beautiful emotional landscape.

When I start to feel lost or overwhelmed by a certain feeling in the new year, I'm going to take a moment to be grateful that I get to experience such a spectacular emotional landscape in the first place. I might even pause to marvel at the scenery. Now that Bride has helped me recognize and name my emotions with more precision,

my next task is to figure out how to deal with all the icky ones. I am sad. I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. I'm not good enough. There's no point in even trying. I'm noticing that this is my I'm not good enough story. When you do this, you aren't ignoring your difficult experience, but you're creating space in it. And that will be the topic of the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. If you love this show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and uninterrupted listening for only $4.99 a month. As a special gift to Pushkin Plus subscribers, I'll be sharing a series of six guided meditations to help you practice the lessons we've learned from our experts. To check them out, look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcast subscriptions.

The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily Ann Vaughn, and Courtney Guarino. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carly Migliore, Christina Sullivan, Brant Haynes, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.