The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - What Your Negative Emotions Are Trying to Tell You

Episode Date: May 25, 2026

Negative emotions like sadness, anger, guilt, and anxiety can feel overwhelming. But what if those uncomfortable feelings aren’t problems to fix, but signals worth listening to? As part of our series on how to spring clean your wellbeing, Dr. Laurie revisits a conversation with Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David, author of Emotional Agility. Together, they discuss why bottling up difficult feelings doesn’t work, why brooding can keep us stuck, and what our individual emotions are actually trying to tell us about our lives and relationships. If you’ve ever tried to bury a bad feeling, this episode offers a more effective approach to emotional healing. Experts Mentioned: Susan David, Harvard Medical School psychologist a Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist, neurologist, and founder of logotherapy Resources Mentioned: Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life, by Susan David (2016) Related Episodes: "How to Identify Your Negative Emotions" "Stepping Off the Path of Anxiety" "How to be Angry Better" "When Guilt is Good... and When it's Not" See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. Welcome back to our special series on spring cleaning your happiness. Today, we're doing another trip into our back catalog to find some of my favorite past episodes. And today's choice is a conversation I still come back to whenever I'm facing a tough emotion. This episode is all about how to clean up the way you manage negative feelings. And as happiness spring cleaning hacks go, the ones you're about to hear today are going to be super important. Because negative emotions, feelings like sadness, anger, fear, overwhelm, they tend to come up on the regular these days, and we don't often deal with these emotions all that well. Sometimes we try to avoid difficult feelings by distracting ourselves or trying to suppress what we're feeling.

Other times, we get very caught up in our negative emotions, keeping them alive through rumination and worry. But what if we used a healthier strategy? What if we instead got curious about what our tough emotions were trying to tell us? What if we looked more carefully at the solutions they might be suggesting? These are the questions I'll be diving into in this episode. I'll chat with Harvard psychologist Susan David about strategies we can use to get more agile with our tough emotions. And Susan will share lots of tips we can use not to sweep our negative emotions away, but to embrace them as healthy data points.

That's all coming up right after some quick words from the Happiness Lab sponsors. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. When we experience negative emotions, things like guilt or sadness or anger, it can feel pretty intense, almost like navigating a violent storm at sea. We might feel buffeted and disoriented, or even a little sick to our stomachs. At times like that, staying on an even emotional course can feel impossible, like we'll never reach the safety of dry land again. I've chosen this nautical analogy for a reason. as I began reading more about the science of negative emotions for this special season,

I learned more about the excellent work of Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David. In her book, Susan argues that negative feelings are like the bright glow of a lighthouse in a storm. To become a wise emotional seafarer, we need to heed the warning of all the hidden rocks ahead. If we ignore the light completely or venture too far out, we might get trapped. The problem is that we tend not to listen to the message our yucky, feelings are sending, and that means we sometimes find ourselves dashed on the emotional rocks. Susan's interest in thinking more carefully about negative emotions began early in life.

It was born of both family tragedy and the grim politics of her homeland. A lot of my work is born, not in the halls of Harvard or Yale, but in, like so many of us, in the messy, tender business of life. So I grew up in the white suburbs as a white child in apartheid South Africa. And it was very much a country and community that was committed to not seeing and to denial. And so from a very early age, I actually became interested in this thread that I think really runs through my work, which is seeing versus not seeing, particularly when it comes to the emotional world and how whether we see ourselves impacts and how it impacts on our capacity to be whole.

hearted humans. And so really that's the thread of so much of my work. And then when I was around 15 years old, my father who was 42, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And I remember my mother telling me to go and say goodbye to him. He was dying in our home. And I went to his room. I opened the door. It was just before I headed off for school. It was on a Friday. And my dad was lying in bed and his eyes were closed. And I just remember this feeling that even though he couldn't see me, that he could. He knew me. I'd always felt seen in his presence. And then also overlayered on that was this experience that I had after my father's death, which was everyone telling me to just be strong, keep smiling. And I am a 15 year old and I become the master of being okay. You know, I don't

drop a single grade, people ask me how I'm doing. And in a world that seems to value relentless positivity, as a marker of so-called strength, I keep saying, I'm okay, I'm okay. But the truth, Laurie is that back home, my family is struggling. My father has died in debt. My mother's grieving the love of her life. She's raising three children. The creditors are knocking. And I, as a child, was just struggling. I felt so untethered from myself and so untethered in this experience of grief. And I started to respond to that as so many people do when they experiencing emotional pain, especially unprocessed emotional pain, which is, for me, that took the form of binging and purging, refusing to accept the full weight of my grief. And then the last thing that I would just add to this journey

of how I come to my work is, I remember when I was, was then probably about six months later, I'm in this struggle. And I recall this extraordinary teacher handing out these blank notebooks to the class. And she was my English teacher. And she looked at me and she said, an invitation to the class, but it felt like it was to me. She said, write, tell the truth, write like no one is reading. And so, Laura, I started this correspondence with this teacher. It was this correspondence where I would journal and I would hand in my journal and she would write back to me in pencil. It was my story and she was writing back in pencil thoughts or responses to what I was experiencing. And so I had this feeling that actually became clear to me, which was this act that I was engaging in with my teacher, was actually revolutionary for me.

It was counter to what I was being told in society, which is just get on with it and just be. positive. And instead, what I was doing is I was facing into these really difficult emotions and experiences. And that, that secret silent correspondence with the teacher, as well as the secret silence correspondence with my own heart, actually landed up shaping my career. So I became an emotions researcher. And I was really just foundationally interested in what is told to us by society about emotions and in what ways does that narrative actually not serve us? In fact, completely counter to making us strong and more resilient. It actually makes us more fragile. And that became the thread of the work that I do. And so I love the story because it, you know, it shows the kind of way that we

normally deal with these undesirable emotions, you know, both kind of the ways that society tells us we need to deal with them, but also our natural instinct, which is like, you know, avoid, avoid, avoid. In their book, you kind of walk through so many bad reactions we have when we have these undesirable emotions. One of these is sort of jumping into our own productivity and overwork. You know, talk about how this strategy plays out and why it's so problematic for dealing with undesirable emotions. Yeah, so what I found in my work is that typically when people have difficult, tough emotions, they very often have one of two ways of responding. The first is what I call bottling.

And bottling is basically where you push aside the difficulty motion, often with good intentions. I've got so much to do. I just can't get on. You know, I've just got to get on with my life. And sometimes the reason that we do this is because we fear that by facing into the difficulty motion, that we don't have the skills to deal with it or that somehow it's just better to be productive and focused on moving forward. And so bottling emotions is really this idea that we push the emotions,

for whatever reason. And we think that that actually is helpful, but there's a body of research showing that when we push aside these difficult emotions, there's actually an amplification effect, which is really fascinating. And for anyone who's ever tried not to eat a big piece of chocolate cake that's tempting you in the refrigerator, you know that the more you try not to think about that piece of chocolate cake,

the more you dream about it. And the same experience happens with emotions. And when I talk about emotions in this way, I'm both talking about the big moments of emotions, the grief, the loneliness, the loss. But I'm also talking about the smaller experiences that we might have day to day. We feel undermined in a meeting. We feel shut down. We feel like we just want to roll our eyes at the change that's going on in our organization. So we have everyday thousands of these kinds of emotional experiences. And on the one hand, we can bottle them, we push them aside. but there is this amplification effect.

And what becomes clear when we look at the research is that when we do this as not just a once-off, but as a tendency, actually it undermines our well-being. We have lower levels of resilience, high depression, high anxiety. It impacts on the quality of our relationships and even on our ability to achieve our goals. Because if you take these emotions that are trying to signal something to you, oh, you're bored in your job or things aren't going well and you push them aside, then you aren't actually adapting to the reality of your life and therefore you aren't putting strategies in place to move forward effectively. So that's one way we can deal with difficulty motions.

The other looks so different and yet a lot of the consequences are the same. So brooding is where we get stuck in the difficulty motion. We get victimized by our news feed. We get hooked on being right. we go over and over and over in our heads, why it is we're so unhappy with something that's happened. And again, even though this might have the semblance of being effective, it actually keeps us very stuck in the emotional experience and not moving forward effectively. And so if we think about this difference, it's really fascinating because brooding is similarly associated with

lower levels of well-being, goal attainment and relationships. And I almost imagine, Lurie, it's like if you've got a pile of books that you're holding and your emotions are the books. Bottling is where you hold those books so far away from you that ultimately the energy and effort that's involved in holding them far from you leads you to drop them. And so you might snap at the person or you cry unexpectedly or caught of guard by those difficulty emotions. When we brooding, we hold the book so tightly to ourselves. And so we're not able to see the child who's giving us a hug or who wants to be with us. We're unable to be and breathe and be wise in the world.

So bottling up pain, anger and anxiety doesn't really work, but allowing these emotions to fully take over doesn't help either. Unfortunately, these both tend to be our go-to strategies when we're facing a tough situation. When we get back from the break, Susan will share a potential. middle path we can use to navigate emotions. As we'll see, it's a strategy that we can all use to find greater happiness no matter what life throws our way. The Happiness Lab will be right back. Psychologist Susan David often explains the idea of emotional agility with a story, the sad tale of a mariner who is too stubborn to switch course when something bad popped up on the horizon. It's a beautiful story and it's this idea that there's a captain on a ship and he's basically

trying to steer the ship effectively. So he says to a junior seaman, let me know if you see anything. And the seaman comes to him and says, I'm seeing something in front of us and we are going to bash into it. And the captain gets like more and more arrogant and says, tell them that we are on a collision course and tell them to move. Tell them to move. And so the seaman keeps on relaying this message to the obstacle saying, you know, you've got to move out the way. You've got to move out the way. And ultimately, a message comes back from the so-called obstacle saying, actually, you need to move. Why? Because we are a lighthouse, sir. And it's a beautiful story because really if we think about what a lighthouse is, a lighthouse is helping us to navigate. A lighthouse is helping us to develop some sense of

steering around the rocky shores of life. And yet often, if we think about the metaphor, if we want to extend it, our emotions are the signal. You know, our emotions are signaling things that are important. Our emotions might be signaling that this job isn't going as wonderfully as you wanted or the relationship is actually not working out. And yet when we keep on either avoiding the emotions or not connecting with them effectively, then we aren't actually using that GPS. system in the way that it was intended. And so we then struggled to be agile. We struggle to be

effective. The world is changing around us. And we need as human beings to be able to have the capacity to deal with the world as it is, which is a world that is fragile in which illness is interwoven with health, in which love and loss are connected, in which we raise children and then one day, that child leaves. The emotions that we experience are brokered to help us with the reality of life, which is changing and fragile. And yet this notion that exists in our society, which is that these difficulty emotions are bad. We need to ignore them. We just need a fake positivity. It sounds good on the surface very often, but actually what it does is it undermines our capacity to be whole human beings in the world. And so you've argued that the right way to kind of listen to this,

you know, lighthouse signal of our emotions is with this notion of emotional agility and trying to increase our emotional agility. Explain what you mean by emotional agility. What is it? So emotional agility is the ability to be with your everyday thoughts and emotions and experiences in a way that is healthy. And I'll go into. what I mean by the word healthy. But it's being with these experiences in a way that's healthy so that you can respond effectively to everyday situations. So let me break that down a little bit. We all have thousands, literally thousands. We have approximately, according to some research, 16,000 spoken thoughts every day and many more course through our minds' experiences of,

am I good enough, am I not good enough, is the job. But, you know, all this stuff goes on in our minds. We have all of our emotions, emotions like fear and sadness, grief, loneliness, loss, stress, anxiety. We have all of it. And we also have stories. Some of our stories were written on our mental chalkboards when we were five years old, stories about who we are, whether we're good enough, whether we're creative or not creative. And so we have this normal experience of these thoughts, emotions and stories. And we need to have skills, that enable us to deal with these in ways that are healthy. Now, what's not healthy is when we either push them aside

or we fail to learn from them or when we allow them to call the shots. And so what emotional agility is, it's the ability to hold these thoughts and emotions and stories lightly, so to not ignore them, but to hold them lightly to recognize, for instance, that when we experience a difficulty motion, that difficulty motion just like the lighthouse is tapping us on the shoulder. And it's saying, there's this thing that's important to you. And Laurie, I'll give you an example. Loneliness. We don't like experiencing loneliness. But loneliness is often signaling, signposting, that intimacy and connection are important for you

and that you don't have enough of it in your life right now. Bordom at work. We could look at boredom and go, I'm just going to ignore it because at least I've got a job. In other words, bottling the difficult experience. Or we might say, what is that boredom signaling? It's signaling that I value growth and learning and I don't have enough of it. I often think grief.

You know, grief is love looking for its home. Grief is tapping us on the shoulder saying, remember me, think of the things that you learn from me, hold me, I'm still with you in some way and bring that to life in a way that feels special and connected. And so holding our thoughts and emotions lightly is by being curious with them and being able to recognize that when we experience these difficulty emotions, while the dictates of society might say, oh, you've just got to be. positive, you've just got to push them aside. In fact, there's extraordinary beauty when we just

slow down with them in a way that is curious, what is this emotion telling me about my needs or my values? There's also connected with that, Laurie, is this need to be compassionate because it's hard to human. It's hard to be a human being in the world, regardless of what the circumstances are of your world. And so emotional agility is really about this ability to be with our emotions in ways that are curious, compassionate, and courageous, courageous because we don't often or always like what we see and feel, so that we can then understand our values and our needs and move forward in the direction of those values. And so one of the ways you've argued we can start this process of kind of gaining our emotional agility is first to kind of show up,

and kind of non-judgmentally see the emotions we're dealing with. Like, is showing up for our emotions so hard. It's kind of funny, right? Like they're there, but we tend not to kind of know what's going on when we experience these undesirable emotions. Yeah, we described it a little bit earlier. We spoke a bit about these narratives that exist in society, and it's important to recognize that all of us grow up with what are called display rules.

Display rules are often the implicit and sometimes even explicit rules. that may be in existence in the families that we were born into or even in society at large. And an example of a display rule might be you come home from school as a child and you angry. And a parent says to you, why are you angry? And you say, I'm angry because, you know, Jack didn't play with me today. And the parent with great intentions jumps in and says something like, don't worry, I'll play with you. You know, I'll phone the mean person's parents. Let's go bake cupcakes.

And it's done with really good intentions, but what that might signal to you is that joy and happiness are loud in this house and that anger isn't or that sadness isn't. Sometimes these rules are explicit. Sometimes someone might say, go to your room and come out when you've got a smile on your face. Display rules exist in our communities. When we say to someone with cancer who is terminally ill and is suffering, and we said to the person, just keep positive, what we are. conveying is a display rule, which is that their experience of pain and grief and hardship has no place. And so it's really important to recognize that one of the reasons that we unsee our difficulty emotions is because despite the fact that they exist and are all around us,

there are these narratives that basically say either they are not allowed or they don't belong or we live in a world that says we can fix everything. If we don't like, our car, we can buy a new car. If we don't like the walls, we can paint them a different color. And so when we experience these difficult thoughts and emotions, we can just fix them. We can find ways to be grateful. We can think positive and everything will be okay. But it actually doesn't work. And so what we are doing when we start cultivating this capacity to show up to our difficulty emotions is we start recognizing that when a city is being bombed, it's very difficult to rebuild. It's very difficult to find a way forward in the midst of the bombing. It's only

when there is an internal ceasefire that one is able to start moving forward effectively. And so if you in a space with your difficulty emotions where you say, I'm not allowed to have it, I should be grateful, I need to just think positive. Literally what you are doing is you're in a little wall with yourself about your own emotions and your own suffering. And so a really important part, of showing up is ending that war, literally ending the war, this is what I feel, this is my experience. There's no wrong or right way to be experiencing right now. This is my feeling. And when we show up to those difficulty motions with compassion, which is really important,

we are then able to start crafting a way forward with the experience. And one of the ways we can really kind of develop that compassion is to kind of, become a little bit curious about the emotions we're experiencing. You know, sometimes we don't even know what they are. And you've argued that one way we can do that is to literally label our emotions. You know, why is the labeling of emotions so important? So labeling emotions, you know, it's almost like an emotional superpower. So because there is a tragedy, and that sounds dramatic, but I think it to be true, there is a tragedy that exists in our schools and in our workplaces where, where emotions have historically, for a number of reasons that we could explore, have been

pushed aside. They're seen as soft skills. They are seen as being less important than things like math and strategy. What we have is literally entire generations of people who have not been taught foundational emotional agility skills. And these are core to our our well-being, to our mental health, to our relationships. Internal pain always comes out. And the people that pay the price ourselves and our communities, our children. And so one of the emotional skills that is not taught is the superpower, which is emotion granularity.

And I'll give you an example of what I mean by this. Often when we've had a tough day, we'll say something like, I'm stressed. We use a very broad brushstroke, black and white label to describe. the emotion that we've experienced. And stressed is the most common one I hear, but people might have their own that they use that have become very familiar. And it's basically this label that you use, that's your quick go-to label to describe what it is your feeling. Now, if we think about it, there is a world of difference between stress and disappointment. Stress and that knowing, knowing, feeling of, I'm in the wrong job, the wrong career, or this relationship isn't working out.

stress and exhaustion, burnout. If you label your experience as stress, it's a very diffuse label. It's very murky, and your body, your psychology doesn't really know what to do with that. It's almost like being in that boat and you think that there might be something on the horizon that you've got to pay attention to do, but you've got no idea what it is. But when you start saying to yourself, what are two other options? I'm calling this thing stressed, but what else could it be? Oh, it's disappointment.

Oh, it's feeling unsupported. What it starts to do is it starts to activate the readiness potential in us as human beings, which starts saying, what do I need to do in relation to this? And so there's enormous power in being able to label this emotion accurately because it helps us to understand both the cause of the emotion as well as the steps that we might need to take in order to process that emotion effectively. And we know, for instance, that even in young children, this capacity is profoundly, profoundly important.

A 16-year-old who is encouraged by a peer to, oh, let's let the air out of the principal's car tires, if that 16-year-old is able to say, hmm, on the one hand, I feel excited and tempted, but actually deeper down, there's a sense of, disquiet trepidation, this doesn't feel right. That is a child who's going to be able to delay gratification, who's going to be able to focus more on their moral compass,

their values and their goals and their character over time. So it sounds like such a subtle skill when someone says, oh, when you experience something, don't use just the first broad brushstroke label, label it more accurately. It feels like, oh, okay, is that all you've got to offer? but it is just extraordinary in terms of how important it is. So when we think about these emotions as distinct, when we kind of label them,

then we can start in on another process, which is to start using our emotions, not as this kind of horrible sensation, but really as data for what we can do as the next step. So talk about some strategies we can use to do this. Yeah, it's so important. The way that I think about emotions is our emotions are data. So emotions, again, contains signposts to the things that we care about.

But our emotions aren't directives. I can show up to my son's frustration with his baby sister. I can see it. I can hold space for it. I can be accepting of it. But it doesn't mean that I'm endorsing his idea that he gets to give her away to the first stranger that he sees in a shopping mall. Our emotions are data, not directives.

In other words, we own our emotions. They don't own us. And so another skill that becomes really important in helping us to not push aside the difficulty emotions, not brood on them, but develop healthy space with our emotions is if we just think about the language again of how we often describe emotions, we often say things like, I am sad, I am angry, I am frustrated, I am being undermined. Now, if you just think about this language, words matter. So when you say I am, it's pretty much as if you are the emotion. I am all of me, 100% of me is the emotion. When you do this, there's no space for anything else. There's no space for wisdom.

There's no space for intention. Victor Frankel talks about this sentiment of between stimulus and response, there is a space. and in that space is our power to choose and in that choice lies our growth and our freedom. So when we are hooked by a difficulty emotion, when we feel triggered by it, there is no space. We just feel something and we respond. You know, someone that I love starting in on the finances, I'm going to leave the room because I feel alienated. So we're hooked.

And what we're trying to do when we being emotionally agile is to cultivate healthy space between us and our emotions so that we own the emotions, they don't own us. And one of the ways we can start doing this is by recognizing, again, that we're we say, I am, there's no space you are literally defining yourself by the emotion. And so what's being crowded out there are the other parts of you that exist in every single one of us, our wisdom, our intention, our values, who we want to be, our breathing, our connectedness. There's so much centeredness in every single one of us. And so the way we can start creating this space is by noticing the thoughts or the emotions or the stories for what they are.

They are thoughts, emotions and stories. They're not fact. So, an example, I am sad, I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. I'm being undermined. I'm noticing that this is my thought that I'm being undermined. 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 a beautiful metaphor that I think, when I think about this skill, is that when you say I am, it's almost like you are the emotion and the emotion is a cloud. And you've become the cloud. I am sad. But when you instead create space between you and the emotion, I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. there's literally a kind of distance that's created in language. What happens then is you aren't the cloud any longer. You are the sky.

You are the sky. Every single one of us is beautiful and capacious enough to have all of our difficulty emotions and still choose who we want to be in the moment. You are not the cloud. You are the sky. But it's not enough to label our emotions and change how we talk about them. True emotional agility requires getting curious about what our emotions are telling us and where they're steering us. And that kind of agility requires something more.

In the words of one of my favorite 70s bands, Parliament, we've got to have that funk. You'll hear more about the funk when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Psychologist Susan David argues that the first step in reacting effectively to our negative emotions is knowing which specific emotion we're dealing with. We need to distinguish a catch-all sensation like stress for more specific feelings like exhaustion or disappointment. But once we know what emotion we're dealing with, we also need to figure out what it's saying to us. Or as Susan puts it, we need to ask, what's the funk? I love this in my book.

I describe this idea of what the funk. And what the funk, like WTF, is not a description of the more explicit label. It's basically saying what is the function. of the emotion. What the funk? You know, what the funk is my grief signaling, what the funk is my loneliness signaling. And so what we're starting to do when we ask ourselves what the funk is we are starting to really create this beautiful space between us and the emotion. So instead of feeling that the emotion owns us, that it's driving us, that we triggered by it, that it's writing our story. What we're starting to do is we're starting to use the emotion in the way that it was

intended, which is to help us to adapt. And so what the funk is a lovely short form for what is the function? What is the emotion trying to tell me about my needs or my values? When I am, you know, worried about a situation in the workplace, on the face of it, I might say, okay, well, I'm I'm just feeling worried or I'm just feeling angry. But when we start saying what the funk, it may be that that worry is signaling that we really care about quality or we really care about our clients and that we are concerned that the way we are moving forward is actually not a good direction. So when we start asking ourselves what the funk, whether that's in a personal context or

in a broader context, we're starting to say, what is this emotion trying to signal about my values or my needs. The example that I gave earlier, which is if I am feeling lonely, the function of that loneliness is to say that I need more intimacy and connection. And so you might say, well, I am on Zoom calls every day and I see people all around me, but we know that we can be lonely in a crowd. And so what the function of loneliness might be saying, you know, you pass your spouse in the kitchen as you're both getting a coffee and you're both on your phones and you barely look up at one another. And yes, you might be in a house full of people, but you still feel lonely. And the function of that loneliness is to help you to reach out in the direction of

the need or the value. And so you can then start making small changes, which is, you know, in this particular example, it might be that there's this moment of opportunity that you have in your day where you can move in the direction of your needs or your values. So it might be that you genuinely are giving that person a hug at the end of the day and crafting a new moment of connection. And we can do this with any of our emotions or emotional experiences where we are learning from them. A good way actually of thinking about this is, as people are listening to this podcast, if I

asked you on a blank piece of paper to just think about some emotion words that you've been experiencing. So I've been feeling X, whatever that is for you, regret or sadness or anxiety, whatever that is. So you've got that on that piece of paper. Now, in a world that focuses on forced, false positivity, you might imagine that I'm going to ask you to now turn the piece of paper over and write about what you should be grateful for or why you should be happy. But actually, what I would ask you to do is something quite different, which is to turn the piece of paper over and ask yourself, what is that emotion signaling about your needs or your values?

And even if that emotion has actually been a joyous emotion, you know, if you over the past couple of months have experienced a lot more joy than might be typical. You might be asking yourself, what is this joy signaling about my needs? It may be that you have reconnected with creativity or with particular people. And so again, even that beautiful experience of joy is signposting that this thing is important to you and you can keep moving towards it. and a reminder to keep threading this experience, this quality through your life. And so this is so important that our emotions can have this function of signaling our values

because I think, you know, just like our thoughts and just like our emotions, sometimes our values are the kind of thing that we can't totally see. You know, we're sort of blind to which values we're living out. And you talk about cases where emotions can sometimes tell us that we're living out the wrong kinds of values. You have this lovely phrase in your book called, the idea we're living out dead people's goals. You know, what do you mean here and how can emotions be so helpful in this regard?

So the idea with what I described with dead people's goals is just often people will say things like, I don't want to be stressed, I don't want my heart to be broken. I don't want this project to fail. And what I mean by dead people's goals is the only people, and I say this, you know, facetiously is the only people who don't ever have their hearts broken. who never experienced stress or loss or disappointment are dead. You know, discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. We don't get to leave the world a better place or raise a family or build a meaningful

career without stress and discomfort. So in that context, you know, when I say discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life, What that then says is it becomes really important for our emotional capacity that we develop the ability to be with and learn from discomfort because those uncomfortable emotions again are signaling things that we care about. And oftentimes when people talk about values, it feels very abstract. It feels like the kinds of things that people put on walls and businesses and feels very distant from. us. The way that I think of values are they're the heartbeat of your why. They are things that at core matter to you and they're not abstract. They are qualities of action. They're qualities of action. So every single day life is asking you, is asking me, is saying, who do you want

to be today? Every day. And every day we have opportunities to either move, towards our values or away from our values. If we value health, are we moving towards the running shoes or away from them? If we value relationship, are we moving towards the uncomfortable conversation because we know that it's important to our relationship? Or are we moving away from it because I just can't be bothered to go there, even though we know at its core that that leads to disengagement and dissolution. So every day we have these opportunities to move towards our values. We stay upright on a bicycle by cycling and we stay upright as people with the lives that we want to be living by moving actively towards the things that we care

about. And so then often people will say things like, well, how do I work out what my values are? You know, how do I start discerning what my values are? And it's a really important question because, again, it's not the kind of conversation that we often have in our schools or in our workplaces. And that becomes really challenging. I'm sure that in the podcast you've explored things like social contagion, where we know that people can start picking up behaviors of other people, your next door neighbor drives a particular car, we want to drive that car. And sometimes we don't even know we're doing it. We know from large-scale epidemiological studies that your chances of getting divorced increase if people in your social network that you don't even know get divorced. And we saw this in the pandemic, how people catch other people's behaviors. So what can start happening is over time, we can move more and more and more away from the things that matter to us. And so it becomes really important. for us to just sometimes take a little bit of time to affirm our values. There's been some work that's just asked people to just sit down for 10 minutes and ask them to remind themselves

what's important to them in their relationship or what's important to them in what they're studying or their careers. And that type of values affirmation is very strong and very protective in terms of enabling people to ward off that social contagion. But as you speak to Laurie, one of the core ways that we can start connecting with our values is by paying attention to the heartbeat that comes through our difficulty emotions because often our difficulty motions are signposting. They signposting things that matter to us. And so, you know, this brings us to a kind of irony, right,

in that running away from our negative emotions, trying to avoid them, you know, trying to bottle them up, we're like missing out on this super important signpost, this like lighthouse that's signaling like, hey, your values over here and you're not meeting it, right? You know, you might need to stretch your behavior. You know, do you think through this idea of really welcoming our inner experiences, you know, like breathing into them, accepting them with curiosity, you know, is that going to set us on a new course that will allow us to flourish a little bit more? Absolutely. If we look just at the notion of acceptance of emotions, we know that. We know that. that acceptance of emotions as opposed to pushing them aside or brooding on them is a cornerstone

to well-being, is a cornerstone to resilience, because now you're actually developing skills to help you to deal with a world as it is, which is this brokered world where heartbreak and loss hold hands with one another. And so these skills that I'm talking to are, are truly foundational skills in our personal relationships, in our relationship with self, and also even in our workplaces and our communities. We can apply these exact same kinds of skills when we're having difficult conversations with our children. Often we try to convey to them, you know, just be happy.

But if we can hold space for those difficulty emotions and we can help them to label them and we can help them to understand, oh, you upset with Jack because friendship is important to you, how do you want to be as a friend? What does friendship look like? What you're now doing is you helping the child to develop their own moral compass and sense of character. And this is extraordinarily important because when the world is changing around us, being grounded in ourselves with levels of courage, with levels of curiosity, with compassion, and with the willingness to take values-connected steps, is the only way forward in a fragile, beautiful world.

I was haunted by a phrase that Susan used a few times during our conversation. She noted that discomfort is the price of admission for a meaningful life. We often run away from things we think will bring us discomfort, all the potential failure, humiliation, and rejection of life. But by running away, by not even trying, we deny ourselves the opportunity to win, to be a success, and to be accepted. Susan's quote really resonated with me because I definitely struggle with this very issue. But I'm hopeful that the Happiness Lab can help us learn how to deal with our negative emotions

without all the fear, so that they won't hold us back from doing all the things that we'll give our lives more happiness and more meaning. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily Anne Vaughn, and Courtney Gorino. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Heather Fain, John Schnars, Carly Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Grant 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. Lari Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.