Unlonely with Dr. Jody Carrington - Permission to Feel: The Science of Emotional Intelligence - Marc Brackett

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

What if the key to a healthier, happier life isn’t about “fixing” feelings—but truly allowing them? In this powerful conversation with Dr. Marc Brackett, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and author of Permission to Feel, we explore how naming, understanding, and regulating emotions can transform our relationships, our mental health, and even our future.From childhood trauma to groundbreaking research, Marc’s journey proves it only takes one person to change a life. Maybe that person is you.Listen now and learn how to give yourself—and others—permission to feel.Follow Dr. Marc Brackett:https://www.instagram.com/marc.brackett/https://x.com/drmarcbracketthttps://www.facebook.com/marc.brackett.5 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome back. Welcome in. I cannot believe that we're into this third season. So wherever you find yourself, I've been podcasting now for a little while and I am just so excited about this guest. It seems like every time we're moving forward in this process, like I'm getting more and more nervous about the people that I get to sit with. And this human is no exception. I want to tell you a little bit about Dr. Mark Bracken. Okay, he's one of the, well, he's the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. He's a professor in the Child Study Center at Yale and author of the bestselling book, Permission to Feel, which has been translated into 25 languages. He's an award-winning researcher for 25 years.

Mark has raised over a million dollars in grant funding and published 175 scholarly articles on the role of emotional intelligence in learning, decision-making, creativity, relationship, relationships, physical and mental health and work performance, workplace performance, I guess. He's done a lot of work in schools with, you know, helping teachers understand the process of emotional intelligence. And he's featured regularly in popular media outlets like New York Times, Washington Post, Good Morning America, Today Show. He serves on the board of directors for the collaborative for academic social and emotional learning and the nonprofit that founded the SEL field and he's on the program board for the mental health coalition founded by Kenneth Cole and Rare Beauty Mental Health Council founded by Selena Gomez. I mean, this fellow is a big shooter,

okay? He has keynote spoke. This is where I saw him in person. He spoke right before me at a conference in Banff not long ago and I was like mesmerized, okay? He's done this over 700 times around the world, including the White House, U.S. Departments of Education and Defense, Surgeon General's office, New York Times, Aspen Institute, and the Royal Foundation of the Prince and Princess of Wales. It's fine. Dozens of Fortune 500 companies. He regularly consults with Google, Amazon, Microsoft,

on best practices for integrating the principles of emotional intelligence into training and product design, and is co-founder of OG Life Lab, a corporate learning firm that develops innovative digital learning systems for emotional intelligence. I mean, come on. He, which I hope the plan is I get to be on his show, but in February 24, he launched a new YouTube webcast called Dealing with Feelings,

where he interviews people, musicians, all cool kind of people, about emotions and emotional regulation strategies that they've used to achieve goals, build healthy relationships, and have a sense of well-being. He's got a new book coming out, dealing with feelings. And in this episode, I'm so interested, it was so self-serving because I really wanted to ask him all the things that I wanted to know about emotions. and what's going to happen if we lose our capacity or access to each other because that's how we learn emotional regulation.

We talk about his hopes, his fears, what he thinks, and so much of his phenomenal research. So settle in, dig in. I hope you love it because I sure did. Hey, everybody, welcome back, back in, back to this incredible space to talk about incredible things. And today, holy mother of all that is holy, I need you to buckle up because sometimes I get to talk to people that have inspired me for years.

And this guest today, Dr. Mark Brackett, is somebody that I have, I don't know, admired, first of all, I'm mad because he has the best book titles of all time. If I could, I'm so sad about particularly his last book. There's a new book coming out, which is also equally as well named, but permission to feel is a book that revolutionized so many things for me because for so long I've only talked about emotional regulation. And I felt like I was the only one talking about emotional regulation, not like emotional intelligence and everybody puts like stupid names on it. But emotional regulation is a heart of everything. And this idea simply clearly permission to feel Mark has just made so easily accessible and he's the founding

director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence so knows a shit and I am just I cannot believe I get this time with you today so how are you how are you Dr. Brackett I am good I'm a little uh you know you have as I remember I think I'm having a flashback to my personality where I was talking about how I'm an introvert and how like people who have lots of energy intimidate me and then you came on stage after my presentation like kind of like I scared me ever loving fucking Jesus out of you I know afterward you send me a note and I don't know if is your team or you and it like it was basically it said something like so like good to see you today you're you're a lot everybody's got to be who they are which is true oh my gosh okay uh so many questions can you

start at the beginning for me. And, you know, I love what inspired you to do this. Uncle Marvin, I know, is a massive part of your story. There's some early trauma. Can you give me a snapshot of how the road that it has taken you to come to this place to do such, I think, transformational work for people in a time where we've never been as disconnected. Yeah. So, I mean, I think, you know, the brief version of it was that I had a pretty tough childhood. I don't look like somebody who had a tough childhood now, but two parents grew up in a town called Clifton, New Jersey, in the States, and two parents who love me a lot, I wouldn't say they had degrees in emotional intelligence, right? My mother was on the neurotic side, but, you know,

seriously anxious and depressed, and my father just had a lot of anger that was not dealt with very well. I have two brothers. One is seven years older than I am. The other is a lot of 11 years older than I am. And so when I was about six years old, my one brother was psychiatrically hospitalized for schizophrenia. He did not have schizophrenia. He had conduct problems. And my eldest brother was hospitalized as well because he had Crohn's disease.

And so he had some serious challenges, you know, obviously with digestion and had to leave college. And so my mother was now, she had the six-year-old little boy in first grade and these two sons who were really not doing well physically or mentally and a lot of energy went to figure out how to get them the help they needed and unfortunately during that time the person who took care of me was a pedophile and so I was abused by my parents close friend for about four to five years and because it really took a while for our family to get things together with what was happening and um not a good period of my life

and you know with that said around when I was around 10 and a half 11 my mother's brother whose name was uncle Marvin uh was an interesting character if you ever saw the movie dead poet society he was kind of like the robin williams character he was a teacher by day and a bandleader by and just was this like amazing human being and a juxtaposition it sounds like a juxtaposition as it were yeah and just by some wave of a magic wand he lived with us one summer because he was getting his master's degree in psychology and counseling cool and he happened to be writing a curriculum to teach kids about feelings this is back now about 1980 yeah and um and we would sit in the backyard

of my house and he'd asked me questions like, you know, have you heard of the word alienation? And I'd be like, no, what's that mean? And he's like, well, it's that feeling when you're left out and when you feel sad about it and you feel not connected. And you say, you know, you ever feel that way? And let me tell you when I felt that way. And then we talk about feelings like elation, which I didn't have a lot of stories to share about. And so we would have these conversations about feelings as he was writing his curriculum and just one day you know he must have asked me a very particular question about a particular feeling and all of a sudden I shared you know what I was going through because I had not shared it with my parents okay um for if you know

it's a whole other podcast right reasons absolutely yeah yeah but um and so uncle Marvin you know radically changed my life because a the person who was my you know the abuser got arrested um and And slowly I came out of my, you know, trauma because of his support and love. I mean, it caused quite a lot of love, a bit of a ruckus, actually, where I lived because the neighborhood freaked out about it. And then we found out other people had been abused and nobody wanted to talk about it. But, you know, my point, you know, is that, I mean, I share that story in the opening of my book because I've been asked now in my 50s and in my 40s, you know, you know, why are you so passionate about teaching kids emotional intelligence and, you know, why do you do the work? And I used to say, well, I hated school because I did not do well in

school. Go figure. And I was bullied badly. And that was even during and after the, you know, the abuse. And those are legitimate reasons, you know, why I do the work I do. But the real reason is that I didn't have permission to feel. You know, I was eating my feelings. I was suppressing my feelings. I was denying them and all those other things. And then there was one individual that came into my life who changed everything. It only takes one. And I think that, you know, so many times we talk about that now. And I'm interested, Mark, in your take on the development now of the accessibility to so many people, but the lack of accessibility to regulated face-to-face human contact. So if we look at the data around, I mean, I think, I can't remember where I got this statistic,

but it is estimated that we look at our children 72% less of the time that our great-grandparents did. And one of the ways that you teach, well, I mean, is so much about showing, right? How do you regulate emotion? For sure, you can ask close questions, but I got to show you, I can't tell you. I can't tell you how to calm down, right? So tell me a little bit about the components of emotional intelligence from your perspective and how critically important is this idea of regulating emotion in a world that is disconnected, right? Can we teach kids how to regulate on screens? Can we, like, and spoiler

alert, I don't think we can. So I'm just interested in where you see this going. How do you feel about what's happening to this next generation? Well, I mean, let me start by saying Emotional intelligence is a set of skills. Like, they're real skills. So, for example... You're not born with them. No. Okay.

You're born with a temperament. Okay. You know, you're born with a proclivity to experience the world a certain way. You know, some of us like you, you know, experience it in big ways. And some of us, like me, a little bit less so. But I'm joking. But, you know, obviously you're an extrovert. And maybe I shouldn't say that, but at least you're outwardly one.

Right. And I'm more of an introvert. I'm an introvert who is socially competent, right? And so I can play the extrovert game on a stage, but then I run away and hide and ask people not to follow up with me. And so that's kind of like your experience in the world. Yeah. But what you do with that information is emotional intelligence.

So am I accurately reading or recognizing my emotions? So am I paying attention to what I'm feeling? am I paying attention to what you're feeling? Am I accurate in my, you know, appraisal of what you might be feeling? Right. Then there's you of emotional intelligence, which is understanding my feelings and your feelings. And I think this is a big one because, you know, the simplest way of thinking about it is, like, we feel angry because of injustice.

We feel disappointment because of unmet expectations. And I think that's the cognitive piece of it, which is important. But for me, As I thought about this more and more in my career, I think what's the most important piece is for me to understand what brings you to the feeling of anger and what you should understand what makes me feel angry. So I may not be able to understand the injustices that you see in the world, but you may not be able to see the ones that I see.

And that's okay because we're different people and we have different genders and different countries we grew up in and different racial and ethnic backgrounds, et cetera. but I don't think that we can have a society where people don't have interest in the reason why other people have their feelings. So to me, that's the core of it. And there's the labeling piece, which is the language. Do I have a rich vocabulary? Is everything like using, you know, is it, do I feel like shit or am I fine?

Right? That's kind of like, that doesn't really tell you much because what kind of shit is it? Is it deep, dirty shit? Exactly. Or is it, you know, light airy shit, which doesn't sound very interesting either. But my point is, is it down, disappointment, hopelessness, despair, or is it peeved, irritated, angry, and raged? So the more you have, the more opportunities you have to describe it, instead of the word just mad, sad, shitty, I give myself much more opportunity to understand or to express. Yeah, well, I mean, think about it.

I mean, I know that you're interested in children and adults with learning differences. And so I worked with a district in New York City with children with an autism spectrum as well as other emotionally, called it emotional disturbance. Yeah. I hate that term, but it is a term. And so these were kids who were, you know, throwing desks at their teachers. They were very disregulated. And then we introduced our mood meter tool, which is, you know, from my book and these kind of yellow, red, blue, and green quadrants. and then we introduced the language.

And so, for example, I'll never forget, I was in this one classroom, and the teacher, you know, whispered to me, she's like, I really can't tell you this because it's illegal. But I used to go home, you know, with welts on my body from the kids, you know, kicking and punching me. And I never reported it because I love these kids. And she said, I know that your program works because I don't have welts anymore. Wow.

And I said, well, can you, you know, of course I'm like hysterical crying for this woman. And it was very, you know, it was very deep. And I said, well, what is it? She's like, well, now, you know, when they're in that red quadrant, you know, what would happen in our school is that the kids would have, you know, they'd get angry, but it would be like enraged. They'd throw stuff and then the officers would come into the classroom, pull the kids out, put them into a rubber room or a peace room or whatever you want to call it, and like sometimes restrain them. And she said, but now we've taught them what peeved means. they actually have a language for peeved and annoyed and irritated. And they know the difference between peeved, irritated, and annoyed, and angry and enraged

and livid. And so when they're starting to get that negative thinking or they feel their body's getting tight, they can raise their hand and say, I'm feeling peeved right now. I need a strategy. And it's a lot easier to regulate little emotions than big emotions. So I think that's the value of what I'll call, you know, having a nuanced vocabulary. Okay, yeah, I love that. It helps you.

and it just gives you, you know, it's like even when you're looking at other people's facial expressions, if you have one word called anger, then it's all the same. Yeah. But when you can differentiate, it's quite different. And to that point, I mean, I think one of the greatest learnings for me in this field has been the difference between us trying to cognitively describe things and get people to switch the focus into the feeling part of things, right? Historically, particularly men, those who identify as men, have less capacity to do that.

So I don't know if you know this, but I do a lot of... It's localized, by the way. Oh, it's not a capacity, right? But again, it's a set of skills. So if you have not been provided those opportunities, right? As you've said, you don't integrate those. So one of my favorite questions in any therapeutic experience, and I work lots with police officers who have been, you know, have never talked about a single thing for...

30 years um one of my favorite questions of all time is where do you feel it and do you can you tell me the difference you know between asking that question because i know it was an uncle marvin turning point for you i can you explain to to everybody why this is important instead of like what happened to you the difference between you know experiencing abuse or a divorce or um you know whatever being bullied what happened to you what happened on the scene of uh an MBA people can do that so much better sometimes than when you switch the question into okay yeah logistically i get it he pushed me this happened she was a son of a bitch because she took me for everything you know she did this this cool where did you feel that and people often switch can you tell me the difference

between those two well they're different complete things i think you know one is you know some people feel emotions are in their body more than other people i think that's just the way we are. Some people are more cognitive, and I think it's all okay. But the, you know, as a scientist of emotion, you know, what I'll argue is that no matter what, even if we're feeling it in our body, it's still coming from our brain. Yeah, tell me more. Tell me more. The brain is where we process sensation. And so, you know, some people, you know, may, you know, you get nervous, your little butterflies in your stomach, but it's still coming from, you know, the appraisal of something in the environment, you know, that is causing this shift in your body and your brain.

Yeah. And so, sorry, keep going. No, I want to go back to, so where we were going through emotional and tell them, I just want to complete my thought there. So there's the recognition of emotion and self and other. That's not necessarily with language. That's more around like when I see your facial expression change, it's telling me something happened in the environment in our relationship. I'm not quite sure what it is because I can make a good guess. But that whole like everybody's smiles when they're happy and frowns when they're sad is not really true.

It's not that simple. You really have to know the reason, the understanding like what what I what did I say you know what is are you feeling anger are you feeling shame are you feeling frustration or overwhelmed yeah and that's where the language comes in so r u.l and our model of emotional intelligence is really about understanding my experience and your experience of emotion right then it goes into what you were asking a little while ago which is then what do I do with these feelings do I express it do I hold it on my body do I go outside and yell and scream what's my strategy for regulating and so e and the r is expressing and regulating emotion

now before i jump into i want to say that for 20 something years um i ran around really focused on the skills of teaching these explicit skills and building tools to do it okay and i got a lot of resistance just everywhere i went you know like i would be like i would go into a like a fortune 500 company C-suite and the CEO would say things like, look at my office, do you really think I need to learn these skills? And I'd be like, well, everybody who reports to you hate you, so probably. Write the soft skills. Yeah.

Schools. And I would be like, my job is not to talk to kids about feelings. Yes. And so then I was writing my book, Permission to Feel. And, you know, as I was writing it, I didn't have a title for it yet. I wasn't sure. and I was giving this speech to about 150 school principals in a very impoverished area of Connecticut.

And the short story of this was that it was online at lunch. And I looked at this guy, he was like a big, beefy, tough guy. And I said, you know, what do you think of the training? And he's like, you know, I think the lunch is going to be pretty good. And I'm like, oof, you know, he's not into it. You know, he's not going to be into learning the skill. He's got kind of an emotional block of an attitude or a belief system that's not aligned with the skill set. Yeah.

So I made him my project. I'm like, I'm going to reach this guy if it's the last thing I do in my career. So at the end of this two-day institute, I just randomly called on him in the middle of the room. And I said, you know, two days ago, you didn't think, you know, was going to be so great. What do you think now? And this guy stands up like six-foot two, you know, as I said, like a built guy. And he just starts crying in front of it. 150 peers and he looked at me and he said all I have to say is thank you for giving me

permission to feel and I'm like that's the title of my book in all seriousness it was an eye-opening moment for me because I realized that until he felt it talking about in the body until he saw the value of emotion he wasn't going to pay attention to me to learn to learn these skills, it just had no meaning to him. And so my, since writing permission to feel, now I've done these very large studies about permission to feel. Like, do you have permission to feel? Did you grow up feeling like you could be your true, full feeling self? And what I find is that only about a third of people across the world believe, you know, that they have this kind of permission to feel. And so. Really? Yeah. Do you, and what is your, what do you anticipate as

we navigate this world in this moment. Do you think that permission, do you think that number is going to decrease? Like a third for me feels, I mean, that breaks my heart, first of all. And it's, I mean, as I understand it, as you're saying, it's freedom. It's freedom to heal, to make sense of the world.

We get inundated with data all the time. And if only a third of us at best are giving light to those things, That means that two-thirds of us are spending a lot of time in unprocessed emotion or staying stuck in many ways, right? And do you see that as a direct reflection, a connection at all to significant increases in anxiety and depression, you know, reported globally? Yeah. Well, I have good data on that.

Yeah, I know you do. But let me clarify a little bit. So the question in the research is very simple. I mean, I do many different studies, but the one I'm talking about right now for this particular point is just I ask people to reflect on their childhoods, go back to elementary school, middle school, high school, and just ask, I just ask them, was there a caring adult? You know, was there a person who created the conditions for you to talk about feelings and be your true self? And that's what breaks my heart is only a third of people say yes. now of that third half of them say it was their mom okay and the other half say it was just you know an aunt and uncle a coach you know a neighbor but hear this out talking about men

only two percent say it was their father shut up and so you know that's alarming so that means if you add up the full 100 percent that 85 percent of people do not see their own parent as the person who gave them permission to feel. Now, that to me is heartbreaking, that we are somehow or another, the people who are raising children don't feel or don't have this skill set to show up for their own kids.

And so there are three characteristics of these, I call them the Uncle Marvin's, which are non-judgmental, good listeners and show empathy and compassion and that's and by the way I've done this now forget about

like parent child or adult kid I've asked people in the workforce do you have an emotional ally at work okay yes it's about 50% on average a little higher which is interesting I think it's because people feel like

I can be the outline that I go home to my house you go back to your house, I don't have to live with you. Yeah, right. There's less skin in the game. Yes. But in terms of outcomes, you know, what I find in the research is A, people are way better at regulating their emotions as

adults if they had the Uncle Marvin. B, better physical health, better mental health. Believe it or not, better sleep quality. Yeah. Which is really kind of interesting. Yeah. And about 15% higher life satisfaction and purpose and meaning in life.

as adults. Okay, so this takes me back to this concern that I think about. So what you're saying or what I hear you saying is the idea that if you have the ability to process emotion, to regulate it in a way to put the experiences that you have, the big feelings that we all have, that that's not going to change. Okay? So we're in this world where we're biologically wired for connection. We're going to interact with people and things.

We will never be devoid of feelings. So we have all of these feelings If we have somewhere to put them and make sense of them And often we can't do this alone Is this true? Well, I think that's This is where people sometimes get a little pushback To like, you know, oh now Mark, you think you're giving me

permission to feel And the Oh my God It probably sounds like you don't have it based on the way you just Frayette. Yeah, now listen, bitch The And I think

The answer is that kids are growing up in contexts, whether they're at home on the playground or in school. And they are shaped by the adults and their peers around them. And so if you grew up in my situation where my mother would say, I can't talk to you about this right now. I'm going to have a nervous breakdown. Or you grew up with my father who would say things like, son, you better toughen up. If you talk to your mother that way one more time, I'm going to lose it. And he lost it plenty of times. Well, that's not giving me permission to feel.

That's basically saying, Mark, suppress, deny, ignore, go to your room. You can cry, you can bang your head against the wall, but we're not talking about how you feel because I don't really care how you feel. You know, it's all about me. And in my definition of permission to feel, that's, you are not creating the conditions for kids to have permission to feel in those environments. Okay. okay. Does that make sense? A hundred percent and do you think sometimes and I you know I spend a lot of

time talking to to adults about their parents capacity or desire to do that and so many times people look back at their parents and be like they fucked it up because they didn't they shut me down every time they told me I should tough it up be a man and I often question you know the ability you can't give away something you've never received. So if we come from a number of generations where nobody showed dad how to do that. Now, he might have had a little bit more proximity. Maybe words weren't necessary because we could see looks on faces now. If our houses are astronomically bigger, we're raising our babies in places where I don't even know where my kids are in the, we're in the same house here, but I'll text them if it's lunchtime. That didn't happen

when we lived in, you know, 200 square feet. So some of those words weren't necessary because you could feel it from your dad. Now, if I'm thinking, I'm not in front of my kids because I mean even in this season I talk often to women you know but I'm a way I'm working you know yes you need to be everything you need to be and yes every we can do all these things if we spend less and less time face to face or being able to read those emotions do you anticipate a cost to that what do you what do you well we know that's pretty I mean it's the research is pretty clear there okay um you know we've only seen increases in anxiety and depression and loneliness over the last decade.

And I think, you know, there's something, and it also, like you said, it's pulling us away from face-to-face time where you see emotion. The other thing that I want to say is that going back to the parent piece, as you were mentioning, when I interview parents and I say, you know, what gets in the way? you know the top reason they say is time okay and then I say well what are you doing like you know and then a lot of times it's like they're distracted or they're kind of they want their own private time or downtime you know I think a lot of people are scrolling for two hours on Instagram and you know that two hours could be spent you know playing a game with your kid or

having a rich conversation the second though is even more challenging which is fear that they say, well, if I'm going to be really honest with you, Mark, I don't want to say this in public, but I'll tell it to you, you know, in your ear, I'm afraid to ask my kid how they're feeling because I'm not sure I want to hear what they have to say. And on top of that, I really don't know what I'm going to do about it when I hear it. Yes, yes. And I imagine dads in particular, and some of the research around this is fascinating to

me, right? Like, you throw yourself where you feel most confident. And I say this quite often in this season as a mother, a working mom who, you know, I feel proud of the success, the company, we build all the opportunities to speak globally. I get the question all the time, right? How does this affect your kids? Do you think your kids are going to pay the price? What about your marriage? What about all these things? And the answer is yes, there will be a cost to this. And so we're in this time where we will never automate relationship. We're going to need each other, I think. to be able to create a next generation of healthy people. And I mean,

I will transition into our hope for the future in a minute. But I really want to think about, I spend a lot of time thinking about that cost. And this idea that, so what? Like, I guess so what do we do about it now? Like that fear is such a big thing. I feel much more competent in my work than I do as a mom.

I'll tell you that for free. And so people are like, is it hard to be away from your kids? Fuck no. I would much rather be on a stage where I get to hang out with Mark Brackett and give high fives to 87 teachers that are like, that was amazing, you just changed my life

than to come home and be like, Mom, I don't really know if I love this girl. I don't know if I like boys. I don't know if I like her. Do you think we should get a, like, I don't know. I don't. Like, and I have a lot of resources. So I need to, I need you to pause for a minute.

I'm going to now do a little therapy with you. Thank you so much. The, uh, Here's the interesting thing in the research that nobody says that the person who gave them permission to feel is smart. Not that you're not smart. Yeah, yeah. They never say fixer or problem solver.

Okay. And I think that's super important that we as kids, we as colleagues, we as partners are not looking to tell somebody how we feel because we want them to solve the whole thing for us and tell us what to do. we just want to have someone to talk about it with and to ask us good questions so that we can think about it and then maybe come up with a solution for ourselves nobody wants the solution given to them truthfully they don't say that they don't the people that they admire or the people that you know are their uncle marvins are not

brilliant they never say smart they never even say wise they say compassionate good listeners who are non-judgmental over and over again from Canada to the United States to Hong Kong to Australia to Italy to Spain to Costa Rica. And I want to just call that out that people. So I think the fear of like, I'm not going to know what to say. I'm not going to know what to do is actually illusory because the real goal is to have the relationship and the kind of the synergy in terms of just being with to have the conversation. I love that point. And thank you for making that. And I wonder. If our dads knew that more, if they would have had the capacity to sit with us,

you actually don't need to fix this because you're, you're not that good. And you can't fix it. I mean, I think about this all the time in the world of grief. You know, people, at least everything. And those of us as grievers don't want the answer. Those of us as the grievous, the ones who were maybe trying to assist in the process. I was like, okay, did you try this? Have you tried this?

You're fine. Let's plant a tree. Yeah, exactly. And it's so fascinating to me. I love that point. You have everything you need right now to assist your people. That said, like if you have the knowledge and skill about what works, you can make nice suggestions. Like, what do you need right now?

Do you want to go for a walk? You know, you want to just take some breaths together? Do you want to talk about it? Yeah, coming up the other side. And tell me if this makes sense. So I always think about it as a bit of a two-way process. it's like first sort of giving that permission, right? Tell me more.

What's the hardest part? What am I missing? And that's scary as a parent, as a partner, as a CEO, because I don't know what you're going to say. You're going to think it's your fault. I mean, that's the other piece that parents in particular think, well, my kid is anxious, my kid is depressed, my kid is being bullied, and it's all that self-blame.

Oh, and it stops it there. It doesn't mean you won't come up the other side. It doesn't mean as the boss, the leader, the CEO, the parent. It doesn't mean you'll make the suggestion or fix it, as we say. The piece that I think you're talking about that makes just so much sense to me is that first part of it, the permission to just feel it. And we skip that all the time when somebody we love or lead is distressed. We don't like it when people aren't calm.

We like it best when people are emotionally regulated and they can use their words and make good choices. They're predictable and safe. And when they're not those things, we understandably, want it to be fine. You're good. Toughen up, Mark. I can't handle this right now. Okay?

Zip it. Do you see what I'm going through? Okay? I have two people in the hot. And the intention is to get you back to regulation. The perception is. I don't know. I don't even think the intention is for you not to be a problem for me.

Yeah. True. True. True. Maybe, right? And isn't that an interesting story, right? If that's what we assume the intention is, it makes me feel very differently about your mom than if I assumed her intention was just please you be okay, babe, because I can't handle another

one not being okay. Exactly. Exactly. And so, okay, so up that other side, the question then becomes, what do you, what do we do about this in this super noisy world? What are some of those thoughts? I mean, the new book, can you tell me a little bit of, yeah. It's called Dealing with Feeling and you know that just a quick little story about that so you know wrote this book permission to feel very proud of it it's done you know a lot of it's been it's now 30 languages and um but then the pandemic hit and then uh all of a sudden people like mark thank you for giving me permission to feel and what the hell do i did all these feelings you know and while i had one chapter in regulation i realized that i needed to

really flesh that out for people and i also struggled with regulating myself during the pandemic. I just was like, wow, this is a whole new world here. But I want to say something going back to permission to feel. Because in my research on emotion regulation, the master strategy that predicts well-being among all the regulation strategies is permission to feel. Really? It goes back to your mind. Better than what? Better than what is this Trumping? Better than relationships even. Really? I mean, they all matter. And they have a cumulative variance, for lack of a researchy term, meaning that all the buckets of regulation matter. But if you want to pick the one that has the highest correlation with your well-being,

the number one is permission to feel, that you give yourself that permission to feel. You see your feelings as temporary. You don't think that your life is over because you're anxious or sad. You realize that this is a moment in my life and it's okay to have this feeling. And just that radical shift in attitude about the feeling is a strategy. So that's a strategy. Is it important that you have that and or you have people around you who can assist you in that process? Well,

give you that permission. How you develop it is a whole other conversation. But the, because that is definitely modeled by other people for sure. But at some point, I just want to say this too, because, you know, I've had people get upset with me in my presentations because they make, they interpret it. in a way that's, you know, easily interpreted, which is, I'm one of those two-thirds. I didn't have permission to feel. And so you're telling me that the people who did are happier, healthier, more effective,

sleep better, have greater purpose in life. And I'm like, oh, shit, like, that is not the message I want people to leave my talks with. And so a couple of things about that. One is, at some point, we have to look in the mirror and give ourselves permission to feel. We can't go backwards. Like, I can't change the fact that I have my mother. was neurotic and my father was angry all the time. I now have a lot of psychological knowledge about that and I've kind of put that in the parking lot. And I have to look in the mirror and say,

Mark, you're doing the best you can. You're doing pretty good actually. Look at you. And I have to give myself that permission to feel. The second thing is I've got to pay it forward. And what's magical about that is that when I create the conditions for the people I love and live and work with to have permission to feel. I can see it in their facial expressions. I can see the shift that I've created in their lives. And it has a dynamic reciprocal effect on me because there's nothing better in life

than helping someone else, you know, feel good about their lives. And I'll say there's a third piece, which is that if you're a parent with many kids, if you're a teacher in a school or a leader in an organization, and you do this in public, and other people observe it, it changes the entire culture and climate. you can't tell them you have to show them exactly wow I love that so permission to feel was

really like a is it is it like a succession now into this next book dealing with feelings yeah it's like it always starts with permission to feel like you can't give that up it's not like next yes okay good so there is that sense of like here's how we ground here's how we get there Okay. Then you've got to know, you've got to know what you're feeling. Okay. And that's so the labeling piece is critical for regulation because the pathway to regulation comes through the experience. So regulating anxiety versus stress, very different.

Regulating disappointment versus. I got to know what I'm dealing with. Yeah. And the pathway, like, you know, I give so many examples in my book, for example, of, you know, the kid comes home. I hate you. And you think, oh, they're angry. but they're feeling shame because someone left them out or made fun of them on the playground.

And you're punishing them or trying to regulate their anger when you haven't really understood their experience to find out they're actually feeling humiliation and shame. Yes. And so what they need is love and support and some guidance not being told to, like, calm down. Smart up, yeah. And then the other buckets are things that you would know

that most people know. They just don't practice. Like knowing how to breathe properly and engage in mindfulness exercises. You have to know how to shift the diet. in your brain. You know, you, if you're a self-sabotaur, you are going to be miserable. You know, and I don't know about you, but I feel like most of my negative self-talk

is as a result of being gaslighted as a kid. Because, Mark, you're too fat, your nose is too big, you're too feminine. You're too, I mean, it was just like, no matter what I did, someone had something to say about it. Nobody intervened, and it became my reality because they just got reinforced and reinforced and force and nobody intervened to help me see a different way. And now as an adult, I have to look in the way and say, Mark, take the high road. Today is going to be a good day. It's okay. And then you need the relationships piece. We need sounding boards. We need those emotional allies, even as adults. And then also, we need to take care of our biology because, you know, parents tell me all the time,

you know, I'm trying to be my best self. And I say, well, what got in the way this morning? Well, I'm exhausted. Oh, okay. So your real strategy is you need better sleep or you haven't moved your body in two weeks or you're eating processed food and you're not getting the right nutrients to help help you be a better regulated person.

And then the last piece that I teach in my new book is really, in my vision, one of the most important things, which is two things. One is you need to look at your calendar and ask yourself, is my life working for me?

and I like this like with my new book coming out I have like 50 presentations in a matter of a month and a half and I'm thinking to myself I can predict I'm not going to be happy and so I'm intentionally finding those half days or that hour at night where I can take care of myself whether it's treating myself to a massage whether it's making sure I go to bed early whether it's making sure I take that walk instead of taking the bus or the taxi whether it's you know, I'm going to the gym or, you know, just meditating by myself for 15 minutes. And I have to build it in. If you don't build it in, it won't show up. It's the discipline of connection that I think we need to talk a little bit more about because if left to our own devices, we will not do that. And we've never had so many opportunities, so many exit ramps to not. So many sexy opportunities.

Like Amazon, Uber, there's an $8.49 trillion market share capitalization of those things. that just keep us from doing the stuff that would be good for our neurophysiology. And would you agree? I mean, many of the things you're talking about has to come down to your neurochemistry and altering that. That's the discipline. And they tend to be the hardest things to do. And so it's because, again, this goes back to a whole other section of my book,

which is around kind of the how we have become lured into the quick fix. and so we think, you know, that the Instagram post from the pseudoscientist telling you to throw your anxiety out the door is actually helpful. And I think it actually is very unhelpful. And it's like there's a social responsibility here that I feel, you know, we can't control. And so we have to become educated consumers and limit ourselves. Yeah, yeah. 100%.

And I think that there's no script for that. I think that there's, you know, a lot of conversation that makes everything else easily accessible. I'm so excited for this new book because I think that's really what we need to, what do we do with this now? If we can feel all these feelings, how exactly do we go through the steps of then integrating those things? What is your two things? What is your biggest hope for the future, the clients that you serve? What is your biggest fear? well my biggest hope is something that I have to figure out how to research because I got the

idea after I finished my book although it's in there but it's not like well thought out okay which is my hope is that we as a society will rethink what it means to be successful and that success equals being someone who is highly skilled in emotion regulation. And that we make it part of our identity. So I literally wake up in the morning and I'm like, Mark, you are the Yoda of emotional intelligence. Like, you can do this. And it's just how I see myself.

I view myself. When someone, like, if you were to like attack me or trigger me or whatever it might be, I would just have all. my kind of right available to me, the ability to manage that effectively to not allow myself to be taken over by, you know, whatever it happened. The trickers, yeah. And my biggest fear is that, you know, we have a lot of competing priorities in our society, you know, that will make people less skilled at regulating their feelings over time.

And so it's funny, you know, as I've been rethinking the strategic plan of our own Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale, one thing that I've done is double down on thought leadership. So I have to do research because I've got to publish the papers because that's what I do as a scientist. But I feel it's more of a moral obligation to get out there more and to share the science and write pieces for newspapers and magazines and be on television. television to share what the science shows about healthy regulation so that people make better choices for their well-being. I love that. I love that so deeply. And I think, you know, the question I often have in my

head is, you know, what is going to be the greatest contribution as, you know, you do this work as I do this work? And I really think that we spend a lot of time serving kids, a lot of time serving bad guys, a lot of time serving the people who struggle mentally. And I get that. I mean, that's always been the concern, but I think if the big people aren't okay, the little people don't stand a chance. If we don't spend more time investing in the caregivers, the teachers, the parents, it's a waste of time. And I think all of the time about this in my practice, you're going to, you know, bring a kid to me. Can you see my child? They're hitting, kicking, biting, and they're asshole or is. Cool. Absolutely. But I need to see you too. In fact, I need to see you first. And

the pushback is always what you think I'm the problem but but you're the solution because if you're not okay right and so I love the consideration of then how do we shift the way that we historically have served this world in healthcare in human sciences to figure out what's wrong with people and treat them but much more about how do we treat the people doing the holding because they have never been this inundated with overwhelm and dames and buzzes yeah i i see it as in very in a very similar way which is that if we only invest in interventions the number of new cases that enter into the system will never decrease and so we need to be prevention scientists we need to think about developing the skills early on and letting them

continue to grow throughout development yeah amen i am so excited to see what you do with this. I am such a huge fan. Mark, thank you for doing this. It was a dream for me. The new book, we're going to put everything in the show notes. I would highly recommend permission to feel. It's one of my faves, and I can't rate to read the new one. So thank you. Thank you for this. Thank you, Jenny. I got to tell you, I've never been more grateful for being able to raise my babies on the land where so much sacrifice was made. And I think what's really critical in this process is that the ask is just that we don't forget. So the importance of saying these words at the beginning of every episode will always be of utmost importance to me and this team.

So everything that we created here today for you happened on Treaty 7. which is now known as the center part of the province of Alberta. It is home of the Blackfoot Confederacy, which is made up of the Sikika, the Kainai, the Pekini, the Tatina First Nation, the Stony Nakota First Nation, and the Métis Nation Region 3. Our job, our job as humans, is to simply acknowledge each other. That's how we do better, be better, and stay connected to the good. The Unloanly podcast is produced by three incredible humans, Brian Siever, Taylor McGilvery, and Jeremy Saunders,

all of Snack Lab productions. Our executive producer, my favorite human on this planet, is Marty Pillar. Soundtracks were created by Donovan Morgan, Unloney branded artwork created by Elliot Cuss. Our big PR shooters are Desvino and Barry Cohen. Our digital marketing manager is the amazing Shana Haddon. Our 007 secret agent from the Talent Bureau is Jeff Lowness. And emotional support is provided by Asher Grant, Evan Grant, and Olivia Grant.

Go live! I am a registered clinical psychologist in Alberta, Canada. The content created and produced in this show, is not intended as specific therapeutic advice. The intention of this podcast is to provide information, resources, education, and the one thing I think we all need the most, a safe place to land in this lonely world. We're all so glad you're here.

Thank you.