Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Mark Brackett Dr Mark Brackett is a professor of psychology at Yale University and the director of the Yale Center for emotional intelligence he is one of the world's foremost experts on emotions meaning what emotions are and how they regulate our relationship to oursel and others today's discussion gets heavily into how we should think about our emotions and the emotional

expressions of others and when and how we should regulate those emotions this is a very important aspect of our life because as we all know emotions are present with us from the moment we are born until the moment we die so much like having a body we need to learn how to work with our emotions in order to have the best quality of life we all know that we are supposed to pay attention to our emotions but at the same time we are often told that we shouldn't take all of our emotions seriously nor should

we react to all of our emotions with behaviors and indeed that is true what's been lacking however and what Dr Mark bracket finally delivers to us is a road map to think about our emotions in a very structured way and thereby to engage with our emotions sometimes shift our emotions and certainly to understand the emotional expressions of others in ways that best serve our quality of life so today's discussion centers very heavily on scientific data that plays out in the real world that we can all use we talk about conflict resolution we talk about how

to think about and work with emotions we talk about bullying both in children and in adults how to deal with that sort of thing effectively and we talk about emotional intelligence which it turns out can be increased at any stage of life so by the end of today's discussion you will be armed with a tremendous amount of new knowledge and many new tools many new protocols that you can immediately apply in your life in order to improve your relationship to yourself and to others before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate

from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is better help betterhelp offers Professional Therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise now there are essentially three things that great therapy provides first of

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and protocols to optimize your physical and your mental health I'll be giving a keynote talk with none other than Dr Gabrielle Lion on Saturday as some of you may know she's a former guest on the hubman Lab podcast and has a terrific podcast of her own that's going to be on November 2nd and we will discuss all things neuroscience and neuroplasticity we'll talk about some of the benefits and protocols related to cognition and mood and much more also presenting at udonia are other excellent scientists and clinicians who've appeared on the hubman Lab podcast including Dr

Sarah gotfried Dr Zachary Knight and Dr Robin cart Harris along with nearly 70 other experts to see the full lineup of speakers and topics and to register visit udonia spelled eud m n.net it's sure to be a terrific Gathering and I hope to see you there and now for my discussion with Dr Mark Brackett Dr Mark bracket welcome thank you great to be here I'm excited to talk to you today about many things related to emotions we hear the word emotions and we have all sorts of ideas about what they are what they aren't we

also hear about emotional intelligence quite a lot these days and I have a feeling that the way it's discussed is often not the way it really is so to just kick things off could you clarify for me for everyone what is emotional intelligence what does it pertain to and then maybe we can use that as a way to drill into the deeper question of what are emotions sure I think you know at the simplest level it's how we reason with and about our emotions and feelings that's like the simple definition the way I talk about

it is as a set of skills and we use the acronym ruler to describe those skills the first is recognizing emotions so I'm trying to read your facial expression right now right are you interested or are you bored already I'm trying to understand emotions where are they coming from like why am I feeling this way what's the consequence of that feeling the third is labeling emotions so being precise with the words that we use to describe our feelings the fourth is expressing emotions knowing how and when to express emotions with different people across context and

culture and then the big one is the final R which is regulating emotions what are the strategies we use to help us deal with everyday emotions so if I were to take an emotional intelligence test would it have me looking at pictures of facial expressions would it have me reading paragraphs about emotional exchanges and gauging who felt what and why and how um that sort of thing if you were to take a test from like 20 years ago yes we try to be a little bit more Innovative now in our measurement of the skills so

for example I just finished with a bunch of colleagues publishing a test of emotion perception but it's not static images it's uh video clips um that are around three to 4 seconds that show subtle emotions uh it's about vocal tone it's about body language and we're trying to get people to um accurately kind of label these emotions in bases body and voice when I think about most uses of the words emotional intelligence it seems to correlate again in a very non-scientific way seems to correlate with one's ability to tolerate others emotions and make sense of

the emotions of others for instance I've heard it said before not about me that so and so has high emotional intelligence because in the presence of their child or someone else's kid reacting in a certain way they were able to see ah they just feel blank and therefore they are screaming as opposed to defaulting to a um you know a broad binning of what they were observing and saying oh my goodness that kid is a brat for instance you're describing emotional intelligence as a self-perception as well yes um and so is our task therefore to

do the equivalent of what in my little anecdote this other person was doing to be able to parse one's own emotions in a fine enough way to understand the experience and kind of a third person way that one can regulate their behavior what they say how they act um how much is recognition of others emotions and understanding of those as opposed to one's recognition and understanding of their own emotions factoring into this thing that we call emotional intelligence so the whole set of skills are intra and interpersonal that's really important it's about self and others

always for example right now we are co-regulating each other's emotions right our facial expressions our vocal tones we're influencing how we each other how we feel um when you think about the recognition piece we'll just start there right there's self-awareness like Mark how you feeling right now and I'm you know I'm having mixed emotions right this is a great podcast I want to be articulate you know I'm excited but I'm a little you know overwhelmed because I got so much I want to share but I don't know how much I'm going to share so there's

like all that awareness of my emotion sometimes I have language for it sometimes I don't like any of us and that's why it starts off with kind of just a general awareness like am I Pleasant am I unpleasant do I have a lot of energy or do I feel depleted and we call that you know your core affect and then I could start asking myself questions like well what are you doing right now Mark well I'm sitting across from Andrew being interviewed okay well how does that what comes up for you with that and then

I try to label that feeling so that's like the r the U and the L of emotional intelligence for the self and I'm doing the same thing for you I'm looking at your facial expressions your body language I'm listening to you I'm trying to understand if I say something do you shift and I'm trying to put language to it so it's self and other so given that we're both scientists interested in emotions you're the expert uh I'm also just the student today um I think it's worth pointing out to people that there isn't one location

in the brain that governs this complex process that you just described it's a network-wide phenomenon but you did mention the body you you mentioned feeling you know how is one feeling both in brain and body to what extent does somebody who has high emotional intelligence have more or less body awareness or somatic awareness as opposed to somebody who's quote unquote in their head put differently can somebody who's very much in their head who has very poor body awareness have High emotional intelligence well I think another big deal about emotional intelligence is that we like to

think of it as or people think of it as this construct I don't think that's the best way to look at it I think it's much more interesting to look at it as a set of discret skills that come together they're not that highly correlated and so you know it's I really like to think of them as emotion skills and that within the r the U the L the E and the r that I described there are subskills and so part of what you're talking about is the body awareness some people are more cognitive you

know they're just very language oriented some people you know a lot of therapists somatic you know talking about somat sensory things all good I think at the end though you know this is why I teach this stuff is that we have to know how we feel we got to know what we want to do with those feelings and we have to know how the people we live with and love and work with and teach how they feel too and so we need language in the end some years ago I went to this course it was

you know broadly could be described as personal development it was interesting it was grounded in science and psychology and each day would start with going around the circle as typically is done at these things and you'd have to say how you feel but you couldn't use evaluation you couldn't say good or bad or so so and I found it it very difficult uh found it difficult for a number of reasons first of all I don't think I was ever trained to use specific language for my feelings in fact I don't think I was ever trained

to understand what feelings were in fact I know neuroscientists and psychologists are still trying to figure out what feelings and emotions really are so um a couple of questions when it comes to using language to describe our emotions how important do you feel it is to have a broad Buffet of options you know a previous guest on this podcast Lisa Feldman Barrett and I talked about this a bit and she mentioned that in some cultures there's very specific language for specific emotions in fact there's even a word to describe the feeling of sadness one has

in a particular culture after getting a really bad haircut yeahh which is incredible when one thinks about it we all know what that feels like right we know what it feels like right but there isn't to my knowledge a word for that in the English language I mean I'm sure there's a curse word for it in the English language but U not necessarily for that specific feeling um or unique to that specific feeling so what is the relationship between language labels and emotion and I ask that as a way to kind of wedge into the

ruler approach right because as you pointed out that one recognizes understands labels and then but the label is Central literally to the uh ruler approach it is yeah so I like I'm very similar to Lisa in terms of there are emotion Concepts or categories well let's use the anger category if you only have one word for anger that means all you know is there's one form of anger but if you start teaching people well there are other words that we could use like peeved irritated angry enraged livid and you have Rich conversations which is what

I do in schools with kids and teachers themselves like what is when you're feeling peeved like what what are the things that make you feel peeved versus the things that make you feel enraged what does it feel like in your body when you're feeling that way granted that everybody feels things differently in their bodies that really doesn't matter what matters is that we have a Common Language and a common understanding of what these emotions are because otherwise we can't communicate you know I I'm really like this is a big deal for me in terms of

uh having a Common Language within a community to talk about emotion because you right now right we're in a crisis of anxiety I'm not 100% bought into that I think that people use the word anxiety um improperly um anxiety is about uncertainty about the future if we're going to Define it it's different than stress you know there's different forms of stress as you know but the distress right is usually when you have too many demands and not enough resources which is different than when you're overwhelmed right which is my emotion of the year which is

I'm just saturated like you know what's I can't even figure out what's going on anymore which is also different from fear and that's we call that emotion differentiation or granularity people call it they're they're slightly different the differentiation is like between emotions and the granularity might be within the emotion but from my work um just to go on about this for a moment the best example I have is I do a lot of corporate training and so I'm in a room filled with lawyers or Executives and I'm ask them how they're feeling nobody's really sure

how they're feeling like you were saying and then I'll do these little kind of quizzes with them tell me the difference you got three minutes in a group anxiety stress pressure fear overwhelmed and they come back and the the number one response is they're all the same and I'm like really take another few minutes like try to like just try to Define them they can't even Define them they say things like you know one is internal one is external one is you know one is higher energy and lower energy I'm like I I get that

but how do you what what do these concept mean to you what do they mean to you anyhow um finally we get to like the definitions and then I say you know who cares like why am I asking you to like understand these differences go back to your groups and talk about it and then after like this is like a 45 minute like you I thought this is going to be like a two-minute activity it turns into like a 45 minute to an hour exercise because they finally realize oh yeah so if I'm anxious because

I'm worrying about the future you know maybe the breathing exercise is not going to be as helpful um because maybe I need a cognitive strategy to say you know Mark stop worrying about the stock market Mark stop worrying about that the University closed down because of the pandemic you got no control over the University's decisions and so helping people make connections between the feeling and the reason for the feeling from my perspective has been very helpful to help them learn how to regulate the emotion so connecting the feeling and the reason for the feeling correct

as opposed to just labeling the feel yeah you need to know why it's why the why that you really have to deal with how do you feel about emojis from everything you're saying they seem like more than um benign to me yeah I mean I I could um imagine that the emogif of culture as I refer to it I don't think that's a real word all right it is now um set up a Wikipedia page tomorrow emojify um is a serious problem because it's what we call in science uh too much lumping in science you

have lumpers and Splitters yeah right and um both can have fabulous careers but if you lump too much or split too much you create more confusion and you often create problems and I just see emojis as lumping this incredible um set of different continuums within us that we call emotions exactly into Lally a small icon and I can imagine this would lead to all sorts of problems not just in communication but in understanding our own emotions put differently do you think that the use of emojis has degraded our level of emotional intelligence and processing I

mean I haven't done the research but from my perspective it's not helpful because the goal is to get granular you know um think about the difference and I'm not going to quiz you right now but anger and disappointment do you know that 95% of the people that I ask to define those two things cannot do it yeah I mean right right off the cuff I'll just say you know I'm familiar with both of those feelings I know they're different sense their difference I mean but the disappointment piece um yeah could be directed outward or inward

I'm I'd have to work systematically through until I found a violation of one or the other so where an example apply to one and not the other and it it would take me a few minutes longer longer than I want this audience to have to wait there you go so we should I got enough but you have a growth mindset so you're okay there you go yeah but the you know so disappointment unmet expectations everything was legit it just didn't work out anger perceived Injustice and that's a really important distinction because if you're a parent

or someone at work and someone is like yelling at screaming firstly we grossly you know make mistakes in terms of labeling emotion from Behavior we got to just throw that out there's no correlation really between behavior and emotion I can stop my feet you know as a boy because I'm feeling sad just because it's more culturally acceptable for me to stomp than to cry and so why are you so angry maybe I'm feeling shame which is my experience you know I was yelling and screaming as a kid because I was being bullied so much and

then my mother would be like you know who do you think you are talking to me that way and then my father would say go to your room and i' be like is anybody reading my you know emotions properly or asking me how I'm feeling because you would know that I'm acting out because of fear and shame never happened because a variety of reasons of you know triggering my parents and they didn't have such high emotional intelligence they love me just didn't have emotional intelligence and so going back to the anger disappointment one unmet expectations

versus perceived Injustice and so when you think about it in terms of the strategy like for example um my other career just you know was as a martial arts teacher so I have a fifth degree black belt in a Korean martial art called hopo so if this podcast doesn't go so well um anyhow the um you know I was a awkward kid had a you know very insecure low self-esteem I got into the martial arts I thought I'm going to get my yellow belt and I'm going to feel tough and proud failed my freaking yellow

BT test I mean at 13 years old you couldn't imagine like there's nothing worse for a 13-year-old kid who's feeling shame and being bullied to fail a yellow bell test so what do I do I go home I hate karate I'm never going back to karate everybody's in an uproar I'm getting yelled at I'm paying for karate you're going back to you know whatever and the truth was like let's think about that for a minute so I go to take the test and I've got to do my blocks and my kicks you know my punches

I know there's five kicks there's five punches and let's say I do them the best I can but the Sensei just says you know Mark just not good enough you know you're not ready yet that's legitimate disappointment I expected to pass I didn't pass I'm feeling disappointed so the strategy for that is what like tutor help show me what I have to do better on the other hand let's say which was true for me that some of the kids who were the bullies in my middle school also took karate and let's imagine they're watching me

take my test and they're giving me some dirty looks because they're going to you know threaten me and which did happen you know you know getting changed Going you know wait you see what it's going to be like for you tomorrow on the way to school now how am I feeling terrorized fearful and I found my test because of that so you can see how I could show up with a particular behavior um people are attributing emotion to me they're labeling my emotions for me because they don't have the skill to deactivate as a parent

or a teacher or partner to be present to help me understand my experience and then label my experience understand where it's coming from and then strategize accordingly I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor ag1 ag1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens ag1 is designed to cover all of your foundational nutritional needs and it tastes great now I've been drinking ag1 since 2012 and I started doing that at a time when my budget for supplements was really Limited in fact I only had enough money back then

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claim a special offer right now they're giving away five free travel packs and a year Supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman to claim that special offer you said that disappointment is when one does everything essentially correctly meaning gave the as much effort as they could Etc and it didn't work out correct versus anger which is perceived Injustice yeah would you say that your response to not getting your yellow belt then because as a fifth degree black belt now clearly you got that yellow belt eventually I want to hear that part of

the story too um that you were experiencing anger in this case could we even call it inapo inappropriate anger simply inappropriate because what you really needed to understand was this notion of disappointment but no one had taught it to you I think what you're getting at though is this like not knowing how you're feeling because I was never taught language right and having an experience that is you know could be many feelings at once which is could be dis appointment could be anger it could be embarrassment um but you got to unpack the situation you

know what was the real event that happened what really happened in that moment and so if it were legitimate like legitimate test and I just you know I blocked the punch and I just didn't have the strength to block it you know like to really stand firm it's disappointment it's like it's son you know like you thought you know your blocks were strong unfortunately you need need some work let's practice every day after school together we're going to get these blocks down so you can get that yellow but test there's no other reason if it's

because the bullies are staring at me and I'm not capable of dealing with the those piercing eyes that are at me and I'm feeling so anxious and overwhelmed and I just can't block because I'm just freaked out that's a whole another story do you see how like a parent or a teacher would um have to really differentiate their support but you have to really get at the experience which means we have to have relationships that are trustworthy loving caring with all people because otherwise we don't build that connection to really understand how people feeling we

just take the kind of behavior like why are you behaving that way you know go to your room or you know just practice it's like no like I've been bullied at school and now the bully is threatening me like that's serious stuff that needs to be taken care of yeah online um emojis and you know downward facing thumbs versus upward facing thumbs and this kind of thing and you know uh vomit uh emojis and things like that a mind blown that I'm starting to realize that um these may be doing far more harm than we

realize um in yeah I think it's fun you know maybe it's just if you want to just use it for fun not a problem if we're going to use it to really communicate not so great I'm thinking of instances where people are just using these um with the intention of expressing their like dislike of something yeah but that the people on the receiving end um experience a lot of um kind of uh self self-criticism as a consequence mostly kids but adults too mean I know some adults that really can't handle somebody commenting on their Instagram

post like big L or something like that devastating for people nope or this kind of thing it's also interesting because I see it even in the academic Community especially on Twitter X yeah where I know that um sure people reject each other's papers critique each other's papers but they do that with a degree of um intellectual Nuance that um transmits a sense of care right if scientists really care then they're going to do a careful review um as much as we would all love the this is a perfect paper that's it um no critique when

somebody critiques something that we do with um with an attention to detail provided it's fair we we feel cared for totally they care for the work and we care for the work and so there's there's a relationship there even if it's an anonymous review but I'm shocked to see how um scientific colleagues I've known for decades um really how they comport themselves online like it's they'll swear they'll come out you know um they won't bother to punctuate things they they'll just sort of behave in a in a very um what seems to be a very

activated way not all of them of course but it's been very interesting the the words that come to mind are I feel like online especially on social media the kids are acting like adults and the adults are acting like children and so there seems to be a kind of regression toward what I'm calling the emojify or the kind of high amplitude expression with um with blunt tools and I don't know what that is because I know these people the reason I'm using the academic Community as an example by the way it's cost some of these

people their jobs um chairs of departments not at Stanford or Yale fortunately um but um it's kind of striking to me the way that um when we remove the face-to-face connection when um people will uh behave that way and I use the uh parallel example of anonymous review because there it's Anonymous So in theory they could behave however they want but there's an etiquette so it seems like online etiquette is very deprived of many of the important features that were starting to you were starting to lay out for us here an amenity you know causes

challenges it's funny cuz I gave a speech at Twitter now known as X about 5 years ago and um and had analyzed quite a lot of data you know it was actually uh the year that Mariah Carey sang and it got messed up and I just it was like the week before I was going in January it was like New Year's Eve and I just was curious and because it really was a mess up and I said what how are people going to respond and it was 99.99% ripping this amazing Diva to shreds so she

I I don't recall this incident so she's obviously phenomenally talented but she made him an error there was something the she made an error there was something oh goodness you know and she just basically like the mic wasn't working the way she wanted it to work and she's like I'm out of here just like I'm not singing and you should have seen how people just I mean millions and millions and millions of of comments you know like and I'm not going to repeat what people say because it was really disgusting and I got really curious

like like what about things like gosh you've like won 15 Grammy Awards like this must really sting for you maybe one post like that and so it does make you wonder about a the type of person who is interested in commenting like we may have a bias there I do I do think we have a bias there you know people who you know they feel protected by you know something if it's you know a more famous person in politics obviously people are very clear how they feel politicians sort of open themselves up to it yeah

they do public facing people in general I've heard um open themselves up to it but um politicians in particular I think we give we sort of give the general public a pass to say almost anything about them but it's it's not pretty it's not pretty and it's not emotionally intelligent to go back to the concept right it's like what's your goal here like I always ask people that like like what are you getting at of being nasty I perceive it as evacuative I I look at that and I think gosh what they must feel inside

to be able to say those things can't be good but maybe it feels good to them I don't know I don't know I don't I don't think I've ever made a negative comment if I have um someone can call me out on it hopefully it it was in sarcasm with a friend yeah as the target um and they were okay with it or happy with it but I don't know what internal emotional or psychological state it would take to go say something cruel to somebody online in my earlier research um with Facebook we we analyze

millions and millions of posts and you know people can be intentionally mean and hurtful just people want to rip people to shreds and they want to instill fear um and you know it's very hard to disentangle that too just to be honest so like what we found in our research was that I could say few like you're Andrew's wearing a black shirt you'll see that I could say like nice shirt and it might mean nice shirt or it might mean I'm making fun of your shirt and it's just hard like that's that's the problem you

know with with social media in terms of post we don't really know because the person who's receiving it has a story right that was one challenge we found around like getting posts taken down was that it was hard to have that objective Criterion of what was you know painful to a person which is why what we tried to do was help the person who was receiving the content communicate in a way with the person who posted the content to get them to take it down and what we found was that it actually worked really well

if you taught a teenager for example to say Hey you know hey Andrew like that comment you made really was hurtful would you please take it down we were more likely to get people to take it down and what we found in experimental research was that if we just let people go you know on their own devices um it tended to be more retaliatory like who the ACT do you think you are you know you want to fight back you know and that did not motivate the person to take it down so even meeting gross

Behavior with compassion can be helpful can we provide a counter example for the anger versus disappointment that's on the positive veillance sure side um what's a positive set of feel feelings that people often conflate like happiness and contentment yeah that's a tough one for I'm I'm getting FS all around you know good thing I became a biologist ecstatic and elated yeah okay yeah this is you know this is why I do what I do yeah I'm good at this yeah yes you are you know when you think about happiness you know it's usually about you

know when you're achieving something right you're going to I'm going to be happy happy when um you know this will bring me happiness contentment is the opposite contentment is everything is just great as it is I Feel Complete I have enough and part of my argument against the happiness research is that we don't spend enough time helping people strive for contentment and we push people to strive for happiness which there's research to show you know backfires you know if you're waking up every day saying what am I going to do to be happy what am

I going to do to be happy chances are you know it's not going to work out a lot and that kind of backfires to create more despair yeah sorry to interrupt but I as soon as you describe contentment that way and thank you for parsing those two very useful um to me um as soon as you describe contentment that way I imagine waking up and rather than thinking about what needs to be done and the things I want to achieve which I want to achieve they bring me joy yeah throw in a third word there

just to confuse myself um this notion of contentment the way that you described I could see might lead me to pay attention to how good it feels to have gotten some sleep to um you know I sleep well most nights but what what a u privilege that is um and to you know maybe feel the comfort of the the comforter and and the mattress for a moment before barging into the day yeah to chase happiness as it were exactly I think you know the idea that we have to be happy all the time is also

ridiculous I mean I'm an neurotic Prof Professor like I'm never happy I you know you know it's just it's tough and so and also like I don't know about you but given that my dispositional affect another term uh you know is more on the lower energy kind of contented with a little anxiety um when I'm around the people who are like high energy and pleasant all the time I have a difficult time you know it's like because you somehow feel like you're not living up to some standard I just feel like overwhelmed and smothered by

it you know it's like stop being so happy all the time here's where I get to appropriately make a joke about because before we started we were talking about East Coast Schools versus West Coast Schools I was like maybe you come West for and um and that'll change or or maybe you're right where you belong there at the also phenomenal University that is Yale but anyway that's kind of inside ball stuff East Coast University is amazing Midwest University is amazing West Coast University is amazing different perceived temper but um and styles just look at the

walking speeds for instance not just the weather but yeah you rais a very important point we have a member of our podcast team that is like always in a great mood he's always in a great mood and it is for me a reminder to be in a better mood I'm not somebody that I would say gets I'm not moody I don't change moods quickly but I wouldn't say that my disposition is to be like Tigger like and just happy all the time um but his energy around that doesn't drain me it's um it but it

makes me wish I was him that's and that's okay that's you you know what I mean like the part of I mean part of being emotionally intelligent with colleagues you know romantic partners with children whoever is picking up on that like now that I know that about you it makes me think differently about you in terms of what your needs are that's emotional intelligence and for me I am like wake up every morning like having an exential crisis and like what am I doing with my life and you know what am I doing this today

for and then I got to publish this paper I got to finish my book I got to run my team like what do I want to do and you know then I'm doing it and then I'm like when I'm doing one thing I think I should be doing the other thing that's is just who I am and it's I've tried everything and it's just that's my operating system I'm more aware like I like when I was I'm I'm working on another book and uh as I was working on it you know I'm in a chapter

and all I can think about to the next chapter and I started like Mark give yourself permission to be with this freaking chapter it's okay like you can focus on one thing and not worry about the future and I had to literally kind of do that for myself that's that's how I am you know and so knowing that about myself is useful because um it helps me find the strategies that work for me and going back to the happiness thing it's because I'm also introverted and so when I'm around extroverts a lot I'm drained you

know I just like after something like this this an intense conversation I'm not going to go to a sports bar you know like have a beer and like watch the game I would never do that anyway but anyway that's just not my thing you know like that would make me I would like my brain would be burnt like my dream would be to leave here go take a hot yoga class and take a walk have a glass of wine Maybe by myself or with a friend and then end of the day all those things are

readily available l a m of here we can point you in the right direction it sounds lovely the um the introversion extroversion bit is going to um prick up people's ears it certainly did mine um I like time alone I also like time alone in the presence of many people in fact I get my best work done always either alone in nature or in Manhattan where there are people around me but I'm complet completely isolated love that too so um how should we think about introversion and extroversion these things get thrown around so much in

popular culture are there some solid scientific studies that support that introversion can best be defined as blank and extroversion as blank and I'm guessing there's a range there it's got to be on a Continuum it can't be two bins I mean for some people it's very clear you know they are a clear traded introvert and for some people they're just like endlessly extroverted no matter they wake up wanting to be with people they the end of the day they want to go out with people more and so what research shows for example with creative people

is they tend to be both they tend to be high introverts and high extroverts which is interesting right they're introverts when they're doing their art and then their extroverts when they're out there selling their art which is hard for some artists right because a lot of artists are kind of introspective and their creative types but they really struggle with getting out there and being that extroverted like look at my art and so you're the you're the lucky artist if you are traded in both directions um I think the easiest way to think about it is

just this it's a proclivity right it's a proclivity to um how you want to use your energy and um the introvert is more a container you know want to contain their energy um they want to um you know be in small groups they want kind of less frenetic environments and the extrovert just has a proclivity for you know more sensation seeking you know larger social groups and again it's a preference I always say I'm an introvert with pretty good social skills like I can appear to be extroverted and most people think I'm outgoing and I

always tell like I don't even like people that much you seem very outgoing yeah I'm not you know it's just not it's not my my natural like if I'm at a party I struggle with like like what what am I going to do here when you say you don't necessarily like people that much I realize you're joking but um and I was just going to um make sure to ask because I can't presume that doesn't mean that you dislike people it's just that being in the presence of a lot of people doesn't draw you um

out to want to be closer to or get to know all these people simply because they're there whereas an extrovert seems to really like forming and um engaging in new new relationships old relationships all relationships relating exactly if you're like running a campaign to run for you know mayor of your town like you're going to you want to hire an extroverted PR person right an extroverted person do marketing because they're like going to be out there like banging on the door it's not very comfortable talking to people right the introvert is going to be better

at doing the accounting you know and doing the planning and we've done this research actually if even fun with my students I would have them take their um take measures of that are valid measures of introversion and extroversion I would score them into groups like get the really extroverted group and the Really introverted group and I'd have them plan a party just go plan a party and the group of extroverts is bonfires there's beer there loud music on the beach and the introverts are like we have to make sure we have good napkins we want

to you know we're going to have four people you know it's going to be quiet music that's just you know how we're built interesting when I think of throwing a great party and I've thrown a few what I like to think we're great parties it involves inviting a bunch of people people over and then being able to stand back from a lot of it and not have to participate in all of it I just like seeing friends that didn't know each other start to interact that's cool that's fun for me and then um if I

have to communicate directly with too many people at the party I would definitely feel drained i' I'm known to retreat to a room and take a nap ored yeah I think so uh Rick Ruben who's world uh renowned for his uh creative insights and uh and creativity and for being Rick um I think once said on a podcast perhaps or maybe he said this to me um that Tom Petty was the sort of person that basically didn't do anything besides write music and read books and interact with a small number of people in his inner

circle and the idea of leaving the house was just completely overwhelming to him now of course people were always approaching him but like really really extreme introvert whereas Rick has described and I won't name names here um other famous people musicians and otherwise that go out specifically to try and get the attention of Fame yeah and if they don't they feel absolutely isolated makes sense even though they have people in their private life it's sort of like it becomes a kind of extroversion requirement I would imagine life is much harder for the extrovert in the

long run because you there's shows the extrovert tend to do you know have a little bit more success um because they're more willing to get out there and ask for it you know they get higher they get raises more quickly I see and you know in my work in schools you know I always ask teachers to pay attention to the personality of their students because the introvert has a lot of great ideas they just not dying to raise their hand and get the attention so don't just call on the kids who are raising their hands

because you're missing out on getting some great information in that case um do you cold call on people whenever I'm teaching I I somewhat reluctant to cold call on people because it I I recall it can be terrifying when suddenly you're sitting there taking notes trying to you know organize your thoughts around what the material and then suddenly you know the whole room is looking at you it's a I mean I set expectations you know around that and I because I'm really particular about that because you know it drives me crazy when the you know

the talkative extrovert is always you know getting their thing said um I think there's ways there there's good instructional practice IES that can help with that one thing I'm thinking about though is this intersection of personality and emotional intelligence you just kind of brought that up for me which is and people confuse those a lot so for example I even confused it when I was younger before I studied it because I'm high also in neuroticism meaning I am more Mercurial in terms of I worry about things and I'm fine then I worry again I just

that's who I am and I just always assumed that someone who is high in neuroticism or you know more as I said kind of volatile emotionally that was this low emotional intelligence because like how could you be emotionally intelligent if you're emotionally volatile and then I did all this research and found there's pretty much no correlation between personality traits and emotional intelligence and why is that well think about it if you are someone who is more even keeled maybe you don't even have that much of an opportunity to regulate your emotions right but then if

you get like triggered you you've never had experience so you it's actually harder for you someone like me I'm practicing it all the time right I'm always like I'm in a bad mood I got to give a meeting I'm like irritable I got to give a presentation so I'm like constantly like figuring out how to deal with my emotions and um and that's why there it's they're separate Concepts and in addition to it just to build on this knowing your personality traits can be extraordinar helpful for choosing the best strategies to regulate your emotions why

is that I was traveling in Australia recently and I gave this speech to a group of people the person who was the person in charge of the speech uh it was about an hour from Melbourne and um I took the train because I preferred to stay in the city took the train out I was planning to take I had bought my train ticket back the convenor said you know Mark I just really would love to be with you and can we just you know can I drive you back to hotel and I'm thinking to myself

like that is the worst thing you could ever ask me then on the wrong side of the road yeah and I had my train ticket I really it was a full day of presentations and stuff I really wanted to be by myself to decompress but I felt bad and I said sure the guy talked to me for the en an hour like he just nonstop talk to me I got back to my hotel I was like I am going to have a nervous breakdown like I need another day to recover because and it just it

annoyed me about myself not practicing you know what I teach which was Mark know thyself you're drained be polite you know it was my insecurity of just saying you know I really appreciate you wanting to drive me back but you know I really have a lot to do tomorrow I need to rest my voice I need to you know do some prep instead I just sat there like you know shaking and like you know having like just went crazy so do you see what I'm getting at like really knowing yourself in terms of like what

drives you and what your you know your personality traits just introversion extroversion alone and how that relates to like your selection of strategies is so important super important and by the way my joke about driving on the wrong side of the road I do realize that we drive on the wrong side of the road for Australians and those in the UK so um I'll do the for you I'd like to take a brief break to thank one of our sponsors element element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't that

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any element drink mix again that's drink element.com huberman to claim a free sample pack text messaging is an interesting example of communication that nowadays um depending on how many people have access to your phone number um can either feel like a wonderful source of filling the gaps you know on trains and while in trans it and while walking to the car perhaps hopefully not while driving although people seem to do that um and yet for the introvert I can imagine that it might feel inundating it might feel kind of um overwhelming um how do you

feel about text messages because it's just yet another form of communication I asked this for a very particular reason um I could imagine that extroverts love to text message they love to receive and send text messages that they can't stand a moment of down time before boarding a plane they're um they're excited that there's yet another form of communication at all hours of the day and night whereas introverts would be less excited to text message I also asked this in part um because I want to protect the um variable latency to respond to text option

that uh I've tried to exercise in my life but that seems to um doesn't really seem to work I think most people assume um you know if I walk up to you and I say hello and you wait 10 minutes to say hello back I'm I'll first think you're a little bit rude and then think you're a little strange whereas if I text you hello and I don't hear back right away um I might think you're busy there's some you know there's some wiggle room for interpretation but I think what I'm really getting at here

is do we tend to project the same um latency expectation on texts that we ourselves uh Embrace um this seems like an important source of um potential miscommunication misunderstanding and maybe worse yeah I mean certainly you could imagine also though that the introvert might be more comfortable texting because it it's less stimulation so it could work I think it could work in both directions um I think the problem with text messaging is that it's decreasing emotional intelligence because you really can't communicate the same way through a text message thank you can you repeat both those

things I'm to say 100 times no because I I I mean I feel this wash of like relief and now I'm looking for the appropriate word because I'm talking to you so I feel like I have to use the exact appropriate word I feel um I feel emancipated there you go um because I also feel that as texting has become more routine and has crossed a number of different lines of formality and in and informality right not just with family members but with um co-workers and that people we do and don't know and just matter

and have known for ages you know the the um jargon that we use with one group is different than the jargon we use with another um but I feel that texting in general has really degraded our ability to communicate verbally and in writing elsewhere there's good research on even like teens right now prefer to text them to be face to face which is weird not helpful to building like good relationship I shouldn't forgive me I I I'm going to interrupt you too I I I have no idea what it's like to be a teenager in

2024 so I I caught myself I have no place saying weird because there were things that I was doing as a teenager that I'm sure adults were like that's weird so I take that back you think about how disconnected and alienated and lonely people feel these days that's not necessarily going to help make things better I have an example you know when my father passed away a number of years ago I can't I got all these text messages I'm so sorry for your loss I'm so sorry for your loss I'm so from people who I

thought were really good friends of mine like 20 30 year friends I'm like you're not going to pick up the phone and like listen to my voice and ask me like what can I do to support you right now and as it's so strange and actually uh one of my closest friends you know didn't even text me she texted my assistant and said please go into Mark's office and tell him that I love him I'm like this is really weird like we need to like I picked up the phone I'm like what is happening right

now what is happening right now and you know people have preconceived notions maybe she thought I was overwhelmed and devastated and needed space but at the same time like make a phone call leave me a voice message and give me you know some options I had one friend she's like Mark I know you're going through a lot right now I just want you to know like if you want to talk anytime you want to call me call me if you want to text text if you want me to come out and stay with you for

a couple days I'm there that's an awesome friend yeah that was like that was exactly what I needed to hear I wanted you know someone to offer provide options or just do um but we're we're so hesitant these days it's kind of scary to me and it makes me fearful about the future of our relationships in general yeah I think this is such an important topic um I think because texting is so common and has been used to um you know communicate so many different forms of human emotion in this broad bin format I mean

how much can you really put into a text I I have some friends and Co put and you can voice text which is like then it's like right right it's long and sometimes well there are issues with that too I feel like it's it's enriched compared to texting unless the text is carefully um written out punct Ed I mean we can see the care that people put into certain texts or emails that they TP and most people including myself don't right texting is a short form communication um audio notes um voice memos seem like a

step up I think what this has probably done is that it's made the phone call or the goodness the handwritten card or letter it's kind of rais that to the the the Pinnicle of care of expression completely and by the way text messaging you know it's fine I always you know I'll be a little while you know like can you please pick this up whatever great nothing wrong with text messaging but when it replaces intimacy you when it replaces building you know strong bonds that's where I see the the largest problem yeah I didn't outright

set this rule in my relationships but I would say with my co-workers family members and in other kinds of relationships there's a rule which is that we don't argue over text yeah it's not cool but people do it a lot it's easier because you don't have to feel the feelings that's that's what it is you know it's I can be psychologically distant from that person and say what I want to say where if I have to say it face to face I'm going to have to face a response and that response may be very uncomfortable

for me and I probably don't have the strategies to deal with it because I never learned them I mean you and I are both aware that there is neural real estate specifically dedicated to the processing of faces and specifically to the processing of human faces and specifically to the processing of the emotions carried in human facial expressions so you know this is a hardwired aspect to our species which is diminishing you know there was a good a study done about kids in camps and they randomly assigned them to be with their phones not with their

phones and showed that after a couple of weeks of Camp kids who um have their phones decreased in their emotion perception skills so it makes a difference you know we need to give children and adults more face to FaceTime wild could we talk about the energy pleasantness axes sure um and create a mental picture for people of what this is I found this to be incredibly useful um if uh listeners or viewers have a a pen or pencil and paper you could uh map this out but it's very easy to um imagine in your mind

so maybe you could just tell us on the vertical axis yeah so we have you know horizontal we'll call that pleasantness and this is going back to something else that we talked about earlier it's called pleasantness not goodness or Badness it's in this moment am I feeling highly Pleasant or am I feeling unpleasant do I feel like approaching my day my colleagues do I feel like avoiding my colleagues do I feel safe and comfortable do I feel uncomfortable that's the xais and the way I like to think about it is that from the moment we

wake up in the morning till the time we go to bed that is activated we just you know you wake up in the morning and you just you're all of a sudden have a thought process like yes I want to get out of bed no I want to pull the covers over my head on the Y AIS is energy or activation okay so vertical axis is energy the technical term is arousal or activation but I think energy is a better term and so it's either your highly energized or you're deactivated or low in energy that's

mental energy it's physical energy it's like kind of like how much fuel you have and then we cross those two axes to create what we call in our work the mood meter and there are four quadrants we got high pleasant high energy yellow so think about emotions there happy excited elated ecstatic optimistic we got the green so that's low energy and pleasant still that's the calm content tranquil peaceful relaxed quadrant and then we have the unpleasant side and I'm going to repeat myself it's not the bad emotions or the negative emotions we're going to call

them unpleasant because it's not generally Pleasant to be sad or down or disappointed or hopeless or feeling despair which is the blue or that low energy unpleasant and we got our red quadrant on the mood meter which we'll call the high energy highly unpleasant emotions which are feelings of anger and anxiety so it's it's very helpful for people because you know when you're like you even said this yourself like you're not really sure how you're feeling and we know our inner lives are complex so to be able to have a tool that has four quadrants

where you like I don't know am I Pleasant I'm guess I'm kind of pleasant but my energy low all right I'm in the green all right now what are my options there no I'm feeling quite energized and pleasant oh what are my options there Etc we find that in for both preschoolers and CEOs very helpful extraordin helpful and then you know going back to ruler for a minute we might talk about the quadrant as being the r for self-awareness right recognizing like where am I in Emotion space and then you might ask yourself like all

right well what what what's going on you know what's why am I thinking that I'm in the yellow or red or blue or green what just happened what might be happening oh I'm about to be on a podcast oh I'm about to take a test oh I'm about to go into a difficult meeting with a colleague oh I'm about to go home and my partner is going to be mad okay now I understand why I'm feeling the way I'm feeling I put a word to it I'm more precise I'm not enraged I'm irritable I'm not

Blissful I'm just content I'm not depressed I'm just feeling down I'm not overwhelmed I'm just feeling a little uneasy that's helpful because that helps you go into the E and the r of ruler which is all right is this an emotion I need to express or do I keep it to myself does this emotion need need help do I need support right now or am I okay with what I'm feeling I have a great story about this actually you know we're born to be fixers I think you know especially in my role like as a

teacher or if you're a parent you know with a kid or a teacher partner right and so I go to visit this school where my program is it's called ruler also and we're in about 5,000 schools now across the United States and I'm visiting the school kindergarten and I do this check-in and the little boy says he's in the blue which means unpleasant low in energy and of course my like little 5-year-old he's in the blue I feel terrible and then I fixer like I want to fix this kid I want to I don't want

this kid to be in the blue and so I I know I can't do that because it's part of the it's like the rules a ruler you don't fix people feelings you don't fix people's feelings so I um I just said to the boy um I'm just curious you know you need a strategy and he goes no and I'm like no I said I'm just curious you know why don't you need a strategy he goes because I know it's impermanent wow maybe the next Generations coming up are far more emotionally intelligent than hours if I

may if they are if they get direct instruction that's my vision for the world is that every everyone gets an emotion education um and the boy says no you know I know it's going to go away I'm fine I'm like okay I'm bad at this kid like you're my teacher you know it was amazing and to think that that 5-year-old had that Insight that he had an unpleasant feeling that didn't need to be fixed that it was okay that he just knew he was in a little funkin but he has already experienced that emotions are

ephemeral you know and he can just let it go and he'll be in the green a little later or the red or whatever else it was really kind of mind-blowing I was going to ask how do we resolve the contradiction between the message to feel our feelings versus to just recognize that the feelings are moving through us as this five year-old gosh uh was and is able to do because I feel like it gets to the heart of a lot of what we hear in the psychological and wellness space which is you know feelings are

just feelings they're transient they represent all sorts of things and we can get to the biological underpinnings or the the um you know childhood trauma root root cause underpinnings the all sorts of things genetics for that matter should we feel our feelings in order to best recognize them I would imagine yes um is there any value to suppressing our feelings or does that tend to just grow the feeling what is known about this from the research literature because you see a lot of different opinions about this but I I'd like to know um have there

been any experiments where people are placed into a negative or positive emotion or are experiencing a negative or positive emotion and then intentionally try to suppress it has there been any brain Imaging any measurement of of galvanic skin response like does the emotion grow or does the emotion shrink it tends to grow um there are cultural differences just to be frank but in you know Western culture um suppression tends not to have great outcomes uh finding ways to reappraise tends to be more helpful this really gets into though for me the core of my work

because you know for 20 years of my life I was running a center for emotional intelligence and teaching skills and I would go around and I would see a lot of resistance a lot of resistance whether it was you know the hedge fund manager or the superintendent of schools or a parent you know I've had fathers come up to me say things like you know Mark you're so vulnerable like you shared your whole story about being like I would never in my wildest dream ever share with my own son that I was bullied as a

kid and I'm like tell me more of course you know I'm a psychologist and in the end you know what you know the guy was afraid that his son would think he was weak and so we have a mindset about feelings that we have to talk about people have feelings about their feelings sometimes we call those meta emotions or meta feelings sometimes it's just that happy is good anger is bad it's that simple my whole uh Recent research has focused on something I call permission to feel you know you know a little bit about my

own story I had a pretty rough childhood that included abuse it included a lot of bullying and I had two parents who love me but um you know my mother was a very anxious woman who never had strategies so you know she was always saying I'm having a nervous breakdown and she'd lock herself in her room and she wouldn't come out for a few few hours my father was as we might call today you know uh the tough guy who was kind of toxically masculine son you got tough and up he even said to me

once you know he's gone now and we have a good we had a good relationship but I'll never forget he said you know son I used to be kids up like you he said that he did and he didn't I mean he thought that was a message that I needed to hear to toughen up right that was he was doing that through love I mean it was not emotionally intelligent parenting but that's was the way he thought and you know he did love me he just didn't how to be a parent in that way um

and so think about that bullied shame fear abused all kinds of stuff going on in my head mom having nervous breakdowns father toughen up what happens you suppress you deny you ignore you eat you do all kinds of weird behaviors because you have nowhere to go with with your feelings and I fear that way too many people feel that way right now and I have good research to show that um you know you've read my book you know I had an uncle Marvin he was a middle school teacher who you know by some wave of

a magic wand was staying with my family one summer when I was 12 and he noticed something in my facial expression my body language he knew something was off and he was the first adult who sat with me and said hey Mark how are you feeling and I don't know if it was his facial expression his body language his vocal tone but that was the opener for me I'm not doing so well I don't really like life very much I'm scared and he didn't say I'm going to have a nervous breakdown or toughen up he

said we're going to get through this I got you I'm with you and it's really interesting to me because you know I feel like we're so focused on skill building which is really important but I want to take a step back and say are we giving ourselves are we giving our colleagues our partners our children the permission to feel and I feel like a lot of people don't have that permission now my research shows with tens of thousands of people across cultures that only about a third of adults felt that they had someone when they

were young who created the conditions for them to have permission to feel I mean 70% of the people walking around here right now in our corporations in our schools in our homes 30% felt like they had that and then you wonder what do you think the characteristics are of these people the characteristics of the uncle Marvins or Aunt maras or the colleague at work by the way this also works in the adult Workforce you can have an emotion uh Mentor or a feelings coach at work there's three characteristics do you want to take a guess

um I'm guessing empathically attuned okay um all of that's a for those that know empathy is a is a involves a bunch of subcategories so I won't acknowledge that empathically attuned um I'm guessing that they have themselves some high high emotional intelligence um and the third is um gosh I My Hope Is that there be a a uh High situational awareness yeah right because your uncle needed to see something subtle in your facial expression or maybe not so subtle but everyone else was missing it but but um to be able to detect that there was

something that really need it was like a silent Cry for Help yeah you're getting at like you're really Nuance which is that's why you're a scientist too the three broad characteristics the first one that show shows up cross-culturally non-judgmental like when we think about the people who gave us permission to feel they just had no judgment they let me be who I can be or who I am the second is empathic and kind of coupled with compassionate which is kind of the different form of empathy the third primarily is active listening people want to be

around people who don't judge them who listen actively and show that they care it's that simple and I'll tell you it's really um interesting to me because you know I do a lot of public speaking and often my my new strategy is I do surveys where I'm going to be presenting so I can present the audience themselves with their data and so I'm giving this speech to a bunch of adult parents High School parents and I'm showing the data from them they filled out the survey non-judgmental active listening empathy compassion and and and I show

just like my national study a third of you said yes two-thirds of you said no so this this this mom and she's like just like impulsively jumps out of his seat she's like I'm having an epiphany I'm like okay and she's like I know I'm certain that my daughter has an uncle Marvin I I know it and I'm also certain that my son doesn't and you know something Mark I am leaving your presentation today and I am finding my son his uncle Marvin I'm like lady it could be you uh and it was interesting it's

kind of going right by her it's like Outsourcing right like there's your karate teacher there's your feelings mentor and it's interesting to me and I push on this in my research now what is the resistance like what are people so afraid of I mean they're so afraid of feelings their own and their childr or their partners and so I asked you know I push on this and what's really interesting and sad to me is that adults today the two barriers I'm going to now I'm going to push you again what do you think the two

things that get in the way of giving other people permission to feel this is actually where my next question was going so I'll just ask the question in the form of an answer is this like Jeopardy I guess that's what you do or no it's the other way around in Jeopardy sorry you can see how many episodes of Jeopardy I've watched um that that if people don't have adequate bound emotional boundaries and they are maybe even too empathically attuned that someone they care about experiencing anger or sadness or frustration maybe even with them would shift

their own emotions um and not make them able to be available with the three qualities that you listed off before in particular non-judgment because now it's personal mhm and so it would undermine the process you're you're right there um the first one though is just a really interesting one just time people I don't have the time you don't have the time to be non-judgmental like can you talk to me about that one please it's actually the case that we don't have the time to be judgmental it's far too energetically costly yeah I agree um the

second really goes back to the skills so I've had parents say things like I'm afraid to ask my child how they're feeling cuz I'm not going to be able to handle it I mean think about that for a minute I'm not going to be able to handle it so you'd rather your son or daughter suppress their fears or their whatever they're feeling because you haven't developed the skills that you need to help co-regulate and support them you know this is again going back to you know my Mission Vision you know is that we need a

world where everyone gets an emotion education preschool to high school and it's got to continue in college and it's got to continue in the workforce and it's got to continue in our as we grow older because as a 54y old person right now who leads a large group of people Co hits like I had a complete meltdown I don't know how to like lead during Co I was trying to figure it out doing Zoom meetings and you know crazy stuff and then my mother-in-law got stuck with me and that was a real kind of wakeup

call in terms of like relationship building um and was really rough for me actually she came for a wedding uh one of my colleagues got married on March 3rd of 2020 well my mother-in-law is from Panama and so just so you know all flights to Panama got cancelled by March 13th and they didn't open until September so we had this 81-year-old lovely lovely woman but like you know it's a lot for your mother-in-law to live with you for eight months one little quick Side Story for this I just I think it's it's relevant so like

it was getting really you know I'm working from home my mother-in-law was there she wants me to make her cappuccino every morning which I like to do for the first week But like after the fourth month like learn how to use the machine and I don't want to do it myself I'm afraid of the machine I'm like sorry I'm not I I didn't mean to laugh out loud that's all right those cappuccino machines can be scary they can be but like growth mindset right like watch me I'll help you do it no I want you

to make the coffee I'm like you got to make your own coffee you got like I I told you I don't like people in the morning you got to make your own coffee anyhow one night we're at dinner and uh she looks at me in Sp she speaks Spanish I speak Spanish and so she said you know in Spanish are you really the director of the center for emotional intelligence and I looked at I'm like not tonight not tonight like it's we're going down and it was a mess oh I'm sorry I didn't mean to

laugh I laughed before you said it was a mess I just your uh impression of the question it's a maybe a Drew to mind some experiences of yeah I mean and there it was like yes my day job is I run a center for emotional intelligence but like I'm a human being who had strong emotions and I didn't have the strategies and I needed to cultivate a whole new set of Regulation strategies to deal with that new aspect of my life in thinking about people that can really help us by asking us the right questions

or in thinking about how we can ask people the right questions to really help them and US gain an understanding of what they're experiencing I recalling numerous instances in my life where there seemed to be the requirement for uh an excuse like an activity excuse like uh I currently have a very good relationship with my father but I remember when there was a time where we had to talk about science or watches as an entry point to any conversation let alone about emotions right and uh he's done a lot of work I've done a lot

of work and I like to think we're much we are much further down the road we enjoy a a very close relationship as a consequence of that work in part but I think what you're describing really makes me realize that no matter who anybody is or what their age or what their background that as human beings we don't just need permission but we really should think about just having a conversation about how others feel 100% as opposed to making an activity a prerequisite for that conversation and as I say this I realize some people are

probably thinking oh boy okay so we're just going to sit around and talk about our feelings but my short response to that is yes because when you don't do that then I can say from experience then pretty soon you're not participating in those activities with that person and potentially with anybody you know I mean I'm not saying that people become so unpleasant to themselves and others that they don't have any friends I mean okay that's an extreme case but what I hear in the backdrop of everything you're saying is that it's not just about an

education it's really about a practice of giving ourselves and others permission to Simply have a conversation about what one is feeling as an exercise for both people to be able to explore that in the correct way and there is a correct way and You' described the ruler approach as one there strategies you know correctness is a tricky term you know it's a it's a game it's no matter what it's going to be a game because you can't predict how people will respond but I couldn't agree with you more um I'll give you another example my

father who like you we ended up having an excellent relationship um my mom died um when I was young and he remarried and uh he had moved to Upstate New York and he had this lovely wife and she called me about two years after they were married and she's like Mark I can't take it anymore your father is driving me out of your out of my mind I'm like what do you mean he's angry all the time he's just really making me miserable and she's like I think you know I might have to leave him

and I'm thinking to myself oh my goodness like you know he's older and if she leaves him he's going to want to move in with me so like road trip and so I went on a road trip took my father out to the local coffee shop we're sitting down I can't take it anymore this is what he's telling me I can't take it anymore I'm like Dad like tell me more I can't take it anymore I'm like that's not enough information dad like what can't you take anymore in the end what I learned was that

my father has three sons all of us have doctorates we're all independent we're all successful her children were having struggles and she was needing to babysit her grandchildren my father didn't like that my sons are all taking care of themselves you know I want you know he's not realizing this but what he's saying is I don't like the idea of you spending so much time with with these grandkids cuz I want your attention now why do I tell you that cuz after my father and I spoke for about a half hour about this I said

dad you know it sounds like you're jealous he's like what do you mean I'm jealous I said well you're upset that Jane your wife wants to spend more time with the grandkids and that's not time with you in my emotion lexicon I didn't use that term you know that's jealousy I can't believe you're telling me I'm jealous I'm like I'm not I'm not telling you're jealous you're telling me you're jealous I'm just giving you the the concept starts crying hysterical crying because he had awareness for the first time of his emotional experience he was so

emotionally illiterate he just didn't know what he was feeling and he was just acting out once he sat down and understood the the experience of like wife wants to be with child because they need support I'm not happy with that cuz I don't know what to do with myself when she's spending time with the grandkids it's jealousy all of a sudden we had a pathway to helping him regulate now I'll finish this story by saying about two months later Jane she calls me she's like Mark I don't know what you did at that coffee shop

but like your father's a changed man and you know I don't take all the credit take some credit but it just shows you the power of emotional self-awareness like once you really know how you're feeling it can be liberating and then you can figure out what you need to do with those feelings I'm letting that really sink in because you know I think these days we hear a lot about therapy fortunately in my opinion um I think and I'm going to get the numbers only crudely right but they're certainly in the right direction and amplitude

there was a survey done I believe at Stamford um asking students how willing uh they would be to seek therapy if they were dealing with an emotionally trying time and this was in the I think early and mid 90s and the numbers that came back were very low somewhere in the teens or 20% of students pulled um whereas nowadays it's in excess of 80 or 90% very high yeah and I think that's representative of L can I give you another example this so here I am a professor at Yale I'm teaching courses on emotional intelligence

now I should just let you know there's resistance often times and my students are fantastic in general but there's a resist resistance to wanting to learn about emotional intelligence what they want to do in general is get an A in my course but they don't and they want to memorize like oh so the theory was written in 1990 by mayor and salv this a Premed course no this just general that was a joke PRS love the preds but they they they're very great conscious I have stories about that too but um and so I say

no this is this is about you developing the skills like this is going to be you're going to think really critically about and part of the essays you're going to write are going to be your action plans for building your own emotional intelligence I don't want to do that I want to you know get the test and take you know get the a after a month I get them bought in um interestingly though in my because I make my courses into research and um I ask them to fill out surveys how they're feeling every class

number one emotion stressed everybody's stressed I'm thinking to myself like stressed out like you got a good life here here but nevertheless stressed you know I have to have empathy I get it but I decided that I really had a hard time remember I defined stress as having too many demands and not enough resources I didn't feel like that was the actual feeling now who am I a judge but one way to get better at it was to have my students do journaling when you're stressed write about it what's on your mind what are you

thinking about take a guess with the number one emotion was after we did the qualitative analysis of journaling about stress yeah what they were really feeling fear okay Envy oh interesting Envy envy your father is richer than my father your mother is more connected than my mother you've got better hips you've got better lips it was endless social comparisons right and so Envy right is wanting what someone else has and anxiety is about uncertainty stress is about too many demands not enough resources and so here I was you know um having deeper knowledge of what

was the underlying feeling or emotion that they were having which was Envy not stress and so I had a conversation with the counseling department and I made a joke about it and I was like you know what's our University's Envy Reduction Program you know it wasn't you know the most popular you know conversation and I just think it's interesting to think about it in terms of helping people to learn what to do with their emotions you know right now you know there's a mindfulness craze everyone's doing mindfulness and I do mindfulness and I appreciate mindfulness

but let me tell you you know when you're feeling chronic Envy you know doing breathing exercises is not going to decrease the Envy you're going to have to work on your Construction in your mind of your relationships with people and so I just feel so strongly that we help people pause a little bit reflect a little bit think about how they're feeling as a pathway to just having wellbeing your joke about Envy reduction um is something I take very seriously we did a four episode series with Dr Paul kti who's a uh World expert in

psychi he's a psychiatrist and and among the very very best uh psychiatrists in the world um by many accounts and he discussed during that series but also on other podcasts he's appeared in such as my friend Lex Friedman's podcast that um Envy is actually the at the root of much of the evil in the world small scale evil large scale evil yeah and a lot of the despair that people feel and I think it's a word that isn't discussed enough um because like the sound of it is it's kind of gross right envious Envy nobody

wants to be associated with it but fortunately Dr kti described it as a you know a natural human emotion in some cases but I had no idea and I don't know if he knows but um maybe he does through his clinical work but I'll certainly pass along what you just said to him that so much of the stress that I have to imagine um good people and these students are after all I imagine people they're not evil um very not characterologically evil um let's hope um are experiencing Envy the wish to have more of what

somebody else has maybe something specific which of course gets to these um more common phrases of people feeling that they are not enough yeah um which is going back to contentment right I actually oh I didn't draw the arrow now I now I I thought I draw the arrow between contentment and envy right so if one wants to combat Envy you could imagine that a program to combat Envy might be perceived if one didn't understand it as a calling for people to just be content with less which is not what we want right I mean

we want ambitious people in the world we want people aspiring we want people to have growth mindset and yet you can we don't want people to be stressed and have a a pervasive feeling of Envy inside either so how would you make inroads into Envy well I think again like all emotions Envy is not a bad emotion you know the way I think about emotions as being you know and when we need to get help with our emotions is when if it's an unpleasant one it's intense in long duration right momentary Envy you know I

get envious all the time I get Envy I watch TED Talks I'm like ah that timing was amazing you know and I'm like I'm G to I'm going to try that out you know so I I use that Envy of someone else's skill you know as a way to grow how does that differ sorry to turn your own work back on on you with from admiration or inspiration like wow they you know like the yeah that's what I'm getting at so that's the difference between you know the the envy that leans toward admiration versus the

Envy like what you're referring to that leads to resentment right it's if I if I hate you because you have you know what I want now we're talking you know pathological Envy potentially and so that's the self-awareness piece you know it that's the part of really getting you know that differentiation of emotion that granularity um because again it's like anger it's not a bad emotion anger is okay there there's reasons to be angry in the world when we get treated unfairly we should be angry doesn't mean that we have to be disregulated right there's an

assumption that we make that when we experience unpleasant strong emotions like anxiety or anger you know that we're going to be disregulated I have a whole new relationship with my anxiety very different relationship I me I spent years working on it I notice it and I'm like hi anxiety how you doing today and then it just it's okay I can even be giving a you know here with you or giving a speech or teaching have that anxiety come in and not allow it to have power over me because I can observe it I can welcome

it and then if it's in the way I can say you know anxiety you're going to go back there for a little while or you know Mark I mean sometimes you know when I give speeches like it's it's the same speech right you redundant and it's like I can't believe I have to talk about this again and then I'll look at the audience I'm like it's their first time you know it's like all of a sudden that like my despair turns into optimism and hope that's all regulation conflict resolution is something that I think a

lot about in any situation where emotions are discussed and it brings me back to this earlier situation you were talking about where uh this woman said that she was going to find uh her child somebody to uh help him to intervene and you were thinking well why not you his feelings me she was going to go you know bu his feelings Mentor right exactly um and now there's a whole field of feelings mentors cropping up that actually wouldn't be such a bad thing hey that's my another one of my goals so it wouldn't be such

a bad thing say it louder I like that goal um so when we were talking about that one of the things that um surfaced was this notion that some people have a natural empathic Attunement or the emotion that the other person is feeling is a negative one and it's about us or about them and as a consequence you know we're not able to really be present to help the person the way that you helped your dad like he was he was frustrated with his wife yes had he been frustrated with you it might be a

little bit little bit more challenging to say hey well Dad maybe what you're experiencing in terms of your frustration with me is actually blank yeah because you're now in a tether with them so to what extent is empathic Attunement um a positive trait are there people who are better at turning it off or directing it in appropriate ways um than others in a previous podcast that I did recently um somebody sitting right there in that chair um uh told me and I believe them that I am codependent it's the first time anyone's ever called me

that codependent she defined it she spelled it out and it and it in a very monious way explained a huge array of challenges that I've experienced to the point where I've been learning more about codependency all right okay not easy for me to say now interdependent interdependent yeah um certainly depending on others is important but certain certain patterns um fall well under the umbrella of codependency so I was like okay and even now I'm uncomfortable talking about which is part of the reason I'm trying to desensitize myself to the word itself let alone drill into

the process of getting through it so the point being that if our emotions are so strongly Tethered to others we see that as empathy we label that typically as positive but it really diminishes our ability to be there for people if their emotions are negative and about us I disagree okay great great fantastic because that's empathy without emotional intelligence and so I I I work with a lot of doctors I you know I've done quite a bit of work with the cancer hospital at Yale it's called Milo and you know doctors have been taught from

early on you know you know like leave your empathy at the door and I challenge that you know when you're a patient with cancer knowing that you may pass the last thing you want is an unempathic doctor right you want a relationship with someone who's treating you and the assumption is that you get lost in your empathy and people have written about that and it's true there is overzealous empathy you can have compass and fatigue but again it's in the absence of you know emotional intelligence what do I mean well part of emotional intelligence is

regulation and so if I see my work as a cancer doctor as you know helping people have the best last few months of their lives that's a really interesting way to think about it you know so as I'm in relationship with my patient my mindset is I've I've come to the understanding that my job you know people pass but I could go down a rabbit hole of Despair because everyone potentially may pass or I can see this as I'm giving someone a gift I'm giving them a gift of my presence I'm giving them a gift

of them you know feeling held and cared for and so to me it's all about the framing you know of empathy um yes of course you know if you're just You Can Lose Yourself and someone else's shoes but that's not emotional intelligence emotional intelligence saying you know what I'm noticing myself I'm getting lost in your feelings I need to pull back a little bit do we know where in the brain um empathy resides um we hear so much about mirror neurons but I think for those of us that have been in neuroscience and psychology long

enough we we acknowledge yes there are appropriate conversations that include the words mirror neurons but that they've been made out to be much more than perhaps they are in terms of empathy and they've become sort of the default description for uh all forms of empathy and understanding and it's not uh it's not just that so what do we know about the the brain science of of empathy I don't know much about that to be honest what I know more about is the kind of psychological experience of empathy and that there are multiple forms of it

so for example there's the cognitive empathy piece where I you know I've never had your experience but intellectually I get that you've suffered or intellectually I get your experience there's the emotional empathy which is you know when I meet other survivors of abuse who have felt shame I understand what that means because I've lived there and not that our experience was the same but our feeling was the same we have a shared emotional experience and then on top of that that compassionate kind of form of empathy is what I think is what we need much

more of in our society which is we don't just just cognitively understand where someone is or relate to their experience but we feel compelled to be in relationship with that person and be supportive I'm thinking about something El that you spoke about earlier which is this idea that like and this is a misconstrual of my work and others work that the goal of this is to talk about feelings all day long like the last thing I want to do is talk about my feelings all day long like that is not helpful actually and I've had

some experiences in my life you know where like some like just to be blunt happens you know and I call everybody I know like my best friends my family can you believe this happened I mean I can't take it anymore and then I hang up the phone and I did the same thing and they all listen to me and then I've spent two hours on the phone telling the same thing over and over again talking about my feelings and I feel worse because I've rehearsed it 15 times that's not emotional intelligence right when we're emotionally

intelligent we recognize and we know that just talking about it is actually not helpful like we need to be with someone who's that active listener who's non-judgmental who shows compassion but when you're compassionate you actually are bringing it back to the person saying you know is this you know the right thing right now for you you know what else might you think about you know um I know when I've had really difficult experiences you know the person who says things like maybe could you just jump in the hot air balloon for a minute mark and

look down at your life and like besides this one thing that you feel like is the worst thing that's ever happened to you in your whole life anything else going right I mean yeah my partner loves me my dogs love me unconditionally I got great friends oh oh yeah all of a sudden that little thing that's activating you is not so big anymore that's emotional intelligence right is not getting lost in the empathy not just endlessly talking about feelings to the point where there's no strategies and I think that that's a that's really interesting um

because it goes back to something important which is the permission to feel characteristics of non-judgment active listening um and empathy compassion never and I'm talking I have tens of thousands of people who've done this does anyone say fixer Problem Solver I don't even get smart or wise when we think about the people who create the conditions for us to be our true selves we don't think about the wisest smartest fixer Problem Solver we think about the non-judgmental listener who shows compassion and I just I think that has to be reinforced that some of the fear

that we have is that we're going to get lost in all these feelings but no one's asking you to get lost in their feelings what they're asking for is support they're asking you to just listen and to maybe ask me a few questions to help me clarify experience and then help me on a path towards feeling better yeah I keep hearing that the way to do this properly is to ask questions as opposed to telling people what they need to do um your friend or this person who was a an effective source of support in

that moment said you know can you can you get in the hot air balloon and look down on your life um I noticed that they didn't say get in the hot air balloon for a second and then do this uh as a former partner of mine said who I'm still on great terms with no one likes to be shifted yeah no one wants to be told what to do right no one wants to be shifted no one no matter what state they're in high or low wants somebody to come along and try and shift them

or just tell them like you know go for a walk okay well why am I you know like to do what or meditate yeah that one's become equally uh grading when it's probably a great thing to do but perhaps there's a a different way posed in the form of a question that would be more effective I think the hot air balloon example also brings to mind something um I'll try and keep this as succinct as possible for your sake and for the audience sake but um you know having studied stress a bit in my laboratory

and experienced a lot of stress as most people have in their lifetime it's very clear that when we stress our mental aperture our visual aperture our auditory aperture everything shrinks right it contracts and and we know that getting a different spatial perspective gives us a different temporal perspective we can start thinking about our life Bend IN larger pieces and get that perspective of the things that um in life that are going well um there's a meditation that I guess it's a meditation I don't know what to call it that I um started doing years ago

when I was a junior Professor because life was so stressful before tenure and you little did I know that it just continues to get be stressful but a pleasure to do the work um that involves basically doing a standard type meditation for a few breaths of closing my eyes and focusing on my body and what's going on internally but then opening my eyes and focusing on something external like my hand or the room and then going to the pale blue dot sure um it's a very you know wide aperture so effectively the the hot air

balloon looking down it's distancing distancing right and making this a practice not in a moment of stress but each morning as I start the day as a kind of reminder that our brains our cognition and our emotions go through tremendous State differentiation like these complete we're kind of different people under these different space-time references um and that when we're in stress we tend to get locked yeah into one SpaceTime reference and I'm not trying to be you know Cosmic about this but you know that the the nature of stress is to have us anchor to

the stressor correct and to put up mental walls to break out of that physical walls so um it sounds like great supporters and we can help ourselves through um the UN more unpleasant portions of the emotion scale if we want to by um taking ourselves in into this different perspective using spatial tools hot air balloon um pale blue dot questions to yourself say things like Mark I mean I travel a lot and you know I was just in Washington State for some presentations before this flight delays then my flight got cancelled I missed a dinner

and I used to get really worked up about it and I would just then I just take a seat at the airport take a nice long inhale I'm like Mark is this really going to be something that's going to bother you next week I'm working on a book I'm like I got another night in a hotel to work I actually reframed it as an opportunity to like have some space and right and so you can use these techniques a lot going back to my dad so my dad as he got older his anger did come

back and he was kind of there were I remember this one you know time where we're at a family dinner and I had already been you know in my position for a while and there was some a little bit of resentment with my father because you know he was a a bluecollar worker and a very very talented air conditioning repair man and had a good career but all of a sudden you went to graduate school and got PhD and that was you know it was a little bit difficult for my father at some time and

so when I got a job at Yale in particular you know he got a little there was some emotions about that and I remember we were at this one dinner and basically he I'm not going to repeat what he said because it's really gross but he said something like you know Mark you think your blank doesn't stink anymore and I was like yesh and then he just kind of went on and on and on and I had to make a choice like do I start crying you know like in the middle of this dinner because

I feel so violated by my father do I like tell him to go blank himself and walk out of the room and I decided to use a distancing technique I decided to make him into a movie I decided that he was now a TV show and that TV show was something I was observing and not feeling and that has proven to be one of the most powerful strategies for me is when I'm in a position with someone who has a lot of and negative energy and as a kid who was bullied I'm more affected by

these things I think I create that psychological Distance by just putting that picture frame up there and I just observe it and I kind of ask myself questions about it I'm like wow or I say things like you know wow that's really interesting I wonder where that I get curious about it like I wonder where that's coming from you know what was his childhood like that he's so angry and it really is helpful so these are very powerful techniques that can be used in real time as you just Des very real time I use them

all the time you know I'm at the grocery store you know I'm not going to get into my issues but you know I have I'm like and I grew up with you know I would say lower middle class we were very we didn't have a lot of money everything was on a budget and you know I'm fortunate to be in a different circumstance now but I'm still cheap and so my partner were I'm like I don't understand like we're not buying that like that is ridiculous like we're not spending $7 on a bottle of organic

almond milk you're like I'm not doing it we're not doing it and then I have to like move away from the aisle take a little walk I'm like Mark you know is this worth your relationship the almond milk like really is this what is this what you're going to do and so like I don't know maybe I'm just the only one who needs regulation like 300 times a day but I find that I you know different strategies like the picture frame works when I'm angry or someone is ang angry with me um my anxiety I

get into the hi a balloon and I look down when I'm like irritated with someone I just take the walk away and I ask myself is this really that important and that's what I hope people will learn is that there's so many amazing strategies out there and that we use them interchangeably with different emotions and different contexts while a lot of the stereotypes dating back to the you know let's just say 1930s through to the end of the 1970s seem to um couch people as U more stoic less emotionally expressive especially in public or with

people that they weren't very close with there was also a tendency at least in movies about that time for people who were passionate to be rewarded for expressions of their passion so it's kind of two ends of the of the spectrum right we always think of the kind of the the real stoic um thing both for for male and female phenotypes right um You Look at M from the like the the 30s and 40s you see that but you also saw intense expression passionate expression um and now I suppose we're in a bit of a

um new place where I think there's an invitation I like to think there's an invitation for a broader range of emotional expressions and phenotypes let's call them I'm a biologist after all it's also a safe word to use still I think you can use the word phenotypes um stereotypes is a bit loaded um a lot loaded but emotionality and the notion of people being overly emotional has a unfortunately a bit of a a negative hinge to it whereas somebody being passionate that sounds like a pretty good thing well emotional is like historically like you're hysterical

it means that you are not in control of your emotions I don't I I don't like to use that term ever I just find it a useless term and um because that's when oftentimes when people think about emotions they think of people being emotional and I just don't even know what that means it just it it has like just connotations from the past that I don't think are helpful maybe that's why my graduate adviser said instead of telling you to be careful um I'll tell you to be mindful because the opposite of mindful is Mindless

and then you'll remember yeah and also exactly and by going back like you you'll hear people say why you so emotional and again that's a place of judgment what they're saying is that you're experiencing a strong emotion that's making me uncomfortable I don't know what to do with that feeling so by me labeling you as emotional I can alienate you where's that going to lead to not good communication right not healthy relationships and yet we reward people still for being passionate even if it's um tinged with some anger like if somebody has a cause that

they're really passionate about we don't necessarily say they're being emotional we say they're really passionate rooted kind TR of AIC outome whereas just anger or sadness kind of just you know um geysering out of us is it doesn't seem like it's directed towards an end right the emotional the emotional is a judgment right when I say you know Andrew you're so emotional right it's also can be a form of gaslighting right which is I'm trying to get you to believe something about yourself that I want you to believe which may not be a reality at

all which is usually problematic in our society um I think most of our low self-esteem comes from gaslighting in our childhoods where people gaslighting each other yeah I think that's the beginning of bullying which is that you know Mark you're too skinny Mark you're too overweight Mark your nose is too big Mark your nose is too small Mark you're too feminine Mark you're too masculine and then all of a sudden there's no um feelings mentors there's no education and I just start beli in it and then it becomes my reality a self-fulfilling prophecy and it's

awful I mean you see it all the time we're not born being self- critics we're born being experience dependent right we depend on relationships and if those relationships are meaning cruel and people are gaslighters well guess what that's going to end up being how we think about ourselves in your book you include a number of really wonderful quotes but one one of them that I anchor to very quickly is the following all learning has an emotional base and it was none other than Plato that said that what is the relationship between emotions and learning and

decision making let's think about right now right our our interaction right as a teacher right I mean how many of you have ever been mean your listeners and you like how many us have ever been in a situation in a classroom where it's like all right everybody let's turn to page 357 all right Mark you're going to read paragraph one and Andrew you're going to read paragraph two and your brain is immediately gone so emotions Drive our attention it's so clear right if we're not feeling engaged or curious we're going to be bored and again

boredom not a bad emotion it just means like what's being presented to me and the way it's being presented is not me meeting my needs it's not engaging me so my brain needs to do something I'm just going to go doodle I'm going to go push the kid here I'm going to get on my phone it's just where we want to our brains are wanting to do things um when we're in environments where there's a lot of curiosity where there is high engagement attention is much better so that's the simplest thing to think about um

in my work you know my whole career has been about building curriculum to help Educators integrate emotions into their everyday classroom and part of what we help them understand going back to that mood meter think about that for a minute you know a lot of us because of our dispositions we tend to speak with a certain Cadence we tend to present in a certain way and if you're someone who like lives in the green right you're just calm and content and tranquil and peaceful B people all right some of the yoga teachers right let's all

turn our attentions to ourselves they're great I love yoga but my point is if you're always in that green quadrant like for me even though I'm like living there a lot it's like give me some energy please and then there's like I have a friend who is a principal of a middle school in San Francisco and she's a former tennis coach and she walks into the school team let's go grow grow every day it's like Heather come on you know like you're overwhelming me and then you've got people who might be in that kind of

you know blue quadrant you know it's like we've done some education work in the past you know and let's be real how much education reform really matters you know why you know Mark you do all this research but who's reading it do anybody really reading it such a downer yeah or that person who's always in the red right that's activated you know like CTIC you know and so my point here is that you know we're going to default in many ways to being in one of these quadrants maybe all day long maybe part of the

day but as someone who is leading um like I because I I consider leadership teaching uh someone who's managing a team as a teacher in a classroom as a parent couple whatever I've got to be aware of kind of where I live emotionally and I've got to be aware that not everybody wants to be with me where I'm at and my job is to create an emotional roller coaster ride for people to bring people on an emotional Journey because that's what's going to keep them interested and believe it or not from our research and others

research we know that certain emotions are better for certain things so for example if I want my high school students to be like really brainstorming ideas I'm not going to put on like a Gregorian chant you know it's like I'm GNA put on you know go back Lady Gaga you know I'm on the edge of glory and like let's get pumped up and like everybody let's get the Post-its out there and everybody's excited and just brainstorming but then you know which one are we like what's going to be the project you can't be all hyped

up because then your brain is not in a very kind of um a building consensus kind of model mode so when we bring our energy level down it's like oh let me think about it for a minute it's more you're more thoughtful you're more careful you're more like I don't know then like people would say well why would blue why would you know unpleasant low energy be helpful well believe it or not often times we can be much more detail oriented when we're in that low energy unpleasant place it's like writing a I do a

lot of grant writing right it's like I think it's great not a great idea Mark like put on the classical music like Zone everybody out get into that place where you are going to look for every eye to dot every comma that should be a semicolon every Dash that should be this paragraph matching you can't do that when you're really super excited it just doesn't your brain doesn't operate that way and then people say red like why would red be great the best story I have for that is so I actually did a collaboration with

Lady Gaga uh and her foundation Born This Way Foundation many years ago and um we did a study of thousands of high school students across America and we looked at how do they feel when they're in school and what we found was 77% of the feelings and I repeat that 77% of their emotions at school were unpleasant tired bored and stress were the top three back then so we did this study we were working on it as a big project called the emotion Revolution and we ended up going to the White House to present our

findings I had to make a decision like I had the Secretary of Education at that time in front of me I'm presenting this big study on the emotional lives of teenagers do I want to go in there like you know I've got an amazing study to share with you I'm like not so great do I want to go in there like secretary let's just take a nice long inhale and an exhale that's not going to go over so well do I want to go in in the blue like you know it's pretty bad out there

no I decided that red was my quadrant I wanted the people in the education department to be fired up by this research I want them to be I want them to feel the passion that I had and the anger that I had that it is an it is an injustice for kids to feel that way in our nation schools we need to figure out what to do to create a more engaging learning environment and so I decided to really present that in that way I didn't present the findings and like look at the data I'm

like I want you to really take a look at these data please 77% of the I mean I'm saying 77% of the emotions tired bored and stressed how is that going to lead to a nation filled with people who are Innovative and creative and making a difference in the world think about it we know how emotions Drive the way we behave if you're tired bored and stressed all day long what's the result and so I presented that way and you know I did the best I could um and I think that's the magic of understanding

emotion does that does this resonate that we're going to we're going to be intentional about the emotions that we feel and that the emotions that we create in environments whether they're at home or at school or in the workplace because certain emotions work better for certain things yeah your examples um bring me back to your earlier Mention Of This brilliant 5-year-old kid who realized that um his current emotional state was like the weather it's yeah going to change in order to have that perspective my guess is that he had to have already at some point

moved from the blue quadrant so low energy low pleasantness um to the green quadrant you know high pleasantness low energy to the yellow quadrant perhaps not in this order and yes I'm using this to remind people about the quadrants uh higher energy higher pleasantness um and then red um high energy low pleasantness yes well because he's checking in Daily right right so in this school which we call a ruler school that's what they do kids check in in the morning and other times throughout the day and they start to recognize that I can feel this

way at one point of the day and I can feel this way at another point of the day and if I'm feeling this way and I'm about to do something with that feeling is not great I can shift out of that feeling or I can still feel that feeling and still be a good learner I mean that's incredible to me that we can do that and I see it in thousands of schools and it's done remarkably well and you've developed an app that's freely available um that allows people to essentially um press the screen um

is that right and and to denote where they are on this um energy versus pleasantness um scale at numerous times throughout the day and night if they choose we'll provide a link to this app in the show note caption it's called how we feel yeah I've used it before and a previous version I need to update and get the new version and I will um I found it to be immensely useful just to start thinking about emotions along this energy versus pleasantness axis yeah um after one does this for a few days or weeks you

know maybe um checking in and and touching the app um I don't know a couple times a day maybe again in the evening upon waking uh what sort of data or information does one get back that um can be informative toward being a healthier happier person app excuse me a healthier person more contented more content um well what's really cool about the app and the reason why we have an app is that technology can be super helpful in this instance for building self-awareness so if I set reminders which you can do on the app to

check in in the morning maybe after lunch or right before I go home you know you pick whatever works for you or you can do it randomly and then you aggregate your data across time right now you have instances of your emotions over time but what's also cool about it is that you can disaggregate your data by things like who you're with or where you're at or what you're doing and then you can analyze that so you get your little mood meters that are all different colors because wow I thought I was more in the

yellow at work but I'm actually more in the blue at work or I thought when I'm with this person I'm actually feeling calm actually when I look at my data I'm always anxious with that person so it runs a reverse correlation yes fantastic and then you can just look at your report and then it asks you questions to get more insights and also importantly we've embedded a lot of the strategies that I've been talking about so like these distancing strategies or the breathing exercises or the mindfulness exercises or gratitude exercises which by the way I

was thinking in the back of my head as we were speaking about the Envy Reduction Program I think the number one thing is gratitude that like if our brains are just endlessly searching for what's better that's out there than what I have we're not experiencing any gratitude for what we have and so I spent a lot of time helping people really understand like take a look like look where you're at as a student think about what you have the opportunity to learn think about the opportunities you have in life and all of a sudden it's

like oh yeah my life is pretty good as opposed to everyone else's life is better than mine so gratitude for me sometimes it feels cliche these days you know you've heard so much about it and I can't talk strongly enough about both the practice and the science that supports it yeah Amen to that when I did an episode about gratitude um now some years ago um I was positively shocked to see the data yeah the the data on gratitude practices are so striking in terms of whether or not one looks at neurotransmitter expression or U

whether one looks at um happiness rating scales as it were um learning ability to learn so many things are improved by even short gratitude practices exactly and it was interesting for me to realize that not only do effective gratitude practices include thinking about what one has but also in observing others expressing their own gratitude either towards us or towards others so um you know there's something about the human brain that that really thrives on gratitude and the other thing that I think is worth mentioning you said um uh these students um could through a gratitude

practice realize the opportunity that they have I think a lot of people default to the assumption that a gratitude practice will make them complacent yeah and um stop seeking uh to reach their goals but actually the opposite is true there's a smaller research as far as I understand maybe it's expanded in recent years where if people do a regular gratitude practice even five minutes a day their achievement actually increases as well so gratitude and complacency are um not on uh they're not in the same bin exactly these are all evidence-based strategies to help us have

a better life so clearly you're on a mission and it's a wonderful in fact admirable one at that to bring more emotional awareness um can we call it that emotional awareness to kids and to adults to better the world I don't I don't think I'm you know overreaching there I think that's the goal I'd like to get back to your origin story a bit to understand uh a little bit more about the motivation behind the goal um you've written about in your book and you've spoken a little bit uh today about the fact that you

were bullied pretty viciously yeah um and also um we're the target of abuse yeah and when one thinks about bullying in particular um we I think all hopefully naturally default to okay how can we stop bullies but I'm guessing this is a two-sided issue and I'm not I'm not trying to create empathy for bullies here but I'm guessing that in order to really um disintegrate The Bullying problem down to zero which would be the ultimate goal sounds great to me yeah that um we need to get into the minds of both the bullied and the

bullies right and as uncomfortable as that might be maybe um this is an opportunity to uh you know Embrace some of the very practices that you've been talking about yeah um so if you would could you tell us a little bit about how as a kid how you perceived your bullies I'm very curious about that um I can say I've never been bullied but I've also not been a bully I I can easily say I was thinking about this during our brief break there um I hate bullies like I I like hate them I'm I'm

like right there in the red low pleasantness like top top corner there like it activates me physically like it makes me angry makes you want to do something about it but as somebody who was bullied how did you perceive your bullies did you think they were like correct or the authority um and how have you embraced whatever understanding that was and morphed it over time to be able to think about how to solve The Bullying problem both from the perspective of the bullied and bully yeah that's going to we're going to have a couple days

together for this um you know I think you know when I think about my 8-year-old self 10-year-old self 11year old self being bullied um remember bullying is about a power imbalance that's one of the core elements of it it's about the intent to harm um which is a the the it's not conflict it's not like sibling rivalry it's intent to harm you know whe there's a power and balance and you know how long and and the repetition of it those are the three key factors in bullying it's repeated it's intended to harm and is a

power imbalance and so that puts you in a really powerless position when you think about it when you have nobody to support you no upstanders no one else around you to to help you get out of the situation what happens is that you feel fear um and what I felt um and it's been the emotion that I've struggled with my whole life a shame because what happens when you're bullied often is that you are made to feel like you are not worthy it's diminished selfworth because I've got power over you I'm going to do whatever

the hell I want to you I'm going to say whatever I want to say I'm going to spit on you I'm going to throw you into the locker I'm going to you know do crazy stuff which is what happened to me um and guess what there's nothing you can do about it and when you're in an environment where nobody does anything about it it creates despair so you can see how there's a lot of emotions there and I'll tell you right now one of my hardest memories of being a student in around 10th I mean

um when I was around 10 years old is that um I remember being in a classroom in math and I was wearing like a vest like a down vest as a protection it was like my thing to hold on to like like my my little vest was going to be protective of me the only problem was I had two bullies sitting on the side of me and what they did throughout the entire class was they used pen and they just drew like wrote things about me on my jacket and I can still remember like you're

sitting across from me you being my teacher and I can still remember locking eyes with my teacher and him just looking away and that feeling that you have of complete despair like how is it that I'm not being protected you know by this adult in my community and so that's the issue that we're trying to solve for now I could make all kinds of excuses about the teacher maybe maybe he didn't really notice I don't buy it because it was repeated over time and it was happening a lot I could also say that you know

maybe he misread my facial expression I'm not buying that either I think it was either he had a mindset you know this is a write a passage you're going to toughen up kiddo or you're not going to survive in your Clifton High School or another point is that he just was like I have no idea what to do about it and I'm just going to let it go none of those are an option for me anymore this is not acceptable and so we need to teach people skills people need to be emotionally perceptive like emotions

are signals I mean that's an important point of this conversation my facial expression which was probably one of depression fear and shame which is not one of a big smile in general obviously there's variability but point is that it's pretty clear when you're wearing a jacket and sitting like this in your classroom with a hoodie on you know doing your work and people are writing on you you're not in a good place how that perception of my experience my emotion was not a signal to do something blows my mind it blows my mind I'm just

saying it just I can't imagine an adult being in a situation with a child that is being treated that way and not thinking action but yet we see it all the time all the time we see it even nowadays all the time there's by the way the research shows that bullying has not really decreased in the last 30 40 years really no it is not it's pretty much about a third of middle school high school kids get bullied each day in school and so this is the point of my work which is that a lot

of the programs out there are like let's create school rules all right who's going to follow these rules like what is how are rules teaching people skills it's not working my whole thinking about this is that we need to teach the things that we've been talking about empathy perspective taking you know doing role plays having people understand what it feels like to be in that situation like you said you've never been bullied right and never have bullied which is great for you which means it might be harder for you to understand that because right it

the empathy for you might be a little tougher yeah that's part of the reason I asked the question I mean I I was um debating to myself whether or not I ask it be in that way because I didn't want to come across as insensitive but precisely because I have sat on neither side um of the bullying equation that it's kind of a foreign thing to me it also makes me realize and especially now after what you just said that while I was in high school I'm guessing there was a lot of bullying going I'm

sure you might have witnessed it and I I missed it yeah you know I had some friends that could definitely be classified as as Misfits yeah and I think looking back they hung out with my group of friends because we were definitely diff we were into different things we weren't I we you know me meaning my peers grew up in the John Hughes film era where you had like the jocks versus the hippies versus the skateboarders versus theout yeah exactly and you know and I had my crowd and and was friends with a number of

people outside that crowd but there were these kids that would hang around us that um weren't into the same things that we were and I am looking back and realizing now that they did it because they they were definitely safe with us yeah and um we could be a little scary if we wanted to be but we weren't the type to go out and be scary so we I think they must have sent some safety with us and um I actually have very fond memories of of those kids and know some of them still now

so yeah I I asked that that way in part because I realized I I missed a lot well Lord knows I missed a lot of what was going on in high school for other reasons but I just missed a lot of this um and I think in even in academic culture as an adult I not now but I certainly witnessed bullying at meetings more that was more demonstrative where people would make fun of um people in general in a way that I felt suppressed the likelihood that people would ask questions which is a kind of

different form of posturing and bullying right make students afraid to raise their hand and and ask questions at meetings for instance um it's intimidation right intimidation and I experienced that too I remember when I when I was younger in my career I was giving a speech and people were like oh he does the field research you know like in school that's soft science and I was very very fortunate and I was hurt by it because it's like by the way like doing your you know experimen the laboratory with your sophomores in college is a lot

easier than trying to randomize 60 schools in Brooklyn and Queens New York and try to find effects of your program it's hard research really difficult even just working on human is hard for those of us that have worked on both animal models which I no longer do and humans which I've done and do um working on humans is that much harder be for all sorts of reasons yeah they're not um on the same genetic background you can't just put them in their cage take them out the same like different like dark Cycles some slept well

some didn't sleep well I mean there are issues with animal work as well but yeah just even embracing human research at all is an immense challenge so the idea that it would be viewed as soft is um I mean that that's just like laughable to me but exactly um but I was very fortunate that there was a a professor of very senior Professor his name was Ed Ziggler he was one of the uh co-founders of headart and he was like my he became my adult Uncle Marvin and um I'm giving this speech and all these

people are like trying to like really like demolish you know the presentation and my research and he was re revered because he was like this famous developmental psychologist and he just stood up and he's like he slams the table he's like I like this research like and I love you you because like I needed you to stand up for me because I'm like the St not the stupid I'm like the little postto here right like I need support and uh so you know my argument is that it's a human right to be protected right now

I could protect myself now right of course I can but I'll have to I'll give you another example of this gosh this is a really tough one for me me I would say eight years ago I was giving a speech at our University uh to a bunch of funders and it was me and another professor who I will not name who is bigger than I am and bigger personality than I am and has a kind of rough rep reputation of being kind of a bully I went on first now granted I'm a pretty good presenter

and he was going on after and I just thank you I went to the side he gets on now I actually did a presentation on bullying as a matter that's why I'm thinking about it all right I'm I get off stage I'm sitting you know everybody else he gets on stage and changes his presentation and shows a video of a kid being horrifically bullied which has nothing to do with his research and I'm thinking what the hell's going on here and he plays a video he's like doing that like laughing to himself and he's like

you know I just want it'll let people know that was Mark before he got his black belt and I'm like what a dick yeah it was not cool and I felt like firstly what was really interesting to me as a psychologist is that in that moment I regressed a 10 years old it was psychologically all the memories of all the feelings and the bodily reactions I was like boom and then you know luckily you know I do have a fifth degree black belt luckily I have a PhD in Psychology luckily I had ch a therapy

and I've been teaching emotional intelligence for 25 years I'm like Mark you're 50 you've got a black B like it took me a lot to recover and I had to make a choice because like I'm still intimidated by that and I it makes me sad to even admit it because I don't like that I'm at this place in my life where I still can be intimidated by the bullies but it's how I feel and I have to just accept that and I decided in that presentation was like Mark like you got to say something you're

going to prove to yourself that you can do it and so after he was over you know I waited a little while and I just went up to him and I said you know I have no idea what motivated you to showare that video but number one it was not cool and number two it can never happen again never and I can cry now thinking about it because it was very difficult for me even as an adult and of course I ran away I didn't run away but I you know I took my breaths I

felt proud you know that I was able to handle myself which you know may sound strange to some people you know being an adult who's a psychologist you know who has a fifth degree black belt I have to reinforce that now to make myself feel strong um but it was such a power it was a it was a great moment for me one of like Having the courage to face bully um and interestingly enough uh the guy never he was he turned his he he treated me like I was like the president of the University

after that and so my point of telling that story is that like I was 50 like that's old to only to to to cultivate the skills that I needed right to be able to deal with that very difficult situation and my dream is that you know I always I you know I say I tell people I'm so envious of that kindergartner because I've been lucky enough to be the developer of the curriculum but I didn't live it and so it talking about Neuroscience like I'm not wired like that 5-year-old is going to be wired because

they're growing up in an environment where every day they're checking in on their feelings it reminds me of just another story I was in a school in Brooklyn and I mean kids they this one school's been using our program for a decade and they wanted the kids wanted to meet me and the principal of the school who's my former student um he said you can ask Mark anything and it's like why do you do this and what motivates you and and I was telling these kids the story of my childhood and this one girl she

must have been in sixth grade she said to mean it's really hard for me to understand your experience I said why' she's like I've been going to this school since I'm in kindergarten and I can't think of a day that someone didn't ask me how I was feeling it's powerful you know when you think about like her neural development right all the pathways that are being built for this person or these children in thousands of schools to be learning their feelings understanding where they're you know why they're feeling the way they're feeling to interact with

other kids and see how they're feeling and how they express their feelings and how they deal with their feelings and learning strategies to together in a Cooperative environment to cultivate and how that gets more complex with development right because in kindergarten you're learning about sadness and disappointment but then you're learning about Despair and alienation and exclusion and that's what makes this work so interesting is that these Concepts evolve throughout our lives right think about it I mean what anger meant to me when I was five is not what it meant to me when I was

10 or 15 or 25 or now 55 your description of confronting this bully I don't even want to call them your colleague because there's nothing collegial about I thought it was an embarrassment for the University but more importantly the fact that you were able to confront them is to me and I think to anybody that hears that story the definition of courage yeah you know because it's in the moments where we feel like this big and we're collapsed on ourselves and we um don't know where the resources are and we don't have somebody sitting there

like holding our shoulder saying listen I'm going to go talk to them or let's go talk to them that you you you did that for yourself you um internalize the um the lessons you'd learned initially from your uncle yeah um and brought that forward and um I think anyone hearing that story um it's it's obvious to them that um that is the a great Act of courage and it's an inspirational one too and and a reminder that for people that are being bullied as adults as well that it's important to calmly but directly and firmly

Express like you basically gave him a no like a really strong like no like you went to a puppy that was like putting itself in danger or something except in this case it's a human being who had agency and so he he needed a sharp he needed to be he need be punished slightly yeah he needed to be educated about boundaries and about how this game of being a colleague is played well certainly not rewarded you're right punished isn't the right word he he certainly um whatever um dopamine hit he got from that that I

think part of antic was just um needed that needed to be retracted that needed to be taken away from him yeah and I think that we should spend a minute on punishment because it never works you know unless it's consistent harsh and nobody wants to be punished because it doesn't feel good and it doesn't teach people anything right go to your room what does that teach me it teach me to go to my room and ruminate and get angrier I've been in schools that are not using our model you know I'll never forget this one

moment where I was in a principal's office a kid had given the teacher the finger and got thrown to the office and it was a Tuesday and uh it was Tuesday before the next week was going to be a holiday break and the uh you know you got it was a two-day suspension you know for giving the teacher the finger but that was going to be till Thursday and then Friday you know after that there'd be a week break and the I literally heard the principal say let's just make it 3 days so we don't

have to see this kid for 10 days and I'm thinking what is this person learning about empathy about self-regulation about emotional awareness they're learning nothing they're going to be thrown out with no skills in an environment that's probably not supportive and so I just think this has has to change and it still does happen not as often thank goodness um I'm a prevention scientist so I I don't want to wait until everyone has an anxiety disorder and everyone's been bullied I want to cultivate a society where people have the skills they need to navigate their

emotions and know how to build healthy relationships and make sound decisions and have good mental health and achieve their dreams and it occurred to me just now that you effectively doing what your uncle did for you but for millions and millions of people you know God bless Uncle Marvin I have a you know as you know now the uh the Storyteller but one of the most profound moments of my career was just after I had written my book and I was on my book tour I'm in Westchester New York and I'm giving a speech and

I had never spoken about my uncle in that level of detail nor my abuse by the way I talk about courage it was not till 48 writing this book that decided like people ask me like why are you so passionate and I would say I hated school I was bullied but I believe I was robbed of my emotional life as a child because of the abuse and you know my circumstances and I felt I need to just share that a little bit not the focus but I needed to be I need to be real so

I'm sharing about Uncle Marvin the sixth grade teacher from monacello New York State and this guy has this like like that woman in the audience he had an epiphany he's like are you talking about Marvin Moore the sixth grade social study teacher from monell New York I'm like like yes he's like Mark you're not going to believe this but your uncle Marvin was my uncle Marvin I'm like are you kidding me he's like your uncle was my sixth grade teacher 45 years ago and he's the reason why I teach I was blown away I was

like I was like I was shaking so excited that I never met one of my uncle's actual students cuz you know we worked when I was older he he was older and so I um I sent to the guy I got to finish my speech but can I interview you afterwards he's like yeah I so I interview this guy I have it on tape 45 minutes what he remembered about his sixth grade social studies class I mean I have no memories of my social studies class this guy remembered details of my uncle's facial expression body

language the way he taught feelings the way he taught history it was on and on and on but here's the kicker so we're done with this conversation and he looks at me and he's like you know Mark it's it's really clear that your uncle had a profound influence on your life and so I just have one question for you for whom are you and Uncle Marvin and it just like like I'm the professor here I'm the one who does the teaching right I do the research you don't ask me questions like that and it was

so eye opening for me about just you know my life in terms of how I spend my time with my own family and am I giving that non-judgment am I giving that active listening am I showing my empathy and compassion I'm like I'm a workaholic you know I write the papers I'm not living it and it really has made a profound difference for me you know I really try hard uh to be an uncle Marvin and it's tough because time right all the factors that we talked about earlier but gosh you know if we only

had more of those in our world well it's absolutely clear to me that you're extremely passionate about this mission of teaching people what emotions are and how to work with them giving them really clear systems to do that tools that they can do that and uh I think it's fair to say that um you answered your own question in my opinion um if I may that you know you through your uncle Marvin to you and through the work that you do and through your public education effort which includes your graciousness in coming here and sharing

with us what you know um what you believe people can benefit from and I it's absolutely clear to me that people can so benefit from these tools and what you put into your book which does include some very personal things that um I must say are entirely couched toward the reader understanding and learning how they can make themselves and others and the world a better place it's um it's really extraordinary I appreciate that the um the Rippling out effect um is not uh sufficient way to describe it it's really an enormous amplification of the hard

work you've done and I'm just really really in awe of the fact that you've taken hard experiences and transmuted those into so much good and so on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching just want to extend an enormous Deb of gratitude this is truly important work and I don't say that lightly I really appreciate that thank you thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Mark bracket to learn more about his work and to find links to his book permission to feel which by the way I highly recommend as well as

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