How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence & Never Get Angry or Bothered by Anyone

Hey, it's your friend Mel and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. If you ever hit send on a text, you know is going to start something, but you do it anyway. Or maybe have a long day at work, you're a little grumpy, so you just kind of pick that fight with your spouse for no reason. Or what about when you talk yourself out of a great date or a great job or a fun night out with your friends because you just get up in your head and you get all negative. It's like an emotional tsunami and you completely lose control of how you react and how you feel. And then I don't know about you, but I immediately then feel regret. Why did I say that? Why do I always assume the worst? Why am I in a bad mood? Why do my feelings run me over? Why do I take them out on everybody around me? It's like your stuck living in reaction mode. But our guest today is going to tell you something life changing. It does not need to be that way. He is here to show you that you can reprogram your mind for more positive thinking. You can control your thoughts and you don't have to take everything so personally. You can learn how to go through life and let the things out there not get to your emotions in here all the time. Because in those moments where you feel like you are being run over by your emotions, there's a very important and simple question that you need to stop and answer. Are you going to keep in control by your emotions for the rest of your life? The answer is no. Because today you're going to learn a skill that 90% of people have never been taught emotional intelligence, which is learning how to recognize what you're feeling. So you can take back control of your life so that you can have freedom, so that you can use your emotions to achieve your goals, to be happier instead of your emotions constantly using you. I'm talking about a simple shift that will make a positive impact in absolutely every single thing you do from your attitude, to your relationships, to your physical and mental health, to your ability to achieve your goals, your emotions impact all of these things. And today you're going to learn how to deal with what you feel and it's going to change your behavior, your relationships, and your entire life. I'm elated that you're here right now because this is one of my all-time favorite topics and the person you're about to meet is somebody that I have admired for gosh, almost a decade. It is an honor to be here together with you. It's an honor to spend time with you. And if you're a new listener or you're here because somebody shared this episode with you, I just want to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast family. And boy, did you pick a winner in this episode? You're about to meet Dr. Mark Brackett. Dr. Brackett is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. He's a professor at the Child Study Center in the Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Brackett and his colleagues at Yale developed an evidence-based framework that has been implemented in more than 5,000 schools and is used by over 10 million students. And today he is teaching you the science of emotional intelligence. He has published more than 200 scientific articles on emotions, decision-making, relationships, health, and performance. Dr. Brackett has headlined over 700 conferences and advised fortune 500 companies on building emotionally intelligent workplace cultures. He's the New York Times best-selling author of Permission to Feel translated into 27 languages and his most recent book is dealing with feeling. How to use your emotions to create the life you want. And that's exactly what Dr. Brackett is here to do. He's here in our Boston studios for you and he's going to distill 30 years of groundbreaking research into this single conversation to help you feel better and do better and to create a more meaningful life. So please help me welcome Dr. Mark Brackett to the Melbourne's podcast. I can't believe I'm here. I have had you at the top top top of the list for a long time because your work has made a big difference for me particularly as a parent and for myself. And I would love to have you explain if I take everything to heart that you're about to teach me today what is going to change about my experience of life. I think most importantly is that you're going to learn how to use your emotions wisely to have freedom, to have good relationships, to have well-being, to achieve your goals and honestly to achieve all the dreams you have in one life. If I use my emotions wisely. Correct. I can achieve my goals dreams and be happier. 100%. What do you mean by that? Because most of us feel like emotions are something we have to endure or overcome or we're subject to or dictated by. Yeah that's the problem. The problem is that we didn't get an emotion education. Emotions pile up like a debt. They pile up like a debt. They do. Those strong unpleasant ones and if we don't know how to express them in ways that are healthy, what happens? The debt comes due. It's denial, it's suppression, it's repression, it's perfectionism, it's control, it's shame. And we need ways to process our emotions. We need skills to do that and we need skills to be able to communicate them and we need skills to be able to manage them effectively. That's the goal of this work is that emotional intelligence is a real set of skills that can help you navigate all emotions and then apply that knowledge to achieve your goals in life. How does somebody who's really thinking about I want what Dr. Brackett's talking about? I don't want my emotions to run me over. How do you begin this? It starts with permission to feel. It always starts going back to the basics. Okay. So let me explain some of this research. Okay. So a little bit of my background. I grew up in northern New Jersey, two parents that loved me. My father was that tough enough kind of guy. My mother was very anxious and neither one of them knew how to deal with their own emotions, nevertheless mine. Unfortunately, I had two older brothers. I unfortunately, I love them, but they also had their own problems and my parents, but at the time, I was around six. They were raising me alone, meaning my brothers had left. They were desperate. They had a lot of struggles. And unfortunately, the person who was my caretaker was a pedophile. And so from age five to 10, I was abused by my parents closest friend. And I never shared it. I share this now in my fifties with courage. I didn't, I suppressed it, denied it until I was 48 years old. I did not share it publicly. And then something magical happened. I had an uncle named Uncle Marvin. He was my mother's brother. He was a band leader by night in the Catska Mountains, and a sixth grade teacher by day, who by some wave of a magic wand was developing a curriculum to teach kids about feelings, who by another wave of a magic wand lived with us when I was 11 years old for a summer because he was going to graduate school in Amory hometown, who ended up rehearsing and practicing his curriculum with me in the backyard when I was 11. And he was the first adult who said to me, "Hey, Mark, how are you feeling?" No one had ever asked me how I was feeling. Ever. It was always like, "Go to your room. Why do you feel like it's home?" You know, like, tough it up. No one actually sat with me and literally had presence. Now fast forward, you know, that's. So I was 11. I'm 56. That's 45 years ago. I mean, my whole career is based on that moment in my life to be frank. So I dedicate my work to this remarkable human who gave me permission to feel. And I became very curious as a scientist, what percentage of people have an uncle Marvin or an aunt Maria? And so for people who are listening, just take a moment and think about that. Was there an adult while you were growing up that created the conditions for you to be your true, full feeling self? And again, my research shows that only one-third of us say yes and two-thirds of us say no. The next step is, what are the characteristics of these uncle Marvin's and aunt Maria's? So the research shows are, I call them the big five characteristics. The first one is just general warmth. The second is non-judgmental. The third is an incredible listener. The fourth is compassionate. And the fifth is steady presence or reliability. Notice what's not there. Brilliant, problem solver, fixer, advice giver. Because what I find in my research is something remarkable that most people say they're afraid to be the emotion ally for somebody else. Because they don't feel confident and capable. Oh, I don't know what to say or do. But notice the characteristics. They're not asking you to do very much except people. present. It's amazing to me. People say I'm afraid because I'm not sure if they say something, I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm not going to be able to fix their problem or give them the advice that they need. And I said, no one's looking for advice. No one's looking for fixing. Now what my research shows also is that people who report having had this emotion ally in their childhood as adults, they are more emotionally intelligent. They have better physical health, better mental health, they have better sleep quality, they have greater life satisfaction, and they have greater purpose in meaning of life. And it's funny because one of my closest friends from childhood came to hear me speak. And he had this reaction to my presentation. He's like, I hated your presentation. I'm like, you hated it. I gotta stand on the ovation. You know, what are you talking about? He's like, well, I didn't have an Uncle Marvin. Now I realize it's why I don't have purpose in meaning of life. And I'm like, freaked out about it. And I said, maybe you can be your Uncle Marvin. At some point, we have to look in the mirror and be those things to ourselves. We have to look in the mirror and have warmth for ourselves. No more judgment. Listen to our feelings, self-compassion, and just be reliable, you know, to yourself. We can all be our own Uncle Marvin's too. And here's something even more remarkable, Mel. So I feel a lot of speaking. And I'm out somewhere in New York State. And I'm giving this speech about this deep data. And all of a sudden, this man stands up and he looks and he's like, are you talking about Marvin more than six great social studies teacher from Minnesota, New York? I said, I am. He's like, Mark, you're not going to believe this. But your Uncle Marvin was my Uncle Marvin. I'm like, what are you talking about? He's like, your Uncle was my sixth great teacher and he transformed my life. And we had this amazing conversation afterwards for 45 minutes. And he said, clearly, he's transformed who you are as a person today. I said, I give him all the credit. And then he looked at me and he goes, well, Mark, for whom are you and Uncle Marvin? It was so eye-opening for me. I'd never been given that kind of in my face, for whom are you paying it forward? It transformed my relationships that day because I realized that I just was not giving it. So beautiful. Really, really beautiful. And as you're going through that list of attributes, I'm like, this is why our kids always go to my husband. I'm not kidding. He can be emotional, I know. And he probably is. Yes. 100%. Dr. Brackett, I would love to start with some more of the fourth grade level stuff about emotions since I feel like I'm definitely in that camp of, okay. What are we talking about here? Is this going to be one of these weird episodes where I'm thinking about my feelings, but I'm not sure what we're talking about. How do emotions shape our lives? So in my work, I talk about five reasons why emotions matter. The first is that emotions drive our attention, memory, and learning. Now you're looking at me now as a tenured professor of psychology. I grew up in Northern New Jersey. I was terribly abused as a kid. I had terrible bullying as a kid. I was a failing student. I didn't realize until I was in graduate school that I was in fight flight model day long. I couldn't learn when I'm getting punched in the face on the bus or made fun of in school. My brain was in survival mode, not learning mode. Emotions drive our attention, period. The second, emotions drive our judgments. Mel, have you ever made a bad decision? My God. It's my name, Mel. We all make decisions. What we don't like to own is that how we feel oftentimes drives the choices we make. I give an example. So my research we do studies where we ask people to think about a good day versus a bad day. So going to my work with teachers, I want you to think about the best day of your hand in the classroom. I want you to think about the worst day of your hand in the classroom. You can apply this to any setting. Immediately thereafter, I gave the teachers the exact same essay to grade. And my question was, would there be differences in how the teachers evaluate the exact same essay just after thinking for five minutes about a good day versus a bad day? What do you think? Oh no. One to two full grade differences. One to two full grade differences based on the mood of the professor. Correct. Now when I ask the people at the end of the study, do you believe that how you felt and any influence? Of course not. Like I do all day long as great papers and make decisions. I said, well, here's the data. Wow. So what this tells us is that our emotions are guiding us through the day. And oftentimes what's happening is we're making a judgment based on the mood we're in that's not necessarily the best judgment. Now what's the antidote to allow our emotions to subconsciously influence our judgments? And the antidote means you change it. Yes. Yes. You allow the, you you recognize, you name the emotion. See how so much you want to do. I was actually panicking a little bit there. Oh my god. And I'm going to get it wrong of my old podcast. You just name it because what happens when you name it? You attribute it to its cause. When I can attribute my emotion to its actual cause, it will no longer have that subconscious influence over the future judgment. I really struggle with this. And I am not proud to say this, but I'm a very leaky emotional person, meaning that it has been a challenge for my entire life to be able to separate myself from the thing that happened and the emotions that I feel. And instead, I wouldn't say leak. I'd say there have been times I've been more like a title wave. And I'm not proud of that. And I can even say that this morning that there was something that happened in our studios yesterday that really made me angry, not with our team. Somebody coming in from the outside. Yeah. I walked into a meeting that was a great like collaborative meeting. And within two minutes, I could feel my intensity. So the leakiness that wasn't about the meeting I was in. It was about how I felt even talking about something that happened yesterday that had nothing to do with that meeting. And it's very useful to understand that a simple thing that you could do in that moment. If you notice that the volcano or the title wave or all of this is leaking, to just say, oh, I'm really irritable. That's it. And I could have just said, I don't mean to be intense everybody. I realize it's from the thing yesterday. And let me just take a beat because it's not about you because I think what happens is your emotions feel like you have no choice. That's exactly right. I mean, for most of my life, Dr. Brackett, I'm the kind of person that was ruled by my emotions to the detriment. We're the same people because I just did not like life as a child or an adolescent. And I remember even in high school crawling up in a ball, crying and saying, who am I? Where am I going with my life? And thinking, oh my gosh, this is who I am. There's no way out. I didn't know there were skills to learn. And that's why I've dedicated my whole life to helping people realize that emotions are impermanent. There are no bad emotions. And we can learn to use our emotions wisely to achieve our goals in life. I want to make sure that we got all five of the reasons why emotions matter and we have attention. We have judgment. Yes. The third is relationship quality. Emotions drive the quality of our relationships. Here's a simple phrase. Emotions are signals to approach or avoid. Period. You just described my childhood. That's right. So my facial expression, my body language, my vocal tone, my presence is I think going to send a signal to you. Mark likes me, marks with me, Mark respects me, or it's going to say stay away. I got, you know, I don't respect you. Like, who are you? I don't, I don't need you. That's critical. And that's from the micro to the macro. I mean, just a vocal tone. I always joke that I can literally influence how a room feels by lifting my right nostril. I mean, literally, if I, I mean, I look like I was going to get a bad grade professor Brown when you did that. Yeah. Well, people who are listening can just imagine this. And if you're watching, you can see it. So if I look at you right now and I do this. Uh-oh. Oh, you're a little bit of disgust and judgment. Whoa. And then amazing. Like, I just literally lifted my right nostril a little bit. And all of a sudden, you're like, "Eesh, I'm not comfortable anymore." Yes. Like that. That's how fast emotions impact our relationships. So that was an example of me showing an emotion that makes people not want to approach me. Yeah. But then the same thing applies to myself. I wake up in the morning and I think, "What's my, what's happening today? Oh my god." And that dread or that fear or that loneliness is going to drive how I communicate. So it's both internal and it's both external. So we've got attention, judgment, and relationships. Where are the other two ways that emotions really run your life. The fourth is mental and physical health. So think about this. Little emotions become big emotions if they're not dealt with. Sad becomes hopeless. Hopeless becomes despair. The spare becomes depressed. Peave becomes irritated. Becomes angry. Becomes illivited and enraged. And if we don't recognize the little emotions and fine strategies for dealing with them, all of a sudden the tear away at our mental and physical health. That makes a lot of sense. And what's the fifth way? The fifth one is that emotions influence our performance or everyday performance. I think about this all the time because I grew up with two blue collar parents, neither one of my parents had a college education. And then all of a sudden I ended this job at Yale. And so every one of my students had higher SAT scores than I had. Greater grade point averages. They played instruments I never heard of the travel to countries. I didn't know where the map. And I'm their teacher. And I had a processor drum for years thinking they're going to find out that I didn't go to an Ivy League school myself. I didn't even get in to an Ivy League school. I didn't even know what one was to be Frank. And I just had this assumption for so many years that oh my gosh they have these are the brightest crayons in the box who have all this background knowledge and parents who read to them and parents who were senators and producers. And then I've gotten to watch for 25 years what happens. And so many people don't achieve their goals in life. And it's not because they're not smart. You know what it is? No. They can't do what they're feelings. They can't do with feedback. They can't do with disappointment. They can't do with the anxiety. And so there's a point in our lives when our brain power we need it. Of course the more academically skilled we are the better. But it's insufficient. It's insufficient. So here I am. I got 500 students in my class. Every one of them looks the same month. They're CVs. They all got the same grades. They all get the same SAT scores. So I look at them and I say who's going to make it? Because you're all going to apply for the same job. Who's going to get hired? And it's not going to be about your intelligence. Just like when you're a basketball player. It's not about your height. Everybody's tall. It's going to be another set of skills. And those skills are emotional intelligence. We need to take a quick pause. I want to just keep on talking. But I've got to give our sponsors a chance to share a few words. And I know you've been thinking about people in your life. I am already I got my three kids in mind, my husband. I'm going to send this basically to everybody. Don't go anywhere. Stay with me. Welcome back. It's your friend Mel Robbins. And today you and I are here with Dr. Brackett, the founder and director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. I am loving this. I'm so thrilled you're here with me right now. Let's just jump right back in. Dr. Brackett, what is emotional intelligence? If I were to define emotional intelligence in its simplest form, emotional intelligence is a set of skills that helps us to use our emotions wisely to achieve our goals in life. Now, of course, that's very broad. So you say, all right, well, what exactly are the skills? And I have an acronym, ruler, which helps describe the five skills of emotional intelligence. And the first skill is recognizing emotions. Number two is we understand emotions. Number three is we label them. Number four is we learn how to express them in ways that help us achieve our goals because we've all expressed them in ways that have not helped us. That's been the norm for me. And then the final one is regulation. So recognize, understand, label, express, and regulate. I would love for you to walk us through each one of those five things of the acronym ruler. And the first letter is recognize. What does that mean? So you've created these wonderful blocks for me to show everybody. Yes. It's a big R. If you're listening, I don't want you to miss anything. He's putting a yoga block in front of him. And it's got a big R. And it says recognize. Recognizing emotions. Think about it. What are we doing here? We're paying attention. Like me right now, I'm laser focused on you. And I'm paying attention to your facial expression, your body language, your vocal tone, and your behavior. That's the social awareness piece of it. Okay. Then there's the introspective piece of recognition. Yes. What's going on your body? What's going on your mind right now? It's that basic, basic piece. Yeah. Let me ask you this question. Everyone listening on a scale from one to 10. How skilled are you at recognizing emotions? One being terrible. Ten meaning you're great. I think I'm 10 at recognizing an emotion is happening. I think I'm probably a four in understanding what exactly the emotion is. Okay. So my research shows that the correlation between our belief and our skill is next to zero. Meaning what you can actually do versus what you think you can do is not related at all. Okay. Because like how much feedback have we gotten in our development? Like when you were coming down the stairs at home, did your father say, oh my gosh, honey, I'm noticing your facial expression today, we didn't do that kind of conversation. Nobody taught us had a read, happy sad fear, surprise, all that stuff. Right. Because nobody taught her parents either. Exactly. So we tend to get pleasant, unpleasant right, like approach, avoid kind of feelings. But the specific emotions, we tend to be very poor at guessing. We tend to attribute emotion to people as opposed to actually recognize their feelings. So let me give an example. Like right now, you would do you want, hmm, if I had some kind of terrible thing that happened this morning, or I heard weird things about Mel, I would come into the meeting and she go, hmm, and I be, oh, she's judging me. She's not curious. That's a judgment signal. I have no clue what the hell is going on in your head or your mind, but I am projecting my own issues or the other issues that people said onto your facial expression all of the time. I mean, have you ever been Miss Red? Well, I've been Miss Redden and I was thinking when I made that sound of a thing that I did with our daughter, Sawyer, who for a while, I was Miss reading her expressions and she would get very rigid and her face would go cold and I would immediately feel like she was judging me. And what I've come to learn in those moments, which makes me really sad, is that she actually was becoming emotionally flooded and felt overwhelmed and didn't know what to do because it seemed like I was getting angry about something. And so here we were two people in constant situations where we are not actually getting each other because I'm not angry at all, but my voice is going in a direction that cues it. She then stiffens and I think she's getting combative. And in fact, it's the opposite. She's in fear. There you go. And we miss each other and we misunderstand each other. And I can see how I was attributing something that then, of course, affects my emotions. And understanding that the first response for her, and same with my husband, actually, is I would always get so mad because he would go silent when I was pissed off, smart dude. And then I would be, of course, walking behind him going, what now you're going to talk? And what I thought was he was trying to control the situation and pull a power move and dominate and the truth is he was shutting down because in those moments, he felt like there's absolutely nothing I can do to like nothing I can do here. You're so clearly showing why we need skills. Yes. Because otherwise we're just projecting all the time. And so using that antidote word again, the antidote is what? To name it. There you go. Because that's what changed everything in the dynamic with my daughter. You have to say how you're feeling, but you also have to encourage to ask her how she's feeling. How would you advise us to ask somebody else? Because I do feel like, especially with couples, my husband and I are celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary. And the question I've asked in the most in our marriage, what are you thinking? I ironically, doesn't typically lead to an answer that tells me how he's feeling or what he's thinking. What is the best way to ask somebody is dumb as a question that is? It's not that dumb because we just don't do it because I think that we are intimacy phobic. So it's easier to say, what are you thinking? There's less connection involved in it. And so when you are in this weird place with your husband or your daughter, you say, you know, I've been a weird place right now. I'm not even sure how I'm feeling. I'm kind of this odd mixture of frustration and overwhelm right now. And I just want you to know that. And I'm really curious about how you're feeling about this situation. That's it. It seems so easy. It is, but we're afraid to hear the response because we don't want to own the fact that we might have created an emotion, which is more complicated than, you know, said. But we do. other people in experiencing unpleasant feelings. And we don't want to own that. So it's easier to just not ask the question. - Wow. So the next letter is you. And you say you wrote in your mega best seller dealing with feeling that this is the hidden driver, emotional intelligence. - Because this is where we build relationships in connection. - Okay. - Understanding emotion, we define it as understanding the causes and the consequences of emotion, including how our emotions impact all the things that we've talked about, thinking, judgment, and behavior. But here's the kicker. And this is where I think most people get it wrong. We have to have a common understanding of emotion. So anger, for example. If I were to ask you, what is the general cause of anger, what would you say? - I would think either sadness, oh, injustice. - Thank you. - Okay. - Anger is the result of a perceived injustice or unfairness. Now, you're a woman, I'm a man. We have different up rings, we have different religions, we have different belief systems. So the things that I see in society that may trigger me to make me feel angry may not trigger you. Vice versa. I don't need to prove to you why you should or should not feel angry. You don't need to prove to me why I should or should not feel angry. The goal of emotion understanding is to have connection and empathy. I want to know, tell me, why do you feel this way about this so that I can be supportive of you? That's the key to understanding. - Wow. And that means more intimacy. - Sorry. - Which is why we don't ask. - I mean, it's why we go to AI to get help with our feelings because we're so afraid of having the connection with the human that we just think is easier to ask a chatbot. - Now, what I found interesting about the understand part of this is that it was both understanding the cause of it and then understanding what it's impacting in your life. How do you understand the cause of it? The cause is going back to the theme, so injustice. - Oh, gosh. Okay. So, oh, I got it. So if you're angry and you don't know why, ask yourself, what has happened that makes me feel like something's unfair. - Correct. - Or if you are disappointed, it would be what? - What was my expectation? - Exactly. Disappointment is about unman expectations. Now, here's the deal. You're with your kid, you're with your partner, you're out and about and someone says, I can't take it anymore. I just said that to you. I can't take it anymore. - Oh my God. Okay. I just had like a little bit of a flashback for something. Go ahead. - Sorry. - That's okay. - How am I feeling? - You are feeling frustrated. - How do you know? - You grit your teeth. You raised your hands. You had a face that was very angry. - Freeze. - What are you doing right now? - You're making the what error. - I am attributing something. I actually don't know how you feel. - Of course not. I'm a dude. I'm not gonna tell you that I feel shame or disappointment. I'm gonna act out like I'm angry to get my needs met. - Oh. So for example, father in a toy aisle and kids want the expensive thing, you can't afford it. The deeper emotion is shame, but you're gonna just erupt at your kids and it's gonna read anger and frustration. - Great example. Hence why we need to deactivate, get curious, find out what's happening to build the connection so that we can be helpful to each other. Emotions or data. So when I'm feeling an unpleasant emotion, it's legitimate. There's nothing wrong with that. As a matter of fact, I've been really thinking about this around my anxiety. And a friend of mine who studies anxiety, we had this long conversation about it and she said to me, Mark, tell me all the things that make you anxious. Well, I'm anxious about fundraising. I had to constantly raise money to keep my research center alive. What else? I'm anxious about the quality of our center's work. I always wanted to be the top quality. What else are you anxious about? And I named all these things and she said, well, what are those things having common? She said, no, listen to me. What do those things have in common? And I had an epiphany. I said, they're all the things that I care about in my life. And she said exactly. So why would anxiety be a bad thing? It's telling you that something may not be going exactly right with something that you care about. So now it's an opportunity to look deeper into that. Okay, that's personally why you're here for me. That one story and that one reframe around anxiety is exactly what I need it as a parent right now to send to one of my adults. That was like a gift. Please do not go anywhere because when we return, Dr. Bracket is gonna break down the research and some surprising insights about negative self-talk. So don't go anywhere. Stay with us. We'll be right back. (soft music) (soft music) - Welcome back at your friend Mel Robbins. Today you and I are here with the incredible Dr. Mark Bracket. You've been talking about this acronym ruler as a way that you can build the skill of emotional intelligence. We've covered R and U on ruler. The third letter of ruler is label. What does that mean? - And we have a block for that. So labeling emotions. So before in understanding, we talked about understanding the causes and the consequences. The differences between let's say anger and anxiety. Anger is about injustice, anxiety is about uncertainty. But now with labeling, we're gonna get super precise with our words. - Okay. - I'm gonna ask everyone who's listening to take a little quiz. - Okay. - We have anxiety, stress, pressure, fear, overwhelmed. This is a big quiz. Anxiety, stress, pressure, fear, overwhelmed. What's the difference between anxiety, stress, pressure, fear, and overwhelmed? - Anxiety is about the future. - I gave you that one already. - Okay, I know, okay, still, that means I'm learning. Stress is about your body state. - Keep going. - Okay. Overwhelm. I'm like now starting to panic and I forgot the other two. Overwhelm is I don't know what to do. Pressure is I can't handle this. And fear is something bad's gonna happen. - You're pretty good. B+. - Okay. - So anxiety, received uncertainty. - Yep. - Stress, too many demands, not enough resources. Pressure, something at stake is dependent upon my behavior. Fear, impending danger, overwhelmed, saturated with emotion. Now, why does that matter? Why am I trying to get you to be as we call it, so granular about your feelings? - Well, I can see by this matters, and it's very helpful because it applies to something I'm dealing with at work, where it feels like all five of those things are present. Anxiety, stress, overwhelmed, pressure, fear. - Yep. - And I think in some way, all of those things are present in this situation, but just taking stress, which is too much to do and not enough resources. That is a very different operational problem than having you feel overwhelmed, which is emotionally flooded and I can't do anything. - Exactly. - Yes. - And so that precision is a guide to healthy regulation. That precision is a guide to healthy regulation. Anxiety is about uncertainty around the future. You can take all the deep breaths, you can take all the walks, guess what? You're gonna come back and you're gonna ruminate about all the uncertainty. Stress is having too many demands and none of resources. You can go to the gym and pump it out. Maybe it'll be some immediate relief, but at the end of the day, you got too much on your plate and you can't handle it. So if you're stressed, either you're gonna have to say, "Mark, your job never ends. You're gonna have to accept this." Or you're gonna have to distribute more and get more people to support you. Otherwise, a stress is not gonna go away. Period. Here's a quick one for you. So I did a study with my own students on how they feel. And it's sad. Like 70% of them say they're tired and stressed and bored. And by this parallels with a big study I did with high schoolers across the nation, 77% of time tired bored and stressed. But then I got really interested in, well, do they really know how they're feeling? So, I had them journal. Journal about all the reasons that you're tired and bored and stressed and overwhelmed and all this stuff. What do you think the real emotion was? Um, despair. The real emotion was envy. What? Because everything they wrote about being stressed was social comparisons. They study for less hours and get better grades. They've got better hips. They've got better lips. This one's parents have more connections. And so they go to the university counseling center and they get treated for stress and anxiety and doing breathing exercises and yoga. And I keep on thinking of myself, I don't know what yoga pose is going to decrease envy. No offense to the yoga people out there. I love yoga. But the point is, is that if we don't really know what we're feeling, then we don't know what to do with our feelings. And if we're kind of unself aware, then we're like, give me breathing exercise. Like, I don't know what the breathing exercise is going to do when you're sitting around thinking, like, oh my god, everybody's better than I am. Everybody's better than I am. Like you need cognitive strategies for that. You got to change the dialogue in your head and stop comparing yourself. That's the only thing that's going to decrease the envy. So Dr. Brackett, what is the thing that you need to do if it is envy and comparison that's making you feel sad, stress, bored, and tired? How about gratitude? Now if I'm sad, stress, bored, and tired, I'm like, how about you go fuck yourself? Like I'm literally, you know, just like, you know, because you know how people, how do I access gratitude if I'm in that spiral? You take a deep breath and you say to yourself, look at me. Look at where I'm at. What's going right for me? What are the three things today that happened that are actually positive? And I always tell students like, you know, all respect, like you got great freaking professors, like, come on, let's have some gratitude. But, engage yourself. Exactly. Just be honest about who I am. That's not exactly. You know, it's not like the food is bad here. It's not like the dorms are so bad. And we just take a moment and pause and just think about what's going right. Again, that negativity by us just pours over us. Just take a minute and think about something you're grateful for. It just changes the chemistry in your brain. We need to reflect on what's going right and not always on what's going wrong. That's a skill. It's a practice. Just like you brush your teeth in the morning. At the end of the day, when we have dinner together, we do, it sounds cliche, but you know what? A gratitude reflection. That is so insanely helpful. If you start adopting a practice, if you recognize yourself and being in the slupe that we've all been in, where you're sad, your straf's, your bored, you're tired, maybe the next time you're in that self criticism beat down spiral. You go, what? Hold on. Let me remember what Dr. Bracket said. Let me look around and find three things that are going well. Or it might just be simpler than that. Mark, this feeling is impermanent. You're 56. There have been rainy days. There have been sunny days. Today's a rainy day for legitimate reasons. It's not going to rain forever. But we have to recognize the key element is that all emotions are impermanent. They're impermanent. They are impermanent. The law of physics says that emotions are ephemeral. I just say that and it makes me feel at ease. Because I lean into rainy days more than sunny days. That's a whole therapy session we will get into right now. But the point is that I have to use that language. I have to talk to myself and say, Mark, today's a rainy day. We had some beautiful sunny days over the last couple of years. Remember, they're there too. And how relieving that is. We've gone from recognizing, to understanding, to labeling. And I want to get to expressing. Can I do that one now? Please? So expressing emotions, this is bringing us to that last big R, regulating, is that there's a lot of discernment in expressing emotions. There's a lot of discernment in me feeling safe psychologically with you, Mel, right here right now, to be my true self. Like you create the context. I'm in your home right now. And so you're creating a context for me, either to be completely open or guarded. Every home is that way, every classroom is that way, every workplace is that way. So when we want to express our emotions, we can't just do it. It's a skill that is embedded in a context. We also have to know how and when to express emotions. I've gotten this pushback too about like you're just saying that permission to feel means permission to say whatever you're feeling, whatever you want to say. I'm like, I never wrote that just to let you know there are norms in our works, in our workplaces, there are norms in our homes and society. And yes, you can be your true self, but is that the most helpful self? You know, if I said everything I was feeling to everybody I was with, I would be a very lonely person. So I'd be fired from my own company. Exactly. There you go. The question here is, are we in relationships with people with whom we can be our authentic selves? I can't tell you how many people I talk to, people who are listening right now. And if I said, can you tell your loved ones how you really feel? Can you be open and say, I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling lonely. Do you have the courage to talk about it with someone? Do you know that most people say no? My research shows it about two thirds of us say no. And this is why we need to help people learn the skills because they don't feel like there is an actual person in their life with whom they can be their true, full feeling self. What is the final R? So the final R ruler is regulate. It's about regulating your emotions to achieve your goals. What does that mean to be regulating your emotion? Well, let me ask everyone who's listening in you. What's your definition of emotion regulation? For me, I think it means to recognize what's happening and to basically try to let it rise up and dissipate. Okay. Try to not let it be leaking all over other human beings. To try to not let my mood or my feelings in the moment dictate the actions that I take next. That's what it means to me. Yeah, and that's a great way of thinking about it. Mark the science is definition is it's about the thoughts and the actions, so the things we can do in our heads. I can prevent the anxiety before the presentation because I can get ready for it. I can reduce an unwanted emotion. I can initiate an emotion. I can intentionally try to help you save your emotions. I can maintain a pleasant emotion. So like when I leave here today, I'm going to assume that we all think this went well and I'm going to call people and I'm going to say like I had an amazing experience with Mel and ask me some questions, please. So I can think back and save it. I think that's important. We tend to just move on. Why? Let's save it. Or we can boost or enhance emotions. And we do that in the service of all the things that I do my work for, which is we regulate. So we have better attention. We regulate so we make better decisions. We regulate so we can have better relationships. We regulate so we can have better mental health. And we regulate so we can achieve our goals in life. And so there are strategies. Should we go through them? Yeah, let's start with the ones that are unhelpful that people may reach for and don't realize it's not actually working. And I'll share one. Go. I recently started to realize that when I would kind of become a volcano or I'd get angry because I feel a sense of injustice. Yeah. Or I get frustrated because I have unmet expectations usually by the way that I've not expressed that in the venting, like I just need to get it out. I'm a verbal processor. It just stirs up even more. And so that's one thing. Another one that has been very unhelpful that I used for decades was telling myself to not be anxious or telling myself I shouldn't be this way and really rejecting the thing that I was feeling and trying to ignore it. Yeah, welcome to America. I think those are many people's go-to strategies. My research shows that there are three big ones that are unhelpful. For everybody who's listening, take a moment and think about it. When you're overwhelmed, when you're stressed, when you're pissed off, what's your automatic go-to, unhelpful way of dealing with your emotions? Just think about it. Just sending an email and venting on people. Yeah. Bitching to my husband about what some idiot did. There you go. Yes. Talking about the state of the world and why this is still happening. Exactly. Yes. I'm actually going to cry. Totally. I can't believe what it says. I get mean and I hate myself for it, but I just get when I get triggered, I like like when I retaliate. And I'm working on it for years, but if I get low enough and angry enough or frustrated enough, it just, and I'm like this, I'm like, I always say I'm a Mark, you're the director of the Center for Freaking Emotion Todd, don't say it, don't do it, Mark, you have the strategies, you're the expert. (laughing) And I go for it and it's like, (groaning) but here's the big ones, avoidance. It's like the person you're having a difficult time with at work, like I'm just gonna not go into the lunch room, I'm gonna avoid that person the whole way. Or I'm just not gonna tell the person how I really feel and just it's gonna, I'm gonna bury it. That also includes the kind of denial of the suppression stuff. The second is eating and drinking. - Hmm. - How many of us have had one too many chips or scoops of ice cream, or one too many alcohol beverages? - Yeah, what do you think the odds are that I had a martini last night after a stressful day? (laughing) - There you go. - And then I walked in here this morning and leaked all over a bunch of people. (laughing) - Self-awareness is a gift. And the other masterful one, I say that jokingly, is just negative self-talk. - Hmm. - We are self-sabotors. - Where does negative self-talk come from, Dr. Brackett? - Yeah, well, I don't think we wanna use it. - Right. - I think we are gas-lighted to use it. Can I give you a really concrete one of them? - Yeah, please. - But example, so I have a niece who is the love of my life. Her name is S.M.A. She was adopted from Guatemala. And I speak Spanish and I went to bring her home back 21 years ago. She just graduated from college. I'm very proud of you, S.M.A. She is dark skinned. She's Latina. She was in a very white area of New York State. And in kindergarten, some kids said to her, you're a different color than your mother. That's disgusting. Now of course, her mother called me and said, "You better get up here 'cause I'm gonna get in my car. "I'm gonna run over that kid. "I'm gonna run over the mother." I'm like, "Take a deep breath." Uncle Mark Road Trip. Now when I got to their home, this is the love of my life, this five year old girl. And I know what it's like 'cause I was terribly bullied as a kid. I knew that I had to be her emotion ally. I knew that I had to help intervene 'cause she was already saying, "I don't wanna go to school, I hate school, "I don't wanna go to school." She was every question her skin color, "Why am I this and who's why are you my mother?" And in that moment, which was a difficult moment for our family, I had to figure a way to connect with this young woman and in her five year old language, tell that no one has the right to define your reality. Now if she were Uncle Mark in his 40s at the time, he would have the courage to say, "Wait a minute, "like who do you think you are talking to me that way? "I love myself, you don't have that power." She's five. - Yeah. - Do you see why I'm saying how important it is? - Of course. - We have to build the skill early. And so this young girl with her uncle and her parents and other people were really trying to help her reframe, build more positive self-talk, recognize that our family has different skin colors and tones and it's okay and that we love her and that she's gonna be okay and et cetera. But imagine no intervention there. - Hmm. - Imagine no one noticing. We were intentional about providing her that support so she could reframe and have more positive self-talk. So our negative self-talk starts early and it doesn't come from within, it comes from without. It's our parents saying, why are you wearing those pants and why are you doing that? And all that negativity about your skin color, about your height, about your weight, about the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you do your homework, everything. And from what I gather, other than the work I do and some others do, there's nobody intervening and helping parents and children notice and say, wait a minute, we need to not be self-sabotors, we need to be self-compassionate. - Dr. Brackett, if you're somebody who struggles with negative self-talk, how do you stop that? - I wake up every single morning with a mindset that today is the first day of the rest of my life. Today is a day that I can start the journey to be the best version of myself. I mean, I just think we have to have that mindset about life. Otherwise, we just get stuck and we're endlessly stuck and we're endlessly trying to fix. There's nothing to fix, only learning. - Why is that mindset so important? What has it done for you? - What it does for me is it allows me to set goals to be the better version of myself that day. And it's like, you know what Mark, you said that to your partner, not cool. Let's think about that a little bit. What need did you have that was unmet? That made you project or displace that crap on him? And so for me, it's an opportunity to grow. It's an opportunity to flourish. And as a kid who had a lot of trauma and I walk around the world and I see the data on how many people have experienced trauma and how many people stay stuck in that trauma. I just feel like that's not the way life should be. Life is about moving forward. - What are the research back strategies that are effective for regulating an emotion? - Yeah. Number one is the permission to feel. - Okay. - You gotta just, it's okay. I'm feeling it, no big deal. Number two, build a vocabulary. We got there. Number three, you have to learn how to deactivate. You do have to build the space. So if you get annoyed with someone here before you go home, sometimes you don't have access to those cognitive strategies right away. So maybe it's taking a walk around the block, maybe it's taking a deep breath, maybe it's a little meditation. It's whatever works for you. For me, it's breathing. I just take some breath, I think. Okay. And then I connect a bit my best self. So just to, it goes from attitude of permission to feel to having the vocabulary, to knowing how to deactivate, to the cognitive strategies. One of my favorite go-to strategies is temporal distancing. It's a fancy way for saying, how am I gonna feel about this in a month? So I'm triggered by everything just so you know. I just, I am, especially I grew up with a father who was like cheap. Like why are we buying that? That's ridiculous. So we go shopping and you know, my partner wants the organic almond milk. I'm like, that's ridiculous. When I'm spending $7 on milk, you add to your mind. And then I realize like, A, I'm not my partner's father. Oh yeah, that's right. Everybody can buy whatever milk they want to buy. It's not like control-freak shut up, control-freak. But sometimes I have to take, go down to an aisle, take a deep breath and be like, Mark, is it worth your relationship? This freaking almond milk? This is ridiculous. Are you really gonna remember that you bought the almond milk in a week from now? No, let it go. So that it's like you build in time or you create the time. One of my ultimate favorites is a relational one. I don't know, but you have ever been in a meeting with someone that you just, their energy is really uncomfortable. Yeah. My father was like this a lot. He would get triggered when we were at family gatherings and then all of a sudden he'd go in the attack mode. And then you feel like, oh my god, what are they gonna do? Oh my god, yes. I have no control here. Yeah, you create a picture frame. So let's imagine right now, for listeners, I'm with Mel and Mel is saying like, "Mark, I think your stuff is bullshit." And I'm like, "I can't believe this is happening right now." And so I could just sit here and absorb it all and be like, "Oh my god, my life is over. Five million people are gonna listen to Mel tell me that my life's work is meaningless." Okay, Mark. Hey, she didn't say it, be, make a little picture frame. So I literally make you into a movie. Okay. And I observe you as opposed to absorb you. Observe versus absorb. Wow. Did you get it? Yes. I need this. We all need it. And I especially need it when I see clips from the news. Yeah. Because it's so activating to see certain people and certain headlines. And I absorb it. Me too. Versus observing is where there is this distance. Right. It's spatial distance. So when my father would say thing like, "You know, Mark, you think your blank doesn't stink now that you're a professor?" And I would be like, "Okay, this is gonna be a fun night." But this is gonna be a B-level movie. And I'm just gonna watch my father go on his rampage and just, wow. Gosh, I wish he had an emotion education when he was young. Gosh, it would have been nice for him to learn some skills. Wow. It's a great movie. And so I would just talk about it while I am observing it. And I would just allow him to bring that into my life. It's a beautiful technique. It is beautiful. And what I just realized is that when I'm saying let them in a moment where somebody is very triggering or they're activated, I've never thought about it like the movie, but I'm basically queuing myself to recognize who I'm dealing with and take a step back emotionally. And remind me, I can't control this person's acting like an eight year old thrown a tantrum. Yeah. So that's actually really cool because I've read your book, which I think is wonderful. And I have applied my own work to your work. And I, we're aligned 100% there because when you are letting them, you still have to regulate your feelings. It's not like you just let them and be like, whatever, you have to manage your own experience with that person and allow them, allow the disengagement or, or let them relationship go in a different direction or whatever it is. But that takes some personal work. Well, what I realized is that before being able to say let them as a way to create the distance between me and somebody else and observe what's happening, I couldn't actually regulate my own emotions because I was their leakiness and my reaction to it. And now I'm just reacting to that. I couldn't actually regulate myself. And it was, it's the distance that you're talking about of observing whether it's in yourself or someone else. And these tools that you're talking yourself, where you start to talk to yourself or you notice it in a picture frame, you go, okay, interesting. Acting like toddlers. Yeah. Six years old. It's very interesting that a 70 year old person's doing this right now. Okay. And not my job to manage. I'm going to let them, you know? And it helps me stay over here. I think about it like snow globes. Like when somebody gets super emotional, there's all this agitation that gets shaken up. And the tools you're teaching us can allow you to keep that stuff in there, snow globe from hitting you. And from recognizing that you can choose to try to comment, but you don't have to. I remember, you know, back a number of years ago, I was giving a speech in this other person who was mean, gave a speech after me. I had given a speech and I was really being heartfelt about my bullying experiences as a kid. For some reason, the second presenter thought there were like a smart ass. And before they began their talk, which was right after mine, he got a piece of shows his video of a boy being bullied. And he goes, that was more before he got his black belt. Now, in that moment, I was crushed. And here was like a 40 something year old man in the front of 300 people. I was off to the side. I literally transgressed to being 12. It was mind blowing. I'm like, wow, I just went, and so I had a moment in my life where I had to make a choice. I wasn't going to run as age and give him. I was going to think, I had this visual of me like, because I'm a 50 degree black belt, I was going to run as age with flying sidekick and knock him out. That was like my like my authentic self. My best self on the other hand said, Mark, let's wait. But afterwards, I really had to go up to this person and I had to make it clear that what they said was not only embarrassment for themselves, but for the community and that it was like, like you're done. Like this will never happen again. You know how much work that took? Oh my gosh. The courage to just be like, I got to give this person feedback in terms of the way they treated me and it was embarrassing and gross. Well, do you do anything about it or not? It's not my control. But I have to have the courage and the skill to go up to you and say, never again. What I love about that is you are using all the tools you talked about and then you're choosing a way to behave that makes you really proud of yourself. It's almost a way for you to be your own uncle, Marvin. Yes. It's so beautiful. Your work is so important and I am grateful that you made the time to be here with us to explain all this and there's so much that I have absorbed and I cannot wait to apply this. And so just personally, I want to say thank you. If you, after all of these incredible tools and insights that you've taught us today, if you could identify what is the one takeaway that you would want somebody to walk away with after listening? I want people to leave realizing they have the power to choose the response in their lives. I want people to leave knowing that emotional intelligence is not a fixed trait. You weren't born that way. It's a learned skill. We can learn to recognize our emotions better and other people. We can learn to understand them. We can learn to label them, express them and regulate them in ways that can help us to achieve all of our goals to build the best possible relationships, to have the well-being that we want. And I do believe that these skills help us to ensure that our dreams come true. Dr. Mark Brackett, what are your parting words? My parting words are, please give yourself permission to feel. Please give everyone you love and even the people you don't love that much permission to feel and build that toolbox of strategies to help you manage the full range of emotions so that you can have emotional freedom and achieve your goals. Well, Dr. Brackett, I have such a deep admiration for you. I appreciate that. And I think your work is real gift. Thank you for sharing it with us today. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. You're welcome. And I also want to thank you for giving us the gift of your time. I know there is so much that you took away from this and that you are going to share with people that you care about and that you're going to start applying in your life. And I'm so excited for you to have these tools and to have all of the wisdom from Dr. Brackett. And in case nobody else tells you today is your friend, I wanted to be sure to tell you that I love you and I believe in you and I believe in your ability to create a better life. And as Dr. Brackett said, when you give yourself permission to feel, when you start to use some of the tools that you learned about today to better understand yourself, to better understand the emotions that you're feeling, you're going to experience a level of freedom that you deserve. And you're going to start seeing yourself and your entire life in a different light. I'll see you in the next episode. I'll welcome you in the moment you hit play. That was okay. You were what? Was that okay? Are you actually asking that? So you're in your workflows when you're making your cabochino. I'm trying to visualize this. My second one. I mean, we're not going to, maybe the first one we won't give the imagery for. Okay, so he's new. Everybody. Maybe halfway. Maybe halfway. We will have a lot of fun. I'm having a breakdown. I can't take it. I'm anxious. And then what I see who is my husband, he'll say, you're anxious. How about you're tired? How about like, go to freak the bed? I didn't quite know. I just have this like soup of feelings right now. Let me say that. I actually really good. Oh, and one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know what the lawyer's right and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode.