How to Manage Your Emotions, Solved

Welcome back everybody to the Solved Podcast the last podcast that you will ever need now if you're new here my name is Mark Manson i'm three-time number one New York Times bestselling author and with me is Drew Bernie a failed neuroscience PhD a a promising young academic until I came along and ruined his life uh the the premise of the show is that we dive deeper we get more thorough we give better advice than any other podcast out there see there's too much of the same [ __ ] going on uh in the personal development

space there's the same guest showing up on the same shows saying the same things and half of the stuff contradicts each other so our goal here at Solved is to take a single topic go absurdly deep with it find out everything that is worth knowing about it and then consolidating it into a single episode that is completely comprehensive and is ideally the last podcast you will ever need to listen to on the topic now the way this works out is that generally the first half of the episode or so is full of all the information

It's all the background research the history the culture the different ideas that you need to be aware of to truly understand whatever we're talking about the back half of the episode is about actionable items takeaways practical advice that you can take and implement into your life today and then of course Drew and I finish with our own personal takeaways and uh things that have impacted us as we've worked through the episode now I understand that this episode is a lot it's very long it's very thorough there's a lot of advice and so there is a

free downloadable PDF guide that goes along with the episode it's over 100 pages it has all of our citations and references it has all of the summaries and takeaways of everything that we're talking about here you can go to solvepodcast.com/eotions and get that free PDF for this episode and follow along and that brings us to the topic of today's episode Drew which is emotions this rabbit hole went really deep very deep yes very deep i'm really Excited about this episode because in previous topics that we've done generally what we find is that when you dig

back through the centuries and dig into you know the ancient world and religions and different philosophers you tend to find that uh there's been a number of people who have gotten the subject matter right hundreds or even thousands of years ago whereas I feel like emotions might be the first topic that I don't think anybody really got it right until recently i I really think it took modern science and the our understanding of the brain and and different experimentation to like really actually parse out what's going on uh inside of ourselves when we're feeling emotional

and so I'm really excited to get into that now for the listeners some of the things that we're going to learn in this episode we're going to understand on a very deep level what emotions are where they come from and why they even exist in the first place we're going to learn about the interplay between our emotions and our cultural environment and so how our emotional reactions are uh both influenced by the people and uh experiences around us but Also cause a lot of the relationships and experiences around us we'll get into how trauma affects

our ability to regulate our own emotions and what we can do to heal ourselves and recover we're going to cover every major school of thought on emotional regulation give an overview of all the major therapies and what their different approaches are to managing your emotions and developing healthier emotions and then we will take the best ones with the most validated scientific evidence and kind of create a emotional toolkit which is a concept we'll talk about later as well we're going to go super deep into relationships and how in in a way you could look at

human relationships as a co-regulation of each other's emotions um which is a fun concept to to think about in a lot of different ways uh but as a result of that co-regulation relationships as most of us have experienced can make our emotions much worse but they can also make them a lot better we will talk about how to build emotional intelligence or whether there's even such a thing in the first place and finally we will give you the most Effective and useful practices to help you manage your emotions in your everyday life this will give

you a greater sense of freedom it'll give you a greater sense of control in your life you'll feel more motivated you'll feel more energetic and of course you'll be sexier too and that honestly Drew that's what we're all here for it's just like this is all just an elaborate mating dance that's a tall order okay okay make us sexy Drew let's go [Music] so why don't we start let's get scientific you're you're you're the science guy at this table so why why don't we actually dig into like what are the biological and evolutionary and neurological

explanations like what the [ __ ] are emotions like what are they yeah like why do we feel things why do we feel so much stuff like what is it here for yeah seems like a simple question right what are emotions but it's actually a very difficult um question to answer very difficult definition To come up with because there's so many different levels at which you can analyze emotions like you just mentioned there's the biological level um there's the evolutionary level there's the cognitive level there's the what you feel in any moment there's all sorts

of things social cultural all of these things past experiences influences as we're going to see so it's actually um there's no agreement among scientists among philosophers about what the definition of an emotion is but um there's a few things that they do kind of agree on and we can we can come up with a functional definition for our purposes here okay bear with me here for a second but emotions are complex psychological states that involve a combination of subjective experiences physiological responses and then behavioral expressions okay there's a rapid response to significant internal or external

stimuli or events that happen and they guide our behavior decision-making as you've already pointed out and also our social interactions okay so that's that's a lot here but there's kind of four components that I think scientists uh and Even philosophers too point to when they're trying to come up with these definitions of emotions one there's a subjective side to emotions right the subjective feelings that you have when you have an emotional experience the physiological side so you might have a tightness in your chest or a warm feeling coming over you or an anxiety that tingles

throughout your limbs or something like that right cognitive interpretations too so while all these things are going on then your brain is like "Okay I feel this certain uh tightness in my chest or warmth going through me whatever it is what does that mean?" So we have this cognitive appraisal going on and then um ultimately what emotions do is they motivate behavior right so those are kind of the four the four components of it subjective feelings physiological responses the cognitions and cognitive uh interpretations we have and then the outward behavior that it ultimately motivates okay

you can understand emotions at any one of those levels um there's different areas of science that that get at each one of those levels too as we'll see and we're gonna what we're going to try to do is try to put that all Together in one definition of emotions that's useful for us today okay does that make sense sounds good to me okay before we do that though too we need to differentiate a little bit between some terms here okay so emotions are different than what um scientists call feelings affect and mood there's these are

different things okay so the emotion uh part what I just went went over is kind of a coordinated system response right it's a it's a whole body whole mind response to things but there you have feelings too mhm feelings from a scientific perspective anyway are kind of like the um the internal experiences you have and the vibe that's going on it could be that tightness in your chest or just like the the overall kind of feeling is but it's not necessarily an emotion you have a mood which is longerlasting state you know you're in a

bad mood or you're in a good mood for the whole day or part of a day or an hour or whatever it is it's longer lasting and there's usually no kind of like there's not an internal or external stimulus that happened it's just happening right and Then you have what they call a a effect which is kind of the broader broader general encompassing uh experience of all of kind of your emotion and feeling and mood that you have the vibe the kind of like the vibe yeah for the Jenzers it's the vibe it's the vibe

yeah and then and then for the boomers it's it's the energy it's the energy it's the energy in the room what's it for the millennials then i don't know we're too cynical to have a word for it oh okay yeah an important thing though about emotions too is that uh like you said they're they're they're based on experiences they're based on our physiology uh they're they're based on culture that produces just this wide wide array of uh outcomes and behaviors that we do based on our emotions right and it's very personal for each one of

us we all of us handle our emotions differently we express them differently they they come up in different situations you know if if we go through you and I both go through A breakup one of us might like just indulge in ice cream where the other one might go and and powerlift right that's an emotional response that we have okay that's all based in emotion and it it colors our lives right it it it comes the variety of our life and that's where it all comes like I remember back when I used to to coach

I used to notice that some people would get very angry you know like that was kind of the default response to stress in their life or disappointment and some people get very sad and it was just like I almost feel like a lot of us have kind of a default negative emotion that we go to you know um some people feel guilty some people feel you know hopeless right it's just like it's almost like we have different waitings in our brain for like different emotions that that we're susceptible to right right yeah yeah and we're

going to get into why that is um here in just a little bit but I mean they really are emotions are like they're meaningful signals that shape our worldviews and and and and kind of inform the way we do react to certain events in our lives And yeah you might be more prone to one emotional state than another and we'll get into why some of that is for sure but yeah one of the big debates and I want to get this out there right now one of the big debates in science for a long time

has been are emotions universal okay um there's kind of there's two camps and there's a lot of sub camps within them but the two big camps within this are yes emotions are universal they're hardwired into our species they're just part of human nature to the extent that even individual emotions are like hardwired so uh there's this concept called the basic emotions theory and actually goes all the way back to Darwin but then it was elaborated by Paul Ecman in like the 60s and 70s um he came up with this theory of basic emotions that we

all have these like six basic emotions of fear anger sadness joy disgust and surprise and those are hardwired into our species all around the world if you go to you know small tribes who have very little exposure to the outside world they even experience these and stuff like that we'll get into why they think that is too then There's this other idea u that no actually and this is more recent and and I think the science is starting to bear this out a little bit more that no actually emotions are constructed we construct our emotional

experiences there's no circuit in the brain say for anger there's no circuit in the brain for joy you know or anything like that it's actually our brains and bodies are constructing emotions on the fly and they're making predictions about our our environment and what's going on right the brain's in this like black box in our heads right and it has to use all of this information from sensory input from uh what they call interosception so like what's going on with your organs your blood sugar how much have you slept all that and it makes this

quick prediction about okay this is what I think's going on this is how we should behave and that all happens kind of in the fly or on the fly rather now that seems like an academic debate okay what do do emotions are they are they basic do we are we hardwired evolved to feel just these six basic emotions and Then culture kind of fine-tunes them or are we constructing them on the fly I might be jumping ahead on any of this but like I feel like that actually has profound implications because if they are learned

then we can unlearn them as well right like it has lications of like if you are somebody who struggles with an anger you can train yourself out of that anger whereas if it's baked into you then it just becomes like dude you're always going to be angry so you might as well learn how to deal with it right right yeah so this is this is uh Lisa Felman Barrett we'll talk about her all throughout this episode but she um is kind of the torchbearer for this idea of constructed emotion theory and that's that's her argument

um for sure is that actually no if if emotions are constructed we actually have a lot of agency around how we construct those emotions whereas if they are fundamental and they are basic then it's just something that happens to you and you just have to deal with it like you just said so that's that's definitely kind of the the debate that's going on I'm I lean more towards the constructed uh emotion side there's and here's the thing too is the the fact that we have the capacity to feel emotion is a biological we've evolved that

absolutely are there six basic emotions that everyone feels and they're the exact same across the world i really don't think so and we'll see that the evidence doesn't really back that up as well if you do want to really dive in and get nerdy on this go read Lisa Felman Barrett's book How Emotions Are Made it's a fantastic book and it's super nerdy but it's also like really kind of interesting too so that's that's kind of where we're at though but yeah of course there there's a biological basis to emotions of course there is just

know from the the get-go there is something you can do about this so if you have these big feelings you don't know what to do with them or if you get in these emotional ruts and you're not sure about it there's something you can do about it it's it can be difficult sure but it is possible whichever is true you you do have agency yes if even if they're baked in you can learn how to manage them Better how to react to them better and then and if they're not baked in if they're constructed then

you can learn how to train them out of yourself to a certain extent absolutely okay so you want to get into some of these details um like let's do it the neuroscience the brain what's the brain talk nerdy to me Drew talk nerdy okay i don't want to get I don't want to get too bogged down in this but again if you do want to see some of these details go go go to our guide that we have put together for this there's a little bit more detail on this go to solvepodcast.com/eotions and you can

download that um we'll go over some of the neuroscience behind it but again I don't want to get too in the weeds with it i just want to give you a flavor of uh what we kind of know right now and what the implications are of that okay there's this kind of outdated idea that you have like some emotional center in your brain like say you have a module in your brain for anger or module in your brain for uh happiness or whatever it is That that's not that is not how it works at all

um not only that but it's even like brain regions like let's say the amygdala okay if you know even a little bit about neuroscience you've heard of the amydala before it's this tiny little structure there's actually two on either side of your brain in the middle deep inside your brain and supposedly it's supposed to be like the fear center right or like the the anger center or whatever it is like negative emotion goes through there that's not actually accurate um more and more as more and more research came out it was pretty clear to neuroscientists

that actually what the amydala does is just notice novel stimuli that's most likely what it does okay um it's an ancient part of your brain sure um but it's not like it's just firing when you should be angry or just firing when something up it's not the I always heard it was the fight orflight no response okay see this is this is what the problem is you know if you've ever seen a brain scan Um you know and it's saying "Oh we found this area lights up quote unquote lights up when this happens." That is

such a reductionist like it you would think looking from the brain scan you have all this gray area and then this like big bright yellow area and that's all that's going on your brain is constantly firing all the neurons in your brain are constantly firing all the time they're always at work all parts of your brain are always working together this is a nice moment to dispel that myth that you're only using 10% of your brain at any given moment which is [ __ ] categorically false yes um but I mean there are regions that

we know of that do participate in emotional experiences the amydala being one of them you have this thing in your brain called the insula which kind of connects your bodily sensations to the emotions you're having and kind of tries to interpret those it seems like your prefrontal cortex that's the thinking part again we go back to the cognition that we were talking about cognitive appraisal you feel something going on you're making an assessment of what's the thinking brain part right Other parts to your your hippocampus for memories they bring in emotional memories all these parts

sure sure they're acting but really what uh neuroscientists have figured out is it's more of a network okay of different um areas of your brain that produce emotional experiences uh emotional appraisals all the things that we think of emotion are usually different parts of your brain or different networks of your brain scaling up or scaling down whenever they need to okay um you have for example the salience network and this is kind of like a a network of brain regions that includes the insula and the amydala and other parts that are like okay they're telling

you pay attention to this emotionally significant thing okay uh the default mode network that's that that's active when you're thinking about yourself or daydreaming or anything like that that's kind cognitive appraisal part what does this emotion mean it's networks though it's not just one part of your brain lighting up yeah And and making you angry or making you happy or or whatever it is okay so just to dispel some of those myths that's kind of what I I wanted to hopefully clear up right there what we're finding actually is that um like with Lisa Feldman

Barrett's constructed view your brain is a prediction machine okay it's it it works as kind of a statistic it's like a statistician basically it works on probabilities again it's this it's in this black box your brain can't see or touch or smell or feel anything so it's relying on its sensory input it's relying on things like what they again what they call interosception so your blood sugar how much you slept yeah your heart rate all of that it's taking all of that information and it's making a prediction about how you should act in a given

situation so again that could be influenced by your past experiences it could be influenced by what you have you ate yet today or not your blood sugar right it can be influenced by all of those your brain says "Okay we've been in this situation before or a situation like it this is what we did before this is how we should act now." Yeah that's essentially instead of it being like "Oh uh I see a snake and I should be afraid there's this snake circuit in your brain that makes you afraid." That's just that's not how

it works okay so when when people when you think of this and you're like "My brain is making me do this." Well it's Yes yes it is making you do this but it's not like just this one little part in your brain like Yeah firing up i love this model for a few reasons one is um I think it just makes sense because you know in psychology we often run into the problem of like everything kind of interacts with everything right and and what the way you just described it right it's like emotion is part

feedback part prediction um of taking all the information about your physical body about your physical environment about your social environment about your conception of yourself yes like all of those things kind of get factored in and and then it the emotions are kind of emergent Out of those all that stimuli right and it's like and the emotions are ultimately adaptive to ideally best prepare you for whatever your brain thinks is coming um like that just feels very logical to me the other reason I like this and it was interesting when I was reading Felman Barrett's

work uh years ago I like I had this like little aha moment when I was reading it it was like it suddenly made acting make sense to me where it's like because I I always wondered I was like how do how do actors like make themselves cry and like and at the time I was I was when I when I found her stuff I was working with Will Smith and I I would hang out with him like he I would like watch him shoot a scene and then he'd come off set and he'd be like

a completely different person and then it was like time to go shoot a scene again and he'd become a completely different person like on the spot and uh I remember talking to him about it like how do you do that and it and it the prediction thing makes sense because it's like if you have a very vivid and powerful imagination you can kind of like trick your your I guess parts of your Brain into like thinking that certain predictions are going to come true right so it's you can like imagine what an environment would be

like and then the emotion emerges as a result as like a byproduct of you imagining that particular situation or environment or self-conception so anyway that was a little bit of a a tangent but I always found like kind of the emotional mastery of acting to be like an like a really fascinating case study of a lot of this stuff that we're talking about yeah absolutely and and that researchers I mean they've often used like actors in their in their research to convey different emotions we'll get to some of the the quirks around that but what's

interesting about that too is like when you see bad acting as well yes right like you're like "Oh this is you're not convincing me that you're actually feeling these emotions at all." And that's what it that's what it comes down to right and it's and it's probably because bad actors are bad at convincing themselves yeah yeah that's a good point because that That was one of the things that really stood out about Will is that he is he is excellent at deluding himself about things and and he like freely admits that that that's just his

whole life he's like able to just conjure up some image of of something than that of a fantasy or something that he could live in and and uh he said he's done that all of his life too like when he was younger he was Yeah yeah so you know fascinating okay back to a little bit of the more brain stuff uh just to wrap it up more brains more brains more brains um we we we have we need to talk a little bit about the neurotransmitters too so the chemicals in your brain swirling around again

I think there's this misconception out there of like oh um you know for example dopamine I'm just like a dopamine fiend dopamine is excitement and serotonin is is joy and yeah it's it's complicated very very complicated these uh uh neurotransmitters for the most part are Pretty diffuse throughout your body and brain and it's not like one just like turns up all of a sudden and and you know causes you to feel a certain way that's that's not how it works either but they do kind of uh they'll modulate emotion quite a bit like dopamine for

example is actually people think of it as a pleasure chemical it's actually kind of a seeking you're seeking out pleasure seeking out um reward of some kind okay that's what it's actually motivating you to behave in a lot of ways whereas like you know serotonin is more like the mood stabilization you find more common peace and joy out of out of that then you have things like norep norepinephrine that's like when you're that's fight or flight high arousal states uh then you have like GABA glutamate these are these are excitatory and um inhibitory chemicals in

your brain the point isn't to get bogged down in these the point is that um these chemicals are are present at different varying levels in different individuals and at different times too and those can modulate your emotional experiences as well and so just this a all of this brain talk is trying to just set the Stage for there's an immense amount of variability in in the brain structures that you have and the chemicals floating around your brain the genes that turn these things on and off there's a a tremendous amount of v variability that can

affect your emotional experience yeah and so just to keep that in mind like maybe be a little uh nicer to yourself sometimes when when some of these things uh come up because you might have a different wiring or a different set of uh chemicals that are acting on your on your brain at any given time so yeah I don't want to get too bogged down in the brain science but that's kind of a quick overview again check out the guide if you want to nerd out on it a little bit more but that's Yeah I

I feel like the neurotransmitter stuff is particularly re relevant when you think about like addiction and compulsion yes you know very if you if you think about like something like alcohol addiction or cocaine addiction opio opioid addiction you know one way to look at it is that you have a very emotionally disregulated individual whether that's from a history of trauma Uh whether that's from genetic issues which we'll we'll talk about later uh whether that's from like a very low evaluation of self um or you're just in a super [ __ ] up environment that there's

a lot of danger and stress and disorder um and that those substances are kind of ways to bootstrap positive emotions into yourself um in in either a situation or environment or in a body that you're not well suited to generate those positive emotions yourself right yeah 100% and that kind of gets us into the genes and environment discussion that we could have about this actually too and um you know look it's 2025 if you don't know that it's not nature or nurture it's both spoiler alert wake the [ __ ] up that's where we're going

with this okay right but but how that interaction how that plays out like in something like addiction or any other uh kind of behavior that we have studied there's it's a combination between your genes and your environment okay so um your genetics uh there's good news and bad news right like so If you're if one or both of your parents were miserable people or you know highly anxious or any of these things well you're probably going to be uh tend towards more misery and anxiety as well if they're happier same type of thing maybe you're

going to be a little bit happier and more joyous throughout your life it's you know there is a component to like similar to your eye color or hair color or whatever there there's some there's a heritability to your emotional life sorry I want to yeah jump in really quick here because this is this is a little pet topic of mine that that comes up a lot like and I think the reason this comes up is is because in psychology and and self-help like it is the overanalysis of your parents and their parenting and your childhood

like it it I find it's a rabbit hole that people kind of get stuck in after a while that's not to say that like your childhood and your parents parenting doesn't matter it does but there's a whole wealth of fascinating research on twins that were separated at birth and it's like absolutely mind-blowing stuff if you get into it there's there's a great book by A woman named Judith Harris called No Two Alike and it's just this like incredible summary of decades of twin research and basically like one of the major conclusions that it comes to

all this research comes to is that like a very large percentage probably a majority of the things that people say like oh my dad was always angry and that's where I learned to be angry it's like no no no you didn't learn to be angry from your angry dad it's your dad has a genetic predisposition towards anger and you have 50% of his genes [ __ ] so like nobody taught you anything you just were born with the same with the same deck of cards inside of you right so I think a lot of parents

have weathered and again disclaimer I know there's shitty parents out there i know there's trauma and abuse and all these like awful things that happen but like I think a lot of kind of just normal parenting has gotten uh dragged through the mud uh over over the last few generations because of these narratives of like you know well my mom was anxious all the time and now I'm anxious all the time and it it's like she made me as neurotic As I Well yeah she did but it's not because she like treated you bad or

forced you to do anything it's it's just like she's genetically predisposed to anxiety so you are too right right yeah the environment does play a role like you said um absolutely and they they've shown this all the way from uh studies in rats studies in monkeys and studies all the way up into humans there's there's a gene environment interaction going on it's both it is both and it's and it is it's close to 50/50 but it's it's like I just want to be clear on this because I I think people the nature nurture question is

I think almost everybody understands it is both but I think mo most people who when they say both they're thinking 8020 in this direction or 8020 in that direction and it's like no it is like 5050 55 45 like depending on what you're measuring it's it's pretty much always in that range uh so it's it is very significant um in both directions right yeah yeah i mean for example there were there were these early studies I think It was probably in the '9s something like that a researcher named Michael Meanie did this study on rats

right you had uh he had these rat mothers some of them were really good mothers some of them were bad mothers dead deadbeat rat moms deadbeat rat moms right versus the the good that would be a good subtitle for this episode deadbeat rat moms well solve your emotions deadbeat Rat Mom edition deadbeat Rat Mom that's an That's a hell of a name that's a band name dead beat Rat name yeah deadbeat rat mom uh so what were we talking about these dead beat Rat moms the dead beat Rat mom yeah so he would time it

so uh they would have uh litters on the same days right and then what he would do is take these litters and he would swap them so the So the deadbeat rat mom's litter would go to the good mom and the good mom would go to the dead beat rat mom so they have these litters and they would see how they would do all these tests when these these rats grew up And stuff like that so the debate rat mom kids if they went over to the good mom they actually had better stress reactivity and

everything so there was this environmental component that was protective of their their emotional regulation or what we would call emotion in anyway in rats right and then the opposite was true too if you sent these um uh the the pups the rat pups from the good mom to the bad mom they kind of turned out not as great okay but later studies too found out that there's this what they call an epigenetic effect going on as well so epigenetics isn't just your your genes it's actually all the it's the things that turn your genes on

and off so it's a lot more complicated than just having a gene that you have this gene and that and that's it that gene can be turned on and off the timing of when it can be turned on and off is uh that's that's regulated by a whole host of different things one of those is your environment okay so we have this idea of epigenetics and they've shown this too in monkeys as well and then there's pretty strong evidence in humans we can't quite do those same type of studies in humans but Similar to it

and what they find is that yeah if you have this genetic disposition from either an emotional style that seems conducive to your environment versus one that's not um there is a protective genetic effect like your genes can actually override some bad environment sometimes yeah right your environment can also cause things to you can have better outcomes for your emotional experiences versus worse as well so again it is probably somewhere in that like 6040 range 50/50 range somewhere in there um but all of that is to say uh is that there's there are environmental things that

we can manipulate and promote that will help with emotional regulation just like any other trait that we have but there is a genetic basis and there's genetic limits to anything that we do too so yeah I again it kind of goes back to like accepting that that that's just part of the game it's just part of what happens is that you have a genetic predisposition quit beating yourself up over it accept it figure out how to deal with it one way I've seen it expressed sometimes I don't know how accurate this is but it like

I think it's a useful heruristic at least for me when thinking about this is that your genetics sets the range of outcome and then your en environment and experience determines where you land within that range right so you could be the most talented individual but if you grow up in a slum with a horrible childhood like you're probably going to come in at the bottom of your genetic range in terms of outcomes whereas you can be maybe a a below average potential person but if you grow up in a great environment you're going to come

in at the very top of your range so right I don't know how scientifically validated that is but I have seen that be expressed around ideas like IQ and and certain like mental health issues and stuff so I I think it's a good way to think about it it's a good way to to conceptualize uh that relationship and I think I mean think about it this way you said you know the genetics at the range like genetics set our physical ranges we know that it sets the range of how tall you can be How short

you can be whether like we don't have wings so we can't fly right that's a genetic thing right like if you uh you have the genes for walking you have the genes for talking but if you aren't exposed to those things at the right time then you don't develop those uh those skills just like if you uh with your emotional life too if you if you aren't exposed to emotion regulation strategies at the right time then later on you're probably going to have some issues around it that's it's fixable though too so we'll get into

why that is as well but yeah I think that's a good way to think about it though yeah I mean pretty much everything we're going to land on you know foreshadowing a little bit where we're going to land towards the end end of this episode is that a lot of this stuff that helps you manage the emotions in your life really can be described as skills they're things that you can learn and develop and practice and get better at and I think like any skill some people are very talented at them Some of them some

people it comes very easily and then some people it's like you have to put in a little bit more work than than the random person you know to get to a decent level yeah and and I mean I think the takeaway though too from kind of looking at the genetic origins of emotional regulation is not not to obsess over where those those come from but rather to say okay there's an acceptance to it yes like I said this is what I have to deal with how do I deal with it so yeah you it's a

skill issue yeah yeah that kind of covers some of the biological basis uh except for we could talk a little bit about the evolution of emotions i think where why do we have emotions uh to begin with why is it part of our nature again this kind of this treads the line a little bit between kind of the classical basic emotions view that they're hardwired versus the more constructionist view nobody in either of those camps though would argue that obviously they're an an evolutionary adaptation emotions are they are an adaptation Obviously then if it's an

adaptation it's helped us survive in the past and pass on our genes yeah I do think that the evolutionary point is important for a couple reasons one is it helps people understand that like emotions aren't destiny like they're not static like if you if you've been sad and depressed the last few years you're not going to be sad and depressed forever that sadness and depression is a is a disregulated adaptation to whatever is going on in your life or to certain things that have happened to you in the past right and um the key is

not to stop being sad or to stop being depressed it's to figure out what that feedback that you're being given constantly is trying to nudge you towards and then and then alter your your life or your environment in such a way that that feedback is no longer getting triggered m um I I just find that's like a much not only is it more realistic and scientifically true but like it's also I think more hopeful like when people just recognize like emotions are feedback they're not destiny they're not just this like these things that happen to

you that You can't control or adapt to and then I think the other reason why this is important is and and I don't think we're going to talk a ton about this although we could the more emotional an experience is the more meaning we tend to attach to it um this is kind of comes back to the salience network thing like if you think about the what feels like the most important moments of your life they are generally uh very very highly emotional experiences part of that is by design right like you one of the

emotions are partially evolved in us to like point us towards meaningful things yes like the more meaningful something is to our survival or replication chances are the more emotional we're going to feel about it but I think people often like develop kind of cosmic explanations for certain experiences in their life and they they assume that because something feels extremely meaningful that it actually is very meaningful when it's actually and we'll get to this in a little bit here but a lot of that is just a narrative that we've kind of wrapped around it and again

coming from the Self-help world like there are a lot of kind of cosmic narratives around certain emotional experiences telling people that it's like oh that's that's your the universe telling your heart that this is your true path in life and like all this [ __ ] and it's like okay like that might be a useful narrative to adopt it also might not and but whatever it is it's it's definitely inflexible and it's inaccurate and I tend to come from the school of thought that like generally the the more the better we understand reality the better

the rest of our life gets so um understanding that like something was very meaningful and impactful in my life uh was meaningful and impactful is fine but also understanding that like that is kind of a evolutionary adaptation to something uh very significant i know it sounds like so heartless and soulless and like No no no it's but but it's like I don't know there there there is something peaceful about it yeah absolutely like okay so for example anxiety right a lot of us we there's a lot of anxiety everybody's anxious Every that's part of our

DNA it's part of our species like we're just talking about right but oftentimes the way we interpret it in the modern world especially is oh this is a a weakness of some kind yes it's actually a survival mechanism absolutely that that is like so yeah cut yourself some slack here it's like you know you there's hundreds of thousands of generations going back that survived because of their anxiety and that's that's okay it's an adaptation you just need to learn to work with it a little bit better and use it to like uh manage it and

point it in the right direction the thing about emotions as well is that like the more you tell yourself an emotion is bad the more you're going to struggle with it right like the more you decide that you shouldn't be anxious in your life the more anxiety is going to derail you anytime it pops up so it's it's you know in subtle art I call this the backwards law but it is like really there's something paradoxical of like of like leaning into the discomfort and being accepting of whether it's anxiety or sadness Or depression like

when it emerges being like "Oh okay this is this is fine this is this is my body trying to take care of me this is millions of years of evolution looking out for me in this moment how am I going to listen to it what what needs to change in my life what actions do I need to take to properly adapt to it uh instead of like just like resisting it and fighting it you know otherwise you you know well we we'll get into all of the maladaptive ways to deal with emotions later but um

but yeah sorry I had to get on my soap box for No that was where I was heading with this anyway so that's No that's great cool um before we get into the cultural stuff which is fascinating stuff and you're absolutely right changes changes the emotions uh that we or the way we experience them a lot and we'll get into that well let's first real quick though go over some of the way that uh your past life experiences oh yeah can shape emotions uh and the way you regulate your emotions for sure obviously like we've

already said the constructed emotion view is that our past experiences our culture around us um Those all uh have like a big influence actually on how we not only uh like regulate our emotions but even experience them in the first place right that just so for example uh trauma okay that's like a big one uh that I think a lot of people you know we've heard about it's it goes around a lot okay sure what trauma like especially early in life can do there there are physical changes to the brain that happen um when you

experience trauma early on and um for example kids who grow up around violence uh or chaos or neglect right they'll they often have these overreactive stress responses and that can carry into your adulthood too and so you're very reactive to things basically because you're vigilant all the time right you you have this hypervigilant um brain at this point and it just it makes you very very sensitive to anything in your environment that seems off or a little bit dangerous or so your anxiety is it's again it's a survival mechanism yes right that's one big area

that they know of your past experiences that can shape your emotions all throughout your life um obviously therapy is a good way to handle all of that with a Lot of these we're going to talk about that but that's one area uh in conjunction with that is kind of like economic stress and poverty as well if you think about that if you if you grew up poor if you do have financial struggles that takes up a lot of your brain space and so emotional regulation is kind of beside the point at that when when you're

in survival mode yeah right emotional regulation is kind of beside the point and so you can see why uh when you grow up in abject poverty when you grow up around uh or you are uh subjected to that even throughout your life and adulthood that causes you to focus more on just like basic survival needs and just stuff like that where it's not your your emotional regulation is not really top priority at that point but doesn't that that causes a little bit of a a downward spiral right because it's like you you grow up in

poverty you grow up in economic stress you are emotionally disregulated which means you're less adaptive to your environment you have worse relationships you you're unable to plan ahead you make worse decisions which keeps you in poverty which keeps you stressed which keeps You disregulated and it like goes on and on uh another one that's uh pertinent to modern society as well is loneliness and social isolation yeah okay so that's um you know been in the kind of zeitgeist for a few years now that people are getting lonier and lonier we live in more secluded areas

or more secluded um uh living arrangements anyway you know even though we might live in these big cities we're living in an apartment we don't even know our neighbors all of that humans are obviously very social animals and we need social contact whether it's good or bad actually um can help with your emotional regulation too actually there's an argument to be made that if you are dealing with difficult people you're probably better at regulating your emotions on some level at least right well it comes back to like we we actually co-regulate with the people around

us and and so if there's nobody around you then you're you're basically not you're getting no assistance there's almost like an emotional safety net of you know having a strong support network around you of people Who you can co-regulate with mhm um so it kind of catches you when [ __ ] starts to go bad in your life or you start to veer off the rails but yeah if you don't have those people or if you have a bunch of dysfunctional fuckups around you um they can make the problem worse but we'll we'll come back

to that at the end of Definitely come back to that yeah but you're absolutely right there's this uh creation of negative emotional feedback loop when you're isolated because you're isolated you think "Ah nobody's around i I'm I'm worthless or whatever it is." And then you just get into that spiral once again yeah related to that as well chronic stress um you know we live in modern societies anyway uh developed societies there's usually kind of this lowgrade chronic stress that we live in and we're not really adapted to that where we're more adapted in our evolutionary

past we're more adapted to handle things in the moment get stressed out really quick and then you come back down you're you're fine yeah where we live and you know sitting in traffic uh dealing with difficult Uh co-workers lowrade stress that kind of are you referring to anybody specific no okay yeah no stress here i have a great boss that's what I thought um but that that's obviously going to set kind of an emotional tone that you have that that is going to you know change based on your uh environment but uh can also you

know exposure like stress hormones and everything like that obviously affect your brain in ways that are uh will change your emotions i mean that that's a huge thing when I lived in New York like that's a huge thing in New York City and I think everybody kind of intuitively feels it and understands it out there like you feel like you're in a very slow pressure cooker you definitely like if you don't get out of the city every 3 or 4 months like Yeah you start snapping like you start kind of like losing it over stupid

things and losing sleep and getting feeling anxious all the time and you don't know why and and then you know suddenly you you go on a quick weekend Vacation out to the countryside or out in the mountains or something and you're just like ah yeah New York yeah have you noticed that though moving out to Los Angeles where it's you know um I don't Is it slower paced out here on definitely slower paced out here yeah yeah less intense for sure for sure i mean LA has its own stressors but I would say life here

in general is like very it's very laid-back i definitely feel more emotionally regulated here yeah um it's actually funny kind of coming back to the the drugs and alcohol thing like everybody in New York drinks yeah everybody parties everybody stays up late everybody's like always doing stuff and I think a lot of that is just the dysregulation that happens with the ambient stress in the city uh whereas you know you come out here or or you know um I go like visit my my parents in Texas where they live which is pretty far outside the

city out in the boonies and yeah everybody's just kind of chilling out like you know life's easy and everybody's relaxed and You know not not a whole lot of stress yeah well I mean it's not a surprise if you're stressed out you're going to feel like [ __ ] i No [ __ ] right but let's you know breaking news everybody you aren't going to hear that on this podcast yeah yeah this this is what they this is the hard-hitting facts that our listeners come for if you're stressed you're going to feel like [ __

] lastly okay um family dynamics and cultural interarmms we'll get more into the cultural stuff but definitely um you know family family dynamics outside of even your genetics though too this can be a huge modulator of your um of your emotional experiences that you have early experiences in your family obviously are going to shape how you uh deal with emotions how you express them how you even experience them as well one of like the big ones is kind of like restraint versus openness you know when you were younger were you encouraged to express your emotions

or were you encouraged to oppress your emotions right and so we'll get into some more of That but that's a huge factor in your experience in your emotional experience as an adult uh it comes from a lot of those family dynamics and even the ones that are ongoing still too now so as you know like one of my favorite probably my single favorite relationship book is called Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendrick fantastic book such a good book and he has a wonderful term for this which he he calls it emotional maps yeah

and he says that your family draws your emotional map for you and it's it's essentially it's like telling you where to be angry when and where to be angry when and where to be happy when and where to be sad when and where to be ashamed when and where to be anxious and he said that if your family draws a really terrible emotional map for you then you're going to like you're going to get to adulthood and it's it's going to lead you to all these all the wrong places essentially so it's it's a it's

a great metaphor it's a fantastic book um it is a relationship book but it it does talk a lot about the impact that our our family and and romantic relationships have on our ability To like emotionally regulate everything so highly recommended absolutely yeah so okay to to kind of wrap this section up then we talked about what emotions are um I hope you have a good idea of that i still don't think we I don't think there's a satisfying single definition of emotions but we just went through all the levels that you could uh kind

of evaluate emotional experience through the big point I want to drive home about this section though is that there's all these different factors that go into your day-to-day emotional minute-to-minute emotional experiences even too it's not about the willpower to overcome these emotions it's not about suppressing the emotions or getting rid of emotions or whatever it's it's really it comes down to the skill issue again and there's all these factors that go into it a lot of them you don't have a ton of control over some of them you do and I think throughout this whole

episode we want to tease those things apart what do you have control over what don't you what do you need To just accept and be okay with versus what can you actually do something about so that's kind of that's what I wanted to just set up there anyway cool yeah so let's talk culture some of this stuff you went really deep on this stuff go ham on it yeah and uh I found some of it to be pretty mind-blowing so where where do you want to start with it i mean I knew I went ham

on this i went like I got deep into it and it it is pretty fascinating i mean I had an idea you know just from studying psychology and everything that of course culture influences emotions sure right we all know that yeah right like some cultures you know are more emotionally expressive than others we all kind of know that right i didn't realize just how deep this went though okay um and you know we I think there is still some tendency to think that emotions are this kind of purely individual level you know we experience these

things and they're very very personal um but they're actually very very uh Inculturated in us and we learn these before we can even talk or tie our shoes or anything like that right one of the concepts that social psychologists have come up with in this realm is uh this idea of display rules okay okay it's kind of like an emotional dress code you know it's just like like you wouldn't wear a swimsuit to a funeral right that there's kind of a dress code for yourself well yeah I know you probably I don't know we're in

California who knows but um that's kind of a like a dress code rule that's culture unspoken rule you know that happens same thing same kind of thing happens with emotions as well they call these display rules so when is it appropriate to display which emotions in which scenarios um how intensely you uh display these emotions or even the the emotion that you display in any given uh situation there's kind of these strategies that happen at the cultural level um that can modify or uh completely change emotions too so you have like intensification so how intensely

are you socialized to uh express emotions in any given situation so there's intensification Versus de-intensification some emotions uh in some cultures are more suppressed uh than they are in others then there's neutralization too there sometimes you're encouraged to just shut off emotion in certain situations uh and then the masking kind of replacing one emotion for another for whether it's for the sake of social harmony or uh status or anything like that okay so there's these display rules uh kind of come up again and again in culture so for example like uh in some cultures if

you're angry they encourage you to smile instead and kind of just cover up that anger right or tone down your excitement to appear modest in some cultures as well that that happens quite a bit um they they've actually reproduced this in the lab as well there's this really kind of interesting study um where they showed uh Americans and Japanese a series of uh emotionally uh charged videos okay and they did it under two different circumstances well first they watched them uh just alone and they had like a hidden camera or something like that and they

could observe the people watching these videos and then they wa um had somebody an observer sit In there where it was very clear that somebody was watching them right so the Americans when you showed them these emotionally charged videos they would uh react um with pretty big emotions or they would just kind of express themselves in both situations whether somebody was watching them or not they just they're like "Oh yeah that's funny." Or that's sad or that's infuriating whatever it is what was interesting though the Japanese participants when they thought they were alone they expressed

a lot of emotion watching these videos but when somebody was watching them they tried to be they tried to tamp it all the way down interesting okay right and so this kind of gets to display rules kind of this big category of display rules anyway of um uh kind of like east west collectivist versus individual cultures right whereas usually in East Asian cultures you have more of an emphasis on the group and the collective and social harmony and so uh emotions almost any emotion whether it's good or bad is kind of seen as a little

bit dangerous to the social balance yeah whereas you know in the United States it's more about It's freedom baby express yourself right i'm angry godamn it the individual takes a much more center stage in in a lot of Western cultures especially in the United States so that's just a one instance of display roles and again they've reproduced that in the lab which I thought was kind of interesting but this happens all the time you'll see it everywhere i'm I'm just thinking about you know because the the culture I know best outside of the US is

Brazil yeah and it's funny brazilians have this thing where Brazilians are very extroverted and it's a a very gregarious culture people are talking they're very loud they're very excitable but it's funny it it it I lived down there for a long time when it before I realized that actually if you're not extroverted if you're not talking a lot and you're not excited like people think you're something's wrong with you they think you're you're like sad or depressed or something and uh so it's like even if you're tired or if you're like not in the mood

or if you're Like worried about like thinking about something they take it very personally if you're not being talkative and yeah it's super fascinating that that jives with the research as well that's what they find is that if you don't if you're not what they call um if you're a non-conformist an emotional non-conformist in your society you're usually perceived as immature or uh unstable rude inappropriate yeah uh when you don't reflect back these display rules of your given society and so like when you travel to to another country this can come up a lot and

sure you've have a ton of instances of this too but if you ever go to another country you usually violate some of these dis display display rules without even knowing it it's that's a powerful social uh cue uh for Yeah yeah for sure so uh that's just kind of to lay out the beginning of it there are these display rules that we all have in all cultures um they're taught to us from a very young age and they shape not only the way we express emotions but the emotions that we feel as well i have

a funny story About culturally clashing display rules okay so in 2013 my wife and I we were in Vietnam we're doing like a long road trip on a motorbike through Vietnam which was awesome but also like totally unsafe uh yeah and so she and I were riding and we we ended up on this like back back road that like it turned into a dirt road and it was super unstable and there was like potholes everywhere and we're on this like shitty motorcycle and sure enough we we hit like a big pothole and both of us

just went flying you know over the handlebars okay and um and I landed on the ground and then she landed on top of me and so I broke her fall fortunately um she was she was a little dinged up but like I got this entire entire left side of my body basically just got scraped like all the skin got scraped off and so I'm like my left arm is just covered in blood i still have scars here from it uh I was like covered in blood just scrapes everywhere um just intense amounts of pain and

we're in the middle of rural Vietnam like in the middle Of nowhere and so we start walking and the bike is destroyed so like we can't drive anywhere and uh so we start walking and fortunately we came across uh like a van or something and and somehow miraculously the passenger in the van like spoke English and so we were able to eventually get ourselves to like this tiny town that maybe had 100 people total yeah barely had like electricity barely had indoor plumbing and they take us to they the guy told us it was a

clinic but uh later figured out that it was like the local school and it was I think the only building that had like running water or anything so anyway we get in there and this woman who speaks no English starts like cleaning my wounds and it hurt so [ __ ] I mean there was like rocks and gravel like embedded into my arm and stuff and so she's just like picking it all out i'm like screaming in pain because it [ __ ] like it hurts so bad and I'm sitting there and I look outside

and I start hearing laughter and I look outside and there's like dozens of school children watching us and they're giggling the entire time and I'm like this is so [ __ ] up like every time Like every time I scream in vain like laughter erupts from from the audience essentially and I but I was like I was too upset and freaked out to kind of like be offended but I was like wow that's like super f and even the woman who was like cleaning my arm she was like giggling and I'm like what's wrong with

this place like what is wrong with these people anyway long story short I came to find out that in Vietnamese culture they laugh when they're uncomfortable it's like it's like a it's It's like a way to like hide their discomfort uh which is something that we all do a little bit but apparently there it's like very common and like socially accepted it was an awkward uncomfortable situation and so everybody kept laughing when I was screaming to like diffuse the discomfort but of course me coming from Western culture that's considered like incredibly rude and insensitive to

like laugh at somebody's pain um so anyway it was super Interesting it was like very it was really fascinating yeah yeah in western cultures too like expressing dissatisfaction is kind of seen there's an authentic kind of you know that's authentic being if you're expressing your your dissatisfaction with something right yeah um whereas in more collectivist cultures that's that's a threat to the group right yeah so yeah kind diffusing their discomfort through laughter that's a common one i mean I do it you know even too but on the societal scale you know when you're taught that

when you're inculturated in that Yeah that becomes a whole different animal it's it's the water you swim in right so you don't even realize that you do it you think it's you think it's universal but it's actually cultural and that's Yeah that's what I want to that's what I want to emphasize through all this cultural stuff is that that's for me anyway those were the biggest m like it was always like "Oh my god this is the water I'm swimming in." And I didn't even realize it so yeah keep it keep that in Mind throughout

all of this yeah so not only do do are there the display rules which are when and how you express your emotions there's also your your culture actually trains you to want certain feelings too okay there's this theory in social social psychology called affect evaluation theory AVT for short and the core idea of of AVT is the ideal versus your actual affect okay so actual a effect is like what you genuinely genuinely feel in your daily life and then there's the ideal affect what the the emotions that your culture prizes and and values over other

uh emotions right so like in the west we generally have um high what they call high arousal positive emotions we like excitement we like you know uh positivity energy drinks you know like all of that that's that's the west right but in a lot more collectivist cultures for example and East Asia you have low arousal positive emotions so serenity and calm peace uh again harmony social balance and harmony within the group that's much more prized and so those emotions get um uh are reinforced more um depending on which culture you're in and so You just

you will have over time you have a propensity to gravitate towards one set of emotions over another just based on your culture like that and um you know this manifests in like your the leisure activities you do like you know do like extreme sports in the United States that's like a big thing right um but so so are like spa days and stuff like that and and treating yourself your music preferences whether it's high energy versus low energy your parenting styles too this influences all of that the thing is you've already kind of mentioned this

um a little bit but when you're in a culture for example like in the United States if if they if we value these high emotion high arousal positive emotional states and you're just not like that personalitywise that becomes a problem right yeah because your personality influences how you actually feel but your culture determines what you want to feel or determines what you should be feeling and then you you get into this like oh I don't feel that way there must be something wrong with me yeah and I think we see a lot of that especially

like in the United States where it's you know we We're supposed to be uh just positive all the time and look at the bright side and turn challenges uh into positive interpretations of whatever's going on in your life when you don't feel that way when you have such a mismatch that can be very disorienting um for your daily emotional life and you get to you start thinking something's wrong with you yes um and I think that's something we we you really have to look out for and there's just this internal friction that goes on between

your actual personality and the culture around you yeah i think it also can't be understated or overstated whatever stated it is uh how much like shifting that environment can mean you know like I I what you just said I felt that when I grew up in Texas I felt that way like Texas is very it's it's big on politeness courtesy and I I I'm just kind of a cynical blunt person and uh some people would say rude well when I was growing up that's what people Constantly told me they constantly told me I was rude

and I'm like I'm just saying what it is like how is this rude everyone's thinking it i'm just saying it exactly like how is this rude uh but then it was interesting because when I went to school on the east coast where everybody is just rude right um it it was pretty incredible actually like the the shift like how how much better I felt like I I felt so much more at ease uh in an environment that like kind of valued the same things I valued and expressed itself in similar ways that I expressed myself

and um I I definitely relate to what you just said like growing up I I was like man what what's wrong with me like why do I feel this way all the time yeah um but yeah it's it's it's there's that there's a fun saying um around therapy which is like uh before you get a therapist make sure you're not surrounded by [ __ ] and uh I think I think there's like a a more more accurate way to put that it's just like make sure you're in the right cultural environment right right yeah and

I mean you know in a place Like the United States too where there's lots of different subcultures and everything like that i think I a part of emotional maturity is kind of finding that right environment for yourself and and and seeking out the right environments we'll get a little bit more into that seeking out the environments that match your personality more or match what you want i I've definitely noticed like over time where I've I I'm pretty introverted for the most part and so um I try to just you know I build my life around

that now and I have the flexibility to do that and that's great and it's been able to I've been able to regulate my emotions a lot better in those kind of environments but you know I I see this all the time where you see mismatches of people who just they're they don't like people but they're forced to be interact with people all the time and it's usually people who have a very different uh idea of of cultural expression of emotions or the way you regulate emotions um and and interact with people so I I but

I think that's part of emotional maturity again is Is finding that good fit for yourself yeah i mean you know what it comes down to is what kind along with that what kind of emotional life are you pursuing and is that is it yours or is it like has that been forced upon you like is are you a little bit more of a subdued um kind of even maybe a little bit melancholy or you know depressive type person but you're and surrounded by a bunch of like super positive people who are just trying to be

positive all the time and see the good side of everything well maybe that's not a good emotional match for you so that's just something to keep in mind I guess um through this another uh thing we see that's very influenced by our culture too when it comes to emotions is this idea of uh emotional suppression um I think in the United States especially and in more individualistic cultures in general there's this idea that suppressing your emotions is bad right we you should get it out you should express yourself and you should be authentic in in

your expression um what's interesting is they found some studies that in collectivist cultures it's actually better For your mental health in some situations to suppress your emotions so for example there was one study done during the pandemic uh where they found that emotional suppression in collectivist cultures actually led to a lot more uh positive uh mental health outcomes than it did in individualistic cultures kind of another little uh instance of this that was pretty interesting though the the Utku Inuit culture actually they um they have this cultural norm around uh anger they they really try

to suppress it in the group because it's very very destabilizing in these small groups that are very interdependent on one another so they don't just tell people like okay don't be angry that's not what they do they have this whole cultural uh kind of set of expectations around it like I was just saying like you know choose the environment you want to be in they actually um set up their kind of social lives and even environments to just avoid uh situations in which people get angry with each other and then they teach children to to

reinterpret frustration as more of a misunderstanding right and the the emotion is actually shared between the people it's Not one person getting angry it's that there's a there's a conflict here and it's shared between people and we need to understand people better uh to do that and so they they they teach them not just to s to like stifle their rage but to reframe it as something more productive as well interesting so there's there's there's good uh ways that culture can actually help you manage your mo emotions as well um obviously this kind of brings

us to to one of the most fascinating things I think I found about um culture and emotions which I'm calling it the paradox of emotional conformity this this blew my mind Mark okay the and so let's talk about emotional conformity first okay so we've kind of mentioned this a little bit uh already but emotional conformity is when you align your emotional experience your expression of emotions the the emotions you experience the way you talk about emotions you align that with societal expectations so again in the United States positive emotions high arousal and you Know you're

expected to kind of like be positive no matter what right that's emotional conformity right the paradox though is that in these individualistic cultures like the United States like Western Europe North America um people that individuals individualistic societies are actually more emotionally conformist than collectivist societies that's weird that's kind of crazy if you think about it so what I'm saying is that in individualist societies people in societies that that emphasize the individual as the core kind of unit social unit uh you would think that uh you know there's this ideal of authenticity and authentic expression right

and there would be more variety in uh emotional expressions but actually this is not what they find in the research which is a recent study that they found that in these individualistic societies people actually display a narrower range of emotions okay compared to collectivist societies and what's what's really interesting is that they found that in collectivist societies the focus is more on behavior okay it's conformist conforming to the behavior in We don't care how you feel as long as you do the right thing exactly that's beside the point how you feel but as long as

you do the right thing in the right situation whereas here it's like you can do whatever you want as long as you feel the right way exactly you want to signal that you're doing well in your culture right yeah and so the way you do that in an individualist society where emotions are kind of like the currency mhm uh who how you feel is very much central to who you are it's reflect it's reflective of who you are yeah right and so you try to display all of these positive emotions and positive uh but all

these positive emotional experiences in order to signal that look I'm doing fine i'm doing great in this society it's kind of a status thing almost that they found um it's almost like con a certain amount of conformity is unavoidable it's just the society picks and chooses what it's going to conform on Right yeah exactly exactly and in individualistic societies it's these emotional states that they that they emphasize and um so it's not like it's not just about feeling good it's about showing others that you're in a good place like I said it's kind of as

a status signaling in a way which makes sense because if everybody's doing their own thing it's not clear to others whether you're doing well or not right so the only way to signal it that you're doing well is to be super happy and positive and upbeat and like Yeah exactly yeah i saw this so I went into uh the greatest grocery stores chain of all time which is Trader Joe's and Trader Joe's could be it's like a microcosm for American emotional life i think if you think about it because all the employees there they're like

it's funny because they emphasize you know like positivity all of our employees are positive you know and it's like they're grocery store employees why Why do we have to do that but so I'm behind this guy he's checking out and they're having this Like conversation like "Oh bro that's awesome bro sweet oh awesome where are you going oh man you're you're off soon like and it's just going nuts and I'm like what the hell is going on and then I get up there and the guy tries to do the same conversation with me and I'm

just kind of in a shitty mood and I just wasn't having it come on Drew and I know I could tell I was like getting pressured i should have been like they were like "Come on get up here get up here with me like it's awesome i'm working at the grocery store." And I'm like "I'm just buying groceries i want to go home dude." You know but it is it is it's like that's that's the expectation that's been set there and what's funny about that is is like oh we have you know you go to

Trader Joe's and they have like everybody's wearing like a like you were saying something different they have or like they have a a Hawaiian shirt on or It reminds me remember in the movie Office Space uh Jennifer Anderson's character works at a restaurant and like she gets she gets like her apron she doesn't have enough colorful pins on her apron and so her manager like Pieces of flare yeah she called like he's like you need to show up with more flare tomorrow or or there's going to be problems and it's like just these [ __

] little pins on our apron yeah right the the point though I mean it is very American it is very American yeah like like outwardly look however you want behave however you want but your emotional uh demeanor should be within this very narrow range performative positivity that's what it is it's performance i I'm just I'm I'm thinking now because I mean a huge part of my work is is kind of trashing this performative positivity this this kind of emotional conformity is starting to make sense now actually like because the countries it my books didn't do

well in Yeah are are highly collectivist cultures you know Japan China whereas I think the the countries it did do very well in are very highly individualistic cultures yeah yeah it's I mean the the the freedom to express yourself it it often translates into Kind of this pressure this pressure to exhibit culturally acceptable versions of what's considered authentic and so that authenticity becomes the new norm right and so now now it's not that you're actually trying to be um authentically expressive it's that you're you're just trying to fit in fit in with that norm which

is quote unquote authenticity and it the paradox of it is is that turns into conformity it's it's insane to think about but that's that's what they're finding cuz I bet if you went to these people who are conforming Mhm like in their sentiment most of them are probably not aware of it i would say when people conform behaviorally like they're not super aware of like what they're doing or why 100% yeah uh but yeah it's probably the same emotionally as well like they probably really think that they're like amped i mean you I imagine you

know a bunch of people like this cuz I know A bunch of people who are like every time you see them like how are things going like oh they're great everything's oh life's awesome but so busy and it's like meanwhile they're like the dog in the burning house like this is fine you know like it just and and nothing ever changes like it's just everything's awesome all the time anyway no that that 100 percent when you're like in a place like the United States you ask somebody "How's it going?" The proper response is good fine

great that th those are your options right but uh like I know some Norwegians i have some Norwegian friends that I met and you ask them "Oh hey how's it going?" It's like "Well my back hurts and my girlfriend broke up with me how do you think it's going?" Right like they'll be a lot more blunt with you about it and um but in Yeah again so that goes back to the emotional conformity this is this is your this is how I expect you to respond and you should respond that way and if you launch

into something like oh things are going terrible and blah blah blah then people are like whoa dude like I was just you know being polite here Where we think that oh that's politeness but actually what it is is it's just a a call for you to conform to to the social expectation that you have pretty fascinating [ __ ] I mean it's just crazy crazy stuff yeah a a lot of what this creates though too is uh what they call emotional labor Right so if you if you aren't feeling like you want to have a

good conversation with the cashier at the grocery store and yet you're kind of you feel pressured to do that uh like you were just saying a lot of people aren't aware that they're doing this so if you ever leave a situation like that and you kind of just feel exhausted that's probably like an indication that hey you're performing some uh emotional labor here right and getting over it um but they also they found there was this one study where u they uh interviewed customer service uh people and they interviewed them in individualistic versus more collectivist

cultures and the more performative people had to be in individualist cultures the more burnout they experienced the higher turnover Rates and and all of that but the more conformous they had to be in collectivist cultures during these customer service jobs where you know they had to deal with these difficult customers and all of that they actually felt better about it because it's like they're contributing to the cultural norm which is social harmony and helping other people out so that's pretty crazy too that it even goes down to that that level yeah that kind of gets

us a little bit into uh language as well and this is pretty fascinating and there's a whole whole like branch of psychology that looks at at this and we're just going to touch on some of it here but um language obviously has a huge role in shaping our emotional lives and the way we express obviously expressing your emotions verbally is one way to express your emotions um having the words for the emotions that you need yeah i would I would say like conceptualizing them when you experience them absolutely absolutely they can even though as we'll

see here in just a minute they can even kind of help you create emotions or or uh at least modify them in in different ways so Just to give you kind of the a salient example I think you know the a common example is the the word shot and Freud in German right taking taking pleasure in someone else's uh uh failures or their in their misfortune I guess right that's a pretty common one most people know that um we don't have a word a specific word for that in English we just use shot and Freud

now we actually just took it from the German i just call it joy you just call it joy because you love seeing other people suffer it's just I just call it joy on a Tuesday afternoon okay well it's it's I mean it's typically towards somebody that you don't like but if you're Yeah there's that the Japanese also have a word called I think it's I think it's am is that is that right there it's this feeling you get uh when you are comfortably dependent on someone else hm so think of like a child and their

parent that's kind of like the the feeling but this can happen between adults as well and in Japanese culture it's a desirable state to have whereas Like you know more individualist cultures we might think oh to like it that's there's a positive connotation to that that's crazy we would pathize it probably we would pathize it more whereas uh they have a word for it and there's a positive connotation for that word and so is it's experienced more and in more positive settings in in those cultures i've got one for you uh salaji in Portuguese okay

which is the pleasure of missing something or someone of like it's kind of it's similar to nostalgia but it's like there's almost like a romantic tinge to it there's like almost this like this like enjoyment of the lack of something of that you like love or care about interesting okay and and so okay that's interesting because um I I don't feel like I've been able to process that i I know the feeling you're talking about but I haven't been able to process that up until just like these last few years where I'm like "Oh I

miss this person." And I kind of like "Oh that's kind of nice to miss You kind of enjoy missing that person i kind of need to miss you sometimes right?" Like I've said that to some people i need to miss you sometimes so it's funny it's it's like it's actually you know cuz in English we think of missing something or somebody as like a negative experience but in in Brazilian and Portuguese culture it's it's actually like a very like powerful romantic kind of like subtly positive thing like yeah I have a lot of salaji for

my my grandmother you know or whatever right interesting okay well I mean but you also have so if you have certain words for certain emotions you're you're you typically can experience those emotions um more easily but also if you don't have a word for it uh there's this one instance I've come across anyway it's in Tahesian culture so in Tahiti they actually don't have a word for sadness they describe it more as like a physical ailment basically like an illness like you feel tired or like maybe you have some pain somewhere in your body or

something like that they they see it more As like a physical affliction than they do an emotional one so they don't even really have a word for sadness or to describe that and so I I don't know that's just interesting to me because having a specific word can enhance your recognition of an emotion but also or it can just completely blind you to it as well not having a word i mean we'll get into this later when we talk about like physiology but it it makes me wonder you know one of the things you and

I have talked about on the previous podcast um like not episode but like the old podcast that we used to do um is kind of the the concept creep of different words you know it's like the definition of anxiety has expanded over the years to include more and more experiences the definition of trauma has expanded over the years to include more and more experiences and so it makes me wonder actually if what a lot of things that are today labeled as anxiety or depression uh you know 20 30 40 years ago people would have just

said like oh I'm I'm I'm just tired or I'm exhausted or I'm like I need a break or I need a vacation whereas like today we kind of pathize it a little bit right yeah and and that changes our emotional experience just like you're saying yeah that modulates it that emphasizes it or deemphasizes it yeah yeah it has farreaching consequences for that and I think part of what you're getting at here too is going back to Lisa Feldman Barrett she has this idea uh this paper she put out about conceptual it's called conceptual act theory

okay um where these words they don't just label feelings but they actually play a part in creating the feeling the basic emotion theory let's step back just a second here uh one of the reasons well there's like there are hundreds of studies if not more that kind of support it okay that support it in a way mhm the the early studies and then this paradigm that they developed that was used later on uh throughout all of these studies was basically you would show somebody a a picture of a face That was making an emotional expression

of some kind so just like you're saying like a baby if a baby's crying and screaming well the baby's upset right what they would do they would show them these pictures of they usually get actors to to do an emotion and then they would show people these pictures and they would give them these list this list of emotions and say which one is this right pick it out and what they found is that yeah people you know 80 some percent of the time they would choose the same word like 80 some percent of people agreed

that this was what it was and that was kind of some evidence for the basic emotion of say fear like this you have an emotion with somebody wideeyed and like kind of a gasast and yeah that's fear right what people like Lisa Felman Barrett found though was when you didn't give them that word you did not give them the the option they just told them said what is this emotion there was very little agreement actually between people when they make it up themselves okay so the word the language and giving them the Word is priming

them it's giving them a social context and contextual cues about what's going on because it's not just the face it's the context of what's going on she has in her book you you see this of uh it's a woman it's a very close-up shot of a woman it looks like she's just in agony because well she says "Look at this woman who's in agony here." And then you flip the page over and it's actually Serena Williams after she beat her her her sister Venus she's excited yeah but and then your your your mind flips in

that instance once you learn that and you're like "Oh okay." Okay so it's the context around it and language plays this huge role in the context there there's So when they go out to these tribes and they do these basic emotion test on them they show them these different emotions uh emotional faces and and get them to uh to tell them what they think it is when you give them a list of words like that um or and translate it into their own language or sometimes what they had to do too is they had to

explain to them what this emotion meant in their own language Because they didn't have a word for it then they would all kind of conform to that they would conform to that idea because you've primed them to think that this is what this means and so language is a hu plays a huge huge role in that this gets into also the idea of emotional granularity as well which is if you have more precise words or or words that kind of distinguish between subtle differences in emotions you can experience these emotions differently as well well so

somebody who has high emotional granularity has a lot of different emotion words that they use to describe how they're feeling versus someone who's just like I feel bad I feel good I feel angry I feel happy that's it yeah right so language plays a huge huge role in that um if we're able to label something uh label an emotion or label um an experience around an emotion that influences not only how we experience that emotion but how we perceive that emotion in others as well mhm so yeah I wonder if some of that explains like

why talk therapy works you know just simply because absolutely You are taking like this ephemeral abstracts experience happening inside people's bodies and brains and forcing them to put labels around it and define it and like differentiate it from like other experiences that they've had and there's like I guess that that like moderates the intensity of that feeling or like I guess it's like when you're not able to define something internally then you feel powerless to it but then it's simply in the act of talking about it or writing it down you your brain is like

defining it and structuring it for yourself and then once it's defined and structured you feel like you can handle it yeah 100% yeah like we'll take a kind of stereotypical therapy situation say you just have some ill feeling towards your parents right just you don't know really what it is and you sit down with a therapist and you kind of work through that and you find out oh I actually resent my parents i I harbor resentment for my parents for X Y and Z right for something they did or something the way They approached things

or whatever it was now that gives you more of a framework to okay I can go in and I can handle this or I can address that resentment itself not just some bad feeling I have that I want to avoid them so yeah I think you're right the language around it is very important um for for meaning making yes is what it is but again that's just one component of experiencing emotion is the meaning part the cognitive part that we have there's all these other um contextual cues that go into it um that language can

influence definitely but yeah I I think that's a a huge part of therapy is putting words to emotions and just like with with little kids too when they're upset we're like "Use your words." Right that's that's that cliche use your words because we need to delineate what's actually going on here so we can address what's going on here right again the emotional granularity thing I think is is pretty important if you're somebody who does struggle with just even knowing how you feel I know I I definitely struggled with that for a long time just like

sometimes I just like I felt I just felt like [ __ ] i just felt bad and I didn't know why and I didn't I wasn't really inquisitive about it but if you kind of dig into that and start putting emotions okay do I feel anxious do I feel depressed do I feel upset do I feel angry just even like going through that and and and labeling how you actually feel can actually give you a lot of clarity and and ability to address emotions as they come up I think too yeah and we've actually there's

a tool for that there's this giant wheel that we've included in the in the PDF guide um and it starts in the center of the wheel it starts with kind of those six fundamental emotions and then it's like as you get out further out it like divides all those up into like subtler and subtler and more specific sub emotions i I know uh in therapy uh uh sometimes they'll just they'll hand that either that wheel or a similar wheel and just have the person look through all of the names of emotions there's probably like a

hundred of them on it and just Say like which one of these resonates which one of these like feels similar sounds similar to what you're feeling at the moment and you know you go through all these different you know there's like despair and and sadness and hopelessness and despondency and and disgust and it's like you you eventually stumble upon the right word that's like "Ah that's it that's what I'm feeling." Right yeah it's kind It's kind of like a color wheel too right it is like like if uh you know it's very pretty somebody we

only put the pretty ones in the in the PDF guide it's aesthetically pleasing yes yes solpodcast.com/eotions for a very pretty PDF guide but I mean it is like you designers uh they can tell you the difference between you know the four types of blue that are sitting in front i was like I'm just like that's blue i don't know like I can't distinguish between the two if you have the words for it yes you can distinguish between these colors just like you can distinguish between all These different emotions as well and then better address them

just like a designer can better use color if they if they have a a framework for basically which language is a huge framework for emotional processing that could get us into then what researchers call emotional complexity okay I think you'll you'll really like this this is uh when you feel more than one emotion at a single time for sure this is fascinating stuff too right yeah so especially as like westerners um who you know we praise uh we place reason and logic and and a rationale above everything else we want things to be very clean

cut you're feeling one thing at a time and that's it and we want to go through them sequentially and logically and that it needs to be clean sort them out and yeahbody even a modicum of attention to this knows that that's just not how emotional life works you could be feeling two opposite emotions at the very same time right and this is actually um culturally uh influenced as well um so in in more collectivist cultures there's what they call dialectical thinking okay which is basically an Acknowledgement not even an acknowledgement but a an expectation that

um two opposing things or two different things can be true at the same time they expect that that's just part of life kind of the yin and the yang exist together right lightness and darkness are two sides of the same coin um whereas in more individualistic cultures we again we want to see it as more clear-cut and just one thing at a time it it's not it's not out of the question in cultures that emphasize dialectical thinking that you can feel grateful and resentful towards your parents like the the example I was just using that's

that's just to be expected you're going to be grateful about some things resentful and you're going to feel those things at the same time um loving you could love someone but feel trapped in the relationship at the same time that's probably a very common one I think a lot of people feel that that's probably a salient one people can actually wrap their heads around being proud of your work but also being insecure about it i would even argue that like the more success you have the more insecure you get about it and that's again That's

kind of this weird contradiction but in in cultures that emphasize this dialectical thinking that's just to be expected right and to me that's a better way of of kind of navigating your emotions in a culture like the United States and other individualist cultures you find that um when you don't feel a clean emotion you think there's something wrong there too or or like going back to the job thing you can be proud of your work but insecure about it you think something's wrong there no that's just how it is yeah you think that you shouldn't

be insecure or you think that you shouldn't feel trapped in the relationship with the person you love or you shouldn't love the person that you feel trapped by we do seem to have a a really hard time holding those two polar opposites at the same time it was funny i I got very curious about this and I uh I asked myself I was like if that's true if if say East Asian cultures are better at uh holding two opposing sentiments at the same time I wonder if they deal with cognitive dissonance differently Or if they're

better at managing it um for those listening in the last episode about procrastination we talked a lot about cognitive dissonance which is when um your your beliefs or expectations are contradicted by reality and and the the the experience of um basically believing two contradictory things are true at the same time is like untenable in most people and um and they like freak out and eventually just pick one thing to go with um so I looked it up and it was it was fascinating it kind of tracks to what we've been talking about so people in

East Asian cultures they don't feel any less cognitive dissonance they just feel cognitive dissonance about different things oh okay and so similarly in that westerners tend to conform more more emotionally but less behaviorally uh Westerners tend to feel more cognitive dissonance around their emotions and expectations and less around their behaviors whereas people in East Asian cultures feel more cognitive dissonance around the social expectations and their behaviors socially And less around their emotions so basically people in those cultures are more comfortable experiencing say uh love and resentment at the same time but they're way less comfortable

say um you know doing uh being nice to somebody today and then being mean to them tomorrow like that that they can't handle that they they did both of those things whereas a westerner is like well yeah I was happy yesterday and I was pissed today so yeah there's no problem with that but you know it's it's it's the it's the emotion the simultaneous emotion in the westerner that drives them nuts whereas in the East Asian culture it's the contradictory behavior here interesting that drives them nuts okay that I didn't I didn't find that so

that's that's interesting that you dug that fascinating well you're right though because like in the the western mind we want that more more of the clarity more the conciseness like we start to get more like "Why can't I make up my mind?" Like when you feel that pull emotionally you're like "Oh my god I can't make up my mind." Or Um I I'm not I'm not over this thing that happened yet or you know why does it hurt something in the past still hurt when I'm doing so well and like you just can't we don't

navigate that as well emotionally but that's interesting from the behavioral um side where yeah it's like because I think in the west there's we kind of have this expectation that you should be the same person oh all the time right like it's like right so it's like if I'm happy if I'm happy with my wife today I should be happy with her all the time to project that all the way out I should be happy with her if we're with friends I should be happy with her if we're visiting her family I should be happy

with her if we're at a work function or if we're hanging out on a Friday night whereas I think in in uh in East Asian cultures it's more there there's more of a contextual understanding of like you know you're going to feel different things in different places and like that's totally Normal but the beh your your behavior should be consistent interesting okay yeah yeah i think I I do think though as westerners we we should probably lean more towards a little bit of that dialectical thinking yeah just from a emotional standpoint anyway and there's there's

a lot of data that supports that that it's the the ability to hold multiple the complexity of emotions in your mind at the same time is like a sign of good emotional maturity resilience mental health yeah yeah you can just navigate a lot more complex situations a lot better that leads into the the resilience you're more flexible you see nuance to I've also seen uh as well like in the in East Asian cultures and other collectivist cultures that this dialect dialectical thinking also leads to like kind of just a better understanding of opposing views as

well like that because again you're uh behaviorally you want more social harmony and so emotionally you are more open to uh kind differing views or somebody who disagrees with you even if you like you don't You don't agree with them but you're you're still you're like okay I can see where you're coming As long as they're doing the right thing as long as they're doing the right thing as long as they're performing the right behaviors yeah yeah for sure for sure so last thing I want to talk about when it comes to culture and emotions

i could go on and on and on about like I went ham on this i spent way too much time uh because I just found it fascinating but kind of the last idea is that your emotions are actually a type of social currency okay so again we kind of have this idea that emotions are personal that they're just happening within us and that uh you know they're just they they happen on a momentto moment basis but actually what's going on is your emotions are are signaling to the people around you you know are you part

of this in-group or out group the vibe you have like we've already talked about right um maybe that manifests in behavior in more collectivist cultures are you part of you know are you part of our inroup or out group and are you going to be a part of the the social Harmony that's created or not you know when you see somebody uh being sad what they're actually doing is they're probably trying to invite some empathy or some support from someone right anger is usually you're demanding recognition or accountability from somebody else um laughter uh for

example that you're trying to create a sense of ease like we talked about earlier with the with the Vietnamese kids uh laughing at your pain well they were actually trying to create a sense of calm and ease amongst themselves uh and inviting more of a closeness a social closeness uh to each other so emotions can be spent like that like like a currency and you to be aware of that I think is a really important thing where you're going about because um some people don't value the same emotions that you do and you're trying to

spend them and that's where a lot of conflict comes as well i think this makes sense when you again when you think of relationships as co-regulation of emotion right so if you if you're around somebody who is like very well emotionally regulated and generally is in a good mood All the time that is valuable because their positive vibe and good mood and adaptability is co-regulates your your emotions as well and so when you think of somebody who's very charismatic or magnetic um I think that's a lot of what's going on is that they're they're just

exuding such positive emotions that they are that they are co-regulating the people around them and so that becomes a valuable currency and you're willing to like make sacrifices to be close to that person to spend time with that person to hang out with that person it's it's uh you have incentives to to be around them like a social currency inversely you have kind of emotional vampires who seem to suck all of the emotions from the people around them constantly and they're this bottomless pit of sympathy and misery and and and and rejection and pity and

uh and as a result you feel like you're going broke by being around them and so you just want to get away as much as possible i had not heard this term social currency before before we we prepared for this episode but I really like it it it's one of those things that like just Intuitively makes sense to me not just with the co-regulation thing but like you see it show up in uh organizational behavior quite a bit it was funny i actually I was having a conversation with a friend like a week ago um

and his wife works at like a really one of the biggest corporations in the world and uh this this corporation's like currently going through a ton of layoffs and so we were just kind of talking about like who's getting laid off at that company and uh and who's not and how it's kind of like his wife is observing that it's actually kind of funny which ones are getting the boot and which ones are being asked to stay and he was telling a story he said that she has this guy on her team who's literally been

at this company for like 20 years and not a single person can explain what he does like nobody knows he shows up to a meeting like once or twice a week he seems to always be like you know on Reddit or like watching YouTube videos like no nobody knows what he's doing he's been in the same position for 12 years he's he's like he's just chilling but everybody loves him he's like he's totally the culture guy like everybody he He brings donuts and Coffee in the morning and he like invites people to parties and he's

like always got cool stuff going on and he's really funny and he like you know he like brings the energy and the meetings up and we were just talking about how it's funny how it's like this company which has now gone through multiple rounds of layoffs in the last 5 years and it's like this dude does nothing yet he's still there he's still there he's still there cuz obviously he's he's obviously bringing something so so question for you um did your friend uh who whose wife works for this big uh corporation are the layoffs related

in any way to AI oh for sure okay okay which which actually interesting which would make sense why this guy right because you can't automate i was just going to say you can't automate a good vibe maybe that's what we all have to like that's our new skill set like they need to start teaching college courses with Yeah social Currency of emotion pro pro uh career tip for everybody listening start start bringing donuts and coffee to work i don't I think you're right i don't know if this is just me now too but um like

I've gone pretty hard on like the content that I consume now online is a lot of comedians and I think they've been having a moment but they've been having a moment for several years now yeah especially across social media and it's because of that like there's social currency around making people laugh and make people feel good there's literal currency involved here too you pay to go see this person tell jokes absolutely it's insane right but um that makes a whole lot of sense when you consider it in the context of social currency so I don't

know maybe maybe that's why we all need to be just uh court gestures going forward and that's going to be our our job court gesture uh super supportive friend hype man yeah um and then also like I think what you said too a calming presence you know you you could probably describe you know what a a really good therapist does a really good Therapist is like 10% intellectual 90% emotional like really what a good therapist is doing is like co-regulating with you extremely well like listening well sympathizing well mh um and then like just knowing

some some of the questions to ask and and you know where to poke and prod but like most of it is just being very emotionally present and attuned and and calm like being a calming presence uh probably goes way further than like you know what school they went to or what certification they have 100% no absolutely that's Yeah I think that's the definition of a good therapist for sure so yeah well cool okay that wraps up my my culture deep dive here i went real hard on it i think the big takeaway here though is

just that like you need to step back and look at this how powerful of an influence culture is on your emotional experience just the way you perceive emotions the way you express your emotions the emotions you have in the first place they're all very very dependent on the culture that you grew up in the culture that you're in currently and the ones you you choose to be in going Forward yeah and and culture is fractal right like your family has a culture your community has a culture your country has a culture your and and the

smaller you get the more modifiable it becomes right like you can control your exposure to your family to a certain extent you can control the friends you hang out with you can control the work environment you're in you can control the city you live in um you can even you know if you want to get a little crazy you can control the country you live in um so it it is uh it is modifiable and it is the water we swim in so we tend to not notice it or think about it or uh overestimate

how universal it is so speaking of the water that we're all swimming in I I think it's worth taking a moment and kind of digging into the historical context of the cultures that we come from and how they've approached emotions throughout history um just so that when we do move into the actual practical takeaways and you know toolkit so to speak in the next section um we'll have a little bit more grounding of kind of where we all came from where all this came from So in the west we've already talked about how there's been

this sense that a people are seen as atomized individuals it's you know you are you and I am I and we're responsible for ourselves and um and ultimately our ability to control ourselves is kind of morally incumbent upon us like that was we covered that in the procrastination episode about how throughout Western history it's if you couldn't control your own actions if basically if you succumb to your emotional impulses uh you were shamed and judged and seen as a bad person all that stuff as we covered in that episode really went back to Plato um

Plato had this analogy of a chariot and two horses he really framed the human psyche in terms of having uh your kind of anim animalistic urges and then your emotional impulses and then your rational thinking self was the chariot rider who it was their responsibility to guide and control the horses and make sure that they were running in the right direction is essentially the thinking brain is in the driver's seat and uh it's their job to force the feeling brain to come along with it now that point of view never really got challenged or changed

up until Recently um you see Aristotle was correct in that he saw it as more of a skill issue but he still ultimately saw uh reason and wisdom as the core virtue that all other virtues stem from the Stoics really picked up where Plato left off you know they saw living a good life is basically being able to detach from your emotions and uh act out rationally despite whatever you might be feeling or whatever impulses cravings you might have and this continued on through Christendom and I think it's you know talking through all of the

examples all the research the cultural research that we went through in the last few sections you see two themes show up over and over again one is the individualism which comes from the Platonic idea of the soul we are each a unique soul that lives on in eternity and it's the fundamental immutable unit of an individual and then you have this idea of rationality dominating the emotions that a high functioning valuable human in the world is able to control what they feel act despite what they feel suppress what they feel you know behave as a

reasonable individual and the result of this is that it it generates a Culture that sees negative emotion or emotional discomfort as weakness it sees people who can't control their urges and their desires as morally failing in some way and again that's very much what the procrastination episode was about on the Eastern side um you know Buddhism was all about witnessing your emotions without necessarily investing in them and I would say out of all the ancient traditions the Buddhists probably got this the most right in that and we're going to come back to mindfulness techniques later

because they are incredibly useful it's basically what the Buddhists understood is that just because you feel something doesn't necessarily mean a it's true b you have to act on it and c it means anything they seem to really kind of be the only tradition that like really nailed that and while they definitely recommended a lot of practices to help people realize that uh there wasn't a whole lot of where to go next after that um you know Buddhism does have the uh four noble truths and the eight-fold path and it's got all these kind of

rules or principles of like these are the right things you should be doing and there is a concept In in Buddhism called uh upka which means like equinimity or like harmony among all the aspects of the self um but the let's just say the how-to is like beyond the the mindfulness practice isn't really there hinduism really focuses on the idea of acting according to the dharma or like a higher purpose um you know we'll we'll come back to this a little bit later but it's it is one thing that shows up and I feel like

this shows up at some point in every single episode is that part of what makes any sort of struggle emotional or otherwise uh more bearable is when you feel as though that struggle is moving you towards something or it's for some sort of worthy cause or or higher purpose than yourself uh and then of course Confucianism we've talked quite a bit about it confucianism is where you really see this concept of uh social harmony um through something called Lee which is collective rituals and Confucianism really based the understanding of self not in the actual individual

but in the the contribution and the harmony of the group and um and as a result you see in a lot of the eastern cultures that they're they they tend to be better at at Uh the dialectical thinking the managing you know the internal contradictions um but at the same time they you do get more emotional suppression you do get more uh behavioral conformity mhm ultimately the the flaw I think of all the ancient traditions is that they all place the thinking brain in the driver's seat all of them see the thinking rational mind as

kind of the one that should be in charge i think this is the tricky thing about managing your emotions is like that intuitively feels very true like your thinking brain is like we've all had this experience a million times of like watching yourself do do something stupid as you're doing it and you're like there's a part of your brain that's like wait no it's just not loud enough it's like come back no don't do it and and like we've all been there and I think you know so it it it's not surprising to me that

um that across human cultures like people would assume like okay we just need to make that voice stronger and counterintuitively like that's not actually the case um it's that voice has a place and it is important but like it's Not a matter of just getting that voice to scream louder and louder um it's and and that actually ends up backfiring in most cases why do you think though that these ancient traditions why do you think they all kind of converged on that look what is it about like because to me I think there probably was

some social utility in that right there was some value in that because when you don't have modern technology especially modern communication technology and you just have the people around you and there's that's your entertainment that's your what your your whole life is right uh I think you kind of do need to keep a lid on emotions a lot right and so there probably is a a place for rationality in those ancient traditions that kind of I don't want to say it was a social control but like there was a social regulation uh mechanism right probably

I mean the stakes for anything were higher you know so if you get upset and you know steal your neighbor's cow like right his family could starve to death you know so it's like any any sort of impulsive action Like that the stakes were pretty high it is a little bit paradoxical though because if you actually read accounts of medieval or ancient cultures like people had absolutely no self-control it was like the story of history basically it is completely impulsive like you know Steven Pinker wrote this great book called the the Better Angels of Our

Nature and like the whole first hundred pages of that book is just going through how violent most of human history was like brutally violent impulsively violent like just completely irrationally violent and across cultures like all over the place so in many ways uh it was I guess emotionality was a much bigger problem back then the consequences were much higher the stakes were much higher and and it was there were social like serious social consequences and so I do think that it was just like I don't know I imagine there was just this constant state of

like guys get the whole get a hold of yourselves you know like like [ __ ] get it together man whereas like in the modern world I think we we Definitely do have a more executive function we are a lot more self-aware um in some cases maybe too self-aware and and so I think in our emotional impulses and our drives and stuff like the stakes are lower right it's like if my biggest failure emotionally this week is like I eat way too much ice cream you know like first of all that's not unusual for for

me this week like like that's that is probably the worst thing that can happen to me if I'm too emotional one week u maybe I get into a stupid fight with my wife or you know maybe I like say something mean to to a friend um but like nobody's going to die and and and like nobody's going to starve and like nobody's going to get burned at the stake uh because of something I said so I think it's it's our emotional failings really just affect us personally more than ever before and for that reason I

think maybe we've we've had enough distance from it to like actually sit back and because I I I think just throughout most human history people were on damage control yeah I totally agree with that yeah it's always more of an aspiration I think really throughout history It's like this is what we should be striving for and it is super counterintuitive right like the the idea that that voice in your head like the more you shout at yourself to uh get it together the worse you're going to feel about yourself and the and the harder it

is going to be to get it together like that's almost that's like a luxury problem you know like it's it's you don't even have the space to think about that when like half of your kids are dying before the age of three right basically what we what this arrives at is you get to the 19th and early 20th century and pretty much like across most cultures you end up with these like as you said display rules in the culture or these standards of conduct of behavior essentially built around three things suppression right so you just

bottle it up put brush it under the rug pretend it's not there uh venting or emotional dumping which is kind of this hydra like sometimes I see it referred to as like the hydraulic theory of emotion which is this idea that if you've if You've been suppressing a bunch of anger one way to relieve it is to just let it out the same way you would like let you know a bunch of steam out of a valve and then once it comes out like the pressure will will drop turns out that's not true yeah turns

out venting anger just leads to more anger like there's no steam inside of you that needs to be let out it just there's like if you uh if you tell yourself that a behavior is healthy you're just going to be like more likely to do more of that behavior in the future and then of course there's like numbing and avoidance right so drinking overwork scroll doom scrolling etc etc these are generally the most like the default adaptive strategies that we all develop and a lot of it depends on where where we come from right like

some people's like I grew up in a household where you did not talk about problems it was like everything's okay pretend like house is on fire it's like this is fine you know it's you know it's like the world could be collapsing and everybody's like pretending like nothing's Happening whereas like somebody like my my wife's family it's just [ __ ] sirens and car alarms 247 people screaming at each other like everything's a problem everything is drama that's not really healthy either and then of course you have families where there's a lot of avoidance there's

a lot of numbing there's a lot of drinking and drugs and smoking and all sorts of stuff going on so none of these are good um I also think that this this has probably become more of a question in in society the last 50 years because we're we're more and more we're living in a world where like our environment is manipulating how we feel right so if you think of like not even social media but like mass media right news media newspaper headlines and then you get into all the social media stuff and the internet

stuff um you think about stuff like hustle culture and uh you know productivity hacking and you know obsessing over you know the career ladder and all these things um we talked about toxic positivity like there's a real kind of therapy culture that's emerged out of self-help where you're people have This unrealistic expectation that they're supposed to feel good all the time and that if they're not like something's wrong um and and then of course there is the classic you know there's still that underlying narrative that being too like being emotional uh especially if you're a

man being emotional revealing vulnerable emotions makes you weak it means something's wrong it means there's a flaw going on and so I think there's just been a lot more intellectual investigation into this uh and rightfully so because it is I think it's just affecting the modern individual in a completely different way than it affected the ancient individual right yeah yeah and mass media like you said it's gotten so good at emotional manipulation that we don't even know not notice it most of the time so yeah I think there is just a much more of an

intellectual curiosity around it for that those kind of reasons anyway yeah all right so now we we have like a pretty full understanding of of what emotions are why they matter how they interact with us personally with society at large with our culture um we Have a a decent understanding of where they came from um what affects them what improves them so now we want to talk about building that emotional toolkit uh how do we develop the skills to better manage the emotions in our life and so what I want to do is uh I'm

going to go through kind of four schools of thought around emotional regulation or emotional mastery uh the heart the head the soul and the body and we're just going to pick and choose the most evidence-based and validated stuff from each one we'll talk about which each where each school thought came from what they contributed what sort of ideas they had um and then also what we can take away from them i'd also like to mention that we have a online community that works through all these episodes together as a group it's called Momentum so if

you're listening to this episode and you're like "My god these two guys are so handsome i would love to work on this in my own life i would love to take all of the stuff that they're saying and apply it to my own life." Uh we have broken that down for listeners we have broken everything down Into a 30-day challenge you can take it one day at a time every day includes one small exercise you have a whole community of people that are working on it with you um I think last month we had over

a thousand people working on on the procrastination track together it's becoming a really really amazing experience so if you want to check that out go to www.findmum.com and you can get set up there so we got four schools of thought i'm going to start with the heart and this is simply because chronologically it came first and as with seemingly everything it starts with Freud it's always Freud you know Freud was the the the pioneer the the the genius historical figure that you figured out that much of our behavior is driven by the unconscious i mean

he you could probably argue that he was the first one to suggest that the feeling brain is driving the car and the thinking brain is just trying to figure out where where they are on the map this was completely uncon unconventional at the time it was seen by as absurd it was very contrarian but really the other incredible thing that he figured out is is talk therapy as We discussed earlier Freud really figured out that if you can get people to verbalize their inner world their inner sentiments their those wisps of feelings and impulses that

they start to lose their control over them that it that for some reason verbalizing all this stuff it it starts to give the thinking brain a little bit more leverage and and it starts to build a bridge of communication between the two sides and bring more clarity into one's life and it helps people to feel not feel so dominated by their emotions but rather feel collaborative with their emotions the problem is is that Freud took a good concept way too far right so I I sympathize because I think it's easy to understand like why he

thought this way but basically he looked at it and he said "Okay well if you get people to start verbalizing you know all of the feelings and thoughts that they've been suppressing for a long time it has this real healing impact on them there's something kind of magical about it uh so what if we dig deeper what if we dig you know really into like the the unconscious stuff that like they're not even they're really not Aware of right like let's let's start digging into dreams let's start digging into fantasies let's start digging into like

free association between concepts and stories and that's where you start getting into all Freud's weird [ __ ] right that's where you start getting into you know the the different complexes and um you know some of a lot of the mythology that that Young and Joseph Campbell carried the torch on like came out of that um but it it's like Freud ended up in some very strange and and awkward places that like haven't really held up over time simply because it it turns out that a large portion of the feeling brain is just a a

free association machine it just like it just throws concepts together and sees what happens and it like doesn't necessarily mean anything right it's just stuff we tell this story real quick just because I I just heard this about Freud and it illustrates um how he would get something right and then his interpretation would be so wrong um and it's I I don't know if it's it's tangentially related I guess to emotions but Freud thought that one of the um great civilization civilizing forces in Human evolutionary history was fire right we'd sit around a fire and

that helped to civilize us because we had to share food we had to look at each other at night you know too and and so he's like you know that's a a monumental shift in human evolution was fire but he the reason for the civilizing that he gave anyway was because men had to really fight the urge not to piss on the fire like that was what civilized men was when we were sitting around we had to realize that we couldn't pee on the fire anymore oh right so it's like he was right directionally like

oh fire actually probably was a a big civilizing force in our in our evolution because we had to learn how to get along around a fire but it wasn't because we you know men couldn't control themselves and not piss on it but anyway I just thought that was I I just learned about that story they thought that was funny it's so Freud yeah it's very Freudian that is so Freud it involves penises Of course yeah of course so yeah yeah it's it's So what's interesting about Freud's discovery is that not only is it verbalizing those

unconscious emotions makes them conscious and then they lose their power over you um he had a nephew named Edward Bernay who took some of the ideas of the early psychoanalysts and ran with them to to really discover and understand that it also works the other way that you can use language to kind of manipulate people unconsciously that you can throw certain words out and people will unconsciously start wanting something or start feeling a certain way without being aware of of of the language that has manipulated them and just a fascinating twist of history Edward Bernay

went on to essentially found the fields of publicity and marketing he was like the original massive New York marketer who was hired for millions of dollars by all these firms to like associate things like cigarettes with libido and um to generate commercials that uh made housewives feel like Uh you know baking goods made them better mothers and it's like all this marketing talk that goes on now around like brand and sentiment and uh all the free association that people make you know between like Coca-Cola and childhood and McDonald's and you know toys and all this

stuff which all started with Edward Bernay and then led back to Uncle Siggy as he called him so psychoanalysis was kind of the early earliest or first form of therapy of of generally what there's like a class of therapy known as psychonamic therapy which is essentially just therapy that addresses your emotions directly so it's like any sort of deep emotional problem that has been ongoing in your life um and you just really need to unpack all these feelings you used the the example earlier of like somebody who like just feels bad around their parents and

like doesn't understand why this is the sort of therapy that tends to do really well with those sorts of problems it's it's like the psychonamic school is like "Let's sit down let's talk about how you feel and then we're going to talk more about how you feel and then we're going to talk more about how you feel and we're just going to Keep digging and digging and digging until you're able to start making sense of some of this stuff." Psychoanalysis like really kind of went out of fashion for a while uh and rightfully so because

it just it started to get associated with a lot of strange stuff uh and I think it overreached quite a bit and so in the mid 20th century um people kind of abandoned it but around the 1980s and 90s you know people like Leslie Greenberg came back and started revitalizing it and kind of making it more practical and and and useful and uh really trying to help people get a handle on um not only understanding their own emotions but also like learning how to direct those emotions in a in a useful way but in terms

of the emotional toolkit that we want to build the the skill sets that we want to work on for ourselves I'd say the biggest thing that we we want to take away from this school of thought the psychonamic school of thought is uh is that verbalization right and it can be with a therapist it can be with a friend it can be through journaling it can be through anything but it's like that consistent practice of speaking out the emotions that you're feeling Finding some sort of logical container to hold them it really does have this

incredible healing effect or at least it alleviates some of the burden that often comes along with a lot of the the emotions that we carry around and we feel less weighted down by them less controlled by them the second school of thought is the head and this is the cognitive behavioral approaches and this really started out uh in the 1950s with Aaron Beck it it's interesting because by this point psychoanalysis had kind of played out like it's kind of like you said everybody agreed like the basis of this stuff is true like there is like

we are very much driven by our subconscious desires and emotions and it is very important to develop an awareness around those things but like come on dude on the fire seriously like is this really what's going to like fix people's depression you know and Aaron Beck was sitting around and he was he was thinking of like how there had to be a better way he saw it in terms of a triangle and that is basically your thoughts your feelings and behaviors all interact with each other right Your behaviors will drive your feelings and your thoughts

your thoughts will drive your feelings and your behaviors and your feelings will drive your thoughts and behaviors and so he looked at that and he was like for a person to change and improve all three of those have to improve you can't just learn more and then expect your life to improve you know it's like you can read as many books as you want about diets but until you stop until you behave differently you're you're never going to lose weight or have a six-pack you can't just change how you feel you could you know go

out and do a bunch of heroin or or lie to your become delusional and tell yourself that you're like the the queen of Monaco but like until your thoughts and your behaviors change like nothing's really changed and then even your behaviors you can go out into the world and you can do different things but if you still feel awful about yourself and you still think awful things about yourself then like what's the point has anything really changed so like really deep personal change comes through all three of those things at the same time now Beck

really believed that each of those things could be an entry point into the other two if you can get somebody to feel differently which is the psychonamic approach you get them to feel differently then they'll behave differently and then they'll start thinking differently or vice versa they'll they'll start thinking differently and then maybe they'll they'll behave differently beck looked at it and he said you know probably the simplest entry point is actually through the thoughts it's actually through looking at the narratives and stories that people say about themselves and their experiences and looking at how

those things could be rewritten or reframed in a way that's a little bit more healthy and a little bit more reasonable and like makes the the desired behaviors more likely to happen and makes the the the feelings the bad feelings less likely to happen uh and so this is where you start to get like cognitive reappraisal uh as it's become known and like a simple version is um you know somebody says wow I'm such a fa like I'm failing at this I tried this thing three times and I failed all Three times like god I'm

such a loser whereas you can go back and rewrite that script and say I'm learning three times I've I've done the thing three times I failed three times but each time I learn something different therefore I'm getting better and that simple cognitive reappraisal of the same exact experience will can result in different feelings and then ideally ultimately result in different behaviors now CBT has this like whole structure that they've built out over the decades around these cognitive reappraisals one of the things that they do that is super useful is pointing stuff out called cognitive distortions

um which are basically [ __ ] up and inaccurate stories that we all tend to tell ourselves like they're like patterns that seem to emerge a lot so one of them is like catastrophization it's like when something small goes wrong um assuming that it's the end of the world or that like oh my god I embarrassed myself once so like nobody's ever going to like me ever again like they're basically irrational stories that are over overindexed on our our negative feelings and that don't actually reflect reality And so learning and understanding the cognitive distortions can

be really useful to to understand like where our stories can get screwed up and um where we can kind of reappraise them and find better ones there's this whole school of cognitive behavioral approaches i personally think it emerged as the most most successful simply because of its consistency and its how uh systematic it was like it it really is a framework that is easily teachable and transferable from therapist to therapist um and it's the sort of thing that like two completely different therapists can kind of run through it and it and get very similar results

which is something that's not true about psycho dynamic therapy psychonamic therapy is so emotional laden that like so much of it depends on the the therapist's particular like emotional abilities or or ability to sympathize or recognize certain tendencies or ask the right questions um whereas CBT it's like I don't want to call it cookie cutter but like it is it is a system and a framework that like you can run through with anybody theoretically right Uh there was another framework around this time that came out um called rational emotive behavioral therapy uh rebt from Albert

Ellis he had a little framework called the ABC framework so you have the A is the activating event it's the thing that happens to you b is your belief about that event and then C is the emotional consequences how you end up feeling about that event and his point was that you can kind of train yourself to have a relatively large gap between those three steps right like a thing can happen to you and you don't necessarily have to have a belief about it you don't have to decide anything about it necessarily and then even

if you do have a belief about it you don't necessarily have to decide whether it's good or bad or upsetting or horrible every time I see REBT it reminds me of this i guess it's a Chinese proverb i don't know it's like one of these little anecdotes that I you see all these places and it's like seems very profound and everything um but I always think of it because I really like it so there's like a Chinese farmer he's super poor like dirt dirt poor and he only owns one horse and one day the Horse

becomes untied and like walks away and so his only horse is gone and the son is like "Oh my god dad this is a disaster our only horse like we're so screwed." And the father looks at him and he says "Good luck bad luck I don't know." So the son goes looking for the horse and eventually finds the horse and he finds the horse and like half a dozen other horses and he manages to bring all the horses back and so now now they have seven horses on the farm and he goes to his dad

he's like "I can't believe it look at this we have seven horses now like we're so rich." And his dad goes "Good luck bad luck who knows?" And then sure enough uh the the boy is training the horses and trying to like tame them and everything and one of the horses is like really wild and he's like bucking around and everything and he throws the kid off the horse and he breaks his leg and the kid is like "Oh my god this is horrible i can't work now." His dad says 'Well good luck bad luck

who knows and then the army comes and the army is conscripting for a war and they come and they look at the son and they say "Well it's too bad his leg is broken otherwise he could be A good soldier." And the son's like "Oh my god dad I can't believe it i don't have to go to war now." Dad says "Good luck bad luck who knows?" Anyway the story goes on and on and on and the point is is that like you don't have to necessarily ascribe what is good or bad like deciding what

is good or bad it's a decision you're making however subtle it is without noticing and I think the cognitive reappraisal piece is the thing that that the Stoics got at that I think is is accurate i don't love the way they describe it but I do think it is what they got at is that like you can kind of rewrite the narrative around you know what happens to you in a way that is adaptive and and promotes you know good behavior or self-belief senica has this great quote where he says you know it's the we

suffer more in imagination than reality and I like I I've always taken that quote to mean that most of what we are upset about is not the thing that happened it is the story and all the meaning that we like ascribe to the thing that happened and so this whole school of thought is still super relevant incredibly useful i think CBT kind of has the highest batting Average in terms of therapeutic modalities go um it's particularly useful for anxiety and and light depression um which everybody has anxiety and light depression these days so I think

that's why it's become so popular as well um and I think this is another tool for the toolkit right is this cognitive reappraisal is this development of the ability to look at something that's happened to you and then ask yourself you know if you're upset about it ask yourself like well is that true uh what else could it be you know could what what would this mean if if it wasn't true uh what if this was actually a good thing that was happening to me what would that mean how what would need to be true

for that to be true and it's just it's a useful exercise and it's a useful skill that I think we should all have in our our toolkit but this brings us to our third school of thought which is the soul cbt was taking off rebt psychonamic therapy was still around you get to the 80s and 90s you have all these different modalities of therapy therapy is starting to become mainstream it's it's starting to become a it's not just for crazy people anymore And something really interesting started to happen around this time as well which is

eastern spirituality and religion arrived in the western world so there are a couple therapeutic modalities that emerge kind of in this later period it's sometimes called like the third wave of therapy the first wave is kind of this psychoanalysis and uh psychonamic school the second one is the cognitive behavioral school and this is the this is the third wave starts integrating some of these mindfulness practices and more kind of eastern sensibility into in into the work and the first one is is one called DBT which is dialectical behavioral therapy now we just had a whole

conversation about thinking dialectically and that's very much what dialectical behavioral therapy is based on it's basically CBT plus sitting with contradictions and paradoxes and getting comfortable with them right very zen yes super zen so dialectical therapy is all about holding two opposites in your mind at the same time it's the dialectical thinking and as I said earlier like it turns out that there's a lot of great data showing that this is very Healthy for people so just to give you an example is that u you should both accept yourself as you are and you should

want to get better that is a seeming paradoxical thing but both of those two things are true and those are they are in tension with one another uh another one is um you want to be vulnerable and open to experiences but you also want to protect yourself and be safe both of those two things are true you want to cultivate an independent identity do things for yourself but you also want to have inter interdependence and rely on others as well because that makes you know a nice healthy life so it actually kind of gets back

into the value stuff that we talked about in the values episode about how like everything is a trade-off like it's not about like a good value versus a bad value it's about having two good values that are actually kind of contradictory or in tension with one another and then managing the that trade-off like understanding that the more you assert your individualism the more that's going to strain your relationships or or your your sense of community in in your life and and being okay with that right um the more you emotionally Open yourself up and be

vulnerable um the more you're going to open yourself to being hurt by people um so it's it's that kind of realism and paradox that I think by default people tend to avoid like we don't like thinking about those things we we tend to be like I want to be independent and I want to have good relationships or or I want to accept myself and I want to change all the time right like it's it's it's hard for us to uh to weigh both of those things simultaneously uh and then a little bit later uh we

get to my personal favorite modality of therapy which is acceptance and commitment therapy act and ACT is and the idea is that a you accept all of your experiences as they are all of your emotions everything that that happens it's like the first step is acceptance and becoming okay with it and then the second thing is like realistically looking at your options and how you can you know approach different pro the each problem in your life and finding some higher value or purpose to commit to that makes that problem feel worthwhile and I mean act

is like the overlap of act and my work is like very very large It might be the thickest vin diagram of of any psychological modality in terms of like the stuff that I write it it is it is the combination of like eastern mindfulness and spiritual awareness and then like western existentialist thought of like find the thing that matters and then be willing to suffer for it make a commitment to it ultimately the the truth the profound truth that these mindfulness-based techniques or meditation or just Eastern spirituality in general like the the really profound truth

that that that school brings with it is that emotions are visitors they are not enemies they are not permanent they are not you're not broken there's nothing wrong with you like emotions are just they're like the weather they come they go sometimes they're good sometimes they're bad it they don't necessarily mean anything you get to decide what they mean and you get to decide how to act in response to them do you think that's specifically that there is that one of the biggest benefits of meditation when it's done successfully i think is you notice the

thoughts and emotions that come and go and then you notice them go you Notice them come in you notice them go out and you see that impermanence do you think you've meditated a lot more than I have I guess so what where is the benefit there absolutely so I I before I was aware of like rational emotive behavioral therapy it I remember my Zen master back in Boston describing it as a widening gap he was like what you know the more you meditate so it's like if you take somebody who is has basically no self-awareness

right they instinctively respond to whatever happens to them you know and it's like a person with zero self-awareness is going to be like well uh it's not my fault I punched the wall like I stubbed my toe right it's just like impulse reaction impulse reaction impulse reaction and generally like what happens the more we develop an understanding of ourselves and and our feelings and our internal world a a small gap starts to open up between impulse and and action right and it's like impulse happens you're like "Okay this this annoying thing happened oh I really

want to punch that wall." And then it's like if the gap gets wide enough you can stop yourself right You're like "Oh wait no don't do that." Right right and I remember my my my Zen master saying he was like the the one of one of the benefits of meditation is he's he used to call it widening the gap he was like watch the gap get wider to the point where it's like something happens to you and eventually the gap is so wide that you're just like you can just play in the empty space in

between you can sit there you can be the the Chinese farmer you can be like is this a good thing is it a bad thing should I decide does it mean anything does it mean anything you know am I going to do something about it you know it's like you're just playing in that gap and um you know when I did come across REBT and and I saw that I was like "Oh yeah." The ABCs the Yeah yeah that's like exactly a lot of the I think a lot of this stuff is getting at at

that right like they're just getting at it at different angles so like mindfulness is really developing the the internal perception the self-awareness to like see the gap emerge between stimulus and response or see the entry point to the You know thought feeling behavior triangle okay and I think you know the cognitive reappraisal is really only becomes possible when that gap gets wide enough to do it um and then I think you know the psychonamic stuff the talk therapy is also widens that gap because it's it's like the more aware you become of those emotions the

more you talk through them the more you reexperience them the less of a hold that they have on you the less triggering they are and the more that gap widens and the more you're able to do cognitive reappraisal and the more you're like able to kind of look at your own mind and try to understand everything so like all of these things are synergistic and again it's like why we're going to hammer on the toolkit metaphor no pun intended um because it's like none of these things by themsel are going to solve your emotional issues

but the same way like a hammer is not going to fix your house or screwdriver is not going to fix your house but when you have like a hammer a screwdriver a saw a wrench you know the full toolbox then it's like okay now I can fix anything you know Yeah yeah yeah and I think too that's just like a it's it just seems to me that's a big part of just emotional maturity is widening that is learning how to widen that gap right that's I mean that's been my experience anyway where things I've seen

in my past where I've been super reactive and now okay now I do stop and that gap is widened up and I can look at the the middle the middle part before reacting to it so yeah yeah and it's funny you know we haven't used that term yet emotional maturity because really what that is is just somebody who is emotionally skillful right emotional maturity you know it's like somebody who has perspective on themselves and on the world and isn't hijacked by their emotions constantly but it's funny because like I I don't think maturity is the

right word okay i think skill is the right word i think it these things are skills and I think when you look at somebody who's immature it's somebody who hasn't learned the skills the same way somebody Who hasn't like learned how to like I don't know manage their finances or you know hold down a job we would describe as immature um you know a person who can't control their anger or um you know is anxious and inappropriate at times um is or blames everybody else for their problems like you know it's like I think these

are all just skill issues okay yeah yeah we don't we don't need to add the extra judgment of maturity yeah maturity thing it inserts that morality okay you know of like uh you can't control yourself you're like a child you know which might be true yeah there's some parallel there but we could do without the judgment i get that yeah yeah yeah okay that brings us to the last school of thought which is the most recent which is kind of funny because you would think this would be maybe the most ancient but anyway the body

somatic approaches it's funny the the the mind body stuff you know the mind and body are not separate even though neuroscience has Known that psychologists have known that for multiple decades now it feels like we're just now actually getting to the point of doing some really frontier research on how those interactions actually happen and it's funny because this is all the kind of touchyfey woowoo stuff that I grew up hearing about that I was like that's ridiculous you know stuff like how gut health affects your emotions and how like um supplementation can like help you

feel better in the morning and how like anxiety can be a vitamin deficiency turns out there's a lot of truth to that [ __ ] and it's it's still like we're still discovering a lot of this stuff um particularly around the gut health stuff but like it is it's a real thing and so this is the section where I annoy everybody listening by saying that one of the most effective ways to manage your emotions is diet exercise and getting good plenty of sleep at night sorry sorry everybody i'm sorry but it really is i mean

it it and it's crazy too because in many ways this is the simplest lever right sleep especially sleep Is like if there's a single thing that can impact your emotional stability on a day-to-day basis the number one thing is probably sleep like if you're underslept you're going to get emotionally hijacked so much quicker that gap between impulse and reaction is going to shrink to nothing you're going to make terrible decisions you're going to be cranky you're going to be impulsive you know every everything else we're talking about is kind of just window dressing if you're

not if you're not taking care of yourself and getting enough sleep there was an interesting meta analysis about a year ago um it looked at every intervention imaginable uh on mild depression and everything from all of these therapeutic modalities that we've talked about to anti-depressants to you know all sorts of different behaviors and the number one thing was dancing dancing dancing you mean just like dancing improved depression really dancing dancing okay physical movement out Like scored higher than anti-depressants scored higher than CBT literally just [ __ ] dancing there's something in me that just wants

to say [ __ ] like Yeah so I get it like that's that's what we're up against here so yeah i Yeah it's like it's it's physical movement right okay yeah when you put it that way yeah it's physical movement and then when you break down she say "Drew you just need to dance." That's like a dance dance party i mean it probably would improve your mood but no I 100% agree after a workout I feel great sure yeah but when you break down so so physical movement like was number one and then when you

broke down when you like zoomed in when you double clicked on physical movement and you like looked at all of the different movements dancing was number one okay exercise was number two uh walking was like number three mhm and like all of them shot at a higher percentage Than all the popular interventions all the CBTs and the RBTs and the anti-depressants and all that stuff i guess the way I've always looked at it though too is like those aren't going they're not going to like solve say depression or they're not going to you know fix

your emotions but they're going to prepare you a lot better to handle your emotions right is that Yeah they set the stage for you to be able to do it okay we've talked about two things right one is a emotions are full body a full body experience they're not just happening in your mind they're happening in your body and b they are a biological feedback mechanism to promote adaptive behavior and so the the goal of emotions is not to uh get rid of them or get more of them the goal is to simply uh adapt

to them as effectively as possible it makes sense that if your emotions are a biological feedback mechanism uh that happen across your body across systems across the the nervous system and the the cardiovascular system And and all the systems then it makes sense that maintaining those systems those physical systems is going to make you more adaptive to your emotions right like if your cardiovascular system is all [ __ ] up and your nervous system is all [ __ ] up and your digestive system is all [ __ ] up and like and then a bunch

of anxiety shows up you're probably not going to get the right signals and then you're not going to react to those signals and then like it it's it's just going to be it's going to make and then and then your inability to react to those signals are going to cause like all sorts of cognitive you know narratives and stuff that promote even more anxiety and like you just get caught lost in this spiral so it's it's like obnoxiously simple but it it's I I would say it's it's equally as important makes a lot of sense

though too i mean but Lisa Felman Barrett in her book uh how emotions are made uh which we've referenced several times now she talks about the body budget uh and how that influences uh emotions and how constructed emotions um are a part of that so your body has a a budget for the limited Resources that it has the energy glucose whatever and if it's not running efficiently and you haven't you haven't slept well you haven't you your body's not moving well you have digestive issues whatever it is that all goes into your emotional experience because

your body is budgeting resources for those things instead of you being able to handle an emotional experience yeah i don't know about you like so this is something that only we we talked about how meditation improves inter reception um which is that the the ability to like sense what's going on in your body one of the things I remember back when I started meditating a lot one of the first things that happened is I I started and I still do sometimes I started mixing up physical ailments for emotions yeah yeah like still to this day

sometimes if I get indigestion I feel anxious and I think I'm anxious about something and then it's like oh no that just that burrito I ate you know well in Isel Barrett's book she has this great example of uh she got in during graduate School she got asked out for a lunch date and she went out with this guy and she's like I wasn't really attracted to him but I went out with him whatever then during lunch I was like oh I started to get like this kind of anxious knot in my stomach and I

was like maybe I am attracted to this person wow and then she goes home and immediately throws up she had the flu is what it was but she mistook that for uh for some level of attraction for somebody else so yeah you can definitely get mixed up with these physical sens sensations and emotional states are definitely very very intertwined it's not mind and body they're all one thing it's all one thing right they're synergistic right it's like the healthier your body is the the more adaptive your emotions are going to be the more adaptive your

emotions are the the more clear-headed you're going to think the better decisions you're going to make the better actions you're going to take the better your body is going to be so it's like it's an upward spiral or it's a downward spiral yeah we just have this propensity to think in Dualistic ways there's mind and body there's spirit and there's physicality the and more the more you pay attention the more you're like there's no separation between the two so yeah that I think is is kind of the last major tool in the tool chest we've

talked about a lot of different stuff one of the things you know when talking about integrating all these things I think um you know the goal isn't to necessarily like I know we've said this a few times but it's not necessarily to like overcome an emotion like a lot of times that language gets used like overcome your anxiety or deal with your anger you know really it's it's more I think adaptation is probably the most accurate word it's like le don't don't deal with your anger leverage your your anger right if you're angry about something

like turn that into something productive use that energy and harness it in a productive direction if you're feeling sad like use that to evaluate the things that you need to evaluate if you're feeling anxious like use that to motivate you to to to move and take action ultimately emotions The whole purpose is for them to generate a new behavior like you are supposed to they are a signal that change needs to happen in some shape or another just the whole mentality of of emotions that you need to defeat overcome master dominate like whatever add whatever

verb you want to add is is probably misguided but yeah I think I think frankly like th this is to me this is the most distilled usefulness of these kind of four different clusters of schools of thought like obviously all these modalities have different individual techniques you know um I think the cognitive distortions and CBT are like super useful i think the defense mechanisms and and psychoanalysis are also super useful understanding like how your your emotions can uh how you protect your emotions and your your your beliefs and your predispositions with uh irrational thoughts there's

a lot of tools to go around but like ultimately at the end of the day I feel like the most important things are verbalizing what you're feeling like really bring what's unconscious into the conscious cognitive reappraisal rewrite the Story figure out you know what what's the meaning that you're attaching to this thing and does it mean something differently potentially third one is is mindfulness self-awareness getting a grip on like you know what you're experiencing in the moment widening the gap between impulse stimulus and response uh and then finally just a basic physiological health move your

body get enough sleep you know we didn't talk about substances you know you we talked briefly at the the top of the show about the neurotransmitters and dopamine and serotonin and everything i think the the physiological side is where this comes in as well right like you can use something like alcohol or um you know even an anti-depressant to like to temporarily uh lift your mood um or or change your emotional state but you are are introducing a new physical substance into your physical system and so it's it's it is going to change the balance

of adaptation within your system and and in the case of something like drugs or alcohol like that's going to have second and third order effects it's going to have long-term consequences you Know especially something like alcohol like you are you're harming your body's ability to regulate in the long term to potentially regulate moderately better in the short term right in the very short term yeah in the very short term so it it is useful to look at things like that and you could even make an argument for things like you know video games or gambling

doing the same thing like you're you're they are short-term uh like emotional regulation hacks that potentially create like long-term compulsive behaviors or or long-term dysregulation so let me give an example of this toolkit okay so my parents were visiting a couple weeks ago good opportunity for emotional regulation huh oh yeah yeah if you ever need to practice emotional regulation have the parents in town for for a three-day weekend so my stepmother and I we get along really well now but for a long time we didn't and and there are still like sensitive topics we'll say

right that come up occasionally that Used to trigger me like there are certain opinions that she has or things that she she will say that you know 10 years ago would quickly end up in a in a pretty feisty argument and occasionally they come up and so they were they were in town this past weekend and uh you know she said a couple things and it it's I do think the the thing I've gotten really good at is a I have a very strong awareness of like where those triggers are right so um and some

some sometimes in the the psychological literature you you see this uh you see this term the amagdala hijack which is basically like just getting triggered it's just like a s like something that's close to your trauma or your like you know some very very negative experience in your past and it's like anything around that subject or that reminds you of that thing when it's touched it's like you the the gap between stimulus and response shrinks to nothing and you're just like gone i'm very aware of where those places are in my life at this point

of like I know I have like a very wide gap on most things and then the few things that I don't have a wide gap on I at least I don't I I'm Aware of where those things are and so I'm like kind of ready for them so first one it's just mindfulness and awareness the second one when she says something one of the things that I've learned to do is you know for a long time I used to take it personally like she would she would say something that I found personally found offensive or

rude and I took it personally and it took me many many many years to realize that like some of her in my opinion [ __ ] up ideas are really like they're not about me they're not personal at all they're about her right like they're they're actually part of a worldview that keeps her feeling safe and secure and so like understanding that that cognitive reappraisal of like what her words actually mean that they actually have nothing to do with me that it's it's actually all about maintaining a safe and comfortable worldview for herself like that

takes a lot of the sting off of it right and so I'm like less likely to react and create a bunch of drama the other thing I've learned since I have widened that gap enough and developed enough of an awareness um around what's going on uh it's given me the space to enact a Better behavior so whenever she brings up one of these topics I just artfully change the subject you gently redirect yeah i'm like "Oh that's really interesting hey you know what the crazy thing I saw on TV last week was?" You know and

then it's just like we're off to the races and then finally and we're going to get to this in our last section here my wife is an amazing support shield and ally um she she's also aware of these these moments and these subjects she knows how to deflect them she knows how to stick up for me in mystead in a way that's not you know not going to cause drama and also you know when my parents leave I can vent to her and you know confide in her and she'll listen and she understands and she

empathizes so we we're gonna get to the importance of relationships and the co-regulation that happens within relationships um because it does deserve its entire own section but I just wanted to give an an example of like you know young Mark would have heard one of those things that she said and it would have been immediate trigger reaction i would have made a snide comment offensive comment back to Her it would have started an argument i would have like we would have said a bunch of mean [ __ ] to each other my dad would probably

start pulling his hair out and uh and it would like completely ruin the weekend and um and then I'd be resentful for like the next six months and so uh thankfully those days are behind you don't do that anymore that's great don't Yeah glad to hear that it only it only took getting the 40 Drew right right well there's probably some of that too i mean I do think that again going back to the constructionist view of emotions based on your past experiences as long as you're paying enough attention and you're mindful and all the

things we just talked about you can really start to change your emotional uh landscape i think that way just through that type of example that you just gave that's I think it's a very common one anyway as you get older you can probably shortcut that uh to some extent though too you don't have to be old yeah ideally it doesn't take as long as it took me right You know I do think there is there is an age component to this well I I think people as you get older you become more secure in who

you are and you you understand who you are i think once you ideally at least um you kind of learn where your the traps and pitfalls are in your own mind you you you learn where you're susceptible and where you're insecure and you learn where you're like you feel good and comfortable and you you learn the people that you feel good and uncomfortable around and you learn the people that who make you don't make you feel good and comfortable so maybe I'm contradicting myself here maybe it is a maturity thing Drew god damn it i

don't know it's it is like some of it is skill but like um I don't know something I guess skill comes from experience i suppose it does but I think there is some skill around it again going back to the constructionist view of emotions if you're you have these past experiences that are helping you to construct an emotional Reaction in on in any given circumstance and a specific situation when an emotion comes up um that's shaped by your past experience and you can kind of just let that happen to you yeah or you can be

a little bit more um you can be a little bit more intentional about it and I think as you get older you realize okay I've done the same thing over and over again that's what you start to realize is that the past experience uh that keeps feeding the emotional reaction that you have isn't very useful for you and so you need to you need to reconstruct that in some way i think that's where if you want to call it emotional maturity or just experience or whatever I think that's where that comes in so Okay okay

all right so that's the four schools of thought i I tried to break I mean we I think we just went through like eight or nine therapeutic modalities and like summarize them each in a couple minutes so like I really tried to distill everything as succinctly as possible just for the sake Of the podcast but if people really do want to learn more and they want to do some exercises from each of these therapeutic modalities that do represent the emotional toolkit as we're talking about we have built out a full 30-day challenge that does that

that we pull all these techniques and different skill sets help people build them um and it's and it's laid out so that you do you know one or one or two small actions each day um so we're we're launching this in the Momentum community if you're listening to this it's already out the community is it kind of tracks the podcast so every month we do one of these huge ass episodes and then the Momentum Community we build out a 30-day challenge for people who actually want to implement everything in the episode so if you're interested

in doing that with with all the emotional stuff that we're talking about you can go to findmomentum.com/eotions um and it's all there not only do you do you get access to the emotion 30-day challenge you get access to all the previous episodes as well so if you want to work on procrastination or Values you get access to future 30-day challenges uh and we also just have an amazing community of people in there working on this stuff talking about this stuff meeting up hanging out doing all sorts of cool things so check it out findm.com/eotions it

feels impossible to do an a full solved episode on emotions without addressing emotional intelligence ah yes it's such a popular concept it's in the lexicon i think probably a lot of people listening to this have either read about it or heard about it at some point or another and I think it's a great candidate you know back on the subtle art not giving a [ __ ] podcast we used to have a segment called brilliant or [ __ ] i think emotional intelligence is a wonderful brilliant or [ __ ] topic yeah let's lay out

the terms what is emotional intelligence it was originally back in the 1990s was two researchers uh Peter Salvie and John Mayer not that John Mayer different John Mayer oh wow john Mayer really really gets around and then he learned how to play guitar right Yeah u no there were these two two researchers that um kind of coined this term of emotional intelligence as the ability to perceive understand and manage emotions in oneself and in others okay so it kind of encompassed this whole emotional I I guess control within yourself but also being able to handle

and navigate the emotions of others as well that was the original concept sure but then in 1995 it was more popularized by Daniel Gleman's book by the name of emotional intelligence um and he expanded the concept to include kind of like these five different traits uh self-awareness self-regulation motivation empathy and social skills which that last one's kind of very vague how do you measure any of those that's probably part of the problem was that we we talked about a lot of these things already being self-aware about things we're talking about regulation through all of this

about how emotions motivate us how you can have empathy for other people the social skills still I'm not really sure about um what that was about but in this book it it Became very popularized and it was kind of a tool for uh corporate management you know um it made its way into all the you know work seminars that people had and he would talk about emotional intelligence i'm sure he went and gave all sorts of corporate talks and all of that kind of stuff right made a killing made tons of money not just off

of book sales but probably doing these seminars too right one of the big claims from the book and I think this is still probably in the popular um kind of ideas right now is that 80% of your success is actually based on your emotional intelligence rather than what he calls EQ yeah emotional quotient over IQ so it's only 20% IQ 80% EQ there is absolutely no [ __ ] there's not that is [ __ ] [ __ ] okay that that part is definitely [ __ ] there's nothing but isn't it funny that that is

the stickiest idea in that entire book cuz like I I read that book I think when I was in college and uh And that was the number one thing I took away from it is that your emotions matter more than your IQ and like it's it's one of those things that is believable it's a combination of like it's believable i think it's it's you kind of want to believe it yeah and and it it but it's also contrarian and kind of sexy and and then also it's like oh well this book can teach you how

to be better at your emotions like I'm ve my radar is very far on the [ __ ] side at the moment so but continue well um I I mean there there were a lot of claims like that but that you're right that one was the stickiest one um the the problem was and this was pointed out pretty early too but of course you know the once it makes its way into the popular uh kind of the the popular culture then it's kind of hard to get rid of as we have seen before but some

of the early criticisms and they still hold up today was that there was just so much overlap with personality traits that it it's like it wasn't actually a separate kind of intelligence that we're describing here um It's just that there were specifically there was all this overlap with the personality traits of agreeableness uh neuroticism and conscientiousness so people who were highly agreeable those are the people who are pretty attuned to other people's emotions too you know they're just they're going to agree with you because they want to please you low in neuroticism too they're not

like emitting all these like crazy emotions and causing everybody else to kind of lose their minds around them and then highly conscientious too so they they can take care of [ __ ] they need to get [ __ ] done they'll they'll do it right early researchers other researchers who were critical of this idea pointed that out and it that but of course they were being all nerdy about it and and didn't have the a book and seminars behind it right okay of course i there's just a lack there's a big lack of measurement too

like you just said how do you measure any of those things yeah i So here's the thing other than the the stickiness of the EQ is more important than IQ Which is [ __ ] but the other thing that bothers me about the emotional intelligence thing is that EQ or emotional intelligence implies that it is a fixed metric that like people either have it or they don't but then if you actually go read the book he's like "Well if you if you listen to if you do these five things and listen to me like you

can improve your EQ anybody can." And then it's like "Okay well then that's those are skills that's not intelligence right?" Yeah so it's like it's a misnomer on top of it's almost like and this is where I start getting very cynical um it's it's it is titled in the most salacious way possible like he named the concept in the most salacious way possible to get the most attention and then he but then he uh defined the actual metrics and traits in a way to get as much attention as possible it's like to to be as

profitable as possible so it just like it doesn't the simple definitions of it don't make sense to me if he had said if he had called it emotional skills or uh emotional techniques or or something like that I'd be like "Okay Methods." Yeah emotional methods like cool i'm in even emotional maturity i'd be like "Sure I'm in right here's how to improve your emotional maturity here's how to improve your emotional skill these are the five most important emotional skills." But it is like "No it's emotional intelligence and this is this determines 80% of your professional

success." So uh hire me for a low price of you know $50,000 to come to your corporation and train all of your team on how to have a higher EQ and like it just it there's a there's a whole cottage industry that you see pop up in psychology over and over and over again um MBTI is another huge offender of this in that you take a very sexy concept or framework that has no empirical validity or very little empirical val validity but it's a it like markets really well like it's like it's a sticky concept

people like it they want to talk about it they want to know their score they want to know their friend's score they know they want to know their co-workers score and Then you take you take it to the business world and you can make a killing you make a [ __ ] killing like in corporate training you know like Microsoft pay me this much over the next three years and me and my team we're going to increase the EQ of all of your staffers by this much and it's all made up it's made up numbers

it's made up measurements it's it's all it's all [ __ ] made up that's my soap box back to you Drew well okay now I I agree with that what I will say though is that people with those emotional skills probably they do do better they do better i'm sure they do absolutely do i'm sure they do um now whether that's a form of intelligence that you can train that's the question here yeah I I agree with you that's probably not right but you know like we were talking earlier about your your uh friend's wife

who they're doing layoffs and the guy who they're not sure he sounds like he's fairly emotionally intelligent what would be defined as emotionally intelligent Here and he's doing pretty well so it's not that it's like there's not nuggets of little truth in it i guess it's just the way it's framed you're absolutely right is not I mean it's not something you learn at a corporate retreat for sure what they're really finding is that it's more just a personality a set of personality traits that people have that are conducive to having good emotional skills yeah and

that's what it is and sure you can you can do very well with those skills that's great but don't call it emotional intelligence a separate form of intelligence that we is is lurking in our brains or something like that and that's just that's [ __ ] yes I agree with you on that so we're coming down hard on the [ __ ] side on this i for the most part [ __ ] yes you know there are some So as you said the five skills as skills they are important yes and that they're very much

the same skills we talked about in this episode so it's you know I'm on board with that But the framing the labeling the the definition and the marketing of it right i'm like "Oh I hope you enjoy your yacht Daniel Goldman." Yeah yeah and I think most most uh contemporary researchers too will agree with that as well they're like you know yeah he can sure they're the skills that then this is what we're trying to get at these all these different areas of research that we do are based on these skills sure but it's Yeah

it's not a separate form of intelligence all right so I think it's actually pretty appropriate to kind of end the episode or wrap up the main content of the episode talking about relationships both because I think fundamentally people tend to struggle with emotions the most around their relationships um I think we tend to get the most triggered by our relationships and also like ultimately I think like our our emotional health is so tied to the quality of our relationships it makes sense that like most of the applications or or the most urgent or important applications

of managing your emotions well are going to be around your relationship so I think um if we could almost do like a fractal episode Within an episode I think it's it's worth taking uh taking a little bit of time going through some of the the models and frameworks of how uh emotions function within relationships and then uh and then pull out all the takeaways and the advice and like just talk about like what healthy co-regulation looks like in a relationship and what unhealthy co-regulation looks like yeah because ultimately I think it you're right i mean

emotional regulation really does come down to improving your relationships that's like kind of the end goal that the the biggest benefit you get out of learning how to how to manage your emotions better which is just better relationships yeah if we look at kind of uh how what em the function of emotions in relationships really the you know emotions come up in relationships they're going to happen and I think there's this uh people get this idea that they can like have these awesome relationships without any negative emotions that come up or any any difficulties whatsoever

and that's just obviously not realistic but also not really the goal the goal is to manage your uh those Kinds of difficult emotions within relationships the thing is is that we all kind of go about this in different ways right and that's where the the real problems start is when we are trying to use one emotional strategy and somebody else in the relationship is using another one or we don't recognize somebody else's emotional strategy we take it personally all those kind of things right so um some of those strategies or some of just like the

basic strategies we use to regulate emotions in our relationships uh I I I have a like a list of like six here that are the most common ones so first of all there's people who just openly express their feelings right they share they share them openly that can usually be healthy but sometimes it's not right you have the suppressors then too the people who just avoid feelings at all costs they hide them they cover them up they're they don't even acknowledge them themselves they might not even know they're they're having these emotions you have distraction

redirecting attention away from your emotions people who withdraw Of course you know they just kind of shut down uh you have the the vocalizers and the vendors the people who are like coming at you you know a lot and that's one strategy we might we might use if we're overwhelmed we we tend to vent uh and then you have the reappraisers too people who kind of try to change the way they view emotions within their own relationships uh uh kind of in the moment and some of these what we're going to see is that some

of these strategies um work in some instances and sometimes they don't others okay my hunch and I've not looked into this but my hunch is that generally people of the opposite type probably work well together like somebody who's naturally a suppressor probably works well with somebody who's an overexpressor because you can kind of compensate for one another yes i think if you're aware of that if you're not aware of it and you're you're expecting somebody else to have a certain style and they're not showing that style then then that can cause problems but yeah I

think if you're aware which I think that's kind of the goal we're going through This is just the awareness of both your own styles and your strategies and someone else's so yeah but I I would agree with that for the most part yeah but broadly speaking more broadly speaking people kind of approach um relationships in two broad ways one is the prevention focused and then we have the promotion focused so prevention focused are these people who just want stability in their relationships emotional stability in their relationships they want peace they want calm um and so

they'll tend to use those styles more like suppression and distraction u more often but then you have the promotion focused people too who what really what their goal is is like emotional int intimacy and closeness right and so they're okay with some emotional turmoil as long as they're getting towards that goal of emotional closeness especially because sometimes emotional turmoil or drama can make you feel close to Right right and sometimes that's what they're going for too and so again so sometimes you have those two opposite uh strategies going on at the same time and that

can either if you're aware of it then great if you're not then that can cause Some issues so the conflicts kind of arise though um when a promotion focused partner will seek like like immediate uh emotional resolution when you have a a prevention focused partner who just wants stability and so we get that and this is going to overlap as we'll see with things like your attachment style and stuff like that which we'll we'll get into but just being aware that like if you do have a partner who has a style that like isn't isn't

the one you would prefer um that's not necessarily a bad thing because you can work with it again just the awareness um that we're trying to develop here is really the goal and then being able to you know these emotions again they're going to come up they're go it's going to be difficult at times but recognizing that somebody is using a certain strategy over another one I think that does help a lot the awareness around it anyway yeah or just knowing that it's like it's not that there's anything wrong with them it's just that's just

the way they are that's the way they they cope with intense emotions and and you know being able to compensate For that or adjust to each other or what not absolutely absolutely yeah and so you know as as part of that too I'm I'm kind of rifling through these uh these frameworks here but um there's regulation styles within these uh relationships too within relationships too so again you do have like the suppressors versus the expressors then you also have the externalizers versus the internalizers okay okay so externalizers um are the people like if big emotions

come up they'll they'll tend to just go outside of themselves and blame people so this is a really common one I think you see with um uh people who kind they're they're more of the promotion focus they want like some resolution but they'll also like blame other people for emotions so if they get upset it's somebody else's fault that made them upset or if they're jealous it's because of somebody else did something that made them jealous right they don't take any responsibility for it ne necessarily okay but on the other end of the uh spectrum

too you have the internalizers and these are the people who tend to blame themselves a little bit more but they'll also kind of shut down a little more Easily too okay interesting yeah maybe they have an externalizing partner that externalizes and blames them they're like "Yeah they're right it's my fault now I'm going to shut down and I'm going to like make myself small in the relationship and not work through these emotions because these emotions are obviously dangerous." Right fun fact yeah so women are disproportionately have a much higher rate of depression than men yes

and men have a much higher rate of suicide than women the reason for both of those things is that it's suspected that women tend to be internalizers they tend to uh blame and focus on themselves around their problems and men to tend to be externalizers they tend to look at something they can do to resolve their problems uh and so they blow their brains out so you know Yeah yeah take that one to work and tell everyone in the break room okay i don't know where to go with that Just another day at the Sol

podcast little nugget of wisdom for you there okay okay well I mean you you can see how these dynamics can escalate to something where like it makes you miserable within a relationship if you're not aware of these again if you're internalizing versus externalizing or or whatever you're doing suppressing versus expressing too much that's obviously like this is a big source of uh strife in relationships right okay so the but the goal here is to be able to again I I think a big a big goal of this section is to just get get you aware

i think the awareness around this is going to get you like at least half the way there if not if not more i mean there's obviously some going to be some regulation strategies we go through but just being aware of your own style versus your partner's style uh and how they express or or suppress their emotions within the relationship that gets you a long way because you can understand somebody and that creates again that gap we were talking about where you can navigate these emotions together and co-regulate i I was going to save this for

Later because we're we're going to talk a little bit later about uh you know how to co-regulate in a healthy way in a relationship or how to have a healthy relationship essentially but because you've brought it up a few times the importance of the awareness um I would even go as far to say that it is the awareness is is it's just a prerequisite to all this stuff and and I want to say this simply because I get I've gotten so many probably thousands of emails at this point over the years from people in very

unhappy relationships who say "I've read all these books i did this seminar i've worked on myself i understand you know I'm a avoidant attachment and I'm a suppressor and blah blah blah blah blah." But my partner doesn't care about any of this stuff they don't want to go to therapy they don't want to talk about it and and they're like "What do I do?" And the fact of the matter is is that the thing that's so hard about relationships is that you can do all the work on this stuff but if your partner is not

doing [ __ ] like nothing's going to change you have to have both people on Board and at least doing the work you know and and the work it may not work out like it may not go anywhere um but at least you need both people trying and so if one person's just just checked out and is like I'm fine and I don't know what your problem is then you're you're kind of stuck so So the awareness piece it's not only is it you know probably the 80% it is it is a prerequisite like you

can't really do anything with any of this unless both you and your partner or you and the other person whoever the other person in the relationship is um are at least like thinking about some of this stuff or care about some of this stuff right yeah yeah and that's why we're going to talk about co-regulation it has to be like there is it takes two to tango right yeah and have a relationship and all of that obviously okay cool and by the way you know snide distasteful suicide jokes aside um it probably is worth mentioning

that there is a lot of data showing that the the two genders process Uh emotions or deal with emotions differently within relationships you know men tend to be more suppressors they tend to push things aside and ignore i mean it's like think of all the stereotypes they're stereotypes for a reason there's a lot of data backing them up and I know that's not like super PC to say but it like it's a thing and it's important to know that um and it's again it comes back to understanding that people are just different like you can't

like you have to work with them where they are and not expect them to completely change and reinvent themselves for this reason or that um and it and it and when it comes down to it it's like certain people you know we've already talked about how a lot of our emotional nature is biologically based genetically based um I think it's important to have realistic expectations for you and your partner to understand that like you know they're not going to completely reinvent themselves uh overnight or in a seminar or over 6 months of therapy like they

can get better they can adjust they can improve but like they're not going to be a different person and so you know it's it's Um I guess that the the the lesson here is to just like ultimately you have to love them for who they are um not who you wish they were and if that's not the case then you know none of this stuff is going to make much of a difference right another prerequisite I think too yeah definitely definitely okay yeah um well I I think with that though we can get into a

little bit of the attachment stuff okay i we don't got to go too deep on this i think at some point we're going to do a relationships episode right and attachment is going to be very very central to that and anybody out there I mean you've probably heard about attachment at this point anybody who's in the dating world or anything like that and listening to this podcast you probably know your attachment style and if you don't we'll go over them really quick but I just to preface all of this to just so you know if

you don't already your attachment style is not destiny okay there there are things you can do with you can work with it maybe you can't completely change it but you can definitely work with it uh again going back to the awareness part being Aware of some of this stuff is a first step but then also working within the relationship within the bounds of your attachment style we'll go over how to do that but just to preface all of that with that so g give us like the fiveinut sure ex summary and explanation of like where

attachment styles came from talk about Bulby and Ainsworth and all that stuff yeah yeah so Bobby and Ainsworth there are these two researchers back in the like 70s '60s7s '8s um they uh formulated this idea of attachment styles and um where it kind of starts and originally comes from is the attachment you have to your uh primary caregivers growing up okay so you learn from them you learn emotional regulation styles from your uh from your parents or whoever was your primary caregivers as a as a young uh as a baby even as the moment you're

born to probably seven or eight years old or more you know one way to think about it is like when you're a a young infant like your your parents emotional regulation Style will kind of like it's almost like making a key yeah right as an infant you kind of shape yourself into the key that unlocks your parents affection and attention and then as you grow up that key is like solidified and so then you kind of go out into the world looking for somebody in the world that has a key that you can unlock right

that's a I like that yeah man i should be an author no that's a good explanation for that because it it really I just came up with that by the way no yeah I like that i like that it does is it like the the relationship uh you your parents when you're like a baby they're kind of showing you this is what the world is like you you're defenseless you're completely dependent on them and so you're looking to to to them for every single uh cue as to what's going on in your environment what kind

of environment are we in what what how do I need to prepare myself emotionally so you have parents uh you know if your parents were when you cried if they came to you and they comforted you um and were responsive to your needs and stuff Like that that usually um leads to what they call a secure attachment where you're able to handle those big emotions because you were like okay it's okay to have these emotions my parents responded to them in a way that made me feel like it was okay to have these emotions and

that I could regulate these emotions as well okay and then they they were held out they were there to help me soothe my big emotions at at any time that I had and help me regulate them and that's how you learned how to regulate your emotions there's other parenting styles though too that will um produce what they call insecure attachments okay um one of those is is the uh anxious attachment right which is um if you had a parent that uh was they weren't comfortable with your emotions uh necessarily and it became clear to you

that they weren't comfortable and uh you you learned that having any sort of emotional reaction um when you needed uh when you had some emotional need that wasn't being met they uh weren't very responsive to that and so you uh the the theory goes is that you um will be highly sensitive to rejection um as you grow up as well you um kind of need more Reassurance that you're not going to be abandoned so you're you kind of get afraid that you're going to be left alone and not be able to deal with your emotions

you don't learn to deal with those big emotions uh in a a very healthy way and you kind of uh instead you develop a style that you end up spiraling a lot with your emotional reactions especially within closer relationships as well and that's the anxious that's the anxious type right then another insecure type is also the avoidant type okay and this is usually when um you learn that having again it's another reaction to uh your caregivers showing that you know having these big emotions isn't isn't um appropriate and they usually in some way um uh

they they kind of encourage you to kind of shut your emotions down and not express them at all okay so as you grow into adulthood and you come to form your own relationships uh those those emotional that emotional um kind of strategy solidifies and you are more likely to be like the withdraw or the suppressor in the relationship and you you you avoid those emotions because you're like "Oo this is a big Emotion coming up i'm just going to shove it down." Right and so you keep people at a distance because you think closer relationships

uh uh are are dangerous or those emotions that are related um rel related to those closer relationships are dangerous and they can be um harmful and hurtful to you yeah those are kind of the two big insecure types but then there's another insecure type too called the disorganized and they're kind of like the worst of all worlds basically right they're both anxious and avoidant they want closeness but then when they get it they pull away yeah um and this is a a pretty small minority of people um who exhibit this uh this attachment style um

but it is kind of like these people are they tend to be just kind of a mess yeah um so they'll be both emotionally explosive and they'll withdraw uh when at different times and it just seems to be unpredictable really really and that's why they call it disorganized one way to think about it you know for those of you who are single and dating out there if if you're like talking to a person who like will text message you eight times Right yeah in a single night and asking where you are all the time wanting

to know everything you're doing who you're hanging out with what you know why do why you didn't invite them that's an anxious right they're like the clingy people right yeah they're the clingers they're super needy um and and part of it is that they as you pointed out they never learned how to regulate their emotions alone and so they are like constantly seeking somebody to co-regulate them at all times the avoidance on the other hand are the people who you might text five times over the course of a week and not get a single response

because they are just so kind of detached withdrawn almost uncomfortable with intimacy and they have the opposite problem they're they they've become very comfortable regulating their own emotions but they never learned how to co-regulate so introducing another person into their emotional regulation system uh introduces unpredictability and chaos and so like that freaks them out and so they like try to keep you at arms length all the time and of course Uh in uh pure cosmic humor um an anxious types tend to spend most of their lives chasing avoidance and avoidance tend to spend most of

their lives uh running away from anxious people because the truth is is that secure types don't really have time for any of this [ __ ] a secure type will look at an anxious and be like dude stop texting me what is your problem and a secure type will look at an avoidant and be like "Dude return a text message what is your problem?" Like and just not have time for any of this so uh the anxious and the avoidance usually end up in a [ __ ] spiral together right yeah and the I think

the modern dating market is full of that's you know everybody thinks oh dating is trash and it's because there you have the anxious and the avoidance constantly getting together and nobody's aware of what's going on half the time i almost wonder if like like because dating apps in a way like actually increase the ability to sort people together so I almost wonder if like that's a byproduct of that the increased sorting ability um like Because maybe anxious and avoidance are no longer being exposed to secure types they're only being exposed to each other and so

you you get all this frustration because I like and it's been a while since I've read up on attachment theory so correct me if I'm wrong here but like my understanding is that generally speaking the insecure types um one of the ways that they kind of get over their insecurity is they like run into and have relationships with secure types yeah right like it's the anxious type uh spends time with a secure type and the secure type's like "Hey relax like you don't have to text me eight times like I'm gonna hang out with you

again i promise." Right and it's like it helps the anxious person chill out and similarly the the avoidant spends time with the secure person and is the secure person's like "Hey man you know what would like make this easier is you actually like took the time to respond to me occasionally like that would be really nice." You know no pressure by the way right And then the avoidance like "Oh okay cool like I can I can open myself up." But it's like if they're if you're they're just never getting that exposure then they just they

end up in their own little spin cycle and they never get out so I don't know that's like a a hairbrain theory yeah no I think it makes a lot of sense though if you're I mean if you're creating a a dating market that's full of people um who have had trouble dating probably because they are insecurely attached then yeah you're going to it's a sorting mechanism in the worst possible configuration yeah and I yeah I I I do think that happens so that's kind of the the standard advice too to insecure insecurely attached people

is to go find somebody who's secure right and like you already mentioned or a lot of the time at least secure people are just not going to put up with the [ __ ] right they're they have boundaries and they're just like "Oh this person's like way too they're over the top and coming at me no I'm I'm walking away i feel secure enough that I can walk away and find somebody else who's not going to cause me the problems." Same thing with The avoidance is like well they're not even trying then fine i'm I'm

done um so but the yeah the advice is oh just go find somebody who's perfectly secure you know and is going to put up with your [ __ ] and I think for one I think that's a it it puts the responsibility on somebody else for you to deal with your own emotional [ __ ] and so I just that right there I think is a bad strategy yeah um I think we again you need to have what they call earn security um which is one like we've already mentioned the the awareness around your attachment

style and um how you regulate emotionally and the awareness of the other person as well um but also like you there's all sorts of different ways you don't have to there's lowrisk ways you can kind of wait into being more secure as well yeah right so um I know for me anyway so I was a a pretty hardcore avoidant um for a long time same yeah yeah you and I both i was actually a little bit more anxious we can talk about this more i got to go i'll uh I'll see you later were you

ever that avoided like you ever just like I'm done i never ghosted people like that that uh I could never I'm too I have too much integrity to ghost right yeah i don't I would always try to be like "Oh okay sorry this just isn't working out." It would be short and like just get out but yeah I'd at least let the person know yeah but there are though I know for me anyway one of the ways I slowly got over this and I didn't really realize it until after it had happened but I decided

I was like "Okay um even in friendships and stuff like that I would be a little bit avoidant keep people at arms length and all that." But I think actually friendships are a good way to start or or family members or whatever to at least open up a little bit and be a little bit more expressive um and that kind of can set the emotional there's it's a lowrisisk way it's not like you're going to be rejected you know by a friend like romantically rejected by a friend or family member so there's a lower risk

way of Yeah i I think that gets into an important point Which is that you it you don't have to date a secure person you can be friends with a secure person you can you can find a secure coworker and work with them like it's really like all a secure attachment type is is just somebody who is like has a healthy form of emotional regulation and can set boundaries as you said right and so if you spend time with that person you can even if you're not dating them you can kind of observe and and

understand like what they're doing and how they functions i've always said that attachment theory is an excellent descriptor of relationships but I don't I'm not convinced it's a good prescriptor right of relationships like it's not clear if you're an anxious attachment style like it's not clear what you should go try to do based on that information it's just like yeah it's this is a useful description of like your emotional process like where you feel anxiety and and insecurity and and why you're feeling it okay so how how do you think you have become more secure

over time and how did you do that i think part of it are you are you still just super avoidant I I do think I've become much more secure um some of it was like kind of brute force so I look at my early romantic relationships and I was definitely in relationships with with insecure women uh I was an insecure man and I was in a relationship with an insecure woman i definitely think my wife is probably the most secure person I've Yeah dated but like also I like obviously like everybody like she had her

own issues um I think it's just by the time I met her I had seen again it comes back to the awareness like I had seen h this story play out so many times in my adult life uh and like watched myself sabotage perfectly good situations for no reason and like pick up and move to the other side of the world for no good reason uh and I I finally hit a point in my late 20s where I'm like "Okay dude." Like you can't just keep doing this like if you keep doing this you're going

to be you're going to be one of those old bald guys on White Lotus like that's that that is your future you're going to be you're going to be in Thailand with like a 20-year-old Tiger who doesn't speak English and uh and you're going to Have like a shady history with arm smuggling so you need to learn how to have relationships man and um and so I really I really had to consciously and I'm still having to consciously do that or I'm still having to consciously do this in my in my personal life my my

relationship my friendships and social life um I'm still not good at it as an avoidant i never learned like good social hygiene of like following up with people and inviting people like you know if I'm going to go for a walk on the beach like inviting a friend to come with me like I I never learned how to do that [ __ ] so I'm still trying to figure that out but on the relationship side it really was just more of a a brute force thing um I definitely had a lot of avoidant type insecurity

in my relationship with my wife but I just remember checking in with myself frequently and being like "Okay is there actually a problem no there's not actually a problem okay am I making the problem?" Yeah I think I'm I'm probably making the problem so uh let's not make the problem like that was Kind of the agreement that I made with myself is like look you don't have to stay with her forever you don't have to like do anything you don't want to do it's just like don't invent a problem when there's not one right and

that was like what I tried to stick to and you know over the course of multiple years um it it slowly got easier right yeah and that that's one of the issues I think I have with the the relatively bad prescriptive advice that comes out of attachment theory I think is that a lot of times is with the especially with avoidance they don't there's first of all there's not a whole lot of advice they give to avoidance it's usually they're they're usually targeting anxious people yes um because they are because the anxious ones are the

ones that care enough to get on Exactly on YouTube or Instagram and look this stuff up the avoidants don't [ __ ] care the avoidance don't care we're like the we're like the hardest uh demographic to reach cuz we just don't care i don't care i don't care I'm happy alone i don't care and so yeah and so it's not like it's it's um you're right i think with when you have a a an anxious and an avoidant together i think it for me anyway through my experience it was like okay I was I needed

to be the one as the avoidant to start the process of hey how do we address this because the the anxious person in my experience anyway is just they're usually like just go go go going and they need just a little bit of reassurance at first and I think that's the seed I think that you can start on and that has to kind of come from the avoidant person I that in my experience that's how it's worked anyway I became aware kind of later in my adult life too of just how little reassurance that you

have to give somebody sometime usually anyway it's it's just like okay they just need a little bit of reassurance in the moment uh and that brings their nervous system down a little bit regulates their emotions a little bit and then you can now you have a space to negotiate what's going to happen from there yeah yeah we we'll come back to this i want to get To there's like a section I've got here called like rules and agreements and I think what you just said is like super important and ties into that but um I

think this is like actually a nice segue to just talk about like what a toxic relationship is okay what it looks like it is if we define a healthy relationship as two people who are effectively co-regulating together um that implies that they are they are a able to regulate their emotions by themselves and then b they're actually helping the other person be more effective at regulating their emotions and this is kind of what I was getting at about like the the diametrically opposed regulation styles um you know I I am a natural suppressor i'm like

I I am totally you know I come from a family and a world that like every problem you just brush under the rug and pretend like it wasn't there um whereas my my wife is like 100% expresser and like very overt and like very promotionally focused and we know that about each other and it actually works really well because it's like She can tell when I'm kind of upset about something and not saying anything and she can kind of pull it out of me and similarly like when she kind of overreacts or starts to get

sucked down a drama hole I can pull her out and be like that's not worth it let's let that go let's pretend that's not there you know and it's so we're able to balance each other and I think even though we're both very effective at at regulating our emotions individually I think when we're together we're actually even more effective so like I think that's kind of the ideal what you're going for within a relationship now a toxic relationship is the complete opposite of that it's and it's generally two individuals who are bad at regulating their

emotions solo and then they come together and they get even worse okay yeah and generally speaking um the reason that happens is you have each individual is bad at doing it by themselves and so they they need their partner to come in and compensate for them so it's like I can't deal with any of my own problems so I need a partner who's going to come In and be willing to deal with my pro deal with my problems for me and as soon as you do that now it's like now I'm not taking any responsibility

for my own actions and now I'm like developing a victim complex and I need to be saved all the time and now my partner is like it's putting all this like undue pressure on my partner to like always be there and be responsible for everything that happens to me and then you start falling into this like victim savior cycle that never ends dependency yeah which is Yeah which is essentially codependency right and these these toxic cycles they can actually work in both directions just in different contexts i I always like to think of it as

like there's a person in a relationship who's like playing with matches near gasoline and uh uh uh and then there's like the other person in the relation relationship is like holding the fire extinguisher and it's like and they they like both sign up for this and and like keep doing it because they they get to a they get to feel the excitement of the drama of like watching the fire starting and watching it get put out over and over again but but b because the person who's Like lighting the matches um gets to feel saved

periodically it's like it's like oh my god this horrible thing happened to me but Drew Drew showed up he's my rock oh my god he took care of everything it was so amazing and then like a week later lighting matches again you know like starting [ __ ] you know sabotaging stuff so that Drew can come save the day again and they get to feel like you know I don't know the the damsel in distress again um although I say damsel in distress like men totally do this too oh yeah um and then on the

other side if you're the savior I mean what feels better than saving someone like oh my god you're so like look how needed I am holy [ __ ] and not only that you get to like avoid all your own emotional [ __ ] and take care of somebody else's emotion exactly exactly it's like who who cares that my life is completely falling apart like I got to go save that person over there and and so you you get into this like this little [ __ ] spiral that just and it and it the thing

is is like a drug it escalates because it's eventually You know if you're if you're causing the same drama over and over well that drama it starts to get old it it starts to get normalized so you need to cause a little bit of a bigger drama next time to get the same kick to get that same feeling of like oh my god I just got saved and sure enough the savior needs to like a bigger challenge to overcome because you know that first drama it's like ah that's that's table stakes like let's let's go

all in here and so you get this this escalation that starts happening to all the drama and it um and yeah it goes to a dark place i feel like everybody listening has probably either been in one of these spirals or has been close to somebody in one of these spirals and it it gets very ugly very ugly yeah okay so yeah that's a toxic relationship is that that spiral you get addicted to that yes yeah here's and here's like actually the saddest part about all of this people fall into toxic relationships because they are

not able to effectively regulate their own emotions or or manage their own Emotions and so they start unnecessarily relying on somebody else to manage their emotions for them but because the toxic spiral gets so destructive and so turbulent and and so like there's so much like stress and emotion and drama and and sometimes trauma involved that generally when people come out of the toxic relationship they're even less able to regulate their emotions effectively like a lot of people can actually make themselves worse off for for being in that relationship and so it it is something

to be very very careful of and um you know and try to stop the roller coaster as soon as you can wherever it is but when you do get addicted to that though Mark um you know normal a normal healthy relationship looks very boring yes to those people too like do you just you need like a I don't know just like a going to rehab and do a detox like where's the reset for that you know yeah i mean this gets into a little bit you know I could I could pull out my soap so

soap Box again here um I and this ties in a little bit to what we were talking about earlier about culture um and how you know Westerners tend to associate like happiness with excitement right um right high arousal states yeah right like people mistakenly associate romance with excitement with intensity of emotion and especially young people um and it's it's actually not like a healthy relationship yeah it is dull it is from the outside it is definitely boring but on the inside it's peaceful it's like very harmonious and it's funny it is very like actually my

experience is quite analogous to the experience of quitting drinking like the biggest struggle for me when I quit drinking was boredom right it was like drinking made everything fun and and suddenly you don't have the thing making everything fun and so everything feels a little bit boring and you really have to like work a bit harder to to find stuff that's fun to you but then when you do the fun is actually it's like a it's like a peaceful relaxing fun it's a sustainable fun it's like a fun that you're like "Oh I could Do

this forever." Like I don't I don't ever get sick of it i don't ever wake up hung over or tired i don't ever like have ups and downs and mood swings around it it's just fun and it's I I think that's that's very analogous to like a toxic relationship and a healthy relationship a toxic relationship man when that roller coaster is up god damn it is it is nice it is like dizzying how how exciting and overwhelming the the passion and the romance can be but man when it's down it is [ __ ] brutal

and and once you've ridden that that ride up and down enough times no pun intended uh it is it is like it's not sustainable and um and I would say a healthy love it is like much more uh even killed consistent sustainable and after a while you I don't know you just you end up in these situations where it's just like I don't know like sitting on the couch reading a book together is like actually more appealing than going to a crazy party and getting [ __ ] up and screwing all night like I I

don't know like it's maybe I'm just old oh yeah yeah i don't know i think you're right though i think there is Just a diminishing return to that excitement that you eventually you just you wear it out yeah and it is unsustainable so Right for sure yeah so okay let's talk about um how do we get from an unhealthy place to a a healthy place and you know step number one is the one that we've been banging on about for 30 minutes now which is really just try to understand these patterns both in yourself and

in your partner and also your partner should ideally understand these patterns both in themselves and in you and it and it doesn't necessarily mean digging into all this science and research that we're talking about here like they don't need to go read a book on attachment theory or understand if they're promotion focused or prevention focused like that stuff's nice but like ultimately it's just getting an awareness and understanding between each other of like this is kind of how I'm how I am this is kind of how I function this is what feels natural to me

this is what I need this is what I need this is what I want this is what I can give and I think you know the cliche advice of just good communication like it it's really this really just like making sure you're both very aware of the the emotional dynamics that are going on and making sure you're on the same page that you both kind of agree on what's going on it's like okay like yeah when we fight you tend to do this and I tend to do this you know instead of trying to change

each other it's like okay how can we manage that remember it's all the way back to the top of the show the goal here is not to change an emotion it's to change how you it's it's how to adapt or manage that emotion how to leverage that emotion in a way that's useful or productive so the same is true within relationships if your partner tends to get really sad and withdraw don't try to convince them to stop being sad and withdrawing find a way to work with the sadness and withdrawal in a way that's productive

and useful it's that's like you know that's the long and short of it all right so step one is just gaining an overall awareness like getting a clear picture of like what are your patterns what tendencies do you guys have Etc i think step two is then recognizing that there are it's not that like any of this stuff is right or wrong like it's not necessarily better to be an expressor versus a suppressor it's not necessarily better to be uh somebody who needs space versus somebody who needs closeness it's there are healthy and unhealthy ways

to do each one right so for example an unhealthy way to suppress is to just sit there and not say what you think right is just be like I don't want to deal with this i'm just going to say whatever gets me out of this situation a healthy way to suppress because some people need time to process a healthy way to suppress is like if a conversation starts to get really intense and high stakes to simply look at your partner and be like I need some time to process this can we come back to this

in like 20 minutes right or tomorrow or whatever right and and if your partner understands that hey you're you're a person who needs time to process things like it it takes a while for the emotions to kind of work their way through your head Then they should be okay with it like that's part part of the understanding there's two parts to that though too right that just that I need the time but then also I am going to come back to this right yeah but commit to coming back to it and that usually puts the

other person at ease a little bit too so yeah anyway one of the things that as an avoidant is like a [ __ ] lifesaver is alone time is not personal um it's you know there so there's there is a healthy way to avoid and there's an unhealthy way to avoid the unhealthy way to avoid is to just [ __ ] go somebody and spend a week by yourself and not text or reply or whatever um the healthy way to avoid is I think this is one of the things that I started doing differently with

my wife that was very effective is at some point I just told her I was like "Look I need alone time like I just need to be alone periodically and it has nothing to do with you like you're great this is great but like I'm gonna go the to this place for four days yeah yeah and the first time the first couple times It made her really uncomfortable but like she trusted me we did it it was fine it went great and throughout our relationship there's like pretty frequent times where I'm like you know I

kind of want to just like take a trip by myself like go somewhere by myself and she's cool with it so again it's that awareness communication of it i would say there's also you know we talked about cognitive reappraisal i think one of the benefits of a close relationship is that you can leverage each other's reappraisal of situations right so it's like if you're really good at reappraising um say like failures in your career and your partner's not um they can rely on you to help them reappraise that situation you can be like "No no

no you no you didn't screw up like this is what happened think of it this way it's just a lesson you're going to get better similarly it's like if you have a deep insecurity around I don't know something in your family and they're actually very good at reappraising their family problems you know they can come to you and say "No no don't it's not about you she just needs to be this way because of this." And like just Realize it's that right so it's like when done correctly reappraisals can be very very effective like if

your if your if your partner is better at reappraising certain areas of their life than you are you can like lean on that and vice versa but it also works the other way if your partner is a reappraises things in like very [ __ ] up ways and has like very negative destructive beliefs about things that can also influence you so you need to be very careful um and make sure that you're not a like reappraising your partner's situation in a really destructive and and spiteful way and in b not accepting their reappraisals uh in

in a in a destructive way either and it's hard because generally speaking like if we're bad at our own cognitive reappraisals like if we're bad at regulating ourselves it we are going to have a vested interest in like making sure other people agree with us like this is the other thing about security and insecurity is like secure people don't care what you believe insecure people really need you to believe what they believe be on your side yeah and so if somebody's very insecure about something in their life and They're in a relationship with you and

that situation comes up in your life man they're going to push their views very hard onto you and so it's just something to be aware of and and make sure and so for this reason to make sure you keep like the healthy co-regulation going this brings us to step three which is uh what I call rules principles agreements i talked to a friend once who said that like uh him and his his wife have a a a marriage constitution which I thought was really cool actually it's like super nerdy but like I was going to

say but but it it was basically like they sat down after like all of these conversations about each other and it they kind of just wrote down like you know who they are what they need what they like and then and then some of these rules and principles that they've they've created for themselves and so when I say rules and principles I mean you should make up your rules and principles together of like what your relationship needs and it's going to be different for every single relationship and these Rules and principles they're not there's nothing

moralistic about them they're they're completely practical i'll give you some examples so in my marriage the word fine is like a four-letter word okay and there's a reason for that and that is um that that it's a my wife has a lot of negative associations with it I guess from her family and her upbringing and then b I'm I am absolutely a prevention focused i'm a suppressor and I'm also very easygoing and so one of my like we caught very early on in our relationship that like one of my favorite ways to avoid anything oh

it's fine no no no it's fine keep doing that and it's like meanwhile I'm like inside I'm like [ __ ] seething and I'm like no no no it's fine yeah don't worry about it yeah so it's um the word fine is a four-letter word it's it's like anything important any topic that's important any debate argument discussion fight the word fine is not allowed okay it's what do you feel mhm do you like it or dislike it it no there's no fine you either like it or hate it tell me now and uh it's so

like that's actually Been incredibly useful because it it kicks me out of my defense mechanism um and it like prevents her from getting triggered all right so another example from my relationship um I am definitely like I said I'm a suppressor i need time to process emotions i get angry very slowly i very seldom but when I do it's like it's like a very slow intense experience for me and so my default as a suppressor as an avoidant sometimes I just storm out of the [ __ ] house i'm like peace i'm out of here

i've been there too yeah i'm like don't [ __ ] talk to me and I I go outside and I you know I'll like walk around the block or something and uh you know in previous relationships and the first couple times it happened in in this relationship you know they'd call me they come out run after me and of course that just makes me even angrier at some point along the way my wife learned like just let let me go I'll be back in an hour and I'll be like way calmer and I I will

like process things and I'll like have the right thing to say whereas if You just like pressure me in that moment moment I'm probably going to say something that I regret or that is like not actually reflective of how I feel overall so that's another one um similarly you know I it takes me a long time to get upset but then once I get upset I get over it pretty quickly whereas my wife like she is a slower processing on the backside of a fight so I used to early in the relationship I used to

like always try to make things okay i'm like "Hey we're okay right?" like it's took it and she'd be like now I just know I'm like okay just leave her alone like when she feels better she'll come she'll come to me like she'll comes she'll come say she's sorry when she's like when she's gotten to that point but it's like she just needs a few hours and like I'll going to go to in the garage or something and you know find something to do so those are some examples from my own personal relationship of like

recognizing each other's patterns creating like little rules and principles agreeing on certain things um there are plenty more examples I'm curious if you've had any any rules or principles like that in relationships in the past yeah i mean that have been effective i mean um for me anyway it it was definitely like I was more quick to anger or quick to um get emotionally charged up and I would also take a while to get over it as well what I've gotten better at though is when those emotions do come up is I I've gotten a

lot better at at at pausing and being like "Okay what's the actual best way to do this?" Again it goes back to that gap we've talked about you know you have the emotional reaction and the behavior and then you have that interpretation with in between and I've gotten better at expanding that gap in there and that has helped tremendously in all sorts of relationships that I've had um you whereas before if somebody would say something that I found like insulting or it was very I'd take it very personally then I would just immediately react and

lash back out and you know do the avoidant thing and be like I'm putting up a barrier here and now I I've been way better At just kind of like stopping and then and again this kind of goes back to the avoidant thing avoidant versus anxious thing and the avoidant kind of taking the lead here is I stop i'm like okay what does this person need right now and I can like kind of stop and let's address that yeah so like just an example like um I just remember like when I was younger somebody would

would uh like a romantic partner or somebody would would snap at me for something you know I was doing something stupid and something that annoy them they'd snap at me and I would just go right back at them and be like "Okay put up my defenses and I'm going to fight back." Um more recently what's though in the last few years I've learned to okay stop um apologize to them like I'm sorry that like upset you obviously can we talk about why that was yeah and I've gotten a lot better at that anyway so that's

kind of like one of one of my rules right now anyway is just like don't just if you're feeling big emotions just stop and that and that takes a lot of practice obviously but if you're Feeling like even upset or something like that I've just noticed that in the past when I've reacted in those moments that's always almost always led to just a a worse relationship just from that point forward even so yeah there's that for sure well one one thing too I want to ask you about in this though how much of the relationship

like the the idea of kind of like the shared emotional experience like how much of the other person's emotional life is your responsibility when you are in a close intimate relationship with them because I think there's people who are like "Well but your emotions aren't my responsibility right?" And true they're not ultimately but at the same time too you're in a relationship with somebody at the same time so where do you think the boundary is for that my just off the cuff yeah thinking about it like I I don't feel responsible for my wife's emotions

because obviously I can't control those right i do feel responsible for the relationship though right Right so it's like let's say she gets super upset i don't feel responsible for her being upset mhm but I do feel responsible for supporting her or doing whatever I can or being available to her because that is in maintenance of the relationship that is in the interest of the relationship right so I I do think that is a very subtle and meaningful distinction um because it's like if she started just getting upset all the [ __ ] time I

I like I can't do anything about that like it it's it's you can't decide for other people what they should be feel should and shouldn't be feeling but you can communicate well again it come it comes right back to the same point it's like you can't change the emotion but you can you can adapt to the emotion and you can react to the emotion and so the the adaptation and the reaction are your responsibility okay yeah that makes sense okay i guess it's worth saying and this is probably like the main point to wrap up

on Before we get to the the final takeaways ultimately the goal in all this is is kind of a a regulatory flexibility you know we've tal we've now talked through probably half a dozen items in our emotional toolkit um different skills that you can develop um in the relationship section we've talked through different frameworks you know learning how to identify like what your personal proclivities are and um I I think it's ultimately it's not about changing yourself it's just like becoming more developing a wider range of emotional skill sets m so the same way it's

like you know like if you're a very introverted person the correct advice is not oh you should be extroverted cuz that's impossible no the the correct advice is it's great you're introverted but you need to at least develop the the skill of being extroverted for a short period of time when the situation requires it because that flexibility is going to serve you really well there are going to be moments in your life where you need to talk to a lot of People and to accomplish the things that you care about and so if you don't

develop that skill then you're you're going to be severely limited and I think the same is true here it's like as as a natural suppressor of my emotions i had to spend many years developing the skill of expressing myself it's not what comes naturally to me it's not what I'm good at but I learned how to do it because I'm often in situations both in my marriage and other relationships where it's like okay like this is a moment like here's a moment where I need to say what I feel i need to speak up and

say something otherwise it's going to cause more problems right so it's developing that that flexibility and that range of um of skills uh around these emotions that is like I think that is kind of the end goal with all of this yeah yeah yeah i I'm similar where I tend to be more of a suppressor as well and it's still I'm still very bad at the expression part of it but when I do it even when I do it bad and clunky and awkwardly it's still like better than not doing it right so yeah I

I totally agree with the the The you need to have this toolkit and a and use it in a flexible way for sure but also I this is one thing I thought about when when we do talk about this emotional flexibility can you be too flexible can can you like when you start like pulling out like little Swift's army knife of your emotional toolkit and you're using this little strategy over here and this little strategy over here can you just become too flexible and not like that's kind of boring right in relationship if you're just

always like oh I'm going to be super flexible and we're going to address this right like I don't know part of what makes relationships interesting is the you know we've already talked about this is the way how challenging it is right yeah and that that experience of growth together yeah i mean first of all I don't think there's anybody who's like nails all this stuff all the time for sure yeah um I don't know i'm like I'm It's reminding me of and I think I talked to him about this on the Podcast i'm sure he

wouldn't mind me talking about it derek Civers yeah um he's one of the wisest people I know and I think one of the reasons for that is that he he does seem so skilled and flexible at all this stuff and it does seem to come very naturally to him um I even asked him once I was like have you ever like not been happy and he was like very rarely like there's been like very brief moments of unhappiness in his life and he's like yeah it's I remember talking to him and I was like do

you think that's actually been kind of a problem and he was like actually yes particularly in relationships he's like I'm generally always happy and so if my partner's not I can He's like I can just kind of put myself in a little pretzel and be whatever they need me to be and he's he was like yeah it's almost um it it it just creates like a very weird dynamic i think there needs to be an interesting balance in a relationship in that both people need to be both self-sufficient and better with each other m Like

I think if either one of those things isn't true then the relationship's probably not long-term sustainable in a in a super healthy way and I guess if you are like so adept at regulating solo then it's going to be very very hard for you to ever find a relationship that like makes you better you're you're always going to be the one giving and they're going to be the ones receiving and you're probably also going to attract people that need a lot of help with with regulation so I don't know that's like a spitball answer but

when you said that the first person that came to mind was Derek yeah yeah i do remember talking about that yeah yeah interesting okay yeah all right so that is all of the relationship stuff before we wrap up here with all of our our 8020 and our takeaways and everything um I do want to remind everybody that if you do want to start implementing this stuff into your life and get better with your emotional regulation improve your emotional toolkit develop these skills we have a 30-day challenge in the momentum community it's at findmomentum.com/eotions it is

We've broken everything down from this episode into single daily practices or challenges they are relatively easy to do you can usually do them in 10 or 20 minutes each day they're super helpful we've like we've really dug into what are the most useful exercises that you can get from this entire episode and then you get to do it with the support and accountability of a community of thousands of people around the world who are working on the same [ __ ] as you so it's uh it's an awesome community i'm in there every week i'm

interacting with people giving people feedback helping out answering questions um so go to findmomentum.com/eotions see you there all right it's 8020 time drew what is the We We covered a lot as usual and we've now distilled at the end of every episode we like to distill all of the advice all the most useful stuff that we've talked about into the 8020 that is the 20% of the episode that will get you 80% of the results in your life why don't you kick us off with with the most basic one that everyone Hates hearing that's right

that's the physical side it's a physiology right getting getting that uh is a it's a foundation of emotion regulation so for instance your sleep exercise diet those types of things and yeah you're right people don't like hearing this necessarily but I would say I'm already sick of hearing it yeah I you you can say this for just about any problem in your life right like well you just get your get your the physical side of everything kind of down but the the cool thing about this episode is that it it dovetales nicely into the point

that we made at the top of the show of like the mind body problem is not like it's the same thing your mind and body are the same thing and if you're not taking care of your body your mind is going to suffer and if you're not taking care of your mind your body's going to suffer so it's a two-way street mhm um and really just sleep exercise um basic nutrition and like even within this 8020 there's another 8020 here of like I think when people hear exercise nutrition they're like "Oh god I got to

go on a diet i got to Join a gym." It's like no actually there's a huge 8020 to sleep exercise and diet itself right so it's like something as simple as like going for a 30-minute walk every day that like there's tons of research showing that a 30 minute walk each day gets you like 60% 70% of the results of like a hardcore workout program um something as simple as like cutting out sugar six days a week will get you like 50% of the results of like this like hardcore diet regimen that you go on

so it's like just do the basic things do the small things the simple things um it it really is just about the small easy wins day after day they accumulate over time that's why we built our whole [ __ ] community around it it's like it is not complicated no it just requires consistency right right the consistency is key there and um it's also like I don't want to overstate it necessarily but it is it's foundational in that you know you get these things right you get your sleep right you get your diet um you

get some exercise they don't have to be crazy Like you said and it's not that like these are going to fix your emotions i think what it does is it gives you like the the space to manage your emotions a lot better you're you're better able to handle emotional ups and downs when you have these things right okay so all the other things we're going to talk about um come easier if you get this right first so that's why we're starting with it for sure for sure um but yeah with that so like your your

sleep as we all know I'm terrible at this sometimes uh I've been better at it lately but it's huge like when you get worse sleep I mean there's all these studies that show like your brain suffers because of it right there's less connectivity from your prefrontal cortex that thinking part of your brain to the rest of your brain and so whether that's um any sort of emotional regulation network or whatever there's just less talk with the thinking part of your brain you noticed this I'm sure if you are tired you're just you're more reactive to

things i noticed this the other day i was just getting annoyed with Somebody who they weren't doing anything annoying but I was tired and I was like every little thing they said frustrated me i was like "Okay I'm just I'm tired." I I tend to I've noticed that I get pessimistic yeah yes if I if I don't sleep like I'm genic and pessimistic i'm generally a very optimistic person i'm like pretty much always excited about something in the future and and so when when there are times where I'm like "Oh this sucks it's not going

to go well oh what am I doing why am I here?" Like it's generally because I didn't sleep right right we go back we we we talked about a emotions versus feelings versus moods versus affect and that really affects your mood I would say absolutely yeah 100% with that uh number two verbalize your feelings and we talked about this in the constructivist view of emotions uh we talked about this some with the the the cultural influence of emotions language as well yeah with the how much language determines emotion and then of course we got into

this with the The psychonamic school of thought the old Freudian old school Freudian talk therapy it stuck around for hundreds of years for a reason it works it's It's like honestly to this day it is still one of the simplest most consistent most effective interventions that we have for emotional problems is like just sit your ass in a chair and talk about it for a couple hours use your words yeah and it's it doesn't have to necessarily be a therapist it it could be a a friend a partner a confidant a family member uh it

could be a journal um it's it's basically taking all the messy stuff in your head and trying to structure it and uh verbalize it you know put it into a container that is a little bit more manageable and that is what the process of of putting language around sentiments and feelings actually does and there's just something about it that makes it feel less overwhelming less out of your control um and it helps you um plan around it adapt to it um mitigate it so on and so forth yeah we we mentioned uh emotional granularity and

a lot of that comes from the the language Uh research that they've done is if you can put words to your emotions rather than this is I feel good or I feel bad it's like okay what are you feeling angry are you feeling depressed are you feeling upset about are you feeling joy are you feeling happiness whatever it is if you can label those emotions that affects the experience again we're going back to the constructed view of emotions that affects your emotional experience and it kind of creates a container for you to be able to

manage those emotions a lot better and again similar to the the phys physiological stuff there's an 8020 with this as well like you don't need to sit down with a therapist for 25 hours like just journal for five minutes like make this a small daily practice you know journal for 5 or 10 minutes each morning um you know catch up with a friend each week confide in them talk about some of your problems like it is actually super simple it and again it's more about consistency and developing the habit than like you know cornering somebody

and emotionally dumping All over them and you know what else involves daily small journaling and verbalizing of your thoughts and feelings the momentum community the 30-day challenge in the Momentum Community and if you go to findmomentum.com/eotions you too can verbalize your thoughts and feelings uh in a constructive and productive way to increase your emotional toolkit all right I promise I'm done promoting them what's the next one uh the next one we have cognitive reappraisal um so we we talked a lot about this especially like in the context of like the CBT therapy right the cognitive

behavioral therapy that's this kind of where this comes from and we talked about um was it uh Aaron Beck as well um the a very simple entry point into emotional regulation is around your thoughts um you can do this at any time it's not like with uh the way you're feeling or the way you're behaving necessarily but when you can control or have some influence in any way over the thoughts you have around your emotions and you can reappraise what those mean to you and that's really what reappraisal is is Reframing the meaning around these

emotions yeah and that's very powerful when done consistently it's not you know one or two times you do it okay fine but when you do when you really practice this consistently then your mind really starts to change over time so cognitive reappraisal just to recap is when you take let's say you have a thought like you know these people are ignoring me um you can reappraise that say they might be distracted or or stressed out in some way or you know I'm behind in life or something like that well I'm progressing at my own pace

you could start reframing things like that or just what a what an emotion means like um this person made me very angry and said well okay I'm feeling angry right now that's kind of a Buddhist way to reappraise things as well to kind of detach yourself from the emotion there's all sorts of little exercises around cognitive reappraisal that you can do that reframe the meaning of emotions in the moment and like I said when you practice that consistently then your mind starts to change around these and you start to see oh these emotions I do

have some influence over these just By thinking about them differently it's it's crazy by by telling yourself a different story um you know there's a kind of a subclass of therapies called narrative therapy that's that's built around this and and a lot of it is around written exercises of basically what is your story what is the story you've told yourself about this area of your life again the meaning right it's like what happened to you uh what caused it and what does that mean and then there are a number of exercises that that have been

developed over the years that like just help you poke at that story change the story rewrite the story and again some of this stuff is is very academic like it's been acade academically validated some of it like I would say this is an area that uh you know the self-help space does well um I'll give you an example from each school so and on the academic There's um there's a process called uh pinabaker journaling and it's basically it's it's a specific journaling prompt sequence that begins with essentially asking you to write about one of the

hardest experiences of your life and then it takes You through a few follow-up questions and it just gets you to look at that experience in different ways and and question whether it potentially means something different whether you could have approached it differently whether you know it may or may not be true um and there's tons of data backing up showing great results from from that you know that sequence of journaling uh on the self-help side I'm a huge fan of uh Byron Katy she's got this method called the work and it's a series of four

questions um and it always as always it starts with the problem in your life and it says uh the first question that you have to ask yourself is you know you write out the problem or the story around the problem and the first question is is this true and the second question is yeah but are you sure it's true how do you know it's true and then of course you have to answer that and then I believe the third one is is like okay invert it now right so um and the inversion is a technique

that she teaches um that is just really it's kind of just playing with the language in interesting ways and so um for example like Let's say uh let's say the problem I'm dealing with is like uh you know my brother hates me um and you you get to the third question and it's like okay now invert it and what you do is you play with the language and you take my brother hates me and you turn it into I hate my brother and you write what if that was true and then you turn it into

um my brother loves me and you write if that was true and then you know it's basically it takes you through all of these like alternate scenarios and then forces you to kind of like do the mental exercise of like okay what if I've been looking at this completely wrong and generally by the time you get to the end of the sequence you've had a bunch of epiphies and ahas and like oh my god I never thought of it that way before so cognitive reappraisal there's tons of stuff everywhere um and it is it is

super effective um and it is a mainstay of the mental health space do you remember I think uh we've shared this I think before this this one picture this meme going around and there's a top and bottom picture part to it and there's the top part is it's like oh nobody gives a [ __ ] and This guy's like he's really bummed out and then the bottom one's nobody gives a [ __ ] yes exactly that's one of my like that's that's awesome yeah yeah totally totally good cognitive reappraisal there uh so the next one

in our 8020 list is mindfulness um this could be meditation i mean there are a number of mindfulness practices that don't necessarily involve classic meditation right um it's really anything that just gets you to focus closely to your yourself and your surroundings your thoughts your feelings your sensations so this could be anything from like a body a five-minute body scan that you find on YouTube to actual like Zen meditation practice to like a full-blown you know uh Tibetan Buddhist retreat whatever you want to do like to develop this this muscle in your brain but ultimately

what we're doing here is like as you develop this um this internal self-awareness you start to see gaps emerge between you know with the CBT stuff we talked about how interrelated u you know thoughts feelings and behaviors are and I think by default we see most of us kind of Feel like those three things are merged like they all happen simultaneously and like one leads to the to the next and there's not really anything we can do to like pry ourselves in between them mindfulness spreads those three things out like the gaps between those three

things get wider and wider and so the more mindful you are of your thoughts and experiences um the the larger the the gap emerges between thoughts and a thought and a feeling a feeling and an action and an action and a thought um you start to develop the ability to look at an experience and be like "Well I actually don't know what that means." or to look at a thought and be like "Well I actually don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing." Or look at a feeling and be like "Yeah I

actually don't know what I should do about this." And then being okay with it like that's ultimately that's that's the goal that we're going for yeah what I've started doing with this too is I I call it minding the gap actually it's like a little mindfulness practice shout out to all the UK listeners that's right yeah mind the gap that's Right on the on the subway there uh the tube the tube um again I I kind of mentioned this is what I've trained myself to do and it's a it's a practice it's a it's a

over time but like when an emotion comes up you feel that and then that I kind of insert into my married mind the gap yeah where's Okay here's the gap what can I do now and you stop and you're like okay that's when the mindfulness kicks in and now I can reappraise um I can I can redirect i can suppress i can choose whatever to do in that situation but that's where I have that control yeah is is in that gap so mind the gap yeah that's what I like to do what's next leveraging better

relationships so getting your relationships done we we spend a lot of time on relationships um and there's this co-regulation aspect to it um uh get being around the the types of relationships that do help you regulate your emotions better and uh finding those secure bases those sources of growth in your relationships versus the the vampires right the drains yeah uh and limiting those and setting stronger boundaries around Those that's going to get you a long ways um just in your social life of of being able to regulate putting yourself in situations um that are more

conducive to regulating your emotions in a positive way versus avoiding the the situations that don't and the people that don't sometimes you just have to put those boundaries around them like we've talked about yeah there's just there's a calming presence to if there is a calming presence that you can find in your life try to try to lean into that more than uh all the energy drains and all the the the the toxic relationships and everything that we talked about as well there's an old cliche that you are the average of the five people you

spend the most time with and I think it's a cliche because it's there's a lot of truth to it um I think for me one of the coolest concepts that I came away with researching this podcast is this idea of co-regulation that like you know you always hear this phrase like humans are social creatures and it's like oh yeah okay sure whatever um what does that mean you know and the co-regulation thing like really drove it home for me it's like no we have these our Nervous systems we have these like these emotional systems that

are largely built on our own nervous systems but actually like connect and branch with other people's nervous systems and we like regulate each other's systems effectively and so if you are surrounded by a bunch of people with dysfunctional nervous systems chances are it's going to uh influence your own nervous system uh and vice versa so and I know like sometimes I run into people who are like they hear that phrase that you're the average of the five people around you and they're like "Well you know they're not great influences but they're good people and I'm

I'm like aware of their faults." And like I I don't think I don't think people realize how much of the the social influence happens on an unconscious level it's not even like you can look at like let's say you have a friend who's like a junkie like you can look at him be like well he's a junkie but I still love him and I'm not going to do any drugs and whatever but it's like there's a certain standard or expectation that is being lowered constantly when you're around them um it will make things that are

for you the bare Minimum will feel like overachieving when you're around that person where what you really want to find is is where your overachievement feels like the bare minimum because those are the people who are going to like bring you up and help you grow and help you become a a better stronger version of yourself so right yeah relationships are huge um the last one we talked about emotional flexibility so again looking a at you know expression suppression you know being prevention focused versus being promotion focused uh attachment types like looking at all this

stuff and understanding that like okay it's not about changing who you are but it's about developing the flexibility to engage in your relationships in different ways like having the ability to to acknowledge like okay this person in my life uh suppresses and avoids very deeply but I do want to have a relationship with them so when I'm around them I'm going to have to be more expressive and I'm going to have to be more promotion focused and that's going to be uncomfortable but like I'm willing to do that to Like maintain that relationship in my

life or stay connected with that person and like ultimately that is what being a very healthy emotionally healthy welladjusted person is is like because ultimately like coming full circle emotions are adaptations to our environment it is they are feedback mechanisms that are generated to inspire certain behaviors that promote health well-being reproduction and survival and so the ideal here is to develop the ability to adapt your behaviors and your emotional engagement with the world around you in such a way that you can thrive in almost any environment that you're put in that is the end goal

it's not to stop being angry or stop being anxious or get over your sadness or stop regretting so much stuff it's like no no no no still feel those things but develop yourself to a point where they no longer hold you back your anger is no longer holding you back it is now propelling you because you found a productive conduit to ch channel it through your anxiety is no longer holding you back you found a productive channel to channel it through this is ultimately the goal of our emotions like this is where we Want to

get is it's it's to that jet kundo you know the be like water my friend you you don't resist the water you flow like water yeah and you might have one you might be have a propensity to to use one emotional strategy over other and I I get that that's fine but it's like you know if you're only using that one you know you're always angry or you're always just expressing your emotions freely and and not never kind of strategically suppressing them or anything like that that's kind of like you know golfing with one club

you know like like you need you need a whole set to to manage the golf course right and you need a whole set of emotional uh strategies in order to navigate your life as well and just getting better like find the ones that you're bad at and practice those first I would say and then yeah you can go from there yeah yeah all right last question Drew how has preparing for this episode what what have you implemented or taken away from this episode uh and and hopefully implement into your life right yeah well so the

big big um kind of I guess lessons I learned were around the culture stuff Like I said was just amazing to me like uh that to me really drove up i may I knew culture influenced emotions mo mostly I thought it was like through how we express our emotions and everything like that but it's actually the culture that you're around whether it's your immediate culture your family your friends and everything like that or the larger culture itself really influences not only how you express your emotions but the emotions you even feel as well which I

just thought was crazy this is the water we are swimming in and we don't realize it and it's only when you like enter another culture and really embed yourself in it that to start to realize how influential that is and just how uh if if you have a mismatch between your own personality and your culture how the problems that arise from that that just that's blown my mind a lot and so being more aware of that like if you are someone who's not super emotionally expressive or um you you're even not you don't feel a

whole lot of like positive emotion a lot and say you're in a place like the United States and you feel like oh I just don't fit in i just Don't belong well know that that's just like a it's not it's not a you thing necessarily it's a cultural mismatch that you're having i think a lot of people and then you can just be okay with that you know like it's okay I don't fit into this culture of that thing i'm just not going to participate that's fine um so for me that was one of like

the big kind of like aha moments I had was like oh this is like way more important than I thought like the culture around emotions is way more important and way more fundamental than I thought so that was one uh big thing just from a kind of big picture view anyway yeah for me I just felt like studying all this stuff it gave me a lot of clarity on my past like looking back at uh some of the stupid things I did in my 20s or how I used to be when I was a teenager

or why my first relationship was such a mess like it there were a lot of things in in in the stuff that we did for this this episode that just like it it helped me make sense of a lot of stuff over the years and really understand myself and be like "Oh yeah yeah that is that's totally me and that explains why I [ __ ] up with this girlfriend when I was 24." Like it just it connected a lot of dots for me so that that was very satisfying um and then I'll just say

that I I am I was familiar with most of the therapeutic modalities that we went through here but it was cool to um really dig into how they I guess the the timeline or the progression of of the different schools of thought of like why um certain things became popular in certain decades and how how different practitioners built off of each other over time so um that was like my nerdy satisfaction on this episode yeah I'm really looking forward to you know like we kind of started the episode out with uh the fact that we

kind of got emotions wrong for a very long like like just up until like the last 50 years or so that we really started to understand them and I still think there's a long long ways to go yeah so I'm kind of like I'm like what are we going to figure out what do we think now that's just like way off i have no idea and that's going to be very interesting to see too because I I did find Again was like we still I don't think have a good definition of what emotions even are

necessarily we kind of have different levels of analysis we can look at them but you know what are we missing i don't know we don't know what we don't know yet that's I think that's exciting i don't know stay tuned then I guess right all right i said I wouldn't promo momentum anymore but I [ __ ] lied we're promoing Momentum again but seriously if uh if you want to have a step-by-step process have all this stuff broken down put into little bite-sized chunks and and and take a little bit of it each and every

day um please go to findmomentum.com/eotions we don't run ads on this podcast for a variety of reasons um and some of them ethical and uh so I if you get a lot out of the show and you want to actually start practicing this stuff in your life the best way to do both of those things is to go to findmomentum.com/eotions and next time Drew what are we going to be talking about oh Mark we're going to be talking about happiness i can finally be happy Well I don't know stay tuned for that too all right

thanks everybody [Music]