How to Better Regulate Your Emotions | Dr. Marc Brackett

It's not what it is. It's just having another relationship to it.

I've had anxiety or live with it for a lot of my life. But sometimes I just say hello to it. It's like, "Hey, how you doing today?" And it goes away pretty quickly. Or it just sits there.

“I think that's the other thing about emotional regulation that people”

kind of misunderstand and they think it's like, "I got to check in with how I'm feeling all day long and then regularly." "Check and regulate." Like, you become psychotic if you did that all day long. Most of the time, our emotions are in the background.

You know, if you thought about your feelings all day long,

you wouldn't be able to do this podcast. Like, that's unproductive. Emotions matter when there's a shift in our environment or the relationships. You know, if you said something that offended me, "Sprim, I'm activated. I'm feeling angry or kind of shocked."

Then I have to make a choice in that moment. Like, how do I manage it? That's where the magic happens. Welcome to the human lab podcast. We discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and up-thamology at Stanford School of Medicine.

My guest today is Dr. Mark Brackett. Dr. Mark Brackett is a professor of psychology at Yale University, where he is also the director of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. He is an expert in the science of emotions and how to apply that to improve communication and relationships and performance in school and work.

One common problem around discussions of emotions and emotional intelligence is that they are often vague and, frankly, somewhat soft and cliche, but not when Mark Brackett explains emotional intelligence as he does today. Because he talks about the practical tools that emerge from the science of emotional intelligence that you can use to improve your emotional life, both with yourself and with others.

And he's not just going to tell us to feel our emotions more deeply,

“while that could be important in certain settings, his research in and out of the laboratory”

is really focused on the small things that we can all do, both in moments of emotion, but also on our own, that can greatly increase our ability to understand what we're feeling, communicate it effectively, and to be better listeners, especially in moments that would otherwise create tension or confusion. In fact, what he shares today are life skills, the sort of life skills that make everything,

school, friendships, romantic relationships, professional life, and family life far more effective and enriching. So I'm confident that you'll come away from today's episode with Mark Brackett,

knowing what to do and when to use the tools that you'll learn and they are indeed very powerful

to improve your life. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Mark Brackett. Dr. Mark Brackett, welcome. Thank you, glad to be back. So much to discuss

today about emotion regulation, about the kids, the future, or the kids are right. They could be better. And our obligation, our generation, other generations in providing a world where kids can thrive and where everyone can thrive. It's a bit of a mess out there, but you're going to put some clarification on things for people. You're doing amazing work to give people tools for emotion regulation and more. So let's start off and define emotion regulation.

What is that? Yeah. Well, I think the simplest way to define it is using your emotions wisely to achieve your goals in life. It's a little bit too broad. And so it's funny, as I was writing in my book, I decided, I need a formula. And so my formula is ER, which is emotion regulation, is a set of goals and strategies. So it's ER parentheses G plus S. And that equals a function of E plus P plus C. You know, maybe it feels smart. Emotion, person context. So what I mean by that's

“specifically is that it's a goal oriented process. You have to want to regulate. You can prevent”

unwanted emotions. I have an acronym for that too. It's prime. You can prevent unwanted emotions. You can reduce the difficult ones. I think people forget the I initiate emotions, like when you're teaching or leading or presenting, like you want to create an emotion in the room. That's upregulating. You can maintain an emotion. Like, you know, I'm having a good day. I'm going to avoid these things. I just keep going. Save for the moment. And then there's enhancing, which is

kind of boosting an emotion. So that's prime. That's the goals. The strategies we can talk about for hours. We'll get into that a little bit later. And then I think what's most people misunderstand is that like what we regulate our emotions. And like what I do, for example, to deal with my anxiety

the emotion you're feeling. It's a function of me as an individual. I am on the neurotic side. I'm on the introverted side. And so my strategy selection would be influenced by that. And then the context, like right here right now, like I know you're into fitness and like running and, you know, all this kind of stuff. And I'm like, Andrew, you know, I'm really nervous right now. Like, do you mind if we take a break and I go for a run? You're like, you know, it's a little weird mark.

So context matters. You've got to be like right now if I were anxious, like, Mark, you've got to

“use some cognitive strategies or breathing work. I can't go anywhere. So I'm stuck. And I think”

people need to see that kind of full spectrum. I feel like there's a close tie between emotion regulation and self-awareness. But I feel like there's a tension between self-awareness and being able to experience an enjoy life. For instance, if I'm feeling anxious, I'm thinking about how I'm appearing, how I'm sounding, that it's uncomfortable. But if I get totally outside of that and just be in the experience that I'm in, then there's the potential to say the wrong thing or, you know,

offend somebody or who knows. So when we talk about emotion regulation, what's the best approach to that that doesn't keep us in a subtext in our mind and sort of out of the room? Because when we're alone, it's quite a bit different. We can breathe. We can use whatever self-regulation tools we want to manipulate, or text or call a friend, whatever it is. But when we're at work, at school, on a podcast, if there's that subtext, I'm not locked in here. I'm not in the experience

completely. I'm self-regulating or paying attention to myself. That can be very uncomfortable in

its own right. It's work. Yeah. It's effortful. And not always the best effort if it's going down

“the rabbit hole. I think that you're getting at, which is this mindset piece, that the first step”

is our mindset about our feelings. So let me ask you, what's your mindset around anxiety? I, why have assumptions around it? I was telling someone the other day, because I spent a lot of time alone, and I'm fairly introverted. But if I go into a crowded environment for the first five, six minutes, I'm feeling kind of overwhelmed. Well, it was really crowded in here. There are a lot of people, and I actually feel like I have a bit of a social interaction disorder for

those first few minutes. But then after about 20, 30 minutes, I'm in that experience, and I feel like a very comfortable. So I have this mindset that social anxiety is something that is like

waiting into water. It's always a little bit too cold at first, or usually a little too cold,

but over time you acclimate. All right. You didn't answer the question. Okay. So I've had a frame in another way. What's your relationship to anxiety? I hate it. Okay. There you go. See how you automatically, like, I hate anxiety. I did too for most of my life. And then I was with a friend who is a neuroscientist about anxiety. And she said to me, Mark, tell me, all the things that make you anxious. I said, well, I'm anxious about fundraising. And, you know, I got to raise the money to

keep the research going. I'm anxious to make sure I want to make sure that like everything we do is high quality. And I went on and on. And then she asked me another question and she said, well, what do those have in common? I'm like, what are you talking about? And then I thought about it, and I said, well, those are things that are important to me. And so she said, so why would anxiety be a bad

“thing? And I think that we have to learn how to adopt a mindset around emotions that there are”

no bad emotions. It's what we do with our emotions that makes them harmful or difficult for us to live our lives. But anxiety is a good thing. It's saying there's perceived uncertainty around the future. Like, I'm anxious about how I'm going to act in this environment or how I'm going to be perceived this environment. It's not a bad thing because you want to be perceived well. But if you automatically assume it's bad, then it's going to put you on the path to disregulation.

So, we accept the idea that all emotions are okay. Yeah. But that the expression of all emotions is in every context is not okay. That it shouldn't context specific. Yes. I actually think that provide some freedom. I can feel that freedom. Like, it's okay to be super angry. It's okay to be

frustrated. It's okay to be anxious. But how that's expressed is what's critical. It makes good

intuitive sense. I think that what's hard to know is what to do with the emotion if there is no

sometimes it can just be. And that's a big part of a regulation, which is that a lot of people think

emotion regulation is getting rid of a feeling. It's not what it is. It's just having another relationship to it. Like, I've been, I'm 56. I've had anxiety or live with it for a lot of my life, but sometimes I just say hello to it. It's like, hey, how you doing today? And it goes away

“pretty quickly. Or it just sits there. I think that's the other thing about emotion regulation that”

people kind of misunderstand. They think it's like, I got to check in with how I'm feeling all day long and then regulate. Check in regulate. Like, you become psychotic if you did that all day long. Most of the time, our emotions are in the background. You know, if you thought about your feelings all day long, you wouldn't be able to do this podcast. Like, that's unproductive. Emotions matter when there's a shift in our environment or the relationships. You know, if you said something that

offended me, boom, I'm activated. I'm feeling angry or kind of shocked. Then I have to make a choice in that moment. Like, how do I manage it? That's where the magic happens. But on a day-to-day basis, thank God we're not, you know, we wouldn't want to do that. I would like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Juve. Juve makes medical grade red light therapy devices.

Now, there's one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast is the incredible impact

that light can have on our biology and our health. Now, in addition to sunlight, which I've talked about a lot on this podcast, red light, near infrared and infrared light have been specifically shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellular and organ health. These include faster muscle recovery, improved skin health, wound healing, improvements in acne, reduced pain and inflammation, improved by the conjureal function, and even improvements in vision.

Nowadays, there are a lot of red light devices out there. But what sets Juve lights apart and why their my preferred red light therapy device is that they use clinically proven wavelengths, meaning they use the specific wavelengths of red light, nearing infrared, and infrared light, in combination to trigger the optimal cellular adaptations. Personally, I use the Juve whole body panel about three to four times a week, usually for about 10 to 20 minutes per session,

and I use the Juve handheld light both at home and when I travel. If you would like to try Juve, they're offering up to $400 off select products for listeners of this podcast. To learn more, visit JuveSpellJ-O-O-VV.com/Huberbin. Again, that's J-O-O-VV.com/Huberbin.

“Today's episode is also brought to us by Lingo. One of the most important factors in your”

short and long-term health is your body's ability to manage glucose over time. Glucose directly impacts our brain function, mood, and energy. You want your glucose relatively stable across the day without big peaks or valleys. This is why I use the continuous glucose monitor and app from Lingo by Abbott. Lingo provides minute by minute glucose data directly within the app, showing you how your glucose responds to food, exercise, and stress. This information can help you

make smarter choices to support your health both now and in the long term. The CDC estimates that more than one in three American adults has pre-diabetes, and that many of these people don't know they are living with pre-diabetes. Visibility about how your diet and activity affect your

glucose can be the first step toward informed conversations with your doctor and making smarter daily

choices. If you'd like to try Lingo, Lingo is offering Huberbin lab listeners in the US and UK 10% off a four-week plan. Just visit HelloLingo.com/Huberbin for more information. Terms in conditions apply. Again, that's HelloLingo.com/Huberbin. I'd love to poke at some of the assumptions that I know I have, but I wonder if other people have as well. My dad's from South America and I remember long ago he said because he went to formal schools. He said that he was raised

with this terrible idea. He called it terrible that if somebody was happy and they smiled a lot that they were stupid and I said what is that about? And he said well that came in his words from the British school system where the idea was that you were supposed to be skeptical of things and that if you were happy or happy go lucky and you weren't drinking that people would assume that you were an idiot because you weren't bothered by the problems in the world and you were

accepting of the things that you heard and were told. In other words, you're an idiot and my dad's a very happy person now and he has talked about having to break that mold that like it's okay to wake up and take a walk and be happy that it's okay to be happy and so that's just one

“thing that I think I grew up thinking too and maybe not to that extreme that especially in academia,”

like if you're not just like to be happy is to not be discerning. It's a totally false, right? Of course. Now we're a long way from England right now and that's probably something more

happy go lucky and you're feeling good that you must not be thinking about all the terrible things

“going on in the world or that it's insensitive to those that are suffering, et cetera, et cetera.”

I'd love your thoughts on this idea that we don't give ourselves permission to feel as good as we might feel because of some social pressure or assumptions that we've internalized. Which is all learned and so these are learned phenomenon and it's sometimes outside influence. So I'll talk about happiness, as I was writing and I was doing the chapter on mine sets around a motion and talking about this relationship with different emotions and you know we could play

around with this all day long so what's your relationship to anger? What's your relationship

to happiness and contentment and all of a sudden you start realizing well I have a complicated

relationship with my emotions and I was thinking about it with happiness too and for me what's interesting which is different completely from your dad's is because of my kind of tough childhood and a lot of bullying is that I would go to school one day and I would be happy and I'd see the bullies and all of a sudden they'd say things like you know what are you so happy about today bracket and I didn't realize that until I was writing and then I would get on stage and

give a schedule a lot of public speaking and I'd be standing there like feeling really good with my speaking and then I'd get the applause at the end and I would start kind of looking down

and I started realizing I'm uncomfortable being happy like I'm I'm waiting for something to go wrong

because you know and my childhood like happy meant like you know we're going to bring you down we all have these kind of developmental connections for lack of a better term to our different

“emotions and I think that it gets back to the phenomenon there's no good or bad emotions”

life firstly some of it is genetic and biological you know our proclivity to experience certain emotions the regulation piece is all learned like you're not born with a you know a pocket full of evidence based strategies to recognize it's like you know I don't know about you growing up you know my father was very different my father was the angry guy and he'd say so and you're a tough enough I'm like dad look at me you know come on let's move on it's not happening and

you know that I have a fifth degree black but I became the tough guy that my father wanted me but nevertheless you know what does that even mean but you know growing up when I was struggling my parents missed a lot of the cues come down the stairs I didn't have my father say son I'm noticing a shift in your emotions today your posture is different your facial expression is different let me give you a research based strategy to help you regulate your anxiety stress pressure for you

no it was just it was no it wasn't even a construct I mean I don't know but did you grow up with a a concept of emotion regulation definitely you did and it was there was a big gender split in my home I had the sort of belief based on the context that women could express their emotions big or small and that men weren't supposed to lose their temper men weren't supposed to be angry that's interesting yeah encounter the way people think about it nowadays right like oh yeah

the men are like the more power you have the more anger you can express oh the complete opposite that in fact and I don't think he'll mind my dad's been on this podcast and we have a great relationship now and and we've done work and it's been awesome I mean it's really it really has I mean and I remember when I was a kid if he got angry he would blink and I it now I know that it's like behavioral suppression you know he was like blinking but I can't ever remember my

dad having an outburst ever so I just internalized this idea like okay you you don't have outburst but I have a certain side of my family that might send it family that's from New Jersey and where words are sometimes used as weapons okay and anger is a bit more outward sometimes at least in that side and then I have a South American side where things are more you know formal and

“boxed away and and I think I internalized a bit of both and and so I have all sorts of constructs”

of brown who's allowed to express emotions and what extremes but now I didn't observe a lot of anger maybe a little suppression lots of suppression lots of suppression lots of suppression which is regulation it's just yeah not the adaptive kind usually right right and you know I probably averaged that too you know in my own life but in terms of happiness I think the same thing now I think about it that so K for women to be fully expressive and for men to be you know it's a bit

in my mind yeah yeah I get think with happiness as with any emotion it's about

the time in the place for happiness like you can't we have research that shows that people who strive to be happy all the time actually are more miserable because it's hard to live up to that all the time you know people who strive for more contentment in their life actually seem to have greater well-being and so I just think again it goes back to these mindsets around emotions that there's no good or bad emotion anger is fine obviously if it's too intense and it's

lasting too long it's probably not going to be good happiness is something that we should you know

experience but you know we're attached to it it's going to be problematic because every day's

not a sunny day there are rainy days too and you've got to be comfortable with the rainy days and the important thing also is not just our feelings about our feelings it's also

“about our mindsets around our capacity to deal with those feelings like do I believe”

I am capable of managing my anger do I believe I'm capable of dealing with the disappointment and we find a distribution of scores for that too like going back to my dad we have very different fathers my father would say things like so and this is the way I deal with my anger you're going to have to get used to it you know I would say now like sounds like you've got to fix my inset dad like there are other options you know to to deal with your anger but he was like this

is the way I am you're going to have to deal with it no learning interests whereas nowadays I hope to help people see wait a minute is that emotion working for you in your relationships or not if it's not there are alternatives maybe we're talking about boys and men yeah I'd have been already here so maybe we just continue that in that direction even though we will touch on girls and women and emotions as it relates to them too I hear a lot nowadays about

problems for boys and young men in emotion regulation in defining masculinity I'm obviously interested in this but I also acknowledge that I'm Gen X I was born in 1975 things were very different and I know I have a giant blind spot to their experience I just do I acknowledge that because

“I don't really have a finger on the pulse of what life is like for a 15-year-old or 12-year-old or”

20-year-old guy out there what are the pain points and what's going right yeah there's a lot going on and I think probably the big issue here with gender is vulnerability that historically this is not just now this is going back to when we were kids when our parents were kids you know go back to other periods and you know and the time is that vulnerability especially for men is weak you got to be tough you're the you know the person who has to you know make the ends meet you're

the you know the hunter gatherer and obviously times have changed and what we find is that that thought today for many boys and men to be emotional firstly emotional alone has a connotation of feminine and out of control that's just the way people think about it still yes really well when you say don't be so emotional it's considered to be a negative thing it's considered to be

“feminine and it's considered to be like a hysterical that's why we call it emotions skills not”

emotional skills that's anyway so vulnerability is a big piece of it let's this is going to be a great conversation between two guys so what's your relationship to vulnerability totally context dependent I mean there are people I'm not afraid at all the crying front of and there are

contexts and people that I would never cry I mean I've cried on very public podcasts too

maybe three one here when Martha Beck came on she really she yeah she wasn't trying but you know it was happening yep and then Steven Bartlett's podcast I think perhaps on another and it was tough I mean it was I didn't want to watch those clips but I'm glad I did it so it totally context dependent yeah and that makes sense when I'm really pushing for is like around emotion and about talking about feelings and so what we find is that boys generally feel more inhibited just

saying how they feel especially when it comes to kind of the sad disappointment you know a shame

the deep ones that are self-conscious you know that make you vulnerable tends to be tough

“and and the question is why is that the case what are your hypothesis why would it be that”

so many boys feel like they're going to be perceived as feminine if they say they're disappointed or sad or ashamed what immediately comes to mind is that somehow it is linked with

the word incapable or incapability exactly there's an incredible video of David Goggins breaking

down crying on stage and he was celebrated for that but David Goggins did a lot of things before hands and no one denies his capability yeah his ability so when he cried it was like awesome he's willing to go to this really hard place yet another difficult thing that David can do that most people can't do and you just go like awesome and he's owning it and I step back from then I was but we already knew former Navy seal went from 300 plus pounds to this

fit individual you know Goggins he's a verb and adjective and you know and I've thrown

down right so it's like shit you know if someone else just breaks down on stage you know

okay like I hope this guy can make it in life that's the the exact right it's like week you worry sometimes for people like that I don't worry about David Goggins because he's a super star and we have a different mindset around him again and so he has the permission to do whatever the hell he wants yeah that permission thing for you me but this this notion of earned the right I mean there are people like James Cameron who wrote all these movies and was famous for like

doing all these super difficult things and then a few years back was like claiming that testosterone

“poisoned men and that his testosterone was the worst thing and everyone that liked his movies”

said hey listen easy for you to say now you built that career on some of that so it wasn't in my opinion taken that seriously he meant like I did a few years this but like I don't like that's like when our colleagues are like oh I'm no longer going to publish a nature in science I'm going to go to these like you know these open source journals like you got in the national academy on nature in science papers so like you're not kidding anybody well that you're making an important

point which is that once you you know I always find it interesting with celebrities once they become

super famous I can now disclose you know I've been depressed or I've been anxious or I've been overwhelmed but for some reason you know they didn't want to take their risk when they were younger and their careers because again the perception is like oh anxiety depression whatever it is that's weak and so that's the point the point is is that we raise kids boys in particular to believe that these feminine type of motions which are not feminine by nature that just human emotions are

weak and therefore that means I'm going to be perceived as not only weak but potentially homosexual and that's also a stigma and so what do I do I suppress I deny I ignore interestingly enough for women what their research shows is that much less likely to suppress or deny much more likely to rumenate a couple of things yeah for so I I feel like and I could be wrong but I feel like the stereotype of gay men being feminine has fallen away somewhat yeah I grew up as

you know in the skateboarding community there's Brian Anderson he was a big expose in the not expose where they exposed him where he voluntarily you know came out in New York times and he's like he's one of the most aggressive you know you know skateboarders out there aggressive in the skateboarding right so he's big dude you know so I feel like that stereotype is kind of shifted a bit where

“people assume that there's a range I think you're ambitious there I think you're right I mean we know”

so being gay is still silly yeah for sure okay I mean if you ask 100 people to run like a gay man they're still caught in the revenge of the nerds yeah they're gonna they're gonna show you someone who's you know more feminine or you know kind of stereotypically feminine to be honest with you so while they you know I mean certainly I remember when I was 18 I went to a gay bar and I grew up in New Jersey it was very homophobic the only gay person I really knew was my mother's hairdresser

who was very flamboyant and then I went to this gay bar and I was like oh my god it's like Wall Street

nevertheless if you ask the majority of people it's still considered to be you know the mindset is

feminine god it yeah I guess if you grew up training in gyms which I did you're round a lot of like very strong physically strong gay men yeah they were kind of early to the gym culture you know so so maybe my my lens on that is a little distorted there's something interesting around this notion of cissy showing emotion and boys and we earlier we were talking about the movie standby me movie I absolutely love and it's just like a perfect story it's a Steven King

“story right turned into a movie um I think Rob Riner wrote that movie yeah and what's interesting”

about that movie it's the transition that happens right around puberty and between junior it's right before junior high school or oh it's between junior high and high school I can remember some some transition and the kids are at different developmental stages I feel like this is a big part of it where like let's say a kid is a little bit more emotional little more um coddled at home perhaps this is I'm making a lot of assumptions here and cries in front of a group of boys when you're

in the seventh or eighth grade some of those boys are are because of their stage of maturation they're not really little kids anymore they're like what are you doing and then you've mixed all those kids together and because of the way that schools and social dynamics are that can stay with a kid for a long time like being sort of having an emotional expression that can stick with you for like two or three years of school right so I feel like some of this stuff comes about that way

which is very different than like in a just I guess like a hypothetical scenario an adult male in the business place maybe use knew it you know where there's things tend to equalize a bit in terms of maturational stage and so these are two different things boys crying versus young men crying this is called a grown men cry again this is all nurture so if you go to schools that do our work I just interviewed a bunch of teenage boys actually it blow your mind they have a whole different

perception of emotion I asking these questions about men and boys and you know and their responses are like huh like what's wrong with crying like if you feel like crying you're crying like are you sure you know even I would know ridicule no ridicule I said well what if you get into a fight can you like talk to the kid about what happened and like tell them how you felt when they left you out

“and they're like of course that's what that's how we grew up that's but they grew up in a school”

that took a motion seriously they gave them the skills and the resources to do it it reminds me

actually I never forget this you know since we're on this topic of boys and men I was in the

beginning of my career doing training in emotional regulation in London outside of London a very kind of rough and tough neighborhood and the head mistresses they call it back then of the school she looked at me she's like you know something work this program's gonna turn the boys into homosexuals I'm like okay we're that come from you know like I'm thinking to myself like you need a lot more training than just emotional intelligence but I'll put that aside for a minute anyhow

I said you know I'm here so can we just go and do it let me let me demonstrate it not a problem we go like a fish ball here I'm like the teacher in the middle of the room I have like 25 teachers around me and like 20 kids in the middle and I start sharing a story

“about my life whatever it was that was about probably feeling discouraged I think it was one of”

when I first got into the martial arts you know it was tough I was not a tough boy and I was afraid of my shadow and I had been doing it all as bullying and abuse and you know going to a karate studio

it was a big shock for me I happen to have an amazing teacher who transformed my life

and became a career of my martial arts anyhow I told the story about that about how I failed my yellow belt and I hated myself and like not only was I bullied but I couldn't even get a freaking yellow belt discouraged hopeless and he's everybody's looking at me like where's this going the teachers the kids were like glued they loved hearing the story and then I said I'm just curious has anyone else ever felt the way I felt and I said just raise your hand if you've had that kind of feeling

every freaking kid in the classroom raise their hand and of course I look over that head

boys and girls we have we we've just socialized it and the socialization piece is really important

because even though with fathers talk to their boy children you know is different you know it's the tough enough it's that other these more feeling words with girls and with boys we're not born that way we are socialized into you know having these complicated relationships with certain emotions but it's not something that can't be modified with good instruction you're saying this I'm really I internalized so many things that skew my perspective on this I guess I should say

“I'm relieved to hear that expression of emotions among boys is more accepted now I think that's”

the generation that's going through this work the kids who are growing up in places that are not taking emotions seriously are growing up and are more are with a more stereotypical way of

viewing it it's got to be infused into your life you gotta have these conversations you got to be in

situations where like in our work just to give you an example like we're really rigorous about teaching this stuff this isn't just like comb by us sitting in a circle this is like all right everyone we've got a problem here there's you know the Gaga pit which isn't these you know this thing in schools you know there's a kid who nobody is you know allowing to participate that kid feels awful what's our obligation what are we supposed to do to handle that imagine you're that kid

imagine you're the one that nobody wants to be you know part of the game now we're going to

“get into groups and we're going to think about a what are the feelings b what are the solutions what”

do for yourself what do you do for the other person and it's like rigorous conversations around the techniques and they got a role play it and then we ask questions about the role play it's like well what if it goes wrong what happens if you say this and they say go blank yourself what do you do then and that's the kind of complex you know muscle building we're giving kids in terms of dealing with emotions as many of you know i've been taking a g one for nearly 15 years now i discovered

it way back in 2012 long before i ever had a podcast and i've been taking it every day since the reason i started taking it and the reason i still take it is because a g one is to my knowledge the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market it combines vitamins minerals prebiotics probiotics and adaptions into a single scoop that's easy to drink and it tastes great it's designed to support things like gut health immune health and

overall energy and it does so by helping to fill any gaps you might have in your daily nutrition now of course everyone should strive to eat nutritious whole foods i certainly do that every day but i'm often asked if you could take just one supplement what would that supplement be

and my answer is always a g one because it is just been also critical to supporting all aspects

of my physical health mental health and performance i know this from my own experience with a g one and i continually hear this from other people who use a g one daily if you would like to try a g one you can go to drink a g one dot com slash human to get a special offer for limited time a g one is giving away six free travel packs of a g one and a bottle of vitamin d three k two with your subscription again that's drink a g one with the numeral one dot com slash human to get six free travel packs

and a bottle of vitamin d three k two with your subscription there is a hard-wired bias towards rough and tumble play in males of all of all species including hours i think what you're talking about a little bit is a capacity also for kind of rough and tumble verbal and emotional exchange which is not necessary like f_u_ and this and that like but some of that is can be ingest some of it can be really damaging there's a something interesting that i learned

a long time ago it even in academia he's now dead but there was a very famous neuroscientist

“i'll never forget like went to my first make night meaning also like excited to be there and he came”

over here's you know he's pretty large guy and he grabbed me like grab any a goes so where you i was picking between laboratories between the place in that place because where's it's gonna where's it gonna be and then he had gave me his advice and then and that was a very comfortable exchange for me because i grew up with a lot of physical interaction usually you guys not putting their armor on me and and like tell me like so what's it gonna be kind of thing but oftentimes you know

if i interact with somebody that's kind of like an old friend or something there's they'll grab my shoulder you know just walking by there's a lot of just kind of physical interaction that just happens it certainly doesn't feel weird or a versa and i could see if somebody for instance was not used so like just a lot of physical interaction with other people that that could feel like a lot and so i'm wondering nowadays where where things with respect to sort of just the amount of

like at a physical distance or they uh you know seeing one another and like handshakes and hose

“what's up and you know or like you know just friendly the kind of physical banter i think it's cultural”

it's there's a lot of there's a lot going on there in terms of you know the type of school and you know where it is in the United States or in the world you know touches a is a cultural thing but i think you know what i want to say about what you said is that rough and tumble is fine of course you you know rough and tumble but there's when it becomes a power over and that's when it becomes a problem when you have no concern for the emotional life of the other this is boring yeah exactly yeah

the dialogue that sort of establishes hierarchy i guess is what if i'm really blunt about it

i just feel like that just to just happen naturally my friend group when i was a kid

like there were some kids who were more developed and more athletic or better at this or better at that we just kind of all fell into place it wasn't necessarily about being at the apex or being at the bottom I was intentioned a harm yeah we we we sort of formed a team uh where you understood that uh this kid was fast and this one was strong and this one was clever and this one was creative and actually

“there was a goofy kid on our street who was always the comedian i think later he actually tried to”

become a comedian or became a comedian and everyone just kind of like was like all right you didn't expect him to be like the other kid and you know expect yourself to come check off all boxes i wonder the extent to which young males in particular nowadays feel the need to check off all the boxes of what it is to be a guy play a sport you go to school the you know whatever well that's again the developmental thing and i think what happens is that in you know you watch kids play in kindergarten

then i'm thinking about this kind of stuff although it's it's it's it's seeking it's sinking in or it's uh sleeping in with the word um i was in a school recently uh and a boy raises hand then he was in the blue quadrant of our mood meter and he was feeling down or sad and i said just do you need anything right now and he said no and i got like i kind of like taken by surprise and i said you know you sure do you can talk about it he's like i don't want to

bother you sir and that was a i opened her for me you know that are ready like his emotions

“were a nuisance and that's what i want to make sure that we address no one's emotion should be”

a burden a kid should be able to talk about it and deal with it we want that kid to be a good learner we want that kid to be a good friend and if he's already suppressing and denying ignoring you know in kindergarten it's not going to be a pretty ride and those things change developmentally kids are much more comfortable talking to each other about their feelings in elementary school and middle school you know it starts getting you know i got to look around and again with the

homophobia piece and in high school you see um less and less touching you know or you know kind of the the kind of friendship kind of stuff that you might have seen early on and that goes back to the you know the things that we were kind of chatting about toxic masculinity kind of this manaz fear and again you know my hope is that we rethink child development we've spent so much time thinking about some of the unnecessary things you know reading and writing and arithmetic

obviously are important but if you don't recognize that how we feel and how we deal with our feelings is going to drive the quality of your relationships you're well-being you're ability to deal with life's ups and downs and the harsh feedback you're going to get in life and ultimately you know having your dreams come true you know it's interesting as someone who works at a university where everyone has perfect as they teach course everyone has great point average that are better than mine

were everyone plays an instrument I never heard of before everyone has done everything to get into this

place and so I have like 7800 students right there and I look at them all and I'm like guess what your SAT scores have no predictive validity then you can't remember it's range restriction it's like brass kit all basketball players are taught height is not going to make a break your your basketball performance same thing applies in a room filled with people with you know high academic performance and then all right well what is the predictor well obviously it's

going to be something else and then we start thinking about well what are the attributes that employers are looking for right now it's not technical skills as much as it used to be

and people will want to be around that person I found in my research for example that

manager and leaders who are good co-regulators that for example during the pandemic I did his longitudinal study and I found that in schools in particular where I do a lot of work that when a teacher perceived their leader as both self-regulated and who is good at co-regulating so what that means is that like I'm looking at you right now I'm thinking okay you know feels like the world's coming to an end are you going to fall apart or are you going

to make it that's number one number two is are you going to be there for me are you going to be to support me and deal with the cast that I've got to deal with and what we found in our

research is that highly predictive of the culture of the school, highly predictive of burnout,

highly predictive of jobs that is faction frustration levels were 40% lower in schools where

“there were leaders with these skills that's what people are looking for these days more so than anything”

else you know more so than beforehand I feel like the word that comes to mind is is calibration and in anticipation of today's discussion I was speaking to a friend I said you know where you get with kind of men expressing emotions you know and you know she said well I've seen you cry and I was like yeah you know you said it can be beautiful like you know you hear that right it can be beautiful and I said but when is a man expressing emotion a problem for you like an assuming

it's not like outward anger or abuse you know his sadness okay it was the example I gave and she said

if he gets very sad about things that happen a lot it makes it hard to imagine that how he would hold it together if really big stuff happened and so it's exactly what you described in the workplace right this notion of calibration so let's say I'm okay with people expressing their emotion crying when they're sad et cetera but if that's happening a lot under every day conditions I could imagine let's say you're in a work or a relationship with this person and you

think we're going to like people die you know more I'm 15 now you know people die as you get older

“more people die as it was kind of the way it works what's going to happen then I think there's this”

underlying question which is are you going to be available for all the other things we depend on each other for and this could be romantic relationship it could be in the workplace so I do wonder whether or not people are trying to work out so what people are calibrated to they trying to understand somebody's I don't want to say emotional set point but when they're able to you know just pack it down and deal with it on their own later or whether it really needs to become the focus like just

to just quickly layer in another example I have a friend who runs a big scientific laboratory their laboratory gathered together and did a presentation for this lab director and had created a statistical bubble map of their experience of being in the lab and there was a giant bubble in the middle that just said stress and they invited someone from HR and the whole idea here was to let the boss know that they were really stressed out and I said let me guess you were probably thinking

he came up in a very very hard branch of science and I said let me guess you're probably thinking what happened to science he said for a little while and then I figured well this is the next generation I have to work with this so they were calibrated to different set points and I could imagine that's hard across generations but even with in generation that's got to be really really tricky so you're all about measurement creating actionable tools is there a language around this is there a

way that we can yes learn to process and deal with our emotions express our emotions in a more healthy way also understanding of other people's motion calibration point a couple of things one is that going back to the kind of partner leader position is I think the confusion that people have well again going back to vulnerability and the motion disregulation is that me being vulnerable are me sharing that I'm anxious or overwhelmed or afraid means that I'm weak and I think what

“leaders need to do is recognize like during the pandemic I never forget this like the university”

shut down everything was freaking out I knew my team was freaked out they were stressed out about their jobs they were dealing with being parents and also being employees and working from home and all that stuff here I was like the head of the emotional intelligence lab and like how you doing marketing like great everything's fine I mean I'm like I hate my life I hate everybody around me you know I had this my little mom you know that story she was stuck with me and and then I

the skill so I decided to be really honest and say I'm going to be frank it's tough right now

but here's what I'm doing I'm going for that walk every day at five o'clock I can't go to my

hot yoga class but guess what I'm I found new workouts online that I'm doing and doing x, y and z so the point is is that I think vulnerability that's like sharing and like you know spewing out all the fears that you have is not helpful when it's not accompanied by the strategy and that's the key

“is that I'm feeling this way but here's what I'm doing about it that's what a role model is and that's”

what a parent needs to do the parent you know has to come home and say you know I can imagine this like you're a dad and you're trying to be a role model for your kid and my here's my dad I my dad went a hard day work daddy let's play son leave me alone done like that was the end of it

as opposed to dad comes home daddy let's play son you know you have to realize I have to just

just tell you something I just had a really rough day at work I actually got into a fight with a colleague in mind didn't go well and I said something that I really feel bad about and so dad just needs a little bit of time to just process that to just think about what I can say tomorrow to kind of help my relationship and if you don't mind I need that time right now I love you

“and we'll play later but right now I'm just not in a right space for it okay son okay dad”

all right let's stop there what did I just teach my son or daughter about feelings all right I'm a dude I'm a dad who has feelings I am someone who makes mistakes I say things that I regret I reflect on the things that I make mistakes about I problem solve about the things that I make mistakes about I need time to you know recoup you know my energy and then I can come back and be with you how much time do that take seconds yeah but how many of us you know are around people that

can process a motion that way that have the capacity to say I'm an dark place things in the go well I made a mistake I feel bad about it I need to strategize and then we'll come back and be together what happens to most of us we're activated like I'm pissed off at the person at work and I project and everybody else let's you know in my next situation and the power of emotional self-awareness going back to what we started with and the power of emotion regulation

is that I notice that there's a shift I notice that I'm feeling this anger this frustration I'm about to go into a new environment with my family and I know because I'm emotionally intelligent that it's not going to be pretty if I don't process that emotion before I move into the next situation so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a breath I'm going to take what I call a meta moment I'm going to pause take a breath I'm going to think about the best version of mark

the father I want to be the husband I want to be and then I'm going to open the door and arrive

“through that lens that's what this work is about it's what people need to learn”

I'm fascinated by time perception and I feel like the human brain is so incredible that being in

the moment and also getting ahead and thinking behind and what you're really talking about is projecting into the future in a healthy way not not future tripping as they call it but in a healthy way and I think that I mean broadly speaking I'm almost embarrassed to say this as an neuroscientist but you know the more limbic we are so to speak I realize that's not really a thing but the more limbic we are the more in the moment we tend to be and it's harder to get that version of ourselves

but when we're relaxed it's very easy to be like well I remember this time we're I'm going to project into the future so to some extent healthy recognition of one's emotions it seems healthy expression of one's emotions is the ability to feel but also split off from the presence enough to get perspective that the time perspective I mean it's all and shift in the time domain you know like I'm going to go to this you know this island in the Caribbean for a moment

although that might be a good useful tactic but that ability to tolerate stress and segment a piece of one's mind and emotions and go okay that's all happening and I'm going to get like right over here that is a skill so the way I like to think about it is that we have to move from automatic habitual unhelpful reactions to deliberate conscious helpful responses because we become more automatic when we're flooded with our emotions we rely more on habits

question always people say what is that what do you do that space how long as it's space I need

to some people say I don't need a meadow moment which is one of our tools I need a meadow moment you know and maybe you do maybe you take three loops around the house before you walk into the

“door to get your kind of Paris empathetic nervous system where it needs to be that is the key to”

emotion regulation right there. Richard Davidson on the podcast and he talked about this myth about meditation that it's supposed to clear the mind and make you relax and he said it's it's actually really about stress tolerance you're supposed to sit there and resist the temptation to get up and move like it's really stress and accumulation. I think is a really beautiful way of thinking about and different way of thinking about meditation so do you recommend that people meditate in order to become

better emotion regulators? 100%. Especially because if you can't be still it's going to be hard to access the good strategies. It's a necessary but insufficient strategy. I know that we're obsessed in our world right now with breathing and mindfulness and it's great but it's not enough. At the end I'm going to have to have the difficult conversation and regulate during that conversation. I can't

be in my room by myself meditating. I always joke with my you know I open my book with that story of

“my mother-in-law and I would take a breath. It's even clear why you have to get the hell out of my house.”

Right so like the breath may help you deactivate but it doesn't necessarily shift your perspective. That's mindfulness work and I want to jump in now because I think even the taking the moment to recognizing you need to take this meta-moment is a mindset piece. It's saying emotion regulation is important. I'll be a better version of myself if I don't walk into my house in this angry state and projected onto everybody else but that's we've only gone through one of like eight

domains that I think are important. The next is like you got to know what you're feeling because

the feeling as I said in my formula earlier is going to drive the strategy selection.

So that labeling piece is really important and I find that people's vocabularies is just awful.

“People find okay I'm upset. I don't think we did this last time but if I were to push you”

anxiety versus fear versus pressure versus stress. I've thought about these before so but it ends up being hair splitting and then I go into scientific operational definitions so anxiety kind of a generalized state of too much sympathetic arousal stress is one or usually I'd add to that you know one or several things that I can pinpoint as kind of a source of that elevated level of arousal you know panic would be if it you've gotten so far outside

the time domain perspective like that the physiology overtakes and overwhelms like I get into my science just. That's interesting because a lot of people well some most people by the way say it's all the same shit. You know you're you know technical you like well this is cortisol and this is you know up and up front and this is this and that's all good too but in the end what you're regulating oftentimes is the underneath the emotion and so anxiety

uncertainty around the future right I get anxious when I can't predict that's really what deep inside is I want everything to be exactly the way I want it to be and I can't control that so oh stress is having too many demands and not of resources pressure or something at stake is dependent upon your behavior fear is immediate danger so when I give you those kind of what we call in psychology the core relational themes the appraisals that are part of those emotions

does it make you see how your strategy choice might be different yeah definitely um and speaking of you know I doubt it's just two bins but I've heard once that you know some people need to learn to externalize and or to talk about their feelings more other people probably less I've heard this uh I'm I'm friends with a couple and one of them says uh she's how she calls herself an external processor so if something's bothering her she has to externally process and her

wife is an internal processor so this obviously they've worked this out and it's pretty cool to see how they do it but but I was like is that really a thing external processor internal processor and then of course my gender bias is show up like a weird two women so like that maybe that language is used like in heterosexual relationships is different you know so and we laughed about it

she has many male female couple clients so there's just a couple's therapist so I got flipped

“on my back with that one the thing that I I find that I I keep projecting into everything I'm hearing”

and I want to put the little asterisk here and say that the reason I share these like things that are happening inside is I like to think that they're perhaps a proxy for what some people are thinking or not but it's that we really at least in the United States we really are not a culture that's clearly defined it's terms let alone it's ways of being around emotions like this is not like my dad growing up in Argentina in a certain era where sure there was a range

but the culture was fairly clearly defined I mean here we've got it all like I do

men expressing anger some people call that passionate depending on what it's about other people

call that scary and disregulated it goes back to your relationship with anger and so you know we construct these emotions in our brains based on our experiences so I grew up with a dad who had you know press lips and red face and look like he was gonna like take his belt off and whack me and so my perception of anger is probably different than your perception based on our upbringing that's just we have to acknowledge that now I could be over reacting to anger which is not going

to be helpful in my life so I've got to learn to realize that everybody's like your dad some people can be angry and not aggressive but that's that's the emotional intelligence journey of learning if I had no cultivating of skills I would just assume that's anger and that's not

“anger that's one way of expressing anger that I learned and I think people get caught up in that”

they get attached to what they learned early in life and don't realize is it there's another way it's kind of why people oftentimes get stuck with trauma because they are fixated on that experience that they had and they haven't learned how to reframe or haven't learned how to compartmentalize that particular experience in their lives I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors element element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't that

means the electrolytes sodium magnesium and potassium all in the correct ratios but no sugar

proper hydration is critical for brain and body function even a slight degree of dehydration

can diminish your cognitive and physical performance it's also important that you get adequate electrolytes the electrolytes sodium magnesium and potassium are vital for the functioning of all

“cells in your body especially your neurons or your nerve cells drinking element makes it very easy to”

ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes my days tend to start really fast meaning I have to jump right into work or right into exercise so to make sure that I'm hydrated and I have sufficient electrolytes when I first wake up in the morning I drink 16 to 32 ounces of water with an element packet dissolved in it I also drink element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water

and electrolytes element has a bunch of great tasting flavors in fact I love them all I love the watermelon the raspberry the citrus and I really love the lemonade flavor so if you'd like to try element you can go to drink element dot com slash huberman to claim a free element sample pack with any purchase again that's drink element dot com slash huberman to claim a free sample pack so this far we've highlighted at least one thing that can be very useful for emotion regulation which is

the you know some short form of meditation for stress tolerance they can give somebody a create a gap or a an opportunity in a moment to at least take some time and regulate a bit I'd like to layer on something else which I'm hearing I don't want words in your mouth but that I'm hearing which is we should all know our assumptions or our presumptions based on our upbringing correct they we need to do this for ourselves no one can do it for us no single article is going to

spell out the full array of ways that one conceptualizes anger or sadness for men for women for straight people for gay people like but this space is actually worth thinking about right right now there's a there's a little bit of a battle against introspection this is not introspection I want to be very clear that's a separate matter but this is really just what any really good scientist would do is to know your assumptions before you generate a hypothesis I mean it isn't introspection I mean

okay fair but just like anything over introspection leads to rumination and so we're not recommending like I don't want you Andrew to like be obsessively compulsively checking in with how you're feeling

of that maybe you do I don't I don't I don't think so emotions matter when they're going to either help or interfere with our performance and that's when we have to check in most of the time thank goodness they're in the background yeah you know when you're driving you know you're not thinking I'm feeling how am I feeling every weird like that would just be weird and you don't want

“to do that but checking in with ones assumptions based on our upbringing I think would be very useful”

very well you got the point and has that been formalized into you know people love

questionnaires I I think if it hasn't been done I think it'd be amazing about eight months ago I had

this wild experience where I realized I had this massive assumption worked into my framework so I these friends and I was visiting them and they called me upstairs and there was a bird flying around and it was like flying into the windows and I was like oh my god you know I had birds growing up Kiwi and sugar Ray Leonard were like my life before I hit puberty and birds were my life you know I love birds I love animals of all kinds and I I was looking over there and this bird is flying

into the window it's not going to make it out it's just doing immense damage to itself and one of them said you know he keeps flying against the window I was like again I tried to get him out and

I couldn't get him out really high ceilings we didn't have the right thing and I said you know I'm

just going to open the windows go downstairs come back and check and and I ended up going back and they said well is he okay is he okay and I like this it he at bird is like flying into the window it's like this moron is going to kill himself he got out eventually and about two weeks later one of them called me and said listen I really need to talk to you about something it's really been on my mind that was like okay and and she said you know I was really disturbed how you

reacted it's like what do you mean I was like I was like trying to help the bird like you know I love animals I mean I really do I mean one of the reasons I like doing the work I do now and said

“what I used to do is I don't have to work on animals anymore I hated it honestly you know”

understand why it has to be done in many cases but I hated it so she said well just your talking

is bird like he's an idiot and I realized in that moment I was like oh shit I was like if you had said oh that poor girl she's she's flying against the window when like oh the poor thing and she really needs you know and I immediately realized this like strong sex slash gender bias that I had that if it that if a female animal is somehow damaging herself like oh my god help her say for and with with him same if it's a boy same thing I want to help

but then my my some shows you idiot like you idiot like like like I would you know and I realized that you're up in a big pack of dudes and someone does something stupid you're like you're an idiot like what are you doing but it's a it's actually to me it was a it was a mode of affection I'm sure I upset some people by saying this but in full disclosure I just had this massive assumption and I've actually had to pay attention to that going forward but I didn't realize I had

that really strong bias like and this is all going to that mindset area of emotion regulation I mean parents have that with their kids I can't tell you how many kids you know you observe a parent with their son or daughter doesn't matter and the kid is trying to like climb a rock and the parent because of their own fears you know how am I gonna be careful be careful be careful and often the kid is losing their self confidence to climb the thing as opposed to a parent who's

skillful you know who checks their assumptions you know I'm nervous okay fine you're nervous you know you're probably you're probably not gonna get her take a take a breath and maybe say something like honey gosh that looks like it's really hard I'm pretty confident you're gonna get there let me just come a little closer to be there just in case something goes wrong but I really do think you're gonna make it what do you think that's instilling in the kid totally different way of thinking

about it and so that parents assumption that person parents fears is being projected if there are more skilled at co-regulating and recognizing my job is to instill resilience and my kid my job

“is to help my kid feel like they can do it on their own because that's what this work and co-regulation”

I'm doing which I think is so important is this intentional you're being super intentional about supporting other people and managing their emotions but the whole goal of it is to support the other person and being capable of regulating on their own eventually not codependent not coddling but actually instilling the belief in the other person that they can do it I love that I guess what I'd love to know is is there a formal process or questionnaire et cetera to learning to understand one's own

see the world in and around emotions gender gender specific emotions because I think that just

“be very useful and has then it allows somebody to do what you just described and really know the”

difference between helping somebody get to the point where they can manage their work with their emotions on their own versus projecting our own beliefs around hey this is the way it's supposed to be done exactly yes there are plenty of surveys actually in my book I even get people list of them you can play around with that and just look at your minds as an attitude about them and you'll see patterns I had no cognitive awareness that I had this word relationship to happiness

until I did my own exercise and it was eye-opening for me and it's actually I've said goals for

myself like mark people want it when they are plotting you when you're giving your speech let them

enjoy it if they're if they're plotting it means it was good don't be like you know like breathe be present and take it in and actually it works it's a beautiful phenomenon the awareness of our programming can liberate us from so many painful things we spent a lot of time on this which is interesting because I don't usually spend so much time talking about these assumptions and mindsets and beliefs we spent some time talking about

the vocabulary words which is very important you've got to be self-aware anger is not the same as disappointment envy is not the same as jealousy happiness is not the same as contentment anxiety stress pressure and fear and overwhelmed are all different and I know people listening might be like oh my god you're overwhelming me but you know we have our app that you've seen how we feel up to give you that vocabulary and it really does matter it matters for communication

it matters for getting your needs met it matters for choosing the strategy but again it's not

“enough so you got to know how to breathe and you have to tell your mindfulness work to bring the”

temperature down to still your mind I mean think about our minds nowadays I mean they're just the ability to process information has dwindled completely just to give you one example we didn't do like two and a half into videos for trainings people won't get through them thirty seconds and this is why people are learning anything anymore could you how you get a teacher an emotional regulation strategy in thirty seconds it's like an Instagram post

of course that's driving me crazy too because so many influences are my favorite one recently was this very famous influence or teaching about emotional regulation and she said you know I've decided to throw away my anxiety and so she's in the car and she opens the door and she's like good dying anxiety and I'm thinking of myself like that door is gonna hit you so hard in the face but yet three thousand five thousand twenty five whatever likes and people are like oh my god

I'm throwing away my anxiety it's like you can't throw away your anxiety it doesn't work that way the quick fixing is an issue then we got to learn how to rethink our feelings that's the programming we have to do we have to learn some of the things that you've spoken about another podcast here whether it's the cognitive re-appraisal whether it's the reframing whether it's the distancing whether it's you know having gratitude as opposed to resentment and envy

I mean I never had anyone helped me practice cognitive regulation nobody ever taught me there was

even if I never knew there was a thing called reframing and it's saved my life as an adult because again we go in with the assumptions about other people too and if you can say win a minute mark is there another way to look at this is there another store you can be telling yourself around this this goes back to something we talked about early we want to be careful about that because an abusive relationship so it can become gaslighting right honey you know you're too sensitive

no you're a jerk I'm not too sensitive you're trying to make me feel like you know bad about the fact that you're lying to me all the time not helpful and that can be that's also reframing but it's a form of deception you know where another person is trying to define your reality for you super scary and we can do that to ourselves too we can trick ourselves and to believe in things

“that way reframing is playing with this idea of telling yourself a new story but you have to always”

be a scientist about it and that's the one thing about all the strategies is that you have to come back as a scientist and ask yourself the question is it's helping me live the life I want am I in a better relationship am I better able at managing my anxiety applying these cognitive strategies or these labeling strategies I find psychology fascinating the reason I became a biologist however is because I got confused by psychology

but I remember thinking okay you know I could see the argument maybe even the experiment for healthy expression of emotion allows that emotion to move through allows us to be healthier physically mentally I can also probably find a manuscript that shows that the longer for every minute longer

we focus on being angry that our anger grows and I don't know what the answer is I sense that's

“probably not the case but I just remember being very afraid of the contradictions absence makes the”

heart grow fun from the out of sight out of mind it was like which one is it exactly and of course it's both right I mean and that's the complexity of the human minds I decided to think about cells and circuits instead and serve me well in my career I probably in my life I remain intensely interested in the sorts of issues we're talking about now including these generational differences and and here's my question typically most work school and other environments are hierarchical in the sense that the older

people have more seniority and more power I sense that nowadays there's an understandable concern

and interesting young people's emotions and emotional processing but I also get the sense from my

peers that there's this kind of fear of the younger generation like they're actually in control I just got through doing three two-hour long trainings because Stanford understandably has you do like

“harassment training and workplace safety workplace violence you have to learn what the rules are”

and I was very surprised to realize that all faculty and staff and some postdocs take this training students don't take it meaning you have two completely different views of what the rules are and this is not unique to Stanford this is unique to a lot of big organizations and it's not even a criticism I'm sure like everything at Stanford there's a rationale but it's kind of interesting you

would hope that there would be a universal at least no-manclature just like we know what it might

a country are here and in Nicaragua it would be nice to know that you know anger and disappointment while those words are spoken differently in two different countries that there's sort of a basic universal understanding of what emotions are what they're not how much comes from our past how much is about our physiology and kind of how to work with them and I'm not saying there's going to solve all the problems in the world but a lot of the problems that I see out there are misunderstandings

about where the line is that's si si no that's healthy emotional expression okay that's anger no that's passion that person's a narcissist no that person just isn't spending a lot of time thinking about their own thoughts and on and on and on I'm certain that one of the reasons your work and your colleagues work is so important is because we need a universal nomenclature we need an agreement that there's at least a way to understand and navigate this stuff this is why the work I do in schools it's not

like a teacher comes to a training and does it in their classroom it doesn't work that way I learned this the hard way it's got to be a systemic approach the leaders the teachers as students in the past need all the same language to describe the work we do on emotional intelligence it makes a huge difference the superintendent can go into the kindergarten room and have that same conversation we all know what these emotions mean and we're all thinking like scientists around

“emotions I want to just go back though because something you said I think is important to address”

and I wish I only wish that there was the correct answer to how we should feel and what we should do with our feelings it just doesn't work that way if funny story about this so I'm giving a speech to 1500 police officers how I don't think we're told in advance that some guy from Connecticut was going to be giving a speech for three and a half hours about feelings and so I walk into the room it was like out of a freaking movie and all of a sudden it's like and we're welcoming

Mark to talk about emotions and all of a sudden you can see these facial expressions and like some of the I mean these guys were see people who can't see me right now like slouching and this he's like you know what they're guns in their pockets I'm thinking I said what have I got myself into and so I started you know playing around I'm telling jokes but I've got to figure out how to meet these this group and the thing that struck me that I haven't forgotten was one guy just stood up

and he's like I'm not sure I'm interested in this I said okay he said but I am I do want to know one thing doc what's the only strategy that works and I said and of course I'm a psychologist like it doesn't work that way there's many strategies it's an emotion by person by context phenomenon and I people are so desperate for the right answer I think the beauty of it is that

beauty of it is that we have to ask ourselves questions over the course of our development

is how I'm living my life working for me or against me to achieve my goals and we have to check him with other people like our partners and our friends and our kids and whoever else and our colleagues and I hate to say that but the people who you know are dying for the correct strategy there is no correct strategy every you know I worked as a fitness instructor for 10 years of my life I taught martial arts I saw so many people use exercise as a way to escape their reality they just

wanted the treadmill for 10 hours a day with an eating disorder who were thinking this is you know my healthy strategy and they were running their lives the same thing with food the same thing

with you can trick yourself into believing things the goal of this work is to help people pause

“consider ideas and then you have to go back and say how is my life how are my relationships”

how's my work going etc and that's where the the beauty comes out of the learning I'm using my checking back into my developmental biases as a way to ask questions that I hope are relevant to everyone and now especially and one of the things that I've observed is that there seems to be a broadening of the context in which broader ranges of emotions are allowed online is a really good example of all of it all of it right and I think that the judgment

about well this person is losing their cool and the someone say well you know so and so stepped in front of his motorcycle for instance you know I mean these are the debates that reflect all these developmental biases and in some cases there's a legal line and those legal channels by the way are very interesting there's a great channel it's a little too hollywood because the guy worked in hollywood but he's a lawyer and it's called the legal beef I don't know but he does these

everyday cases of like his someone says like it's illegal to film here you can't touch my camera you know and he goes well that's the legal beef tells you and he gives you exactly what the

“law says and so I think we tend to like that I certainly like that like where I like”

dick black lines clear operational definitions but it is true that for instance growing up I wasn't of the mind that you know it's not okay to cry I just but it was definitely certain places certain times yeah it doesn't seem like the workplace and school and online it's become either more accepted or it just happens that people are bringing more of their own stuff and I think one thing I worry about I'm showing my age here but the one thing that I worry about

as people think about their emotions without having really good strategies to work with them is that they lose the ability to be effective I agree because time is running and I hear from a fair number of friends who's kid is struggling because they're dealing with depression or they're dealing with anxiety or they have a cannabis used disorder or they're times ticking and

“developmental milestones are real and so the question I have is how should people think about”

evolving their own ability to work with their emotions because you said it's a process it's a dance it takes time with the needs to really show up and get things done in life because you and I are two people who are agreed and have steady jobs and and it's we have space to think about this stuff

well we do and I always tell people that like for example there's a school I want to mention

its name because this is not a good story post the election this past election wrote a note to every student and said we recognize that some of you may be feeling overwhelmed by your feelings and if you need to take the day off it's okay I almost had a connection about that I was that's my father speaking a connection but I was like I cannot believe it is that way they weren't what it was cool that I worked with I wanted to call the head of that school and say like this is the worst advice you can

give people people have to learn how to live with difficult feelings and if we're going to give excuses to people to like you know they can just like I'm overwhelmed by what's happened and not get a process it and manage it and move forward in their life we're going to create a generation of very weak people so I couldn't agree more and that's not what this work is about like that's the confusion it's been politicized in many ways sometimes in this groups of people now that say this is

you're making kids fragile by having them talk about their feelings and it's called emotional intelligence a motion regulation we're not letting them like sit in their feelings all day long we want them to recognize is that feeling helping or hurting them achieve their goals

I think that's a huge huge issue right now and the same thing with discomfort like it's okay to be on

I mean my whole career is built upon being uncomfortable people saying I don't like your work your program's going to turn kids into homosexuals I don't want to talk about feelings you know you're this I'm a psychologist but you recreate your childhood with the public yeah there you go sublimated but you know I love that feeling that discomfort I sit with it

“I don't try to push it away and I think Mark what you're creating a solution”

that's to me is like the beauty of the work I don't get it if I were if I just got paralyzed you know by that I would what would I go in life I would be frozen we don't want kids to be frozen we don't want anyone to be frozen want people to be able to live their lives experience the full range of emotions regulate effectively and achieve their goals I'm no psychologist I said that four times but I have the strong feeling that your

martial arts training prepared you to be public facing because it is a relationship right and I'd

like to talk a little bit about that relationship specifically because you've been this amazing

ambassador for emotions what they are how to work with them in a healthy way and it's also still show up in life to not necessarily take the day off right I mean if you lose a close family member it makes we would all say like of course stay home take a day take what you need right but eventually come back you know that's important to come back it's important piece too to not as one scientist I used to work with say you know dissolve into a puddle he's to say

when someone's paper came back he said and if it gets for before you look if it gets rejected don't dissolve into a puddle of your own tears it was that kind of old school harsh thing but

“I think it came from a place of care because you're like listen it's not the end of the world”

and they've been graduate students who've killed themselves on the basis of their PhD

not going well I know stories about this sadly you have taken some heat for both being a champion of this process but also by not giving in to this idea that we're all just supposed to take the decade off and so you get it from both sides you're in a unique position yeah and I feel for you because some people will say hey listen your teaching people to be soft and clearly that's not what you're I'm advocating for and people have also said hey you're pushing us to push our

feelings away and there's a lot that we're really angry about in the world and how can you be talking about this when fashion is taking over there's a war and you know and and on and on and on so how have you just personally if you're willing how how is that landed and how have you decided to respond to that I love challenge and so you know I wrote this piece for time magazine and of course you probably know this but when you're writing out bed the publisher decides on the

title and they like to be provocative so they called it the overreaction epidemic and I got slam for it you know overreaction went out overreacting the world's coming to an end and it does feel like for many of us you know between wars and everything else happening political polarization you know does feel that way for many on both sides and I say yes but running around yelling and screaming at people how is that helpful like where is the benefit to you and to the other person

to move forward and so to me it just makes me think more creatively about the work I do and the other side you know where people have said that I'm now making people fragile because I'm getting kids and boys to talk about their feelings and it's going to make them more fragile as a matter of fact I saw somebody said recently that this work causes kids to have mental illness and I was like wow that's a good one and again this stems from misunderstanding

of the concepts a I'm a big stickler like you said operational definitions I want to be super clear about what I'm teaching I'm not teaching Lala I'm teaching you how to be emotionally self-aware would you agree that it matters to be clear about what you're feeling yes thank you okay so when you're clear about how you're feeling and if that feeling is disrupting you from being a good student or being a good partner or being a good manager leader do you think that you

“should use techniques to help you figure out how to manage it yes absolutely perfect that's what we”

teach it's really clear when you have conceptual clarity I think there's less confusion what happens that people it's got and politicized you know it's confusing around going back to what we spoke

the deal a kid comes to school with feelings we all have feelings from the moment we wake up in the

morning at the time we go to bed at night even when we sleep have you ever been irritable in the morning definitely yeah yeah and have you ever noticed that we call it incidental leakage it's not a great term but like you're irritable you really haven't processed it and you get maybe to the studio here and then maybe people are trying to interact with you but and you're not like the best version of

“you definitely yeah that's what happens and so that happens to a kid who's got and bullet on the”

bus or had a fight at home and you want that kids like every parent does I want my kid to be a good learner you know have good friends et cetera all right so now I'm teaching you a process Andrew that before you walk into the studio I want you to take 30 seconds maybe 20 if you get good at it did this check in take a breath how you feeling gosh I'm pissed off with that phone call I had I'm annoyed at this okay how do you want to be seen and talked about an experience in that studio

today that well that's a whole it's you know like I even saying that like it makes you like stand still and like reflect well I'm going to be this cool dude who's you know compassionate and creative okay well what do you need to get there and then you walk in and all of a sudden you have attributed the emotion to his actual cause which is that stupid fun call whatever happened and you know longer gonna displace that or projected or take it out on somebody else

do you think that would be a useful process for kids couples leaders to use definitely hell I'm gonna take seconds there you go this is not obsession with feeling this is not you know this is an opportune moments you know when I come home from work I'm I work a long hours and I'm tired and I'm irritable a lot of time I just am I got it switch my mindset to be the best version of

“myself as a husband so that's what we're trying to help people do and I don't want people to be”

confused by that I want people to be super I want real clarity it's articulating what your experience is recognizing that it may be helpful if it's helpful you got nothing to do congratulations if it's not gonna be helpful you need to think about those strategies is it labeling it maybe is it taking the breath maybe there have been times I've taken 15 deep breaths and I'm still irritable I need a new strategy I need to call a good friend and just say hey Doug can you like

I'm really struggling with this right now you got some thoughts not a problem getting social support is not weak it's smart maybe I need to take another walk around the block to just decompress

maybe I got a really shitty night sleep and I just need to recognize that I'm never going to be

the best version of myself no matter how hard I try because I haven't replenished you know the resources of my brain to be the best version of myself it's an unfortunate reality but tap water often contains contaminants that negatively impact our health in fact a 2020 study by the environmental working group estimated that more than 200 million Americans are exposed to PFAS chemicals also known as forever chemicals through drinking of tap water these forever chemicals are linked

to serious health issues such as hormone disruption gut microbiome disruption fertility issues and many other health problems the environmental working group has also shown that over 122 million Americans drink tap water with high levels of chemicals known to cause cancer it's for all these reasons that I'm thrilled to have Roa as a sponsor of this podcast I've been using the Roa countertop system for almost a year now Roa's filtration technology removes harmful substances

including endocrine disruptors and disinfection byproducts while preserving beneficial minerals like magnesium and calcium it requires no installation or plumbing it's built from medical grade stainless steel and it sleek design fits beautifully on your countertop in fact I consider it a welcome addition to my kitchen it looks great and the water is delicious if you'd like to try Roa you can go to Roa.com/Huberman and get an exclusive discount again that's Roa. RRA.com/Huberman

I love it and I've two reflections I'd love your reflections on the first one is

a positive states and emotions that are also dangerous when people are feeling over affiliate of over comfortable they sometimes say things that get them into real trouble they either

“disclose things or they make jokes that later they pay them the price for this is I think”

maybe not as common as anger and sadness and anxiety but given that some very prominent very very smart people I've seen completely destroy their careers by

not going to be around the bush it was fired for saying something that was totally it was actually

inappropriate and lame and stupid and you just go but this person is clearly intelligent they're the chair of a Ivy League school in psychiatry and you say well what happened and what was interesting to me were the tweets leading up to it you could say he was showing his true self but there was this sort of like ease and comfort around joking and there's certain jokes you just don't

“make and so I think what you're describing is equally important for not overstepping not”

you know hurting oneself or other people activation is activation so your heart rate and your you know different chemicals get released when you're super excited and when you're anxious activation might be the same the psychology of it is different right one is like anticipation

of like positive things one is anticipation of you know the negative things and of course

emotions drive are thinking or decision making everything so you know how many of us have made a mistake when we went too excited when we were young you know we won't go into those stories now excitement without regulation is not helpful it's funny because you tell that then I go back to the school situation and that's a big problem with a lot of teachers and like the kid is so excited they're just for you're going to see grandma after school and they

can't stop talking about it all day long and it's driving me crazy so positive emotions can be a pain about too and but they're afraid that they don't want to squelch the kids excitement and I say well let's talk about it what do you think I mean this is like the easiest solution I came up with on this spot I said what's the challenge he just can't stop talking about going to see his grandmother said well he must love his grandmother that's a great thing have you given

an opportunity to stand up in the front of the class to just tell everybody how excited he is and just let it get it out what do you mean you want me to give him the like give him like the throne I said yeah I want you to try this out I want you to let him what he said I can't stop talking about waiting to say Johnny I'm going to give you a minute to get up and tell everybody how excited you are but then we're going to go back to math we're going to go back to science and

let me know how that works and of course two weeks later I go back and visit she's like you're a magician I'm like I'm not a magician he just needed an outlet for his emotions give the kid the one minute to just tell everybody how excited it is but also let him know that the expectations that I have for you are not changing just because you're excited about going to see

“grandma doesn't mean you have to focus that's the magic of the work be a channel not a damn there you go”

I didn't make that up I learned that when I was a camp counselor in your semedy you get a kid that you know back then we didn't have concepts of ADHD yeah you got a kid that back then you would just be like oh this kid is he's at a control it wasn't a harming it was just like

would not settle down you can't like to say hey sit down I mean that kid would always be getting

in trouble get sent home so you give them an opportunity to do something but then you have to like let them settle down likewise for the kid that was more creative and less physical if your entire bunk was a bunch of kids who were super physical that always would happen but then you find out this kid it was like had some some something of value to share with the other kids and then it would establish his place in this group there's a very weird thing happening lately online

which is this obsession with the 90s I grew up in the 90s so a teen in the 90s went to use them

“and there's an example that I saw recently that I think is really relevant to what you're describing”

it was a picture of a classroom sitting around listening to a radio I remember doing this it was an actual picture and it said when this Challenger space shuttle blew up we all listened to it with our teachers because we were listening to that space shuttle launch and then afterwards we went back to our lesson plan we didn't process it for weeks and weeks and someone said gosh I missed the 90s now my school is a little bit different I actually remember the teacher going around the room

the next day and asking people if they had anything they wanted to share and people would share their thoughts and then like one kid said like I heard they found a foot you know and then she was like okay Garrett you know like settled down you know like some kids were being a bit morbid and stuff maybe she shouldn't have done that I don't know but there was an opportunity but I think that was the last it was ever discussed and we witnessed with our ears it's not the

same as seeing it but we witnessed with our ears a bunch of people blowing up and it was true it was like okay this happened this is tragic we're gonna talk about it for a bit and then we're not gonna talk about it anymore I love your thoughts on the picture I just laid out what happened what's happening now this kind of emphasis on let's get back to when things were not as coddled I'm just

that kids are growing up and now is different it is different at world I was not thinking about

climate change when I was a kid I really didn't worry about who is president or not president and the whatever's going on politically I wasn't thinking about you know wars as much as people are thinking about right now I wasn't thinking about artificial intelligence and technology is going to take over my career so there are real concerns that high school kids tell me they're feeling and it's really causing them a lot of stress we haven't created solutions we're not teaching them how to

manage it we're gonna have to learn how to manage it in this world we're living in so I do think you know the challenge is there I just want to say one thing that's related which is this artificial intelligence piece that is obviously prominent right now in society which people are freaked out about for some reasons and thrilled about for other reasons the thing that I'm most concerned about is this is that about 20% of adolescents now report using technology AI as a therapist

“you know as a companion now do I think you can get advice for me I am about like stress definitely”

do I think it's gonna help a little bit do I want people to be in relationship with the chatbot absolutely not and here's the deal when I was a kid who was being bullied and like spit on the bus and my head being banged in the windows and I came off the bus what I needed was a human being to say I love you are you and being to grab my hand are you and being to say we're going to get through this together there's no way to take now you're gonna replace that and I would argue that

this this obsession with technology to solve our emotional problems is a symptom of the thing we started talking about from the beginning which is this fear of intimacy this fear of connection this fear of being present with people's emotions it's so scary for parents to be with their

kids emotions they're I never learn how to do with my anxiety can't do with my kids anxiety rather

than not know that they're feeling anxious and then I said you want your kid married to a chatbot and so the real issue in my humble opinion is that we are cultivating more and more disconnection

“and I think about this you know developmentally I don't think you know in general you know”

I was stressed out as a kid and I was I was at the age where video games were beginning hot popular and I got that first little football game I could spend 10 hours a day on that that was my way of not being in the real world of not dealing with my challenges of my parents not connecting with me then I got to walk man and then the internet came and then I got email and then I got social media and now it's AI this is just an endless trajectory of outside influences that are

pulling us away from being in relationship and I think I wouldn't say this I wouldn't say this

publicly this is the podcast is that I never thought evolution can move so quickly but I do

feel that way all of a sudden what's happening now this chronic disconnection and kids are preferring to text instead of to communicate with their friends there's research you know anxiety stress and depression are increasing consistently and it comes back to connection and strategies yeah a good friend of mine who's a geneticist said it's you know takes a very long time to evolve yes species it doesn't take very long to devolve a species you can crash a species very quickly

in terms of um people feeling overwhelmed and saying I can't do anything right now because of what's

“happening in the world I remember when I was an undergraduate the 90s were pretty peaceful time”

and we had Gulf War and things like that but relatively speaking and the professor who's lab I worked in told me this was in Santa Barbara where they burned the bank down during the Vietnam more protests but he said that in the early 70s very early 70s and late 60s that you'd be giving a lecture he was a young professor and students were just stand up what about the war in Vietnam and he's like this is a physiology class we're talking about this and they'd say what about and

the students would start protesting so this is not a really new phenomenon I agree I mean this was happening people feeling overwhelmed people feeling like the campus was theirs they're going to make noise I'm not justifying unlawful protests I'm not I'm certainly not justifying any kind of protests where certain students are being restricted I'm fundamental don't write I'm fundamentally opposed to that but this notion that people are feeling overwhelmed and young people are full of energy

backdrop the lines moving the conveyor is moving forward I agree but I think that in order for

people to feel like and this comes from the article that was written by you you quoted a comment someone said we're not overreacting we're underreacting so in order for people to feel heard I want to double click on that comment but in order for people to feel really heard and understood

“in their reaction I think it's also important that our society just can't sit around protesting”

all day and we can't collapse and we can't dissolve into a puddle of our own tears and I do want to talk to you about the ways that you're formalizing this work because one thing that I think is wonderful that's happened in the last ten years or so is that we've moved from the language of

consciousness and mindfulness which I think are great terms of course to long exhale breathing

to the notion that stress can be adaptive alley crumbs lab it can make us better to an understanding that there's a way of working with your physiology to be stronger and yet acknowledge your physiology I'm feeling stressed now I need to bring my stress down I'm exhausted I need to figure out a way to have more energy work on sleep et cetera et cetera I don't think it's happened yet but I think it's starting that psychology needs the same kind of organizational principles so that people can

move past narcissism gaslighting claiming everyone that they don't like is is being abusive and there's been a sort of psychological I don't want to say collapse but I don't think people know how to

navigate this space whereas I think mindfulness consciousness and the idea that we need to pick

our sleep we need exercise we need some light you know I and others have worked very hard to

“try and get people to understand like you need to work with your body you're not trying to conquer”

your body but you do need to nudge it and sometimes push it you don't want to be that person 10 hours on the treadmill who's suppressing everything and I think where psychology has been a little bit self-defeating is that there's a lot of language and it can start to feel like oh this is a lot I get shit to do so along those lines if you are told you know so until it's gaslighting me there are narcissists that you know fascism is taking over and like you expect me to not be outraged

quote we're not overreacting we're underreacting you're a martial artist you're a very state guy where do you start what do you say to that person well I think we have to ask them if they're being effective and so is whatever you're doing leading to the change that you want to have and if they know about emotions you know I don't know about you but when someone is yelling and screaming at me I shut down I'm no longer present and so they're actually not getting

their goal achieved if they're asking me to do something different or they're trying to help me understand something if they can't communicate in a way that I can understand it and I want to actually

“listen it's not going anywhere so I think that people need to recognize that I'm a person who is”

both and so just to give you concrete example our program ruler which is the school-based work that we do is in all the schools in one district of Harlem New York 21 schools thousands of kids the teachers the leaders the deputy superintendent don't as my former student they're facing food security these are really troubled families and many instances they're facing obviously racism they're facing poverty you know home insecurity of course I want to solve for that problem I would do anything

I could to make sure everybody has a meal at the same time every one of those kids is being dropped off at school and we're expecting that kid to thrive for eight hours a day in that classroom how could I not teach like kids skills to thrive I have to there's no obligation there's no there's it's it's my moral obligation to help that kid be the best version of themselves no matter what's their background is no matter what their circumstances are it doesn't mean that I'm not

also thinking about that and I think that people in our society today this is part of that article is that we're so focused on the big change many of us have very little control over the big change I feel blessed that I have some control over the lives of thousands of kids that are waking up every morning and trying to be the best version of themselves but they need help they need strategies any teachers who are well who can be the best version of themselves

for them they need leaders who care about the teachers and so I think that we have to find in our own way I know my way and I sleep well at night thinking I'm doing important work

but I do think that the more well people are the better they're able to be at problem-solving around the larger societal issues I don't think a disregulated society is going to solve its problems I agree completely and I'm grateful for the work you're doing I I feel like that again I just draw the parallel to what's happened around sleep stress regulation

exercise nutrition I feel like there's always resistance at the beginning like what is this

stuff like I don't want a morning routine I just want to get up and do my thing like I don't want to hear the alcohol's bad for me like I mean when I was coming up in academia like alcohol was everywhere the happy hour is that was the source of a lot of problems I was a little bit drinker so for me it was like great opportunity to go do something else but if you didn't drink with your senior

“colleagues it was like people like what's wrong with you or something like that I think what causes”

a tide change is when first of all someone creates a structure around things that science shows work you've been doing that and I love that you're taking this broader through books through podcasts into the school districts we'll talk more about the ways you're doing it ways people can incorporate

some of this but I think at some point a few or more brave individuals start incorporating a

structure like oh wow maybe Matt Walker's right maybe sleep when your dad is not a good philosophy and now the mindset is well if you sleep you're smarter if you're smarter you're more effective and so the people who are doing best are incorporating a structure and then I also think inevitably what happens and we're kind of edging up against this now at least in the sorts of things that I teach is a pushback like okay enough structure like we need some freedom I'm sensing that

now people like how many things am I supposed to do and the idea is like you're not supposed to do them all you're supposed to do what you need right and and I acknowledge that that's happening now that's the contour of sort of the areas that that I've worked in and tried to share in the area that you work in trying to share and I realize there's overlap I feel like the structures there I think great examples of people kids and adults who are really not just succeeding not just

getting by but are like really kicking butt by virtue of doing the things that you're talking about

“that's what's going to lead to a system of change I think about Steve Curr talks about meditation”

and he's Steve Curr so you're like okay people were like basketball like this guy's a stud and he meditates it's okay meditation is no longer considered magic carpet stuff yeah right for every one of these things that's kind of how it is it's like breath work okay like I know whim Hof and it was a little bit eccentric people like oh yeah breathe exhale that's like everyone does that now so no one's gonna be like oh now we're breathing like but how much time do we have to spend breathing and so I

think with what you're talking about I feel like it's central to everything I actually worry about our species if we don't incorporate the sorts of things that you're talking about you talk

about you know the idea of regulating is not suppressive okay I think the the concepts are critical

and the practices are critical so could you give us a couple examples of the concepts that are just core concepts we started off this way but and then maybe a few practical tools so that people can start to think about this in the same way that 10 years ago we might have talked about like hey like you think sleep when your dead is working for you but you're actually kind of an idiot when you don't sleep and you're in a job that requires you to be smart now an idiot this kind of thing

“yeah I think firstly you know in my book I have something called the dealing with feeling wheel”

and this goes directly to what you're thinking about when people are just regulated when parents are like dealing with a kid for example who's just regular they get desperate let's take a deep breath and breathe breathe no let's go for walk no let's cook together no let's play a game no let's do this and you go crazy that's not helpful I'll give you an example for myself for a couple of months I've been just I have so much work and I have not slept well the last week I've prioritized going

a bit early I prioritized like real dark you know the dark in room and like like I woke up today at seven thirty it was like that's a miracle like seven thirty it's like you know it's a middle of the afternoon and I feel energized today I feel you know and I'm in a good place and I have felt that way for like a week now I recognize I'm building new patterns for my sleep it's no longer in my wheel a priority I figured it out there are some days where my I just feel

I can't think straight I'm like all over the place I realized that I've been maybe on social media too much I realized I have like 85 things I might to do list and I'm like mark you got to go back to your mindfulness work you need some breath work you need to just sit

you need this back into your routine there are the days I sit around I think so lonely I don't

talk to anybody anymore you know I feel like so like you know whatever and I'm like any

“connection I'm desperate for connection I think that's the way we have to look at it that there are”

these components of our well-being and that are correlated and are the same as what we do to regulate our emotions there's the self-awareness piece am I am I at all like paying attention to my emotions right now there's that breath work piece there's the cognitive work there's the relational work there's the biology of the sleep, the nutrition, the physical activity like for example one of the things that happened for me in writing this new book was that I became very very

committed to my own fitness much even I'm more relaxed was like you know that was like teaching 10 karate classes a week that was younger than I was in the best shape of my life and I got like professor dumpy professor syndrome and like that is not I'm not getting on that stage looking that way anymore I was like whoa and I made this major commitment and one of the things that happened to me was that it became my go-to strategy for my overwhelming stress while writing my book

“and I remember saying to myself one day like Mark you may not finish this book but you're going to be”

the best freaking shape of your life and truthfully it transformed my life now here's what I'm

telling you that story because in the conversation with this friend Marco who is a trainer we started having these conversations around fitness identity and how it relates to emotional intelligence identity and I realized something magical which is that now at 56 it's been four years that I've like done my four workouts a week I'm going to have a really missed a workout unless I'm like on a vacation but I'll still do something else I cannot not exercise and this morning just to be

you know talking about you know coming on your rhythm and lab I'm like I woke up at seven thirty I'm like I gotta get there at this time but like I can't work out I have to work out before I go to your rhythm like I can't show up not doing my workout and I knew I would feel better I knew I'd be more present and I did my hour you know back workout but the point I'm really making here is that I identify as a person who exercises I it's like just who I am my vision for

the world is that we cultivate people who identify as well regulated because if you walk into a room thinking yourself I got this nothing you can say can trigger me I can get through this or I

“can manage my emotions life is gonna be completely different and that's why I end my book with this”

concept that people talk a lot about like be the best self and you're everybody's talking about their best selves but it really does relate to emotion regulation and is good research to support it that you ask me for like a concrete like technique well this is that thing we call them at a moment and I cultivated this technique with my colleague Robin she was a therapist working with patients in New York City and she's like I teach the most strategies and then they go home and they yell at each other

and I'm like I'm a scientist working in schools and everybody's like this is boring and then nobody wants to do this I'm like the motivation is not there people don't see the benefit people they don't see that their life is gonna be better gonna make better choices have better relationships etc so what's gonna make it a difference well as we know between stimulus and response

there is space okay so what do I do to fill this space well the first step is I got a sense

that some things going on I got to be aware well that just triggered me well that was not cool my automatic habitual response was gonna be who the after you think you are like don't talk to me that way or whatever it might be mark who is identifies as the most well-regulated person the whole wide world the feelings master the emotional guru he has a process he automatically takes the path he automatically builds a space he automatically takes a step back he does not go on that

gut he says there's a better way but that's not enough so now I have to think about my best version of myself in my role as a husband how do I want to be seen how do I want to be talked about how do I want to be experienced and my role as a professor and my role as a presenter different roles different selves and I've helped millions of people engage in this process by the way

the trigger and it brings you back to your values and then through the lens of Mark the

director of the center for emotional intelligence like he's a different dude he's a totally different guy than Mark who grew up in New Jersey being bullied in his triggered Mark was a center director is like you know as you know the the Yoda of emotional intelligence well how a he responds to this moment this is a beautiful challenge love it and so my point is is that we can do that for ourselves we can help other people do it we can do it in a moment ideally we'll do it proactively so when you go home

or when you come into work you pause you identify and you think about the best version of yourself and you enter into that lens my favorite story about this was you know we teach us in schools and this one kid you know when you know when people joke about things you know they got it so I'm in this school and this teacher is like Mark you know this stuff is you know it's really funny I said what do you mean she goes well this kid was really really not being kind of someone

on the playground and I call him out on it and he came over and I said you know I need to know exactly what happened and the kids said you know Mrs. Johnson I'm going to tell you what happened

by an age to take a minimum first like the kid knew if he if she were looking at what he

had done through the best version of herself she would respond differently that's the magic of the

“work well I think that the language around that moment is something that I'm going to”

with your permission I'm going to help propagate because I do think languageing and labels is very very important in terms of getting useful tools out more broadly you know again not to knock on the mindfulness meditation work that's gone goes back thousands of years but you know occurred to me at some point like there's there's genuine power for mental and physical health in these practices yoga needra etc and I had to like have a conversation with myself and you know

what I'm going to take some heat for this but I'm not going to call it yoga needra I'm going to call

non-sleep deep rest some more people do it and I apologize but that's you know you know there was a reason there's a reason to say this is the physiological side you know eventually now we know you can just do long exhale breathing right principles the same the languageing

“is so key for people to adopt these concepts and they can't drink from the fire hose this is”

also what I've realized they can't take it all at once but you're building a curriculum for people and it's so important I also I'm so struck by this the link that you discovered and and clearly embody of internalizing a fit person identification you know you're a coach of a team you're not going to be a slowly coach you're going to show that you also could you did all this and you could continue to do it if you if your students and your players

challenge you too right identifying with a certain emotional maturity regulation level that that is also key because for myself I mean many years ago I remember thinking you know I don't miss workouts I just decided I just don't miss them to the point where sometimes I probably should miss them I probably overshot the market I was like you know when I learned I don't train sick I now take weeks off everyone's now also those are structured around that so it's not push push push

to the point of self destruction but with having an emotional identity that you see in yourself

“and can live into I think that's a beautiful thing I mean David Goggins talks about having to”

have the old Goggins and the new one in order to be the new one because both live inside his head he sat in the very chair and explained both of them are in here but he has to take actions to be one and not the other every single day and I think as this language around what we're talking about evolves I do think it's going to go really far and wide I have a theory right now tell me where it's wrong because it's almost certainly wrong that many people are very in touch

with their extreme emotions of anger sadness feeling like they're just you know they're too woke there to their fascists like they're just in touch with the emotions and then we're really good at putting labels on other people's identities right there are narcissists there are fascists they're extreme woke but we don't really think about our own identity as much yeah we're kind of lost in the emotions and political parties people usually know where they stand

but what would this look like to come up like I'm not asking you to do this on the fly but I'm asking you to do this on the fly all right like like it's should we be thinking about emotional maturity emotional intelligence is there a word that like we can internalize like I'd

amount of endurance certain amount of I want to be able to run for the plane and not cough up

along I also want to be able to open the pickle jar want to be able to go up the stairs without pain I know I have a concept of what that is for me what is a label that works really well that people can start to fill in the bins of what it is to be an emotionally intelligent person I think it's a emotional intelligence because it's again we need concepts that are clear that can be defined that can be measured in that demonstrate predictive validity

and so every one of the skills I wrote a book on a motion regulation because that was the area that I want that a focus on right now because that is at the top of the hierarchy at the end

“it's what you do with the feelings that's the regulation piece but to do that you need to”

recognize your feelings understand them label them decide whether you want to express them or regulates the rule of framework emotion perception yes it's complicated but at the end it's about building relationships I can't know how you're feeling by your facial expression you know that from Lisa's film and barracks work but I can make hypothesis and I can check in and say hey did what I say land on you well or not so well let's talk about it the intelligence

is the courage to engage the understanding is listen because of my childhood I have a different relationship to anger than you do we learn that today together I see anger and I I have fear comes in my blood because I knew I was going to get hit or yelled at her screams or punished you have a different relationship with anger anger still is about injustice period we have to agree that the definition is about perceived injustice however my relationships that and years of

different just like whether you're gay or stray or buy or trans homophobia to someone who is LGBTQ IA is different than to someone who's not I can't relate if I'm not you but I can have the courage to have empathy for your experience that's the understanding piece I'm not going to ever be fully empathic to your life because I didn't live your life it's your life so you can't understand my life you can relate to pieces of it but I can be curious about it and not

judge it the labeling piece is having that language you know what is really happening here what is the experience the expression piece is knowing how and went to express with different people across context it's saying is how I'm communicating landy well is my intended outcome a possibility here or is the person going to just you know run away and then the last piece is the regulation which is in the end is as a motion helping or hurting me achieve my goals in life and if it's going to hurt

“your goals you need strategies to get with it life is difficult I don't know about you but this journey”

and becoming an emotion revolutionary and easy you know now I got it's politicized and like we were

talking about earlier it's like really come on like what happened who was your mother that's what I want to say like tell me about the relationship you had with your mother probably should have said that but anyway okay with it so good maybe your father whoever the point is is that I feel very confident in that what I teach is easily defined it's measurable and I can show you my own and thousands of other studies where these skills predict the things that we care about in life whether it's well

being whether it's leadership whether it's decision making whether it's just mental health outcomes and so it's I kind of have incontrovertible evidence for the effectiveness of it

and so you can still say I'm not into it but you have to be educated first

and once you I once you really understand the value proposition the why behind learning the skills I can't imagine that every parent in the world wouldn't want their kid to develop these skills especially if these skills are going to be the defining skills of who succeeds and who doesn't I feel like that's when I culture evolves and I'm just imagining a future not too long from now where the debate around and we all know who we're talking about here one group is saying

they're all fascists with no empathy and the other side is saying well they're so caught up in

“inclusivity that nothing's getting done and people are being treated unfairly that's what”

the dialogue that's the dialogue and at some point we gotta go okay everyone like we understand your positions but what are we going to do we got we got to move forward I don't know that there's going to be a meeting in the middle for a while what is going to happen

who strive incorporate these tools and are rewarded for them then that will become the standard

exactly it's kind of interesting the obesity crisis was real and there was also a discussion on inclusivity and that is now shifted and part because of the GLPs but there's now this idea that you know being obese is unhealthy you couldn't say that five six years ago I remember during the pandemic a colleague of my very senior colleague said we're seeing people dying of COVID and as people who are obese and yeah you said but you can't say that publicly he told me don't say

“I remember that and so now there's this acknowledgement right that you know physical health”

is important and people are striving for that more and I think that's I think that's generally a positive shift it can be taken too far but I think that there's this weird moment that we're in

where the name calling and the labeling of others it's not getting us anywhere the opportunity

costs is that we're not actually figuring out like what we're responsible for and I'm pointing fingers at both sides and I'm also pointing fingers at myself because for sure I can see here and say all sorts of things but you know clearly we all have this work to do something important about that is that you don't know someone until you know their story like I know a little bit about your story now you know I want to know more but you know and you know a little bit more about

my story and once you know someone's story you start having more interest in them more compassion for them you know my partner made a movie during the pandemic called America unfiltered which was him and his friend so it's a gay pandemic and running around with a straight Russian

around America for a year interviewing people about what it means to live in America today

and they went to Trump rallies and Biden rallies and they went into poverty you know and they went into all over America gun shop owners and black moms whose kids had been murdered by the police and people who wanted to become Americans you know citizens and it was a listening journey and it was a remarkable on how I did a study on this actually I showed people the expressions of people and I had them judge you know would you want to get to know this person how warm is this

person etc before they watched the movie and what we found was that people were very judgemental based on race based on if they were holding a gun or not and then you watch the movie and you see the gun shop owner cry when he's talking about his relationship with his father and that the only way he and his father could bond was over you know the guns and he started hearing his story and you're sort of like it's causing really nice kill actually and then we tested people after

words and we found that people had completely different judgments of people after hearing them

“and listening to their stories and that's what we need in our society we need more curiosity”

and less judgment and that goes to you know ourselves we'll be much more regulated we'll have better relationships we don't have to agree I don't what does no need to agree but there is a need to be civil we were talking about our standards I think what you're talking about is some standards of emotional intelligence or at least standards for striving because if we say like other standards of physical presence and what does that mean does that mean everyone has to have like eight

pack abs and be perfectly you know and then you have older people trying to reverse their age and ending up looking like like totally artificial and yeah and it can go too far right but I think having standards of striving like every kid does physical education because even if you're not going to be a great athlete it's good to develop a relationship to your body and take care of it every kid should do emotional intelligence training if you're even if you're

not going to become mark bracket you you can learn to regulate better than your parents and if if you're rewarded we love rewards right we we're we're obsessed with if we if the promotions and the the money and the status let's face it people care about that stuff comes from being healthier physically and emotionally who wouldn't want that I agree and I

“goes back again I think I'm obsessive about this like being a scientist about yourself”

you said this earlier you know you based on whatever you know we will have to go into go into this right now but the working out is your big thing but then you realize you know like hey a little break I can take a break it's okay it's okay to take a day off I can go walking on the beach or whatever it is but that's the reflection process that's you having that medical kind of ability to say let me evaluate my life right now like I could have a day like

without the gym it's going to be good I can go have some fun with some friends I'm the same way all of this work that we do is about that level of reflection I have to ask myself

just like lazy right now and that's the work you know I was thinking about this as we were talking

that it's a process and you know this I came up with this process for myself as I was you know writing which with the workouts you know in the beginning you look in the mirror by the way I took photos of myself every month every month religiously and the proof is in the photos I then like sometimes I'm like wow I'm lucky really did a good job because I really got out of shape and I was not happy with myself I was used to being an athlete as a martial artist and now I have

four years of photos you know front side back every month and you look at the day one and you look at today and it's a completely different human being I have to look at that once in a while because I still have weird issues and I look in the mirror and I'm like oh I'm like wait the picture

“tells the truth but the phases of that are important the first phase is like can I get through this”

can I like I can't do four workouts go from 3,500 cows a day down to 1800 calories a day there's no way to do all that just like you can't take every strategy in my book and be obsessed with about it like I'm going to breathe it I'm going to walk no I'm going to sleep no I'm going to talk positively no I'm going to reach out you're going nuts it's a process this is life's work like the good news you get your whole life to work on it because you're going to need it forever so

that first phase is kind of just the learning phase like what can I like what's the little steps

I can take the second phase is like you start seeing a little bit of changes my life's a little bit better feel a little better I'm sleeping better my relations are better I'm more positive I even during that phase of my workouts I went through this whole phase of negativity because I'm

“like mark your married for 30 years or 56 years old who gives a shit about your body and I would”

I mean I would do like deadless and like this is ridiculous like when deadless it's 55 years old and I would catch myself every time and like mark this is what you do like you're you are a self saboteur right now you get a pause and you got it like where is this coming from and how you're going to get that self saboteur self added here the best version of you is not someone who does just two sets of those deadlifts you do all four but it was so much work I can tell you but the

beauty of all that of like working through the discomfort is that is that identity phase because now it's not an option and so if you just do it and it becomes part of your identity you don't have those struggles anymore I love it and that the parallel between physical fitness and emotional intelligence is not something I predicted before this conversation

“but I love it and I'm certain that it's resonating with people because it's just physical stuff”

is just so tangible yeah it's so concrete and look I just want to thank you for making the emotional intelligence piece so concrete and for laying out these steps will obviously provide links to your goals I want to play a game with you for a minute though okay you're ready okay because one of my former colleagues and I got together a couple weeks ago but a month ago and we decided like people are so disconnected we so we took all the contents of my my books and we made a game so you actually

when you have your party it's called the point of connection and so I did these are random cards and it doesn't involve an app or a Wi-Fi can I shut it be with people awesome so there's your first card what's the best advice I mentor ever gave you and how is it shaped the way you live or work two pieces briefly the mic mentor one of the great trainers gave me the advice to do low volume high intensity resistance training

each body part once a week and train only three times per week maybe four never more than 75

minutes but to really learn to enjoy training extremely hard and I follow that advice for 30 plus years and I look forward to work out so I don't work out every day um amazing advice and then the other advice which is separate from fitness comes from a guy named Bob Knight who is a neurologist at UC Berkeley who said figure out how much work you can do each week consistently and then find some way to reset yourself each week that is not destructive and I said what's

yours he said fishing and I was like okay I've done a lot of fishing because my mom's side all men wouldn't fishing and I like it decent fishermen but thought what is that for me for me it's hiking so for someone else to give me something else but I taught my lab that and I would teach a career development course where I would pass that on at Coltsbury Harbor during the summer which is kind of geek summer camp and I said that doesn't mean drinking but maybe one or two

drink someone said okay fine but as long as it's non-destructive find a way to reset every week

two mentors all right last one because I think this one is more relevant to our specific conversation

“I thought you were going to answer a question right what's one emotion you've been carrying”

a lot lately that you'd like to experience less often oh man sorry what might help soften it all right um I don't know the name of this emotion maybe you can help me I'll try and describe it briefly lately I've been having these moments of feeling so much love and affection for someone and it like opens and I go and then it shuts but it's not opening and shutting because of them I'm like oh and I know this feeling because in a different version of it I'm about to get a new puppy

he's already picked out he's already like he's waiting and I know the difference between what I just described you know like and I just let it rip with the with the dog two different things person dog acknowledges a fundamental difference but I feel this sort of like like I shut it down so what is that emotion of closing down I guess love like shutting off to love is that an emotion or did I probably just reveal way more than that well love is a feeling obviously and

but I think you know and we're gonna go back to that opening a little bit about that fear and vulnerability like just allowing yourself to be with there's something that's uh getting away there so what might help soften it time yeah just be with it I didn't let it ride man thank you for that opportunity thank you I actually I really appreciate the opportunity I hadn't thought about that until I read this are you willing to answer one yeah sure you're the gas

“I feel like you should speak last I spoke a lot today all right um I can pick one or you can pick”

how's the game work you basically you can go in circles and everybody shares and you look for

the point of connection so it's get to know people but I'm already you know in the workplace who is one of your heroes and what does that reveal about what you value well as you know from our prior um conversation my the hero in my life was my uncle Marvin because he helped me get through my very traumatic experiences of the kid and when I value about him now that I think about it more was that nothing I could say could startle him nothing I could

say would make him run away he would he was just fully present and a listener and a learner and provide it steady support well clearly you've internalized that mark thank you so much for coming back your your work is evolving so fast and you're doing such good in the world

and do come back again I feel like you're you're clearly on the move and doing amazing things

and again I'll put links to your book and your books plural and and other work but just want to say thank you as a as a co-public educator and somebody who's really doing important work in the world thank you you're a really good man thank you appreciate you thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Mark Brackett to learn more about his work and to find links to his books please see the links in the show note captions if you're learning from and are enjoying this

podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zero-cost way to support us in addition please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple and on both Spotify and Apple you can leave us up to a five-star review and you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning

“and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions for”

me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you like me to consider for the human lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments

for those of you that haven't heard I have a new book coming out it's my very first book

it's entitled protocols an operating manual for the human body this is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols or everything from sleep to exercise to stress control protocols related to focus and motivation and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included the book is now available by presale at protocol's book.com

there you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocols an operating manual for the human body and if you're not already following me on social media I am human lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram x threads facebook

overlaps with the content of the human lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the

“information on the human lab podcast again it's human lab on all social media platforms and if”

you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter the neural network newsletter is a

zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcasts summaries as well as what we call protocols

“in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep how”

to optimize dopamine deliberate cold exposure we have a foundational fitness protocol that covers

cardiovascular training and resistance training all of that is available completely zero cost

“you simply go to humanlab.com go to the menu tab in the top right corner scroll down to news letter”

and enter your email and I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Mark Brackett and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [BLANK_AUDIO]