Speaker 1: Pushkin. When we experience negative emotions, things like guilt or
Speaker 1: sadness or anger, it can feel pretty intense, almost like
Speaker 1: navigating a violent storm at sea. We might feel buffeted
Speaker 1: and disoriented, or even a little sick to our stomachs.
Speaker 1: At times like that, staying on an even emotional course
Speaker 1: can feel impossible, like we'll never reach the safety of
Speaker 1: dry land again. I've chosen this nautical analogy for a reason.
Speaker 1: As I began reading more about the science of negative
Speaker 1: emotions for this special season, I learned more about the
Speaker 1: excellent work of Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David. In
Speaker 1: her book, Susan argues that negative feelings are like the
Speaker 1: bright glow of a lighthouse in a storm. To become
Speaker 1: a wise emotional seafarer, we need to heed the warning
Speaker 1: of all the hidden rocks ahead. If we ignore the
Speaker 1: light completely or venture too far out, we might get trapped.
Speaker 1: The problem is that we tend not to listen to
Speaker 1: the message our yucky feelings are sending, and that means
Speaker 1: we sometimes find ourselves dashed on the emotional rocks. Susan's
Speaker 1: interest in thinking more carefully about negative emotions began early
Speaker 1: in life. It was born of both family tragedy and
Speaker 1: the grim politics of her homeland. A lot of my
Speaker 1: work is born not in the halls of Harvard or Yale, but,
Speaker 1: like so many of us, in the messy, tender business
Speaker 1: of life. So I grew up in the white suburbs
Speaker 1: as a white child in Napartit, South Africa, and it
Speaker 1: was very much a country and community that was committed
Speaker 1: to not seeing and to denial. And so from a
Speaker 1: very early age I actually became interested in this thread
Speaker 1: that I think really runs through our work, which is
Speaker 1: seeing versus not seeing, particularly when it comes to the
Speaker 1: emotional world, and whether we see ourselves impacts and how
Speaker 1: it impacts on our capacity to be wholehearted humans. And
Speaker 1: so really that's the thread of so much at my work.
Speaker 1: And then when I was around fifteen years old, my father,
Speaker 1: who was forty two, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and
Speaker 1: I remember my mother telling me to go and say
Speaker 1: goodbye to him. He was dying in our home, and
Speaker 1: I went to his room. I opened the door. It
Speaker 1: was just before I head it off for school. It
Speaker 1: was on a Friday, and my dad was lying in
Speaker 1: bed and his eyes were closed, and I just remember
Speaker 1: this feeling that even though he couldn't see me, that
Speaker 1: he could he knew me. I'd always felt seen in
Speaker 1: his presence. And then also overlayered on that was this
Speaker 1: experience that I had after my father's death, which was
Speaker 1: everyone telling me to just be strong, smiling, and I
Speaker 1: am a fifteen year old and I become the master
Speaker 1: of being okay. You know, I don't drop a single grade.
Speaker 1: People ask me harm doing it in a world that
Speaker 1: seems to value relentious positivity as a marker of so
Speaker 1: called strength. I keep saying I'm okay, I'm okay, but
Speaker 1: the truth lurries it Back home, my family is struggling.
Speaker 1: My father has died in debt. My mother's grieving the
Speaker 1: love of her life. She's raising three children, the creditors
Speaker 1: are knocking, and I, as a child, was just struggling.
Speaker 1: I felt so untethered from myself and so untethered in
Speaker 1: this experience of grief, and I started to respond to
Speaker 1: that as so many people do when they experiencing emotional pain,
Speaker 1: especially unprocessed emotional pain, which is for me, that took
Speaker 1: the form of binging and purging, refusing to accept the
Speaker 1: full weight to my grief and then the last thing
Speaker 1: that I would just add to this journey of how
Speaker 1: I come to my work is I remember when I
Speaker 1: was then, probably about six months later, I'm in this struggle,
Speaker 1: and I recall this extraordinary teacher handing out these blank
Speaker 1: notebooks to the class. And she was my English teacher,
Speaker 1: and she looked at me and she said an invitation
Speaker 1: to the class, but it felt like it was to me.
Speaker 1: She said, right, tell the truth, right, like no one
Speaker 1: is reading. And so Laura, I started this correspondence with
Speaker 1: this teacher. It was this correspondence where I would journal,
Speaker 1: and I would hand in my journal and she would
Speaker 1: write back to me in pencil. It was my story,
Speaker 1: and she was writing back in pencil thoughts or responses
Speaker 1: to what I was experiencing. And so I had this
Speaker 1: feeling that actually became clear to me, which was this
Speaker 1: act that I was engaging in with my teacher was
Speaker 1: actually revolutionary for me. It was counter to what I
Speaker 1: was being told in society, which is just get on
Speaker 1: with it and just be positive. And instead what I
Speaker 1: was doing is I was facing into these rarely difficulty
Speaker 1: emotions and experiences, and that that secret, silent correspondence with
Speaker 1: the teacher as well as the secret silence correspondence with
Speaker 1: my own heart actually landed up shaping my career. So
Speaker 1: I became an emotions researcher, and I was really just
Speaker 1: foundationally interested in what is told to us by society
Speaker 1: about emotions and in what ways does that narrative actually
Speaker 1: not serve us. In fact, completely counter to making us
Speaker 1: strong and more resident, it actually makes us more fragile.
Speaker 1: And that became the threat of the work that I do.
Speaker 1: And so I love this story because, you know, it
Speaker 1: shows the kind of way that we normally deal with
Speaker 1: these undesirable emotions, you know, both kind of the ways
Speaker 1: that society tells us we need to deal with them,
Speaker 1: but also our natural instinct, which is like, you know, avoid, avoid, avoid.
Speaker 1: Like in the book, you kind of walk through so
Speaker 1: many bad reactions we have when we have these undesirable emotions.
Speaker 1: One of these are sort of jumping into our own
Speaker 1: productivity and overwork. You know, talk about how this strategy
Speaker 1: plays out and why it's so problematic for dealing with
Speaker 1: undesirable emotions. Yeah, So, what I've found in my work
Speaker 1: is that typically when people have difficult, tough emotions, they
Speaker 1: very often have one of two ways of responding. The
Speaker 1: first is what I call bottling, and bottling is basically
Speaker 1: where you push aside the difficulty emotion, often with good intentions.
Speaker 1: I've got so much to do. I just can't get on,
Speaker 1: you know, I've just got to get on with my life.
Speaker 1: And sometimes the reason that we do this is because
Speaker 1: we fear that by facing into the difficulty emotion that
Speaker 1: we don't have the skills to deal with it, or
Speaker 1: that somehow it's just better to be productive and focused
Speaker 1: on moving forward. And so bottling emotions is really this
Speaker 1: idea that we push the emotions aside for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: and we think that that actually is helpful. But there's
Speaker 1: a body of research showing that when we push aside
Speaker 1: these difficulty emotions, there's actually an amplification effect, which is
Speaker 1: really fascinating. For anyone who's ever tried not to eat
Speaker 1: a big piece of chocolate cake that's tempting you in
Speaker 1: the refrigerator, you know that the more you try not
Speaker 1: to think about that piece of chocolate cake, the more
Speaker 1: you dream about it. And the same experience happens with emotions.
Speaker 1: And when I talk about emotions in this way, I'm
Speaker 1: both talking about the big moments of emotions, the grief,
Speaker 1: the loneliness, the loss. But I'm also talking about the
Speaker 1: smaller experiences that we might have day to day. We
Speaker 1: feel undermined in a meeting, we feel shut down, we
Speaker 1: feel like we just want to roll our eyes at
Speaker 1: the change that's going on in our organization. So we
Speaker 1: have everyday thousands of these kinds of emotional experiences, and
Speaker 1: on the one hand, we can bottle them, we push
Speaker 1: them aside, but there is this amplification effect. And what
Speaker 1: becomes clear when we look at the research is that
Speaker 1: when we do this as not just a once off,
Speaker 1: it as a tendency, actually it undermines our well being.
Speaker 1: We have lower levels of resilience, higher depression, high anxiety.
Speaker 1: It impacts on the quality of our relationships and even
Speaker 1: on our ability to achieve our goals. Because if you
Speaker 1: take these emotions that are trying to signal something to you, oh,
Speaker 1: you bought in your job or things on going well,
Speaker 1: and you push them aside, then you aren't actually adapting
Speaker 1: to the reality of your life, and therefore you on
Speaker 1: putting strategies in place to move forward effectively. So that's
Speaker 1: one way we can deal with difficulty emotions. The other
Speaker 1: looks so different, and yet a lot of the consequences
Speaker 1: are the same. So brooding is where we get stuck
Speaker 1: in the difficulty motion. We get victimized by our news feed,
Speaker 1: we get hooked on being right. We go over and
Speaker 1: over and over in our heads why it is we
Speaker 1: so unhappy with something that's happened. And again, even though
Speaker 1: this might have the semblance of being effective, it actually
Speaker 1: keeps us very stuck in the emotional experience and not
Speaker 1: moving forward effectively. And so if we think about this difference,
Speaker 1: it's really fascinating because brooding is similarly associated with lower
Speaker 1: levels of well being, a goal attainment, and relationships and
Speaker 1: our almost imaginary It's like if you've got a pile
Speaker 1: of books that you're holding in your emotions, or the
Speaker 1: books bottling is where you hold those books so far
Speaker 1: away from you that ultimately the energy and effort that's
Speaker 1: involved in holding them far from you leads you to
Speaker 1: drop them, and so you might snap at the person,
Speaker 1: or you cry unexpectedly or court of God. By those
Speaker 1: difficulty emotions. When we brooding, we hold the book so
Speaker 1: tightly to ourselves, and so we're not able to see
Speaker 1: the child who's giving us a hug or who wants
Speaker 1: to be with us. We unable to be and breathe
Speaker 1: and be wise in the world, So bottling up pain, anger,
Speaker 1: and anxiety doesn't really work, But allowing these emotions to
Speaker 1: fully take over doesn't help either. Unfortunately, these both tend
Speaker 1: to be our go to strategies when we're facing a
Speaker 1: tough situation. When we get back from the break, Susan
Speaker 1: will share a potential middle path we can use to
Speaker 1: navigate emotions. As we'll see, it's a strategy that we
Speaker 1: can all use to find greater happiness. No matter what
Speaker 1: life throws our way, the Happiness Lab will be right back.
Speaker 1: Psychologist Susan David often explains the idea of emotional agility
Speaker 1: with a story, the sad tale of a mariner who
Speaker 1: is too stubborn to switch course when something bad popped
Speaker 1: up on the horizon. It's a beautiful story, and it's
Speaker 1: this idea that there's a captain on a ship and
Speaker 1: he's basically trying to steer the ship effectively. He says
Speaker 1: to a junior seman, let me know if you see anything,
Speaker 1: and the seman comes to him and says, I'm seeing
Speaker 1: something in front of us, and we are going to
Speaker 1: bash into it. And the captain gets like more and
Speaker 1: more arrogant and says, tell them that we are on
Speaker 1: a collision course and tell them to move, tell them
Speaker 1: to move. And so the seman keeps on relaying this
Speaker 1: message to the obstacle, saying, you know, you've got to
Speaker 1: move out the way. You've got to move out the way.
Speaker 1: And ultimately a message comes back from the so called
Speaker 1: obstacle saying, actually you need to move. Why because we
Speaker 1: are a lighthouse, sir. And it's a beautiful story. Because ready,
Speaker 1: if we think about what a lighthouse is, a lighthouse
Speaker 1: is helping us to navigate. A lighthouse is helping us
Speaker 1: to develop some sense of steering around the rocky shores
Speaker 1: of life. And yet, often, if we think about the
Speaker 1: metaphor if we want to extend it, our emotions are
Speaker 1: the signal. You know, our emotions are signaling things that
Speaker 1: are important. Our emotions might be signaling that this job
Speaker 1: isn't going as wonderfully as you wanted, or the relationship
Speaker 1: is actually not working out. And yet when we keep
Speaker 1: on either avoiding the emotions or not connecting with them effectively,
Speaker 1: then we aren't actually using that GPS system in the
Speaker 1: way that it was intended, And so we then struggled
Speaker 1: to be agile. We struggle to be effective. The world
Speaker 1: is changing around us, and we need as human beings
Speaker 1: to be able to have the capacity to deal with
Speaker 1: the world as it is, which is a world that
Speaker 1: is fragile, in which illness is interwoven with health, and
Speaker 1: which love and loss are connected, in which we raise
Speaker 1: children and then one day that child leaves. The emotion
Speaker 1: that we experience are brokered to help us with the
Speaker 1: reality of life which is changing and fragile. And yet
Speaker 1: this notion that exists in our society, which is that
Speaker 1: these difficulty emotions are bad. We need to ignore them,
Speaker 1: We just need to fake positivity. It sounds good on
Speaker 1: the surface very often, but actually what it does is
Speaker 1: it undermines our capacity to be whole human beings in
Speaker 1: the world. And so you've argued that the right way
Speaker 1: to kind of listen to this lighthouse signal of our
Speaker 1: emotions is with this notion of emotional agility and trying
Speaker 1: to increase our emotional agility. Explain what you mean by
Speaker 1: emotional agility. What is it so emotional agility is the
Speaker 1: ability to be with your everyday thoughts and emotions and
Speaker 1: experiences in a way that is healthy. And I'll go
Speaker 1: into what I mean by the word healthy, but it's
Speaker 1: being with these experiences in a way that's healthy so
Speaker 1: that you can respond effectively to everyday situations. So let
Speaker 1: me break that down a little bit. We all have thousands,
Speaker 1: literally thousands, We have approximately according to some research, sixteen
Speaker 1: thousand spoken thoughts every day and many more course through
Speaker 1: our minds experiences of am I good enough? Am I
Speaker 1: not good enough? Is the job? But you know that
Speaker 1: all the stuff goes on in our minds. We have
Speaker 1: all of our emotions, emotions like fear and sadness, grief, loneliness, loss, stress, anxiety,
Speaker 1: we have all of it. And we also have stories.
Speaker 1: Some of our stories were written on our mental chalkboards
Speaker 1: when we were five years old, stories about who we are,
Speaker 1: whether we good enough, whether we creative or not creative.
Speaker 1: And so we have this normal experience of these thoughts, emotions,
Speaker 1: and stories, and we need to have skills that enable
Speaker 1: us to deal with these in ways that are healthy. Now,
Speaker 1: what's not healthy is when we either push them aside
Speaker 1: or we fail to learn from them, or when we
Speaker 1: allow them to call the shots. And so what emotional
Speaker 1: agility is. It's the ability to hold these thoughts and
Speaker 1: emotions and stories lightly, so to not ignore them, but
Speaker 1: to hold them lightly, to recognize, for instance, that when
Speaker 1: we experience a difficulty emotion, that difficulty emotion, just like
Speaker 1: the lighthouse, is tapping us on the shoulder, and it's saying,
Speaker 1: there's this thing that's important to you, and Laurie, I'll
Speaker 1: give you an example, loneliness. We don't like experiencing loneliness,
Speaker 1: but loneliness is often signaling, sign posting that intimacy and
Speaker 1: connection are important for you and that you don't have
Speaker 1: enough of it in your life right now. Boredom at work.
Speaker 1: We could look at boredom and go, I'm just going
Speaker 1: to ignore it because at least I've got a job.
Speaker 1: In other words, bottling difficult experience all we might say,
Speaker 1: what is that boredom signaling? It's signaling that I value
Speaker 1: growth and learning and I don't have enough of it.
Speaker 1: I often think grief grief is love looking for its home.
Speaker 1: Grief is tapping us on the shoulders saying, remember me,
Speaker 1: think of the things that you learn from me. Hold
Speaker 1: me I'm still with you in some way and bring
Speaker 1: that to life in a way that feels special and connected.
Speaker 1: And so holding our thoughts and emotions lightly is by
Speaker 1: being curious with them and being able to recognize that
Speaker 1: when we experience these difficulty emotions. While the dictates of
Speaker 1: society might say, oh, you've just got to be positive,
Speaker 1: you've just got to push them aside, in fact, there's
Speaker 1: extraordinary beauty when we just slow down with them in
Speaker 1: a way that is curious. Huh, what is this emotion
Speaker 1: telling me about my needs or my values? There's also
Speaker 1: connected with that, lorry, is this need to be compassionate
Speaker 1: because it's hard to human it's hard to be a
Speaker 1: human being in the world, regardless of what the circumstances
Speaker 1: are of your world. And so emotional agility is really
Speaker 1: about this ability to be with our emotions in ways
Speaker 1: that are curious, compassionate, and courageous. Courageous because we don't
Speaker 1: often always like what we see and feel, so that
Speaker 1: we can then understand our values and our needs and
Speaker 1: move forward in the direction of those values. And so
Speaker 1: one of the ways you've argued we can start this
Speaker 1: process of kind of gaining our emotional agility is first
Speaker 1: to kind of show up and kind of non judgmentally
Speaker 1: see the emotions we're dealing with. Bike is showing up
Speaker 1: for our emotions so hard it's kind of funny, right,
Speaker 1: like they're there, But we tend not to kind of
Speaker 1: know what's going on when we experience these undesirable emotions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we described a little bit earlier. We spoke a bit
Speaker 1: about the narratives that exist in society, and it's important
Speaker 1: to recognize that all of us grow up with what
Speaker 1: are called display rules. Display rules are often the implicit
Speaker 1: and sometimes even explicit rules that may be in existence
Speaker 1: in the families that we were born into, or even
Speaker 1: in society at large. And an example of a display
Speaker 1: rule might be you come home from school as a
Speaker 1: child and you angry, and a parent says to you
Speaker 1: why you're angry, and you say, I'm angry because you know,
Speaker 1: Jack didn't play with me today, and the parent, with
Speaker 1: great intentions, jumps in and says something like, don't worry,
Speaker 1: I'll play with you, you know, or I'll phone the
Speaker 1: mean person's parents. Let's go back cupcakes. And it's done
Speaker 1: with really good intentions. But what that might signal to you,
Speaker 1: is that joy and happiness are loud in this house,
Speaker 1: and that anger isn't or that sadness isn't. Sometimes these
Speaker 1: rules are explicit. Sometimes someone might say, go to your
Speaker 1: room and come up when you've got a smile on
Speaker 1: your face. Lay rules exist in our communities. When we
Speaker 1: say to someone with cancer who is terminally ill and
Speaker 1: is suffering, and we said to the person, just keep positive,
Speaker 1: what we are conveying is a display rule, which is
Speaker 1: that their experience of pain and grief and hardship has
Speaker 1: no place. And so it's really important to recognize that
Speaker 1: one of the reasons that we unsee our difficulty emotions
Speaker 1: is because despite the fact that they exist and are
Speaker 1: all around us, there are these narratives that basically say
Speaker 1: either they are not allowed, or they don't belong, or
Speaker 1: we live in a world that says we can fix everything.
Speaker 1: If we don't like our car, we can buy a
Speaker 1: new car. If we don't like the walls, we can
Speaker 1: paint them at different color. And so when we experience
Speaker 1: these difficult thoughts and emotions, we can just fix them.
Speaker 1: We can find ways to be grateful, we can think
Speaker 1: positive and everything will be okay. But it actually doesn't work.
Speaker 1: And so what we are doing when we start cultivating
Speaker 1: this capacity to show up to our difficulty emotions is
Speaker 1: we stopped recognizing that when a city is being bombed,
Speaker 1: it's very difficult to rebuild, it's very difficult to find
Speaker 1: a way forward in the midst of the bombing. It's
Speaker 1: only when there is an internal ceasefire that one is
Speaker 1: able to start moving forward effectively. And so if you
Speaker 1: in a space with your difficulty emotions where you say,
Speaker 1: I'm not allowed to have heard I should be grateful.
Speaker 1: I need to just think positive. Literally, what you're doing
Speaker 1: is you're in a little wall with yourself about your
Speaker 1: own emotions and your own suffering. And so a really
Speaker 1: important part of showing up is ending that war, literally
Speaker 1: ending the war. This is what I feel. This is
Speaker 1: my experience. There's no wrong or right way to be
Speaker 1: experiencing right now. This is my feeling. And when we
Speaker 1: show up to those difficulty emotions with compassion, which is
Speaker 1: really important, we are then able to start crafting a
Speaker 1: way forward with the experience. And one of the ways
Speaker 1: we can really kind of develop that compassion is to
Speaker 1: kind of become a little bit curious about the emotions
Speaker 1: we're experiencing. You know, sometimes we don't even know what
Speaker 1: they are. And you've argued that one way we can
Speaker 1: do that is to literally label our emotions. You know,
Speaker 1: why is the labeling of emotions so important? So labeling emotions,
Speaker 1: you know, it's almost like an emotional superpower. So because
Speaker 1: there is a tragedy. And that sounds dramatic, but I
Speaker 1: think it to be true. There is a tragedy that
Speaker 1: exists in our schools and in our workplaces, where emotions
Speaker 1: have historically, for a number of reasons that we could explore,
Speaker 1: have been pushed aside. They're seen as soft skills. They
Speaker 1: are seen as being less important than things like math
Speaker 1: and strategy. What we have is literally entire generations of
Speaker 1: people who have not been taught foundational emotional agility skills.
Speaker 1: And these are core to our well being, tour mental health,
Speaker 1: to our relationships. Internal pain always comes out, and the
Speaker 1: people that pay the price, ourselves and our community, is
Speaker 1: our children. And so one of the emotional skills that
Speaker 1: is not taught is the superpower, which is emotion granularity.
Speaker 1: And I'll give you an example of what I mean
Speaker 1: by this. Often, when we've had a tough day, we'll
Speaker 1: say something like I'm stressed. We use a very broad brushstroke,
Speaker 1: black and white label to describe the emotion that we've experienced,
Speaker 1: and stressed is the most common one I hear, but
Speaker 1: people might have their own that they use that have
Speaker 1: become very familiar, and it's basically this label that you use,
Speaker 1: that your quick go to label to describe what it
Speaker 1: is you're feeling. Now, if we think about it, there
Speaker 1: is a world of difference between stress and disappointment. Stress
Speaker 1: and that knowing, gnawing feeling of I'm in the wrong job,
Speaker 1: the wrong career, or this relationship isn't working out. Stress
Speaker 1: and exhaustion burnout. If you label your experience as stress,
Speaker 1: it's a very diffuse label. It's very murky, and your body,
Speaker 1: your psychology doesn't really know what to do with that.
Speaker 1: It's almost like being in that boat and you think
Speaker 1: that there might be something on the horizon that you've
Speaker 1: got to pay attention to, but you've got no idea
Speaker 1: what it is. But when you start saying to yourself,
Speaker 1: what are two other options? I'm calling this thing stress,
Speaker 1: but what else could it be? Oh it's disappointment, Oh
Speaker 1: it's feeling unsupported. What it starts to do is it
Speaker 1: starts to activate the readiness potential in us as human beings,
Speaker 1: which starts saying, what do I need to do in
Speaker 1: relation to this? And so there's enormous power in being
Speaker 1: able to label this emotion accurately because it helps us
Speaker 1: to understand both the cause of the emotion as well
Speaker 1: as the steps that we might need to take in
Speaker 1: order to process that emotion effectively. And we know, for instance,
Speaker 1: that even in young children this capacity is profoundly, profoundly important.
Speaker 1: As sixteen year old who is encouraged by a peer to, oh,
Speaker 1: let's let the air out of the principle's car tires.
Speaker 1: If that sixteen year old is able to say, on
Speaker 1: the one hand, I feel excited and tempted, but actually,
Speaker 1: deeper down, there's a sense of disquiet, trepidation, this doesn't
Speaker 1: feel right. That is a child who's going to be
Speaker 1: able to delay gratification, who's going to be able to
Speaker 1: focus more on their moral compass, their values and their
Speaker 1: goals and their character over time. So it sounds like
Speaker 1: such a subtle skill when someone says, oh, when you
Speaker 1: experience something, don't use just the first broad brushstroke label
Speaker 1: labor more accurately. It feels like, oh, okay, is that
Speaker 1: what you've got to offer? But it is just extraordinary
Speaker 1: in terms of how important it is. So when we
Speaker 1: think about these emotions is distinct. When we kind of
Speaker 1: label them, then we can start in on another process,
Speaker 1: which is to start using our emotions not as this
Speaker 1: kind of horrible sensation, but really as data for what
Speaker 1: we can do as the next app. You know, so
Speaker 1: talk about some strategies we can use to do this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's so important. The way that I think about emotions
Speaker 1: is our emotions are data. So emotions again contain signposts
Speaker 1: to the things that we care about, but our emotions
Speaker 1: on directives. I can show up to my son's frustration
Speaker 1: with his baby sister. I can see it, I can
Speaker 1: hold space for it. I can be accepting of it,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't mean that I'm endorsing his idea that
Speaker 1: he gets to give away to the first stranger that
Speaker 1: he sees in a shopping mall. Okay, our emotions are data,
Speaker 1: not directives. In other words, we own our emotions. They
Speaker 1: don't own us. And so another skill that becomes really
Speaker 1: important in helping us to not push aside the difficulty emotions,
Speaker 1: not brood on them, but develop healthy space with our emotions.
Speaker 1: Is if we just think about the language again of
Speaker 1: how we often describe emotions. We often say things like
Speaker 1: I am sad, I am angry, I am frustrated, I
Speaker 1: am being undermined. Now, if you just think about this language,
Speaker 1: words matter. So when you say I am, it's pretty
Speaker 1: much as if you are the emotion. I am all
Speaker 1: of me, one hundred percent of me is the emotion.
Speaker 1: When you do this, there's no space for anything else.
Speaker 1: There's no space for wisdom, there's no space for intention.
Speaker 1: Victor Frankel talks about this sentiment of between stimulus and response,
Speaker 1: there is a space and in that space is our
Speaker 1: power to choose, and in that choice our growth and
Speaker 1: our freedom. So when we are hooked by a difficulty emotion,
Speaker 1: when we feel triggered by it, there is no space.
Speaker 1: We just feel something and we respond. You know someone
Speaker 1: that I love starting in on the finances, I'm going
Speaker 1: to leave the root because I feel alienated. So we hooked.
Speaker 1: And what we're trying to do when we being emotionally
Speaker 1: agiles to cultivate healthy space between us and our emotions,
Speaker 1: so that we own the emotions. They don't own us.
Speaker 1: And one of the ways we can start doing this
Speaker 1: is by recognizing again that when we say I am,
Speaker 1: there's no space. You're literally defining yourself by the emotion,
Speaker 1: and so what's being crowded out. There are the other
Speaker 1: parts of you that exist in every single one of us.
Speaker 1: Our wisdom, our intention, our values, who we want to be,
Speaker 1: our breathing, our connectedness. There's so much scentedness in every
Speaker 1: single one of us. And so the way we can
Speaker 1: start creating this space is by noticing the thoughts or
Speaker 1: the emotion or the stories for what they are. They
Speaker 1: are thoughts, emotions, and stories. They're not fact. So an example,
Speaker 1: I am sad, I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. I'm
Speaker 1: being undermined. I'm noticing that this is my thought that
Speaker 1: I'm being undermined. I'm not good enough, there's no point
Speaker 1: in even trying. I'm noticing that this is my I'm
Speaker 1: not good enough story. When you do this, you aren't
Speaker 1: ignoring your difficult experience, but you're creating space in it.
Speaker 1: And a beautiful metaphor that I think when I think
Speaker 1: about this skill is that when you say I am.
Speaker 1: It's almost like you are the emotion, and the emotion
Speaker 1: is a cloud, and you've become the cloud. I am sad.
Speaker 1: But when you instead create space between you and the emotion,
Speaker 1: I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. There's literally a kind
Speaker 1: of distance that's created in language. What happens then, is
Speaker 1: you aren't the cloud any longer. You are the sky.
Speaker 1: You are the sky. Every single one of us is
Speaker 1: beautiful and capacious enough to have all of our difficulty
Speaker 1: emotions and still choose who we want to be in
Speaker 1: the moment. You are not the cloud. You are the sky.
Speaker 1: But it's not enough to label our emotions and change
Speaker 1: how we talk about them. True emotional agility requires getting
Speaker 1: curious about what our emotions are telling us and where
Speaker 1: are they're steering us. And that kind of agility requires
Speaker 1: something more. In the words of one of my favorite
Speaker 1: seventies bands, Parliament, we got to have that funk. You'll
Speaker 1: hear more about the funk when the Happiness Lab returns
Speaker 1: in a moment. Psychologists Susan David argues that the first
Speaker 1: step in reacting effectively to our ne emotions, there's no
Speaker 1: anguish specific emotion. We're dealing with. We need to distinguish
Speaker 1: a catchisle sensation like stress for more specific feelings like
Speaker 1: exhaustion or disappointment. But once we know what emotion we're
Speaker 1: dealing with, we also need to figure out what it's
Speaker 1: saying to us, or, if Susan puts it, we need
Speaker 1: to ask, what's the funk? I love this In my book,
Speaker 1: I describe this idea of what the funk and what
Speaker 1: the funk like? WTF is not a description of the
Speaker 1: more explicit label. It's basically saying, what is the function
Speaker 1: of the emotion? What the funk? You know, what the
Speaker 1: funk is my grief signaling? What the funk is my
Speaker 1: loneliness signaling. And so what we're starting to do when
Speaker 1: we ask ourselves what the funk is, we are starting
Speaker 1: to really create this beautiful space between us and the emotion.
Speaker 1: So instead of feeling that the emotion owns us, that
Speaker 1: it's driving us, that we triggered by it, that it's
Speaker 1: right at our story, what we're starting to do is
Speaker 1: we're starting to use the emotion in the way that
Speaker 1: it was intended, which is to help us to adapt.
Speaker 1: And so what the funk is a lovely short form
Speaker 1: for what is the function? What is the emotion trying
Speaker 1: to tell me about my needs or my values? When
Speaker 1: I am worried about a situation in the workplace. On
Speaker 1: the face of it, I might say, Okay, well, I'm
Speaker 1: just feeling worried or I'm just feeling angry. But when
Speaker 1: we start saying what the funk, it may be that
Speaker 1: that worry is signaling that we really care about quality,
Speaker 1: or we really care about our clients, and that we
Speaker 1: are concerned that the way we are moving forward is
Speaker 1: actually not a good direction. So when we start asking
Speaker 1: ourselves what the funk, whether that's in a personal context
Speaker 1: or in a broader context, we're starting to say, what
Speaker 1: is this emotion trying to signal about values? On my needs?
Speaker 1: And the example that I gave earlier, which is if
Speaker 1: I am feeling lonely, the function of that loneliness is
Speaker 1: to say that I need more intimacy and connection. And
Speaker 1: so you might say, well, I am on zoom calls
Speaker 1: every day and I see people all around me. But
Speaker 1: we know that we can be lonely in a crowd,
Speaker 1: and so what the function of loneliness might be saying,
Speaker 1: you know, you pass your spouse in the kitchen as
Speaker 1: you're both getting a coffee and you're both on your
Speaker 1: phones and you barely look up at one another. And yes,
Speaker 1: you might be in a house full of people, but
Speaker 1: you still feel lonely. And the function of that loneliness
Speaker 1: is to help you to reach out in the direction
Speaker 1: of the need or the value, and so you can
Speaker 1: then start making small changes, which is, you know, in
Speaker 1: this particular example, it might be that there's this moment
Speaker 1: of opportunity that you have in your day where you
Speaker 1: can move in the direction of your needs or your values.
Speaker 1: So it might be that you genuinely are giving that
Speaker 1: person a hug at the end of the day and
Speaker 1: crafting a new moment of connection. And we can do
Speaker 1: this with any of our emotions or emotional experiences where
Speaker 1: we are learning from them. A good way actually of
Speaker 1: thinking about this is, as people are listening to this podcast,
Speaker 1: if I asked you on a blank piece of paper
Speaker 1: to just think about some emotion words that you've been experiencing.
Speaker 1: So I've been feeling X whatever that is for you,
Speaker 1: regret or sadness or anxiety, whatever that is. So you've
Speaker 1: got that on that piece of paper. Now in a
Speaker 1: world that focuses on forced false positivity. You might imagine
Speaker 1: that I'm going to ask you to now turn the
Speaker 1: piece of paper over and write about, well, what you
Speaker 1: should be grateful for or why you should be happy.
Speaker 1: But actually what I would ask you to do is
Speaker 1: something quite different, which is to turn the piece of
Speaker 1: paper over and ask yourself, what is that emotion signaling
Speaker 1: about your needs or your values? And even if that
Speaker 1: emotion has actually been a joyous emotion. You know, if
Speaker 1: you of the past couple of months have experienced a
Speaker 1: lot more joy than might be typical, you might be
Speaker 1: asking yourself, what is this joy signaling about my needs?
Speaker 1: It may be that you have reconnected with creativity or
Speaker 1: with particular people. And so again, even that beautiful experience
Speaker 1: of joy is signposting that this thing is important to
Speaker 1: you and you can keep moving towards it, and a
Speaker 1: reminder to keep threading this experience, this quality through your life.
Speaker 1: And so this is so important that our emotions can
Speaker 1: have this function of signaling our values, because I think,
Speaker 1: you know, just like our thoughts and just like our emotions,
Speaker 1: sometimes our values or the kind of thing that we
Speaker 1: can't totally see, you know, we're sort of blind to
Speaker 1: which values we're living out, and you talk about cases
Speaker 1: where emotions can sometimes tell us that we're living out
Speaker 1: the wrong kinds of values. You have this lovely phrase
Speaker 1: in your book called the idea we're living out dead
Speaker 1: people's goals. You know, what do you mean here? And
Speaker 1: how can emotions be so helpful in this in this regard?
Speaker 1: So the idea with what I described with dead people's
Speaker 1: goals is just often people will say things like I
Speaker 1: don't want to be stressed, I don't want my heart
Speaker 1: to be broken, I don't want this project to fail.
Speaker 1: And what I mean by dead people's goals is the
Speaker 1: only people and I say this, you know facetiously, is
Speaker 1: that the only people who don't ever have their hearts broken,
Speaker 1: who never experience stress or loss or disappointment, are dead.
Speaker 1: You know, discomfort is the price of admission to a
Speaker 1: meaningful life. We don't get to leave the world a
Speaker 1: better place, or raise a family, or build a meaningful
Speaker 1: career without stress and discomfort. So in that context, you know,
Speaker 1: when I say discomfort is the price of admission to
Speaker 1: a meaningful life, what that then says is it becomes
Speaker 1: really important for our emotional capacity that we develop the
Speaker 1: ability to be with and learn from discomfort, because those
Speaker 1: uncomfortable emotions, again are signaling things that we care about.
Speaker 1: And oftentimes when people talk about values, it feels very abstract.
Speaker 1: It feels like the kinds of things that people put
Speaker 1: on walls and businesses, and feels very distant from us.
Speaker 1: The way that I think of values are that they're
Speaker 1: the heartbeat of your why. They are things that at
Speaker 1: core matter to you, and they not abstract. They are
Speaker 1: qualities of action, the qualities of action. So every single
Speaker 1: day life is asking you, it's asking me, is saying
Speaker 1: who do you want to be today? Every day and
Speaker 1: every day we have opportunities to either move towards our
Speaker 1: values or away from our values. If we value health,
Speaker 1: are we moving towards the running shoes or away from them?
Speaker 1: If we value relationship, are we moving towards the uncomfortable
Speaker 1: conversation because we know that it's important to our relationship,
Speaker 1: or are we moving away from it because I just
Speaker 1: can't be bothered to go there, even though we know
Speaker 1: at its core that that leads to disengagement and dissolution.
Speaker 1: So every day we have these opportunities to move towards
Speaker 1: our values. We stay upright on a bicycle by cycling,
Speaker 1: and we stay up its people with the lives that
Speaker 1: we want to be living by moving actively towards the
Speaker 1: things that we care about. And so then often people
Speaker 1: will say things like, well, how do I work out
Speaker 1: what my values are? You know, how do I start
Speaker 1: discerning what my values are? And it's a really important
Speaker 1: question because again it's not the kind of conversation that
Speaker 1: we often have in our schools or in our workplaces,
Speaker 1: and that becomes really challenging. I'm sure that in the
Speaker 1: podcast you've explored things like social contagion, where we know
Speaker 1: that people can start picking up behaviors of other people.
Speaker 1: Your next door neighbor drives a particular car, We want
Speaker 1: to drive that car, and sometimes we don't even know
Speaker 1: we're doing it. We know from large scale epidemiological studies
Speaker 1: that your chances of getting divorced increase if people in
Speaker 1: your social network that you don't even know get divorced,
Speaker 1: and we saw this in the pandemic, how people catch
Speaker 1: other people's behaviors. So what can start happening is, over time,
Speaker 1: we can move more and more and more away from
Speaker 1: the things that matter to us, and so it becomes
Speaker 1: really important for us to just sometimes take a little
Speaker 1: bit of time to affirm our values. There's been some
Speaker 1: work that's just asked people to just sit down for
Speaker 1: ten minutes and ask them to remind themselves what's important
Speaker 1: to them in their relationship or what's important to them
Speaker 1: in what they're studying or their careers. And that type
Speaker 1: of values affirmation is very strong and very protective in
Speaker 1: terms of enabling people to ward off that social contagion.
Speaker 1: But as you speak to Laurie, one of the core
Speaker 1: ways that we can start connecting with our values is
Speaker 1: by paying attention to the heartbeat that comes through our
Speaker 1: difficulty emotions. Because often our difficulty emotions are sign posting.
Speaker 1: They're sign posting things that matter to us, and so
Speaker 1: you know, this brings us to you kind of irony
Speaker 1: rate in that running away from our negative emotions, trying
Speaker 1: to avoid them, you know, trying to bottle them up.
Speaker 1: We're like missing out on this super important signpost. This
Speaker 1: like lighthouse that's signaling like, hey, your value is over
Speaker 1: here and you're not meeting it right, you know, but
Speaker 1: you might need to switch your behavior, you know. Do
Speaker 1: you think through this idea really welcoming our inner experiences,
Speaker 1: you know, like breathing into them, accepting them with curiosity.
Speaker 1: You know, is that going to set us on a
Speaker 1: new course that will allow us to flourish a little
Speaker 1: bit more. Absolutely, if we look just at the notion
Speaker 1: of acceptance of emotions, we know that acceptance of emotions
Speaker 1: as opposed to pushing them aside or brooding on them,
Speaker 1: is a cornerstone to well being, is a cornerstone to resilience,
Speaker 1: because now you're actually developing skills to help you to
Speaker 1: deal with the world as it is, which is this
Speaker 1: broken world where heartbreak and loss hold hands with one another.
Speaker 1: And so these skills that I'm taught to our truly
Speaker 1: foundational skills in our personal relationships, in our relationship with self,
Speaker 1: and also even in our workplaces, in our communities. We
Speaker 1: can apply these exact same kinds of skills when we're
Speaker 1: having difficult conversations with our children. Often we try to
Speaker 1: convert them just be happy. But if we can hold
Speaker 1: space for those difficulty emotions and we can help them
Speaker 1: to label them, and we can help them to understand, Oh,
Speaker 1: you upset with Jack, because friendship is important to you,
Speaker 1: how do you want to be as a friend. What
Speaker 1: does friendship look like? What you're now doing is you're
Speaker 1: helping the child to develop their own moral compass and
Speaker 1: sense of character. And this is extraordinarily important because when
Speaker 1: the world is changing around us, being grounded in ourselves
Speaker 1: with levels of courage, with levels of curiosity, with compassion,
Speaker 1: and with the willingness to take values connected steps is
Speaker 1: the only way forward in a fragile, beautiful world. I
Speaker 1: was haunted by a phrase that Susan used a few
Speaker 1: times during our conversation. She noted that discomfort is the
Speaker 1: price of admission for a meaningful life. We often run
Speaker 1: away from things we think will bring us discomfort, all
Speaker 1: the potential failure, humiliation, and rejection of life. But by
Speaker 1: running away, by not even trying, we deny ourselves the
Speaker 1: opportunity to win, to be a success, and to be accepted.
Speaker 1: Susan's quote really resonated with me because I definitely struggle
Speaker 1: with this very issue. But I'm hopeful that this special
Speaker 1: season of the Happiness Lab can help us learn how
Speaker 1: to deal with our negative emotions without all the fear,
Speaker 1: so that they won't hold us back from doing all
Speaker 1: the things that we'll give our lives, more happiness, and
Speaker 1: more meaning. In our next two shows, we're going to
Speaker 1: be jumping right into the deep end when it comes
Speaker 1: to yucky feelings. We're going to focus on an emotion
Speaker 1: that goes way beyond mere discomfort, one that many of
Speaker 1: us dread the most, but that none of us can
Speaker 1: really hope to avoid in this beautiful, fragile world. When
Speaker 1: the happiness slab returns, we're going to look at how
Speaker 1: to deal with grief, how to learn from this emotion,
Speaker 1: and how to figure out what is there to teach us.
Speaker 1: The purpose of grief is that pain is the agent
Speaker 1: to change that when we allow it to come through
Speaker 1: our system, forces us to face this reality that we
Speaker 1: don't want to look at. That this person that I
Speaker 1: love or this thing in my life that I was
Speaker 1: really attached to is no longer here. Until next week,
Speaker 1: stay safe and stay happy. If you like this show
Speaker 1: and others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus.
Speaker 1: As a special gift to Pushkin Plus subscribers, I'll be
Speaker 1: sharing a series of six guided meditations to help you
Speaker 1: practice the lessons we've learned from our experts. To check
Speaker 1: them out, look for Pushkin plus on Apple podcast subscriptions.
Speaker 1: The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley,
Speaker 1: Emily Anne Vaughan, and Courtney Guerino. Our original music was
Speaker 1: composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering
Speaker 1: by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Milabelle Heather Fame, John Schnars,
Speaker 1: Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Brandt Haynes, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler,
Speaker 1: Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis.
Speaker 1: The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries
Speaker 1: and me Doctor Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
Speaker 1: listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your podcasts,