Speaker 1: Pushkin. As a professor who teaches about the science of
Speaker 1: well being, I spend a lot of time thinking and
Speaker 1: talking and also podcasting about how to feel happier. But
Speaker 1: in spite of all that, I'm not exactly happy one
Speaker 1: hundred percent of the time. I too still feel guilty
Speaker 1: and anxious. I get angry and sad and jealous, and
Speaker 1: with so many responsibilities, I often feel overwhelmed and frustrated.
Speaker 1: All this makes sense, I mean, experiencing negative emotions is
Speaker 1: part of what it means to be human, but actually
Speaker 1: having to go through all these bad emotions that kind
Speaker 1: of sucks. If I'm being honest, I pretty much hate
Speaker 1: going through these negative feelings, and so my first instinct
Speaker 1: is always to push them away. As soon as I
Speaker 1: start to detect that I'm feeling frustrated or sad or
Speaker 1: a little pissed at someone, I try to avoid the
Speaker 1: experience completely. I pretend it's not happening, or distract myself
Speaker 1: or dive into my work so I don't have to
Speaker 1: experience that not so nice feeling. But the science shows
Speaker 1: this isn't the smartest strategy. There's lots and lots of
Speaker 1: evidence that suppressing and avoiding our negative sensations is ultimately
Speaker 1: only going to make us feel worse in the long run.
Speaker 1: So my New Year's resolution for twenty twenty two is
Speaker 1: to stop running away from all my difficult emotions. I
Speaker 1: want to allow and embrace and maybe even learn from
Speaker 1: the yuckier sensations in life. But that's easier said than done.
Speaker 1: So I decided to call in some reinforcements. In this
Speaker 1: special new season of the Happiness Lab, I'll chat with
Speaker 1: an amazing group of experts about how we can learn
Speaker 1: from our negative emotions. Over the next few weeks, we'll
Speaker 1: explore strategies we can all use to navigate the feelings
Speaker 1: we'd rather not feel. We'll see how we can make
Speaker 1: peace with the emotions we hate, and we'll see that
Speaker 1: they may even have something important to teach us. But
Speaker 1: learning from our worst emotions can be a challenge even
Speaker 1: for the experts. I think I came from fifth generation Texan.
Speaker 1: I just came from a family that really perceived emotion
Speaker 1: in general as weakness and as threatening. We grew up
Speaker 1: with the belief that we are thinking, doing people who
Speaker 1: on occasion feel, and that can get us sidelined. And
Speaker 1: so obviously no neuroscientists in my family. This is five
Speaker 1: time New York Times best selling author Brenee Brown Brinee
Speaker 1: is one of my idols. She's an internationally recognized expert
Speaker 1: on navigating emotions, and these days she's begun helping people
Speaker 1: figure out how to name their emotions too. Brenee's new
Speaker 1: book is called Atlas of the Heart, Mapping meaningful connection
Speaker 1: and the Language of human experience. Her book has a
Speaker 1: huge number of important tips for understanding our complex emotional landscape,
Speaker 1: which is something Brenie has been interested in for a
Speaker 1: really long time. Brenie learned as a child that she
Speaker 1: wasn't supposed to talk about or even acknowledge her feelings,
Speaker 1: but she also discovered that she was surprisingly good at
Speaker 1: observing while other people were feeling, especially when it came
Speaker 1: to adults. It just became actually kind of a form
Speaker 1: of psychological safety for me growing up to know the
Speaker 1: relationship between behavior and language and thinking and feeling. I
Speaker 1: think today a therapist would probably just say an over diligent,
Speaker 1: kind of hyper vigilant way of thinking about emotion and cognition.
Speaker 1: And I got really good at it to the point
Speaker 1: where I could predict behavior. It was like a superpower.
Speaker 1: I had a swim coach who was really volatile. I
Speaker 1: mean he just would lose his shit in really inappropriate ways,
Speaker 1: and everyone would always try to figure out, like who
Speaker 1: is he after? Who is he after? But it only
Speaker 1: took me like a couple of practices to realize he
Speaker 1: didn't love the fastest kids. He liked the kids who
Speaker 1: tried the hardest. And he also had a pinchip for backstroke,
Speaker 1: I think whether he was a backstroker in college. So
Speaker 1: I would just always get in the lane with the
Speaker 1: people who weren't the best swimmers but who really tried hard,
Speaker 1: which was good because I wasn't one of the best swimmers.
Speaker 1: So it worked and I never got in trouble. And
Speaker 1: I never shared with anyone what the secret was either,
Speaker 1: because it was, you know, every person for themselves. Terrible
Speaker 1: experiences like this made brine wonder why couldn't her peers
Speaker 1: see what to her was so obvious. I spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time thinking to myself, holy shit, do they
Speaker 1: not understand what's getting ready to happen? Like? Do they
Speaker 1: not see what's happening here? Brinee's fascination with emotion and
Speaker 1: behavior led her on a path to becoming a social worker.
Speaker 1: The research she eventually did on emotions helped her understand
Speaker 1: why her superpower was so rare. We asked people to
Speaker 1: make a list of all the emotions that they could
Speaker 1: recognize in themselves as they were experiencing them, and the
Speaker 1: mean number was as three just three three, yeah, happy, sad,
Speaker 1: and pissed off. I always call it the bad, sad,
Speaker 1: glad triad. And that was really shocking to me. Now,
Speaker 1: they could list a lot of other emotions, but they
Speaker 1: couldn't recognize when they were in them. They just knew
Speaker 1: that those emotion feeling words existed. That got me thinking
Speaker 1: back to a quote that I came across when I
Speaker 1: was in college by Ludwig Wittgenstein that the limits of
Speaker 1: my language mean the limits of my world. And I
Speaker 1: just spent a lot of years thinking what happens when
Speaker 1: our language is not as expansive as our human experience?
Speaker 1: What does it mean when we have to shove an
Speaker 1: experience of despair or disappointment into one of these three buckets?
Speaker 1: And I always knew that it completely crippled our ability
Speaker 1: to own and communicate. But I think it was probably
Speaker 1: four or five years ago when we started seeing some
Speaker 1: of the research on how language doesn't just communicate emotion
Speaker 1: but shape it. That I started thinking, oh God, holy shit,
Speaker 1: we are individually and collectively in trouble if we don't
Speaker 1: have language. Yeah, I mean, part of our task is
Speaker 1: recognizing emotions and other people. But how on earth are
Speaker 1: we going to fulfill that task when we can't even
Speaker 1: recognize our own emotional experience when it's happening and categorizing it.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it's one thing to think about
Speaker 1: not being able to recognize positive emotions, right, you know,
Speaker 1: the distuned say joy and awe and amusement. But it
Speaker 1: feels sort of different to not be able to recognize
Speaker 1: negative emotions. And I could think of a couple of
Speaker 1: reasons why you know, people don't do that. You know.
Speaker 1: The biggest one is it just sucks to reflect on
Speaker 1: anything that's painful, right, We tend to avoid it. It's
Speaker 1: deep part of human nature. If it sucks, just don't
Speaker 1: think about it. And so do you think that's part
Speaker 1: of it? I think it's probably the biggest driver. I mean,
Speaker 1: as someone who is like studied and written about shame
Speaker 1: for fifty years, I can tell you that no one
Speaker 1: wants to talk about it. You know. The bad news
Speaker 1: is the less we talk about it, the more we
Speaker 1: experience it. But no one wants to talk about it.
Speaker 1: People will do just about anything to avoid pain, including
Speaker 1: cause pain, right, I mean, so that seems to be
Speaker 1: part of it, is that you know, we're avoiding these
Speaker 1: negative emotions. But another I think is just a misconception
Speaker 1: about experiencing emotions, which is that if you look deep
Speaker 1: into the void, the void looks back at you. Right,
Speaker 1: if we really dig into you know, anguish and sadness
Speaker 1: and despair and all these things, that it won't feel
Speaker 1: good or it'll amplify these emotions. So talk about why
Speaker 1: that's a little bit of a misconception that labeling them
Speaker 1: can shape them, but maybe not in the way we
Speaker 1: often think. Yeah. No, it's a huge part of the
Speaker 1: mythology around emotion that if we look at in the eye,
Speaker 1: it gives it power, when the reality is if we
Speaker 1: look at in the eye and name it, it gives
Speaker 1: us power. And so I think it's to your point exactly,
Speaker 1: it's just human nature to avoid what hurts, even if
Speaker 1: and this is the cognitive dissonance part, even if we
Speaker 1: know avoiding it will exacerbate it. You know, emotions are
Speaker 1: such a big part of human behavior, of human nature.
Speaker 1: They affect so many parts of our life. So you
Speaker 1: might think that academics had them reasonably sorted out, that
Speaker 1: people across disciplines agreed on a definition and these kinds
Speaker 1: of things, you know, talk about. Way, when you really
Speaker 1: look into this, especially academically, things are much more complex
Speaker 1: than they might seem to liay folks. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: think there is a consensus on even the definition of emotion.
Speaker 1: In fact, I'm really careful in the book. The middle
Speaker 1: of the book is an exploration of eighty seven emotions
Speaker 1: and experiences. And I say emotions and experiences very purposefully
Speaker 1: because I don't want to get into that kind of
Speaker 1: academic pissing match about what is an emotion and what
Speaker 1: isn't an emotion because I'm a mix like terrible metaphors here.
Speaker 1: But there's bigger fish to fry. Yeah. One of the
Speaker 1: big questions that really comes up is this issue of
Speaker 1: like how many any emotions are there, which I think
Speaker 1: is you know, something else academics fight about. So, you know,
Speaker 1: what are some of the ideas you came up with
Speaker 1: and what have you found in your own work in
Speaker 1: terms of the like the number. The way we came
Speaker 1: up with the eighty seven was really straightforward. It was
Speaker 1: a content analysis of comments from seventy thousand people who
Speaker 1: took an online course that I did with in partnership
Speaker 1: with Oprah Winfrey Network, and we went in asking what
Speaker 1: are the emotions people are struggling to name and identify,
Speaker 1: and when they do name and identify them, help them
Speaker 1: move through them. So then we came up with a
Speaker 1: collection of emotions and experiences. Then we brought in a
Speaker 1: focus group of therapists who spend hours kind of ranking
Speaker 1: around the same question. These are critical for our clients
Speaker 1: to understand in order to heal and move through them
Speaker 1: or to experience more of it, and these are less critical,
Speaker 1: and these are not critical. And this is the list
Speaker 1: ended up with. And then I added a couple for
Speaker 1: comparative reasons, like Freudenfreude wasn't on the list, but Schadenfreud
Speaker 1: was just to compare. So when people say how many
Speaker 1: emotions are there, my answer is, I have no idea.
Speaker 1: We're exploring eighty seven of the one of the emotions
Speaker 1: and experiences we believe are helpful to be able to
Speaker 1: name to move through them. I think that's an awesome
Speaker 1: answer in it gets at this cross cultural issue, right,
Speaker 1: because those are the eighty seven emotions that you're my
Speaker 1: guess is Western mostly American participants, you know, came up
Speaker 1: with right where you did do the same analysis somewhere else.
Speaker 1: It might be a different set of them too. I mean,
Speaker 1: just as a shame researcher Man, English is one of
Speaker 1: the only languages that has one word for shame, and
Speaker 1: when we were translating into Spanish, there was a debate
Speaker 1: for three months about whether you should use the word
Speaker 1: for sin for shame the gallo like no, and then
Speaker 1: is it balwinsa. You know, maybe, but it's in context
Speaker 1: because that can also mean embarrassing. You know, It's like,
Speaker 1: it's really tricky emotions happen in the context of culture.
Speaker 1: So this is the first book and all my books
Speaker 1: that I have really put my foot down. We're not
Speaker 1: allowing it to be translated. And that's you know, that's
Speaker 1: hard with your publisher, right. A lot of the books
Speaker 1: are translating into thirty forty languages, and I didn't collect
Speaker 1: the data cross culturally. Therefore, just because we can translate
Speaker 1: it using a computer program. Doesn't make it right? Does
Speaker 1: that make sense? Totally? Totally. A bigger goal of the
Speaker 1: new book is really to do something that's important for
Speaker 1: all of us but we rarely do, which is to
Speaker 1: kind of get into emotional granularity, right, like really map
Speaker 1: out the tiny emotions and how they move through space.
Speaker 1: And so I wanted you to talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about this idea of an atlas, you know, and how
Speaker 1: you get to this metaphor of making a map. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when I interviewed cartologists, they said, when you build a map,
Speaker 1: a map is just a collection of layers. You first
Speaker 1: go and you get the topography. Then maybe you get
Speaker 1: where the water is, and maybe where you get where
Speaker 1: the roads are. And the story of a map is
Speaker 1: in the layers. And I really thought this is the
Speaker 1: right metaphor for this work because the story of our
Speaker 1: emotional lives is in the layers. Which is why I think.
Speaker 1: Have you ever seen the movie Chef? No? Actually, oh
Speaker 1: my god, I really want you to watch it. Okay,
Speaker 1: I will go, I will go, and the next time
Speaker 1: part two on Chef, Well, there's this great scene where
Speaker 1: John Favreau, he's losing his shit. A critic is in
Speaker 1: his restaurant tasting his food, and he's sticking his fingers
Speaker 1: in this guy's food. He's yelling at this guy, and
Speaker 1: it was such a great example of if I just
Speaker 1: saw you doing that like Laurie was doing that, I
Speaker 1: would say, Oh, he's so angry, But is it anger?
Speaker 1: Because grief could present the same way as could shame,
Speaker 1: as could humiliation, as could despair, And so I was
Speaker 1: really wrong about something I have said probably a thousand times.
Speaker 1: We need to learn how to recognize emotions and self
Speaker 1: and others, and I actually, coming to the end of
Speaker 1: this process, don't believe that we can actually recognize emotion
Speaker 1: in others. And if anybody could, I think I would
Speaker 1: be somebody at least in the top one hundred or so.
Speaker 1: I don't think we can read emotion in people. What
Speaker 1: I think we can do is get curious, connect with
Speaker 1: them deeply, as opposed to diminish, question, challenge, and listen.
Speaker 1: When we get back from the break, we'll hear more
Speaker 1: about this idea that emotions come in layers, and how
Speaker 1: understanding those layers can help us get better at describing
Speaker 1: the things we're feeling. The happiness lab will be right back.
Speaker 1: I've been talking with social worker and best selling author
Speaker 1: Brene Brown about how important it is to recognize and
Speaker 1: communicate our emotions, especially the difficult ones. But the language
Speaker 1: we used to talk about our feelings doesn't just shape us.
Speaker 1: It also influences our relationships. This idea that language doesn't
Speaker 1: communicate solely, it also shapes. It's like the benefit that's
Speaker 1: come to mind is if you're baking cookies, you know
Speaker 1: your Grandma's best russ pay and the flavor change is
Speaker 1: radically dependent on the bowl you use. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: the power of language. And so what happens if what
Speaker 1: you're experiencing is actually disappointment but the only language you
Speaker 1: have available to you is sad. I can't, as your friend,
Speaker 1: call you and say, Laurie, do you have a second sure,
Speaker 1: I'm so disappointed. If you and I both understand what
Speaker 1: disappointment is, somewhere in our conversation, we're probably going to
Speaker 1: get to the expectation that got betrayed, which because there's
Speaker 1: a relationship between disappointment and expectation, and that's where the
Speaker 1: healing is, that's where the learning is. I'll call you
Speaker 1: and say I'm so pissed off, you know, like that's
Speaker 1: more my modus operandi, but it doesn't get to Wow.
Speaker 1: I said an expectation that I had no control over,
Speaker 1: and I put a lot behind it. And so you've
Speaker 1: given us a nice guide to kind of figure out
Speaker 1: how we can get that granularity, you know, to what
Speaker 1: our kind of roads and elevation is in the emotions
Speaker 1: map in this for your idea of the sort of
Speaker 1: four bees as it were, I'm not sure if you
Speaker 1: called them the four bees, but yeah, so walk me
Speaker 1: through some of the things that are kind of in
Speaker 1: the emotion map. These four bees. Well, I think, and
Speaker 1: I don't know that they work in a linear way biology, biography, behavior,
Speaker 1: and backstory. So I think biology. Look, they call them
Speaker 1: feelings because our body is the first to respond. I mean,
Speaker 1: this emotion is physiological, and so to be able to
Speaker 1: understand where in your body are you feeling this and
Speaker 1: what are you feeling? Even just in a more you know,
Speaker 1: kind of less granular, more chunky level, I'm triggered by something,
Speaker 1: something's got me hooked. I'm in emotion and then biography.
Speaker 1: You know, I was raised in a family where you
Speaker 1: don't feel, and if you feel anything. The only thing
Speaker 1: that's really okay to feel as anger, Like we could
Speaker 1: be pissed, but we could never say my feelings are hurt,
Speaker 1: because that would be too vulnerable and too weak. Probably,
Speaker 1: So what did I grow up understanding or believing or
Speaker 1: learning about this feeling? And then the next is behavior?
Speaker 1: How am I showing up right now? You know? Like
Speaker 1: I'm coming down of my skin. I'd want to punch
Speaker 1: the wall. I just want to hide and cry. And
Speaker 1: then I think this last be is the one that
Speaker 1: really changed my mind about my belief that we can
Speaker 1: really understand what other people are thinking without stories, which
Speaker 1: is the backstory. Like if I see you in tears,
Speaker 1: I can't assume that it's grief. I can't assume that
Speaker 1: it's disappointment. I can't. I need to be so other
Speaker 1: focused and so curious that I want to know what
Speaker 1: it's about. And so yeah, I think they're complicated, and
Speaker 1: I think that we know enough now from neuroscience to
Speaker 1: know that unlike how I was raised, we are emotional beings.
Speaker 1: We do a lot based on emotion, and when we're feeling,
Speaker 1: cognition is not even in the passenger seat. It's like
Speaker 1: hog tied in the trunk. Yeah. But part of the
Speaker 1: insight for me, and I think the insight for a
Speaker 1: lot of people reading this is first just realizing how
Speaker 1: little they thought, carefully thought about their emotional landscaped at all,
Speaker 1: Like how very little they knew about the specific places.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite things about reading the book is
Speaker 1: that I like to think that I'm learning all this stuff.
Speaker 1: But then when you, you know, amazing social worker and
Speaker 1: five time best selling New York Times author Brene Brown,
Speaker 1: when you're learning stuff about emotion, when you're getting it wrong,
Speaker 1: you know, that makes me feel really really good, or
Speaker 1: at least it makes me feel like I'm not like
Speaker 1: completely messing up. Yeah, I mean, you know, we bucketed
Speaker 1: at the eighty seven into different families, into different maps,
Speaker 1: and there's not a single grouping where I did not
Speaker 1: make at least two or three mistakes. And how I
Speaker 1: use language constantly, Like I didn't understand the difference between
Speaker 1: jealousy and envy, and I didn't understand that envy was
Speaker 1: wanting something someone else had, and that jealousy is the
Speaker 1: fear of losing something you have to someone else. Now
Speaker 1: I understand it, but I'm not going to stop saying jealous.
Speaker 1: So because if you show me your vacation pictures, I'm like, hey, Laurie, like,
Speaker 1: how was Greece, And you're like, oh my god, let
Speaker 1: me show you. And I'm like, oh my god, I'm
Speaker 1: so jealous. I'm so jelly. You know, That's what I
Speaker 1: would say, and I'd try to figure out why I
Speaker 1: would never say, God, Laurie, I'm really envious. First of all,
Speaker 1: that sounds terrible, right, yeah. It sounds more like you're
Speaker 1: going after my vacation or something, you know, something negative, like, yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: I think that's because there's two types of envy. There's
Speaker 1: kind of benign MV which means I want something you
Speaker 1: have and I'm so glad you had it. But there's
Speaker 1: also malicious envy, where I want something you have and
Speaker 1: you're going down forgetting it. One of the ones that
Speaker 1: was a life changing for me, to be honest with you,
Speaker 1: is comparison. To compare is to be human. Basically, we
Speaker 1: compare involuntarily. It's just part of our wiring. Like I
Speaker 1: did not know that, And so where the inflection point comes,
Speaker 1: where the self determination comes, is what we choose to
Speaker 1: do with a comparison. So the story I tell in
Speaker 1: my book is I swim laps a lot, and if
Speaker 1: I happened to sync up with someone in a lane
Speaker 1: next to me and we push off the wall at
Speaker 1: the same time, I'm racing them, and I don't care
Speaker 1: if it's a twenty five year old triathlete or an
Speaker 1: eighty five year old woman, I'm racing you. But now,
Speaker 1: since doing this research, I'll say, to compare is human.
Speaker 1: To let go of it is divine. That's what I
Speaker 1: say to myself. So now I'll push off at the
Speaker 1: wall and then I just look at the person. Then underwater,
Speaker 1: I just say, have a good swim friend. And so
Speaker 1: the intervention point is not to not compare, because apparently
Speaker 1: we just do that as humans, probably related to like safety, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's evidence, for example that even non human
Speaker 1: primates and animals compare thea really, somebody else is getting
Speaker 1: a better You know, you're only getting a cucumber for
Speaker 1: your work on some project. You know, you're doing some
Speaker 1: reward task and you get a cucumber, but somebody else
Speaker 1: gets a grape, even though a cucumber would have been
Speaker 1: you know, fine delicious food. To get all of a
Speaker 1: sudden you're like mad that you're getting a grape, and
Speaker 1: so you can see monkeys like throwing the cucumber and
Speaker 1: rejecting and you know, shaking, you know, the bars of
Speaker 1: their enclosure. You know. So it it's not even the
Speaker 1: comparison is human. Comparison might be primate or maybe it's
Speaker 1: even mammal. We don't know life, but it's deep, yeah,
Speaker 1: like a social say, oh my god, I am the
Speaker 1: cucumber wielding monkey. One of the you know, ironically surprising
Speaker 1: ones for me was thinking about surprise. You talk about
Speaker 1: how we should pay attention to surprise because it's this
Speaker 1: really weird emotion because it has an incredibly short duration.
Speaker 1: You know, we wait for like sadness, you know, grief
Speaker 1: for a long time does this dissipate, But surprise one
Speaker 1: second you realize what's happening and then it's over. So
Speaker 1: fascinating from like a cognitive science perspective that there's just
Speaker 1: one emotion that's just really short lived. It's like the
Speaker 1: shortest and this also taught me something about myself, so
Speaker 1: it's very short, and then it's a bridge to other things,
Speaker 1: other cognitions and emotions that follow. Right, It's a bridge,
Speaker 1: I call it a cannon, Like you get shot out
Speaker 1: of this thing emotionally and it's over like that, but
Speaker 1: then you're in something else. The emotion that follows a
Speaker 1: surprise are normally exacerbated by surprise. You feel them more
Speaker 1: deeply what's happening. So I hate surprises, Like even I'm
Speaker 1: a huge mystery reader and a huge mystery watcher, and
Speaker 1: I will read a plot or the back of a
Speaker 1: book before I start, and people think, God, what is
Speaker 1: wrong with you, Like if there's no joy in that,
Speaker 1: And I'm like, well, it may not be joined that
Speaker 1: for you, But for me to sit in a theater
Speaker 1: for two hours not knowing what's going to happen, I can't.
Speaker 1: That's not fun for me. That's anxiety producing for me.
Speaker 1: So I can really enjoy the film if I understand
Speaker 1: who's going to die or who did it, or who's
Speaker 1: the bad person or you know whatever. But now I
Speaker 1: understand better. But it's not surprised that I mind so much.
Speaker 1: It's the fact that it heightens the emotions that follow,
Speaker 1: and I do not like heightened emotion. This was really
Speaker 1: clarifying for me because I'm with you, not not for
Speaker 1: all films, but definitely for scary films. I'm really even
Speaker 1: I like love Halloween. I'm obsessed with Halloween, but I
Speaker 1: hate scary movies, and to watch one with my husband,
Speaker 1: I have to like go on Wikipedia and read the
Speaker 1: plot so I know when the jump scares are coming,
Speaker 1: so that I can like be like it's coming, I'll
Speaker 1: be okay, I'll just feel a little bit afraid. So
Speaker 1: it was nice to hear that I'm not alone in that.
Speaker 1: So those are cases of like realizing more about these emotions,
Speaker 1: you know, surprises this canon that shoots you into other things.
Speaker 1: I thought another deep insight of your book was all
Speaker 1: these cases where we just failed to tell emotions apart.
Speaker 1: You know you mentioned this with jealousy and envy right.
Speaker 1: Another one I love learning about was this distinction between
Speaker 1: worry and rumination. So talk a little bit about why
Speaker 1: those are so different. Man, I did not know a
Speaker 1: lot about ruminating and the dangerous for rumination before I
Speaker 1: went into this. It came up as kind of the
Speaker 1: variable that predicts whether nostalgia is going to be healthy
Speaker 1: psychologically are dangerous because honestly, I think of nostalgia as
Speaker 1: a dog whistle for white supremacy most of the time
Speaker 1: to be honest with you. Like, ah, back then it
Speaker 1: was so good soft comma when people knew their place,
Speaker 1: you know. And so I came into nostalgia like loaded
Speaker 1: for bear. I was like, there's nothing good about nostalgia.
Speaker 1: But I think it was Sandra Garrido who said in
Speaker 1: her research nostalgic can be beautiful and wonderful, which is
Speaker 1: good because it gives me permission to feel nostalgic again
Speaker 1: about some things like a childhood smell or something that
Speaker 1: makes me feel warm and fuzzy. But it's they're ruminating
Speaker 1: that makes it really psychologically unhealthy, and I think it
Speaker 1: can be dangerous collectively. After the break, Brenee will walk
Speaker 1: us through even more of these emotions that we think
Speaker 1: we understand but we kind of just don't. We'll also
Speaker 1: see that understanding the nuances of these emotions might be
Speaker 1: the key to breaking free from some pretty negative patterns
Speaker 1: of behavior. The Happiness Lab will be right back as
Speaker 1: a professor of psychology and host of this podcast. I
Speaker 1: had always assumed that I knew a lot about my
Speaker 1: own feelings. I'm not totally sure how many emotions I
Speaker 1: could have named before talking with Burnee, but it was
Speaker 1: probably way less than the eighty seven she identified in
Speaker 1: her book, But Brine admitted that some of these emotions
Speaker 1: were pretty tricky for her to disentangle too. One of
Speaker 1: the cool differences between rumination and worry is kind of
Speaker 1: which direction they're pointing, which is something I'd never really
Speaker 1: thought about before. Your rumination is kind of pointing towards
Speaker 1: the past, whereas worry is pointing towards the future. I mean,
Speaker 1: both are bad, but that means you deal with them
Speaker 1: in slightly different ways. Yeah, And how would you define ruminating? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think of rumination is like, you know,
Speaker 1: a thought pattern that you get stuck in, you know,
Speaker 1: a lot like worry right where you're kind of, you know,
Speaker 1: your thoughts are going back to this over and over again.
Speaker 1: You're not actually making progress in terms of dealing with it.
Speaker 1: But it was funny to realize that one of those
Speaker 1: thought patterns is about the future. You know, I tend
Speaker 1: to have a lot of health anxiety, so I'm like,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, you know, I see the symptoms. It
Speaker 1: can't you're you know, like I'm you know, worrying, worrying
Speaker 1: about the future. But then you also have rumination. Right
Speaker 1: that thing that I did before, I can't believe I
Speaker 1: said that to that person, like I wonder how they're
Speaker 1: going to react, and did it out God, But it
Speaker 1: was funny to realize that the form of the feel
Speaker 1: so familiar, and I would have used those words interchangeably,
Speaker 1: but they map onto totally different things, right Like with worry,
Speaker 1: I need to deal with my anxiety or make take
Speaker 1: control about the future or kind of allow that. With rumination,
Speaker 1: there's something about the past that I might need to
Speaker 1: deal with and get over and allow in a different way.
Speaker 1: And so it's sort of different paths forward with each
Speaker 1: of them. It's holding on to something different and then
Speaker 1: different paths out of them. Worry, I'm a warrior, like
Speaker 1: I can really worry with the best of them, but
Speaker 1: some of them mythology that warriors carry felt like I
Speaker 1: felt like I was really being read. It was terrible,
Speaker 1: because you know, warriors believe that worrying is helpful. It's not.
Speaker 1: Warriors believe that they cannot change that about them. We can.
Speaker 1: And then how dangerous it is to worry about worrying.
Speaker 1: And so I have to dispel the mythology about worry
Speaker 1: because I do tell myself it's good, and I do
Speaker 1: tell myself that I can't help it when I can.
Speaker 1: I also, before I wrote this book, I use the
Speaker 1: word overwhelmed a lot, and I used it when I
Speaker 1: was actually just stressed. And I think when I tell
Speaker 1: my body that I'm overwhelmed, it has a protocol that
Speaker 1: it follows, where that is just shut down protocol. I
Speaker 1: think it's John Cabotzen that has this beautiful definition of overwhelmed,
Speaker 1: where life is unfolding at a pace faster than my
Speaker 1: nervous system or psyche can manage, and so overwhelmed I
Speaker 1: need to reserve that term for when I mean it.
Speaker 1: These are all cases where the act of not telling
Speaker 1: emotions of heart allows us to miss nuance. That's critical
Speaker 1: for kind of figuring out how to deal with these emotions.
Speaker 1: But there are other cases where we don't realize that
Speaker 1: two emotions are very close on a map, and that
Speaker 1: can help us miss cases where maybe thinking about emotions
Speaker 1: in that different way it might help us. And so
Speaker 1: I thought about this in the context of anxiety versus excitement.
Speaker 1: You know, if you did like anxiety versus excitement, I'm like,
Speaker 1: you know, one hundred percent excitement, you know, the heck
Speaker 1: with anxiety, but like in emotional space on your atlast,
Speaker 1: they're kind of close, and that might give us some
Speaker 1: insights about how to kind of navigate anxiety that we
Speaker 1: didn't think about before. Yeah, I mean, I'll be honest
Speaker 1: with you, I'm still wrestling with this and I write
Speaker 1: about wrestling with it because I think when we think
Speaker 1: about the four bees in biology terms, I think our
Speaker 1: physiological response to excitement anxiety can be very similar, kind
Speaker 1: of coming out of our skin a little bit. That
Speaker 1: just Oh and then with the research shows is that
Speaker 1: when we're torn between what we're feeling but we label
Speaker 1: it anxiety, the outcomes are more positive. When we label
Speaker 1: what we're feeling as anxiety, it's more negative. So I'm
Speaker 1: trying to figure out for myself what that means and
Speaker 1: when that's helpful without diminishing the fact that anxiety is
Speaker 1: a real thing and when we're in it, just calling
Speaker 1: it something else doesn't make it go away. Does that
Speaker 1: make sense? Yeah? Totally. I mean it suggests that we
Speaker 1: might be able to prepare ourselves better, you know, with
Speaker 1: the backstory ahead of time. Yeah, you know, I'm going
Speaker 1: into this job interview, and you can work on the
Speaker 1: backstory to be what a cool challenge to meet these
Speaker 1: new people. I'm so excited that kind of backstory might
Speaker 1: lead to a different outcome. Then if the backstory is, gosh,
Speaker 1: I need this job, you know, I'm worried that I
Speaker 1: don't have the right qualifications that backstory, even though the
Speaker 1: biology is the same. Right your fight or flight systems activated.
Speaker 1: You know, your heart's racing, you know, you can see
Speaker 1: it in these totally different ways, you know, So those
Speaker 1: are cases where you know, recognizing these are emotions are
Speaker 1: close and if we just push one of the bees,
Speaker 1: you know, push the backstory or something a different way,
Speaker 1: I can help. But another one of the biggest insights
Speaker 1: I got from your book, perhaps the biggest insight, is
Speaker 1: these cases where we just don't remember where the emotions
Speaker 1: are on an emotional map, and thinking about them differently
Speaker 1: can completely change the way we respond to them. And
Speaker 1: so you talked about one of the big insights you
Speaker 1: had in this domain when thinking about the emotion of resentment.
Speaker 1: You know, do you want to talk about the kind
Speaker 1: of insight you got there? The resentment was living on
Speaker 1: the wrong continent in my life it's like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: this was real. This is hard for me. The long
Speaker 1: story short is that I've struggled a lot with resentment
Speaker 1: and I can really feel it. So I was interviewing
Speaker 1: Mark Brackett from You All about his book, and before
Speaker 1: we went on the air, I said, Hey, can I
Speaker 1: just ask you a personal question for me personally? And
Speaker 1: he's like, yeah, sure, and I said, resentment is from
Speaker 1: the Anger family, right, and he goes, no, resentment is
Speaker 1: actually a function of envy. And then it was like
Speaker 1: time to go on and I was like, oh, holy shit,
Speaker 1: and you know, we did this podcast. It was great.
Speaker 1: I called my therapist, like on the way home, I said,
Speaker 1: I really need to talk to you. And as we
Speaker 1: started to unpack that, what I realized is the times
Speaker 1: when I was the most resentful is when I'm deep
Speaker 1: in to burnout. I'm exhausted, and I don't think everyone
Speaker 1: else is working as hard as I am. And it
Speaker 1: turns out that I'm not mad because people aren't working
Speaker 1: as hard. I'm envious because they're taking care of themselves.
Speaker 1: And what's so surprising about that is then it gives you,
Speaker 1: like it plops in your lap, a solution which is
Speaker 1: not yell at them and be like, hey, you work more,
Speaker 1: you know, dang it. It's it's to say, actually, I
Speaker 1: need to set up my own boundaries, like I'm what
Speaker 1: I'm jealous of that? You know, because as you talk about,
Speaker 1: envy has a kind of content and there's a thing
Speaker 1: that you're envious of. It might be those other people's
Speaker 1: boundaries or there, you know, time affluence, the fact that
Speaker 1: they have some space totally. And so that one was
Speaker 1: profound for me because it made me realize the way
Speaker 1: I go about solving yet and my teams in my
Speaker 1: life with family members. It's wrong, right, It's about me
Speaker 1: and the changes I need to make for myself that
Speaker 1: the changes I need to make for the relationship. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and now, and when I feel envious, I don't say
Speaker 1: what is this person doing to piss me off? Which
Speaker 1: is an easy question for me to ask. It's how
Speaker 1: I was raised, It's my biography, you know. Now I
Speaker 1: ask what do you need that you're afraid to ask for?
Speaker 1: And it's hard, No, it's just hard. It's hard for
Speaker 1: me because it's very vulnerable. I'm tired. I need more joy,
Speaker 1: I need more play, any more connect with Steve and
Speaker 1: my kids. It's all the stuff I'm really scared of.
Speaker 1: So disappointment was another one for me that kind of
Speaker 1: had this Aha moment where, you know, I think it's
Speaker 1: about sadness, but the content of disappointment is that it's
Speaker 1: really about your expectations. It's a reaction to a violation
Speaker 1: of an expectation. And that felt like yet another one
Speaker 1: that maybe you could work on yourself, like, you know,
Speaker 1: because I control those expectations, so maybe there's a point
Speaker 1: where I need to update my expectations. You kind of
Speaker 1: had this same aha moment when you were thinking about
Speaker 1: disappointment too, right, Yeah. I mean Steve and I have
Speaker 1: been together for thirty plus years. Maybe the biggest threat
Speaker 1: to our marriage is kind of what I call stealth expectations,
Speaker 1: these expectations that I have or he has that we
Speaker 1: don't communicate with each other. But then we're just reeling
Speaker 1: in disappointment and blame and anger. And I mean I
Speaker 1: tell simple story in there about packing for Disney, you know,
Speaker 1: and I have five books that I carry on and
Speaker 1: he's like, what you're doing? And I said, I'm just
Speaker 1: bringing all these books and he's like, should we talk
Speaker 1: about that? And I said, no, this is I'm so excited.
Speaker 1: We're gonna be gone for a whole week and this
Speaker 1: is so cool. And he's like, we have seven kids
Speaker 1: at Disney World for six days. The only thing you're
Speaker 1: going to read is you have to be this tall
Speaker 1: to ride. And I was like what, and he goes,
Speaker 1: I just want to reality check these expectations with you,
Speaker 1: if that's what kind of time off we need. We
Speaker 1: picked the wrong place, you know, and we end up
Speaker 1: having a great time, but it wasn't just riddled with disappointment.
Speaker 1: And I think this is really the power of the book.
Speaker 1: You went through eighty seven. We probably just had time
Speaker 1: to go through ten. But what we're seeing is like
Speaker 1: knowing where emotions are, what other emotions they're near, making
Speaker 1: sure we're distinguishing them when they require distinguishing, and kind
Speaker 1: of recognizing their definitions. This is really helpful for figuring
Speaker 1: out the kind of thing you need to do to
Speaker 1: make sure your Disney vacation is working and the way
Speaker 1: you want right And so, you know, do you think
Speaker 1: that having this better map is really going to help
Speaker 1: us in terms of flourishing, not even changing our emotions,
Speaker 1: but just better understanding them. Can really help us navigate them. Yes,
Speaker 1: I think that we are really desperate to find our
Speaker 1: way back to ourselves and to each other. I think
Speaker 1: it starts with language and self awareness and some deep
Speaker 1: breaths and just trying to understand that we're emotional beings.
Speaker 1: And if we don't have the language that reflects our experiences,
Speaker 1: it gets really tricky to talk about how we feel
Speaker 1: and ask for what we need. And I do feel
Speaker 1: like there's some hope there. And what I hope is
Speaker 1: I hope that couples read it together, and I hope
Speaker 1: friends talk about it, and I hope that there are
Speaker 1: some real conversations. And I think there are so many
Speaker 1: people out there, yourself included, trying to make a dent
Speaker 1: in a world that says how we feel doesn't matter,
Speaker 1: when really nothing matters if we don't understand how we feel.
Speaker 1: Speaking with Brene really drove home the importance of trying
Speaker 1: to commit to recognizing and describing my feelings more precisely,
Speaker 1: especially when they're feelings that i'd kind prefer to run
Speaker 1: away from. So I hope you'll join me in trying
Speaker 1: to better map your emotions in the new year. The
Speaker 1: next time I'm having a bad day at work, I'm
Speaker 1: going to try to put my emotional thinking cap on
Speaker 1: and identify what's really going on, whether I'm dealing with
Speaker 1: frustration or disappointment, or overwhelm or boredom. I'm also going
Speaker 1: to try to more specifically notice what my body is
Speaker 1: experiencing and to see if there's some wiggle room and
Speaker 1: how I describe it. The next time my heart is
Speaker 1: racing before a big new project, I'll try to reframe
Speaker 1: that as excitement rather than anxiety. And if nothing else,
Speaker 1: I'm going to hold onto Brune's wonderful metaphor that my
Speaker 1: feelings are part of a vast and layered and perhaps
Speaker 1: even beautiful emotional landscape. When I start to feel lost
Speaker 1: or overwhelmed by a certain feeling in the new year,
Speaker 1: I'm going to take a moment to be grateful that
Speaker 1: I get to experience such a spectacular emotional landscape in
Speaker 1: the first place. I might even pause to marvel at
Speaker 1: the scenery. Now that Brette has helped me recognize and
Speaker 1: name my emotions with more precision, my next task is
Speaker 1: to figure out how to deal with all the ichy
Speaker 1: ones I am saying it. I'm noticing that I'm feeling
Speaker 1: said I'm not good enough, there's no point in even trying.
Speaker 1: I'm noticing that this is my I'm not good enough story.
Speaker 1: When you do this, you aren't ignoring your difficult experience,
Speaker 1: but you're creating space in it, and that will be
Speaker 1: the topic of the next episode of The Happiness Lab
Speaker 1: with me Doctor Laurie Santos. If you love this show
Speaker 1: and others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to pushkin Plus.
Speaker 1: Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content
Speaker 1: and uninterrupted listening for only four ninety nine a month.
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 Podcasts subscrib ops.
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 Faine, 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,