January 3, 2022 • 44 mins
Uncomfortable emotions such as anger, guilt or loneliness are like the guiding beam of a lighthouse - they warn you of dangers ahead and help you navigate a meaningful life more effectively.
Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David tells Dr Laurie Santos why many of us choose to ignore negative feelings or suppress them - when we should be engaging with them in a way that helps us understand what is going wrong in our lives and what we need to do to fix things and find greater happiness.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. When we experience negative emotions, things like guilt or
sadness or anger, it can feel pretty intense, almost like
navigating a violent storm at sea. We might feel buffeted
and disoriented, or even a little sick to our stomachs.
(00:37):
At times like that, staying on an even emotional course
can feel impossible, like we'll never reach the safety of
dry land again. I've chosen this nautical analogy for a reason.
As I began reading more about the science of negative
emotions for this special season, I learned more about the
excellent work of Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David. In
her book, Susan argues that negative feelings are like the
(01:00):
bright glow of a lighthouse in a storm. To become
a wise emotional seafarer, we need to heed the warning
of all the hidden rocks ahead. If we ignore the
light completely or venture too far out, we might get trapped.
The problem is that we tend not to listen to
the message our yucky feelings are sending, and that means
we sometimes find ourselves dashed on the emotional rocks. Susan's
(01:26):
interest in thinking more carefully about negative emotions began early
in life. It was born of both family tragedy and
the grim politics of her homeland. A lot of my
work is born not in the halls of Harvard or Yale, but,
like so many of us, in the messy, tender business
of life. So I grew up in the white suburbs
(01:47):
as a white child in Napartit, South Africa, and it
was very much a country and community that was committed
to not seeing and to denial. And so from a
very early age I actually became interested in this thread
that I think really runs through our work, which is
seeing versus not seeing, particularly when it comes to the
(02:10):
emotional world, and whether we see ourselves impacts and how
it impacts on our capacity to be wholehearted humans. And
so really that's the thread of so much at my work.
And then when I was around fifteen years old, my father,
who was forty two, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and
(02:30):
I remember my mother telling me to go and say
goodbye to him. He was dying in our home, and
I went to his room. I opened the door. It
was just before I head it off for school. It
was on a Friday, and my dad was lying in
bed and his eyes were closed, and I just remember
this feeling that even though he couldn't see me, that
(02:55):
he could he knew me. I'd always felt seen in
his presence. And then also overlayered on that was this
experience that I had after my father's death, which was
everyone telling me to just be strong, smiling, and I
am a fifteen year old and I become the master
of being okay. You know, I don't drop a single grade.
(03:17):
People ask me harm doing it in a world that
seems to value relentious positivity as a marker of so
called strength. I keep saying I'm okay, I'm okay, but
the truth lurries it Back home, my family is struggling.
My father has died in debt. My mother's grieving the
love of her life. She's raising three children, the creditors
(03:39):
are knocking, and I, as a child, was just struggling.
I felt so untethered from myself and so untethered in
this experience of grief, and I started to respond to
that as so many people do when they experiencing emotional pain,
especially unprocessed emotional pain, which is for me, that took
(04:01):
the form of binging and purging, refusing to accept the
full weight to my grief and then the last thing
that I would just add to this journey of how
I come to my work is I remember when I
was then, probably about six months later, I'm in this struggle,
and I recall this extraordinary teacher handing out these blank
(04:21):
notebooks to the class. And she was my English teacher,
and she looked at me and she said an invitation
to the class, but it felt like it was to me.
She said, right, tell the truth, right, like no one
is reading. And so Laura, I started this correspondence with
this teacher. It was this correspondence where I would journal,
(04:42):
and I would hand in my journal and she would
write back to me in pencil. It was my story,
and she was writing back in pencil thoughts or responses
to what I was experiencing. And so I had this
feeling that actually became clear to me, which was this
act that I was engaging in with my teacher was
actually revolutionary for me. It was counter to what I
(05:05):
was being told in society, which is just get on
with it and just be positive. And instead what I
was doing is I was facing into these rarely difficulty
emotions and experiences, and that that secret, silent correspondence with
the teacher as well as the secret silence correspondence with
my own heart actually landed up shaping my career. So
I became an emotions researcher, and I was really just
(05:29):
foundationally interested in what is told to us by society
about emotions and in what ways does that narrative actually
not serve us. In fact, completely counter to making us
strong and more resident, it actually makes us more fragile.
And that became the threat of the work that I do.
(05:49):
And so I love this story because, you know, it
shows the kind of way that we normally deal with
these undesirable emotions, you know, both kind of the ways
that society tells us we need to deal with them,
but also our natural instinct, which is like, you know, avoid, avoid, avoid.
Like in the book, you kind of walk through so
many bad reactions we have when we have these undesirable emotions.
(06:09):
One of these are sort of jumping into our own
productivity and overwork. You know, talk about how this strategy
plays out and why it's so problematic for dealing with
undesirable emotions. Yeah, So, what I've found in my work
is that typically when people have difficult, tough emotions, they
very often have one of two ways of responding. The
first is what I call bottling, and bottling is basically
(06:33):
where you push aside the difficulty emotion, often with good intentions.
I've got so much to do. I just can't get on,
you know, I've just got to get on with my life.
And sometimes the reason that we do this is because
we fear that by facing into the difficulty emotion that
we don't have the skills to deal with it, or
that somehow it's just better to be productive and focused
(06:55):
on moving forward. And so bottling emotions is really this
idea that we push the emotions aside for whatever reason,
and we think that that actually is helpful. But there's
a body of research showing that when we push aside
these difficulty emotions, there's actually an amplification effect, which is
really fascinating. For anyone who's ever tried not to eat
(07:18):
a big piece of chocolate cake that's tempting you in
the refrigerator, you know that the more you try not
to think about that piece of chocolate cake, the more
you dream about it. And the same experience happens with emotions.
And when I talk about emotions in this way, I'm
both talking about the big moments of emotions, the grief,
the loneliness, the loss. But I'm also talking about the
(07:40):
smaller experiences that we might have day to day. We
feel undermined in a meeting, we feel shut down, we
feel like we just want to roll our eyes at
the change that's going on in our organization. So we
have everyday thousands of these kinds of emotional experiences, and
on the one hand, we can bottle them, we push
them aside, but there is this amplification effect. And what
(08:03):
becomes clear when we look at the research is that
when we do this as not just a once off,
it as a tendency, actually it undermines our well being.
We have lower levels of resilience, higher depression, high anxiety.
It impacts on the quality of our relationships and even
on our ability to achieve our goals. Because if you
(08:25):
take these emotions that are trying to signal something to you, oh,
you bought in your job or things on going well,
and you push them aside, then you aren't actually adapting
to the reality of your life, and therefore you on
putting strategies in place to move forward effectively. So that's
one way we can deal with difficulty emotions. The other
looks so different, and yet a lot of the consequences
(08:47):
are the same. So brooding is where we get stuck
in the difficulty motion. We get victimized by our news feed,
we get hooked on being right. We go over and
over and over in our heads why it is we
so unhappy with something that's happened. And again, even though
this might have the semblance of being effective, it actually
(09:10):
keeps us very stuck in the emotional experience and not
moving forward effectively. And so if we think about this difference,
it's really fascinating because brooding is similarly associated with lower
levels of well being, a goal attainment, and relationships and
our almost imaginary It's like if you've got a pile
(09:31):
of books that you're holding in your emotions, or the
books bottling is where you hold those books so far
away from you that ultimately the energy and effort that's
involved in holding them far from you leads you to
drop them, and so you might snap at the person,
or you cry unexpectedly or court of God. By those
(09:51):
difficulty emotions. When we brooding, we hold the book so
tightly to ourselves, and so we're not able to see
the child who's giving us a hug or who wants
to be with us. We unable to be and breathe
and be wise in the world, So bottling up pain, anger,
and anxiety doesn't really work, But allowing these emotions to
(10:15):
fully take over doesn't help either. Unfortunately, these both tend
to be our go to strategies when we're facing a
tough situation. When we get back from the break, Susan
will share a potential middle path we can use to
navigate emotions. As we'll see, it's a strategy that we
can all use to find greater happiness. No matter what
(10:35):
life throws our way, the Happiness Lab will be right back.
Psychologist Susan David often explains the idea of emotional agility
with a story, the sad tale of a mariner who
is too stubborn to switch course when something bad popped
(10:58):
up on the horizon. It's a beautiful story, and it's
this idea that there's a captain on a ship and
he's basically trying to steer the ship effectively. He says
to a junior seman, let me know if you see anything,
and the seman comes to him and says, I'm seeing
something in front of us, and we are going to
(11:19):
bash into it. And the captain gets like more and
more arrogant and says, tell them that we are on
a collision course and tell them to move, tell them
to move. And so the seman keeps on relaying this
message to the obstacle, saying, you know, you've got to
move out the way. You've got to move out the way.
And ultimately a message comes back from the so called
obstacle saying, actually you need to move. Why because we
(11:43):
are a lighthouse, sir. And it's a beautiful story. Because ready,
if we think about what a lighthouse is, a lighthouse
is helping us to navigate. A lighthouse is helping us
to develop some sense of steering around the rocky shores
(12:03):
of life. And yet, often, if we think about the
metaphor if we want to extend it, our emotions are
the signal. You know, our emotions are signaling things that
are important. Our emotions might be signaling that this job
isn't going as wonderfully as you wanted, or the relationship
is actually not working out. And yet when we keep
(12:26):
on either avoiding the emotions or not connecting with them effectively,
then we aren't actually using that GPS system in the
way that it was intended, And so we then struggled
to be agile. We struggle to be effective. The world
is changing around us, and we need as human beings
(12:48):
to be able to have the capacity to deal with
the world as it is, which is a world that
is fragile, in which illness is interwoven with health, and
which love and loss are connected, in which we raise
children and then one day that child leaves. The emotion
(13:09):
that we experience are brokered to help us with the
reality of life which is changing and fragile. And yet
this notion that exists in our society, which is that
these difficulty emotions are bad. We need to ignore them,
We just need to fake positivity. It sounds good on
(13:30):
the surface very often, but actually what it does is
it undermines our capacity to be whole human beings in
the world. And so you've argued that the right way
to kind of listen to this lighthouse signal of our
emotions is with this notion of emotional agility and trying
to increase our emotional agility. Explain what you mean by
emotional agility. What is it so emotional agility is the
(13:53):
ability to be with your everyday thoughts and emotions and
experiences in a way that is healthy. And I'll go
into what I mean by the word healthy, but it's
being with these experiences in a way that's healthy so
that you can respond effectively to everyday situations. So let
(14:14):
me break that down a little bit. We all have thousands,
literally thousands, We have approximately according to some research, sixteen
thousand spoken thoughts every day and many more course through
our minds experiences of am I good enough? Am I
not good enough? Is the job? But you know that
all the stuff goes on in our minds. We have
all of our emotions, emotions like fear and sadness, grief, loneliness, loss, stress, anxiety,
(14:40):
we have all of it. And we also have stories.
Some of our stories were written on our mental chalkboards
when we were five years old, stories about who we are,
whether we good enough, whether we creative or not creative.
And so we have this normal experience of these thoughts, emotions,
and stories, and we need to have skills that enable
(15:03):
us to deal with these in ways that are healthy. Now,
what's not healthy is when we either push them aside
or we fail to learn from them, or when we
allow them to call the shots. And so what emotional
agility is. It's the ability to hold these thoughts and
emotions and stories lightly, so to not ignore them, but
(15:26):
to hold them lightly, to recognize, for instance, that when
we experience a difficulty emotion, that difficulty emotion, just like
the lighthouse, is tapping us on the shoulder, and it's saying,
there's this thing that's important to you, and Laurie, I'll
give you an example, loneliness. We don't like experiencing loneliness,
(15:49):
but loneliness is often signaling, sign posting that intimacy and
connection are important for you and that you don't have
enough of it in your life right now. Boredom at work.
We could look at boredom and go, I'm just going
to ignore it because at least I've got a job.
In other words, bottling difficult experience all we might say,
(16:11):
what is that boredom signaling? It's signaling that I value
growth and learning and I don't have enough of it.
I often think grief grief is love looking for its home.
Grief is tapping us on the shoulders saying, remember me,
think of the things that you learn from me. Hold
me I'm still with you in some way and bring
(16:34):
that to life in a way that feels special and connected.
And so holding our thoughts and emotions lightly is by
being curious with them and being able to recognize that
when we experience these difficulty emotions. While the dictates of
society might say, oh, you've just got to be positive,
(16:55):
you've just got to push them aside, in fact, there's
extraordinary beauty when we just slow down with them in
a way that is curious. Huh, what is this emotion
telling me about my needs or my values? There's also
connected with that, lorry, is this need to be compassionate
(17:17):
because it's hard to human it's hard to be a
human being in the world, regardless of what the circumstances
are of your world. And so emotional agility is really
about this ability to be with our emotions in ways
that are curious, compassionate, and courageous. Courageous because we don't
often always like what we see and feel, so that
(17:40):
we can then understand our values and our needs and
move forward in the direction of those values. And so
one of the ways you've argued we can start this
process of kind of gaining our emotional agility is first
to kind of show up and kind of non judgmentally
see the emotions we're dealing with. Bike is showing up
for our emotions so hard it's kind of funny, right,
like they're there, But we tend not to kind of
(18:01):
know what's going on when we experience these undesirable emotions. Yeah,
we described a little bit earlier. We spoke a bit
about the narratives that exist in society, and it's important
to recognize that all of us grow up with what
are called display rules. Display rules are often the implicit
and sometimes even explicit rules that may be in existence
(18:26):
in the families that we were born into, or even
in society at large. And an example of a display
rule might be you come home from school as a
child and you angry, and a parent says to you
why you're angry, and you say, I'm angry because you know,
Jack didn't play with me today, and the parent, with
great intentions, jumps in and says something like, don't worry,
(18:47):
I'll play with you, you know, or I'll phone the
mean person's parents. Let's go back cupcakes. And it's done
with really good intentions. But what that might signal to you,
is that joy and happiness are loud in this house,
and that anger isn't or that sadness isn't. Sometimes these
rules are explicit. Sometimes someone might say, go to your
room and come up when you've got a smile on
(19:08):
your face. Lay rules exist in our communities. When we
say to someone with cancer who is terminally ill and
is suffering, and we said to the person, just keep positive,
what we are conveying is a display rule, which is
that their experience of pain and grief and hardship has
(19:30):
no place. And so it's really important to recognize that
one of the reasons that we unsee our difficulty emotions
is because despite the fact that they exist and are
all around us, there are these narratives that basically say
either they are not allowed, or they don't belong, or
we live in a world that says we can fix everything.
(19:52):
If we don't like our car, we can buy a
new car. If we don't like the walls, we can
paint them at different color. And so when we experience
these difficult thoughts and emotions, we can just fix them.
We can find ways to be grateful, we can think
positive and everything will be okay. But it actually doesn't work.
And so what we are doing when we start cultivating
this capacity to show up to our difficulty emotions is
(20:13):
we stopped recognizing that when a city is being bombed,
it's very difficult to rebuild, it's very difficult to find
a way forward in the midst of the bombing. It's
only when there is an internal ceasefire that one is
able to start moving forward effectively. And so if you
(20:33):
in a space with your difficulty emotions where you say,
I'm not allowed to have heard I should be grateful.
I need to just think positive. Literally, what you're doing
is you're in a little wall with yourself about your
own emotions and your own suffering. And so a really
important part of showing up is ending that war, literally
ending the war. This is what I feel. This is
(20:55):
my experience. There's no wrong or right way to be
experiencing right now. This is my feeling. And when we
show up to those difficulty emotions with compassion, which is
really important, we are then able to start crafting a
way forward with the experience. And one of the ways
(21:15):
we can really kind of develop that compassion is to
kind of become a little bit curious about the emotions
we're experiencing. You know, sometimes we don't even know what
they are. And you've argued that one way we can
do that is to literally label our emotions. You know,
why is the labeling of emotions so important? So labeling emotions,
you know, it's almost like an emotional superpower. So because
(21:37):
there is a tragedy. And that sounds dramatic, but I
think it to be true. There is a tragedy that
exists in our schools and in our workplaces, where emotions
have historically, for a number of reasons that we could explore,
have been pushed aside. They're seen as soft skills. They
(21:58):
are seen as being less important than things like math
and strategy. What we have is literally entire generations of
people who have not been taught foundational emotional agility skills.
And these are core to our well being, tour mental health,
(22:21):
to our relationships. Internal pain always comes out, and the
people that pay the price, ourselves and our community, is
our children. And so one of the emotional skills that
is not taught is the superpower, which is emotion granularity.
And I'll give you an example of what I mean
by this. Often, when we've had a tough day, we'll
(22:41):
say something like I'm stressed. We use a very broad brushstroke,
black and white label to describe the emotion that we've experienced,
and stressed is the most common one I hear, but
people might have their own that they use that have
become very familiar, and it's basically this label that you use,
that your quick go to label to describe what it
(23:02):
is you're feeling. Now, if we think about it, there
is a world of difference between stress and disappointment. Stress
and that knowing, gnawing feeling of I'm in the wrong job,
the wrong career, or this relationship isn't working out. Stress
and exhaustion burnout. If you label your experience as stress,
(23:25):
it's a very diffuse label. It's very murky, and your body,
your psychology doesn't really know what to do with that.
It's almost like being in that boat and you think
that there might be something on the horizon that you've
got to pay attention to, but you've got no idea
what it is. But when you start saying to yourself,
(23:46):
what are two other options? I'm calling this thing stress,
but what else could it be? Oh it's disappointment, Oh
it's feeling unsupported. What it starts to do is it
starts to activate the readiness potential in us as human beings,
which starts saying, what do I need to do in
relation to this? And so there's enormous power in being
(24:06):
able to label this emotion accurately because it helps us
to understand both the cause of the emotion as well
as the steps that we might need to take in
order to process that emotion effectively. And we know, for instance,
that even in young children this capacity is profoundly, profoundly important.
As sixteen year old who is encouraged by a peer to, oh,
(24:32):
let's let the air out of the principle's car tires.
If that sixteen year old is able to say, on
the one hand, I feel excited and tempted, but actually,
deeper down, there's a sense of disquiet, trepidation, this doesn't
feel right. That is a child who's going to be
able to delay gratification, who's going to be able to
(24:54):
focus more on their moral compass, their values and their
goals and their character over time. So it sounds like
such a subtle skill when someone says, oh, when you
experience something, don't use just the first broad brushstroke label
labor more accurately. It feels like, oh, okay, is that
what you've got to offer? But it is just extraordinary
(25:16):
in terms of how important it is. So when we
think about these emotions is distinct. When we kind of
label them, then we can start in on another process,
which is to start using our emotions not as this
kind of horrible sensation, but really as data for what
we can do as the next app. You know, so
talk about some strategies we can use to do this. Yeah,
it's so important. The way that I think about emotions
(25:36):
is our emotions are data. So emotions again contain signposts
to the things that we care about, but our emotions
on directives. I can show up to my son's frustration
with his baby sister. I can see it, I can
hold space for it. I can be accepting of it,
but it doesn't mean that I'm endorsing his idea that
(25:57):
he gets to give away to the first stranger that
he sees in a shopping mall. Okay, our emotions are data,
not directives. In other words, we own our emotions. They
don't own us. And so another skill that becomes really
important in helping us to not push aside the difficulty emotions,
not brood on them, but develop healthy space with our emotions.
(26:21):
Is if we just think about the language again of
how we often describe emotions. We often say things like
I am sad, I am angry, I am frustrated, I
am being undermined. Now, if you just think about this language,
words matter. So when you say I am, it's pretty
(26:43):
much as if you are the emotion. I am all
of me, one hundred percent of me is the emotion.
When you do this, there's no space for anything else.
There's no space for wisdom, there's no space for intention.
Victor Frankel talks about this sentiment of between stimulus and response,
(27:04):
there is a space and in that space is our
power to choose, and in that choice our growth and
our freedom. So when we are hooked by a difficulty emotion,
when we feel triggered by it, there is no space.
We just feel something and we respond. You know someone
that I love starting in on the finances, I'm going
to leave the root because I feel alienated. So we hooked.
And what we're trying to do when we being emotionally
(27:25):
agiles to cultivate healthy space between us and our emotions,
so that we own the emotions. They don't own us.
And one of the ways we can start doing this
is by recognizing again that when we say I am,
there's no space. You're literally defining yourself by the emotion,
and so what's being crowded out. There are the other
parts of you that exist in every single one of us.
(27:50):
Our wisdom, our intention, our values, who we want to be,
our breathing, our connectedness. There's so much scentedness in every
single one of us. And so the way we can
start creating this space is by noticing the thoughts or
the emotion or the stories for what they are. They
(28:12):
are thoughts, emotions, and stories. They're not fact. So an example,
I am sad, I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. I'm
being undermined. I'm noticing that this is my thought that
I'm being undermined. I'm not good enough, there's no point
in even trying. I'm noticing that this is my I'm
not good enough story. When you do this, you aren't
(28:33):
ignoring your difficult experience, but you're creating space in it.
And a beautiful metaphor that I think when I think
about this skill is that when you say I am.
It's almost like you are the emotion, and the emotion
is a cloud, and you've become the cloud. I am sad.
(28:55):
But when you instead create space between you and the emotion,
I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. There's literally a kind
of distance that's created in language. What happens then, is
you aren't the cloud any longer. You are the sky.
You are the sky. Every single one of us is
beautiful and capacious enough to have all of our difficulty
(29:18):
emotions and still choose who we want to be in
the moment. You are not the cloud. You are the sky.
But it's not enough to label our emotions and change
how we talk about them. True emotional agility requires getting
curious about what our emotions are telling us and where
are they're steering us. And that kind of agility requires
(29:40):
something more. In the words of one of my favorite
seventies bands, Parliament, we got to have that funk. You'll
hear more about the funk when the Happiness Lab returns
in a moment. Psychologists Susan David argues that the first
(30:07):
step in reacting effectively to our ne emotions, there's no
anguish specific emotion. We're dealing with. We need to distinguish
a catchisle sensation like stress for more specific feelings like
exhaustion or disappointment. But once we know what emotion we're
dealing with, we also need to figure out what it's
saying to us, or, if Susan puts it, we need
to ask, what's the funk? I love this In my book,
(30:31):
I describe this idea of what the funk and what
the funk like? WTF is not a description of the
more explicit label. It's basically saying, what is the function
of the emotion? What the funk? You know, what the
funk is my grief signaling? What the funk is my
loneliness signaling. And so what we're starting to do when
(30:51):
we ask ourselves what the funk is, we are starting
to really create this beautiful space between us and the emotion.
So instead of feeling that the emotion owns us, that
it's driving us, that we triggered by it, that it's
right at our story, what we're starting to do is
we're starting to use the emotion in the way that
(31:13):
it was intended, which is to help us to adapt.
And so what the funk is a lovely short form
for what is the function? What is the emotion trying
to tell me about my needs or my values? When
I am worried about a situation in the workplace. On
(31:37):
the face of it, I might say, Okay, well, I'm
just feeling worried or I'm just feeling angry. But when
we start saying what the funk, it may be that
that worry is signaling that we really care about quality,
or we really care about our clients, and that we
are concerned that the way we are moving forward is
actually not a good direction. So when we start asking
(32:00):
ourselves what the funk, whether that's in a personal context
or in a broader context, we're starting to say, what
is this emotion trying to signal about values? On my needs?
And the example that I gave earlier, which is if
I am feeling lonely, the function of that loneliness is
to say that I need more intimacy and connection. And
so you might say, well, I am on zoom calls
(32:24):
every day and I see people all around me. But
we know that we can be lonely in a crowd,
and so what the function of loneliness might be saying,
you know, you pass your spouse in the kitchen as
you're both getting a coffee and you're both on your
phones and you barely look up at one another. And yes,
(32:45):
you might be in a house full of people, but
you still feel lonely. And the function of that loneliness
is to help you to reach out in the direction
of the need or the value, and so you can
then start making small changes, which is, you know, in
this particular example, it might be that there's this moment
of opportunity that you have in your day where you
(33:11):
can move in the direction of your needs or your values.
So it might be that you genuinely are giving that
person a hug at the end of the day and
crafting a new moment of connection. And we can do
this with any of our emotions or emotional experiences where
we are learning from them. A good way actually of
(33:31):
thinking about this is, as people are listening to this podcast,
if I asked you on a blank piece of paper
to just think about some emotion words that you've been experiencing.
So I've been feeling X whatever that is for you,
regret or sadness or anxiety, whatever that is. So you've
(33:52):
got that on that piece of paper. Now in a
world that focuses on forced false positivity. You might imagine
that I'm going to ask you to now turn the
piece of paper over and write about, well, what you
should be grateful for or why you should be happy.
But actually what I would ask you to do is
something quite different, which is to turn the piece of
(34:14):
paper over and ask yourself, what is that emotion signaling
about your needs or your values? And even if that
emotion has actually been a joyous emotion. You know, if
you of the past couple of months have experienced a
lot more joy than might be typical, you might be
(34:36):
asking yourself, what is this joy signaling about my needs?
It may be that you have reconnected with creativity or
with particular people. And so again, even that beautiful experience
of joy is signposting that this thing is important to
you and you can keep moving towards it, and a
(34:58):
reminder to keep threading this experience, this quality through your life.
And so this is so important that our emotions can
have this function of signaling our values, because I think,
you know, just like our thoughts and just like our emotions,
sometimes our values or the kind of thing that we
can't totally see, you know, we're sort of blind to
which values we're living out, and you talk about cases
(35:20):
where emotions can sometimes tell us that we're living out
the wrong kinds of values. You have this lovely phrase
in your book called the idea we're living out dead
people's goals. You know, what do you mean here? And
how can emotions be so helpful in this in this regard?
So the idea with what I described with dead people's
goals is just often people will say things like I
don't want to be stressed, I don't want my heart
(35:41):
to be broken, I don't want this project to fail.
And what I mean by dead people's goals is the
only people and I say this, you know facetiously, is
that the only people who don't ever have their hearts broken,
who never experience stress or loss or disappointment, are dead.
(36:03):
You know, discomfort is the price of admission to a
meaningful life. We don't get to leave the world a
better place, or raise a family, or build a meaningful
career without stress and discomfort. So in that context, you know,
when I say discomfort is the price of admission to
a meaningful life, what that then says is it becomes
(36:26):
really important for our emotional capacity that we develop the
ability to be with and learn from discomfort, because those
uncomfortable emotions, again are signaling things that we care about.
And oftentimes when people talk about values, it feels very abstract.
(36:48):
It feels like the kinds of things that people put
on walls and businesses, and feels very distant from us.
The way that I think of values are that they're
the heartbeat of your why. They are things that at
core matter to you, and they not abstract. They are
qualities of action, the qualities of action. So every single
(37:08):
day life is asking you, it's asking me, is saying
who do you want to be today? Every day and
every day we have opportunities to either move towards our
values or away from our values. If we value health,
(37:30):
are we moving towards the running shoes or away from them?
If we value relationship, are we moving towards the uncomfortable
conversation because we know that it's important to our relationship,
or are we moving away from it because I just
(37:50):
can't be bothered to go there, even though we know
at its core that that leads to disengagement and dissolution.
So every day we have these opportunities to move towards
our values. We stay upright on a bicycle by cycling,
and we stay up its people with the lives that
(38:11):
we want to be living by moving actively towards the
things that we care about. And so then often people
will say things like, well, how do I work out
what my values are? You know, how do I start
discerning what my values are? And it's a really important
question because again it's not the kind of conversation that
we often have in our schools or in our workplaces,
(38:34):
and that becomes really challenging. I'm sure that in the
podcast you've explored things like social contagion, where we know
that people can start picking up behaviors of other people.
Your next door neighbor drives a particular car, We want
to drive that car, and sometimes we don't even know
we're doing it. We know from large scale epidemiological studies
that your chances of getting divorced increase if people in
(38:57):
your social network that you don't even know get divorced,
and we saw this in the pandemic, how people catch
other people's behaviors. So what can start happening is, over time,
we can move more and more and more away from
the things that matter to us, and so it becomes
really important for us to just sometimes take a little
(39:19):
bit of time to affirm our values. There's been some
work that's just asked people to just sit down for
ten minutes and ask them to remind themselves what's important
to them in their relationship or what's important to them
in what they're studying or their careers. And that type
of values affirmation is very strong and very protective in
(39:43):
terms of enabling people to ward off that social contagion.
But as you speak to Laurie, one of the core
ways that we can start connecting with our values is
by paying attention to the heartbeat that comes through our
difficulty emotions. Because often our difficulty emotions are sign posting.
(40:04):
They're sign posting things that matter to us, and so
you know, this brings us to you kind of irony
rate in that running away from our negative emotions, trying
to avoid them, you know, trying to bottle them up.
We're like missing out on this super important signpost. This
like lighthouse that's signaling like, hey, your value is over
here and you're not meeting it right, you know, but
you might need to switch your behavior, you know. Do
(40:25):
you think through this idea really welcoming our inner experiences,
you know, like breathing into them, accepting them with curiosity.
You know, is that going to set us on a
new course that will allow us to flourish a little
bit more. Absolutely, if we look just at the notion
of acceptance of emotions, we know that acceptance of emotions
as opposed to pushing them aside or brooding on them,
(40:46):
is a cornerstone to well being, is a cornerstone to resilience,
because now you're actually developing skills to help you to
deal with the world as it is, which is this
broken world where heartbreak and loss hold hands with one another.
And so these skills that I'm taught to our truly
(41:12):
foundational skills in our personal relationships, in our relationship with self,
and also even in our workplaces, in our communities. We
can apply these exact same kinds of skills when we're
having difficult conversations with our children. Often we try to
convert them just be happy. But if we can hold
(41:32):
space for those difficulty emotions and we can help them
to label them, and we can help them to understand, Oh,
you upset with Jack, because friendship is important to you,
how do you want to be as a friend. What
does friendship look like? What you're now doing is you're
helping the child to develop their own moral compass and
(41:53):
sense of character. And this is extraordinarily important because when
the world is changing around us, being grounded in ourselves
with levels of courage, with levels of curiosity, with compassion,
and with the willingness to take values connected steps is
(42:16):
the only way forward in a fragile, beautiful world. I
was haunted by a phrase that Susan used a few
times during our conversation. She noted that discomfort is the
price of admission for a meaningful life. We often run
away from things we think will bring us discomfort, all
the potential failure, humiliation, and rejection of life. But by
(42:38):
running away, by not even trying, we deny ourselves the
opportunity to win, to be a success, and to be accepted.
Susan's quote really resonated with me because I definitely struggle
with this very issue. But I'm hopeful that this special
season of the Happiness Lab can help us learn how
to deal with our negative emotions without all the fear,
so that they won't hold us back from doing all
(43:00):
the things that we'll give our lives, more happiness, and
more meaning. In our next two shows, we're going to
be jumping right into the deep end when it comes
to yucky feelings. We're going to focus on an emotion
that goes way beyond mere discomfort, one that many of
us dread the most, but that none of us can
really hope to avoid in this beautiful, fragile world. When
(43:21):
the happiness slab returns, we're going to look at how
to deal with grief, how to learn from this emotion,
and how to figure out what is there to teach us.
The purpose of grief is that pain is the agent
to change that when we allow it to come through
our system, forces us to face this reality that we
don't want to look at. That this person that I
(43:41):
love or this thing in my life that I was
really attached to is no longer here. Until next week,
stay safe and stay happy. If you like this show
and others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus.
As a special gift to Pushkin Plus subscribers, I'll be
sharing a series of six guided meditations to help you
(44:02):
practice the lessons we've learned from our experts. To check
them out, look for Pushkin plus on Apple podcast subscriptions.
The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley,
Emily Anne Vaughan, and Courtney Guerino. Our original music was
composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering
(44:25):
by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Milabelle Heather Fame, John Schnars,
Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Brandt Haynes, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler,
Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis.
The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries
and me Doctor Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
(44:47):
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your podcasts,
Pushkin. When we experience negative emotions, things like guilt or
sadness or anger, it can feel pretty intense, almost like
navigating a violent storm at sea. We might feel buffeted
and disoriented, or even a little sick to our stomachs.
(00:37):
At times like that, staying on an even emotional course
can feel impossible, like we'll never reach the safety of
dry land again. I've chosen this nautical analogy for a reason.
As I began reading more about the science of negative
emotions for this special season, I learned more about the
excellent work of Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David. In
her book, Susan argues that negative feelings are like the
(01:00):
bright glow of a lighthouse in a storm. To become
a wise emotional seafarer, we need to heed the warning
of all the hidden rocks ahead. If we ignore the
light completely or venture too far out, we might get trapped.
The problem is that we tend not to listen to
the message our yucky feelings are sending, and that means
we sometimes find ourselves dashed on the emotional rocks. Susan's
(01:26):
interest in thinking more carefully about negative emotions began early
in life. It was born of both family tragedy and
the grim politics of her homeland. A lot of my
work is born not in the halls of Harvard or Yale, but,
like so many of us, in the messy, tender business
of life. So I grew up in the white suburbs
(01:47):
as a white child in Napartit, South Africa, and it
was very much a country and community that was committed
to not seeing and to denial. And so from a
very early age I actually became interested in this thread
that I think really runs through our work, which is
seeing versus not seeing, particularly when it comes to the
(02:10):
emotional world, and whether we see ourselves impacts and how
it impacts on our capacity to be wholehearted humans. And
so really that's the thread of so much at my work.
And then when I was around fifteen years old, my father,
who was forty two, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and
(02:30):
I remember my mother telling me to go and say
goodbye to him. He was dying in our home, and
I went to his room. I opened the door. It
was just before I head it off for school. It
was on a Friday, and my dad was lying in
bed and his eyes were closed, and I just remember
this feeling that even though he couldn't see me, that
(02:55):
he could he knew me. I'd always felt seen in
his presence. And then also overlayered on that was this
experience that I had after my father's death, which was
everyone telling me to just be strong, smiling, and I
am a fifteen year old and I become the master
of being okay. You know, I don't drop a single grade.
(03:17):
People ask me harm doing it in a world that
seems to value relentious positivity as a marker of so
called strength. I keep saying I'm okay, I'm okay, but
the truth lurries it Back home, my family is struggling.
My father has died in debt. My mother's grieving the
love of her life. She's raising three children, the creditors
(03:39):
are knocking, and I, as a child, was just struggling.
I felt so untethered from myself and so untethered in
this experience of grief, and I started to respond to
that as so many people do when they experiencing emotional pain,
especially unprocessed emotional pain, which is for me, that took
(04:01):
the form of binging and purging, refusing to accept the
full weight to my grief and then the last thing
that I would just add to this journey of how
I come to my work is I remember when I
was then, probably about six months later, I'm in this struggle,
and I recall this extraordinary teacher handing out these blank
(04:21):
notebooks to the class. And she was my English teacher,
and she looked at me and she said an invitation
to the class, but it felt like it was to me.
She said, right, tell the truth, right, like no one
is reading. And so Laura, I started this correspondence with
this teacher. It was this correspondence where I would journal,
(04:42):
and I would hand in my journal and she would
write back to me in pencil. It was my story,
and she was writing back in pencil thoughts or responses
to what I was experiencing. And so I had this
feeling that actually became clear to me, which was this
act that I was engaging in with my teacher was
actually revolutionary for me. It was counter to what I
(05:05):
was being told in society, which is just get on
with it and just be positive. And instead what I
was doing is I was facing into these rarely difficulty
emotions and experiences, and that that secret, silent correspondence with
the teacher as well as the secret silence correspondence with
my own heart actually landed up shaping my career. So
I became an emotions researcher, and I was really just
(05:29):
foundationally interested in what is told to us by society
about emotions and in what ways does that narrative actually
not serve us. In fact, completely counter to making us
strong and more resident, it actually makes us more fragile.
And that became the threat of the work that I do.
(05:49):
And so I love this story because, you know, it
shows the kind of way that we normally deal with
these undesirable emotions, you know, both kind of the ways
that society tells us we need to deal with them,
but also our natural instinct, which is like, you know, avoid, avoid, avoid.
Like in the book, you kind of walk through so
many bad reactions we have when we have these undesirable emotions.
(06:09):
One of these are sort of jumping into our own
productivity and overwork. You know, talk about how this strategy
plays out and why it's so problematic for dealing with
undesirable emotions. Yeah, So, what I've found in my work
is that typically when people have difficult, tough emotions, they
very often have one of two ways of responding. The
first is what I call bottling, and bottling is basically
(06:33):
where you push aside the difficulty emotion, often with good intentions.
I've got so much to do. I just can't get on,
you know, I've just got to get on with my life.
And sometimes the reason that we do this is because
we fear that by facing into the difficulty emotion that
we don't have the skills to deal with it, or
that somehow it's just better to be productive and focused
(06:55):
on moving forward. And so bottling emotions is really this
idea that we push the emotions aside for whatever reason,
and we think that that actually is helpful. But there's
a body of research showing that when we push aside
these difficulty emotions, there's actually an amplification effect, which is
really fascinating. For anyone who's ever tried not to eat
(07:18):
a big piece of chocolate cake that's tempting you in
the refrigerator, you know that the more you try not
to think about that piece of chocolate cake, the more
you dream about it. And the same experience happens with emotions.
And when I talk about emotions in this way, I'm
both talking about the big moments of emotions, the grief,
the loneliness, the loss. But I'm also talking about the
(07:40):
smaller experiences that we might have day to day. We
feel undermined in a meeting, we feel shut down, we
feel like we just want to roll our eyes at
the change that's going on in our organization. So we
have everyday thousands of these kinds of emotional experiences, and
on the one hand, we can bottle them, we push
them aside, but there is this amplification effect. And what
(08:03):
becomes clear when we look at the research is that
when we do this as not just a once off,
it as a tendency, actually it undermines our well being.
We have lower levels of resilience, higher depression, high anxiety.
It impacts on the quality of our relationships and even
on our ability to achieve our goals. Because if you
(08:25):
take these emotions that are trying to signal something to you, oh,
you bought in your job or things on going well,
and you push them aside, then you aren't actually adapting
to the reality of your life, and therefore you on
putting strategies in place to move forward effectively. So that's
one way we can deal with difficulty emotions. The other
looks so different, and yet a lot of the consequences
(08:47):
are the same. So brooding is where we get stuck
in the difficulty motion. We get victimized by our news feed,
we get hooked on being right. We go over and
over and over in our heads why it is we
so unhappy with something that's happened. And again, even though
this might have the semblance of being effective, it actually
(09:10):
keeps us very stuck in the emotional experience and not
moving forward effectively. And so if we think about this difference,
it's really fascinating because brooding is similarly associated with lower
levels of well being, a goal attainment, and relationships and
our almost imaginary It's like if you've got a pile
(09:31):
of books that you're holding in your emotions, or the
books bottling is where you hold those books so far
away from you that ultimately the energy and effort that's
involved in holding them far from you leads you to
drop them, and so you might snap at the person,
or you cry unexpectedly or court of God. By those
(09:51):
difficulty emotions. When we brooding, we hold the book so
tightly to ourselves, and so we're not able to see
the child who's giving us a hug or who wants
to be with us. We unable to be and breathe
and be wise in the world, So bottling up pain, anger,
and anxiety doesn't really work, But allowing these emotions to
(10:15):
fully take over doesn't help either. Unfortunately, these both tend
to be our go to strategies when we're facing a
tough situation. When we get back from the break, Susan
will share a potential middle path we can use to
navigate emotions. As we'll see, it's a strategy that we
can all use to find greater happiness. No matter what
(10:35):
life throws our way, the Happiness Lab will be right back.
Psychologist Susan David often explains the idea of emotional agility
with a story, the sad tale of a mariner who
is too stubborn to switch course when something bad popped
(10:58):
up on the horizon. It's a beautiful story, and it's
this idea that there's a captain on a ship and
he's basically trying to steer the ship effectively. He says
to a junior seman, let me know if you see anything,
and the seman comes to him and says, I'm seeing
something in front of us, and we are going to
(11:19):
bash into it. And the captain gets like more and
more arrogant and says, tell them that we are on
a collision course and tell them to move, tell them
to move. And so the seman keeps on relaying this
message to the obstacle, saying, you know, you've got to
move out the way. You've got to move out the way.
And ultimately a message comes back from the so called
obstacle saying, actually you need to move. Why because we
(11:43):
are a lighthouse, sir. And it's a beautiful story. Because ready,
if we think about what a lighthouse is, a lighthouse
is helping us to navigate. A lighthouse is helping us
to develop some sense of steering around the rocky shores
(12:03):
of life. And yet, often, if we think about the
metaphor if we want to extend it, our emotions are
the signal. You know, our emotions are signaling things that
are important. Our emotions might be signaling that this job
isn't going as wonderfully as you wanted, or the relationship
is actually not working out. And yet when we keep
(12:26):
on either avoiding the emotions or not connecting with them effectively,
then we aren't actually using that GPS system in the
way that it was intended, And so we then struggled
to be agile. We struggle to be effective. The world
is changing around us, and we need as human beings
(12:48):
to be able to have the capacity to deal with
the world as it is, which is a world that
is fragile, in which illness is interwoven with health, and
which love and loss are connected, in which we raise
children and then one day that child leaves. The emotion
(13:09):
that we experience are brokered to help us with the
reality of life which is changing and fragile. And yet
this notion that exists in our society, which is that
these difficulty emotions are bad. We need to ignore them,
We just need to fake positivity. It sounds good on
(13:30):
the surface very often, but actually what it does is
it undermines our capacity to be whole human beings in
the world. And so you've argued that the right way
to kind of listen to this lighthouse signal of our
emotions is with this notion of emotional agility and trying
to increase our emotional agility. Explain what you mean by
emotional agility. What is it so emotional agility is the
(13:53):
ability to be with your everyday thoughts and emotions and
experiences in a way that is healthy. And I'll go
into what I mean by the word healthy, but it's
being with these experiences in a way that's healthy so
that you can respond effectively to everyday situations. So let
(14:14):
me break that down a little bit. We all have thousands,
literally thousands, We have approximately according to some research, sixteen
thousand spoken thoughts every day and many more course through
our minds experiences of am I good enough? Am I
not good enough? Is the job? But you know that
all the stuff goes on in our minds. We have
all of our emotions, emotions like fear and sadness, grief, loneliness, loss, stress, anxiety,
(14:40):
we have all of it. And we also have stories.
Some of our stories were written on our mental chalkboards
when we were five years old, stories about who we are,
whether we good enough, whether we creative or not creative.
And so we have this normal experience of these thoughts, emotions,
and stories, and we need to have skills that enable
(15:03):
us to deal with these in ways that are healthy. Now,
what's not healthy is when we either push them aside
or we fail to learn from them, or when we
allow them to call the shots. And so what emotional
agility is. It's the ability to hold these thoughts and
emotions and stories lightly, so to not ignore them, but
(15:26):
to hold them lightly, to recognize, for instance, that when
we experience a difficulty emotion, that difficulty emotion, just like
the lighthouse, is tapping us on the shoulder, and it's saying,
there's this thing that's important to you, and Laurie, I'll
give you an example, loneliness. We don't like experiencing loneliness,
(15:49):
but loneliness is often signaling, sign posting that intimacy and
connection are important for you and that you don't have
enough of it in your life right now. Boredom at work.
We could look at boredom and go, I'm just going
to ignore it because at least I've got a job.
In other words, bottling difficult experience all we might say,
(16:11):
what is that boredom signaling? It's signaling that I value
growth and learning and I don't have enough of it.
I often think grief grief is love looking for its home.
Grief is tapping us on the shoulders saying, remember me,
think of the things that you learn from me. Hold
me I'm still with you in some way and bring
(16:34):
that to life in a way that feels special and connected.
And so holding our thoughts and emotions lightly is by
being curious with them and being able to recognize that
when we experience these difficulty emotions. While the dictates of
society might say, oh, you've just got to be positive,
(16:55):
you've just got to push them aside, in fact, there's
extraordinary beauty when we just slow down with them in
a way that is curious. Huh, what is this emotion
telling me about my needs or my values? There's also
connected with that, lorry, is this need to be compassionate
(17:17):
because it's hard to human it's hard to be a
human being in the world, regardless of what the circumstances
are of your world. And so emotional agility is really
about this ability to be with our emotions in ways
that are curious, compassionate, and courageous. Courageous because we don't
often always like what we see and feel, so that
(17:40):
we can then understand our values and our needs and
move forward in the direction of those values. And so
one of the ways you've argued we can start this
process of kind of gaining our emotional agility is first
to kind of show up and kind of non judgmentally
see the emotions we're dealing with. Bike is showing up
for our emotions so hard it's kind of funny, right,
like they're there, But we tend not to kind of
(18:01):
know what's going on when we experience these undesirable emotions. Yeah,
we described a little bit earlier. We spoke a bit
about the narratives that exist in society, and it's important
to recognize that all of us grow up with what
are called display rules. Display rules are often the implicit
and sometimes even explicit rules that may be in existence
(18:26):
in the families that we were born into, or even
in society at large. And an example of a display
rule might be you come home from school as a
child and you angry, and a parent says to you
why you're angry, and you say, I'm angry because you know,
Jack didn't play with me today, and the parent, with
great intentions, jumps in and says something like, don't worry,
(18:47):
I'll play with you, you know, or I'll phone the
mean person's parents. Let's go back cupcakes. And it's done
with really good intentions. But what that might signal to you,
is that joy and happiness are loud in this house,
and that anger isn't or that sadness isn't. Sometimes these
rules are explicit. Sometimes someone might say, go to your
room and come up when you've got a smile on
(19:08):
your face. Lay rules exist in our communities. When we
say to someone with cancer who is terminally ill and
is suffering, and we said to the person, just keep positive,
what we are conveying is a display rule, which is
that their experience of pain and grief and hardship has
(19:30):
no place. And so it's really important to recognize that
one of the reasons that we unsee our difficulty emotions
is because despite the fact that they exist and are
all around us, there are these narratives that basically say
either they are not allowed, or they don't belong, or
we live in a world that says we can fix everything.
(19:52):
If we don't like our car, we can buy a
new car. If we don't like the walls, we can
paint them at different color. And so when we experience
these difficult thoughts and emotions, we can just fix them.
We can find ways to be grateful, we can think
positive and everything will be okay. But it actually doesn't work.
And so what we are doing when we start cultivating
this capacity to show up to our difficulty emotions is
(20:13):
we stopped recognizing that when a city is being bombed,
it's very difficult to rebuild, it's very difficult to find
a way forward in the midst of the bombing. It's
only when there is an internal ceasefire that one is
able to start moving forward effectively. And so if you
(20:33):
in a space with your difficulty emotions where you say,
I'm not allowed to have heard I should be grateful.
I need to just think positive. Literally, what you're doing
is you're in a little wall with yourself about your
own emotions and your own suffering. And so a really
important part of showing up is ending that war, literally
ending the war. This is what I feel. This is
(20:55):
my experience. There's no wrong or right way to be
experiencing right now. This is my feeling. And when we
show up to those difficulty emotions with compassion, which is
really important, we are then able to start crafting a
way forward with the experience. And one of the ways
(21:15):
we can really kind of develop that compassion is to
kind of become a little bit curious about the emotions
we're experiencing. You know, sometimes we don't even know what
they are. And you've argued that one way we can
do that is to literally label our emotions. You know,
why is the labeling of emotions so important? So labeling emotions,
you know, it's almost like an emotional superpower. So because
(21:37):
there is a tragedy. And that sounds dramatic, but I
think it to be true. There is a tragedy that
exists in our schools and in our workplaces, where emotions
have historically, for a number of reasons that we could explore,
have been pushed aside. They're seen as soft skills. They
(21:58):
are seen as being less important than things like math
and strategy. What we have is literally entire generations of
people who have not been taught foundational emotional agility skills.
And these are core to our well being, tour mental health,
(22:21):
to our relationships. Internal pain always comes out, and the
people that pay the price, ourselves and our community, is
our children. And so one of the emotional skills that
is not taught is the superpower, which is emotion granularity.
And I'll give you an example of what I mean
by this. Often, when we've had a tough day, we'll
(22:41):
say something like I'm stressed. We use a very broad brushstroke,
black and white label to describe the emotion that we've experienced,
and stressed is the most common one I hear, but
people might have their own that they use that have
become very familiar, and it's basically this label that you use,
that your quick go to label to describe what it
(23:02):
is you're feeling. Now, if we think about it, there
is a world of difference between stress and disappointment. Stress
and that knowing, gnawing feeling of I'm in the wrong job,
the wrong career, or this relationship isn't working out. Stress
and exhaustion burnout. If you label your experience as stress,
(23:25):
it's a very diffuse label. It's very murky, and your body,
your psychology doesn't really know what to do with that.
It's almost like being in that boat and you think
that there might be something on the horizon that you've
got to pay attention to, but you've got no idea
what it is. But when you start saying to yourself,
(23:46):
what are two other options? I'm calling this thing stress,
but what else could it be? Oh it's disappointment, Oh
it's feeling unsupported. What it starts to do is it
starts to activate the readiness potential in us as human beings,
which starts saying, what do I need to do in
relation to this? And so there's enormous power in being
(24:06):
able to label this emotion accurately because it helps us
to understand both the cause of the emotion as well
as the steps that we might need to take in
order to process that emotion effectively. And we know, for instance,
that even in young children this capacity is profoundly, profoundly important.
As sixteen year old who is encouraged by a peer to, oh,
(24:32):
let's let the air out of the principle's car tires.
If that sixteen year old is able to say, on
the one hand, I feel excited and tempted, but actually,
deeper down, there's a sense of disquiet, trepidation, this doesn't
feel right. That is a child who's going to be
able to delay gratification, who's going to be able to
(24:54):
focus more on their moral compass, their values and their
goals and their character over time. So it sounds like
such a subtle skill when someone says, oh, when you
experience something, don't use just the first broad brushstroke label
labor more accurately. It feels like, oh, okay, is that
what you've got to offer? But it is just extraordinary
(25:16):
in terms of how important it is. So when we
think about these emotions is distinct. When we kind of
label them, then we can start in on another process,
which is to start using our emotions not as this
kind of horrible sensation, but really as data for what
we can do as the next app. You know, so
talk about some strategies we can use to do this. Yeah,
it's so important. The way that I think about emotions
(25:36):
is our emotions are data. So emotions again contain signposts
to the things that we care about, but our emotions
on directives. I can show up to my son's frustration
with his baby sister. I can see it, I can
hold space for it. I can be accepting of it,
but it doesn't mean that I'm endorsing his idea that
(25:57):
he gets to give away to the first stranger that
he sees in a shopping mall. Okay, our emotions are data,
not directives. In other words, we own our emotions. They
don't own us. And so another skill that becomes really
important in helping us to not push aside the difficulty emotions,
not brood on them, but develop healthy space with our emotions.
(26:21):
Is if we just think about the language again of
how we often describe emotions. We often say things like
I am sad, I am angry, I am frustrated, I
am being undermined. Now, if you just think about this language,
words matter. So when you say I am, it's pretty
(26:43):
much as if you are the emotion. I am all
of me, one hundred percent of me is the emotion.
When you do this, there's no space for anything else.
There's no space for wisdom, there's no space for intention.
Victor Frankel talks about this sentiment of between stimulus and response,
(27:04):
there is a space and in that space is our
power to choose, and in that choice our growth and
our freedom. So when we are hooked by a difficulty emotion,
when we feel triggered by it, there is no space.
We just feel something and we respond. You know someone
that I love starting in on the finances, I'm going
to leave the root because I feel alienated. So we hooked.
And what we're trying to do when we being emotionally
(27:25):
agiles to cultivate healthy space between us and our emotions,
so that we own the emotions. They don't own us.
And one of the ways we can start doing this
is by recognizing again that when we say I am,
there's no space. You're literally defining yourself by the emotion,
and so what's being crowded out. There are the other
parts of you that exist in every single one of us.
(27:50):
Our wisdom, our intention, our values, who we want to be,
our breathing, our connectedness. There's so much scentedness in every
single one of us. And so the way we can
start creating this space is by noticing the thoughts or
the emotion or the stories for what they are. They
(28:12):
are thoughts, emotions, and stories. They're not fact. So an example,
I am sad, I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. I'm
being undermined. I'm noticing that this is my thought that
I'm being undermined. I'm not good enough, there's no point
in even trying. I'm noticing that this is my I'm
not good enough story. When you do this, you aren't
(28:33):
ignoring your difficult experience, but you're creating space in it.
And a beautiful metaphor that I think when I think
about this skill is that when you say I am.
It's almost like you are the emotion, and the emotion
is a cloud, and you've become the cloud. I am sad.
(28:55):
But when you instead create space between you and the emotion,
I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. There's literally a kind
of distance that's created in language. What happens then, is
you aren't the cloud any longer. You are the sky.
You are the sky. Every single one of us is
beautiful and capacious enough to have all of our difficulty
(29:18):
emotions and still choose who we want to be in
the moment. You are not the cloud. You are the sky.
But it's not enough to label our emotions and change
how we talk about them. True emotional agility requires getting
curious about what our emotions are telling us and where
are they're steering us. And that kind of agility requires
(29:40):
something more. In the words of one of my favorite
seventies bands, Parliament, we got to have that funk. You'll
hear more about the funk when the Happiness Lab returns
in a moment. Psychologists Susan David argues that the first
(30:07):
step in reacting effectively to our ne emotions, there's no
anguish specific emotion. We're dealing with. We need to distinguish
a catchisle sensation like stress for more specific feelings like
exhaustion or disappointment. But once we know what emotion we're
dealing with, we also need to figure out what it's
saying to us, or, if Susan puts it, we need
to ask, what's the funk? I love this In my book,
(30:31):
I describe this idea of what the funk and what
the funk like? WTF is not a description of the
more explicit label. It's basically saying, what is the function
of the emotion? What the funk? You know, what the
funk is my grief signaling? What the funk is my
loneliness signaling. And so what we're starting to do when
(30:51):
we ask ourselves what the funk is, we are starting
to really create this beautiful space between us and the emotion.
So instead of feeling that the emotion owns us, that
it's driving us, that we triggered by it, that it's
right at our story, what we're starting to do is
we're starting to use the emotion in the way that
(31:13):
it was intended, which is to help us to adapt.
And so what the funk is a lovely short form
for what is the function? What is the emotion trying
to tell me about my needs or my values? When
I am worried about a situation in the workplace. On
(31:37):
the face of it, I might say, Okay, well, I'm
just feeling worried or I'm just feeling angry. But when
we start saying what the funk, it may be that
that worry is signaling that we really care about quality,
or we really care about our clients, and that we
are concerned that the way we are moving forward is
actually not a good direction. So when we start asking
(32:00):
ourselves what the funk, whether that's in a personal context
or in a broader context, we're starting to say, what
is this emotion trying to signal about values? On my needs?
And the example that I gave earlier, which is if
I am feeling lonely, the function of that loneliness is
to say that I need more intimacy and connection. And
so you might say, well, I am on zoom calls
(32:24):
every day and I see people all around me. But
we know that we can be lonely in a crowd,
and so what the function of loneliness might be saying,
you know, you pass your spouse in the kitchen as
you're both getting a coffee and you're both on your
phones and you barely look up at one another. And yes,
(32:45):
you might be in a house full of people, but
you still feel lonely. And the function of that loneliness
is to help you to reach out in the direction
of the need or the value, and so you can
then start making small changes, which is, you know, in
this particular example, it might be that there's this moment
of opportunity that you have in your day where you
(33:11):
can move in the direction of your needs or your values.
So it might be that you genuinely are giving that
person a hug at the end of the day and
crafting a new moment of connection. And we can do
this with any of our emotions or emotional experiences where
we are learning from them. A good way actually of
(33:31):
thinking about this is, as people are listening to this podcast,
if I asked you on a blank piece of paper
to just think about some emotion words that you've been experiencing.
So I've been feeling X whatever that is for you,
regret or sadness or anxiety, whatever that is. So you've
(33:52):
got that on that piece of paper. Now in a
world that focuses on forced false positivity. You might imagine
that I'm going to ask you to now turn the
piece of paper over and write about, well, what you
should be grateful for or why you should be happy.
But actually what I would ask you to do is
something quite different, which is to turn the piece of
(34:14):
paper over and ask yourself, what is that emotion signaling
about your needs or your values? And even if that
emotion has actually been a joyous emotion. You know, if
you of the past couple of months have experienced a
lot more joy than might be typical, you might be
(34:36):
asking yourself, what is this joy signaling about my needs?
It may be that you have reconnected with creativity or
with particular people. And so again, even that beautiful experience
of joy is signposting that this thing is important to
you and you can keep moving towards it, and a
(34:58):
reminder to keep threading this experience, this quality through your life.
And so this is so important that our emotions can
have this function of signaling our values, because I think,
you know, just like our thoughts and just like our emotions,
sometimes our values or the kind of thing that we
can't totally see, you know, we're sort of blind to
which values we're living out, and you talk about cases
(35:20):
where emotions can sometimes tell us that we're living out
the wrong kinds of values. You have this lovely phrase
in your book called the idea we're living out dead
people's goals. You know, what do you mean here? And
how can emotions be so helpful in this in this regard?
So the idea with what I described with dead people's
goals is just often people will say things like I
don't want to be stressed, I don't want my heart
(35:41):
to be broken, I don't want this project to fail.
And what I mean by dead people's goals is the
only people and I say this, you know facetiously, is
that the only people who don't ever have their hearts broken,
who never experience stress or loss or disappointment, are dead.
(36:03):
You know, discomfort is the price of admission to a
meaningful life. We don't get to leave the world a
better place, or raise a family, or build a meaningful
career without stress and discomfort. So in that context, you know,
when I say discomfort is the price of admission to
a meaningful life, what that then says is it becomes
(36:26):
really important for our emotional capacity that we develop the
ability to be with and learn from discomfort, because those
uncomfortable emotions, again are signaling things that we care about.
And oftentimes when people talk about values, it feels very abstract.
(36:48):
It feels like the kinds of things that people put
on walls and businesses, and feels very distant from us.
The way that I think of values are that they're
the heartbeat of your why. They are things that at
core matter to you, and they not abstract. They are
qualities of action, the qualities of action. So every single
(37:08):
day life is asking you, it's asking me, is saying
who do you want to be today? Every day and
every day we have opportunities to either move towards our
values or away from our values. If we value health,
(37:30):
are we moving towards the running shoes or away from them?
If we value relationship, are we moving towards the uncomfortable
conversation because we know that it's important to our relationship,
or are we moving away from it because I just
(37:50):
can't be bothered to go there, even though we know
at its core that that leads to disengagement and dissolution.
So every day we have these opportunities to move towards
our values. We stay upright on a bicycle by cycling,
and we stay up its people with the lives that
(38:11):
we want to be living by moving actively towards the
things that we care about. And so then often people
will say things like, well, how do I work out
what my values are? You know, how do I start
discerning what my values are? And it's a really important
question because again it's not the kind of conversation that
we often have in our schools or in our workplaces,
(38:34):
and that becomes really challenging. I'm sure that in the
podcast you've explored things like social contagion, where we know
that people can start picking up behaviors of other people.
Your next door neighbor drives a particular car, We want
to drive that car, and sometimes we don't even know
we're doing it. We know from large scale epidemiological studies
that your chances of getting divorced increase if people in
(38:57):
your social network that you don't even know get divorced,
and we saw this in the pandemic, how people catch
other people's behaviors. So what can start happening is, over time,
we can move more and more and more away from
the things that matter to us, and so it becomes
really important for us to just sometimes take a little
(39:19):
bit of time to affirm our values. There's been some
work that's just asked people to just sit down for
ten minutes and ask them to remind themselves what's important
to them in their relationship or what's important to them
in what they're studying or their careers. And that type
of values affirmation is very strong and very protective in
(39:43):
terms of enabling people to ward off that social contagion.
But as you speak to Laurie, one of the core
ways that we can start connecting with our values is
by paying attention to the heartbeat that comes through our
difficulty emotions. Because often our difficulty emotions are sign posting.
(40:04):
They're sign posting things that matter to us, and so
you know, this brings us to you kind of irony
rate in that running away from our negative emotions, trying
to avoid them, you know, trying to bottle them up.
We're like missing out on this super important signpost. This
like lighthouse that's signaling like, hey, your value is over
here and you're not meeting it right, you know, but
you might need to switch your behavior, you know. Do
(40:25):
you think through this idea really welcoming our inner experiences,
you know, like breathing into them, accepting them with curiosity.
You know, is that going to set us on a
new course that will allow us to flourish a little
bit more. Absolutely, if we look just at the notion
of acceptance of emotions, we know that acceptance of emotions
as opposed to pushing them aside or brooding on them,
(40:46):
is a cornerstone to well being, is a cornerstone to resilience,
because now you're actually developing skills to help you to
deal with the world as it is, which is this
broken world where heartbreak and loss hold hands with one another.
And so these skills that I'm taught to our truly
(41:12):
foundational skills in our personal relationships, in our relationship with self,
and also even in our workplaces, in our communities. We
can apply these exact same kinds of skills when we're
having difficult conversations with our children. Often we try to
convert them just be happy. But if we can hold
(41:32):
space for those difficulty emotions and we can help them
to label them, and we can help them to understand, Oh,
you upset with Jack, because friendship is important to you,
how do you want to be as a friend. What
does friendship look like? What you're now doing is you're
helping the child to develop their own moral compass and
(41:53):
sense of character. And this is extraordinarily important because when
the world is changing around us, being grounded in ourselves
with levels of courage, with levels of curiosity, with compassion,
and with the willingness to take values connected steps is
(42:16):
the only way forward in a fragile, beautiful world. I
was haunted by a phrase that Susan used a few
times during our conversation. She noted that discomfort is the
price of admission for a meaningful life. We often run
away from things we think will bring us discomfort, all
the potential failure, humiliation, and rejection of life. But by
(42:38):
running away, by not even trying, we deny ourselves the
opportunity to win, to be a success, and to be accepted.
Susan's quote really resonated with me because I definitely struggle
with this very issue. But I'm hopeful that this special
season of the Happiness Lab can help us learn how
to deal with our negative emotions without all the fear,
so that they won't hold us back from doing all
(43:00):
the things that we'll give our lives, more happiness, and
more meaning. In our next two shows, we're going to
be jumping right into the deep end when it comes
to yucky feelings. We're going to focus on an emotion
that goes way beyond mere discomfort, one that many of
us dread the most, but that none of us can
really hope to avoid in this beautiful, fragile world. When
(43:21):
the happiness slab returns, we're going to look at how
to deal with grief, how to learn from this emotion,
and how to figure out what is there to teach us.
The purpose of grief is that pain is the agent
to change that when we allow it to come through
our system, forces us to face this reality that we
don't want to look at. That this person that I
(43:41):
love or this thing in my life that I was
really attached to is no longer here. Until next week,
stay safe and stay happy. If you like this show
and others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus.
As a special gift to Pushkin Plus subscribers, I'll be
sharing a series of six guided meditations to help you
(44:02):
practice the lessons we've learned from our experts. To check
them out, look for Pushkin plus on Apple podcast subscriptions.
The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley,
Emily Anne Vaughan, and Courtney Guerino. Our original music was
composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering
(44:25):
by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Milabelle Heather Fame, John Schnars,
Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Brandt Haynes, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler,
Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis.
The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries
and me Doctor Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
(44:47):
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your podcasts,
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