January 3, 2022 • 36 mins
We need to pay attention to our negative feelings - since they are telling us important things which we should address if we are to be happier in 2022. But often we just can't tell different emotions apart or have the proper words to describe what we are feeling.
Social worker and author Brené Brown joins Dr Laurie Santos to explain how we can more fully explore distinct feelings such as envy and jealousy - so we can tell them apart and work out how to change our lives so we feel them less frequently and less painfully.
Brené Brown's new book is Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. As a professor who teaches about the science of
well being, I spend a lot of time thinking and
talking and also podcasting about how to feel happier. But
in spite of all that, I'm not exactly happy one
(00:35):
hundred percent of the time. I too still feel guilty
and anxious. I get angry and sad and jealous, and
with so many responsibilities, I often feel overwhelmed and frustrated.
All this makes sense, I mean, experiencing negative emotions is
part of what it means to be human, but actually
having to go through all these bad emotions that kind
(00:58):
of sucks. If I'm being honest, I pretty much hate
going through these negative feelings, and so my first instinct
is always to push them away. As soon as I
start to detect that I'm feeling frustrated or sad or
a little pissed at someone, I try to avoid the
experience completely. I pretend it's not happening, or distract myself
or dive into my work so I don't have to
(01:20):
experience that not so nice feeling. But the science shows
this isn't the smartest strategy. There's lots and lots of
evidence that suppressing and avoiding our negative sensations is ultimately
only going to make us feel worse in the long run.
So my New Year's resolution for twenty twenty two is
to stop running away from all my difficult emotions. I
(01:41):
want to allow and embrace and maybe even learn from
the yuckier sensations in life. But that's easier said than done.
So I decided to call in some reinforcements. In this
special new season of the Happiness Lab, I'll chat with
an amazing group of experts about how we can learn
(02:01):
from our negative emotions. Over the next few weeks, we'll
explore strategies we can all use to navigate the feelings
we'd rather not feel. We'll see how we can make
peace with the emotions we hate, and we'll see that
they may even have something important to teach us. But
learning from our worst emotions can be a challenge even
for the experts. I think I came from fifth generation Texan.
(02:24):
I just came from a family that really perceived emotion
in general as weakness and as threatening. We grew up
with the belief that we are thinking, doing people who
on occasion feel, and that can get us sidelined. And
so obviously no neuroscientists in my family. This is five
(02:48):
time New York Times best selling author Brenee Brown Brinee
is one of my idols. She's an internationally recognized expert
on navigating emotions, and these days she's begun helping people
figure out how to name their emotions too. Brenee's new
book is called Atlas of the Heart, Mapping meaningful connection
and the Language of human experience. Her book has a
(03:09):
huge number of important tips for understanding our complex emotional landscape,
which is something Brenie has been interested in for a
really long time. Brenie learned as a child that she
wasn't supposed to talk about or even acknowledge her feelings,
but she also discovered that she was surprisingly good at
observing while other people were feeling, especially when it came
(03:29):
to adults. It just became actually kind of a form
of psychological safety for me growing up to know the
relationship between behavior and language and thinking and feeling. I
think today a therapist would probably just say an over diligent,
kind of hyper vigilant way of thinking about emotion and cognition.
(03:50):
And I got really good at it to the point
where I could predict behavior. It was like a superpower.
I had a swim coach who was really volatile. I
mean he just would lose his shit in really inappropriate ways,
and everyone would always try to figure out, like who
is he after? Who is he after? But it only
took me like a couple of practices to realize he
didn't love the fastest kids. He liked the kids who
(04:13):
tried the hardest. And he also had a pinchip for backstroke,
I think whether he was a backstroker in college. So
I would just always get in the lane with the
people who weren't the best swimmers but who really tried hard,
which was good because I wasn't one of the best swimmers.
So it worked and I never got in trouble. And
I never shared with anyone what the secret was either,
because it was, you know, every person for themselves. Terrible
(04:35):
experiences like this made brine wonder why couldn't her peers
see what to her was so obvious. I spent a
lot of time thinking to myself, holy shit, do they
not understand what's getting ready to happen? Like? Do they
not see what's happening here? Brinee's fascination with emotion and
behavior led her on a path to becoming a social worker.
The research she eventually did on emotions helped her understand
(04:58):
why her superpower was so rare. We asked people to
make a list of all the emotions that they could
recognize in themselves as they were experiencing them, and the
mean number was as three just three three, yeah, happy, sad,
and pissed off. I always call it the bad, sad,
glad triad. And that was really shocking to me. Now,
(05:20):
they could list a lot of other emotions, but they
couldn't recognize when they were in them. They just knew
that those emotion feeling words existed. That got me thinking
back to a quote that I came across when I
was in college by Ludwig Wittgenstein that the limits of
my language mean the limits of my world. And I
just spent a lot of years thinking what happens when
(05:44):
our language is not as expansive as our human experience?
What does it mean when we have to shove an
experience of despair or disappointment into one of these three buckets?
And I always knew that it completely crippled our ability
(06:05):
to own and communicate. But I think it was probably
four or five years ago when we started seeing some
of the research on how language doesn't just communicate emotion
but shape it. That I started thinking, oh God, holy shit,
we are individually and collectively in trouble if we don't
(06:27):
have language. Yeah, I mean, part of our task is
recognizing emotions and other people. But how on earth are
we going to fulfill that task when we can't even
recognize our own emotional experience when it's happening and categorizing it.
I mean, you know, it's one thing to think about
not being able to recognize positive emotions, right, you know,
the distuned say joy and awe and amusement. But it
feels sort of different to not be able to recognize
(06:48):
negative emotions. And I could think of a couple of
reasons why you know, people don't do that. You know.
The biggest one is it just sucks to reflect on
anything that's painful, right, We tend to avoid it. It's
deep part of human nature. If it sucks, just don't
think about it. And so do you think that's part
of it? I think it's probably the biggest driver. I mean,
as someone who is like studied and written about shame
for fifty years, I can tell you that no one
(07:12):
wants to talk about it. You know. The bad news
is the less we talk about it, the more we
experience it. But no one wants to talk about it.
People will do just about anything to avoid pain, including
cause pain, right, I mean, so that seems to be
part of it, is that you know, we're avoiding these
negative emotions. But another I think is just a misconception
about experiencing emotions, which is that if you look deep
(07:35):
into the void, the void looks back at you. Right,
if we really dig into you know, anguish and sadness
and despair and all these things, that it won't feel
good or it'll amplify these emotions. So talk about why
that's a little bit of a misconception that labeling them
can shape them, but maybe not in the way we
often think. Yeah. No, it's a huge part of the
(07:55):
mythology around emotion that if we look at in the eye,
it gives it power, when the reality is if we
look at in the eye and name it, it gives
us power. And so I think it's to your point exactly,
it's just human nature to avoid what hurts, even if
and this is the cognitive dissonance part, even if we
(08:17):
know avoiding it will exacerbate it. You know, emotions are
such a big part of human behavior, of human nature.
They affect so many parts of our life. So you
might think that academics had them reasonably sorted out, that
people across disciplines agreed on a definition and these kinds
of things, you know, talk about. Way, when you really
look into this, especially academically, things are much more complex
(08:38):
than they might seem to liay folks. Yeah, I don't
think there is a consensus on even the definition of emotion.
In fact, I'm really careful in the book. The middle
of the book is an exploration of eighty seven emotions
and experiences. And I say emotions and experiences very purposefully
because I don't want to get into that kind of
academic pissing match about what is an emotion and what
(09:00):
isn't an emotion because I'm a mix like terrible metaphors here.
But there's bigger fish to fry. Yeah. One of the
big questions that really comes up is this issue of
like how many any emotions are there, which I think
is you know, something else academics fight about. So, you know,
what are some of the ideas you came up with
and what have you found in your own work in
terms of the like the number. The way we came
up with the eighty seven was really straightforward. It was
(09:23):
a content analysis of comments from seventy thousand people who
took an online course that I did with in partnership
with Oprah Winfrey Network, and we went in asking what
are the emotions people are struggling to name and identify,
and when they do name and identify them, help them
move through them. So then we came up with a
collection of emotions and experiences. Then we brought in a
(09:45):
focus group of therapists who spend hours kind of ranking
around the same question. These are critical for our clients
to understand in order to heal and move through them
or to experience more of it, and these are less critical,
and these are not critical. And this is the list
ended up with. And then I added a couple for
comparative reasons, like Freudenfreude wasn't on the list, but Schadenfreud
(10:09):
was just to compare. So when people say how many
emotions are there, my answer is, I have no idea.
We're exploring eighty seven of the one of the emotions
and experiences we believe are helpful to be able to
name to move through them. I think that's an awesome
answer in it gets at this cross cultural issue, right,
because those are the eighty seven emotions that you're my
guess is Western mostly American participants, you know, came up
(10:32):
with right where you did do the same analysis somewhere else.
It might be a different set of them too. I mean,
just as a shame researcher Man, English is one of
the only languages that has one word for shame, and
when we were translating into Spanish, there was a debate
for three months about whether you should use the word
for sin for shame the gallo like no, and then
is it balwinsa. You know, maybe, but it's in context
(10:55):
because that can also mean embarrassing. You know, It's like,
it's really tricky emotions happen in the context of culture.
So this is the first book and all my books
that I have really put my foot down. We're not
allowing it to be translated. And that's you know, that's
hard with your publisher, right. A lot of the books
are translating into thirty forty languages, and I didn't collect
the data cross culturally. Therefore, just because we can translate
(11:18):
it using a computer program. Doesn't make it right? Does
that make sense? Totally? Totally. A bigger goal of the
new book is really to do something that's important for
all of us but we rarely do, which is to
kind of get into emotional granularity, right, like really map
out the tiny emotions and how they move through space.
And so I wanted you to talk a little bit
about this idea of an atlas, you know, and how
you get to this metaphor of making a map. Yeah,
(11:40):
when I interviewed cartologists, they said, when you build a map,
a map is just a collection of layers. You first
go and you get the topography. Then maybe you get
where the water is, and maybe where you get where
the roads are. And the story of a map is
in the layers. And I really thought this is the
right metaphor for this work because the story of our
(12:03):
emotional lives is in the layers. Which is why I think.
Have you ever seen the movie Chef? No? Actually, oh
my god, I really want you to watch it. Okay,
I will go, I will go, and the next time
part two on Chef, Well, there's this great scene where
John Favreau, he's losing his shit. A critic is in
his restaurant tasting his food, and he's sticking his fingers
(12:25):
in this guy's food. He's yelling at this guy, and
it was such a great example of if I just
saw you doing that like Laurie was doing that, I
would say, Oh, he's so angry, But is it anger?
Because grief could present the same way as could shame,
as could humiliation, as could despair, And so I was
(12:47):
really wrong about something I have said probably a thousand times.
We need to learn how to recognize emotions and self
and others, and I actually, coming to the end of
this process, don't believe that we can actually recognize emotion
in others. And if anybody could, I think I would
be somebody at least in the top one hundred or so.
I don't think we can read emotion in people. What
(13:09):
I think we can do is get curious, connect with
them deeply, as opposed to diminish, question, challenge, and listen.
When we get back from the break, we'll hear more
about this idea that emotions come in layers, and how
understanding those layers can help us get better at describing
(13:29):
the things we're feeling. The happiness lab will be right back.
I've been talking with social worker and best selling author
Brene Brown about how important it is to recognize and
communicate our emotions, especially the difficult ones. But the language
(13:53):
we used to talk about our feelings doesn't just shape us.
It also influences our relationships. This idea that language doesn't
communicate solely, it also shapes. It's like the benefit that's
come to mind is if you're baking cookies, you know
your Grandma's best russ pay and the flavor change is
radically dependent on the bowl you use. I mean, that's
(14:15):
the power of language. And so what happens if what
you're experiencing is actually disappointment but the only language you
have available to you is sad. I can't, as your friend,
call you and say, Laurie, do you have a second sure,
I'm so disappointed. If you and I both understand what
disappointment is, somewhere in our conversation, we're probably going to
(14:35):
get to the expectation that got betrayed, which because there's
a relationship between disappointment and expectation, and that's where the
healing is, that's where the learning is. I'll call you
and say I'm so pissed off, you know, like that's
more my modus operandi, but it doesn't get to Wow.
I said an expectation that I had no control over,
(14:57):
and I put a lot behind it. And so you've
given us a nice guide to kind of figure out
how we can get that granularity, you know, to what
our kind of roads and elevation is in the emotions
map in this for your idea of the sort of
four bees as it were, I'm not sure if you
called them the four bees, but yeah, so walk me
through some of the things that are kind of in
the emotion map. These four bees. Well, I think, and
(15:18):
I don't know that they work in a linear way biology, biography, behavior,
and backstory. So I think biology. Look, they call them
feelings because our body is the first to respond. I mean,
this emotion is physiological, and so to be able to
understand where in your body are you feeling this and
what are you feeling? Even just in a more you know,
(15:39):
kind of less granular, more chunky level, I'm triggered by something,
something's got me hooked. I'm in emotion and then biography.
You know, I was raised in a family where you
don't feel, and if you feel anything. The only thing
that's really okay to feel as anger, Like we could
be pissed, but we could never say my feelings are hurt,
because that would be too vulnerable and too weak. Probably,
(16:01):
So what did I grow up understanding or believing or
learning about this feeling? And then the next is behavior?
How am I showing up right now? You know? Like
I'm coming down of my skin. I'd want to punch
the wall. I just want to hide and cry. And
then I think this last be is the one that
(16:21):
really changed my mind about my belief that we can
really understand what other people are thinking without stories, which
is the backstory. Like if I see you in tears,
I can't assume that it's grief. I can't assume that
it's disappointment. I can't. I need to be so other
(16:41):
focused and so curious that I want to know what
it's about. And so yeah, I think they're complicated, and
I think that we know enough now from neuroscience to
know that unlike how I was raised, we are emotional beings.
We do a lot based on emotion, and when we're feeling,
cognition is not even in the passenger seat. It's like
(17:04):
hog tied in the trunk. Yeah. But part of the
insight for me, and I think the insight for a
lot of people reading this is first just realizing how
little they thought, carefully thought about their emotional landscaped at all,
Like how very little they knew about the specific places.
One of my favorite things about reading the book is
that I like to think that I'm learning all this stuff.
But then when you, you know, amazing social worker and
(17:27):
five time best selling New York Times author Brene Brown,
when you're learning stuff about emotion, when you're getting it wrong,
you know, that makes me feel really really good, or
at least it makes me feel like I'm not like
completely messing up. Yeah, I mean, you know, we bucketed
at the eighty seven into different families, into different maps,
and there's not a single grouping where I did not
(17:47):
make at least two or three mistakes. And how I
use language constantly, Like I didn't understand the difference between
jealousy and envy, and I didn't understand that envy was
wanting something someone else had, and that jealousy is the
fear of losing something you have to someone else. Now
I understand it, but I'm not going to stop saying jealous.
So because if you show me your vacation pictures, I'm like, hey, Laurie, like,
(18:10):
how was Greece, And you're like, oh my god, let
me show you. And I'm like, oh my god, I'm
so jealous. I'm so jelly. You know, That's what I
would say, and I'd try to figure out why I
would never say, God, Laurie, I'm really envious. First of all,
that sounds terrible, right, yeah. It sounds more like you're
going after my vacation or something, you know, something negative, like, yeah, Well,
(18:31):
I think that's because there's two types of envy. There's
kind of benign MV which means I want something you
have and I'm so glad you had it. But there's
also malicious envy, where I want something you have and
you're going down forgetting it. One of the ones that
was a life changing for me, to be honest with you,
is comparison. To compare is to be human. Basically, we
compare involuntarily. It's just part of our wiring. Like I
(18:55):
did not know that, And so where the inflection point comes,
where the self determination comes, is what we choose to
do with a comparison. So the story I tell in
my book is I swim laps a lot, and if
I happened to sync up with someone in a lane
next to me and we push off the wall at
the same time, I'm racing them, and I don't care
(19:16):
if it's a twenty five year old triathlete or an
eighty five year old woman, I'm racing you. But now,
since doing this research, I'll say, to compare is human.
To let go of it is divine. That's what I
say to myself. So now I'll push off at the
wall and then I just look at the person. Then underwater,
I just say, have a good swim friend. And so
the intervention point is not to not compare, because apparently
(19:40):
we just do that as humans, probably related to like safety, right, Yeah,
I mean there's evidence, for example that even non human
primates and animals compare thea really, somebody else is getting
a better You know, you're only getting a cucumber for
your work on some project. You know, you're doing some
reward task and you get a cucumber, but somebody else
gets a grape, even though a cucumber would have been
you know, fine delicious food. To get all of a
(20:01):
sudden you're like mad that you're getting a grape, and
so you can see monkeys like throwing the cucumber and
rejecting and you know, shaking, you know, the bars of
their enclosure. You know. So it it's not even the
comparison is human. Comparison might be primate or maybe it's
even mammal. We don't know life, but it's deep, yeah,
like a social say, oh my god, I am the
cucumber wielding monkey. One of the you know, ironically surprising
(20:22):
ones for me was thinking about surprise. You talk about
how we should pay attention to surprise because it's this
really weird emotion because it has an incredibly short duration.
You know, we wait for like sadness, you know, grief
for a long time does this dissipate, But surprise one
second you realize what's happening and then it's over. So
fascinating from like a cognitive science perspective that there's just
(20:43):
one emotion that's just really short lived. It's like the
shortest and this also taught me something about myself, so
it's very short, and then it's a bridge to other things,
other cognitions and emotions that follow. Right, It's a bridge,
I call it a cannon, Like you get shot out
of this thing emotionally and it's over like that, but
then you're in something else. The emotion that follows a
surprise are normally exacerbated by surprise. You feel them more
(21:07):
deeply what's happening. So I hate surprises, Like even I'm
a huge mystery reader and a huge mystery watcher, and
I will read a plot or the back of a
book before I start, and people think, God, what is
wrong with you, Like if there's no joy in that,
And I'm like, well, it may not be joined that
for you, But for me to sit in a theater
for two hours not knowing what's going to happen, I can't.
(21:29):
That's not fun for me. That's anxiety producing for me.
So I can really enjoy the film if I understand
who's going to die or who did it, or who's
the bad person or you know whatever. But now I
understand better. But it's not surprised that I mind so much.
It's the fact that it heightens the emotions that follow,
and I do not like heightened emotion. This was really
(21:51):
clarifying for me because I'm with you, not not for
all films, but definitely for scary films. I'm really even
I like love Halloween. I'm obsessed with Halloween, but I
hate scary movies, and to watch one with my husband,
I have to like go on Wikipedia and read the
plot so I know when the jump scares are coming,
so that I can like be like it's coming, I'll
be okay, I'll just feel a little bit afraid. So
(22:11):
it was nice to hear that I'm not alone in that.
So those are cases of like realizing more about these emotions,
you know, surprises this canon that shoots you into other things.
I thought another deep insight of your book was all
these cases where we just failed to tell emotions apart.
You know you mentioned this with jealousy and envy right.
Another one I love learning about was this distinction between
worry and rumination. So talk a little bit about why
(22:34):
those are so different. Man, I did not know a
lot about ruminating and the dangerous for rumination before I
went into this. It came up as kind of the
variable that predicts whether nostalgia is going to be healthy
psychologically are dangerous because honestly, I think of nostalgia as
a dog whistle for white supremacy most of the time
(22:54):
to be honest with you. Like, ah, back then it
was so good soft comma when people knew their place,
you know. And so I came into nostalgia like loaded
for bear. I was like, there's nothing good about nostalgia.
But I think it was Sandra Garrido who said in
her research nostalgic can be beautiful and wonderful, which is
good because it gives me permission to feel nostalgic again
(23:15):
about some things like a childhood smell or something that
makes me feel warm and fuzzy. But it's they're ruminating
that makes it really psychologically unhealthy, and I think it
can be dangerous collectively. After the break, Brenee will walk
us through even more of these emotions that we think
we understand but we kind of just don't. We'll also
(23:36):
see that understanding the nuances of these emotions might be
the key to breaking free from some pretty negative patterns
of behavior. The Happiness Lab will be right back as
a professor of psychology and host of this podcast. I
(23:56):
had always assumed that I knew a lot about my
own feelings. I'm not totally sure how many emotions I
could have named before talking with Burnee, but it was
probably way less than the eighty seven she identified in
her book, But Brine admitted that some of these emotions
were pretty tricky for her to disentangle too. One of
the cool differences between rumination and worry is kind of
(24:18):
which direction they're pointing, which is something I'd never really
thought about before. Your rumination is kind of pointing towards
the past, whereas worry is pointing towards the future. I mean,
both are bad, but that means you deal with them
in slightly different ways. Yeah, And how would you define ruminating? Yeah,
I mean, I think of rumination is like, you know,
a thought pattern that you get stuck in, you know,
(24:38):
a lot like worry right where you're kind of, you know,
your thoughts are going back to this over and over again.
You're not actually making progress in terms of dealing with it.
But it was funny to realize that one of those
thought patterns is about the future. You know, I tend
to have a lot of health anxiety, so I'm like,
oh my gosh, you know, I see the symptoms. It
can't you're you know, like I'm you know, worrying, worrying
about the future. But then you also have rumination. Right
(25:00):
that thing that I did before, I can't believe I
said that to that person, like I wonder how they're
going to react, and did it out God, But it
was funny to realize that the form of the feel
so familiar, and I would have used those words interchangeably,
but they map onto totally different things, right Like with worry,
I need to deal with my anxiety or make take
control about the future or kind of allow that. With rumination,
there's something about the past that I might need to
(25:22):
deal with and get over and allow in a different way.
And so it's sort of different paths forward with each
of them. It's holding on to something different and then
different paths out of them. Worry, I'm a warrior, like
I can really worry with the best of them, but
some of them mythology that warriors carry felt like I
felt like I was really being read. It was terrible,
(25:42):
because you know, warriors believe that worrying is helpful. It's not.
Warriors believe that they cannot change that about them. We can.
And then how dangerous it is to worry about worrying.
And so I have to dispel the mythology about worry
because I do tell myself it's good, and I do
tell myself that I can't help it when I can.
(26:03):
I also, before I wrote this book, I use the
word overwhelmed a lot, and I used it when I
was actually just stressed. And I think when I tell
my body that I'm overwhelmed, it has a protocol that
it follows, where that is just shut down protocol. I
think it's John Cabotzen that has this beautiful definition of overwhelmed,
(26:23):
where life is unfolding at a pace faster than my
nervous system or psyche can manage, and so overwhelmed I
need to reserve that term for when I mean it.
These are all cases where the act of not telling
emotions of heart allows us to miss nuance. That's critical
for kind of figuring out how to deal with these emotions.
But there are other cases where we don't realize that
(26:45):
two emotions are very close on a map, and that
can help us miss cases where maybe thinking about emotions
in that different way it might help us. And so
I thought about this in the context of anxiety versus excitement.
You know, if you did like anxiety versus excitement, I'm like,
you know, one hundred percent excitement, you know, the heck
with anxiety, but like in emotional space on your atlast,
they're kind of close, and that might give us some
(27:07):
insights about how to kind of navigate anxiety that we
didn't think about before. Yeah, I mean, I'll be honest
with you, I'm still wrestling with this and I write
about wrestling with it because I think when we think
about the four bees in biology terms, I think our
physiological response to excitement anxiety can be very similar, kind
of coming out of our skin a little bit. That
(27:29):
just Oh and then with the research shows is that
when we're torn between what we're feeling but we label
it anxiety, the outcomes are more positive. When we label
what we're feeling as anxiety, it's more negative. So I'm
trying to figure out for myself what that means and
when that's helpful without diminishing the fact that anxiety is
(27:53):
a real thing and when we're in it, just calling
it something else doesn't make it go away. Does that
make sense? Yeah? Totally. I mean it suggests that we
might be able to prepare ourselves better, you know, with
the backstory ahead of time. Yeah, you know, I'm going
into this job interview, and you can work on the
backstory to be what a cool challenge to meet these
new people. I'm so excited that kind of backstory might
(28:16):
lead to a different outcome. Then if the backstory is, gosh,
I need this job, you know, I'm worried that I
don't have the right qualifications that backstory, even though the
biology is the same. Right your fight or flight systems activated.
You know, your heart's racing, you know, you can see
it in these totally different ways, you know, So those
are cases where you know, recognizing these are emotions are
close and if we just push one of the bees,
(28:37):
you know, push the backstory or something a different way,
I can help. But another one of the biggest insights
I got from your book, perhaps the biggest insight, is
these cases where we just don't remember where the emotions
are on an emotional map, and thinking about them differently
can completely change the way we respond to them. And
so you talked about one of the big insights you
had in this domain when thinking about the emotion of resentment.
(29:00):
You know, do you want to talk about the kind
of insight you got there? The resentment was living on
the wrong continent in my life it's like, oh my god,
this was real. This is hard for me. The long
story short is that I've struggled a lot with resentment
and I can really feel it. So I was interviewing
Mark Brackett from You All about his book, and before
(29:23):
we went on the air, I said, Hey, can I
just ask you a personal question for me personally? And
he's like, yeah, sure, and I said, resentment is from
the Anger family, right, and he goes, no, resentment is
actually a function of envy. And then it was like
time to go on and I was like, oh, holy shit,
and you know, we did this podcast. It was great.
(29:44):
I called my therapist, like on the way home, I said,
I really need to talk to you. And as we
started to unpack that, what I realized is the times
when I was the most resentful is when I'm deep
in to burnout. I'm exhausted, and I don't think everyone
else is working as hard as I am. And it
turns out that I'm not mad because people aren't working
(30:05):
as hard. I'm envious because they're taking care of themselves.
And what's so surprising about that is then it gives you,
like it plops in your lap, a solution which is
not yell at them and be like, hey, you work more,
you know, dang it. It's it's to say, actually, I
need to set up my own boundaries, like I'm what
I'm jealous of that? You know, because as you talk about,
envy has a kind of content and there's a thing
that you're envious of. It might be those other people's
(30:27):
boundaries or there, you know, time affluence, the fact that
they have some space totally. And so that one was
profound for me because it made me realize the way
I go about solving yet and my teams in my
life with family members. It's wrong, right, It's about me
and the changes I need to make for myself that
the changes I need to make for the relationship. Yeah,
and now, and when I feel envious, I don't say
(30:47):
what is this person doing to piss me off? Which
is an easy question for me to ask. It's how
I was raised, It's my biography, you know. Now I
ask what do you need that you're afraid to ask for?
And it's hard, No, it's just hard. It's hard for
me because it's very vulnerable. I'm tired. I need more joy,
I need more play, any more connect with Steve and
(31:09):
my kids. It's all the stuff I'm really scared of.
So disappointment was another one for me that kind of
had this Aha moment where, you know, I think it's
about sadness, but the content of disappointment is that it's
really about your expectations. It's a reaction to a violation
of an expectation. And that felt like yet another one
that maybe you could work on yourself, like, you know,
(31:32):
because I control those expectations, so maybe there's a point
where I need to update my expectations. You kind of
had this same aha moment when you were thinking about
disappointment too, right, Yeah. I mean Steve and I have
been together for thirty plus years. Maybe the biggest threat
to our marriage is kind of what I call stealth expectations,
these expectations that I have or he has that we
(31:54):
don't communicate with each other. But then we're just reeling
in disappointment and blame and anger. And I mean I
tell simple story in there about packing for Disney, you know,
and I have five books that I carry on and
he's like, what you're doing? And I said, I'm just
bringing all these books and he's like, should we talk
about that? And I said, no, this is I'm so excited.
We're gonna be gone for a whole week and this
(32:15):
is so cool. And he's like, we have seven kids
at Disney World for six days. The only thing you're
going to read is you have to be this tall
to ride. And I was like what, and he goes,
I just want to reality check these expectations with you,
if that's what kind of time off we need. We
picked the wrong place, you know, and we end up
having a great time, but it wasn't just riddled with disappointment.
(32:38):
And I think this is really the power of the book.
You went through eighty seven. We probably just had time
to go through ten. But what we're seeing is like
knowing where emotions are, what other emotions they're near, making
sure we're distinguishing them when they require distinguishing, and kind
of recognizing their definitions. This is really helpful for figuring
out the kind of thing you need to do to
make sure your Disney vacation is working and the way
(33:01):
you want right And so, you know, do you think
that having this better map is really going to help
us in terms of flourishing, not even changing our emotions,
but just better understanding them. Can really help us navigate them. Yes,
I think that we are really desperate to find our
way back to ourselves and to each other. I think
it starts with language and self awareness and some deep
(33:23):
breaths and just trying to understand that we're emotional beings.
And if we don't have the language that reflects our experiences,
it gets really tricky to talk about how we feel
and ask for what we need. And I do feel
like there's some hope there. And what I hope is
I hope that couples read it together, and I hope
friends talk about it, and I hope that there are
some real conversations. And I think there are so many
(33:45):
people out there, yourself included, trying to make a dent
in a world that says how we feel doesn't matter,
when really nothing matters if we don't understand how we feel.
Speaking with Brene really drove home the importance of trying
to commit to recognizing and describing my feelings more precisely,
(34:06):
especially when they're feelings that i'd kind prefer to run
away from. So I hope you'll join me in trying
to better map your emotions in the new year. The
next time I'm having a bad day at work, I'm
going to try to put my emotional thinking cap on
and identify what's really going on, whether I'm dealing with
frustration or disappointment, or overwhelm or boredom. I'm also going
(34:27):
to try to more specifically notice what my body is
experiencing and to see if there's some wiggle room and
how I describe it. The next time my heart is
racing before a big new project, I'll try to reframe
that as excitement rather than anxiety. And if nothing else,
I'm going to hold onto Brune's wonderful metaphor that my
feelings are part of a vast and layered and perhaps
(34:49):
even beautiful emotional landscape. When I start to feel lost
or overwhelmed by a certain feeling in the new year,
I'm going to take a moment to be grateful that
I get to experience such a spectacular emotional landscape in
the first place. I might even pause to marvel at
the scenery. Now that Brette has helped me recognize and
(35:11):
name my emotions with more precision, my next task is
to figure out how to deal with all the ichy
ones I am saying it. I'm noticing that I'm feeling
said 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 ignoring your difficult experience,
(35:32):
but you're creating space in it, and that will be
the topic of the next episode of The Happiness Lab
with me Doctor Laurie Santos. If you love this show
and others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to pushkin Plus.
Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content
(35:53):
and uninterrupted listening for only four ninety nine a month.
As a special gift to pushkin Plus subscribers, I'll be
sharing a series of six guided meditations to help you
practice the lessons we've learned from our experts. To check
them out, look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts subscrib ops.
(36:13):
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
by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Milabelle, Heather Faine, John Schnars,
Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Brandt Haynes, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler,
(36:34):
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,
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your podcasts,
Pushkin. As a professor who teaches about the science of
well being, I spend a lot of time thinking and
talking and also podcasting about how to feel happier. But
in spite of all that, I'm not exactly happy one
(00:35):
hundred percent of the time. I too still feel guilty
and anxious. I get angry and sad and jealous, and
with so many responsibilities, I often feel overwhelmed and frustrated.
All this makes sense, I mean, experiencing negative emotions is
part of what it means to be human, but actually
having to go through all these bad emotions that kind
(00:58):
of sucks. If I'm being honest, I pretty much hate
going through these negative feelings, and so my first instinct
is always to push them away. As soon as I
start to detect that I'm feeling frustrated or sad or
a little pissed at someone, I try to avoid the
experience completely. I pretend it's not happening, or distract myself
or dive into my work so I don't have to
(01:20):
experience that not so nice feeling. But the science shows
this isn't the smartest strategy. There's lots and lots of
evidence that suppressing and avoiding our negative sensations is ultimately
only going to make us feel worse in the long run.
So my New Year's resolution for twenty twenty two is
to stop running away from all my difficult emotions. I
(01:41):
want to allow and embrace and maybe even learn from
the yuckier sensations in life. But that's easier said than done.
So I decided to call in some reinforcements. In this
special new season of the Happiness Lab, I'll chat with
an amazing group of experts about how we can learn
(02:01):
from our negative emotions. Over the next few weeks, we'll
explore strategies we can all use to navigate the feelings
we'd rather not feel. We'll see how we can make
peace with the emotions we hate, and we'll see that
they may even have something important to teach us. But
learning from our worst emotions can be a challenge even
for the experts. I think I came from fifth generation Texan.
(02:24):
I just came from a family that really perceived emotion
in general as weakness and as threatening. We grew up
with the belief that we are thinking, doing people who
on occasion feel, and that can get us sidelined. And
so obviously no neuroscientists in my family. This is five
(02:48):
time New York Times best selling author Brenee Brown Brinee
is one of my idols. She's an internationally recognized expert
on navigating emotions, and these days she's begun helping people
figure out how to name their emotions too. Brenee's new
book is called Atlas of the Heart, Mapping meaningful connection
and the Language of human experience. Her book has a
(03:09):
huge number of important tips for understanding our complex emotional landscape,
which is something Brenie has been interested in for a
really long time. Brenie learned as a child that she
wasn't supposed to talk about or even acknowledge her feelings,
but she also discovered that she was surprisingly good at
observing while other people were feeling, especially when it came
(03:29):
to adults. It just became actually kind of a form
of psychological safety for me growing up to know the
relationship between behavior and language and thinking and feeling. I
think today a therapist would probably just say an over diligent,
kind of hyper vigilant way of thinking about emotion and cognition.
(03:50):
And I got really good at it to the point
where I could predict behavior. It was like a superpower.
I had a swim coach who was really volatile. I
mean he just would lose his shit in really inappropriate ways,
and everyone would always try to figure out, like who
is he after? Who is he after? But it only
took me like a couple of practices to realize he
didn't love the fastest kids. He liked the kids who
(04:13):
tried the hardest. And he also had a pinchip for backstroke,
I think whether he was a backstroker in college. So
I would just always get in the lane with the
people who weren't the best swimmers but who really tried hard,
which was good because I wasn't one of the best swimmers.
So it worked and I never got in trouble. And
I never shared with anyone what the secret was either,
because it was, you know, every person for themselves. Terrible
(04:35):
experiences like this made brine wonder why couldn't her peers
see what to her was so obvious. I spent a
lot of time thinking to myself, holy shit, do they
not understand what's getting ready to happen? Like? Do they
not see what's happening here? Brinee's fascination with emotion and
behavior led her on a path to becoming a social worker.
The research she eventually did on emotions helped her understand
(04:58):
why her superpower was so rare. We asked people to
make a list of all the emotions that they could
recognize in themselves as they were experiencing them, and the
mean number was as three just three three, yeah, happy, sad,
and pissed off. I always call it the bad, sad,
glad triad. And that was really shocking to me. Now,
(05:20):
they could list a lot of other emotions, but they
couldn't recognize when they were in them. They just knew
that those emotion feeling words existed. That got me thinking
back to a quote that I came across when I
was in college by Ludwig Wittgenstein that the limits of
my language mean the limits of my world. And I
just spent a lot of years thinking what happens when
(05:44):
our language is not as expansive as our human experience?
What does it mean when we have to shove an
experience of despair or disappointment into one of these three buckets?
And I always knew that it completely crippled our ability
(06:05):
to own and communicate. But I think it was probably
four or five years ago when we started seeing some
of the research on how language doesn't just communicate emotion
but shape it. That I started thinking, oh God, holy shit,
we are individually and collectively in trouble if we don't
(06:27):
have language. Yeah, I mean, part of our task is
recognizing emotions and other people. But how on earth are
we going to fulfill that task when we can't even
recognize our own emotional experience when it's happening and categorizing it.
I mean, you know, it's one thing to think about
not being able to recognize positive emotions, right, you know,
the distuned say joy and awe and amusement. But it
feels sort of different to not be able to recognize
(06:48):
negative emotions. And I could think of a couple of
reasons why you know, people don't do that. You know.
The biggest one is it just sucks to reflect on
anything that's painful, right, We tend to avoid it. It's
deep part of human nature. If it sucks, just don't
think about it. And so do you think that's part
of it? I think it's probably the biggest driver. I mean,
as someone who is like studied and written about shame
for fifty years, I can tell you that no one
(07:12):
wants to talk about it. You know. The bad news
is the less we talk about it, the more we
experience it. But no one wants to talk about it.
People will do just about anything to avoid pain, including
cause pain, right, I mean, so that seems to be
part of it, is that you know, we're avoiding these
negative emotions. But another I think is just a misconception
about experiencing emotions, which is that if you look deep
(07:35):
into the void, the void looks back at you. Right,
if we really dig into you know, anguish and sadness
and despair and all these things, that it won't feel
good or it'll amplify these emotions. So talk about why
that's a little bit of a misconception that labeling them
can shape them, but maybe not in the way we
often think. Yeah. No, it's a huge part of the
(07:55):
mythology around emotion that if we look at in the eye,
it gives it power, when the reality is if we
look at in the eye and name it, it gives
us power. And so I think it's to your point exactly,
it's just human nature to avoid what hurts, even if
and this is the cognitive dissonance part, even if we
(08:17):
know avoiding it will exacerbate it. You know, emotions are
such a big part of human behavior, of human nature.
They affect so many parts of our life. So you
might think that academics had them reasonably sorted out, that
people across disciplines agreed on a definition and these kinds
of things, you know, talk about. Way, when you really
look into this, especially academically, things are much more complex
(08:38):
than they might seem to liay folks. Yeah, I don't
think there is a consensus on even the definition of emotion.
In fact, I'm really careful in the book. The middle
of the book is an exploration of eighty seven emotions
and experiences. And I say emotions and experiences very purposefully
because I don't want to get into that kind of
academic pissing match about what is an emotion and what
(09:00):
isn't an emotion because I'm a mix like terrible metaphors here.
But there's bigger fish to fry. Yeah. One of the
big questions that really comes up is this issue of
like how many any emotions are there, which I think
is you know, something else academics fight about. So, you know,
what are some of the ideas you came up with
and what have you found in your own work in
terms of the like the number. The way we came
up with the eighty seven was really straightforward. It was
(09:23):
a content analysis of comments from seventy thousand people who
took an online course that I did with in partnership
with Oprah Winfrey Network, and we went in asking what
are the emotions people are struggling to name and identify,
and when they do name and identify them, help them
move through them. So then we came up with a
collection of emotions and experiences. Then we brought in a
(09:45):
focus group of therapists who spend hours kind of ranking
around the same question. These are critical for our clients
to understand in order to heal and move through them
or to experience more of it, and these are less critical,
and these are not critical. And this is the list
ended up with. And then I added a couple for
comparative reasons, like Freudenfreude wasn't on the list, but Schadenfreud
(10:09):
was just to compare. So when people say how many
emotions are there, my answer is, I have no idea.
We're exploring eighty seven of the one of the emotions
and experiences we believe are helpful to be able to
name to move through them. I think that's an awesome
answer in it gets at this cross cultural issue, right,
because those are the eighty seven emotions that you're my
guess is Western mostly American participants, you know, came up
(10:32):
with right where you did do the same analysis somewhere else.
It might be a different set of them too. I mean,
just as a shame researcher Man, English is one of
the only languages that has one word for shame, and
when we were translating into Spanish, there was a debate
for three months about whether you should use the word
for sin for shame the gallo like no, and then
is it balwinsa. You know, maybe, but it's in context
(10:55):
because that can also mean embarrassing. You know, It's like,
it's really tricky emotions happen in the context of culture.
So this is the first book and all my books
that I have really put my foot down. We're not
allowing it to be translated. And that's you know, that's
hard with your publisher, right. A lot of the books
are translating into thirty forty languages, and I didn't collect
the data cross culturally. Therefore, just because we can translate
(11:18):
it using a computer program. Doesn't make it right? Does
that make sense? Totally? Totally. A bigger goal of the
new book is really to do something that's important for
all of us but we rarely do, which is to
kind of get into emotional granularity, right, like really map
out the tiny emotions and how they move through space.
And so I wanted you to talk a little bit
about this idea of an atlas, you know, and how
you get to this metaphor of making a map. Yeah,
(11:40):
when I interviewed cartologists, they said, when you build a map,
a map is just a collection of layers. You first
go and you get the topography. Then maybe you get
where the water is, and maybe where you get where
the roads are. And the story of a map is
in the layers. And I really thought this is the
right metaphor for this work because the story of our
(12:03):
emotional lives is in the layers. Which is why I think.
Have you ever seen the movie Chef? No? Actually, oh
my god, I really want you to watch it. Okay,
I will go, I will go, and the next time
part two on Chef, Well, there's this great scene where
John Favreau, he's losing his shit. A critic is in
his restaurant tasting his food, and he's sticking his fingers
(12:25):
in this guy's food. He's yelling at this guy, and
it was such a great example of if I just
saw you doing that like Laurie was doing that, I
would say, Oh, he's so angry, But is it anger?
Because grief could present the same way as could shame,
as could humiliation, as could despair, And so I was
(12:47):
really wrong about something I have said probably a thousand times.
We need to learn how to recognize emotions and self
and others, and I actually, coming to the end of
this process, don't believe that we can actually recognize emotion
in others. And if anybody could, I think I would
be somebody at least in the top one hundred or so.
I don't think we can read emotion in people. What
(13:09):
I think we can do is get curious, connect with
them deeply, as opposed to diminish, question, challenge, and listen.
When we get back from the break, we'll hear more
about this idea that emotions come in layers, and how
understanding those layers can help us get better at describing
(13:29):
the things we're feeling. The happiness lab will be right back.
I've been talking with social worker and best selling author
Brene Brown about how important it is to recognize and
communicate our emotions, especially the difficult ones. But the language
(13:53):
we used to talk about our feelings doesn't just shape us.
It also influences our relationships. This idea that language doesn't
communicate solely, it also shapes. It's like the benefit that's
come to mind is if you're baking cookies, you know
your Grandma's best russ pay and the flavor change is
radically dependent on the bowl you use. I mean, that's
(14:15):
the power of language. And so what happens if what
you're experiencing is actually disappointment but the only language you
have available to you is sad. I can't, as your friend,
call you and say, Laurie, do you have a second sure,
I'm so disappointed. If you and I both understand what
disappointment is, somewhere in our conversation, we're probably going to
(14:35):
get to the expectation that got betrayed, which because there's
a relationship between disappointment and expectation, and that's where the
healing is, that's where the learning is. I'll call you
and say I'm so pissed off, you know, like that's
more my modus operandi, but it doesn't get to Wow.
I said an expectation that I had no control over,
(14:57):
and I put a lot behind it. And so you've
given us a nice guide to kind of figure out
how we can get that granularity, you know, to what
our kind of roads and elevation is in the emotions
map in this for your idea of the sort of
four bees as it were, I'm not sure if you
called them the four bees, but yeah, so walk me
through some of the things that are kind of in
the emotion map. These four bees. Well, I think, and
(15:18):
I don't know that they work in a linear way biology, biography, behavior,
and backstory. So I think biology. Look, they call them
feelings because our body is the first to respond. I mean,
this emotion is physiological, and so to be able to
understand where in your body are you feeling this and
what are you feeling? Even just in a more you know,
(15:39):
kind of less granular, more chunky level, I'm triggered by something,
something's got me hooked. I'm in emotion and then biography.
You know, I was raised in a family where you
don't feel, and if you feel anything. The only thing
that's really okay to feel as anger, Like we could
be pissed, but we could never say my feelings are hurt,
because that would be too vulnerable and too weak. Probably,
(16:01):
So what did I grow up understanding or believing or
learning about this feeling? And then the next is behavior?
How am I showing up right now? You know? Like
I'm coming down of my skin. I'd want to punch
the wall. I just want to hide and cry. And
then I think this last be is the one that
(16:21):
really changed my mind about my belief that we can
really understand what other people are thinking without stories, which
is the backstory. Like if I see you in tears,
I can't assume that it's grief. I can't assume that
it's disappointment. I can't. I need to be so other
(16:41):
focused and so curious that I want to know what
it's about. And so yeah, I think they're complicated, and
I think that we know enough now from neuroscience to
know that unlike how I was raised, we are emotional beings.
We do a lot based on emotion, and when we're feeling,
cognition is not even in the passenger seat. It's like
(17:04):
hog tied in the trunk. Yeah. But part of the
insight for me, and I think the insight for a
lot of people reading this is first just realizing how
little they thought, carefully thought about their emotional landscaped at all,
Like how very little they knew about the specific places.
One of my favorite things about reading the book is
that I like to think that I'm learning all this stuff.
But then when you, you know, amazing social worker and
(17:27):
five time best selling New York Times author Brene Brown,
when you're learning stuff about emotion, when you're getting it wrong,
you know, that makes me feel really really good, or
at least it makes me feel like I'm not like
completely messing up. Yeah, I mean, you know, we bucketed
at the eighty seven into different families, into different maps,
and there's not a single grouping where I did not
(17:47):
make at least two or three mistakes. And how I
use language constantly, Like I didn't understand the difference between
jealousy and envy, and I didn't understand that envy was
wanting something someone else had, and that jealousy is the
fear of losing something you have to someone else. Now
I understand it, but I'm not going to stop saying jealous.
So because if you show me your vacation pictures, I'm like, hey, Laurie, like,
(18:10):
how was Greece, And you're like, oh my god, let
me show you. And I'm like, oh my god, I'm
so jealous. I'm so jelly. You know, That's what I
would say, and I'd try to figure out why I
would never say, God, Laurie, I'm really envious. First of all,
that sounds terrible, right, yeah. It sounds more like you're
going after my vacation or something, you know, something negative, like, yeah, Well,
(18:31):
I think that's because there's two types of envy. There's
kind of benign MV which means I want something you
have and I'm so glad you had it. But there's
also malicious envy, where I want something you have and
you're going down forgetting it. One of the ones that
was a life changing for me, to be honest with you,
is comparison. To compare is to be human. Basically, we
compare involuntarily. It's just part of our wiring. Like I
(18:55):
did not know that, And so where the inflection point comes,
where the self determination comes, is what we choose to
do with a comparison. So the story I tell in
my book is I swim laps a lot, and if
I happened to sync up with someone in a lane
next to me and we push off the wall at
the same time, I'm racing them, and I don't care
(19:16):
if it's a twenty five year old triathlete or an
eighty five year old woman, I'm racing you. But now,
since doing this research, I'll say, to compare is human.
To let go of it is divine. That's what I
say to myself. So now I'll push off at the
wall and then I just look at the person. Then underwater,
I just say, have a good swim friend. And so
the intervention point is not to not compare, because apparently
(19:40):
we just do that as humans, probably related to like safety, right, Yeah,
I mean there's evidence, for example that even non human
primates and animals compare thea really, somebody else is getting
a better You know, you're only getting a cucumber for
your work on some project. You know, you're doing some
reward task and you get a cucumber, but somebody else
gets a grape, even though a cucumber would have been
you know, fine delicious food. To get all of a
(20:01):
sudden you're like mad that you're getting a grape, and
so you can see monkeys like throwing the cucumber and
rejecting and you know, shaking, you know, the bars of
their enclosure. You know. So it it's not even the
comparison is human. Comparison might be primate or maybe it's
even mammal. We don't know life, but it's deep, yeah,
like a social say, oh my god, I am the
cucumber wielding monkey. One of the you know, ironically surprising
(20:22):
ones for me was thinking about surprise. You talk about
how we should pay attention to surprise because it's this
really weird emotion because it has an incredibly short duration.
You know, we wait for like sadness, you know, grief
for a long time does this dissipate, But surprise one
second you realize what's happening and then it's over. So
fascinating from like a cognitive science perspective that there's just
(20:43):
one emotion that's just really short lived. It's like the
shortest and this also taught me something about myself, so
it's very short, and then it's a bridge to other things,
other cognitions and emotions that follow. Right, It's a bridge,
I call it a cannon, Like you get shot out
of this thing emotionally and it's over like that, but
then you're in something else. The emotion that follows a
surprise are normally exacerbated by surprise. You feel them more
(21:07):
deeply what's happening. So I hate surprises, Like even I'm
a huge mystery reader and a huge mystery watcher, and
I will read a plot or the back of a
book before I start, and people think, God, what is
wrong with you, Like if there's no joy in that,
And I'm like, well, it may not be joined that
for you, But for me to sit in a theater
for two hours not knowing what's going to happen, I can't.
(21:29):
That's not fun for me. That's anxiety producing for me.
So I can really enjoy the film if I understand
who's going to die or who did it, or who's
the bad person or you know whatever. But now I
understand better. But it's not surprised that I mind so much.
It's the fact that it heightens the emotions that follow,
and I do not like heightened emotion. This was really
(21:51):
clarifying for me because I'm with you, not not for
all films, but definitely for scary films. I'm really even
I like love Halloween. I'm obsessed with Halloween, but I
hate scary movies, and to watch one with my husband,
I have to like go on Wikipedia and read the
plot so I know when the jump scares are coming,
so that I can like be like it's coming, I'll
be okay, I'll just feel a little bit afraid. So
(22:11):
it was nice to hear that I'm not alone in that.
So those are cases of like realizing more about these emotions,
you know, surprises this canon that shoots you into other things.
I thought another deep insight of your book was all
these cases where we just failed to tell emotions apart.
You know you mentioned this with jealousy and envy right.
Another one I love learning about was this distinction between
worry and rumination. So talk a little bit about why
(22:34):
those are so different. Man, I did not know a
lot about ruminating and the dangerous for rumination before I
went into this. It came up as kind of the
variable that predicts whether nostalgia is going to be healthy
psychologically are dangerous because honestly, I think of nostalgia as
a dog whistle for white supremacy most of the time
(22:54):
to be honest with you. Like, ah, back then it
was so good soft comma when people knew their place,
you know. And so I came into nostalgia like loaded
for bear. I was like, there's nothing good about nostalgia.
But I think it was Sandra Garrido who said in
her research nostalgic can be beautiful and wonderful, which is
good because it gives me permission to feel nostalgic again
(23:15):
about some things like a childhood smell or something that
makes me feel warm and fuzzy. But it's they're ruminating
that makes it really psychologically unhealthy, and I think it
can be dangerous collectively. After the break, Brenee will walk
us through even more of these emotions that we think
we understand but we kind of just don't. We'll also
(23:36):
see that understanding the nuances of these emotions might be
the key to breaking free from some pretty negative patterns
of behavior. The Happiness Lab will be right back as
a professor of psychology and host of this podcast. I
(23:56):
had always assumed that I knew a lot about my
own feelings. I'm not totally sure how many emotions I
could have named before talking with Burnee, but it was
probably way less than the eighty seven she identified in
her book, But Brine admitted that some of these emotions
were pretty tricky for her to disentangle too. One of
the cool differences between rumination and worry is kind of
(24:18):
which direction they're pointing, which is something I'd never really
thought about before. Your rumination is kind of pointing towards
the past, whereas worry is pointing towards the future. I mean,
both are bad, but that means you deal with them
in slightly different ways. Yeah, And how would you define ruminating? Yeah,
I mean, I think of rumination is like, you know,
a thought pattern that you get stuck in, you know,
(24:38):
a lot like worry right where you're kind of, you know,
your thoughts are going back to this over and over again.
You're not actually making progress in terms of dealing with it.
But it was funny to realize that one of those
thought patterns is about the future. You know, I tend
to have a lot of health anxiety, so I'm like,
oh my gosh, you know, I see the symptoms. It
can't you're you know, like I'm you know, worrying, worrying
about the future. But then you also have rumination. Right
(25:00):
that thing that I did before, I can't believe I
said that to that person, like I wonder how they're
going to react, and did it out God, But it
was funny to realize that the form of the feel
so familiar, and I would have used those words interchangeably,
but they map onto totally different things, right Like with worry,
I need to deal with my anxiety or make take
control about the future or kind of allow that. With rumination,
there's something about the past that I might need to
(25:22):
deal with and get over and allow in a different way.
And so it's sort of different paths forward with each
of them. It's holding on to something different and then
different paths out of them. Worry, I'm a warrior, like
I can really worry with the best of them, but
some of them mythology that warriors carry felt like I
felt like I was really being read. It was terrible,
(25:42):
because you know, warriors believe that worrying is helpful. It's not.
Warriors believe that they cannot change that about them. We can.
And then how dangerous it is to worry about worrying.
And so I have to dispel the mythology about worry
because I do tell myself it's good, and I do
tell myself that I can't help it when I can.
(26:03):
I also, before I wrote this book, I use the
word overwhelmed a lot, and I used it when I
was actually just stressed. And I think when I tell
my body that I'm overwhelmed, it has a protocol that
it follows, where that is just shut down protocol. I
think it's John Cabotzen that has this beautiful definition of overwhelmed,
(26:23):
where life is unfolding at a pace faster than my
nervous system or psyche can manage, and so overwhelmed I
need to reserve that term for when I mean it.
These are all cases where the act of not telling
emotions of heart allows us to miss nuance. That's critical
for kind of figuring out how to deal with these emotions.
But there are other cases where we don't realize that
(26:45):
two emotions are very close on a map, and that
can help us miss cases where maybe thinking about emotions
in that different way it might help us. And so
I thought about this in the context of anxiety versus excitement.
You know, if you did like anxiety versus excitement, I'm like,
you know, one hundred percent excitement, you know, the heck
with anxiety, but like in emotional space on your atlast,
they're kind of close, and that might give us some
(27:07):
insights about how to kind of navigate anxiety that we
didn't think about before. Yeah, I mean, I'll be honest
with you, I'm still wrestling with this and I write
about wrestling with it because I think when we think
about the four bees in biology terms, I think our
physiological response to excitement anxiety can be very similar, kind
of coming out of our skin a little bit. That
(27:29):
just Oh and then with the research shows is that
when we're torn between what we're feeling but we label
it anxiety, the outcomes are more positive. When we label
what we're feeling as anxiety, it's more negative. So I'm
trying to figure out for myself what that means and
when that's helpful without diminishing the fact that anxiety is
(27:53):
a real thing and when we're in it, just calling
it something else doesn't make it go away. Does that
make sense? Yeah? Totally. I mean it suggests that we
might be able to prepare ourselves better, you know, with
the backstory ahead of time. Yeah, you know, I'm going
into this job interview, and you can work on the
backstory to be what a cool challenge to meet these
new people. I'm so excited that kind of backstory might
(28:16):
lead to a different outcome. Then if the backstory is, gosh,
I need this job, you know, I'm worried that I
don't have the right qualifications that backstory, even though the
biology is the same. Right your fight or flight systems activated.
You know, your heart's racing, you know, you can see
it in these totally different ways, you know, So those
are cases where you know, recognizing these are emotions are
close and if we just push one of the bees,
(28:37):
you know, push the backstory or something a different way,
I can help. But another one of the biggest insights
I got from your book, perhaps the biggest insight, is
these cases where we just don't remember where the emotions
are on an emotional map, and thinking about them differently
can completely change the way we respond to them. And
so you talked about one of the big insights you
had in this domain when thinking about the emotion of resentment.
(29:00):
You know, do you want to talk about the kind
of insight you got there? The resentment was living on
the wrong continent in my life it's like, oh my god,
this was real. This is hard for me. The long
story short is that I've struggled a lot with resentment
and I can really feel it. So I was interviewing
Mark Brackett from You All about his book, and before
(29:23):
we went on the air, I said, Hey, can I
just ask you a personal question for me personally? And
he's like, yeah, sure, and I said, resentment is from
the Anger family, right, and he goes, no, resentment is
actually a function of envy. And then it was like
time to go on and I was like, oh, holy shit,
and you know, we did this podcast. It was great.
(29:44):
I called my therapist, like on the way home, I said,
I really need to talk to you. And as we
started to unpack that, what I realized is the times
when I was the most resentful is when I'm deep
in to burnout. I'm exhausted, and I don't think everyone
else is working as hard as I am. And it
turns out that I'm not mad because people aren't working
(30:05):
as hard. I'm envious because they're taking care of themselves.
And what's so surprising about that is then it gives you,
like it plops in your lap, a solution which is
not yell at them and be like, hey, you work more,
you know, dang it. It's it's to say, actually, I
need to set up my own boundaries, like I'm what
I'm jealous of that? You know, because as you talk about,
envy has a kind of content and there's a thing
that you're envious of. It might be those other people's
(30:27):
boundaries or there, you know, time affluence, the fact that
they have some space totally. And so that one was
profound for me because it made me realize the way
I go about solving yet and my teams in my
life with family members. It's wrong, right, It's about me
and the changes I need to make for myself that
the changes I need to make for the relationship. Yeah,
and now, and when I feel envious, I don't say
(30:47):
what is this person doing to piss me off? Which
is an easy question for me to ask. It's how
I was raised, It's my biography, you know. Now I
ask what do you need that you're afraid to ask for?
And it's hard, No, it's just hard. It's hard for
me because it's very vulnerable. I'm tired. I need more joy,
I need more play, any more connect with Steve and
(31:09):
my kids. It's all the stuff I'm really scared of.
So disappointment was another one for me that kind of
had this Aha moment where, you know, I think it's
about sadness, but the content of disappointment is that it's
really about your expectations. It's a reaction to a violation
of an expectation. And that felt like yet another one
that maybe you could work on yourself, like, you know,
(31:32):
because I control those expectations, so maybe there's a point
where I need to update my expectations. You kind of
had this same aha moment when you were thinking about
disappointment too, right, Yeah. I mean Steve and I have
been together for thirty plus years. Maybe the biggest threat
to our marriage is kind of what I call stealth expectations,
these expectations that I have or he has that we
(31:54):
don't communicate with each other. But then we're just reeling
in disappointment and blame and anger. And I mean I
tell simple story in there about packing for Disney, you know,
and I have five books that I carry on and
he's like, what you're doing? And I said, I'm just
bringing all these books and he's like, should we talk
about that? And I said, no, this is I'm so excited.
We're gonna be gone for a whole week and this
(32:15):
is so cool. And he's like, we have seven kids
at Disney World for six days. The only thing you're
going to read is you have to be this tall
to ride. And I was like what, and he goes,
I just want to reality check these expectations with you,
if that's what kind of time off we need. We
picked the wrong place, you know, and we end up
having a great time, but it wasn't just riddled with disappointment.
(32:38):
And I think this is really the power of the book.
You went through eighty seven. We probably just had time
to go through ten. But what we're seeing is like
knowing where emotions are, what other emotions they're near, making
sure we're distinguishing them when they require distinguishing, and kind
of recognizing their definitions. This is really helpful for figuring
out the kind of thing you need to do to
make sure your Disney vacation is working and the way
(33:01):
you want right And so, you know, do you think
that having this better map is really going to help
us in terms of flourishing, not even changing our emotions,
but just better understanding them. Can really help us navigate them. Yes,
I think that we are really desperate to find our
way back to ourselves and to each other. I think
it starts with language and self awareness and some deep
(33:23):
breaths and just trying to understand that we're emotional beings.
And if we don't have the language that reflects our experiences,
it gets really tricky to talk about how we feel
and ask for what we need. And I do feel
like there's some hope there. And what I hope is
I hope that couples read it together, and I hope
friends talk about it, and I hope that there are
some real conversations. And I think there are so many
(33:45):
people out there, yourself included, trying to make a dent
in a world that says how we feel doesn't matter,
when really nothing matters if we don't understand how we feel.
Speaking with Brene really drove home the importance of trying
to commit to recognizing and describing my feelings more precisely,
(34:06):
especially when they're feelings that i'd kind prefer to run
away from. So I hope you'll join me in trying
to better map your emotions in the new year. The
next time I'm having a bad day at work, I'm
going to try to put my emotional thinking cap on
and identify what's really going on, whether I'm dealing with
frustration or disappointment, or overwhelm or boredom. I'm also going
(34:27):
to try to more specifically notice what my body is
experiencing and to see if there's some wiggle room and
how I describe it. The next time my heart is
racing before a big new project, I'll try to reframe
that as excitement rather than anxiety. And if nothing else,
I'm going to hold onto Brune's wonderful metaphor that my
feelings are part of a vast and layered and perhaps
(34:49):
even beautiful emotional landscape. When I start to feel lost
or overwhelmed by a certain feeling in the new year,
I'm going to take a moment to be grateful that
I get to experience such a spectacular emotional landscape in
the first place. I might even pause to marvel at
the scenery. Now that Brette has helped me recognize and
(35:11):
name my emotions with more precision, my next task is
to figure out how to deal with all the ichy
ones I am saying it. I'm noticing that I'm feeling
said 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 ignoring your difficult experience,
(35:32):
but you're creating space in it, and that will be
the topic of the next episode of The Happiness Lab
with me Doctor Laurie Santos. If you love this show
and others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to pushkin Plus.
Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content
(35:53):
and uninterrupted listening for only four ninety nine a month.
As a special gift to pushkin Plus subscribers, I'll be
sharing a series of six guided meditations to help you
practice the lessons we've learned from our experts. To check
them out, look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts subscrib ops.
(36:13):
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
by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Milabelle, Heather Faine, John Schnars,
Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Brandt Haynes, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler,
(36:34):
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,
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
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