The Science of Emotion Regulation: Strategies for When You're Anxious, Angry, or Comparing Yourself To Others | Marc Brackett

Yale emotional intelligence expert on how to deal with other people's emotions (and your own). Marc Brackett, Ph. D. https://marcbrackett.com/ is the author of Dealing with Feeling: Use Your Emotions to Create the Life You Want https://marcbrackett.com/dealing-with-feeling/ and the bestselling Permission to Feel https://marcbrackett.com/permission-to-feel/. He is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence https://medicine.yale.edu/childstudy/services/community-and-schools-programs/center-for-emotional-intelligence/ and a professor in the Child Study Center at Yale University. You can watch Marc's podcast interviews here https://www.youtube.com/@marcbrackett. In this episode we talk about: How to deal with stress, anxiety and anger How to use gratitude in moments of compare and despair, like when you're on Instagram comparing yourself to other people's lives How to talk to yourself in moments of high stress How to talk to other people when they're experiencing powerful emotions themselves Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here https://app.danharris.com/membership Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Thanks to our sponsors: FitBod — Personalized workout plans that adapt as you improve. Get 25% off or try free for 7 days at fitbod.me/tenpercent https://fitbod.me/tenpercent/ ZipRecruiter — Find qualified candidates fast. Try free at ziprecruiter.com/tenpercent https://www.ziprecruiter.com/tenpercent Gainbridge — Guaranteed-rate financial products with no hidden fees. Learn more at gainbridge.com https://www.gainbridge.com Henson Shaving — Aerospace-precision razors with 100 free blades included. Visit hensonshaving.com/happier https://www.hensonshaving.com/happier or use code HAPPIER at checkout. Wix — Build a pro-grade website with AI and drag-and-drop tools. Try Wix Harmony at wix.com/harmony https://www.wix.com/harmony To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:18Dan Harris?

  Hello, party people. Today, I am talking to a world-leading expert on emotional intelligence. He is a professor and researcher from Yale, who is sometimes referred to as the feelings master. We're going to talk about how to deal with stress, anxiety, and anger, how to use gratitude in moments of compare and despair, like when you're on Instagram comparing your life to other people's lives, how to talk to yourself in moments of high stress, and how to talk to other people when they're experiencing powerful emotions. By the way, this is a thing a lot of us avoid or fear, dealing with other people's emotions. But as you're about to hear, my guest makes a very strong case for developing this skill as a way to vastly improve your own life. And I've seen this play out in my own life.

• 1:03Dan Harris?

  My guest is Dr. Mark Brackett. He's the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and he's the author of a book called, "Dealing with Feeling: Use Your Emotions to Create the Life You Want." As you know, meditation is a great way to manage your unruly emotions, so please check out my new meditation app, 10% with Dan Harris. We've got guided practices from many of the world's greatest teachers. We also do these amazing weekly live video meditation and Q&A sessions. There's a ton of evidence that shows that meditating with other people is a great way to keep the practice going. You can get the app by heading over to danharris.com. D-A-N-H-A-R-R-I-S dot com. Join the party. We'll get started with Dr. Mark Brackett right after this.

• 1:48Dan Harris?

  Did you know that three out of four US homes have at least some levels of toxic chemicals in the tap water? Surprisingly, standard fridge and pitcher filters do little to remove most contaminants, and bottled water contains microplastics. So what's the solution here? Introducing Aqua True, the countertop water purifier, tested and certified to remove 84 contaminants, including chlorine, lead, forever chemicals, and microplastics. Its patented four-stage reverse osmosis system goes way beyond ordinary filters for pure, healthy water you can trust. No plumbing, no installation. Aqua True has been featured in Business Insider, Popular Science, and named Best Countertop Water Filter By good housekeeping.

• 2:30Dan Harris?

  Join 98% of customers who say their drinking water is cleaner, safer, and healthier. Go to aquatrue.com right now for 20% off your purifier using promo code HAPPIER. Aqua True comes with a 30-day best tasting water guaranteed. That's aquatrue.com, A-Q-U-A-T-R-U.com, and the promo code H-A-P-P-I-E-R.

• 2:57Dan Harris?

  Not long ago, my wife had an interior design dilemma. She's been researching a book for a while, and in order to do the research, she's been ordering a lot of books that she is then reading. But then the question became, what do I do with all these books? She didn't want to throw them away or give them away because she wants to be able to refer to them for her research. So she found a great solution via one of our sponsors today, Wayfair. Through Wayfair, she got these really beautiful translucent bookshelves. They're not even waist-high, and she has lined her office with them and filled them with books. And the net effect is, it looks quite beautiful. It's an elegant solution, and that is what Wayfair can do for you for many of your interior

• 3:41Dan Harris?

  design and also outside backyard furniture solutions as well. And now they have something called Wayfair Verified. Wayfair helps you create a home that stands up to real life with quality products, great value, and trusted reviews. Products that you see through Wayfair Verified are hand-vetted by product specialists using a 10-point quality inspection. Find pieces made for real life and get even more value with Wayfair Rewards. Join Wayfair Rewards today to get 5% back on every purchase. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Wayfair, every style, every home.

• 4:21Dan Harris?

  Dr. Mark Brackett, welcome to the show.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 4:26Dan Harris?

  It's a pleasure. You make a pretty strong claim here. You say emotion regulation is the single most important skill we can develop. Why is that?

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Because if you can't deal with your own emotions, life is pretty tough. And if you can't deal with other people's emotions, meaning if you're not a good co-regulator, I don't think many people want to be around us.

• 4:49Dan Harris?

  Your belief is that this inability that many of us have, or this underdeveloped skill to co-regulate with others and to regulate ourselves is a major contributor to the mental health crisis we're seeing these days?

• 5:03Speaker 02

  It is. If you think about what we're seeing these days, whether it's emotion dysregulation with anxiety or depression, or whether it's the inability to control oneself from doom scrolling for six hours every night, I mean, in the end, it's a form of self-regulation that most people are lacking. And in the relational aspects, let's think about our society today. I mean, don't you think maybe our society would be a little bit better run if leaders cared about how people felt and were concerned about the well-being of society?

• 5:37Dan Harris?

  I do. And that caring quotient fluctuates in Washington and in the seats of power around the country. This is a whole digression, but I'm not sure how high it has ever been. I mean, we were a flawed species. Sometimes it's high, sometimes it's not, but I'm not sure how high it ever gets.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Well, it hasn't been explicitly taught, and that's my whole argument, that none of us really ever got an emotion education. And, you know, for my book, I did this research with thousands of people across the world. Less than 10% of people said they had any formal education in emotion regulation. They couldn't even define it. Most of us can't even articulate what it even means.

• 6:19Dan Harris?

  What does it mean?

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Good question. You want the long form or you want the short form first?

• 6:25Dan Harris?

  This is a podcast. You can go as long as you want, baby.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  All right, good. So the way I like to think about it is that emotion regulation is a set of goals and strategies. So we can prevent unwanted emotions. These are the goals. We can reduce difficult ones. We can initiate the ones that we want to have or help others to have. We can maintain our emotions. We can enhance our emotions. So I have an acronym. I use PRIME for that. So we can prevent, reduce, initiate, maintain, or enhance our own or other people's emotions. And we use strategies to do that. That we can go into in a minute because there's a lot of strategies. So emotion regulation is a set of goals and strategies, but there's a lot more to the formula. Because it's a function of three big things.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  The emotion you're feeling, you know, I do different things to regulate my anxiety than my stress and my anger than my disappointment. Or to feel more pleasant emotions like happiness and contentment. That's the E. The P is the personality. I'm an introvert who's on the neurotic side. So, you know, what I need and what you might need are two different things, but I have a feeling you might have some of these traits too. And then there's the context, which is right now I'm traveling. So I've got my nice setup here in the hotel. I feel really good. I've got a good mic. And so the context matters for regulation because I can't go for a run right now. If I'm feeling anxious during the podcast, I've got to like use some cognitive strategies or breathing strategies. But tonight or early this morning, I can use different strategies.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  So just to put it together, emotion regulation is a set of goals and strategies that are a function of the emotion we're feeling, the person that we are, and the context we're in.

• 8:06Dan Harris?

  We're going to go deep on your strategies because the book is loaded with them. But let me just ask a few more sort of high level questions.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 8:14Dan Harris?

  First, just to make this even more appealing to people, what are the health benefits of learning how to regulate your emotions? And maybe we can even think about it in the inverse. Like, what are the health dangers of not doing this?

• 8:28Speaker 02

  Well, what does dysregulation lead to? It leads to an immune system that doesn't function well. It leads to cortisol levels that are skyrocketing in our body throughout the day. It leads to us choosing poor foods. It leads us to not engaging in a lot of physical activity in general. Lots of downside health benefits. On the upside, what my research and other people's research shows is that people who regulate better are better learners in school. They're make more sound decisions. They have healthier and higher quality relationships. They have better physical and mental health. They achieve their goals in life. And I think the big one, which seems to be the new thing that everyone wants to talk

• 9:13Speaker 02

  about, is longevity. People live longer. You're going to live a healthier, happier life if you can deal with your feelings.

• 9:20Dan Harris?

  On the longevity piece, my understanding, and you're the expert here, so I'll defer to you, obviously, on this. My understanding that the most powerful way to regulate your emotions is by having positive relationships, and those positive relationships are what help us do it. Is that your understanding?

• 9:36Speaker 02

  It's part of my understanding. We have never put all the variables into the equation to look at predictive wise. A lot of the studies, you know, my friend Bob Waldinger is the big person to do the Good Life Study. And yes, relationships do matter. But I find in my research that something I wrote about earlier in my career seems to have the same predictive power, which is what I call permission to feel. That when we give ourselves just the permission to be true, full feeling selves, that we don't judge our feelings, that we're comfortable being with them, that alone is a master emotion regulation strategy.

• 10:16Dan Harris?

  Hmm. I'm thinking about my longtime meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein. He teaches in these pithy phrases, and one of them is... It's okay, by which he does not mean everything's fine. He means it's okay to feel what you're feeling right now. Like, you might not think you can withstand it, but you can just let it all in.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. That's a big project that I'm working on right now, which is the follow-up research to that concept of permission to feel. Got about 70 studies that I run across the world on it, actually. It's a powerful concept to give oneself permission to feel, to live without judgment of the emotional experiences you're having. So much of our dysregulation comes from the judgment around the feeling. Ah, I'm anxious, that makes me weak, you know, I can't feel this way. It's the feelings we have about our feelings. You know, we call that meta emotions, but, you know, the shame I had as a kid that I was being bullied, so I was feeling fearful, you know, with the bullying, but my shame around being a boy who was bullied and had a father who was a tough guy is what really got in the way of dealing with it.

• 11:22Dan Harris?

  What you were just saying right there, that's your story. That wasn't just a, for example.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's personal. Yeah.

• 11:30Dan Harris?

  So that sounds pretty searing. Bullying, I think, is always, most of the time, quite a searing experience. And then when you add that into the context of your family configuration, is that what drove you into this work?

• 11:45Speaker 02

  It is, although if we want to go deeper into the personal, unfortunately, I also was abused sexually by my parents' best friend for five years of my childhood.

• 11:55Dan Harris?

  Oh, my God.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  And so if you couple having five years of sexual abuse from five to 10 years old and not disclosing it with hating school and having two parents who loved me, but one was angry, couldn't deal with his life, and the other one was anxious and couldn't deal with her life, where do you go with your feelings? You eat your feelings, you know, you scream your feelings, you cry your feelings, you do mischievous things. The reason why I wrote my first book called Permission to Feel was because I had one person in my life, who was my Uncle Marvin, who was an amazing human being. He was a schoolteacher by day and a bandleader by night. And he happened to be running a curriculum to teach kids about feelings in the 1980s.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  And he happened to use me as a guinea pig. So we sat in my backyard when I was around 11, and he'd say, hey, Mark, how are you feeling?

• 12:50Speaker 02

  I would say things like sad, angry. He was the only person who ever asked me how I felt. But on top of that, when I shared what I was really feeling, he didn't say, you know, toughen up kiddo, or I can't handle this because I'm going to have a breakdown because of your feelings, which was what would have happened at home. He's like, let's get through this together. He didn't fix me. He didn't solve my emotional difficulties. He just was present. And that's what we're hoping for, or what I'm hoping for, for everybody. Because my research shows only about one third of us have an Uncle Marvin. One third of us. And only about 15% of us say it's our parent.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  85% of us are growing up in homes where we don't believe our own parents give us permission to feel.

• 13:38Dan Harris?

  I'm having a million thoughts as I'm listening to you talk. First of all, I'm really sorry that happened to you.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  I appreciate that. Thank you.

• 13:44Dan Harris?

  Not the Marvin part, the abuse part and the bullying. That's awful. The other thought I was having, which is, we don't have to dwell on, is just, I sometimes think about how we use language. We say to people, how you doing? How you feeling? We often say also, take care or take care of yourself. And we don't actually mean any of that. It's just rote. But it would be interesting if we, as a culture, started to mean it.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  I meant I do because I think you're correct, which is that, you know, in the workplace, especially, it's like, you know, we don't say, how are you feeling? Because that's like very intimate, right? It's like, how you doing? And then before the person even responds, you're already down, you know, the hallway. We don't really stay with people's feelings. And I have research to show why that's the case, too. A lot of it is people don't think it's worthy. It's like time, like really? Like, I'm going to waste my time with this? The second is fear, which is that people are afraid about what they're going to hear. Like, if I asked you, hey, Dan, how you feeling today? By the way, how are you feeling today?

• 14:46Dan Harris?

  But that's a whole other discussion. Let's blow past that. We can come back to it if you want, but we.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  All right.

• 14:53Dan Harris?

  I would answer, and I will answer, but I don't want to derail the point you're trying to make.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  I appreciate that. But the point of me asking you is that if you were to say, like, most people say, "Good, fine, okay," you know, it's like, great, me too. And then we move on. But if you said, "You know, Mark, I'm actually feeling this odd mixture of anxiety and frustration and overwhelm. I'm excited to be with you on the podcast, but I got so much going on in my life." What do most people do when they hear that? They're like, "Ugh, oh, gosh, really? This is why I didn't ask you how you felt from the beginning. I don't want to have to deal with this." And that leads to the third issue. Well, for parents, by the way, it's a lot of fear. I ask my kid how they're really feeling, and they tell me the truth. Yikes. What am I going to do with that? And the big one is skill, which is why I wrote this book, because people don't have the skills.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  They don't know what to do with that information. They get overwhelmed by other people's emotions, and they don't know how to work with them, to support them.

• 15:47Dan Harris?

  You're one of these guests, this happens every once in a while, where your answers beg a bunch of questions. I'm trying to write them all down and then figure out what order I should ask them in. But you said something right there at the end that kind of begs a question. I think a lot of people don't know, what do you do if you actually inquire of someone how they're feeling? And they say something that has some moment to it, some power, it's momentous in some way. How do we handle that? How can we develop that skill? Because it's a massive public service to be Marvin for other people.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  That's my vision. And again, I think people have this weird conception that being the Uncle Marvin means that you're like indulging. You know, this is the pushback we get now for the work that we do in schools. It's all, "You're indulging kids' emotions." I'm like, absolutely not. This is emotional intelligence, not emotional indulgence. We're helping people develop the skills they need, because if a kid, for example, comes into my classroom as a teacher, who's just gotten bullied on the bus and feeling fearful and hatred and anger. They're gonna be ruminating about that pretty much all day long and figuring out a way to get home safely. They're not gonna be good learners. So it's my obligation to help kids, A, be safe, and B, have the vocabulary and the strategies to deal with their feelings.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  So I think the first step is, let's say you said, "I'm anxious and overwhelmed." They say, "Gosh, Dan, yeah, it's a lot of feelings today. What's going on?" Just be curious. What's wrong with being curious about someone's experience? Again, what I want to share is that people are not looking for someone to fix their feelings, or even to give them necessarily specific advice. People are looking for presence and co-regulation or support. And that really should relieve people, provide some relief to people who are listening, thinking, "You know, the reason why I'm afraid to ask people how they're feeling is because, you know, I'm not sure what to do." You don't have to do that much. You've just gotta be

• 17:46Speaker 02

  there. People, actually, their resilience muscle will be built by not giving advice, by not doing problem-solving for kids especially. It's letting them be with their feelings, the ones that are uncomfortable, and help them think through the solutions to those emotions, if they're even in need of a solution. Because most emotions, right, they're ephemeral. We're not regulating all day long. We go crazy. It's the strong ones. It's the big ones that we have to deal with.

• 18:14Dan Harris?

  I just want to completely agree with you. I mean, it's something I learned late in life that you don't need to fix. In fact, fixing is annoying usually for the person who is being worked on. I often think of something Brene Brown said here on this show, actually, about her own children, and of course, this applies to grownups too. She often says to her kids, or at least did at the time we did this interview, "I can't solve the problem, but I can sit in the dark with you." And I like that, because that's what people want. We want somebody to... I learned this when I was a hospice volunteer too, like, sit there, hold somebody's hand.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  And sit in the light too. I think that we underestimate the power of co-regulation of positive emotions. The savoring of these beautiful experiences in life that we say, oh, fabulous, good, congratulations, as opposed to really being with those pleasant feelings.

• 19:06Dan Harris?

  I completely agree with you. And another little moment of wisdom is coming to mind from another past guest on the show. She didn't say it on the show. She said it in the context of a direct teaching from her to me. There's a great Dharma teacher named Spring Washam, who one of her subspecialties is teaching what are known in Buddhism as the Brahma Viharas, these four interrelated skills of, I would call them love, call them warmth or heart qualities, whatever, compassion, friendliness, equanimity, and then the skill she was talking about specifically that comes to mind when you said your thing about sitting in the light, it's called sympathetic joy or mudita, which is just the pleasure we

• 19:45Dan Harris?

  take in other people's success. This is a trainable skill through meditation where you envision people and imagine people savoring their success and you send them wishes for continued happiness and success. And it's very hard to do. That's why there's that expression every time a friend of mine succeeds, I die a little bit. But what Spring once said to me that has never gotten out of my head is, you want to be the person that other people like to call when they have good news.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Exactly. I would say that it's a skill.

• 20:21Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  And I teach this skill to kids and to others, but kids are my favorite because they're our future. Just to give an example of this, it was a fun one. When I do writing, I oftentimes go into the real world to do it, meaning I do workshops with kids or teachers or leaders and I record them and it helps me think about my work. So I'm working with this group of fourth graders and I'm asking them to differentiate the feelings of excitement and elation. Do you want to try it?

• 20:52Dan Harris?

  Verbally to distinguish them?

• 20:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:55Dan Harris?

  Excitement to me is jangly.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 20:58Dan Harris?

  And elation has a bit more stability and ballast and calm in it.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Nice. That was a beautiful way to describe them. Definitionally speaking, right, one is more anticipatory. I'm excited about going to the park. I'm excited to go on vacation. Where elation tends to be kind of afterward. You're elated, you know, when you watch the thing in sports, the goal, you get the goal and you're like this sense of joy and kind of pride coming together. So I'm teaching this to kids. And I asked them to think about, well, what are the ways that you would help a close friend prolong their feelings of elation? And it was amazing. I mean, they got into groups and they're thinking about all like, give me scenarios where this could be true. And where you would practice this and do it. And what would it look like and sound like? And how would you do it? And then we role played it.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  I mean, these kids were, would blow your mind. And what I loved about it was at the end, I usually tell these kids. Obviously, it was a letter that went home that Professor Brackett came to visit your class today. And your parents are going to probably ask, what did Mark do with you in that class on emotional intelligence today? And this one girl raises her hand. She goes, sir. I think we learned a new form of empathy. And I said, say more. She goes, well, we always talk about empathy, you know, if someone's grandma dies or their dog dies, you know, we have to show that we care. And that's obviously important. But helping people savor their pleasant feelings, that's a really important form of empathy.

• 22:33Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  My point is that you can teach this at a young age. And when they see the value of it, they're going to do it more. But I didn't learn. I mean, did you learn anything about modita or positive empathy when you were a kid?

• 22:44Dan Harris?

  No, I have to say, I had really touchy feely parents, like hippie, ex hippies. And I was raised in, as I often joke, the People's Republic of Massachusetts. And it was like, you know, Free to Be You and Me, that record that they played to kids back then. So I may have been taught it, but I wasn't paying attention.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not explicit.

• 23:02Dan Harris?

  Yeah, it should have been more explicit. Absolutely. And I agree that it's a new form or a enhanced and advanced form of empathy. I will also shout out that you said two words there that can be very practical for the rest of us. When dealing with what can feel like an emotional onslaught from other people. Say more.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Exactly. The same thing, by the way, goes for pleasant feelings.

• 23:27Dan Harris?

  Yes, yes, of course.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  That's how you engage in the modita process, right? It's like, tell me more about that goal you got. What did it feel like in your body? What was going on in your mind? I want to hear the whole story. And people love that. As a matter of fact, longitudinally speaking, when we reflect back on our childhoods, or even when we reflect back, period, and we think about the people that had the greatest impact on us, it's the people who engaged in the positive empathy that stand out, more so than the people who engage in the traditional empathy.

• 23:58Dan Harris?

  That's great. That's good to know as a father of an 11-year-old as well.

• 24:05Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Dr. Mark Brackett talks about a self-interested topspin on everything we've been discussing thus far. Why savoring positive emotions actually strengthens relationships, upregulating joy and contentment in your everyday life, and the upside of identifying what brings you well-being, and then thinking about how to get more of it.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  I'm Jake Stauk, co-founder and CEO of Serval. We built Serval to automate the IT work that slows companies down. Onboarding, password resets, access to applications, my laptop stopped working. While employees wait for help, their real work is put on hold. IT desperately wants to automate this work, and that's why they need Serval. You just tell Serval what you want to automate in plain English, and it's built. No drag-and-drop workflows, no expensive consultants. Employees get unblocked, and IT teams go from drowning in tickets to building what actually matters. With Serval, IT becomes the AI engine powering the entire company. This is a new way to run IT. We guarantee you'll automate 50% of all tickets,

• 25:19Speaker 03

  and we'll prove it to you in a free four-week pilot. Go to serval.com/tickets. That's S-E-R-V-A-L dot com slash tickets.

• 25:34Speaker 04

  Your joints help you keep doing what you love. Give them daily support with Ancient Nutrition Multi-Collagen Protein. Two scoops deliver 20 grams of collagen from 10 types, including clinically studied eggshell membrane, plus vitamin C and probiotics to support skin, hair, nails, and joint health. Visit ancientnutrition.com/protein and use code PROTEIN for $15 off. That's ancientnutrition.com code PROTEIN.

• 26:02Dan Harris?

  I just want to put a fine point on this part of the discussion. I'm always, and I don't know if this is a service that people actually need, but it's what I need as a person who is wired for selfishness. I want to put a self-interested topspin on everything we've been discussing. Sure. In my experience, if I had heard this discussion 10 years ago, even though I was already kind of interested in Buddhism and personal growth, I don't know that I would have understood why helping people savor their positive emotions or survive their negative ones would be in my interest. But I think to me, it kind of, well, there's the evidence base, which is what you referred to earlier with Bob Waldinger and his work at Harvard

• 26:46Dan Harris?

  with the Harvard Study for Adult Development, which has shown over 80-plus years that the quality of your relationships determines the length and quality of your life. So there's that. And then I can also just say from an N of one perspective, having these skills to draw people out and be with them no matter what's happening has brought my life from black and white to color. I don't do it all the time. I once heard somebody on my team say that Dan practices what he preaches about 70% of the time. So that felt pretty good, actually. It really has helped.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  You're making me think about, not just about parent-child relationships, but colleague-to-colleague relationships. You know, I work at a university where people are not so great at celebrating other people's success. I see couples all the time who feel inhibited sharing the good news they had because they feel like maybe their partner will feel like, well, I don't get the good news that you get. And so it almost is like this weird dynamic of power where I can't really share my pleasant feelings because I'm afraid that you can't handle the fact that I'm actually enjoying my life. Which is, we can do like a 17-part series. So I think where we're going, just from my own sense of staying on track,

• 28:06Speaker 02

  is that the regulation of emotion oftentimes is focused on down-regulating unpleasant feelings. And we just had a little movement here around, it's not just that. It's also about supporting other people in experiencing pleasant emotions and also up-regulating our own pleasant emotions to enjoy our lives. And that matters a lot.

• 28:29Dan Harris?

  Well, say more about that. Up-regulating our own positive emotions. Because I don't think we've really touched on that. We talked about how to get other people to savor theirs. But I think, given the negativity bias that is so hardwired into the human animal, it can be very easy to move past the pleasant things in our day, the taste of our food, the quality of a tiny fleeting little interaction with your pharmacist or somebody at the barista or whatever, or big positive things. How do we draw those out and savor them more?

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Well, first, we have to know what those things are. In our work, we have a tool we call the Mood Meter, which you may have seen before. It's this box of four colors, the yellow, the red, the blue, and the green. And we have an app now that helps people to use that more effectively. And so, yellow emotions are the high-energy, pleasant ones, the excitement, delation, the optimism, the hope. The green emotions are those of calm, content, tranquil, peaceful, relaxed, low-energy, pleasant feelings. And then we got the blue and the red, which are the unpleasant emotions, the anger and the anxiety family, and the sadness and loneliness family. So firstly, like, do you know what brings you into the yellow? Like, what actually brings you into the yellow quadrant?

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Like, what are the things that you like to do that, when you're there or doing them, you feel joy and excitement? People don't reflect on these things very much. What are the things that bring you into that green quadrant? The things that make you feel content? It's funny, I live now in the countryside of Connecticut. We moved after the pandemic to like a very rural area. I've got lots of property and hiking trails. And people always say, like, what do you love to do more? And I said, well, now that I live in the country, I love to hike. And people say, well, how often do you hike? And I'm like, I think I did two last year.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  So like, you know, it's like, I don't make the time to do the things that I know bring me pleasant feelings, because I'm busy working. So identifying those things in your life and planning them. For me, one thing that I do that I've never done before is I plan my well-being time. And so, my calendar, I may look like a severely neurotic human being, but I schedule my workouts, I schedule my hiking time, I schedule my connection time, because otherwise, I'm not going to do it.

• 30:51Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  My default is research and analysis and, you know, blah, blah, blah.

• 30:57Dan Harris?

  Yes, you're reminding me of somebody on my team. She didn't give me permission to name her, so I won't name her. But somebody on my team who talks about her default mode being work robot, and so therefore has to put, go to the movies with a friend, or take a walk on her calendar, because otherwise, it's just the slog.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Exactly. So identifying those things that bring you joy is critically important, and scheduling them really matters. I mean, I think that's just one thing. If everybody did that every week, twice a week, or three times a week, just found those 15-minute blocks or one-hour blocks, and just schedule that, I think it would be a huge difference in people's lives.

• 31:35Dan Harris?

  Okay, let's dive more deeply into the book. You referenced your first book, Permission to Feel. The new book is called Dealing with Feeling. It's just packed with, as you say, research-backed strategies for emotion regulation, which, as we established at the top of this episode, is a very important skill. And so, number one, the first strategy you mentioned is quieting the mind. What do you recommend for doing that?

• 32:03Speaker 02

  I mean, this is your whole thing. I mean, I listen to you all the time. This is your practice, right? It's the breathing exercises, it's the mindfulness exercises, it's the meditation. Writing a book on emotion regulation that has a chapter on quieting the mind was not easy, by the way, given there are 3,750 million, you know, books on this topic. And so I wanted to be really clear in terms of, I was very curious around the nuance in the research, because, I mean, it's pretty obvious for most of us, breathing is going to deactivate our nervous system. Would you agree?

• 32:39Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I think that's unimpeachable. It's the advice every mom gives their kid. You'll take a deep breath, but it's actually, it's, there's evidence for it.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  Exactly, except it's not great when we tell people that. I've, I've learned that the hard way.

• 32:52Dan Harris?

  Fair enough.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  I mean, it really doesn't work. I'm like, everybody breathe, and like, that's a trigger mark, that's a trigger. I'm like, okay. But we do know it works, and it's the place where we can build that space to deactivate. I make sure I'm clear that I don't think breathing is sufficient. I always joke, when my mother-in-law got trapped with us during the pandemic, we'd do a lot of breathing exercises, and I'd be like, I'm even clear why she needs to go home. So, you know, yes, it does lower the temperature. It helps us to be able to access some of those cognitive strategies that I think are critically important, but it doesn't guarantee we're going to use them. Obviously, the mindfulness work is important, whether it be mindfulness exercises to be

• 33:38Speaker 02

  more present, or to, as we talked about earlier, the compassion-focused ones. And so I think- Stating the obvious that we need to do that. The problem is that nobody wants to do it. We haven't sold it well. The best example I have for that is here I am. I've got a large amount of money from a donor to do a study with my undergraduate students to put them through different forms of mindfulness training. And we were going to pay these people, and they didn't even need the money, but we paid them anyway to participate because we figured we'd get them to stick with the research. By the time the study was over, something like seventy something percent dropped out.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  So we couldn't even actually analyze the data because there was nobody left to actually study. And it was once a week, working together through the mindfulness exercise, and they had their on their own time practice. Zero percent practice on their own. The numbers were terrible. And when I interviewed the students afterwards, what do you think the number one reason why they didn't do it was?

• 34:45Dan Harris?

  Not enough time?

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Not enough time? That's only a piece of it. It's deeper than that. It's a waste of their time. But you can't be productive while you're doing mindfulness and breathing exercise.

• 35:01Dan Harris?

  Oh, I see, I see, I see, I see. To me, that seems like a problem with the pedagogy. I deal with a lot of people who have beefs with meditation. Usually, if I can bend their ear for five minutes, they're disabused of the notion that it's a waste of time because there's a ton of science to show that it's really good for you and it's actually can make you more productive and focused and all that stuff. What I've found is that people aren't doing it because they don't have enough time. And habit formation is really hard. The same thing is true with exercise or sleep hygiene or eating a healthy diet.

• 35:42Dan Harris?

  Like, there's a reason why New Year's resolutions were we bail on them by February.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  You're right, but I think this goes back to, you know, I'm a prevention scientist. And it sometimes fascinates me how unpopular prevention science is and how popular clinical research is or treatment research is. Because if we keep on treating people with anxiety disorders or depression or whatever it is, like the number of new kids or adults who fall into that system of the need for help is never going to diminish. It just makes no sense to me why we don't think, oh. My other background, by the way, is I taught martial arts for 30 years and have a strong background in eastern philosophy and Buddhism myself. And I would teach five-year-olds really complex meditations and mindfulness exercises, and they loved it.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  But I got them when they were young and they saw the connection between the breathing exercise and the mindfulness and their martial arts and their lives. And I taught them that explicitly. But now, as a professor of college students, I have kids who are 18, 19 years old. They've gone through a system where the only thing that makes you successful is playing an instrument that no one ever heard or having something in your CV that sounds so special that like, it's like, wow, you went to a country that I didn't even know existed to volunteer. There's no reinforcement for having these kinds of practices. And so we're starting late. And so we have to work in that mindset, which is before, the way I talk about it in my

• 37:14Speaker 02

  book, is like, before we can get to teaching people, whether it's mindfulness or cognitive strategies, we've got to get them to believe that all this matters. Yes. They have to have that, both that emotions are data and valuable sources of information and that it's a learnable skill. Because a lot of people think of this as something that's innate. Yes. Like, I thought this way, by the way. I mean, until I got a PhD in psychology, I just thought I was emotionally a basket case. You know, I had so much neuroses from my childhood, this complicated life, and I would have strong emotions, that's just part of who I am. And I just thought, okay, you got to live it out. And then I realized, oh, wait a minute.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  There's evidence-based strategies to regulate emotions. There's actually a science to this, there's skills you can learn. And it's harder, not impossible, to do it as we develop. You know, my big push is let's start this in preschool and teach it in a developmentally appropriate way, across development. And of course, you know, now at 56, I run a center at the university. I've got 40 employees. I've got political pushback on my work. Like I still got to regulate and I need new strategies. But I have the muscle, you know, has already gotten that exercise that it needs to try a new technique.

• 38:37Dan Harris?

  Well, I agree with you about teaching them while they're young. I totally agree with you about that. And I will say that the people listening to this show want to buy what you're selling. So this is a hospitable environment.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  The good news, it's never too early, it's never too late. The areas of our brain responsible for learning these skills are with us until we're in our 90s. I got a letter from a 90-year-old man just a while back thanking me for teaching him this stuff. He said, "I only wish I learned it earlier, but you're making the last years of my life better." So I promise everyone, this is something you can learn today and make a difference. So the breathing and mindfulness work that we discussed, I have my favorites. And I think that's part of the work is that, I can't remember, a Zen background. I learned Vipassana and other forms of meditation and mindfulness. But the one that stuck with me the most was the work from Thich Nhat Hanh. And I just related to him as a human.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  I liked the way he thought about the world. And so I like his mindfulness practices and they work for me. Been practicing them now for 40 years. I can tell you that I don't need 15, I need like two or three different ones for different purposes. And it really does its work for me.

• 39:51Dan Harris?

  Okay, so strategy number one, quieting the mind. Strategy number two is about redirecting your thoughts or cognitive strategies.

• 40:01Dan Harris?

  What should we know about that?

• 40:03Speaker 02

  This goes back to your point about the negativity bias. We really have to fight that. And because, again, we're not taught from a young age to sit through, you know, the way people are talking to us. For me, this is a big one because I grew up with very low self-esteem. Hated myself. I was too Jewish. I was too chubby. My nose was too big. I was too feminine. The world had a lot to say about who I was. And nobody really helped me sit through that and say, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, wait a minute. Who are you to define my reality for me? That's called gaslighting, by the way. And like, I don't accept that. I do think that most of our negative talk comes from gaslighting.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  I think that other people just feel they have the right to tell you who you are. And then you start believing it because no one else teaches you otherwise. And so going from that self-critic to the person who's self-compassionate is effortful. And we have to learn the strategies. That work of positive self-talk and that distant self-talk of, like, Mark, take the high road. Like, my favorite, because of my Zen meditation background, my favorite strategy for cognitive strategies is I say to myself consistently, Mark, you know, this feeling is impermanent. And to me, it's like, ah, I can breathe. Because, I don't know about you, but when bad stuff happens, little bad things like,

• 41:32Speaker 02

  you know, the flight gets canceled and you're stuck there freaking out, or whatever, you're having a really rough day, you get news that something didn't work out at work, and you just go into that ruminative state, which is my default. I take that breath, which gives me access to the cognitive strategies, and I say, hey, Mark, today's a rainy day. It's okay. Tomorrow's gonna be a sunny day. And recognizing that emotions are ephemeral. And that that's kind of the law of physics is freeing for me. And I don't think many people take the opportunity to adopt that mindset around their emotions. They get stuck in it. The biggest challenge I'm seeing today, by the way, this is with a young teenager. Like I do a lot of work in high schools and I can't tell you how many high school students

• 42:17Speaker 02

  come up to me, you know, they don't want to say this in front of their peers, but they say it privately and they say, Mark, I don't feel anxious. I am anxiety. They define their whole body and life by the emotion. And there's where the problem lies. They're not anxiety or not your emotions. Your emotions are experiences. Some of us have stronger experiences than others and sometimes they're more intense or, you know, more frequent than others. But emotions are ephemeral. And if we can adopt that mindset and recognize that when we're experiencing the strong unpleasant ones, life is going to be a lot better for us.

• 42:55Dan Harris?

  You said this was your favorite strategy for interrupting rumination. Is the name for this strategy distant self-talk?

• 43:01Speaker 02

  It is because distant self-talk is just like literally having empathy for yourself and saying, Mark, you know, this feeling is impermanent. Yes, Mark, it's true today. Mark, you know, this is like that rainy day. It feels like a thunderstorm, but tomorrow there's going to be a rainbow. So it's okay. And I have to say, like, again, I repeat this, I'm 56. I still get caught up in the rainy day is never going to go away. I even take like a double step back. Mark, last week you had that really shitty experience and you were in that same spot and the next day everything was fine. Remember that? Oh, yeah, yeah, right. Okay. It's work. Maybe I just need a lot more work than other people, but from my exposure in the world, I don't think so.

• 43:43Dan Harris?

  You should do it. Yes, yes, I completely identify with what you're describing by yourself. And just to be technical here, you added on top of distant self-talk, temporal distance.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  That's another form of it, which is that's when you say to yourself. Mark, is this really going to be something that's problematic in a week from now? Does this really matter? I do a lot of that in my relationship. I've been with my partner for 31 years and we have very different lives and different styles of being and we have different values about buying things. Part of it is like, really? You really need that? And then I have to say, Mark, you're not your partner's father. Let it go. Or I have to say something like, is this really going to impact our finances? No, let it go. So that forward looking, forward thinking strategy, very, very helpful. Reappraisal, oh my gosh, how critical is that?

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Instead of going right for the blame, can you just try to see it from a different lens or a different perspective for a minute? It may not be the right answer, but give someone the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they're trying to sabotage you. Maybe they're not intentionally late because they don't respect you. Maybe they just really hit traffic.

• 44:59Dan Harris?

  I want to talk about reappraisal in a second, but just to say on distance self-talk, which includes the kind of bonus level of temporal distancing, just want to point out to the audience that the key move that Mark was making was using his own name. That is the way to distance yourself. Dude, bro, Mark, whatever you want to call yourself. It allows you to harness this ability we all have, underdeveloped, but there anyway, to give good advice when appropriate to children, mentees, friends, whatever. You can do that to yourself.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 45:36Dan Harris?

  You can be your Uncle Marvin.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Well, by the way, I love that you just said that because a big part of my training now is because two thirds of us didn't have the Uncle Marvin. A lot of people, and my research shows that if you have the Uncle Marvin, you tend to be more successful in life. You tend to have greater life satisfaction, greater purpose and meaning, better physical health, better mental health. You actually sleep better at night. Big benefits to having grown up with that Uncle Marvin. But then two thirds of the people in the room thinking like, look at me, like, maybe that's why I'm so messed up. Look, I didn't have the Uncle Marvin. And I have to remind people, you got to look in the mirror and be your own Uncle Marvin.

• 46:12Dan Harris?

  Yes. I just think that's so important. We can, and I'm here for this to a certain extent, bemoan our life circumstances and we've all got challenging ones, some of us way more than others. And that's all true. They'll be trying to take that away from you or gaslight you. And you still have an opportunity right now to be your own supportive aunt or uncle.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  By the way, just for the research, plug a little bit of my research here that will help clarify what that means. Like it's being Uncle Marvin, like, okay, that sounds complicated. Like, what is that? My research shows three things that Uncle Morvins have. And by the way, they can be Aunt Marias, they can be grandparents, they can be coaches. This is just people that we want to be around that are emotional allies, as I call it. Three things. Nonjudgmental, good listeners who show empathy and compassion. That's it. And by the way, that shows up cross culturally. There are cultural differences in strategies that people use to regulate or how people express emotions. But in terms of people reflecting on their childhoods and thinking about the people that created the conditions

• 47:21Speaker 02

  for them to have permission to feel, I have not found cross cultural differences. People say nonjudgmental, good listeners who show empathy and compassion.

• 47:32Dan Harris?

  Write it down, people.

• 47:36Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Mark talks about some tools for breaking out of rumination, the importance of gratitude when you're in one of those envy or social comparison situations on social media, for example, and how to regulate your identity and act from your best self. He'll explain what that means.

• 47:56Dan Harris?

  Not long ago, my wife had an interior design dilemma. She's been researching a book for a while. And in order to do the research, she's been ordering a lot of books that she is then reading. But then the question became, what do I do with all these books? She didn't want to throw them away or give them away because she wants to be able to refer to them for her research. So she found a great solution via one of our sponsors today, Wayfair. Through Wayfair, she got these really beautiful translucent bookshelves. They're not even waist high. And she has lined her office with them and filled them with books. And the net effect is it looks quite beautiful. It's an elegant solution. And that is what Wayfair can do for you for many of your interior design

• 48:41Dan Harris?

  and also outside backyard furniture solutions as well. And now they have something called Wayfair Verified. Wayfair helps you create a home that stands up to real life with quality products, great value and trusted reviews. Products that you see through Wayfair Verified are hand vetted by product specialists using a 10-point quality inspection. Find pieces made for real life and get even more value with Wayfair Rewards. Join Wayfair Rewards today to get 5% back on every purchase. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's W A Y F A I R dot com.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Wayfair, every style, every home.

• 49:19Speaker 05

  When you're running a growing business, the right systems can unlock your full sales potential and make fulfilling every order effortless. Switch to ShipStation before peak season so you're prepped and ready before the rush hits. ShipStation connects Shopify, Amazon, TikTok Shop and over 200 more marketplaces with one platform that does it all. You can manage orders, sync inventory, track returns, all automatically. Everything your operation needs, all in one place. Upgrade your shipping operations to stress-proof your biggest sales days and capture every bit of potential revenue. Go to shipstation.com and use code AUDIO and get 30 days free.

• 49:51Dan Harris?

  Okay, so reappraisal.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:54Dan Harris?

  Another Josephism. Don't side with yourself.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Nice, I love that. The reappraisal piece for me, I actually love reappraisal. And I love teaching it because I think it's actually one of the most creative emotion regulation strategies there is. And I love helping kids think about it like, give me five alternative ways of thinking about that particular experience. And they love the challenge. And so this is where I think there's a beautiful intersection of emotional intelligence and creativity.

• 50:23Dan Harris?

  Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein's longtime partner in crime in the meditation world, has this rap that she goes on sometimes about how we all think certainty is gonna help. We crave certainty in a world in constant, non-negotiable flux, which is scary. We find refuge, we think, in certainty. But actually, thinking we know how things are, that they're terrible and will never change, makes us feel worse. It's that, think of five different explanations.

• 50:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:56Dan Harris?

  That's how uncertainty, actually, curiosity feels safer, actually, when you do it.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  Hundred percent agree with that. That's also the certainty, control, this is why we get anxious, because we can't make the prediction. We want to make that, we want to be clear. The pandemic, I want to be clear. When are the offices opening? I want to be clear. When am I gonna be taken off the mask? I want to be clear. All that kind of stuff. And for things that we have no control over, it's where all these strategies come into play. I remember my favorite one during the pandemic, remember that, like, it was like, maybe May? And it was like, nobody knew what the heck was happening. Everybody was freaking out. And we're spraying our groceries with Windex. I mean, it was nuts. The stock market's crashing. I mean, it was just like, you're watching the news and it's like, horrific.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  And I would just sit there thinking, I started singing songs like, "We all go down together." Because, you know, like, Mark, you're pretty selfish, thinking like, you're the only one who's suffering right now. You're actually doing pretty good. You got a good job, you have a home, little home office. Actually, life is pretty good. How about some gratitude? And I switched from all the negativity to gratitude, and it was eye-opening for me. And I actually did a study on gratitude during the time, because I was very curious how people thought about gratitude during the pandemic. And the little results of that study were that people just rely on like, they think about, I'm grateful, I have a family, I'm grateful I have food. There was no real gratitude for things like the doctors and nurses who were putting their

• 52:27Speaker 02

  lives at risk to help people, the people who had like have jobs where they're cooking for people in precarious waters, or the delivery people. And I think that oftentimes, taking a moment is another strategy, right? Of cognitive strategy of gratitude really does make a difference, as we know. Probably the strongest research is in the field of gratitude.

• 52:50Dan Harris?

  Tell me about the how of gratitude. If we want to use that as a motion regulation strategy, what's the best practice?

• 52:59Speaker 02

  It's pausing. There's multiple strategies, I mean, techniques. One can be just doing the writing exercise. One little caveat about that, though, is that people tend to overdo it. And so this is the stuff that never gets published, but I won't mention the scientists on this, but years ago, it was part of a think tank of researchers doing stuff on this. And there's a sweet spot because if you write 10 things you're grateful for every day, by the time Friday comes, you can't think of anything. And then all of a sudden, it's sort of like, you know, like, I guess I have nothing to be grateful for, and it actually backfires and your happiness goes down. It's like all things. To me, it's like the Buddhist way, the middle path. All these strategies are middle path. The breathing is the middle path, the cognitive is the middle path, eating's the middle path.

• 53:43Speaker 02

  You know, it's all kind of that way. But I think the writing of it is great, and I think just the pausing as a mindset shift. For me, I do it in the morning. I have some rituals that I do. And one of my other rituals in the morning is I say to myself, how wonderful it is that today is the first day of your rest of your life. And it's just like, all that shit that was like, oh, yesterday, that's the past. I got the whole day. I got tomorrow. And I think we could all be more forward looking in our lives, to be frank. It's like present moment with forward lookingness. One other quick side about the gratitude thing.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  I think it's a beautiful antidote to a very popular emotion these days, which is envy. I know from my research with students. They say they're stressed, but the research actually shows that the deep feeling is envy and jealousy. But they don't have the vocabulary, so they say stressed. But when you get into the nuance, it's actually all about social comparisons. Whether it's about body type or whether it's about studying for less hours and getting better grades or parents who have better connections in Wall Street or Hollywood. Everybody's like scanning the world for what's going to be better than me. Remember my formula. I don't think just doing kind of mindfulness and breathing exercises alone is sufficient.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  Because when you're in a classroom of 300 people like mine and you're looking around thinking everybody else is better than you are, you gotta switch your cognitions. If you don't shift to the way you see the world, you're gonna drown in the envy. And if you take a moment and think, wait a minute, I'm actually a student at Yale University. Wow, I got a great freaking professor. Whatever it is. But getting people to shift out and please just focus on three things that you might have gratitude for. And it just pulls them away from the rumination or the perseveration around their not worthiness or everyone else's betterness.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  And it gives them a bit more freedom.

• 55:55Dan Harris?

  So just to put a fine point on this, I think what you're saying is to the listeners, next time you find yourself in a moment of social comparison, if you can catch it, because it can be sneaky and subtle. But if you're in that moment, and it's probably gonna happen the next time you're on Instagram, if you're on Instagram or whatever social media death trap in which you find yourself.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 56:18Dan Harris?

  Try to use that as a wake up, an alarm bell, to pause for a second and think of three good things in your life to mitigate the pernicious effects of comparing yourself to other people's curated versions of their lives.

• 56:32Speaker 02

  Exactly right.

• 56:34Dan Harris?

  Okay.

• 56:36Dan Harris?

  I'm skipping around a little bit in your book.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  That's okay.

• 56:38Dan Harris?

  One of the strategies you recommend is identity regulation. What does that mean?

• 56:47Speaker 02

  Well, what I mean by that, it goes back to kind of our opening conversation about like, why is this so important? I got this idea, by the way. So one of the things I did for my own well being while writing the book was I started doing a rigorous weightlifting workout. I was always a physically active person with martial arts and other things. I taught exercise in gyms during graduate school. But, you know, you become a professor, you get a little dumpy. And if pandemic hits, you're eating too much Thai food. And I'm like, Mark, you gotta work out. You gotta get yourself in shape. So this is the positive benefits of social media. I was scrolling one night, kind of feeling disgusted, and I found this virtual trainer.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  And I decided it was a reasonable price to get me started. And I meet this person, his name is Marco, and he's interviews me. He's like, I only really want to take people who are motivated. And I'm like, wow, that's pretty intense. Anyway, we had this long conversation and he said, there's different phases to working out. The first phase is you're gonna hate it. It's like, why am I doing this? This is ridiculous, which by the way, I went through for months. I would be doing like deadlifts and I'm like, I'm 50 years old. You know, I've been with my partner for 30 years. Who cares? Like, nobody's looking at you anyway. All the negativity. I got through that. I was like, Mark, this is ridiculous. Take the high road. You know that this is what you want to do. And how all self-talk worked. Then I saw changes.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  But the conversation that was the most interesting to me was that he said, just to make the parallel, I see myself as a martial artist. I have a 50 degree black belt in a style called hopkido. If you ask me, like, do you consider martial arts an aspect of your identity? I'd say a hundred percent. I feel like I operate as a martial artist in the world around. I'm scanning the environment. You know, I feel confident in terms of protecting myself and other people. Do I feel like I have a black belt in emotional intelligence? Not so much. Do I identify? Do I see Mark Brackett as a highly regulated human? Not yet.

• 59:00Speaker 02

  And I feel like that's where people need to grow. That when we start identifying as people who got this, yes, I am the Yoda of emotion regulation. That's when our automatic habitual, unhelpful reactions to stimuli become our automatic habitual deliberate, conscious, helpful ways of dealing with our emotional lives. And that's my whole life is striving for that. I mean, for helping people to see that, to identify that way.

• 59:34Dan Harris?

  Isn't that a setup for failure? If you think you're Yoda, the next time you're a shitbag, like, it's gonna be devastating.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  Well, you're gonna be Yoda with some humility. But for me, it's actually great because I'm very easily, for whatever reason, I feel strong emotions in the world around me. And whether I'm getting a coffee and I feel like the barista's nasty, or whether I'm on line at the airport, or wherever, or people challenging me in my public speeches, or students, for example, first of all, I've got a question, but I'm not sure you're gonna know the answer. I'm thinking to myself, okay, yeah, this is gonna be a winner. I've used that as an opportunity. To me, it's like, Mark? I go into Mark the Yoda. Mark, you are the feelings master. Mark, you are the world's leading expert in emotional intelligence. Use that identity to solve this problem.

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  And by the way, it works. And it's good research to support that.

• 1:00:32Dan Harris?

  Okay, but let me press on that. What about, what does it do to your identity in those inevitable moments when you are dysregulated? And in a bad enough situation that dysregulation might last for a while?

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  It might. And that's where you have to have the humility and the courage to either have some self forgiveness or apologize to your partner.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  There's a lot of emotion regulation that goes into having the courage to say, "I'm sorry, honey." I have to do that pretty much every week. I'm terrible at this, by the way. And I just the other day, I was like, we went out for dinner with friends and I was triggered by something and we're walking home. And of course, I'm like, "Don't say it, Mark. Don't say it." Of course, I said it. And then I'm like, "Chin, why did you do that?" And then it was like a whole thing. When we got home, the next morning, I woke up and I was like, "I don't know what got to me that I needed to say that. And I'm sorry. And I'm gonna really work on not doing that again." That's the best you can do. You reflect on it and you try to move forward. I think that 90% of our divorces are because people can't regulate.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  They can't deal with their feelings in their relationship, whether it's telling someone about their discomfort or whether it's managing these moments. People just either decide that they're gonna cheat on them, they go to the gym for six hours, they compartmentalize, suppress, deny, repress, as opposed to approach. The approach takes courage. The approach takes skill. But I think the approach is what makes us healthier, happier people.

• 1:02:09Dan Harris?

  You have this kind of order of operations in this section of the book, under identity regulation.

• 1:02:16Dan Harris?

  Sense, stop, see your best self, strategize, and act.

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:20Dan Harris?

  Walk us through that.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's a technique we call the Metamoment. I cultivated this technique with a colleague of mine, whose name is Robin Stern. And we came at this from a really fun perspective. She's a clinician who was dealing with patients. She was teaching them emotion regulation strategies. They'd go home and they would not use them.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  She'll be, "We just worked on this in your couples therapy. Like, what's going on here?" I was a scientist working on research and like, teaching people this, and I got all this resistance. And so we're like, "Nobody wants to regulate." It's not just about the strategy. Because you can do the breathing exercises, you can do the cognitive exercise that we've talked about and others. But if you don't actually see that my life is going to be better, my relationships are going to be better by applying these strategies to my life, then you're probably not going to do them because it does feel good to be dysregulated. I proved myself right that evening on that walk home.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  And it does feel good to say, go blank yourself and have that extra alcoholic beverage in the moment. These strategies don't tend to do well for you long term. With that said, we realized the missing link was something we've spoken about already, which is this idea of cultivating your best self. So we get the four step process of the meta moment. Three of the steps are similar, right? The first step is you notice that something has shifted in your environment. I am triggered. I'm feeling tense in my shoulders. I have that negative thought. I want to say something mean or hurtful. And then we do that pause button where we do that breath.

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  But the critical and creative thing about the meta moment is this moment of seeing your best self. So what does that mean? Well, it's role specific, but very simply, if I were to ask you, Dan, you're a father of an 11 year old, you just said?

• 1:04:15Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  Okay. So I'm going to put you through this exercise. You didn't sign the consent form, but it's okay. Dan, in your role as a parent, your best self, or you would say this to yourself, my best self, how I want my child to see me, how I want my child to experience me, how I want my child to talk about me to their peers. What are the three qualities that you would want them to have in mind?

• 1:04:42Dan Harris?

  Well, I think number one is the Uncle Marvin role, just a safe place. I don't know that my son would have the vocabulary for this, but like a safe place to just express himself in his full range.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  So what's the trait or attribute that you would have?

• 1:04:57Dan Harris?

  How about easy to talk to?

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  Great. So you want to see yourself as a dad who's easy to talk to?

• 1:05:03Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  Give me in two more.

• 1:05:06Dan Harris?

  Fun to be around, like I'm down to do his stuff, even though I don't really want to do it. Listen to him talk about video games as long as he wants to talk. Taking to sporting events, another thing I also don't really want to do. But I play drums with him. I watch 30 Rock with him. We're working our way through that whole show.

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 1:05:23Dan Harris?

  Which has a lot of inappropriate shit in it, but whatever.

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  So easy to be around, fun.

• 1:05:28Dan Harris?

  Easy to talk to, fun to be around.

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  Okay, easy to talk to, fun to be around. Give me one more.

• 1:05:35Dan Harris?

  Aspirational figure, like I want to be like him.

• 1:05:38Speaker 02

  Say more about that.

• 1:05:39Dan Harris?

  I don't believe as a parent in a lot of direct instruction of my child because I don't believe that will work. So I try to lead and teach through osmosis or example, you know? And so I want him to feel like, yeah, that's a dude I want to be like because he has rich relationships, he has work that he really cares about, he pays attention to his marriage, he's fit, you know, to the best of his ability. And I don't mean like looking a certain way. I pay attention to my fitness. I want him to look up to me in that way.

• 1:06:15Speaker 02

  So what's a word? What's an attribute?

• 1:06:18Dan Harris?

  Role model.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's not specific enough for me. I want more specific. Is it passionate? Is it perseverant? Is it motivated? Is it?

• 1:06:31Dan Harris?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, passionate. Sure.

• 1:06:34Speaker 02

  Nice. So as a dad, I want my son to see me as someone who is.

• 1:06:40Dan Harris?

  Easy to talk to, fun, passionate.

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  Nice. So tonight, or wherever you are, if you're gonna meet your child tonight at home, you can be forward looking. I said I was a preventionist? Well, if we always are waiting for our kids to trigger us to then activate that best self, it's going to be harder. But you can be proactive about this. Can you, before you walk into your. Kitchen tonight for dinner, or whenever you're gonna see your kid next, just pause and set a goal and remind yourself, I've made a commitment that I want to be a dad who is.

• 1:07:18Dan Harris?

  Easy to talk to, fun, passionate?

• 1:07:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:21Dan Harris?

  This kind of gets into the whole idea of intention setting, which I feel can metastasize in a very positive way throughout your life. In a Buddhist sense, I wake up in the morning, and this is Buddhist language, say that, you know, my job is to be of benefit to all beings. It sounds to me, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, that you're saying that we can just be tweaking our intention or our best self and setting that as a north star in different contexts throughout the day.

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. And my best self as a husband is very different from my best self as a public speaker on stage, which is different than my best self as a colleague. And there's different attributes that come up for me. But how many of us really take the time, like I did with you, to just sit back and reflect on these things? And that's how you feel right now with your kid being 11. When they're 17 or 18, you might think of different attributes because of what's going on in both of your lives at that point. The real point of it is, like you said, it's the intentionality of it, but it's the granularity of it. Just saying I want to be a role model, it's kind of too broad. And so for me, this joke in my book,

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  when I say like, because my students call me the feelings master, is that I had to operationalize that. Like, what does that mean exactly? It means he is beautifully creative at dealing with life's curveballs. That means that when I'm in a classroom and someone throws that curveball at me, I see myself as beautifully creative at solving those big challenges. And if I can bring myself into that place, I'm just gonna be much better at managing it. And then you reflect on it. Because importantly, Dan, this is not about, you're never gonna arrive there. This is going back to your thing, well, Mark, you're gonna make mistakes and you're gonna mess up. Of course I am. Then I have to look at the barriers.

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  Then it's like, okay, so what was the reason? And I could say, say this publicly, I felt insecure about what my partner said in that dinner, and it was my issue. And so that was a nice reflection for me to have, oh, so the reason why I really, the real deep down reason why I didn't live up to my best self was that I got insecure. Oh, okay, that's interesting, Mark. Stay with that for a little bit. Let's get curious about that. So oftentimes, when we're trying to be our best selves, the things that are the barriers to that are where real, the real learning happens.

• 1:10:04Dan Harris?

  We're almost out of time, so let me ask you the two questions I ask at pretty, at the end of pretty much every interview. One is, is there something you were hoping that we would get to that we didn't?

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  We covered a lot. We weren't linear, which is fine. I like over the river and through the woods. I think we covered a lot. You know, we didn't get into some of the other strategies, but that people can read about them in terms of the biology of regulation, you know, the way how food and sleep and physical activity all are supportive of that. That's an important thing for people to know. Because a lot of people, I'm trying to be my best self, but I can't. And I just say things like, well, how much sleep did you get last night? Well, it's terrible. I'm like, well, there you go. There's the barrier. And so we need a budget. We need fuel to regulate our emotions effectively.

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  But for me, I see it as really two big things. One is the attitudinal. It's the permission to feel piece. And by the way, the one thing we didn't talk about was to give ourselves permission to feel, but to give other people permission to feel. And I want to recommend that people do this in public. Meaning, show up and let other people observe you being the nonjudgmental, good listener who's empathic and compassionate, because it has a contagion effect also.

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  So, once we can give ourselves and everyone we love, and even the people we don't love that much, permission to feel, we can lean and figure out, well, even though I give myself permission to feel, there are certain feelings that are interfering with my success, with my goals. I need strategies to deal with them. And I think importantly, that our society is so like the quick fix thing is like, I was giving this speech for, I don't know, a couple thousand actually, police officers. And like, they were very impatient with me. And they were like, dude, what's the one strategy that works? And I'm like, I'm sorry, it just doesn't work that way. They're like, I'm asking you right now, what's the one strategy? I'm like, alright, be kind to yourself. And my point in sharing that with you

• 1:12:09Speaker 02

  is that when we're regulating our emotions in real life, it's never just one strategy. It's using all the strategies that I write about. And you realize you're having a strong emotion. You take the deep breath, you walk out of the room, you gather your thoughts, you go back and you say something to try to rectify the situation, or you take a break and you go look at nature, or you go work out, or you call a friend. We need all of these strategies. They're collective. And if we can help ourselves to see where our strength areas are and where our challenge areas are and kind of cultivate the challenge areas, we're going to be, I think, happier, healthier people.

• 1:12:51Dan Harris?

  Well said. Final question, just can you remind everybody of the name of your new book, your old book, any other books, any other things you do in the world, website, social media, that we should know about?

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  So, my new book is called, Dealing with Feeling. My first book is called, Permission to Feel. I have a Dealing with Feeling podcast now, where I interview the world's experts on emotions and emotional intelligence and learn about their ways of dealing with emotions, which is fun. I'm on Instagram primarily and LinkedIn, which is my name. And my website is marcbrackett.com.

• 1:13:24Dan Harris?

  We will put links to all of those in the show notes for anybody driving or otherwise not holding a pencil. Mark, great job. Thank you very much.

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  Thank you, Dan.

• 1:13:41Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Dr. Mark Brackett. Awesome to have him on the show. Don't forget to check out my new app, 10% with Dan Harris. We've got a big meditation challenge coming up. It's coming up on March 23rd. It'll go for five days and this challenge is pegged to the release of a new Audible book that I'm putting out with my co-author, 7A Salassi. The book is called Even You Can Meditate. You can get it on Audible. If you want to join the challenge, which will be led by 7A, head on over to danharris.com to download the app. If you already a subscriber, nothing you need to do. The challenge will begin on March 23rd and there'll be plenty of notifications for you right there in the app. Last thing to say here, thank you so much to everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers

• 1:14:25Dan Harris?

  are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:14:57Speaker 05

  When you're running a growing business, the right systems can unlock your full sales potential and make fulfilling every order effortless. Switch to ShipStation before peak season so you're prepped and ready before the rush hits. ShipStation connects Shopify, Amazon, TikTok Shop, and over 200 more marketplaces with one platform that does it all. You can manage orders, sync inventory, track returns, all automatically. Everything your operation needs, all in one place. Upgrade your shipping operations to stress-proof your biggest sales days and capture every bit of potential revenue. Go to shipstation.com and use code AUDIO and get 30 days free.

• 1:15:27Speaker 06

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover, seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.