The science of emotional regulation — and how to do it better

Do you ever feel like your emotions control you instead of you controlling them? Maybe you lash out at someone after a long day at work or indulge to avoid a stressful situation. It’s called emotional dysregulation and don’t worry – we all experience it at some point. Luckily, there’s a better way of dealing with our feelings: building emotional intelligence. That may seem daunting, but Short Wave is here to guide you through everything from understanding the importance of emotions to how we can repair our relationship to them. Interested in learning more about your brain and your feelings? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. We might cover it in a future episode! Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. It includes perks like bonus episodes, early access, archive access, curated playlists and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:25Speaker 01

  You're listening to Short Wave

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  from NPR.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Hey, short wavers. Regina Barber here with an admission that sometimes I let my emotions get the best of me. But I'd like to think we've all been there, right? Like, work sucks one day, or we get into a fight with a loved one. And when those emotions rise up.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  We eat too much cake. We yell and scream at someone. We avoid the difficult person at work who's going to make our lives challenging. We suppress. We smoke cigarettes if we smoke. We drink alcohol if we drink. We doom scroll. I mean, the list goes on.

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  This is Mark Brackett. He's talking about what happens when we're emotionally dysregulated and we have trouble managing feelings and reactions.

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  I think most of us are dysregulated in some instances.

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  Mark is an emotion scientist and the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. For the past 25 years, he's been working to change people's relationship to their emotions.

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  A lot of people have mindsets that some emotions are good and some are bad. And we want to get rid of that mindset. There's no such thing as a bad emotion. Emotions are signals. They're information. They're guides.

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  And emotions have a lot of power.

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  They drive our attention, our decision-making, the quality of our relationships, our physical and our mental health, and our goal attainment.

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  In case you want to write off Mark and say, well, easier said than done, you should know that emotions haven't always been easy for him, especially when he was younger.

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  I didn't deal with my emotions very well. I had abuse in my childhood and bullying in my childhood. And I didn't have anywhere to go with my feelings. And no one taught me what to do with those feelings. And I didn't have any good role models.

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  Until his Uncle Marvin stepped in.

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  He was a middle school teacher by day and a bandleader by night.

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  Uncle Marvin was developing a curriculum to teach kids about feelings. And he tested it out with Mark when he was a teenager. Fast forward a decade or so later.

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  I was in therapy, trying to figure out what I'm going to do with my life. And I had an epiphany that I'm going to take all my conversations with my Uncle Marvin and my Uncle Marvin's curriculum and help make a program out of it. And now we have a program that has reached 10 million kids.

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  And so the Ruler program was born with a framework for using our emotions wisely, you know, sneakily building emotional intelligence, whether you're a kid or an adult.

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  So today on the show, buckle up. Your crash course to working with your emotions instead of against them is about to begin. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 4:25Speaker 01

  OK, Mark, I think something that's tripped me up that might be helpful for our listeners is just plainly talking about the difference between emotions and emotional intelligence. Like, what is it?

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  Well, emotions are a phenomenon. They're an experience. We experience emotions because of shifts in the environment or shifts in our thinking. So, for example, I live in the countryside of Connecticut now. And a while back, there was a bobcat outside my door.

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  And I just had an immediate emotional response, which was fear. And my talk in my head was, we're moving because I'm going to be dead by the bobcat. Now, of course, I'm not about bobcats. I learned a little bit about them, and I feel much safer now.

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  But they're pretty docile, right, to people?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not taking my risk. But it's an automatic response to a stimulus. I see the bobcat. My brain says, danger. I feel fear. Something happens that creates a shift in our brains. That includes thinking shifts. That shift includes chemical changes. That shift includes behavioral urges to change. That's an emotion. Now, emotional intelligence is learning how to use your emotions wisely. So when I see the bobcat, do I cry hysterically for three hours and sell my house without talking to my significant other? Probably not a good strategy. Emotional intelligence is, OK, A, what am I really feeling?

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  B, is this emotion helpful or unhelpful for achieving my goal? If it's unhelpful, what am I going to do about it? Or what's my strategy for regulating it? So the emotional intelligence piece is working with your emotions to achieve the best outcome.

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  Right, right. Because if you're scared of a bobcat once and you deal with it, that's way different for your body physically and mentally than just avoiding dealing with those emotions for a really long time, right?

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Well, when we're not regulated, a lot of the damaging chemicals, our brain is floating around in them. And that's not good for brain health. For example, when you get triggered at work by someone who makes you angry, you get increases in cortisol. And short doses of that are OK. If you're in a room with a fire, it's like, I need adrenaline. I need cortisol to get out of there. But if you're kind of triggered three hours a day at work by the same people and you're not dealing with it well, it's going to drain you. It's going to have an impact on your brain health and on your immune system. So if you have the option of getting another job, go for it. If you don't, you have to learn how to have a different relationship with that person

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  or with that trigger. And that's where the healthy strategies come into play. So we can decrease that chance of those chemicals being there by knowing how to regulate and increasing the positive chemicals, like serotonin and dopamine.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  OK, fascinating. And speaking of strategies, you've developed this Ruler method for building emotional intelligence. And Ruler is an acronym. What role does each letter play?

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  Well, Ruler's a framework, and it starts with recognizing emotions. That's the broadest level. It's like, am I pleasant? Am I unpleasant? Do I have a lot of energy? Do I feel tired and depleted?

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  That's the R in Ruler.

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  Correct. Then the U is saying, all right, well, what's happening right now? I'm feeling high-energy and pleasant. Why? Oh, because I'm having a cool conversation. That's the understanding and labeling of emotion. So R, U, and L are all about self-awareness and also social awareness. The E and the R of Ruler are expressing and regulating. And this is thinking about, all right, now, I'm feeling this way. Do I have the need to talk about it? That's expressing. And then the regulating is saying, is this emotion helping me with my goal at hand? Or is it getting in the way? If it's helping, what's my maintenance strategy? And if it's not, what's my strategy to shift the emotion to the best emotion to help me achieve my goals?

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  How do you study that skill? Like, if people have it, if it's getting better, that kind of stuff?

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  We have tools that we use to measure it. So, for example, we built a tool for emotion perception, showing different emotion states. And the test taker has to observe those facial expressions and make their best guess as to what that person would be feeling.

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  Oh, wow.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  So that's a more objective, what we call ability or performance-based test. There's vocabulary tests. So if I were to ask you, what's the definition of anger?

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  It is what covers sadness.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Well, sadness is a different emotion.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  I know. I don't know. It's frustration. It's an expression of frustration.

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  That's another emotion.

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  I don't know.

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  Again, most people don't. They don't feel bad. Frustration is when we have goals that are blocked.

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  OK.

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  Like, I can't get this to work. Anger is perceived injustice.

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  Oh, OK.

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  Yeah, it's like, wait a minute. That is not fair. You lied to me. That's anger.

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  OK.

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  And so that's a big piece of it. So we want to know, do people actually understand? And can they label emotions accurately?

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Oh, fascinating. OK. What happens when you've gone through the Ruler? Like, I recognized it. I understand why I'm feeling that way. I labeled it as frustration or disappointment. And then I expressed it in a way that I didn't want to express. So how do I regulate the guilt, the aftermath?

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Well, expressing and regulating go together.

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  OK.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  When you're frustrated, of course, you can express, like, I'm going to tell you one more time. I can't take it anymore. That's expressing.

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  Yeah.

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  It just doesn't get you very far. So you have to think, OK, so what's my communication strategy to not deny my feelings, to express my feelings, but in a way that the other person will listen? And together, we can achieve the desired outcome.

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  OK.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Part of the work is being a scientist around your own strategy use. So you have to monitor and kind of do a self-assessment. Because self-awareness doesn't come without practice.

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  And we need opportunities to check in. Am I being overly apologetic? Okay, is that working for me or not for me? Okay, not for me. All right, change the model.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like that you said you're a scientist because it makes me think of like the scientific method, right? Like, you do this experiment and then you look at the results and you're like, okay, next time.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Um, so Mark, I want to go kind of big picture now. There are some cultural norms around men in the US that, you know, men shouldn't show emotions, that they don't have feelings. So to me, it's really remarkable that you, as a man, are working in this space, creating Ruler, more recently, creating this app to do emotional check-ins. Do you feel that being a man makes a difference in your work? Like, helping normalize talking about emotions?

• 11:18Speaker 02

  I think it is important. I think we need more male role models for the value of talking about emotion. It's interesting you ask about this because I've been doing a lot of podcasts for my new book, and I've been on the male bro podcasts. And these dudes, they're not actually wanting to talk to me about their feelings. What they really are asking me is, how do they optimize emotion to achieve longevity and life success?

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  How do they win?

• 11:50Speaker 02

  Yes, and if that's the way in, I'll take it. But I'm going to let you know, by the time we get to the end, you're going to be talking about your feelings. This goes back to the mindset work, that men in particular grew up that I have to be the provider, I've got to be the tough man. But what does that do? Well, let's look at the suicide rates. They're significantly higher for men than for women. Let's look at alcoholism. Let's look at other things that are the unhelpful ways of dealing with emotion. And you see a lot more men experiencing those things than women. And the truth is, whether it's a gay couple or a straight couple,

• 12:33Speaker 02

  people, I think, want a partner with whom they can be their true selves. And if you have a partner who can't deal with emotion, then you really can't have an authentic relationship. Because we need people in our lives that are, as I call it, emotion allies, that can be there with us and for us to help us work through the difficult situations. And there are going to be good days and difficult days. So I'm in a relationship for 32 years, and there are days I'm like, Mark, you're the director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence? Okay, well, who cares? I'm going for the jugular tonight. And then, of course, I wake up the next morning thinking like, really, Mark, was that really necessary? So we're going to make mistakes. And as I say, we have to give ourselves permission to feel,

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  and we have to give ourselves permission to fail and repair, too.

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  Because if we weren't flawed, we wouldn't be human.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Exactly. And we can make fewer mistakes. That's a good call.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Mark, thank you so much for talking with us today about emotions.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend. It really helps our show out, and it might help your emotional regulation, or your friends. This episode was produced by Arudh Nair. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineer was Patrick Murray. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you so much for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

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