How to Manage Your Emotions, Solved

Welcome back, everybody, to The Solved Podcast, the last podcast that you will ever need. Now, if you're new here, my name is Mark Manson. I'm 3-time number 1 New York Times bestselling author. And with me is Drew Birnie, a failed neuroscience PhD, a promising young academic until I came along and ruined his life. The premise of the show is that we dive deeper, we get more thorough, we give better advice than any other podcast out there. See, there's too much of the same shit going on in the personal development space. There's the same guest showing up on the same shows saying the same things, and half of the stuff contradicts each other. So our goal here at Solved is to take a single topic, go absurdly deep with it, find out everything that is worth knowing about it, and then consolidating it into a single episode that is completely comprehensive and is ideally the last podcast you will ever need to listen to on the topic. Now, the way this works out is that generally the first half of the episode or so is full of all the information. It's all the background research, the history, the culture, the different ideas that you need to be aware of to truly understand whatever we're talking about. The back half of the episode is about actionable items, takeaways, practical advice that you can take and implement into your life today. And then, of course, Drew and I finish with our own personal takeaways and things that have impacted us as we've worked through the episode. Now, I understand that this episode is a lot. It's very long, it's very thorough. There's a lot of advice. And so there is a free downloadable PDF guide that goes along with the episode. It's over 100 pages. It has all of our citations and references. It has all of the summaries and takeaways of everything that we're talking about here. You can go to solvedpodcast.com/emotions and get that free PDF for this episode and follow along. And that brings us to the topic of today's episode, Drew, which is emotions.

Mm.

This rabbit hole went really deep.

Very deep. Yes.

Very deep. I'm really excited about this episode because in previous topics that we've done, generally what we find is that when you dig back through the centuries and dig into, you know, the ancient world and religions and different philosophers, you tend to find that, uh, there's been a number of people who have gotten the subject matter right hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Whereas I feel like emotions might be the first topic that I don't think anybody really got it right until recently. I really think it took modern science and the— our understanding of the brain and, and different experimentation to, like, really actually parse out what's going on inside of ourselves when we're feeling emotional. And so I'm really excited to get into that. Now, for the listeners, some of the things that we're going to learn in this episode, we're going to understand on a very deep level what emotions are, where do they come from, and why they even exist in the first place. We're gonna learn about the interplay between our emotions and our cultural environment. And so how our emotional reactions are, uh, both influenced by the people and, uh, experiences around us, but also cause a lot of the relationships and experiences around us. We'll get into how trauma affects our ability to regulate our own emotions and what we can do to heal ourselves and recover. We're gonna cover every major school of thought on emotional regulation, give an overview of all the major therapies and what their different approaches are to managing your emotions and developing healthier emotions. And then we will take the best ones with the most validated scientific evidence and kind of create an emotional toolkit, which is a concept we'll talk about later as well. We're gonna go super deep into relationships and how, in a way, you could look at human relationships as a co-regulation of each other's emotions, which is a fun concept to think about in a lot of different ways. But as a result of that co-regulation, relationships as most of us have experienced, can make our emotions much worse, but they can also make them a lot better. We will talk about how to build emotional intelligence or whether there's even such a thing in the first place. And finally, we will give you the most effective and useful practices to help you manage your emotions in your everyday life. This will give you a greater sense of freedom. It'll give you a greater sense of control in your life. You'll feel more motivated, you'll feel more energetic, and of course, you'll be sexier too. And that, honestly, Drew, that's what we're all here for. It's just like, this is all just an elaborate mating dance.

That's a tall order.

Okay, okay, make us sexy, Drew. Let's go. So why don't we start let's get scientific. You're the science guy at this table. So why don't we actually dig into like, what are the biological and evolutionary and neurological explanations? Like, what the fuck are emotions? Like, what are they? Yeah, like, why do we feel things? Why do we feel so much stuff? Like, what is it here for?

Yeah, seems like a simple question, right? What are emotions? But it's actually a very difficult question to answer, very difficult definition to come up with because there's so many different levels at which you can analyze emotions. Like you just mentioned, there's a biological level, there's the evolutionary level, there's the cognitive level, there's the what you feel in any moment. There's all sorts of things. Social, cultural, all of these things. Past experiences influence, as we're going to see. So it's actually— there's no agreement among scientists, among philosophers about what the definition of an emotion is. But there's a few things that they do kind of agree on, and we can come up with a functional definition for our purposes here.

Okay.

Okay? Bear with me here for a second, but emotions are complex psychological states that involve a combination of subjective experiences, physiological responses, and then behavioral expressions.

Okay?

Okay? That's a rapid response to significant internal or external stimuli or events that happen, and they guide our behavior decision-making, as you've already pointed out, and also our social interactions, okay? So that's a lot here, but there's kind of 4 components components that I think scientists, uh, and even philosophers too point to when they're trying to come up with these definitions of emotions. One, there's a subjective side to emotions, right? The subjective feelings that you have when you have an emotional experience. The physiological side. So you might have a tightness in your chest or a warm feeling coming over you or an anxiety that tingles throughout your limbs or something like that, right? Cognitive interpretations too. So while all these things are going on, then your brain is like, okay, I feel this certain tightness in my chest or warmth going through me, whatever it is, what does that mean? So we have this cognitive appraisal going on. And then ultimately what emotions do is they motivate behavior, right? So those are kind of the four components of it. Subjective feelings, physiological responses, the cognitions and cognitive interpretations we have, and then the outward behavior that it ultimately motivates, okay? You can understand emotions at any one of those levels. There's different areas of science that, that get at each one of those levels too, as we'll see. And we're gonna— what we're gonna try to do is try to put that all together in one definition of emotions that's useful for us today. Okay, does that make sense?

Sounds good to me.

Okay, before we do that though too, we need to differentiate a little bit between some terms here. Okay, so emotions are different than what scientists call feelings, affect, and mood. There's— these are different things. Okay. So the emotion part, what I just went over, is kind of a coordinated system response, right? It's a whole body, whole mind response to things. But you have feelings too. Feelings from a scientific perspective anyway are kind of like the internal experiences you have and the vibe that's going on. It could be that tightness in your chest or just like the overall kind of feeling is, but it's not necessarily an emotion. You have a mood, which is longer lasting state. You know, you're in a bad mood or you're in a good mood for the whole day or part of a day or an hour or whatever it is. It's longer lasting and there's usually no, kind of like there's not an internal or external stimulus that happened, it's just happening, right? And then you have what they call affect, which is kind of the broader, broader, general encompassing experience of all of kind of your emotion and feeling and mood that you have.

It's the vibe.

Kind of like the vibe, yeah.

For the Gen Zers, it's the vibe.

It's the vibe, yeah.

And then for the boomers, it's the energy.

It's the energy.

It's the energy in the room.

What's it for the millennials then? I don't know. We're too cynical to have a word. Oh, okay, yeah. An important thing though about emotions too is that, like you said, they're based on experiences, they're based on our physiology, they're based on culture. That produces just this wide, wide array of outcomes and behaviors that we do based on our emotions, right? And it's very personal for each one of us. All of us handle our emotions differently, we express them differently, they come up in different situations. You know, if we go through, you and I both go through a breakup, one of us might like just indulge in ice cream where the other one might go and powerlift, right? That's an emotional response that we have. Okay, that's all based in emotion. And it colors our lives, right? It comes to the variety of our life and that's where it all comes.

Like I remember back when I used to coach, I used to notice that some people would get very angry, you know? Like that was kind of the default response to stress in their life or disappointment. And some people would get very sad. And it was just like, I almost feel like a lot of us have kind of a default negative emotion that we go to. You know, some people feel guilty, some people feel, you know, hopeless, right? It's just like, it's almost like we have different weightings in our brain for like different emotions that we're susceptible to.

Right, right. Yeah, and we're gonna get into why that is here in just a little bit. But I mean, they really are, emotions are like, they're meaningful signals that shape our worldviews and, and kind of inform the way we do react to certain events in our lives. And yeah, you might be more prone to one emotional state than another, and we'll get into why some of that is for sure. But yeah, one of the big debates— and I want to get this out there right now— one of the big debates in science for a long time has been, are emotions universal? Okay, um, there's kind of— there's two camps, and there's a lot of sub-camps within them, but the two big camps within this are, yes, emotions are universal, they're hardwired into our species. They're just part of human nature to the extent that even individual emotions are like hardwired. So there's this concept called the basic emotions theory and actually goes all the way back to Darwin, but then it was elaborated by Paul Ekman in like the '60s and '70s. He came up with this theory of basic emotions that we all have these like 6 basic emotions of fear, anger, sadness, joy, disgust, and surprise. And those are hardwired into our species. All around the world. If you go to, you know, small tribes who have very little exposure to the outside world, they even experience these and stuff like that. We'll get into why they think that is too. Then there's this other idea, uh, that no, actually— and this is more recent, and, and I think the science is starting to bear this out a little bit more— that no, actually emotions are constructed. We construct our emotional experiences. There's no circuit in the brain, say, for anger. There's no circuit in the brain for joy, you know, or anything like that. It's actually our brains and bodies are constructing emotions on the fly and they're making predictions about our environment and what's going on, right? The brain's in this like black box in our heads, right? And it has to use all of this information from sensory input, from what they call interoception. So like what's going on with your organs, your blood sugar, how much have you slept, all of that. And it makes this quick prediction about, okay, this is what I think's going on, this is how we should behave. And that all happens kind of in the fly. Or on the fly, rather. Now, that seems like an academic debate. Okay, what do emotions, are they basic? Are we hardwired, evolved to feel just these 6 basic emotions and then culture kind of fine-tunes them, or are we constructing them on the fly?

I might be jumping ahead on any of this, but I feel like that actually has profound implications because if they are learned, then we can unlearn them as well, right? Like it has implications of like, if you are somebody who struggles with anger, you can train yourself out of that anger.

Yeah.

Whereas if it's baked into you, then it just becomes like, dude, you're always gonna be angry, so you might as well learn how to deal with it.

Right, right. Yeah, so this is Lisa Feldman Barrett, and we'll talk about her all throughout this episode, but she is kind of the torchbearer for this idea of constructed emotion theory. And that's her argument for sure, is that actually, no, if emotions are constructed, we actually have a lot of agency around how we construct those emotions. Whereas if they are fundamental and they are basic, then it's just something that happens to you and you just have to deal with it, like you just said. So that's, that's definitely kind of the, the debate that's going on. I'm, I lean more towards the constructed emotion side. There's, and here's the thing too, is the fact that we have the capacity to feel emotion is a biological, we've evolved that. Absolutely. Are there 6 basic emotions that everyone feels and they're the exact same across the world? I really don't think so. And we'll see that the evidence doesn't really back that up as well. If you do wanna really dive in and get nerdy on this, go read Lisa Feldman Barrett's book.

Yeah.

"How Emotions Are Made." It's a fantastic book and it's super nerdy, but it's also like really kind of interesting too. So that's kind of where we're at though. But yeah, of course there, there's a biological basis to emotions. Of course there is. Just know from the get-go, there is something you can do about this. So if you have these big feelings, you don't know what to do with them, or if you get in these emotional ruts and you're not sure about it, there's something you can do about it. It can be difficult, sure.

Yeah.

But it is possible.

Whichever is true, you do have agency. Like, even if they're baked in, you can learn how to manage them better, how to react to them better. And if they're not baked in, if they're constructed, then you can learn how to train them out of yourself to a certain extent.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

So you want to get into some of these details, like—

Let's do it.

The neuroscience, the brain. What's the brain doing?

Talk nerdy to me, Drew. Talk nerdy. Okay.

I don't want to get too bogged down in this, but again, And again, if you do wanna see some of these details, go to our guide that we have put together for this. There's a little bit more detail on this. Go to solvepodcast.com/emotions and you can download that. We'll go over some of the neuroscience behind it, but again, I don't want to get too in the weeds with it. I just wanna give you a flavor of what we kind of know right now and what the implications are of that, okay? There's this kind of outdated idea that you have like some emotional center in your brain. Like say you have a, module in your brain for anger or module in your brain for happiness or whatever it is. That is not how it works at all. Not only that, but it's even like brain regions, like let's say the amygdala, okay? If you know even a little bit about neuroscience, you've heard of the amygdala before. It's this tiny little structure. There's actually two on either side of your brain in the middle, deep inside your brain. And supposedly it's supposed to be like the fear center, right? Or like the anger center or whatever it is. Like negative emotion goes through there. That's not actually accurate. Um, more and more, as more and more research came out, it was pretty clear to neuroscientists that actually what the amygdala does is just notice novel stimuli. That's most likely what it does. Okay, um, it's an ancient part of your brain, sure, um, but it's not like it's just firing when you should be angry or just firing when something—

I always heard it was the fight or flight response.

Okay, see, this is, this is what the problem is, that, you know, if you've ever seen a brain scan You know, and it's saying, oh, we found this area lights up, quote unquote, lights up when this happens. That is such a reductionist, like you would think looking from the brain scan, you have all of this gray area and then there's like big bright yellow area and that's all that's going on. Your brain is constantly firing. All the neurons in your brain are constantly firing all the time. They're always at work. All parts of your brain are always working together.

This is a nice moment to dispel that myth that you're only using 10% of your brain at any given moment, which is bullshit.

Categorically false. Yes. But I mean, there are regions that we know of that do participate in emotional experiences, the amygdala being one of them. You have this thing in your brain called the insula, which kind of connects your bodily sensations to the emotions you're having and kind of tries to interpret those, it seems like. Your prefrontal cortex, that's the thinking part. Again, we go back to the cognition that we were talking about, cognitive appraisal. You feel something going on, you're making an assessment of what's—

The thinking brain.

The thinking brain part, right? Other parts to your, your hippocampus for memories. They bring in emotional memories. All these parts, sure, sure, they're acting, but really what neuroscientists have figured out is it's more of a network, okay, of different areas of your brain that produce emotional experiences, emotional appraisals. All the things that we think of an emotion are usually different parts of your brain, are different networks of your brain scaling up or scaling down whenever they need to. Okay, um, you have, for example, the salience network, and this is kind of like a network of brain regions that includes the insula and the amygdala and other parts that are like, okay, they're telling you pay attention to this emotionally significant thing. Okay, uh, the default mode network, that's, that, that's active when you're thinking about yourself or daydreaming or anything like that. That's kind of a cognitive appraisal part. What does this emotion mean? It's networks though. It's not just one part of your brain lighting up. And making you angry or making you happy or whatever it is, okay? So just to dispel some of those myths, that's kind of what I wanted to hopefully clear up right there. What we're finding actually is that, like with Lisa Feldman Barrett's constructed view, your brain is a prediction machine, okay? It works as kind of a statistic. It's like a statistician basically. It works on probabilities. Again, it's this, it's in this black box. Your brain can't see or touch or smell or feel anything. So it's relying on its sensory input. It's relying on things like what they, again, what they call interoception. So your blood sugar, how much you've slept.

Yeah.

Your heart rate, all of that. It's taking all of that information and it's making a prediction about how you should act in a given situation. So again, that could be influenced by your past experiences. It could be influenced by what you, have you ate yet today or not? Your blood sugar, right? It can be influenced by all of those. Your brain says, okay, we've been in this situation before or a situation like it. This is what we did before. This is how we should act now.

Yeah.

That's essentially, instead of it being like, oh, I see a snake and I should be afraid. There's a snake circuit in your brain that makes you afraid. That's just, that's not how it works.

Yeah.

Okay. So when people, when you think of this and you're like, my brain is making me do this, well, it's yes, yes, it is making you do this, but it's not like this was one little part in your brain.

Like, yeah.

Firing up.

I love this model for a few reasons. One is I think it just makes sense because, you know, in psychology we often run into the problem of like everything kind of interacts with everything, right? Yeah, right. And the way you just described it, right, it's like emotion is part feedback, part prediction of taking all the information about your physical body, about your physical environment, about your social environment, about your conception of yourself.

Yes.

Like all of those things kind of get factored in and then the emotions are kind of emergent out of those, all that stimuli, right? And it's like, and the emotions are ultimately adaptive to ideally best prepare you for whatever your brain thinks is coming. Like that just feels very logical to me. The other reason I like this, and it was interesting when I was reading Feldman Barrett's work years ago, I had this little aha moment when I was reading it. It was like, it suddenly made acting make sense to me. Where it's like, because I always wondered, I was like, how do actors make themselves cry? And at the time, when I found her stuff, I was working with Will Smith and I would hang out with him. I would watch him shoot a scene and then he'd come off set and he'd be a completely different person. And then it was time to go shoot a scene again and he'd become a completely different person on the spot. And I remember talking to him about it, like, how do you do that? And it, the prediction thing makes sense because it's like if you have a very vivid and powerful imagination, you can kind of like trick your, I guess, parts of your brain into like thinking that certain predictions are gonna come true, right? So it's, you can like imagine what an environment would be like and then the emotion emerges as a result, as like a byproduct of you imagining that particular situation or environment or self-conception. So anyway, that was a little bit of a tangent. I always found like kind of the emotional mastery of acting to be like a really fascinating case study of a lot of this stuff that we're talking about.

Yeah, absolutely. And that researchers, I mean, they've often used like actors in their research to convey different emotions. We'll get to some of the quirks around that. But what's interesting about that too is like when you see bad acting as well. Yes.

Right?

Like you're like, oh, you're not convincing me that you're you're actually feeling these emotions at all. And that's what it comes down to.

Right. And it's probably because bad actors are bad at convincing themselves.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point.

'Cause that was one of the things that really stood out about Will is that he is excellent at deluding himself about things. And he freely admits that, that that's just his whole life. He's able to just conjure up some image of something, of a fantasy or something that he could live in.

Right. He said he's done that all of his life too.

Oh yeah.

Travis Bradberry was, yeah, yeah. So fascinating. Okay, back to a little bit of the more brain stuff just to wrap it up.

More brains. More brains. More brains.

We need to talk a little bit about the neurotransmitters too. So the chemicals in your brain swirling around. Again, I think there's this misconception out there of like, oh, you know, for example, dopamine. I'm just like a dopamine fiend or something.

Dopamine's excitement and serotonin is, joy and yeah.

Right, right.

It's complicated.

Very, very complicated. These neurotransmitters for the most part are pretty diffuse throughout your body and brain. And it's not like one just like turns up all of a sudden and, you know, causes you to feel a certain way. That's not how it works either. But they do kind of, they'll modulate emotion quite a bit. Like dopamine, for example, is actually, people think of it as a pleasure chemical. It's actually kind of a seeking. You're seeking out pleasure, seeking out, reward of some kind, okay? That's what it's actually motivating you to behave in a lot of ways. Whereas like, you know, serotonin's more like the mood stabilization. You find more calm and peace and joy out of that. Then you have things like norepinephrine. That's like when you're, that's fight or flight, high arousal states. Then you have like GABA, glutamate. These are excitatory and inhibitory chemicals in your brain. The point isn't to get bogged down in these. The point is that these chemicals are present at different varying levels in different individuals and at different times too. And those can modulate your emotional experiences as well. And so just this, all of this brain talk is trying to just set the stage for there's an immense amount of variability in the brain structures that you have and the chemicals floating around your brain. The genes that turn these things on and off, there's a tremendous amount of variability that can affect your emotional experience.

Yeah.

And so just to keep that in mind, like, maybe be a little, uh, nicer to yourself sometimes when some of these things, uh, come up, because you might have a different wiring or a different set of, uh, chemicals that are acting on your, on your brain at any given time. So yeah, I don't want to get too bogged down in the brain science, but that's kind of a quick overview. Again, check out the guide if you want nerd out on it a little bit more. But that's, yeah.

I feel like the neurotransmitter stuff is particularly relevant when you think about addiction and compulsion. Yes, very much so. If you think about something like alcohol addiction or cocaine addiction, opioid addiction, one way to look at it is that you have a very emotionally dysregulated individual, whether that's from a history of trauma whether that's from genetic issues, which we'll talk about later, whether that's from like a very low evaluation of self or you're just in a super fucked up environment that there's a lot of danger and stress and disorder and that those substances are kind of ways to bootstrap positive emotions into yourself in, in either a situation or environment or in a body that you're not well-suited to generate those positive emotions yourself.

Right. Yeah, 100%. And that kind of gets us into the genes and environment discussion that we could have about this actually too. And, you know, look, it's 2025. If you don't know that it's not nature or nurture, it's both.

Spoiler alert.

Wait the fuck up. That's where we're going with this.

Okay. Right.

But how that interaction, how that plays out, like in something like addiction or any other kind of behavior that we have studied, there's, it's a combination between your genes and your environment. Okay. So your genetics, there's good news and bad news, right? Like, so if you're, if one or both of your parents were miserable people or, you know, highly anxious or any of these things, well, you're probably gonna be, tend towards more misery and anxiety as well. If they're happier, same type of thing. Maybe you're gonna be a little bit happier and more joyous throughout your life. It's, you know, there is a component to like similar to your eye color or hair color or whatever. There's a heritability to your emotional life.

Sorry, I wanna jump in really quick here because this is a little pet topic of mine that comes up a lot. Like, and I think the reason this comes up is because in psychology and self-help, like, it is the over-analysis of your parents and their parenting in your childhood. Like, it, it, I find it's a rabbit hole that people kind of get stuck in after a while. That's not to say that like your childhood and your parents' parenting doesn't matter. It does. But there's a whole wealth of fascinating research on twins that were separated at birth. And it's like absolutely mind-blowing stuff if you get into it. There's, there's a great book by a woman named Judith Harris called No Two Alike, and it's just this, like, incredible summary of decades of twin research. And basically, like, one of the major conclusions that it comes to, all this research comes to, is that, like, a very large percentage, probably a majority of the things that people say, like, oh, my dad was always angry and that's where I learned to be angry, it's like, no, no, you didn't learn to be angry from your angry dad. It's Your dad has a genetic predisposition towards anger and you have 50% of his genes, motherfucker. So like nobody taught you anything. You just were born with the same, with the same deck of cards inside of you, right? So I think a lot of parents have weathered— and again, disclaimer, I know there's shitty parents out there. I know there's trauma and abuse and all these like awful things that happened. But like, I think a lot of kind of just normal parenting has gotten, uh, dragged through the mud, uh, over, over the last few generations because of these narratives of like, you know, well, my mom was anxious all the time and now I'm anxious all the time, and it's like she made me as neurotic as I— well, yeah, she did, but it's not because she like treated you bad or forced you to do anything. It's, it's just like she's genetically predisposed to anxiety, so You are too, right?

Right. Yeah. The environment does play a role, like you said. Absolutely. And they've shown this all the way from studies in rats, monkeys, and studies all the way up into humans. There's, there's a gene-environment interaction. Yes, it's both.

It is both. So it's, and it is, it's close to 50/50, but it's, it's like, I just want to be clear on this because I think people, the nature-nurture question is, I think almost everybody understands it is both. But I think most people who, when they say both, they're thinking 80/20 in this direction or 80/20 in that direction. And it's like, no, it is like 50/50, 55/45, like depending on what you're measuring, it's pretty much always in that range. So it is very significant in both directions.

Right, yeah. Yeah, I mean, for example, there were these early studies, I think it was probably in the '90s, something like that, researcher named Michael Meaney did this study on rats, right? He had, uh, he had these rat mothers. Some of them were really good mothers, some of them were bad mothers.

Deadbeat rat mothers, right?

Versus the—

that'd be a good subtitle for this episode: Deadbeat Rat Moms. Solve Your Emotions, Deadbeat Rat Mom Edition.

Rat Mom, that's an— that's a hell of a—

that's a bad name.

Yeah, that's a bad name.

Yeah, Deadbeat rat mom. Uh, so what were we talking about?

These deadbeat rat moms.

The deadbeat rat mom. Yeah.

So he would time it so, uh, they would have, uh, litters on the same days, right? And then what he would do is take these litters and he'd swap them. Okay. So the deadbeat rat mom's litter would go to the good mom and the good mom would go to the deadbeat rat mom. Okay. So they have these litters and they would see, um, how they would do all these tests when these, these rats grew up and stuff like that. So the, the deadbeat rat mom kids, if they went over to the good mom, they actually had better stress reactivity and everything. So there was this environmental component that was protective of their, their emotional regulation. Yeah, what we would call emotion in any way in rats, right? And then the opposite was true too. If you sent these, um, uh, the, the pups, the rat pups from the good mom to the bad mom, they kind of turned out not as great. Okay, but later studies too found out there's this what they call an epigenetic effect going on as well. So epigenetics isn't just your, your genes, it's actually all the— it's the things that turn your genes on and off. So it's a lot more complicated than just having a gene that you have this gene and that, and that's it. That gene can be turned on and off. The timing of when it can be turned on and off is, uh, that's, that's regulated by a whole host of different things. One of those is your environment. Okay, so we have this idea of epigenetics, and they've shown this too in monkeys as well. And then there's pretty strong evidence in humans. We can't quite do those same type of studies in humans, but similar to it. And what they find is that, yeah, if you have this genetic disposition from either an emotional style that seems conducive to your environment versus one that's not, um, there is a protective genetic effect. Like, your genes can actually override some bad environment sometimes. Yeah, right. Your environment can also cause things to, you can have better outcomes for your emotional experiences versus worse as well. So again, it is probably somewhere in that like 60/40 range, 50/50 range, somewhere in there. Yeah. But all of that is to say is that there are environmental things that we can manipulate and promote that will help with emotional regulation, just like any other trait that we have. But there is a genetic basis and there's genetic limits to anything that we do too. Yeah, again, it kind of goes back to like accepting that that's just part of the game. It's just part of what happens is that you have a genetic predisposition. Quit beating yourself up over it. Accept it. Figure out how to deal with it.

One way I've seen it expressed sometimes, I don't know how accurate this is, but it like, I think it's a useful heuristic, at least for me when thinking about this, is that your genetics sets the range of outcome and then your environment and experience determines where you land within that range, right? So you could be the most talented individual, but if you grow up in a slum with a horrible childhood, like, you're probably going to come in at the bottom of your genetic range in terms of outcomes. Whereas you can be maybe a below-average potential person, but if you grow up in a great environment, you're going to come in at the very top of your range. So I don't know how scientifically validated that is, but I have seen that be expressed around ideas like IQ and certain like mental health issues and stuff. So I don't, yeah.

I think it's a good way to think about it. It's a good way to conceptualize that relationship. And I think, I mean, think about it this way. You said, you know, the genetics set the range. Like genetics set our physical ranges. We know that it sets the range of how tall you can be, how short you can be, whether like we don't have wings, so we can't fly, right? That's a genetic thing, right? Like, but if you're, You have the genes for walking, you have the genes for talking, but if you aren't exposed to those things at the right time, then you don't develop those skills. Just like if you, with your emotional life too, if you aren't exposed to emotion regulation strategies at the right time, then later on you're probably gonna have some issues around it. It's fixable though too. So we'll get into why that is as well. But yeah, I think that's a good way to think about it though. Yeah.

I mean, pretty much everything we're gonna land on foreshadowing a little bit where we're gonna land towards the end of this episode is that a lot of this stuff that helps you manage the emotions in your life really can be described as skills. There are things that you can learn and develop and practice and get better at. And I think like any skill, some people are very talented at them. Some of them, some people it comes very easily. And then some people it's like you have to put in a little bit more work than the random person to get to a decent level.

Yeah, and I mean, I think the takeaway though too from kind of looking at the genetic origins of emotional regulation is not to obsess over where those come from, but rather to say, okay, there's an acceptance to it. Like I said, this is what I have to deal with. How do I deal with it? So yeah, you're absolutely right. It's a skill issue. Yeah. That kind of covers some of the biological basis, except for we could talk a little bit about the evolution of emotions. I think. Where— why do we have emotions, uh, to begin with? Why is it part of our nature? Again, this kind of— this treads the line a little bit between kind of the classical basic emotions view that they're hardwired versus the more constructionist view. Nobody in either of those camps though would argue that obviously they're an evolutionary adaptation. Emotions are— they are an adaptation obviously then If it's an adaptation, it's helped us survive in the past and pass on our genes.

Yeah, I do think the evolutionary point is important for a couple reasons. One is it helps people understand that like emotions aren't destiny, like they're not static. Like if you, if you've been sad and depressed the last few years, you're not going to be sad and depressed forever, right? That sadness and depression is a, is a dysregulated adaptation to whatever's going on in your life or to certain things that have happened to you in the past, right? And the key is not to stop being sad or to stop being depressed. It's to figure out what that feedback that you're being given constantly is trying to nudge you towards. And then alter your life or your environment in such a way that that feedback is no longer getting triggered. I just find that's like a much, not only is it more realistic and scientifically true, but like it's also, I think, more hopeful. Like when people just recognize like emotions are feedback, they're not destiny, they're not just this like these things that happen to you that you can't control or adapt to. And then I think the other reason why this is important is, and I don't think we're gonna talk a ton about this, although we could, the more emotional an experience is, the more meaning we tend to attach to it. This is kind of comes back to the salience network thing. Like if you think about the, what feels like the most important moments of your life, they're generally very, very highly emotional experiences. Part of that is by design, right? Like you, one of the emotions are partially evolved in us to like point us towards meaningful things.

Yes.

Like the more meaningful something is to our survival or replication, chances are the more emotional we're gonna feel about it. But I think people often like develop kind of cosmic explanations for certain experiences in their life. And they assume that because something feels extremely meaningful, that it actually is very meaningful when it's actually, and we'll get to this in a little bit here, but a lot of that is just the narrative that we've kind of wrapped around it. And again, coming from the self-help world, like, there are a lot of kind of cosmic narratives around certain emotional experiences telling people that it's like, oh, that's, that's your— the universe telling your heart that this is your true path in life and like all this shit. And it's like, okay, like that might be a useful narrative to adopt. It also might not. And but whatever it is, it's definitely inflexible and it's inaccurate. And I tend to come from the school of thought that like generally the more, the better we understand reality, the better the rest of our life gets. So understanding that like something was very meaningful and impactful in my life, was meaningful and impactful is fine, but also understanding that like that is kind of an evolutionary adaptation to something very significant. I know it sounds like so heartless and soulless and like.

No, no, no.

But it's like, I don't know, there is something peaceful about it.

Yeah, absolutely. Like, okay, so for example, anxiety, right? A lot of us, there's a lot of anxiety.

Everybody's anxious at some point. Yeah, we're all anxious.

That's part of our DNA. It's part of our species, like we're just talking about, right? But oftentimes the way we interpret it in the modern world especially is, "Oh, this is a weakness of some kind." It's actually a survival mechanism. Absolutely. That is like, so, Yeah, cut yourself some slack here. It's like, you know, there's hundreds of thousands of generations going back that survived because of their anxiety. And that's okay, it's an adaptation. You just need to learn to work with it a little bit better and use it to like manage it and point it in the right direction.

The thing about emotions as well is that like the more you tell yourself an emotion is bad, the more you're gonna struggle with it, right? Like the more you decide that you shouldn't be anxious in your life, the more anxiety is gonna derail you anytime it pops up. So it's, you know, in "Subtle Art," I called this the backwards law, but it is like really, there's something paradoxical of like leaning into the discomfort and being accepting of whether it's anxiety or sadness or depression, like when it emerges being like, oh, okay, this is fine. This is my body trying to take care of me. This is millions of years of evolution looking out for me in this moment? How am I gonna listen to it? What needs to change in my life? What actions do I need to take to properly adapt to it instead of just resisting it and fighting it? Otherwise, you, well, we'll get into all of the maladaptive ways to deal with emotions later. But yeah, sorry, I had to get on my soapbox for a minute.

No, no, that was where I was heading with this anyway. So that's, no, that's great. Cool. Before we get into the cultural stuff, which is fascinating stuff and you're absolutely You're right, absolutely right. It changes the emotions that we, or the way we experience them a lot. And we'll get into that. Well, let's first real quick though, go over some of the way that your past life experiences.

Oh yeah.

Can shape emotions and the way you regulate your emotions for sure. Obviously, like we've already said, the constructed emotion view is that our past experiences, our culture around us, those all have like a big influence actually on how we not only like regulate our emotions, but even experience them in the first place, right? That just, so for example, trauma. Okay, that's like a big one that I think a lot of people, you know, we've heard about. It goes around a lot.

Sure.

Okay, sure. What trauma, like especially early in life, can do, there are physical changes to the brain that happen when you experience trauma early on. And for example, kids who grow up around violence or chaos or neglect, right? They often have these overreactive stress responses and that can carry into your adulthood too. And so you're very reactive to things. Things, basically because you're vigilant all the time, right? You have this hypervigilant brain at this point, and it just, it makes you very, very sensitive to anything in your environment that seems off or a little bit dangerous, or so your anxiety is, it's, again, it's a survival mechanism.

Yes.

Right? That's one big area that they know of, of your past experiences that can shape your emotions all throughout your life. Obviously therapy is a good way to handle all of that with a lot of these that we're gonna talk about that, but that's one area. In conjunction with that is kind of like economic stress and poverty as well. If you think about that, if you grew up poor, if you do have financial struggles, that takes up a lot of your brain space. And so emotional regulation is kind of beside the point at that point. When you're in survival mode, right? Emotional regulation is kind of beside the point. And so you can see why when you grow up in abject poverty, when you grow up around, or you are subjected to that even throughout your life, into adulthood, that causes you to focus more on just like basic survival needs and just stuff like that where it's not, your emotional regulation is not really top priority at that point.

But doesn't that, that causes a little bit of a downward spiral, right? Because it's like you grow up in poverty, you grow up in economic stress, you are emotionally dysregulated, which means you're less adaptive to your environment, you have worse relationships, you're unable to plan ahead, you make worse decisions, which keeps you in poverty, which keeps you stressed, which keeps you dysregulated, and it like goes on and on.

Another one that's pertinent to modern society as well is loneliness and social isolation. Yeah. Okay, so that's, um, you know, been in the kind of zeitgeist for a few years now that people are getting lonelier and lonelier. We live in more secluded areas, or more secluded living arrangements anyway, you know, even though We might live in these big cities, we're living in an apartment, we don't even know our neighbors, all of that. Humans are obviously very social animals and we need social contact, whether it's good or bad, actually can help with your emotional regulation too. Actually, there's an argument to be made that if you are dealing with difficult people, you're probably better at regulating your emotions on some level at least, right?

Well, it comes back to like, we actually co-regulate with the people around us. And so if there's nobody around you, then you're basically not, you're getting no assistance. There's almost like an emotional safety net of, you know, having a strong support network around you of people who you can co-regulate with. So it kind of catches you when shit starts to go bad in your life or you start to veer off the rails. But yeah, if you don't have those people or if you have a bunch of dysfunctional fuck-ups around you, they can make the problem worse. But we'll come back to that at the end of the episode.

We'll definitely come back to that, yeah. But you're absolutely right, there's this creation of negative emotional feedback loop when you're isolated. Because you're isolated, you think, "Oh, nobody's around, I'm worthless," or whatever it is. And then you just get into that spiral once again, yeah. Related to that as well, chronic stress. You know, we live in modern societies anyway, developed societies are usually kind of this low-grade chronic stress that we live in, and we're not really adapted to that. We're more adapted in our evolutionary past, we're more adapted to handle things in the moment, get stressed out really quick, and then you come back down and you're fine. Where we live, you know, sitting in traffic, dealing with difficult coworkers, low-grade stress, that kind of—

Are you referring to anybody specific? No. No?

No.

No stress here.

I have a great boss.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Um, but that, that's obviously going to set kind of an emotional tone that you have that, that is going to, you know, change based on your, uh, environment. But, uh, can also, you know, exposure, like stress hormones and everything like that obviously affect your brain in ways that are, uh, will change your emotions.

I mean, that, that's a huge thing. When I lived in New York, like, that's a huge thing in New York City, and I think everybody kind intuitively feels it and understands it out there. Like you feel like you're in a very slow pressure cooker.

Yeah.

You definitely like, if you don't get out of the city every 3 or 4 months, like yeah, you start snapping. Yeah. You start kind of like losing it over stupid things and losing sleep and feeling anxious all the time and you don't know why. And then, you know, suddenly you go on a quick weekend vacation out to the countryside or out in the mountains or something and you're just like, Ah.

Yeah.

What? New York, yeah.

Have you noticed that the movement out to Los Angeles where it's, you know, is it slower paced out here?

It's definitely slower paced out here, yeah.

Yeah. It's less intense for sure.

For sure. I mean, LA has its own stressors, but I would say life here in general, it's very laid back. I definitely feel more emotionally regulated here.

Yeah.

It's actually funny kind of coming back to the drugs and alcohol thing, like everybody in New York drinks.

Yeah.

Everybody parties, everybody stays up late, everybody's like always doing stuff. And I think a lot of that is just the dysregulation that happens with the ambient stress in the city. Whereas, you know, you come out here or, you know, I go like visit my parents in Texas where they live, which is pretty far outside the city, out in the boonies. Yeah, everybody's just kind of chilling out. Like, you know, life's easy and everybody's relaxed and, you know.

Yeah.

Not a whole lot of stress.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's not a surprise if you're stressed out, you're going to feel like shit. No shit, right? But let's, you know.

Breaking news, everybody.

You aren't going to hear that on this podcast.

Yeah, yeah. This is what they, this is the hard-hitting facts that our listeners come for. If you're stressed, you're gonna feel like shit.

Lastly, okay, um, family dynamics and cultural norms. We'll get more into the cultural stuff, but definitely, um, you know, family dynamics outside of even your genetics though too. This can be a huge modulator of your, um, of your emotional experiences that you have. Early experiences in your family obviously are going to shape how you, uh, deal with emotions, how you express them, how you even experience them as well. One of like the big ones is kind of like restraint versus openness. You know, when you were younger, were you encouraged to express your emotions or were you encouraged to oppress your emotions? Yeah. And so we'll get into some more of that, but that's a huge factor in your experience, in your emotional experience as an adult. It comes from a lot of those family dynamics and even the ones that are ongoing still. Yeah.

Now, as you know, like one of my favorite, probably my single favorite relationship book is called "Getting Love You Want" by Harville Hendrix.

Oh, fantastic book.

Such a good book.

Oh, so good.

And he has a wonderful term for this, which he calls it emotional maps.

Yeah.

And he says that your family draws your emotional map for you. And it's essentially, it's like telling you where to be angry, when and where to be angry, when and where to be happy, when and where to be sad, when and where to be ashamed, when and where to be anxious. And he said that if your family draws a really terrible emotional map for you, then you're gonna get to adulthood and it's gonna lead you to all the wrong places, essentially. So it's a great metaphor, it's a fantastic book. It is a relationship book, but it does talk a lot about the impact that our family and romantic relationships have on our ability to emotionally regulate everything. So highly recommended.

Absolutely. Yeah, so, okay, to kind of wrap this section up then, we talked about what emotions are. I hope you have a good idea of that. I still don't think, I don't think there's a satisfying single definition of emotions, but we just went through all the levels that you could kind of evaluate emotional experience through. The big point I want to drive home about this section though is that there's all these different factors that go into your day-to-day emotional, minute-to-minute emotional experiences even too. It's not about the willpower to overcome these emotions. It's not about suppressing the emotions or getting rid of emotions or whatever. It's really, it comes down to the skill issue again. And there's all these factors that go into it. A lot of them you don't have a ton of control over. Some of them you do. And I think throughout this whole episode, we want to tease those things apart. What do you have control over? What don't you? What do you need to just accept and be okay with versus what can you actually do something about? So that's kind of, that's what I wanted to just set up there anyway.

Cool.

Yeah.

So let's talk culture. Some of this stuff, you went really deep on this stuff.

I ham on it. Yeah.

And I found some of it to be pretty mind-blowing. So Where do you wanna start with it?

I mean, I knew, I went ham on this. I went, like, I got deep into it and it is pretty fascinating. I mean, I had an idea, you know, just from studying psychology and everything that of course culture influences emotions. Sure, right? We all know that. You would expect that. Yeah, right. Like some cultures, you know, are more emotionally expressive than others. We all kind of know that, right? I didn't realize just how deep this went though. Okay. And, you know, I think there is still some tendency to think that emotions are this kind of purely individual level. You know, we experience these things and they're very, very personal, but they're actually very, very enculturated in us. We learn these before we can even talk or tie our shoes or anything like that, right? One of the concepts that social psychologists have come up with in this realm is this idea of display rules.

Okay.

Okay. It's kind of like an emotional dress code You know, it's just like you wouldn't wear a swimsuit to a funeral, right? There's kind of a dress code.

Speak for yourself.

Well, yeah, I know. You probably, I don't know, we're in California, who knows? But that's kind of like a dress code rule. It's culture, unspoken rule, you know, that happens. Same kind of thing happens with emotions as well. And they call these display rules. So when is it appropriate to display which emotions in which scenarios? How intensely you display them. Display these emotions, or even the emotion that you display in any given situation. There's kind of these strategies that happen at the cultural level that can modify or completely change emotions too. So you have like intensification. So how intensely are you socialized to express emotions in any given situation? So there's intensification versus de-intensification. Some emotions, uh, in some cultures are more suppressed than they are in others. Then there's neutralization too. There's sometimes you're encouraged to just shut off emotion in certain situations. And then the masking, kind of replacing one emotion for another, for whether, whether it's for the sake of social harmony or status or anything like that. Okay, so there's these display rules, uh, kind of come up again and again in culture. So for example, like, uh, In some cultures, if you're angry, they encourage you to smile instead and kind of just cover up that anger, right? Or tone down your excitement to appear modest in some cultures as well. That happens quite a bit. They've actually reproduced this in the lab as well. There's this really kind of interesting study where they showed Americans and Japanese a series of emotionally charged videos, okay? And they did it under two different circumstances. Well, first they watched them just alone and they had like a hidden camera or something like that and they could observe the people watching these videos. And then they had somebody, an observer sit in there where it was very clear that somebody was watching them, right? So the Americans, when you showed them these emotionally charged videos, they would react with pretty big emotions or they would just kind of express themselves in both situations, whether somebody was watching them or not, they'd just, they're like, "Oh yeah, that's funny," or, "That's sad," or, "That's infuriating," whatever it is. What was interesting though, the Japanese participants, when they thought they were alone, they expressed a lot of emotion watching these videos. But when somebody was watching them, they tried to be, they tried to tamp it all the way down.

Interesting.

Okay, right? And so this kind of gets to display rules, kind of this big category of display rules anyway, of kind of like East-West collectivist versus individual cultures, right? Whereas usually in East Asian cultures, you have more of an emphasis on the group and the collective and social harmony. And so emotions, almost any emotion, whether it's good or bad, is kind of seen as a little bit dangerous to the social balance. Whereas, you know, in the United States, it's more—

It's all about freedom, baby. Yeah.

Express yourself, right?

I'm angry, goddammit.

The individual takes a much more center stage. In a lot of Western cultures, especially in the United States. So that's just one instance of display rules. And again, they've reproduced that in the lab, which I thought was kind of interesting, but this happens all the time. You'll see it everywhere.

I'm just thinking about, you know, 'cause the culture I know best outside of the US is Brazil. And it's funny, Brazilians have this thing where Brazilians are very extroverted. And it's a very gregarious culture. People are talking, they're very loud, they're very excitable. But it's funny, I lived down there for a long time before I realized that actually if you're not extroverted, if you're not talking a lot and you're not excited, like people think something's wrong with you.

Yeah.

They think you're like sad or depressed or something. And so it's like even if you're tired or if you're like not in the mood or if you're like worried about like thinking about something, they take it very personally if you're not being talkative.

Yeah.

And yeah, it's super fascinating.

That jives with the research as well. That's what they find is that if you don't, if you're not what they call, if you're a nonconformist, an emotional nonconformist in your society, you're usually perceived as immature or unstable, rude, inappropriate.

Yeah.

When you don't reflect back these display rules of your given society. And so like when you travel to another country, this can come up a lot. And sure, you have a ton of instances of this too. But if you ever go to another country, you usually violate some of these display rules. Display rules without even knowing it. Yeah. That's a powerful social cue for conformity. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

For sure.

So that's just kind of to lay out the beginning of it. There are these display rules that we all have in all cultures. They're taught to us from a very young age and they shape not only the way we express emotions, but the emotions that we feel as well.

I have a funny story about culturally clashing display rules.

Okay.

So in 2013, my wife and I, we were in Vietnam. We're doing like a long road trip on a motorbike through Vietnam, which was awesome, but also like totally unsafe.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so she and I were riding and we ended up on this like back, back road that like it turned into a dirt road and it was super unstable and there was like potholes everywhere and we were on this like shitty motorcycle.. And sure enough, we, we hit like a big pothole and both of us just went flying, you know, over the handlebars. Okay. And, um, and I landed on the ground and then she landed on top of me. Mm-hmm. And so I broke her fall, fortunately. Yeah. Um, she was, she was a little dinged up, but like I got this entire, the entire left side of my body basically just got scraped, like all the skin got scraped off. Mm-hmm. And so I'm like, my left arm is just covered in blood. I still have scars here from it. I was like covered in blood, just scrapes everywhere, just intense amounts of pain. And we're in the middle of rural Vietnam, like in the middle of nowhere. And so we start walking and the bike is destroyed, so like we can't drive anywhere. And so we start walking and fortunately we came across, like a van or something. And, and somehow miraculously the passenger in the van like spoke English. And so we were able to eventually get ourselves to like this tiny town that maybe had 100 people total. Yeah. Barely had like electricity, barely had indoor plumbing. And they take us to, they, the guy told us it was a clinic, but, uh, later figured out that it was like the local school and it was, I think, the only building that had like running water or anything. So. Anyway, we get in there and this woman who speaks no English starts like cleaning my wounds and it hurt so far. I mean, there was like rocks and gravel like embedded into my arm and stuff. And so she's just like picking it all out. I'm like screaming in pain because it fucking like, it hurts so bad. And I'm sitting there and I look outside and I start hearing laughter and I look outside and there's like dozens of schoolchildren watching us. And they're giggling the entire time. And I'm like, this is so fucked up. Like, every time, like, every time I scream in pain, like, laughter erupts from, from the audience, essentially. And I— but I was like, I was too upset and freaked out to kind of like be offended. But I was like, wow, that's like super fun. And even the woman who was like cleaning my arm, she's like giggling. And I'm like, what's wrong with this place? Like, what is wrong with these people? Anyway, long story short, I came to find out that in Vietnamese culture, they laugh when they're uncomfortable. It's like, it's like a, it's like a way to like hide their discomfort. Uh, which is something that we all do a little bit, but apparently there it's like very common and like socially accepted. It was an awkward, uncomfortable situation. And so everybody kept laughing when I was screaming to like diffuse the discomfort. But of course, me coming from Western culture, that's considered incredibly rude and insensitive to laugh at somebody's pain. So anyway, it was super interesting. It was really fascinating.

Yeah, yeah. In Western cultures too, expressing dissatisfaction is kind of seen, there's an authentic, kind of, that's authentic if you're expressing your dissatisfaction with something, right? Whereas in more collectivist cultures, that's a threat to the group, right? Yeah. So yeah, kind of diffusing their discomfort through laughter, that's a common one. I mean, I do it, you know, even too. But on the societal scale, you know, when you're taught that, when you're enculturated in that, yeah, that becomes a whole different animal.

It's the water you swim in, right? So you don't even realize that you do it.

Yeah.

You think it's universal, but it's actually cultural.

And that's, yeah, that's what I want to, That's what I wanna emphasize through all this cultural stuff is that that's, for me anyway, those were the biggest mind, like it was always like, oh my God, this is the water I'm swimming in and I didn't even realize it. So yeah, keep it, keep that in mind throughout all of this. Yeah. So not only do, are there the display rules, which are when and how you express your emotions, there's also your culture actually trains you to want certain feelings too. Okay. There's this theory in social psychology called affective valuation. Theory, AVT for short. And the core idea of, of AVT is the ideal versus your actual affect. Okay, so actual affect is like what you generally genuinely feel in your daily life, and then there's the ideal affect, what the, the emotions that your culture prizes, right, and, and values over other, uh, emotions, right? So like in the West, we generally have what they call high arousal positive emotions. We like excitement, we like, you know, positivity, energy drinks, you know, like all of that. That's the West, right? But in a lot more collectivist cultures, for example, again, East Asia, you have low arousal positive emotions. So serenity and calm, peace, again, harmony, social balance and harmony within the group, that's much more prized. And so those emotions get, are reinforced more depending on which culture you're in. And so you just, you will have over time, you have a propensity to gravitate towards one set of emotions over another just based on your culture like that. And you know, this manifests in like the leisure activities you do, like, you know, do like extreme sports in the United States. That's like a big thing, right? But so are like spa days and stuff like that and treating yourself, your music preferences, whether it's high energy versus low energy. Your parenting styles too. This influences all of that. The thing is, you've already kind of mentioned this a little bit, but when you're in a culture, for example, like in the United States, if they, if we value these high emotion, high arousal, positive emotional states, and you're just not like that personality-wise, that becomes a problem, right?

Yeah.

Because your personality influences how you actually feel, but your culture determines what you want to feel or determines what you should be feeling. And then you get into this like, "Oh, I don't feel that way. There must be something wrong with me." And I think we see a lot of that, especially like in the United States where it's, you know, we're supposed to be just positive all the time and look at the bright side and turn challenges into positive interpretations of whatever's going on in your life. When you don't feel that way and when you have such a mismatch, that can be, very disorienting for your daily emotional life. And then you get to, you start thinking something's wrong with you.

Yes.

And I think that's something you really have to look out for. And there's this internal friction that goes on between your actual personality and the culture around you.

Yeah. I think it also can't be understated or overstated, whatever stated it is, how much like shifting that environment can, mean, you know, like I, what you just said, I felt that when I grew up in Texas, I felt that way. Like Texas is very, it's, it's big on politeness, courtesy. And I, I'm just kind of a cynical, blunt person.

And, uh, it's— Some people would say rude.

Yeah. When I was growing up, that's what people constantly told me. They constantly told me I was rude. And I'm like, I'm just, Saying what it is. Like, how is this rude?

Everyone's thinking it, I'm just saying it.

Exactly. Like, how is this rude? But then it was interesting because when I went to school on the East Coast, where everybody is just rude, it was pretty incredible actually, like the shift, like how much better I felt. Like, I felt so much more at ease in an environment that like kind of valued the same things I valued and expressed itself in similar ways that I express myself. And I definitely relate to what you just said. Like growing up, I was like, man, what's wrong with me? Like, why do I feel this way all the time? But yeah, it's, there's a fun saying around therapy, which is like, before you get a therapist, make sure you're not surrounded by assholes. And I think there's like a more accurate way to put that. It's just like, make sure you're in the right cultural environment.

Right, right.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I mean, you know, in a place like the United States too, where there's lots of different subcultures and everything like that, I think a part of emotional maturity is kind of finding that right environment for yourself and seeking out the right environments. And we'll get a little bit more into that. Seeking out the environments that match your personality more, match what you want. I've definitely noticed like over time where I've, I'm pretty introverted for the most part. And so I try to, I just, you know, I build my life around that now. And I have the flexibility to do that. And that's great. And it's been able to, I've been able to regulate my emotions a lot better in those kind of environments. But, you know, I see this all the time where you see mismatches of people who just, they don't like people, but they're forced to be, interact with people all the time. And it's usually people who have a very different idea of cultural expression of emotions or the way you regulate emotions and interact with people. So I, but I think that's part of emotional, maturity again is finding that good fit for yourself.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, what it comes down to is what kind, along with that, what kind of emotional life are you pursuing? And is that, is it yours or is it like, has that been forced upon you? Like, are you a little bit more of a subdued kind of even maybe a little bit melancholy or, you know, depressive type person, but you're surrounded by a bunch of like super positive people who are just trying to be positive all the time and see the good side of everything, well, maybe that's not a good emotional match for you.

Yeah.

So that's just something to keep in mind, I guess, through this. Another thing we see that's very influenced by our culture too when it comes to emotions is this idea of emotional suppression. I think in the United States especially and in more individualistic cultures in general, there's this idea that suppressing your emotions is bad, right? Which you should get it out, you should express yourself and you should be authentic in your expression. What's interesting is they found some studies that in collectivist cultures, it's actually better for your mental health in some situations to suppress your emotions. So for example, there was one study done during the pandemic where they found that emotional suppression in collectivist cultures actually led to a lot more positive mental health outcomes than it did in individualistic cultures. Kind of another little instance of this that was pretty interesting though, the Utqiu Inuit culture, actually. They have this cultural norm around anger. They really try to suppress it in the group 'cause it's very, very destabilizing these small groups that are very interdependent on one another. So they don't just tell people like, okay, don't be angry. That's not what they do. They have this whole cultural, uh, kind of set of expectations around it. Like I was just saying, like, you know, choose the environment you want to be in. They actually set up their kind of social lives and even environments to just avoid situations in which people get angry with each other. And then they teach children to reinterpret frustration as more of a misunderstanding, right? And the emotion is actually shared between the people. It's not one person getting angry. It's that there's a conflict here and it's shared between people and we need to understand people better to do that. And so they teach them not just to like stifle their rage, but to reframe it as something more productive as well.

Interesting.

So there's good ways that culture can actually help you manage your emotions as well, obviously. This kind of brings us to, to one of the most fascinating things I think I found about, um, culture and emotions, which I'm calling it the paradox of emotional conformity. This just blew my mind, Mark. Okay, the— and so let's talk about emotional conformity first. Okay, so we've kind of mentioned this a little bit already, but emotional conformity is when you align your emotional experience, your expression of emotions, the, the emotions you experience, the way you talk about emotions, emotions, you align that with societal expectations. So again, in the United States, positive emotions, high arousal, and, you know, you're expected to kind of like be positive no matter what, right? That's emotional conformity, right? The paradox though is that in these individualistic cultures like the United States, like Western Europe, North America, um, people that— individuals— individualistic societies are actually more emotionally conformist than collectivist societies. That's weird. That's kind of crazy if you think about it. So what I'm saying is that in individualist societies, people in societies that emphasize the individual as the core kind of unit, social unit, you would think that, you know, there's this ideal of authenticity and authentic expression, right? And there would be more variety in emotional expressions. But actually, this is not what they find in the research, there's a recent study that they found that in these individualistic societies, people actually display a narrower range of emotions, okay? Compared to collectivist societies. And what's really interesting is that they found that in collectivist societies, the focus is more on behavior, okay? It's conformist, conforming to the behavior in that society.

Yeah, we don't care how you feel as long as you do the right thing.

Exactly. Yeah. It's beside the point how you feel. Yeah. But as long as you do the right thing in the right situation, you're good.

Whereas here it's like you can do whatever you want as long as you feel the right way.

Exactly. You wanna signal that you're doing well in your culture, right?

Yeah.

And so the way you do that in an individualist society where emotions are kind of like the currency, mm-hmm, how you feel is very much central to who you are.

It's reflective of who you are, yeah.

Right. And so you try to display all of these positive emotions and positive, all these positive emotional experiences in order to signal that, look, I'm doing fine. I'm doing great in this society. It's kind of a status thing almost that they've found.

It's almost like a certain amount of conformity is unavoidable. It's just the society picks and chooses what it's gonna conform on.

Right. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And in individualistic societies, it's these emotional states that they emphasize. And so it's not just about feeling good, it's about showing others that you're in a good place. Like I said, it's kind of a status signaling in a way.

Which makes sense because if everybody's doing their own thing, it's not clear to others whether you're doing well or not.

Right.

Right, so the only way to signal it that you're doing well is to be super happy and positive and upbeat.

And you vibe.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I saw this. So I went into the greatest grocery store chain of all time, which is Trader Joe's. Trader Joe's could be— it's like a microcosm for American emotional life, I think, if you think about it. Because all the employees there, they're like— it's funny because they emphasize positivity. All of our employees are positive. And it's like they're grocery store employees. Why do we have to do that? So I'm behind this guy, he's checking out and they're having this like conversation like, oh bro, that's awesome, bro, sweet. Oh awesome, where you go? Oh man, you're here, you're off soon. Like, and it's just going nuts. And I'm like, what the hell is going on? And then I get up there and the guy tries to do the same conversation with me and I'm just kind of in a shitty mood and I just wasn't having it.

Come on, Drew.

And I know I could tell I was like getting pressured to be a bro. I should have been like, be a bro. They were like, come on, get up here, get up here with me. Like, it's awesome. I'm working at the grocery store and I'm like, I'm just buying I'm getting groceries, I wanna go home, dude. You know? But it is, it is, it's like, that's the expectation that's been set there. And what's funny about that is, is like, oh, we have, you know, you go into Trader Joe's and they have like, everybody's wearing like a, like you were saying, something different. They have, or like they have a Hawaiian shirt on or—

It reminds me, remember in the movie Office Space? Jennifer Aniston's character works at a restaurant and like she gets, She gets like her apron, she doesn't have enough colorful pins on her apron. And so her manager like, "Fuck, chat, chat." Pieces of flair. Yeah, but she called, he's like, "You need to show up with more flair tomorrow or there's gonna be problems." And it's like just these bullshit little pins on her apron. Yeah.

Right. The point though.

I mean, it is very American. It is very American.

Yeah, like outwardly look however you want, behave however you want, But your emotional demeanor should be within this very narrow range.

It's performative positivity.

That's what it is, is performance.

I'm just, I'm thinking now because I mean, a huge part of my work is kind of trashing this performative positivity, this kind of emotional conformity. It's starting to make sense now actually, like, 'cause the countries that my books didn't do well in, are highly collectivist cultures, you know, Japan, China, whereas I think the countries it did do very well in are very highly individualistic cultures.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the freedom to express yourself, it often translates into kind of this pressure, this pressure to exhibit culturally acceptable versions of what's considered authentic. And so that authenticity becomes the new norm.

Yeah. Right?

And so now it's not that you're actually trying to be authentically expressive, it's that you're just trying to—

Fit in.

Fit in with that norm, which is quote unquote authenticity. And the paradox of it is, is that turns into conformity. It's insane to think about, but that's what they're finding.

'Cause I bet if you went to these people who are conforming, like in their sentiment, Most of them are probably not aware of it. I would say when people conform behaviorally, like they're not super aware of like what they're doing or why.

100%.

Yeah. But yeah, it's probably the same emotionally as well. Like they probably really think that they're like amped. I mean, you've, I imagine, you know, a bunch of people like this. I know a bunch of people who are like, every time you see them, you're like, how are things going?

Like, oh, they're great.

Everything's, oh, life's awesome. It's so busy. And it's like, meanwhile, they're like the dog in the burning house. They're like, this is fine. You know, like it just, Yeah. And nothing ever changes. It's just everything's awesome all the time.

Anyway. No, that 100%. When you're in a place like the United States, you ask somebody, "How's it going?" The proper response is, "Good, fine, great." Those are your options, right?

Yeah, yeah.

But I know some Norwegians, I have some Norwegian friends that I met, and you ask them, "Oh, hey, how's it going?" It's like, "Well, my back hurts and my girlfriend broke up with me. How do you think it's going?" Right? They'll I'll be a lot more blunt with you about it. And, but in, yeah, again, so that goes back to the emotional conformity. This is how I expect you to respond and you should respond that way. And if you launch into something like, oh, things are going terrible and blah, blah, blah, then people are like, whoa, dude. Like I was just, you know, being polite here. Where we think that, oh, that's politeness. But actually what it is is it's just a call for you to conform to the social expectation that you have. Pretty fascinating shit. Crazy, crazy stuff. Yeah, a lot of what this creates though too is what they call emotional labor, right? So if you aren't feeling like you wanna have a good conversation with the cashier at the grocery store, and yet you're kind of, you feel pressured to do that, like you were just saying, a lot of people aren't aware that they're doing this. So if you ever leave a situation like that and you kind of just feel exhausted, that's probably like an indication that, hey, performing some emotional labor here, right? And getting over it. But they also, they found, there was this one study where they interviewed customer service people and they interviewed them in individualistic versus more collectivist cultures. And the more performative people had to be in individualist cultures, the more burnout they experienced, the higher turnover rates and all of that. But the more conformist they had to be in collectivist cultures, during these customer service jobs where, you know, they had to deal with these difficult customers and all of that, they actually felt better about it because it's like they're contributing to the cultural norm, which is social harmony and helping other people out.

Yeah.

So that's pretty crazy too, that it even goes down to that, that level.

Interesting. Yeah.

That kind of gets us a little bit into language as well. And this is pretty fascinating. And there's a whole, whole like branch of psychology that looks at this. And we're just gonna touch on some of it here. But language obviously has a huge role in shaping our emotional lives and the way we express. Obviously, expressing your emotions verbally is one way to express your emotions. Having the words for the emotions that you need.

Yeah, I would say like conceptualizing them when you experience them.

Absolutely, absolutely. They can even though, as we'll see here in just a minute, they can even kind of help you create emotions or at least modify them in different ways. So just to give you kind of a salient example, I think, you know, a common example is the word Schadenfreude in German, right? Taking pleasure in someone else's failures or in their misfortune, I guess, right? That's a pretty common one. Most people know that. We don't have a word, a specific word for that in English. We just use Schadenfreude now. We actually just took it from the German.

I just call it joy.

You just call it joy?

I just call it joy.

Because you love it. Seeing other people suffer.

It's just, I just call it joy on a Tuesday afternoon.

Okay, well, it's, it's, I mean, it's typically towards somebody that you don't like, but if you're, yeah, there's that. The Japanese also have a word called, I think it's, I think it's ame. Is that, is that right? It's this feeling you get when you are comfortably dependent on someone else. So think of like a child and their parent. That's kind of like the feeling, but this can can happen between adults as well. And in Japanese culture, it's a desirable state to have, whereas like, you know, in more individualist cultures, we might think, oh, like, there's a positive connotation to that? That's crazy.

We would pathologize it probably.

We would pathologize it more, whereas they have a word for it and there's a positive connotation for that word. And so it's experienced more and in more positive settings in those cultures.

I've got one for you.

Saldaji.

In Portuguese, which is the pleasure of missing something or someone of like, it's kind of, it's similar to nostalgia, but it's like, there's almost like a romantic tinge to it. There's like almost this like, this like enjoyment of the lack of something that you like love or care about.

Interesting. Okay. And so, okay, that's interesting because, um, I don't feel like I've been able to process that. I know the feeling you're talking about, but I haven't been able to process that up until just like these last few years where I'm like, "Oh, I miss this person." And I kind of like, "Oh, that's kind of nice to miss them." You kind of enjoy missing them. I kind of need to miss you sometimes. Right, right. I've said that to some people. I need to miss you sometimes.

So it's funny. It's like, it's actually, you know, 'cause in English we think of missing something or somebody as like a negative experience. But in Brazilian and Portuguese culture, it's actually like a very like powerful romantic kind of like subtly positive thing.

Okay, okay, interesting.

Yeah, I have a lot of saudade for my grandmother, you know, or whatever.

Right, interesting, okay. Well, I mean, but you also have, so if you have certain words for certain emotions, you typically can experience those emotions more easily. But also if you don't have a word, for it. There's this one instance I've come across anyway, it's in Tahitian culture. So in Tahiti, they actually don't have a word for sadness. They describe it more as like a physical ailment, basically, like an illness. Like, interesting, you feel tired, or like maybe you have some pain somewhere in your body or something like that. They, they see it more as like a physical affliction than they do an emotional one. So they don't even really have a word for sadness. Or to describe that. And so I don't know, that's just interesting to me because having a specific word can enhance your recognition of an emotion, but also, or it can just completely blind you to it as well. Yeah. Not having a word.

I mean, we'll get into this later when we talk about like physiology, but it makes me wonder, you know, one of the things you and I have talked about on the previous podcast, like not episode, but like the old podcast that we used to do, is kind of the concept creep of different words. You know, it's like the definition of anxiety has expanded over the years to include more and more experiences. The definition of trauma has expanded over the years to include more and more experiences. And so it makes me wonder actually if what a lot of things that are today labeled as anxiety or depression, you know, 20, 30, 40 years ago, people would've just said like, oh, I'm just tired or I'm exhausted or I need a break or I need a vacation. Whereas like today we kind of pathologize it a little bit.

Right, yeah. And that changes our emotional experience, just like you're saying.

Yeah, exactly.

That modulates it, that emphasizes it or de-emphasizes it. Yeah, yeah. It has far-reaching consequences for that. And I think part of what you're getting at here too is going back to Lisa Feldman Barrett. She has this idea, this paper she put out about conceptual, it's called Conceptual Act Theory, where these words, they don't just label feelings, but they actually play a part in creating the feeling. The basic emotion theory, let's step back just a second here. One of the reasons, there are hundreds of studies, if not more, that kind of support it, okay? That support it in a way. The early studies and then this paradigm that they developed that was used later on throughout all of these studies was basically you would show somebody a picture of a face that was making an emotional expression of some kind. So just like you're saying, like a baby, if a baby's crying, crying and screaming while the baby's upset.

Right.

Right. What they would do, they would show them these pictures of, they'd usually get actors to do an emotion, and then they would show people these pictures and they would give them this list of emotions and say, which one is this?

Right.

Pick it out. And what they found is that, yeah, people, you know, 80-some percent of the time they would choose the same word. Like 80-some percent of the people agreed that this was what it was. And that was kind of some evidence for the basic emotion of, say, fear. Like this, you have an emotion with somebody wide-eyed and like kind of aghast, and yeah, that's fear, right? What people like Lisa Feldman Barrett found though is when you didn't give them that word, you did not give them the option, they just told them, said, "What is this emotion?" There was very little agreement actually between people when they make it up themselves, okay? So the word, the language, and giving them the word is priming them. It's giving them a social context and contextual cues about what's going on. Because it's not just the face.

Yeah.

It's the context of what's going on. She has in her book, you see this of, it's a woman, it's a very close-up shot of a woman. And it looks like she's just in agony because, well, she says, look at this woman who's in agony here. And then you flip the page over and it's actually Serena Williams after she beat her sister Venus. It's she's excited.

Yeah.

But, and then your mind flips in that instance once you've learned that and you're like, oh, okay. So it's the context around it. And language plays this huge role in the context. There's, so when they go out to these tribes and they do these basic emotion tests on them, they show 'em these different emotions, emotional faces and get them to tell them what they think it is. When you give 'em a list of words like that, and translate it into their own language, or sometimes what they had to do too is they had to explain to them what this emotion meant in their own language 'cause they didn't have a word for it, then they would all kind of conform to that. They would conform to that idea because you've primed them to think that this is what this means. And so language plays a huge, huge role in that. This gets into also the idea of emotional granularity as well. Which is if you have more precise words or words that kind of distinguish between subtle differences in emotions, you can experience these emotions differently as well. So somebody who has high emotional granularity has a lot of different emotion words that they use to describe how they're feeling versus someone who's just like, "I feel bad, I feel good, I feel angry, I feel happy." That's it, right? So language plays a huge, huge role in that. If we're able to, label something, label an emotion or label an experience around an emotion, that influences not only how we experience that emotion, but how we perceive that emotion in others as well. So yeah.

I wonder if some of that explains like why talk therapy works, you know, simply because—

Absolutely.

You are taking like this ephemeral abstract experience happening inside people's bodies in brains and forcing them to put labels around it and define it and like differentiate it from like other experiences that they've had. And there's like, I guess that like moderates the intensity of that feeling. Or like, I guess it's like when you're not able to define something internally, then you feel powerless to it. But then it's simply in the act of talking about it or writing it down, your brain is like defining it and structuring it for yourself. And then once it's defined and structured, you feel like you can handle it.

Yeah, 100%.

Yeah.

Like we'll take a kind of stereotypical therapy situation. Say you just have some ill feeling towards your parents, right? Just, you don't know really what it is. And you sit down with a therapist and you kind of work through that and you find out, oh, I actually, I resent my parents. I harbor resentment for my parents for X, Y, and Z, right? For something they did or something, the way they approached things or whatever it was. Now that gives you more of a framework to, okay, I can go in and I can handle this, or I can address that resentment itself, not just some bad feeling I have that I wanna avoid them. So yeah, I think you're right. The language around it is very important for meaning making. That's what it is. But again, that's just one component of, experiencing emotion is the meaning part, the cognitive part that we have. There's all these other contextual cues that go into it that language can influence, definitely. But yeah, I think that's a huge part of therapy is putting words to emotions. And just like with little kids too, when they're upset, we're like, "Use your words," right? That's that cliché. "Use your words," because we need to delineate what's actually going on here so we can address what's going on here, right? Again, the emotional granularity thing I think is pretty important. If you're somebody who does struggle with just even knowing how you feel, I know I definitely struggled with that for a long time. It's just like sometimes I just like, I felt, I just felt like shit. I just feel bad and I didn't know why. And I didn't, I wasn't really inquisitive about it. But if you kind of dig into that and start putting emotions, okay, do I feel anxious? Do I feel depressed? Do I feel upset? Do I feel angry? So just even like going through that and labeling how you actually feel can actually give you a lot of clarity and ability to address emotions as they come up, I think too. Yeah.

And we've actually, there's a tool for that. There's this giant wheel that we've included in the PDF guide. And it starts in the center of the wheel, it starts with kind of those 6 fundamental emotions. And then it's like, as you get out further out, it like divides all those up into like subtler and subtler and more specific sub-emotions. I know, uh, in therapy, uh, uh, sometimes they'll just— they'll hand that— either that wheel or a similar wheel and just have the person look through all of the names of emotions. There's probably like 100 of them on it, and just say like, which one of these resonates? Which one of these like feels similar, sounds similar to what you're feeling at the moment? And, you know, you go through all these different— you know, there's like despair and sadness and hopelessness and despondency and disgust. And it's like you eventually stumble upon the right word that's like, ah, that's it, that's what I'm feeling, right?

Yeah, it's kind of like a color wheel too.

Yeah, it is.

Like, like if, uh, you know, it's very pretty. So yeah, somebody—

we only put the pretty ones in the PDF guide.

It's aesthetically pleasing.

Yes, solvepodcast.com emotions for a very pretty PDF guide.

But I mean, it is like, you know, designers, uh, they can tell you the difference between, you know, the 4 types of blue that are sitting in front of them.

Exactly.

I was like, I'm just like, that's blue.

Yes.

I don't know. Like I can't distinguish between the 3, but if you have the words for it, yes, you can distinguish between these colors just like you can distinguish between all these different emotions as well. And then better address them just like a designer can better use color if they, if they have a a framework for it, basically, which language is a huge framework for emotional processing. That could get us into then what researchers call emotional complexity. Okay? I think you'll really like this. This is when you feel more than one emotion at a single time. This is fascinating stuff too, right? So especially as like Westerners who, you know, we praise, we place reason and logic and, a rationale above everything else. We want things to be very clean cut. You're feeling one thing at a time and that's it. And we wanna go through them sequentially and logically and it needs to be clean like that.

Sort them out and yeah, process them.

Anybody who's given even a modicum of attention to this knows that that's just not how emotional life works. You could be feeling two opposite emotions at the very same time, right? And this is actually culturally influenced as well. So in more collectivist cultures, there's what they call dialectical thinking, okay? Which is basically an acknowledgement, not even an acknowledgement, but an expectation that two opposing things or two different things can be true at the same time.

Yeah.

They expect that. That's just part of life. It's kind of the yin and the yang exist together, right?

Mm-hmm.

Lightness and darkness are two sides of the same coin. Whereas in more individualistic cultures, we, again, we wanna see it as more clear-cut and just one thing at a time. It's not out of the question in cultures that emphasize dialectical thinking that you can feel grateful and resentful towards your parents. Like the example I was just using. That's just to be expected. You're gonna be grateful about some things, resentful, and you're gonna feel those things at the same time. Loving, you could love someone but feel trapped in the relationship at the same time. That's probably a very common one I think a lot of people feel. Feel. That's probably a salient one people can actually wrap their heads around. Being proud of your work, but also being insecure about it. I would even argue that like the more success you have, the more insecure you get about it. And that's, again, that's kind of this weird contradiction. But in cultures that emphasize this dialectical thinking, that's just to be expected. And to me, that's a better way of kind of navigating your emotions. In a culture like the United States and other individualist cultures, you find that when you don't feel a clean emotion, you think there's something wrong there too. Or like going back to the job thing, you can be proud of your work but insecure about it. You think something's wrong there. No, that's just how it is.

Yeah, you think that you shouldn't be insecure or you think that you shouldn't feel trapped in the relationship with the person you love or you shouldn't love the person that you feel trapped by. We do seem to have a really hard time holding those two polar opposites at the same time. It was funny, I got very curious about this and I asked myself, I was like, if that's true, if say East Asian cultures are better at holding two opposing sentiments at the same time, I wonder if they deal with cognitive dissonance differently or if they're better at managing it. For those listening, in the last episode about procrastination, we talked a lot about cognitive dissonance, which is when your beliefs or expectations are contradicted by reality and the, The experience of basically believing two contradictory things are true at the same time is like untenable in most people, and they like freak out and eventually just pick one thing to go with. So I looked it up and it was fascinating. It kind of tracks to what we've been talking about. So people in East Asian cultures, they don't feel any less cognitive dissonance. They just feel cognitive dissonance cognitive dissonance about different things.

Oh, okay.

And so similarly in that Westerners tend to conform more emotionally but less behaviorally, Westerners tend to feel more cognitive dissonance around their emotions and expectations and less around their behaviors, whereas people in East Asian cultures feel more cognitive dissonance around the social expectations and their behaviors socially and less around their emotions. Basically, people in those cultures are more comfortable experiencing, say, love and resentment at the same time, but they're way less comfortable, say, you know, doing— being nice to somebody today and then being mean to them tomorrow like that, that they can't handle that they did both of those things. Whereas a Westerner is like, well, yeah, I was happy yesterday and I was pissed today. So yeah, there's no problem with that. But, you know, it's the emotion, the simultaneous emotion in the Westerner that drives them nuts. Whereas in the East Asian culture, it's the contradictory behavior.

Interesting.

That drives them nuts.

Okay. I didn't find that. So that's interesting that you dug that up. Yeah.

Fascinating.

Yeah. You're right though, because like in the Western mind, we want that more, more of the clarity, more of the conciseness. Like we start to get more like, why can't I make up my mind? Like when you feel that pull emotionally, you're like, "Oh my God, I can't make up my mind," or, "I'm not over this thing that happened yet," or, you know, "Why does it hurt? Something in the past still hurt when I'm doing so well?" And like, you just get, we don't navigate that as well emotionally. But that's interesting from the behavioral side where, yeah.

It's like, 'cause I think in the West, we kind of have this expectation that you should be the same person Oh, all the time, right? Like, it's like, yeah, right. So it's like, if I'm happy, if I'm happy with my wife today, I should be happy with her all the time.

You tend to project that all the way out.

I should be happy with her if we're with friends. I should be happy with her if we're visiting her family. I should be happy with her if we're at a work function or if we're hanging out on a Friday night. Whereas I think in, in, uh, in East Asian cultures, it's more— there's more of a contextual understanding of like like, you know, you're gonna feel different things in different places and like that's totally normal, but your behavior should be consistent.

Interesting. Okay. Yeah, yeah, I think, I do think though as Westerners, we should probably lean more towards a little bit of that dialectical thinking. Yeah. Just from an emotional standpoint anyway.

And there's a lot of data that supports that.

Yes.

That is the ability to hold the complexity of emotions in your mind at the same time is like a sign of good emotional maturity.

Right, resilience too.

And mental health, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, you can just navigate a lot more complex situations a lot better. That leads into the resilience. You're more flexible. You see nuance too. I've also seen as well, like in East Asian cultures and other collectivist cultures, that this dialectical thinking also leads to like kind of just a better understanding of opposing views as well. Because again, behaviorally you want more social harmony, and so emotionally you are more open to differing views or somebody who disagrees with you, even if you don't agree with them, but you're still, you're like, okay, I can see where you're coming from.

As long as they're doing the right thing.

As long as they're doing the right thing. As long as they're performing the right behavior. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. So last thing I want to talk about when it comes to culture and emotions, I could go on and on here, and on about that. Like, I went ham on this, Mark. I spent way too much time because I just found it fascinating. But kind of the last idea is that your emotions are actually a type of social currency, okay? So again, we kind of have this idea that emotions are personal, that they're just happening within us, and that, you know, they're just, they happen on a moment-to-moment basis. But actually what's going on is your emotions are signaling to the people around you are you part of this in-group or out-group? The vibe you have, like we've already talked about, right? Maybe that manifests in behavior in more collectivist cultures. Are you part of, you know, are you part of our in-group or out-group? And are you gonna be a part of the social harmony that's created or not? You know, when you see somebody being sad, what they're actually doing is they're probably trying to invite some empathy or some support from someone, right? Anger is usually you're demanding recognition or accountability from somebody else. Laughter, for example, that you're trying to create a sense of ease, like we talked about earlier with the Vietnamese kids laughing at your pain. Well, they were actually trying to create a sense of calm and ease amongst themselves and inviting more of a closeness, a social closeness to each other. So emotions can be spent like that, like a currency. And to be aware of that, I think, is a really important thing where you're going about because Some people don't value the same emotions that you do when you're trying to spend them, and that's where a lot of conflict comes as well.

I think this makes sense when you, again, when you think of relationships as co-regulation of emotion, right? So if you're around somebody who is like very well emotionally regulated and generally is in a good mood all the time, that is valuable because their positive vibe and good mood and adaptability is co-regulates your, your emotions as well. And so when you think of somebody who's very charismatic or magnetic, um, I think that's a lot of what's going on is that they're, they're just exuding such positive emotions that they are, that they are co-regulating the people around them. And so that becomes a valuable currency, and you're willing to like make sacrifices to be close to that person, to spend time with that person, to hang out with that person. It's, it's, uh, you have incentives to be around them like a social currency. Inversely, you have kind of emotional vampires who seem to suck all of the emotions from the people around them constantly, and they're this bottomless pit of sympathy and misery and, and, and rejection and pity. And, and as a result, you feel like you're going broke by being around them. And so you just want to get away as much as possible. I had not heard this term social currency before, before we prepared for this episode, but I really like it. It's one of those things that like just intuitively makes sense to me, not just with the co-regulation thing, but like you see it show up in organizational behavior quite a bit. It was funny, I actually, I was having a conversation with a friend like a week ago and his wife works at like a really, one of the biggest corporations in the world. And this corporation's like currently going through a ton of layoffs. And so we were just kind of talking about who's getting laid off at that company and who's not and how it's kind of like his wife is observing that it's actually kind of funny which ones are getting the boot and which ones are being asked to stay. And he was telling a story. He said that she has this guy on her team who's literally been at this company for 20 years and not a single person can explain what he does. Nobody knows. He shows up to a meeting once or twice a week. He seems to always be on Reddit or watching YouTube videos. Nobody knows what he's doing. He's been in the same position for 12 years. He's just chilling, but everybody loves him. He's totally the culture guy. Everybody, he brings donuts and coffee in the morning and he invites people to parties and he's always got cool stuff going on and he's really funny. And he like, you know, he like brings the energy in the meetings up. And we were just talking about how it's funny how it's like this company, which has now gone through multiple rounds of layoffs in the last 5 years, and it's like this dude does nothing, yet he's still there.

And he's still there.

He's still there. 'Cause obviously he's obviously bringing something.

So question for you. Did your friend whose wife works for this big corporation, Are the layoffs related in any way to AI? Oh, for sure. Okay, okay.

Which actually would—

That's interesting.

Which would make sense why this guy—

Right.

Because you can't automate—

I was just gonna say—

You can't automate a good vibe.

Maybe that's what we all have to, like, that's our new skillset. Like they need to start teaching college courses with, yeah, social currency of emotion.

Pro career tip for everybody listening. Start bringing donuts and coffee to work.

I think you're right. I don't know if this is just me now too, but like I've gone pretty hard on like the content that I consume now online is a lot of comedians. And I think they've been having a moment, but they've been having a moment for several years now, especially across social media. And it's because of that, like there's social currency around making people laugh and make people feel good. There's literal currency involved here too. You pay to go see this person tell jokes.

Absolutely.

It's insane, right? That makes a whole lot of sense when you consider it in the context of social currency.

Yeah.

So I don't know. Maybe that's why we all need to be just court jesters going forward, and that's gonna be our job.

Court jester, super supportive friend, hype man. Yeah. And then also, I think what you said too, a calming presence. You could probably describe You know, what a really good therapist does. A really good therapist, it's like 10% intellectual, 90% emotional. Like really what a good therapist is doing is like co-regulating with you extremely well. Like listening well, sympathizing well. And then like just knowing some of the questions to ask and, you know, where to poke and prod. But like most of it has just been very emotionally present and attuned and calm. Like being a calming presence probably goes way further than like, you know, what school they went to or what certification they have.

100%. No, absolutely. That's, yeah, I think that's the definition of a good therapist for sure. So yeah.

Well, cool.

Okay, that wraps up my culture deep dive here. I went real hard on it. I think the big takeaway here though is just that, But you need to step back and look at this, how powerful of an influence culture is on your emotional experience. Just the way you perceive emotions, the way you express your emotions, the emotions you have in the first place, they're all very, very dependent on the culture that you grew up in, the culture that you're in currently, and the ones you choose to be in going forward.

Yeah, and culture is fractal, right? Like your family has a culture, your community has a culture, country as a culture, you're— and the smaller you get, the more modifiable it becomes. Right? Like you can control your exposure to your family to a certain extent. You can control the friends you hang out with. You can control the work environment you're in. You can control the city you live in. You can even, you know, if you want to get a little crazy, you can control the country you live in. So it is modifiable and it is the water we swim in, so we tend to not notice it. Or think about it, or, uh, overestimate how universal it is. So speaking of the water that we're all swimming in, I, I think it's worth taking a moment and kind of digging into the historical context of the cultures that we come from and how they've approached emotions throughout history. Just so that when we do move into the actual practical takeaways and, you know, toolkit, so to speak, in the next section, we'll have a little bit more grounding of kind of where we all came from, where all this came from. So in the West, we've already talked about how there's been this sense that, A, people are seen as atomized individuals. It's, you know, you are you and I am I, and we're responsible for ourselves. And ultimately our ability to control ourselves is kind of morally incumbent upon us. Like that was, we covered that in the procrastination episode about how throughout Western history, it's if you couldn't control your own actions, if basically if you succumbed to your emotional impulses, you were shamed and judged and seen as a bad person. All that stuff, as we covered in that episode, really went back to Plato. Plato had this analogy of a chariot and two horses. He really framed the human psyche in terms of having your kind of animalistic urges and then your emotional impulses, and then your rational thinking self was the chariot rider who— it was their responsibility to guide and control the horses and make sure that they were running in the right direction. It was essentially the thinking brain is in the driver's seat, and, uh, it's their job to force the feeling brain to come along with it. Now, that point of view never really got challenged or changed up until recently. Um, you see, Aristotle was correct in that he saw it as more of a skill issue, but he still ultimately saw, uh, reason and wisdom as the core virtue that all other virtues stem from. The Stoics really picked up where Plato left off. You know, they saw living a good life is basically being able to detach from your emotions and act out rationally despite whatever you might be feeling or whatever impulses, cravings you might have. And this continued on through Christendom. And I think it's, you know, talking through all of the examples, all the research, the cultural research that we through in the last few sections, you see two themes show up over and over again. One is the individualism, which comes from the Platonic idea of the soul. We are each a unique soul that lives on in eternity, and it's the fundamental immutable unit of an individual. And then you have this idea of rationality dominating the emotions, that a high-functioning valuable human in the world is able to control what they feel, act despite what they feel, suppress what they feel, you know, behave as a reasonable individual. And the result of this is that it generates a culture that sees negative emotion or emotional discomfort as weakness. It sees people who can't control their urges and their desires as morally failing in some way. And again, that's very much what the procrastination episode was about. On the Eastern side, you know, Buddhism was all about witnessing your emotions without necessarily investing in them. And I would say out of all the ancient traditions, the Buddhists probably got this the most right in that, and we're gonna come back to mindfulness techniques later because they are incredibly useful. It's basically what the Buddhists understood is that just because you feel something doesn't necessarily mean A, it's true, B, you have to act on it, and C, it means anything. They seem to really kind of be the only tradition that like really nailed that. And while they definitely recommended a lot of practices to help people realize that, there wasn't a whole lot of where to go next after that. You know, Buddhism does have the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, and it's got all these kind of, rules or principles of like, these are the right things you should be doing. And there is a concept in Buddhism called upekkha, which means like equanimity or like harmony among all the aspects of the self. But the— let's just say the how-to is like beyond the mindfulness practice isn't really there. Hinduism really focuses on the idea of acting according to the dharma or like a higher purpose. Travis Bradberry, you know, we'll come back to this a little bit later, but it is one thing that shows up, and I feel like this shows up at some point in every single episode, is that part of what makes any sort of struggle, emotional or otherwise, more bearable is when you feel as though that struggle is moving you towards something or it's for some sort of worthy cause or higher purpose than yourself. And then of course Confucianism, we've talked quite a bit about it. Confucianism is where you really see this concept of social harmony through something called li, which is collective rituals. And Confucianism really based the understanding of self not in the actual individual, but in the contribution and the harmony of the group. And And as a result, you see in a lot of the Eastern cultures that they're— they, they tend to be better at, uh, the dialectical thinking, the managing, you know, the internal contradictions. Um, but at the same time, they— you do get more emotional suppression, you do get more, uh, behavioral conformity. Ultimately, the, the flaw, I think, of all the ancient traditions is that they all place the thinking brain in the driver's seat. All of them see the thinking rational mind as kind of the one that should be in charge. I think this is the tricky thing about managing your emotions is like that intuitively feels very true. Like your thinking brain is like, we've all had this experience a million times of like watching yourself do something stupid as you're doing it. And you're like, there's a part of your brain that's like, wait, no.

It's just not loud enough.

Yeah, it's like, come back. No, don't do it. And like we've all been there. And I think, you know, so it's not surprising to me that across human cultures, like people would assume like, okay, we just need to make that voice stronger. And counterintuitively, like that's not actually the case. It's that voice has a place and it is important, but like, It's not a matter of just getting that voice to scream louder and louder. It's— and that actually ends up backfiring in most cases.

Well, why do you think, though, that these ancient traditions— why do you think they all kind of converged on that? What is it about, like— because to me, I think there probably was some social utility in that, right? There was some value in that, because when you don't have modern technology, especially modern communication technology, and you just have the people around you, and there's— that's your entertainment, that's your— what your, your whole life is, right? Uh, I think you kind of do need to keep a lid on emotions a lot, right? And so there probably is a place for rationality in those ancient traditions that kind of— I don't want to say it was a social control, but like, there was a social regulation mechanism, right?

Probably. I mean, the stakes for anything were higher. You know, so if you get upset and, you know, steal your neighbor's cow, like his family could starve to death. So it's like any sort of impulsive action like that, the stakes were pretty high. It is a little bit paradoxical though, because if you actually read accounts of medieval or ancient cultures, like people had absolutely no self-control. It was like, this is the story of history basically. It is completely impulsive, like, you know, Steven Pinker wrote this great book called The Better Angels of Our Nature. And like the whole first 100 pages of that book is just going through how violent most of human history was. Like brutally violent, impulsively violent, like just completely irrationally violent. And across cultures, like all over the place. So in many ways, it was, I guess, emotionality was a much bigger problem back then. The consequences were much higher, the stakes were much higher, and it was, there were social, like serious social consequences. And so I do think that it was just like, I don't know, I imagine there was just this constant state of like, guys, get a hold of yourselves. You know, like fucking get it together, man. Whereas like in the modern world, I think we definitely do have a more executive function. We are a lot more self-aware, in some cases maybe too self-aware. And so I think, and our emotional impulses and our drives and stuff, the stakes are lower, right? It's like if my biggest failure emotionally this week is I eat way too much ice cream, first of all, that's not unusual. For me this week. That is probably the worst thing that can happen to me if I'm too emotional one week. Maybe I get in a stupid fight with my wife, or maybe I say something mean to a friend, but nobody's going to die and nobody's going to starve and nobody's going to get burned at the stake because of something I said. So I think it's our emotional failings really just affect us personally more than ever before. And for that reason, I think maybe we've had enough distance from it to like actually sit back and, 'cause I think just throughout most human history, people are on damage control.

Yeah, I totally agree with that. Yeah, it's always more of an aspiration, I think, really throughout history. It's like, this is what we should be striving for.

And it is super counterintuitive, right? Like the idea that that voice in your head, like the more you shout at yourself to get it together, the worse you're gonna feel about yourself and the harder it is gonna be to get it together. Like that's almost, that's like a luxury problem.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, like it's, you don't even have the space to think about that when like half of your kids are dying before the age of 3.

Right, right.

Basically what we, what this arrives at is you get to the 19th and early 20th century, and pretty much like across most cultures, you end up with these, like, as you said, display rules in the culture, or these standards of conduct of behavior essentially built around 3 things: suppression, right? So you just bottle it up, put— brush it under the rug, pretend it's not there. Uh, venting or emotional dumping, which is kind of this hydraulic— like, sometimes I see it referred to as like the hydraulic theory of emotion, which is this idea that if you've, if you've been suppressing a bunch of anger, one way to relieve it is to just let it out the same way you would like let, you know, a bunch of steam out of a valve. And then once it comes out, like, the pressure will drop. It turns out that's not true.

Yeah, yeah.

Turns out venting anger just leads to more anger. Like, there's no steam inside of you that needs to be let out. It Travis Bradberry, if you tell yourself that a behavior is healthy, you're just gonna be more likely to do more of that behavior in the future. And then of course there's numbing and avoidance, right? So drinking, overwork, doom scrolling, et cetera, et cetera. These are generally the most, like the default adaptive strategies that we all develop. And a lot of it depends on where we come from., right? Like some people's, like I grew up in a household where you did not talk about problems. It was like, everything's okay. Pretend like house is on fire. It's like, this is fine. You know, it's, you know, it's like the world could be collapsing and everybody's like pretending like nothing's happening. Whereas like somebody like my wife's family, it's just fucking sirens and car alarms 24/7, people screaming at each other. Like everything's a problem, everything is drama. That's not really healthy either. And then of course you have families where there's a lot of avoidance, there's a lot of numbing, there's a lot of drinking and drugs and smoking and all sorts of stuff going on. So none of these are good. I also think that this has probably become more of a question in society the last 50 years because we're more and more, we're living in a world where like our environment is, manipulating how we feel, right? So if you think of like, not even social media, but like mass media, right? News media, newspaper headlines, and then you get into all the social media stuff and the internet stuff. You think about stuff like hustle culture and productivity hacking and obsessing over the career ladder and all these things. We talked about toxic positivity. Like there's a real kind of, therapy culture that's emerged out of self-help where you're— people have this unrealistic expectation that they're supposed to feel good all the time and that if they're not, like, something's wrong. Um, and, and then of course there is the classic, you know, there's still that underlying narrative that being too— like, being emotional, uh, especially if you're a man, being emotional, revealing vulnerable emotions makes you weak. It means something's wrong. It means there's a flaw going on. And so I think there's just been a lot more intellectual investigation into this, uh, and rightfully so, because it is— I think it's just affecting the modern individual in a completely different way than it affected the ancient individual, right?

Yeah, yeah. And mass media, like you said, it's gotten so good at emotional manipulation that we don't even notice it most of the time. So yeah, I think there is just much more of an intellectual curiosity around it for that, those kind of reasons anyway. Yeah.

Yeah. All right, so now we have like a pretty full understanding of what emotions are, why they matter, how they interact with us personally, with society at large, with our culture. We have a decent understanding of where they came from. What affects them, what improves them. So now we want to talk about building that emotional toolkit. Mm-hmm. How do we develop the skills to better manage the emotions in our life? And so what I want to do is I'm going to go through kind of 4 schools of thought around emotional regulation or emotional mastery: the heart, the head, the soul, and the body. And we're just going to pick and choose the most evidence-based and validated stuff from each one. We'll talk about which each— where each school of thought came from, what they contributed, what sort of ideas they had, and then also what we can take away from them. I'd also like to mention that we have an online community that works through all these episodes together as a group. It's called Momentum. So if you're listening to this episode and you're like, My God, these two guys are so handsome. I would love to work on this in my own life. I would love to take all of the stuff that they're saying and apply it to my own life. We have broken that down for listeners. We have broken everything down into a 30-day challenge. You can take it one day at a time. Every day includes one small exercise. You have a whole community of people that are working on it with you. I think last month we had over 1,000 people working on the procrastination track together. It's becoming a really, really amazing experience. So if you want to check that out, go to www.findmomentum.com and you can get set up there. So we got 4 schools of thought. I'm going to start with the heart, and this is simply because chronologically it came first. And as with seemingly everything, it starts with Freud. It's always Freud. You know, Freud was the, the, the pioneer, the, the, the genius historical figure that figured out that much of our behavior is driven by the unconscious. I mean, he— you could probably argue that he was the first one to suggest that the feeling brain is driving the car and the thinking brain is just trying to figure out where, where they are on the map. This was completely unconventional at the time. It was seen by as absurd. It was very contrarian. But really the other incredible thing that he figured out is talk therapy, as we discussed earlier. Freud really figured out that if you can get people to verbalize their inner world, their inner sentiments, their— those wisps of feelings and impulses, that they start to lose their control over them. That it— for some reason, verbalizing all this stuff, it it starts to give the thinking brain a little bit more leverage, and it starts to build a bridge of communication between the two sides and bring more clarity into one's life. And it helps people to feel— not feel so dominated by their emotions, but rather feel collaborative with their emotions. The problem is, is that Freud took a good concept way too far. Right? So I sympathize because I think it's easy to understand like why he thought this way. But basically he looked at it and he said, okay, well, if you get people to start verbalizing, you know, all of the feelings and thoughts that they've been suppressing for a long time, it has this real healing impact on them. There's something kind of magical about it. Uh, so what if we dig deeper? What if we dig, you know, really into like the the unconscious stuff that like they're not even, they're really not aware of, right? Like let's start digging into dreams. Let's start digging into fantasies. Let's start digging into like free association between concepts and stories. And that's where you start getting into all Freud's weird shit, right? That's where you start getting into, you know, the different complexes and, you know, some of, a lot of the mythology that Jung and Joseph Campbell carried the torch on, like came out of that. But it's like Freud ended up in some very strange and awkward places that like haven't really held up over time simply because it turns out that a large portion of the feeling brain is just a free association machine. It just like, it just throws concepts together and sees what happens and it like doesn't necessarily mean anything, right? It's just stuff.

I'm gonna tell this story real quick just because I, I just heard this about Freud and it illustrates, um, how he would get something right and then his interpretation would be so wrong. Um, and it's— I don't know if it's tangentially related, I guess, to emotions, but Freud thought that one of the, um, great civilization— civilizing forces in human evolutionary history was fire, right? We'd sit around a fire and that helped to civilize us because we had to share food. We had to look at each other at night, you know, too. And so he's like, you know, that's a monumental shift in human evolution was fire. But the reason for the civilizing that he gave anyway was because men had to really fight the urge not to piss on the fire. Like that was what civilized men was when we were sitting around and we had to realize that we couldn't pee on the fire anymore. Oh, right. So it was like he was right directionally, like, oh, fire actually probably was a big civilizing force in our evolution because we had to learn how to get along around a fire, but it wasn't because, you know, men couldn't control themselves and not piss on it. But anyway, I just thought that was, I just learned about that story. I thought that was funny.

That's so Freud.

Yeah, it's very Freudian.

That is so Freud.

It involves penises. Of course.

Yeah, of course.

So yeah.

Yeah, it's, So what's interesting about Freud's discovery is that not only is it verbalizing those unconscious emotions makes them conscious and then they lose their power over you, um, he had a nephew named Edward Bernays who took some of the ideas of the early psychoanalysts and ran with them to, to really discover and understand that it also works the other way, that you can use language to kind of manipulate people unconsciously, that you can throw certain words out and people will unconsciously start wanting something or start feeling a certain way without being aware of the language that has manipulated them. And just a fascinating twist of history, Edward Bernays went on to essentially found the fields of publicity and marketing. He was like the original, massive New York marketer who was hired for millions of dollars by all these firms to like associate things like cigarettes with libido and to generate commercials that made housewives feel like, you know, baking goods made them better mothers. And it's like all this marketing talk that goes on now around like brand and sentiment and all the free association that people make between Coca-Cola and childhood and McDonald's and toys and all this stuff, which all started with Edward Bernays and then led back to Uncle Siggy, as he called him. So psychoanalysis was kind of the earliest or first form of therapy of generally, there's like a class of therapy known as psychodynamic therapy, which is essentially just therapy that addresses your emotions directly. So it's like any sort of, deep emotional problem that has been ongoing in your life and you just really need to unpack all these feelings. You used the example earlier of somebody who just feels bad around their parents and doesn't understand why. This is the sort of therapy that tends to do really well with those sorts of problems. It's like the psychodynamic school is like, let's sit down, let's talk about how you feel, and then we're going to talk more about how you feel, and then we're going to talk more about how you feel, and we're just going to keep keep digging and digging and digging until you're able to start making sense of some of this stuff. Psychoanalysis really kind of went out of fashion for a while, and rightfully so, because it just, it started to get associated with a lot of strange stuff, and I think it overreached quite a bit. And so in the mid-20th century, people kind of abandoned it. But around the 1980s and '90s, people like Leslie Greenberg, came back and started revitalizing it and kind of making it more practical and, and useful and really trying to help people get a handle on not only understanding their own emotions, but also like learning how to direct those emotions in a, in a useful way. But in terms of the emotional toolkit that we want to build, the skill sets that we want to work on for ourselves, I'd say the biggest thing that we want to take away from this school of thought, the psychodynamic school of thought, is, is that verbalization, right? And it can be with a therapist, it can be with a friend, it can be through journaling, it can be through anything. But it's like that consistent practice of speaking out the emotions that you're feeling, finding some sort of logical container to hold them. It really does have this incredible healing effect. Or at least it alleviates some of the burden that often comes along with a lot of the emotions that we carry around, and we feel less weighted down by them, less controlled by them. The second school of thought is the head, and this is the cognitive behavioral approaches. And this really started out in the 1950s with Aaron Beck. It's interesting because by this point, psychoanalysis had kind of played out. Like, it's kind of like you said, everybody agreed, like, the basis of this stuff is true. Like, there is, like, we are very much driven by our subconscious desires and emotions, and it is very important to develop an awareness around those things. But like, come on, dude, pissing on the fire? Seriously? Like, is this really what's gonna like fix people's depression?

You know?

And Aaron Beck was sitting around and he was, he was thinking of like how there had to be a better way. He saw it in terms of a triangle, and that is basically your thoughts, your feelings, and behaviors all interact with each other, right? Your behaviors will drive your feelings and your thoughts. Your thoughts will drive your feelings and your behaviors, and your feelings will drive your thoughts and behaviors. And so he looked at that and he was like, For a person to change and improve, all three of those have to improve. You can't just learn more and then expect your life to improve. You know, it's like you can read as many books as you want about diets, but until you stop, until you behave differently, you're never going to lose weight or have a six-pack. You can't just change how you feel. You could, you know, go out and do a bunch of heroin or lie to your— become delusional and tell yourself that you're like the the Queen of Monaco, but like until your thoughts and your behaviors change, like nothing's really changed. And then even your behaviors, you can go out into the world and you can do different things, but if you still feel awful about yourself and you still think awful things about yourself, then like what's the point? Has anything really changed? So like really deep personal change comes through all three of those things at the same time. Now Beck really believed that Each of those things could be an entry point into the other two. If you can get somebody to feel differently, which is the psychodynamic approach, you get 'em to feel differently, then they'll behave differently and then they'll start thinking differently or vice versa. They'll, they'll start thinking differently and then maybe they'll, they'll behave differently. Beck looked at it and he said, you know, probably the simplest entry point is actually through the thoughts. Mm-hmm. It's actually through looking at the narratives and stories that people say about themselves and their experiences, and looking at how those things could be rewritten or reframed in a way that's a little bit more healthy and a little bit more reasonable, and it like makes the desired behaviors more likely to happen and makes the feelings, the bad feelings less likely to happen. And so this is where you start to get like cognitive reappraisal, as it's become known. And like a simple version is, you know, somebody says, wow, I'm such a, like, I'm failing at this. I tried this thing 3 times and I failed all 3 times. Like, God, I'm such a loser. Whereas you can go back and rewrite that script and say, I'm learning 3 times. I've done the thing 3 times, I failed 3 times, but each time I learned something different, therefore I'm getting better. And that simple cognitive reappraisal of the same exact experience can result in different feelings, and then ideally, ultimately result in different behaviors. Now, CBT has this like whole structure that they've built out over the decades around these cognitive reappraisals. One of the things that they do that is super useful is pointing stuff out called cognitive distortions, which are basically fucked up and inaccurate stories that we all tend to tell ourselves. Like, they're like patterns that seem to emerge a lot. So one of them is like catastrophization. It's like when something small goes wrong, assuming that it's the end of the world or that like, oh my God, I embarrassed myself once, so like nobody's ever gonna like me ever again. Like they're basically irrational stories that are over-indexed on our negative feelings and that don't actually reflect reality. And so learning and understanding the cognitive distortions can be really useful to understand like where our stories can get screwed up and where we can kind of reappraise them and find better ones. There's this whole school of cognitive behavioral approaches. I personally think it emerged as the most successful simply because of its consistency and how systematic it was. Like, it really is a framework that is easily teachable and transferable from therapist to therapist. And it's the sort of thing that like two completely different therapists can kind of run through it and get very similar results, which is something that's not true about psychodynamic therapy. Psychodynamic therapy is so emotional laden that like so much of it depends on the therapist's particular like emotional abilities or ability to sympathize or recognize certain tendencies or ask the right questions. Or CBT. It's like, I don't want to call it cookie cutter, but like, it is, it is a system and a framework that like you can run through with anybody, theoretically, right? Uh, there was another framework around this time that came out, um, called Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy, uh, REBT, from Albert Ellis. He had a little framework called the ABC framework. So you have the A is the activating event, It's the thing that happens to you. B is your belief about that event. And then C is the emotional consequences, how you end up feeling about that event. And his point was that you can kind of train yourself to have a relatively large gap between those three steps, right? Like a thing can happen to you and you don't necessarily have to have a belief about it. You don't have to decide anything about it necessarily. And then even if you do have a belief about it, you don't necessarily have to decide whether it's good or bad or upsetting or horrible. Every time I see REBT, it reminds me of this, I guess it's a Chinese proverb, I don't know. It's like one of these little anecdotes that I, you see all these places and it's like, seems very profound and everything. Um, but I always think of it because I really like it. So there's like a Chinese farmer, he's super poor, like dirt, dirt poor. And he only owns one horse.. And one day the horse becomes untied and like walks away. And so his only horse is gone. And the son is like, oh my God, Dad, this is a disaster. Our only horse. Like, we're so screwed. And the father looks at him and he says, good luck, bad luck, I don't know. So the son goes looking for the horse and eventually finds the horse and he finds the horse and like half a dozen other horses. And he manages to bring all the horses back. And so now, now they have 7 horses on the farm. And he goes to his dad, he's like, I can't believe it. Look at this. We have 7 horses now. Like, we're so rich. And his dad goes, good luck, bad luck, who knows? And then sure enough, the boy is training the horses and trying to, like, tame them and everything. And one of the horses is, like, really wild and he's, like, bucking around and everything. And he throws the kid off the horse and he breaks his leg. And the kid is like, "Oh my God, this is horrible. I can't work now." His dad says, "Well, good luck, bad luck, who knows?" And then the army comes and the army is conscripting for a war. And they come and they look at the son and they say, "Well, it's too bad his leg is broken. Otherwise he could be a good soldier." And the son's like, "Oh my God, Dad, I can't believe it. I don't have to go to war now." Dad says, "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" Anyway, the story goes on and on and on. And the point is, is that like, You don't have to necessarily ascribe what is good or bad, like deciding what is good or bad. It's a decision you're making, however subtle it is, without noticing. And I think the cognitive reappraisal piece is the thing that, that the Stoics got at that I think is, is accurate. I don't love the way they describe it, but I do think it is what they got at is that like you can kind of rewrite the narrative around what happens to you in a way that is adaptive and promotes good behavior or self-belief. Seneca has this great quote where he says, "We suffer more in imagination than reality." And I've always taken that quote to mean that most of what we are upset about is not the thing that happened. It is the story and all the meaning that we ascribe to the thing that happened. And so this whole school of thought is still super relevant, incredibly useful. I think CBT kind of has the highest batting average in terms of therapeutic modalities go. It's particularly useful for anxiety and light depression, which everybody has anxiety and light depression these days. So I think that's why it's become so popular as well. And I think this is another tool for the toolkit, right? Is this cognitive reappraisal? Is this is development of the ability to look at something that's happened to you and then ask yourself, if you're upset about it, ask yourself like, well, is that true? What else could it be? What would this mean if it wasn't true? What if this was actually a good thing that was happening to me? What would that mean? What would need to be true for that to be true? And it's just, it's a useful exercise and it's a useful skill that I think we should all have in our toolkit. But this brings us to our third school of thought, which is the soul. CBT was taking off, REBT, psychodynamic therapy was still around. You get to the '80s and '90s, you have all these different modalities of therapy. Therapy's starting to become mainstream. It's starting to become a, it's not just for crazy people anymore. And something really interesting started to happen around this time as well, which is Eastern spirituality and religion arrived in the Western world. So there are a couple therapeutic modalities that emerge kind of in this later period. It's sometimes called like the third wave of therapy. So the first wave is kind of this psychoanalysis and psychodynamic school. The second one is the cognitive behavioral school. And this is the, this is the third wave starts integrating some of these mindfulness practices and more kind of Eastern sensibility into the work. And the first one is one called DBT, which is dialectical behavioral therapy. Now we just had a whole conversation about thinking dialectically, and that's very much what dialectical behavioral therapy is based on. It's basically CBT plus sitting with contradictions and paradoxes and getting comfortable with them, right?

Very zen, yes.

Super zen. So dialectical therapy is all about holding two opposites in your mind. At the same time. It's the dialectical thinking. And as I said earlier, like, it turns out that there's a lot of great data showing that this is very healthy for people. So just to give you an example is that you should both accept yourself as you are and you should want to get better. That is a seeming paradoxical thing, but both of those two things are true and those are— they are in tension with one another. Another one is You want to be vulnerable and open to experiences, but you also want to protect yourself and be safe. Both of those two things are true. You want to cultivate an independent identity, do things for yourself, but you also want to have interdependence and rely on others as well because that makes, you know, a nice healthy life. So it actually kind of gets back into the values stuff that we talked about in the values episode about how like, everything is a trade-off. Like, it's not about like a good value versus a bad value. It's about having two good values that are actually kind of contradictory or in tension with one another and then managing that trade-off. Like understanding that the more you assert your individualism, the more that's gonna strain your relationships or your sense of community in your life and being okay with that, right? The more you emotionally open yourself up and be vulnerable, the more you're gonna open yourself to being hurt by people. So it's that kind of realism and paradox that I think by default people tend to avoid. Like we don't like thinking about those things. We tend to be like, I wanna be independent and I wanna have good relationships, or I wanna accept myself and I wanna change all the time, right? It's hard for us to weigh both of those things simultaneously. And then a little bit later, we get to my personal favorite modality of therapy, which is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, ACT. And ACT is, and the idea is that, A, you accept all of your experiences as they are, all of your emotions, everything that happens. It's like the first step is, acceptance and becoming okay with it. And then the second thing is realistically looking at your options and how you can approach each problem in your life and finding some higher value or purpose to commit to that makes that problem feel worthwhile. And I mean, ACT is like, the overlap of ACT in my work is like, very, very large. It might be the thickest Venn diagram of any psychological modality in terms of the stuff that I write. It is the combination of Eastern mindfulness and spiritual awareness and then Western existentialist thought of find the thing that matters and then be willing to suffer for it, make a commitment to it. Ultimately, the truth, the profound truth that these mindfulness-based techniques or meditation or just Eastern spirituality in general, like the really profound truth that that school brings with it is that emotions are visitors. They are not enemies. They are not permanent. They are not— you're not broken. There's nothing wrong with you. Like emotions are just— they're like the weather. They come, they go. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad. They don't necessarily mean anything. You get to decide what they mean and you get to decide how to act in response to them.

Do you think that's specifically that there? Is that one of the biggest benefits of meditation when it's done successfully, I think, is you notice the thoughts and emotions that come and go and then you notice them go, you notice them come in, you notice them go out, and you see that impermanence. Do you think— you've meditated a lot more than I have, I guess. So where is the benefit there?

Absolutely. So I, before I was aware of like rational emotive behavioral therapy, I remember my Zen master back in Boston describing it as a widening gap. He was like, you know, the more you meditate. So it's like if you take somebody who has basically no self-awareness, right? They instinctively respond to whatever happens to them. You know, it's like a person with zero self-awareness is gonna be like, well, it's not my fault I punched the wall. Like, oh, I stubbed my toe, right? It's just like impulse reaction, impulse reaction, impulse reaction. And generally, like, what happens, the more we develop an understanding of ourselves and our feelings and our internal world, a small gap starts to open up between impulse and action, right? And it's like impulse happens. You're like, okay, this annoying thing happened. Oh, I really want to punch that wall. And then it's like, if the gap gets wide enough, you can stop yourself. You're like, oh wait, no, don't do that.

Right?

And I remember my Zen master saying, he was like, one of the benefits of meditation is he used to call it widening the gap. He was like, watch the gap get wider to the point where it's like something happens to you and eventually the gap is so wide that you're just like, you can just play in the empty space in between. You can sit there, you can be the Chinese farmer. You can be like, is this a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Should I decide?

Does it mean anything?

Does it mean anything?

Yeah.

Am I gonna do something about it? It's like you're just playing in that gap. But when I did come across REBT and I saw that, I was like, "Oh yeah." ABCs.

Yeah, yeah.

That's like exactly. I think a lot of the, I think a lot of this stuff is getting at that, right? Like they're just getting at it at different angles. So like mindfulness is really developing the internal perception, the self-awareness. To like see the gap emerge between stimulus and response, or see the entry point to the, you know, thought-feeling-behavior triangle.

Okay.

And I think, you know, the cognitive reappraisal is really only becomes possible when that gap gets wide enough to do it. And then I think, you know, the psychodynamic stuff, the talk therapy, is also widens that gap because it's like the more aware you become of those emotions, the more you talk through them, the more you re-experience them, the less of a hold that they have on you, the less triggering they are, and the more that gap widens and the more you're able to do cognitive reappraisal and the more you're like able to kind of look at your own mind and try to understand everything. So like all of these things are synergistic. And again, it's like why we're gonna hammer on the toolkit metaphor, no pun intended. Because it's like none of these things by themselves are going to solve your emotional issues. But the same way like a hammer is not going to fix your house, or a screwdriver is not going to fix your house, but when you have like a hammer, a screwdriver, a saw, a wrench, you know, the full toolbox, then it's like, okay, now I can fix anything, you know?

Yeah, yeah. And I think too, that's just like a— it's just seems to me that's a big part of just emotional maturity is widening that, is learning how to widen that gap. Correct. I mean, that's been my experience anyway, where things I've seen in my past where I've been super reactive and now, okay, now I do stop and that gap is widened up and I can look at the middle. The middle part before reacting to it.

So yeah.

Yeah.

And it's funny, you know, we haven't used that term yet, emotional maturity, 'cause really what that is is just somebody who is emotionally skillful.

Right.

Emotional maturity. You know, it's like somebody who has perspective on themselves and on the world and isn't hijacked by their emotions constantly. But it's funny because I don't think maturity is the right word.

Oh, okay.

I think skill is the right word. I think these things are skills. And I think when you look at somebody who's immature, it's somebody who hasn't learned the skills. The same way somebody who hasn't learned how to, I don't know, manage their finances or hold down a job, we would describe as immature. You know, a person who can't control their anger or, you know, is anxious in inappropriate times, or blames everybody else for their problems. Like, you know, it's like, I think these are all just skill issues.

Okay, yeah, yeah. We don't need to add the extra judgment of maturity.

Yeah, the maturity thing, it inserts that morality.

Okay, okay.

Of like, you can't control yourself, you're like a child. Which might be true.

Yeah, there's some parallel there, but we could do without the judgment. I get that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

That brings us to the last school of thought, which is the most recent, which is kind of funny 'cause you would think this would be maybe the most ancient, but anyway, the body, somatic approaches. It's funny, the mind-body stuff, you know, the mind and body are not separate. Even though neuroscience has known that psychologists have known that for multiple decades now. It feels like we're just now actually getting to the point of doing some really frontier research on how those interactions actually happen. And it's funny because this is all the kind of touchy-feely woo-woo stuff that I grew up hearing about that I was like, that's ridiculous. You know, stuff like how gut health affects your emotions and how like supplementation can like help you feel better in the morning and how like anxiety can be a vitamin deficiency. Turns out there's a lot of truth to that shit. And it's, it's still like we're still discovering a lot of this stuff, particularly around the gut health stuff. But like it is, it's a real thing. And so this is the section where I annoy everybody listening by saying that one of the most effective ways to manage your emotions is diet, exercise, and getting good, plenty of sleep at night.

Sorry.

Sorry, everybody. I'm sorry. Yeah. But it really is. I mean, it, and it's crazy too because in many ways this is the simplest lever, right?

Mm-hmm.

Sleep especially. Sleep is like, if there's a single thing that can impact your emotional stability on a day-to-day basis, the number one thing is probably sleep. Sleep. Like if you're underslept, you're gonna get emotionally hijacked so much quicker. That gap between impulse and reaction is gonna shrink to nothing. You're gonna make terrible decisions. You're gonna be cranky. You're gonna be impulsive. You know, every, everything else we're talking about is kind of just window dressing if you're not, if you're not taking care of yourself and getting enough sleep. There was an interesting meta-analysis about a year ago. It looked at every intervention imaginable on mild depression and everything from all of these therapeutic modalities that we've talked about to antidepressants to all sorts of different behaviors. And the number one thing was dancing.

Dancing?

Dancing.

You mean just like dancing improved depression? Really? Dancing.

Dancing.

Okay.

Physical movement. Out, like scored higher than antidepressants.

Yeah.

Scored higher than CBT. Literally just fucking dancing.

There's something in me that just wants to say bullshit. Like, yeah, so I get it. Like that's what we're up against here. But yeah.

I, yeah, it's like, it's physical movement.

Right, okay. Yeah, when you put it that way, yeah.

It's physical movement. And then when you break down—

Drew, you just need to dance. That's like what I hear.

You just need to dance, Drew. Yeah, dance party.

I mean, it probably would improve your mood, but yeah, 100% agree. But after a workout, I feel great. Sure.

Yeah. But when you break down, so, so physical movement like was number one. And then when you broke down, when you like zoomed in, when you double-clicked on physical movement and you like looked at all of the different movements, dancing was number one.

Okay.

Exercise was number two. Walking was like number three. And like all of them shot at a higher percentage than all the popular interventions. Yeah, all the CBTs and the REBTs and the antidepressants and all that stuff.

I guess the way I've always looked at it though too is like, those aren't going— they're not going to like solve, say, depression, or they're not going to, you know, fix your emotions, but they're going to prepare you a lot better to handle your emotions, right? Is that—

yeah, they set the stage for you to be able to do it. Okay, we've talked about 2 things, right? One is, A, emotions are full body, a full body experience. They're not just happening in your mind, they're happening in your body. And B, they are a biological feedback mechanism to promote adaptive behavior. And so the goal of emotions is not to get rid of them or get more of them. The goal is to simply adapt to them as effectively as possible. It makes sense that if your emotions are a biological feedback mechanism that happen across your body, across systems, across the nervous system and the cardiovascular system and all the systems, then it makes sense that maintaining those systems, those physical systems, is going to make you more adaptive to your emotions, right? Like if your cardiovascular system is all fucked up and your nervous system is all fucked up your digestive system is all fucked up and like, and then a bunch of anxiety shows up, you're probably not gonna get the right signals. Mm-hmm. And then you're not gonna react to those signals. And then like, it, it's, it's just gonna be, it's gonna make, and then, and then your inability to react to those signals are gonna cause like all sorts of cognitive, you know, narratives and stuff that promote even more anxiety. And like, you just get caught lost in this spiral. So it's, it's like obnoxiously simple, but it, it's, I, I would say it's, it's equally as important.

Makes a lot of sense though too. I mean, but Lisa Feldman Barrett in her book, uh, How Emotions Are Made, uh, which we've referenced several times now, she talks about the body budget, uh, and how that influences, uh, emotions and how constructed emotions, um, are a part of that. So your body has a budget for the limited resources that it has, the energy, glucose, whatever. And if it's not running efficiently and you haven't, you haven't slept well, you haven't, your, your body's not moving well, you have digestive issues, whatever it is, that all goes into your emotional experience because your body is budgeting resources for those things instead of you being able to handle an emotional experience.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know about you, like, so this is something that only— we talked about how meditation improves interoception, um, which is that the, the ability to like sense what's going on in your body. One of the things I remember back when I started meditating a lot, one of the first things that happened is I I started, and I still do sometimes, I started mixing up physical ailments for emotions.

Yeah, yeah.

Like still to this day sometimes if I get indigestion, I feel anxious and I think I'm anxious about something. And then it's like, oh no, that's just that burrito I ate. Yeah, yeah.

Well, in Lisa Feldman Barrett's book, she has this great example of she got, and during graduate school, graduate school, she got asked out for a lunch date and she went out with this guy and she's like, "I wasn't really attracted to him, but I went out with him, whatever." And then during lunch I was like, "Oh, I started to get this kind of anxious knot in my stomach." And I was like, "Maybe I am attracted to this person. Wow." And then she goes home and immediately throws up. She had the flu is what it was, but she mistook that for some level of attraction for somebody else. So yeah, you can definitely get mixed up with these physical sensations and emotional states are definitely Very, very intertwined. It's not mind and body, they're all one thing.

It's all one thing. Right. They're synergistic.

Yes.

Right? It's like the healthier your body is, the more adaptive your emotions are gonna be. The more adaptive your emotions are, the more clear-headed you're gonna think, the better decisions you're gonna make, the better actions you're gonna take, the better your body's gonna be. So it's like it's an upward spiral or it's a downward spiral.

Yeah, we just have this propensity to think dualistic ways. There's mind and body, there's spirit and there's physicality. And the more you pay attention, the more you're like, there's no separation between the two. So yeah.

That I think is kind of the last major tool in the tool chest. We've talked about a lot of different stuff. One of the things, you know, when talking about integrating all these things, I think, you know, the goal isn't to necessarily like, I know we've said this a few times, but it's not necessarily to overcome an emotion. A lot of times that language gets used, like overcome your anxiety or deal with your anger. Really, it's more, I think adaptation is probably the most accurate word. It's like, don't deal with your anger, leverage your anger, right? If you're angry about something, turn that into something productive, use that energy and harness it in a productive direction. If you're feeling sad, like, use that to evaluate the things that you need to evaluate. If you're feeling anxious, like, use that to motivate you to, to move and take action. Ultimately, emotions, the whole purpose is for them to generate a new behavior. Like, you are supposed to— they are a signal that change needs to happen in some shape or another. Just the whole mentality of, of emotions that you need to to defeat, overcome, master, dominate, like whatever, add whatever verb you want to add, is probably misguided. But yeah, I think frankly, like this is, to me, this is the most distilled usefulness of these kind of four different clusters of schools of thought. Like obviously all these modalities have different individual techniques. You know, I think the cognitive distortions in CBT are like super useful. I think the defense mechanisms and psychoanalysis are also super useful, understanding like how your emotions can, how you protect your emotions and your beliefs and your predispositions with irrational thoughts. There's a lot of tools to go around, but like ultimately at the end of the day, I feel like the most important things are verbalizing what you're feeling, like really bring what's unconscious into the conscious. Cognitive reappraisal, rewrite the story, figure out, you know, what's the meaning that you're attaching to this thing and does it mean something differently potentially? Third one is mindfulness, self-awareness, getting a grip on like, you know, what you're experiencing in the moment, widening the gap between impulse, stimulus, and response. And then finally, just a basic physiological health. Move your body, get enough sleep. You know, we didn't talk about substances. You know, you— we talked briefly at the, the top of the show about the neurotransmitters and dopamine, serotonin, and everything. I think the, the physiological side is where this comes in as well, right? Like, you can use something like alcohol or, um, you know, even an antidepressant to like, to temporarily lift your mood or change your emotional state, but you are introducing a new physical substance into your physical system. And so it is going to change the balance of adaptation within your system. And in the case of something like drugs or alcohol, like that's gonna have second and third order effects. It's gonna have long-term consequences, you know, especially something like alcohol. Like you are, you're harming your body's ability to regulate in the long term to potentially regulate moderately better in the short term.

Right. In the very short term.

In the very short term. So it is useful to look at things like that. And you could even make an argument for things like, you know, video games or gambling doing the same thing. Like, they are short-term, like, emotional regulation hacks that potentially create, like, long-term compulsive behaviors or long-term dysregulation. So let me give an example of this toolkit.

Okay.

So my parents were visiting a couple weeks ago.

Good opportunity for emotional regulation, huh? Oh yeah.

Yeah. If you ever need to practice emotional regulation, have the parents in town for a 3-day weekend. So my stepmother and I, we get along really well now, but for a long time we didn't. And there are still like sensitive topics, right? We'll say, right? That always will be— yeah, that come up occasionally. That used to trigger me. Like, there are certain opinions that she has or things that she, she will say that, you know, 10 years ago would quickly end up in a, in a pretty feisty argument. And occasionally they come up. And so they were, they were in town this past weekend, and, uh, you know, she said a couple things. And it, it's— I do think The thing I've gotten really good at is, A, I have a very strong awareness of where those triggers are, right? So, and sometimes in the psychological literature, you see this term, the amygdala hijack, which is basically just getting triggered. It's just like something that's close to your trauma or your, you know, some very, very negative experience in your past and it's like anything around that subject or that reminds you of that thing, when it's touched, it's like the gap between stimulus and response shrinks to nothing and you're just like gone. I'm very aware of where those places are in my life at this point of like, I know I have like a very wide gap on most things. And then the few things that I don't have a wide gap on, at least I'm aware of where those things are, and so I'm kind of ready for them. So first one, it's just mindfulness and awareness. Second one, when she says something, one of the things that I've learned to do is for a long time I used to take it personally. She would say something that I personally found offensive or rude, and I took it personally. And it took me many, many, many years to realize that some of her her, in my opinion, fucked up ideas are really like, they're not about me. They're not personal at all. They're about her, right? Like they're actually part of a worldview that keeps her feeling safe and secure. And so like understanding that cognitive reappraisal of like what her words actually mean, that they actually have nothing to do with me, that it's actually all about maintaining a safe and comfortable worldview for herself. That takes a lot of the sting off of it. And so I'm less likely to react and create a bunch of drama. The other thing I've learned, since I have widened that gap enough and developed enough of an awareness around what's going on, it's given me the space to enact a better behavior. So whenever she brings up one of these topics, I just artfully change the subject.

You gently redirect.

Yeah. I'm like, oh, that's really interesting. Hey, you know what the crazy thing I saw on TV last week was, you know, and then it's just like we're off to the races. And then finally, and we're gonna get to this in our last section here, my wife is an amazing support shield and ally. She's also aware of these moments and these subjects. She knows how to deflect them. She knows how to stick up for me in my stead in a way that's not, not gonna cause drama. And also, you know, when my parents leave, I can vent to her and, you know, confide in her and she'll listen.

Right.

And she understands and she empathizes. So we're gonna get to the importance of relationships and the co-regulation that happens within relationships because it does deserve its entire own section. But I just wanted to give an example of like, you know, young Mark would've heard one of those things that she said and it would've been immediate trigger reaction. I would've made a snide comment, offensive comment back to her. It would've started an argument. I would've, like, we would've said a bunch of mean shit to each other. My dad would probably start pulling his hair out and it would like completely ruin the weekend. And then I'd be resentful for like the next 6 months. And so thankfully those days are behind.

You don't do that anymore. That's good.

No, don't. Yeah.

Glad to hear that.

It only took getting to 40, Drew. Right, right.

Well, there's probably some of that too. I mean, I do think that, again, going back to the constructionist view of emotions, based on your past experiences, as long as you're paying enough attention and you're mindful and all the things we just talked about, you can really start to change your emotional landscape, I think, that way. Just through that type of example that you just gave, I think that's a very common one anyway as you get older. You can probably shortcut that to some extent though too. You don't have to be old and—

Yeah, ideally it doesn't take as long as it took me.

Right, right.

You know, I do think there is an age component to this. Well, I think people, as you get older, you become more secure in who you are and you understand who you are. I think once you, ideally at least, you kind of learn where your the traps and pitfalls are in your own mind. You learn where you're susceptible and where you're insecure, and you learn where you feel good and comfortable, and you learn the people that you feel good and comfortable around, and you learn the people that don't make you feel good and comfortable. So maybe I'm contradicting myself here. Maybe it is a maturity thing, Drew. Goddammit. I don't know. It is like some of it is skill, but like— I don't know, something. I guess skill comes from experience, I suppose.

It does, but I think there is some skill around it. Again, going back to the constructionist view of emotions, if you have these past experiences that are helping you to construct an emotional reaction in any given circumstance and a specific situation when an emotion comes up, that's shaped by your past experience. And you can kind of just let that happen to you.

Yeah.

Or you can be a little bit more, you can be a little bit more intentional about it. And I think as you get older, you realize, okay, I've done the same thing over and over again. That's what you start to realize is that the past experience that keeps feeding the emotional reaction that you have isn't very useful for you. And so you need to reconstruct that in some way. I think that's where, if you want to call it emotional maturity or just experience or whatever, whatever, I think that's where that comes in. So, okay.

All right, so that's the 4 schools of thought. I tried to break, I mean, I think we just went through like 8 or 9 therapeutic modalities and like summarized them each in a couple minutes. So like, I really tried to distill everything as succinctly as possible just for the sake of the podcast. But if people really do want to learn more and they want to do some exercises from each of these therapeutic modalities that do represent the emotional toolkit as we're talking about, we have built out a full 30-day challenge that does that, that we pull all these techniques and different skill sets, help people build them. And it's laid out so that you do, you know, one or two small actions each day. So we're launching this in the Momentum community. If you're listening to this, it's already out. The community is, it kind of tracks the podcast. So every month we do one of these huge-ass episodes and then the Momentum community, we build out a 30-day challenge for people who actually want to implement everything in the episode. So if you're interested in doing that with, with all the emotional stuff that we're talking about, you can go to findmomentum.com/emotions and it's all there. Not only do you get access to the emotion 30-day challenge, you get access to all the previous episodes as well. So if you want to work on procrastination or values, you get access to future 30-day challenges. And we also just have an amazing community of people in there working on this stuff, talking about this stuff, meeting up, hanging out, doing all sorts of cool things. So check it out. Findmomentum.com/emotions. It feels impossible to do a full solved episode on emotions without addressing emotional intelligence.

Ah, yes.

It's such a popular concept. It's in the lexicon. I think probably a lot of people listening to this have either read about it or heard about it at some point or another. And I think it's a great candidate. Back on The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck podcast, we used to have a segment called Brilliant or Bullshit. I think emotional intelligence is a wonderful brilliant or bullshit topic.

Yeah. Let's lay out the terms. What is emotional intelligence? There's really, back in the 1990s, there was two researchers, uh, Peter Salovey and John Mayer. Not that John Mayer, different John Mayer.

Wow, John Mayer really, uh, really gets around.

And then he learned how to play guitar, right?

Yeah.

Uh, no, there were these two, two researchers that, um, kind of coined this term of emotional intelligence as the ability to perceive, understand, and manage emotions in oneself and in others. Okay. So it kind of encompassed this whole emotional, I guess, control within yourself, but also being able to handle and navigate the emotions of others as well. That was the original concept.

Sure.

But then in 1995, it was more popularized by Daniel Goleman's book by the name of Emotional Intelligence. And he expanded the concept to include kind of like these 5 different traits: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills, which that last one's kind of very vague.

How do you measure any of those?

That's probably part of the problem. Was that, well, we talked about a lot of these things already, being self-aware about things. Right. We're talking about regulation through all of this, about how emotions motivate us, how you can have empathy for other people. The social skills still, I'm not really sure about what that was about. But in this book, it became very popularized and it was kind of a tool for corporate management. You know, it made its way into all the, you know, work seminars that people had. And he would talk about emotional intelligence. I'm sure he went and gave all sorts of corporate talks and all of that kind of stuff, right?

Oh yeah, probably made a killing.

Made tons of money, not just off of book sales, but probably doing these seminars too, right? Yeah. One of the big claims from the book, and I think this is still probably in the popular kind of ideas right now, is that 80% of your success is actually based on your emotional intelligence rather than— What he calls EQ. Yeah. Emotional quotient over IQ. So it's only 20% IQ, 80% EQ. There is absolutely no bullshit. There's not.

That is bullshit. Total bullshit.

Okay. That, that part is definitely bullshit. Yeah, there's nothing.

But isn't it funny that that is the stickiest idea in that entire book? Because like, I read that book, I think when I was in college and, and that was the number one thing I took away from it is that your emotions matter more than your IQ.

Yeah.

And like, It's one of those things that is believable. It's a combination of like, it's believable. I think it's, you kind of want to believe it.

Yeah.

And it, but it's also contrarian and kind of sexy. And then also it's like, oh, well this book can teach you how to be better at your emotions. And like, I'm very, my radar is very far on the bullshit side at the moment. So, but continue.

Well, I mean, there were a lot of claims like that, but that you're right, that one was the stickiest one. The problem was, and this was pointed out pretty early too, but of course, you know, once it makes its way into the popular culture, then it's kind of hard to get rid of, as we have seen before. But some of the early criticisms, and they still hold up today, was that there was just so much overlap with personality traits that it's like it wasn't actually a separate kind of intelligence that we're describing here. Um, it's just that there were specifically— there was all this overlap with the personality traits of agreeableness, uh, neuroticism, and conscientiousness. So people who were highly agreeable, those are the people who are pretty attuned to other people's emotions too, you know, just are going to agree with you because they want to please you. Low in neuroticism too, they're not like emitting all these like crazy emotions and causing everybody else to kind of lose their minds around them. And then highly conscientious too, so they they can take care of shit. They need to get shit done, they'll do it, right? Early researchers, other researchers who were critical of this idea pointed that out, but of course they were being all nerdy about it and didn't have a book and seminars behind it, right? Of course. Okay. Of course. There's just a lack, there's a big lack of measurement too. Like you just said, how do you measure any of those things?

Yeah, so here's the thing other than the stickiness of the EQ is more important than IQ. Which is bullshit. But the other thing that bothers me about the emotional intelligence thing is that EQ or emotional intelligence implies that it is a fixed metric that people either have it or they don't. But then if you actually go read the book, he's like, well, if you do these 5 things and listen to me, you can improve your EQ. Anybody can. And then it's like, okay, well then those are skills. That's not intelligence.

That's not intelligence, right? Yeah.

So it's a misnomer on top of— it's almost like, and this is where I start getting very cynical, um, it's, it's, it is titled in the most salacious way possible. Like, he named the concept in the most salacious way possible to get the most attention, and then he— but then he, uh, defined the actual metrics and traits in a way to get as much attention as possible. It's like to, to be as profitable as possible. So it just like it doesn't, the simple definitions of it don't make sense to me. If he had said, if he had called it emotional skills or emotional techniques or something like that, I'd be like, okay.

Methods, yeah.

Emotional methods, like cool, I'm in. Even emotional maturity, I'd be like, sure, I'm in. Right, here's how to improve your emotional maturity. Here's how to improve your emotional skills. These are the 5 most important emotional skills. He's like, "No, it's emotional intelligence. And this determines 80% of your professional success. So hire me for a low price of $50,000 to come to your corporation and train all of your team on how to have a higher EQ." And like, it just, there's a whole cottage industry that you see pop up in psychology over and over and over again. MBTI is another huge offender of this. In that you take a very sexy concept or framework that has no empirical validity or very little empirical validity, but it's a, it like markets really well.

Yeah.

Like it's like, it's a sticky concept. People like it, they want to talk about it. They want to know their score. They want to know their friend's score. They know, they want to know their coworker's score. And then you take, you take it to the business world. And you can make a killing. You can make a fucking killing in corporate training. Microsoft, pay me this much over the next 3 years and me and my team, we're going to increase the EQ of all of your staffers by this much. And it's all made up. It's made up numbers. It's made up measurements. It's all fucking made up. That's my soapbox. Back to you, Drew.

Well, okay. Now I agree I agree with that. Yeah. What I will say though is that people with those emotional skills probably— They do, do better. They do better.

I'm sure they do.

They absolutely do.

I'm sure they do.

And now whether that's a form of intelligence that you can train, that's the question here. Yeah, I agree with you. Yeah. That's probably not right. But you know, like we were talking earlier about your friend's wife who they're doing layoffs and the guy who they're not sure, it sounds like he's fairly emotionally intelligent.

Yeah.

What would be defined as emotionally intelligent here? And he's doing pretty well. So it's not that it's like there's not nuggets of little truth in it, I guess. It's just the way it's framed. You're absolutely right, it's not— I mean, it's not something you learn at a corporate retreat for sure. What they're really finding is that it's more just a personality, a set of personality traits that people have that are conducive to having good emotional skills.

Yeah.

And that's what it is. And for sure you you can do very well with those skills, that's great, but don't call it emotional intelligence. A separate form of intelligence that we— is lurking in our brains or something like that, that's just, that's bullshit. Yes, I agree with you on that.

So we're coming down hard on the bullshit side on this.

I'm for the most part bullshit, yes. I mean, you know, there are some—

so as you said, the 5 skills as skills, they are important.

Yes.

And they're very much the same skills we talked about in this episode. So it's, you know, I'm on board with that. But the framing, the labeling, the definition and the marketing of it, right? I'm like, oh, I hope you enjoy your yacht, Daniel Goleman.

Yeah, yeah. And I think most, most contemporary researchers too will agree with that as well. They're like, you know, yeah, he gets— sure, they're the skills.

Yeah.

But then this is what we're trying to get at. And these— all these different areas of research that we do are based on these skills. Sure. But it's— yeah, it's not a separate form of intelligence.

All right, so I think it's actually pretty appropriate to kind of end the episode or wrap up the main content of the episode talking about relationships, both because I think fundamentally people tend to struggle with emotions the most around their relationships. Um, I think we tend to get the most triggered by our relationships, and also like ultimately I think like our emotional health is so tied to the quality of our relationships. It makes sense that like most of the applications or the most urgent or important applications of managing your emotions well are gonna be around your relationship. So I think if we could almost do like a fractal episode within an episode, I think it's worth taking a little bit of time going through some of the models and frameworks of how, emotions function within relationships, and then pull out all the takeaways and the advice and like just talk about like what healthy co-regulation looks like in a relationship and what unhealthy co-regulation looks like.

Yeah, because ultimately I think you're right. I mean, emotional regulation really does come down to improving your relationships. That's like kind of the end goal, the biggest benefit you get out of learning how to manage your emotions better, which is just better relationships. Yeah. Yeah. If we look at kind of how, what, the function of emotions in relationships, really, the, you know, emotions come up in relationships, they're going to happen. And I think there's this, people get this idea that they can like have these awesome relationships without any negative emotions that come up or any difficulties whatsoever. And that's just obviously not realistic, but also not really the goal. The goal is to manage your, those kinds of difficult emotions within relationships. The thing is, is that we all kind of go about this in different ways, right? And that's where the real problems start is when we are trying to use one emotional strategy and somebody else in the relationship is using another one, or we don't recognize somebody else's emotional strategy, we take it personally, all of those kind of things, right? So some of those strategies, or some of just like the basic strategies we use to regulate emotions in our relationships. Uh, I, I have a, like, a list of, like, 6 here that are the most common ones. So first of all, there's people who just openly express their feelings, right? They share, they share them openly. That can usually be healthy, but sometimes it's not, right? You have the suppressors then too, the people who just avoid feelings at all costs. They hide them, they cover them up, they don't even acknowledge them themselves. They might not even know they're, they're having these emotions. You have distraction, redirecting attention away from your emotions. People who withdraw, of course, you know, they just kind of shut down. You have the vocalizers and the venters, the people who are like coming at you, you know, a lot. And that's one strategy we might use if we're overwhelmed. We tend to vent. And then you have the reappraisers too, people who kind of try to change the way they view emotions within their own relationships, kind of in the moment. And some of these, what we're gonna see is that some of these strategies work in some instances and sometimes they don't in others. Okay.

My hunch, and I've not looked into this, but my hunch is that generally people of the opposite type probably work well together. Like somebody who's naturally a suppressor probably works well with somebody who's an over-expressor because you can kind of compensate for one another.

Yes, I think if you're aware of that. If you're not aware of it and you're expecting somebody else to have a certain type expecting a certain style and they're not showing that style, then that can cause problems. But yeah, I think if you're aware, which I think that's kind of the goal we're going through this is just the awareness of both your own styles and your strategies and someone else's.

Sure.

So yeah, but I would agree with that for the most part. Yeah. But broadly speaking, more broadly speaking, people kind of approach relationships in two broad ways. One is the prevention-focused and then we have the promotion-focused. Focused. So prevention focused are these people who just want stability in their relationships, emotional stability in their relationships. They want peace, they want calm, um, and so they'll tend to use those styles more like suppression and distraction, uh, more often. But then you have the promotion focused people too, who— what really, what their goal is, is like emotional intimacy and closeness, right? And so they're okay with some emotional turmoil as long as they're getting towards that goal of emotional closeness.

Especially because sometimes emotional turmoil or drama can make you feel close.

Right, right. And sometimes that's what they're going for too. And so again, so sometimes you have those two opposite, uh, strategies going on at the same time, and that can either— if you're aware of it, then great. If you're not, then that can cause some issues. So yeah, the conflicts kind of arise though, um, when a promotion-focused partner will seek like, like immediate, uh, emotional resolution when you have a prevention-focused partner who just stability. And so we get that. And this is going to overlap, as we'll see, with things like your attachment style and stuff like that, which we'll get into. But just being aware that, like, if you do have a partner who has a style that, like, isn't, isn't the one you would prefer, um, that's not necessarily a bad thing because you can work with it. Again, just the awareness that we're trying to develop here is really the goal. And then being able to, you know, these emotions, again, they're going to come up. It's going to be difficult at times, but recognizing that somebody is using a certain strategy over another one, I think that does help a lot, the awareness around it anyway.

Yeah, or just knowing that it's like, it's not that there's anything wrong with them. It's just, that's just the way they are. That's the way they cope with intense emotions and, you know, being able to compensate for that or adjust to each other or whatnot.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, and so, you know, as part of that too, I'm kind of rifling through these frameworks here, but there's regulation styles within these relationships too, within relationships too. So again, you do have like the suppressors versus the expressors. Then you also have the externalizers versus the internalizers. Okay. Okay, so externalizers are the people, like if big emotions come up, they'll tend to just go outside of themselves and blame people. So this is a really common one I think you see with people who kind of, they're more of the promotion focus. They want like some resolution, but they'll also like blame other people for emotions. So if they get upset, it's somebody else's fault that made them upset. Or if they're jealous, it's because of somebody else did something that made them jealous, right? They don't take any responsibility for it necessarily. But on the other end of the spectrum too, you have the internalizers. And these are the people who tend to blame themselves a little bit more, but they'll also kind of shut down a little more easily too. Okay, interesting. Yeah, maybe they have an externalizing partner that externalizes and blames them. They're like, yeah, they're right, it's my fault. Now I'm going to shut down and I'm going to like make myself small in the relationship and not work through these emotions because these emotions are obviously dangerous, right?

Fun fact. Yeah, so women are disproportionately— have a much higher rate of depression than men.

Yes.

And men have a much higher rate of suicide than in women. The reason for both of those things is that it's suspected that women tend to be internalizers. They tend to blame and focus on themselves around their problems. And men tend to be externalizers. They tend to look at something they can do to resolve their problems. And so they blow their brains out. So, you know. Yeah.

Yeah.

Take that one to work and tell everyone in the break room.

Okay. I don't know where to go with that one so far.

Just another day at the Solve Podcast.

A little nugget of wisdom for you there. Okay, okay. Well, I mean, you, you can see how these dynamics can escalate to something where, like, it makes you miserable within a relationship if you're not aware of these. Again, if you're internalizing versus externalizing or whatever you're doing, suppressing versus expressing too much, that's obviously, like, this is a big source of, uh, strife in relationships, right? Okay. So the— but the goal here is to be able to— again, I, I think a big, a big goal of this section is to just get you aware. I think the awareness around this is going to get you like at least half the way there, if not, if not more. I mean, there's obviously some going to be some regulation strategies we go through, but just being aware of your own style versus your partner's style, uh, and how they express or, or suppress their emotions within the relationship, that gets goes a long way because you can understand somebody and that creates again that gap we were talking about where you can navigate these emotions together and co-regulate.

I was gonna save this for later 'cause we're gonna talk a little bit later about, you know, how to co-regulate in a healthy way in a relationship or how to have a healthy relationship essentially. But because you've brought it up a few times, the importance of the awareness, I would even go as far to say that it is, the awareness is just a prerequisite to all this stuff. And I wanna say this is simply because I get, I've gotten so many, probably thousands of emails at this point over the years from people in very unhappy relationships who say, I've read all these books, I did this seminar, I've worked on myself, I understand, you know, I'm avoidant attachment and I'm a suppressor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but my partner doesn't care about any of this stuff. They don't wanna go to therapy, they don't wanna talk about it. And they're like, what do I do? And the fact of the matter is, is that the thing that's so hard about relationships is that you can do all the work on this stuff, but if your partner is not doing shit, like nothing's going to change. You have to have both people on board and at least doing the work, you know, and the work, it may not work out like it may not go anywhere, right? But at least you need both people trying. And so if one person's just checked out and is like, I'm fine, I don't know what your problem is, then you're kind of stuck. So the awareness piece, it's not only is it, you know, probably the 80%, it is a prerequisite. Like you can't really do anything with any of this unless both you and your partner or you and the other person, whoever the other person in the relationship is, or at least like, thinking about some of this stuff or care about some of this stuff.

Right, yeah, yeah. And that's why we're gonna talk about co-regulation. It has to be like, there is, yeah, it takes two to tango.

Takes two.

Right, yeah.

Yeah.

And have a relationship and all of that, obviously. Yeah. Okay, cool.

And by the way, you know, snide, distasteful suicide jokes aside, it probably is worth mentioning that there is a lot of data showing that the two genders process emotions or deal with emotions differently within relationships. You know, men tend to be more suppressors. They tend to push things aside and ignore. I mean, it's like, think of all the stereotypes. Mm-hmm. They're stereotypes for a reason. There's a lot of data backing them up. And I know that's not like super PC to say, but it like, it's a thing and it's important to know that. And it's, again, it comes back to to understanding that people are just different. Like, you can't— like, you have to work with them where they are and not expect them to completely change and reinvent themselves for this reason or that. And it— and it— and when it comes down to it, it's like certain people, you know, we've already talked about how a lot of our emotional nature is biologically based, genetically based. I think it's important to have realistic expectations for you and your partner to understand that, like, you know, they're not gonna completely reinvent themselves overnight or in a seminar or over 6 months of therapy. Like, they can get better, they can adjust, they can improve, but like, they're not gonna be a different person. And so, you know, it's, I guess the lesson here is to just like, ultimately you have to love them for who they are, not who you wish they were. And if that's not the case, then, you know, none of this stuff is gonna make much of a difference.

Right, not another prerequisite, I think too. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Okay, yeah. Well, I think with that though, we can get into a little bit of the attachment stuff. Okay, we don't gotta go too deep on this. I think at some point we're gonna do a relationships episode, right? Oh, for sure. Attachment's going to be very, very central to that, for sure. Anybody out there, I mean, you've probably heard about attachment at this point. Anybody who's in the dating world or anything like that and listen to this podcast, you probably know your attachment style. If you don't, we'll go over them really quick. But I just, to preface all of this too, just so you know, if you don't already, your attachment style is not destiny, okay? There, there are things you can do with, you can work with it, maybe Maybe you can't completely change it, but you can definitely work with it. Again, going back to the awareness part, being aware of some of this stuff is a first step, but then also working within the relationship within the bounds of your attachment style. We'll go over how to do that, but just to preface all of that with that.

So give us like the 5-minute—

sure, yeah—

summary and explanation of like where attachment styles came from. Talk about Bowlby and Ainsworth, right? All that stuff.

Yeah, so Bowlby and Ainsworth, they were these two researchers back in the like '70s, '60s, '70s, 80s, um, they formulated this idea of attachment styles. And where it kind of starts and originally comes from is the attachment you have to your primary caregivers growing up, okay? So you learn from them, you learn emotional regulation styles from your, uh, from your parents or whoever was your primary caregivers as a, as a young, uh, as a baby even, as the moment you're born to probably 7 or 8 years old or more.

Yeah. One way to think about it is like when you're a young infant, like your parents' emotional regulation style will kind of like, it's almost like making a key.

Yeah.

Right? Like you as an infant, you kind of shape yourself into the key that unlocks your parents' affection and attention. And then as you grow up, that key is like solidified. And so then you kind of go out into the world looking for somebody in the world that has a key that you can unlock.

Right. That's a good— I like that.

Yeah, man, I should be an author. No, that's a good explanation for that because it really just came up with that.

Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, I like that.

I like that.

It does. It like the, the relationship, uh, your parents when you're like a baby, they're kind of showing you this is what the world is like. You, you're defenseless, you're completely dependent on them, and so you're looking to to them for every single cue as to what's going on in your environment. What kind of environment are we in? What— how do I need to prepare myself emotionally? So you have parents, uh, you know, if your parents were— when you cried, if they came to you and they comforted you, um, and were responsive to your needs and stuff like that, that usually leads to what they call a secure attachment, where you're able to handle those big emotions because you're like, okay, it's okay to have these emotions. My parents really responded to them in a way that made me feel like it was okay to have these emotions and that I could regulate these emotions as well. Okay, and then they were held out, they were there to help me soothe my big emotions at any time that I had and help me regulate them. And that's how you learned how to regulate your emotions. There's other parenting styles though too that will, um, produce what they call insecure attachments. Okay, one of those is, is the anxious attachment.

Right?

Which is, um, if you had a parent that, uh, was— they weren't comfortable with your emotions, uh, necessarily, and it became clear to you that they weren't comfortable, and, uh, you, you learned that having any sort of emotional reaction, um, when you needed, uh, when you had some emotional need that wasn't being met, they, uh, weren't very responsive to that. And so you The theory goes is that you will be highly sensitive to rejection as you grow up as well. You kind of need more reassurance that you're not gonna be abandoned. So you kind of get afraid that you're gonna be left alone and not be able to deal with your emotions. You don't learn to deal with those big emotions in a very healthy way. And you kind of, instead you develop a style that you end up spiraling a lot with your emotional reactions. Especially within close relationships as well.

And that's the anxious—

that's the anxious type, right? Then another insecure type is also the avoidant type, okay? And this is usually when you learn that having— again, it's another reaction to your caregivers showing that, you know, having these big emotions isn't appropriate. And they usually in some way, um, uh, they, they kind of encourage you to kind of shut your emotions down and not express them them at all. Okay, so as you grow into adulthood and you come to form your own relationships, uh, those, those emotional— that emotional, um, kind of strategy solidifies, and you are more likely to be like the withdrawer or the suppressor in the relationship. And you, you avoid those emotions because you're like, oh, this is a big emotion coming up, I'm just going to shove it down, right? And so you keep people at a distance because you think close relationships, uh, uh, are, are dangerous, or those emotions that are related, um, related to those closer relationships are dangerous and they can be, um, harmful and hurtful to you. Yeah, those are kind of the two big insecure types. But then there's another insecure type too called the disorganized, and they're kind of like the worst of all worlds basically, right? They're both anxious and avoidant. They want closeness, but then when they get it, they pull away.

Yeah.

Um, And this is a pretty small minority of people who exhibit this attachment style, but it is kind of, it's like these people are, they tend to be just kind of a mess.

Yeah.

So they'll be both emotionally explosive and they'll withdraw when, at different times. And it just seems to be unpredictable really. Yeah. And that's why they call it disorganized.

One way to think about it, you know, for those of you who are single and dating out there, if you're like talking to a person who like, will text message you 8 times in a single night and asking where you are all the time, wanting to know everything you're doing, who you're hanging out with, why you didn't invite them, that's an anxious.

Right, right.

They're clingy people, right? Yeah, they're the clingers, they're super needy. And part of it is that they, as you pointed out, they never learned how to regulate their emotions alone. And so they are like constantly seeking somebody to co-regulate them at all times. The avoidants, on the other hand, are the people who you might text 5 times over the course of a week and not get a single response because they are just so kind of detached, withdrawn, almost uncomfortable with intimacy.

Right.

And they have the opposite problem. They're— they've become very comfortable regulating their own emotions, but they never learned how to co-regulate. So introducing another person into their emotional regulation system introduces unpredictability and chaos. And so like, that freaks them out. And so they like try to keep you at arm's length all the time. And of course, uh, in, uh, pure cosmic humor, um, anxious types tend to spend most of their lives chasing avoidants, and avoidants tend to spend most of their lives, uh, running away from anxious people. Because the truth is, is that secure types don't really have time for any of this bullshit. A secure type will look at an anxious and be like, "Dude, stop texting me. What is your problem?" And a secure type will look at an avoidant and be like, "Dude, return a text message. What is your problem?" And just not have time for any of this. So the anxious and the avoidants usually end up in a shit spiral together.

Right, yeah. I think the modern dating market is full of that. Everybody thinks, oh, dating is trash and it's because you have the anxious and the avoidant constantly getting together and nobody's aware of what's going on half the time.

I almost wonder if like, like because dating apps in a way like actually increase the ability to sort people right together. So I almost wonder if like that's a byproduct of that, the increased sorting ability, like because maybe anxious and avoidance are no longer being exposed to secure types. They're only being exposed to each other. And so you get all this frustration because I like— and it's been a while since I've read up on attachment theory, so correct me if I'm wrong here, but like my understanding is that generally speaking, the insecure types, um, one of the ways that they kind of get over their insecurity is they like run into and have relationships with secure types. Yeah, right. Like it's the anxious type, uh, spends time with a secure type And the secure type's like, hey, relax. Like, you don't have to text me 8 times. Like, I'm going to hang out with you again, I promise. Right? And it's like, it helps the anxious person chill out. And similarly, the avoidant spends time with a secure person and the secure person's like, hey man, you know what would like make this easier is if you actually like took the time to respond to me occasionally. Like, that would be really nice. You know, no pressure, by the way. Right?

Right.

And then the avoidant's like, oh, okay, cool. Like, I can I can open myself up. But it's like if they're just never getting that exposure, then they just, they end up in their own little spin cycle and they never get out. So I don't know, that's like a harebrained theory.

Yeah, no, I think it makes a lot of sense though. If you're, I mean, if you're creating a dating market that's full of people who have had trouble dating, probably because they are insecurely attached, then yeah, you're gonna, It's a sorting mechanism in the worst possible configuration. And yeah, I do think that happens. So that's kind of the standard advice to insecurely attached people is to go find somebody who's secure, right? And like you already mentioned, or a lot of the time at least, secure people are just not gonna put up with the bullshit, right? They have boundaries and they're just like, oh, this person's like way too, they're overbearing. Over the top and coming at me, no, I'm walking away. I feel secure enough that I can walk away and find somebody else who's not gonna cause me the problems. Same thing with the avoidance is like, oh, they're not even trying, then fine, I'm done. So, but the, yeah, the advice is, oh, just go find somebody who's perfectly secure, you know, and is gonna put up with your bullshit. And I think for one, I think that's a, it puts the responsibility on somebody else. For you to deal with your own emotional bullshit. Yeah. And so I just, that right there I think is a bad strategy. Yeah. I think we, again, you need to have what they call earned security, which is one, like we've already mentioned, the awareness around your attachment style and how you regulate emotionally and the awareness of the other person as well. But also like you, there's all sorts of different ways. You don't have to, there's low risk ways ways you can kind of wade into being more secure as well. Yeah, right. So, um, I know for me anyway, so I was a pretty hardcore avoidant, um, for a long time.

Same.

Yeah, yeah, you and I both. I was actually a little bit more anxious. We can talk about this.

I got to go.

I'll, uh, see you later. Were you ever that avoidant? You ever just like, I'm—

I never ghosted people like that, that, uh, I could never— I'm too— I have too much integrity to go somewhere.

Yeah, I don't— I would always try to be like, oh, okay, sorry, this isn't working out. Yeah, it would be short and like just get out.

I'd be blunt, but yeah, I'd at least let the person know.

Yeah. There are though— I know for me anyway, one of the ways I slowly got over this, and I didn't really realize it until after it had happened, but I decided— I was like, okay, um, even in friendships and stuff like that, I would be a little bit avoidant, keep people at arm's length and all that. But I think actually friendships are a good way to start, or, or family members or whatever, to at least open up a little bit and be a little bit more expressive. Um, and that kind of can set the emotional— there's— it's a low-risk way. It's not like you're going to be rejected, you know, by a friend, like romantically rejected by a friend or family member. So there's a lower risk way of—

yeah, I, I think that gets into a an important point, which is that you, it, you don't have to date a secure person. You can be friends with a secure person. You can, yeah, you can find a secure coworker and work with them. Like, it's really like all a secure attachment type is, is just somebody who is like, has a healthy form of emotional regulation and can set boundaries, as you said, right? And so if you spend time with that person, you can, even if you're not dating them, you can kind of observe and and understand what they're doing and how they function. I've always said that attachment theory is an excellent descriptor of relationships, but I'm not convinced it's a good prescriptor of relationships. Like it's not clear, if you're an anxious attachment style, it's not clear what you should go try to do based on that information. It's just like, yeah, this is a useful description of like, your emotional process, like where you feel anxiety and insecurity and why you're feeling it.

Okay, so how do you think you have become more secure over time and how did you do that?

I think part of it—

Or are you? Are you still just super avoidant?

I do think I've become much more secure. Yeah. Some of it was like kind of brute force. So I look at my early romantic relationships and I was definitely in relationships with with insecure women.

Yeah.

I was an insecure man and I was in a relationship with an insecure woman. I definitely think my wife is probably the most secure person I've dated. But like also, I like obviously like everybody, like she had her own issues. I think it's just by the time I met her, I had seen— again, it comes back to the awareness. Like I had seen the story play out so many times in my adult life. And like watched myself sabotage perfectly good situations for no reason and like pick up and move to the other side of the world for no good reason. And I finally hit a point in my late 20s where I'm like, okay, dude, like you can't just keep doing this. Like if you keep doing this, you're gonna be one of those old bald guys on White Lotus. Like that is your future. You're going to be, you're going to be in Thailand with like a 20-year-old Thai girl who doesn't speak English. And, uh, and you're going to have like a shady history with arms smuggling. So you need to learn how to have relationships, man. And, um, and so I really, I really had to consciously, and I'm still having to consciously do that, or I'm still having to consciously do this in my, in my personal life, my, my relationship, my friendships and social life. I'm still not good at it. As an avoidant, I never learned like good social hygiene of like following up with people and inviting people. Like, you know, if I'm going to go for a walk on the beach, like inviting a friend to come with me, like I never learned how to do that shit. So I'm still trying to figure that out. But on the relationship side, it really was just more of a brute force thing. I definitely had a lot of avoidant type insecurity in my relationship with my wife, but I just remember checking in with myself frequently and being like, okay, is there actually a problem? No, there's not actually a problem.

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

Am I making the problem? Yeah, I think I'm probably making the problem. So let's not make the problem. Like that was kind of the agreement that I made with myself is like, look, you don't have to stay with her forever. You don't have to, like, do anything you don't want to do. It's just like, don't invent a problem where there's not one.

Right.

And that was like what I tried to stick to. And, you know, over the course of multiple years, it slowly got easier, right?

Yeah. And that's one of the issues I think I have with the, the relatively bad prescriptive advice that comes out of attachment theory, I think, is that a lot of times is with the, especially with avoidance, they don't, there's, first of all, there's not a whole lot of advice they give to avoidance. It's usually, they're usually targeting anxious people. Yes. Because they are—

'Cause the anxious ones are the ones that care enough to get on—

Exactly.

On YouTube or Instagram and look this stuff up. The avoidance don't fucking care.

The avoidance don't care. They're like the, we're like the hardest demographic to reach 'cause we just don't really care.

I don't care. I don't care. I'm happy alone. I don't care.

And so, yeah. So it's not like, it's, you're right, I think when you have an anxious and avoidant together, I think it, for me anyway, through my experience, it was like, okay, I needed to be the one as the avoidant to start the process of, hey, how do we address this? Because the anxious person, in my experience anyway, is just, they're usually like just go, go, going, and they need just a little bit of reassurance at first. And I think that's the seed I think that you can start on. Down. And that has to kind of come from the avoidant person. In my experience, that's how it's worked anyway. I became aware kind of later in my adult life too of just how little reassurance that you have to give somebody sometimes, usually anyway. It's just like, okay, they just need a little bit of reassurance in the moment. And that brings their nervous system down a little bit, regulates their emotions a little bit. And then now you have a space to negotiate what's gonna happen from there. Yeah.

Well, we'll come back to this. I want to get to— there's like a section I've got here called like rules and agreements. And I think what you just said is like super important and ties into that. But I think this is like actually a nice segue to just talk about like what a toxic relationship is.

Ah, okay. Yeah.

And what it looks like.

Yeah.

Because it is, if we define a healthy relationship as two people who are effectively co-regulating together, um, that implies that they are, they are A, able to regulate their emotions by themselves, and then B, they're actually helping the other person be more effective at regulating their emotions. And this is kind of what I was getting at about like the, the diametrically opposed regulation styles. Um, you know, I, I am a natural suppressor. I'm like, I, I I am totally, you know, I come from a family and a world that like every problem you just brush under the rug and pretend like it wasn't there. Whereas my, my wife is like 100% expresser and like very overt and like very promotionally focused. And we know that about each other. And it actually works really well because it's like she can tell when I'm kind of upset about something and not saying anything and she can kind of pull it out of me. And similarly, like when she kind of overreacts or starts to get sucked down a drama hole, I can pull her out and be like, "That's not worth it. Let's let that go. Let's pretend that's not there." You know? And it's so we're able to balance each other. And I think even though we're both very effective at regulating our emotions individually, I think when we're together, we're actually even more effective. So like, I think that's kind of the ideal, what you're going for.

Right.

Within a relationship. Now, a toxic relationship is the complete opposite of that. It's— and it's generally two individuals who are bad at regulating their emotions solo, and then they come together and they get even worse. Okay. And generally speaking, the reason that happens is you have each individual is bad at doing it by themselves, and so they, they need their partner to come in and compensate for that. So it's like I can't deal with any of my own problems, so I need a partner who's gonna come in and be willing to deal with my problems for me. And as soon as you do that, now it's like, now I'm not taking any responsibility for my own actions, and now I'm like developing a victim complex and I need to be saved all the time. And now my partner is like, it's putting all this like undue pressure on my partner to like always be there and be responsible for everything that happens to me. And then you start, falling into this like victim-savior cycle that never ends.

Dependency, yeah.

Which is, yeah, which is essentially codependency, right? And these toxic cycles, they can actually work in both directions, just in different contexts. I always like to think of it as like there's a person in a relationship who's like playing with matches near gasoline and then there's like the other person in the relationship is like holding the fire extinguisher and it's like, and they, they like both sign up for this and like keep doing it because they get to, A, they get to feel the excitement of the drama of like watching the fire start and then watching it get put out over and over again. But B, because the person who's like lighting the matches gets to feel saved periodically. Oh yeah. It's like, oh my God, this horrible thing happened to me, but Drew. Drew showed up. He's my rock. Oh my God. He took care of everything. It was so amazing. And then like a week later, lighting matches again, you know, like starting shit, you know, sabotaging stuff so that Drew can come save the day again. And they get to feel like, you know, I don't know, the, the damsel in distress again. Although I say damsel in distress, like men totally do this too.

Oh yeah.

And then on the other side, if you're the savior, I mean, what feels better than saving somebody? Right?

Yeah.

Like, oh my God, you're so like, look how needed I am. Holy shit.

And not only that, you get to like avoid all your own emotional shit and take care of somebody else's.

Exactly. Exactly. It's like, who cares that my life is completely falling apart? Like I gotta go save that person over there. And so you get into this like, this little shit spiral that just— and it— the thing is, is like a drug, it escalates because it's eventually, you know, if you're, if you're causing the same drama over and over, well, that drama, it starts to get old, it starts to get normalized. So you need to cause a little bit of a bigger drama next time to get the same kick, to get that same feeling of like, oh my God, I just got saved. And sure enough, the savior needs to like a bigger challenge to overcome. 'Cause you know, that first drama, it's like, ah, that's table stakes. Like let's go all in here. And so you get this escalation that starts happening to all the drama and it, and yeah, it goes to a dark place. I feel like everybody listening has probably either been in one of these spirals or has been close to somebody in one of these spirals. And it, it gets very ugly, very ugly.

Yeah. Okay, so yeah, that's a toxic relationship is that spiral. You get addicted to that.

Yes. Yeah. And here's like actually the saddest part about all of this. People fall into toxic relationships because they are not able to effectively regulate their own emotions or manage their own emotions. And so they start unnecessarily relying on somebody else to manage their emotions for them. But because the toxic spiral gets so destructive and so turbulent and so like there's so much like stress and emotion and drama and sometimes trauma involved that generally when people come out of the toxic relationship, they're even less able to regulate their emotions effectively. Like a lot of people can actually make themselves worse off for being in that relationship. And so it is something to, be very, very careful of and, you know, and try to stop the roller coaster as soon as you can, wherever it is.

But when you do get addicted to that though, Mark, you know, normal, a normal healthy relationship looks very boring.

Yes.

To those people too. Like, do you just, you need like a, I don't know, just like go into rehab and do a detox? Like, where's reset for that, you know?

Yeah. I mean, this gets into a little bit, you know, I could, I could pull out my soapbox again here. I, and this ties in a little bit to what we were talking about earlier about culture and how, you know, Westerners tend to associate like happiness with excitement.

Right.

Right.

High arousal states. Yeah.

Right. Like people mistakenly associate romance with excitement, with intensity of emotion, and especially young people. And it's actually not. Like a healthy relationship, yeah, it is dull. It is, from the outside, it is definitely boring, but on the inside it's peaceful. It's like very harmonious. And it's funny, it is very like, actually my experience is quite analogous to the experience of quitting drinking. The biggest struggle for me when I quit drinking was boredom, right? It was like drinking made everything fun and suddenly you don't have the thing making everything fun. And so everything feels a little bit boring and you really have to work a bit harder to find stuff that's fun to you. But then when you do, the fun is actually, it's like a peaceful, relaxing fun. It's a sustainable fun. It's like a fun that you're like, oh, I could do this forever. I don't ever get sick of it. I don't ever wake up hungover or tired. I don't ever like have ups and downs and mood swings around it. It's just fun. And I think that's very analogous to like a toxic relationship and a healthy relationship. A toxic relationship, man, when that roller coaster's up, goddamn, it is nice. It is like dizzying how exciting and overwhelming the passion and the romance can be. But man, when it's down, it is fucking brutal. And once you've ridden that ride up and down enough times, no pun intended, it is like, it's not sustainable. And I would say a healthy love, it is like much more even-keeled, consistent, sustainable. And after a while, I don't know, you end up in these situations where it's just like, I don't know, like sitting on the couch reading a book together is like actually more appealing than going to a crazy party and getting fucked up and screwing all night. Like, I don't know, like it's, maybe I'm just old.

Oh yeah, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I think you're right though. I think there is just a diminishing return to that excitement that you eventually, you just—

You wear it out.

Wear it out. Yeah, yeah.

And it is unsustainable.

So, right, for sure.

Yeah. So, okay, let's talk about how do we get from an unhealthy place to a healthy place. And, you know, step number one is the one that we've been banging on about for 30 minutes now, which is really just try to understand these patterns both in yourself and in your partner. And also your partner should ideally understand these patterns both in themselves and in you. And it doesn't necessarily mean digging into all this science and research that we're talking about here. Like, they don't need to go read a book on attachment theory or understand if they're promotion-focused or prevention-focused. Like, that stuff's nice, but like, ultimately it's just getting an awareness and understanding between each other of like, this is kind of how I am, this is kind of how I function, this is what feels natural to me.

This is what I need.

This is what I need, this is what I want, this is what I can give. And I think, you know, the cliché advice of just good communication, like it's really this, it's really just like making sure you're both very aware of the emotional dynamics that are going on and making sure you're on the same page that you both kind of agree on what's going on. It's like, okay, like, yeah, when we fight, you tend to do this and I tend to do this, you know, instead of trying to change each other, it's like, okay, how can we manage that? Remember, it's all the way back to the top of the show, the goal here is not to change an emotion. It's to change how you— it's how to adapt or manage that emotion, how to leverage that emotion in a way that's useful or productive. So the same is true within relationships. If your partner tends to get really sad and withdraw, don't try to convince them to stop being sad and withdrawing. Find a way to work with the sadness and withdrawal in a way that's productive and useful. It's, that's like, you know, that's the long and short of it. All right. So step one is just gaining an overall awareness, like getting a clear picture of like, what are your patterns? What tendencies do you guys have, et cetera? I think step two is then recognizing that there are, it's not that like any of this stuff is right or wrong. Like it's not, necessarily better to be an expressor versus a suppressor. It's not necessarily better to be somebody who needs space versus somebody who needs closeness.

It's—

there are healthy and unhealthy ways to do each one, right? So for example, an unhealthy way to suppress is to just sit there and not say what you think, right? Is just be like, I don't want to deal with this. I'm just going to say whatever gets me out of this situation. A healthy way to suppress, because some people need time to process. A healthy way to suppress is like if a conversation starts to get really intense and high stakes, to simply look at your partner and be like, I need some time to process this. Can we come back to this in like 20 minutes?

Right.

Or tomorrow or whatever. Right. And, and if your partner understands that, hey, you're, you're a person who needs time to process things, like it takes a while for the emotions to kind of work their way through your head. Then they should be okay with it. Like that's part of the understanding.

There's two parts to that though too, right? There's that I need the time, but then also I am going to come back to this. Yes, yes, yes. But commit to coming back to it. And that usually puts the other person at ease a little bit too. Yeah.

Anyway. One of the things that as an avoidant is like a fucking lifesaver is alone time's not personal. It's, you know, there's, so there's, there is a healthy way to avoid and there's an unhealthy way to avoid. The unhealthy way to avoid is to just fucking ghost somebody and spend a week by yourself and not text or reply or whatever. The healthy way to avoid is, I think this is one of the things that I started doing differently with my wife that was very effective, is at some point I just told her, I was like, look, I need alone time. Like, I just need to be alone periodically and it has nothing to do with you. Like, you're great. "Hey, this is great, but I'm going to go to this place for 4 days." Yeah. Yeah. And the first time, the first couple times it made her really uncomfortable, but she trusted me. We did it. It was fine. It went great. And throughout our relationship, there's pretty frequent times where I'm like, "You know, I kind of want to just take a trip by myself." Yeah. Like go somewhere by myself. She's cool with it. So again, it's that awareness, the communication of it. I would say there's also, you know, we talked about cognitive reappraisal. I think one of the benefits of a close relationship is that you can leverage each other's reappraisal of situations, right? So it's like if you're really good at reappraising, say, like failures in your career and your partner's not, they can rely on you to help them reappraise that situation. You can be like, no, no, no, no, you didn't screw up. This is what happened. Think of it this way. It's just a lesson. You're going to get better. Similarly, it's like if you have a deep insecurity around, I don't know, something in your family and they're actually very good at reappraising their family problems, they can come to you and say, no, no, no, don't. It's not about you. She just needs to be this way because of this. And just realize it's that, right? So it's like when done correctly, reappraisals can be very, very effective. Like if your partner is better at reappraising certain areas of their life than you are, you can like lean on that and vice versa. But it also works the other way. If your partner reappraises things in like very fucked up ways and has like very negative, destructive beliefs about things, that can also influence you. So, You need to be very careful and make sure that you're not, A, like reappraising your partner's situation in a really destructive and spiteful way, and then B, not accepting their reappraisals in a destructive way either. And it's hard because generally speaking, like if we're bad at our own cognitive reappraisals, like if we're bad at regulating ourselves, we are gonna have a vested interest in like, making sure other people agree with us. Like, this is the other thing about security and insecurity is like, secure people don't care what you believe. Insecure people really need you to believe what they believe.

Be on your side.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so if somebody's very insecure about something in their life and they're in a relationship with you and that situation comes up in your life, man, they're gonna push their views very hard onto you. And so, It's just something to be aware of and make sure. And so for this reason, to make sure you keep like the healthy co-regulation going, this brings us to step 3, which is what I call rules, principles, agreements. I talked to a friend once who said that like him and his wife have a marriage constitution, which I thought was really cool, actually. It's like super nerdy, but like he's going to say, but it was basically like they sat down after like all of these conversations about each other and they kind of just wrote down like, you know, who they are, what they need, what they like, and then some of these rules and principles that they've created for themselves. And so when I say rules and principles, I mean you should make up your rules and principles together of like what your relationship needs. And it's gonna be different for every single relationship. And these rules and principles, they're not, there's nothing moralistic about them. They're completely practical. I'll give you some examples. So in my marriage, the word fine is like a 4-letter word. Okay. And there's a reason for that. And that is that it's, A, my wife has a lot of negative associations with it, I guess, from her family and her upbringing. And then B, I am absolutely a prevention-focused, I'm a suppressor and I'm also very easygoing. And so one of my, like, we caught very early on in our relationship that like one of my favorite ways to avoid anything, oh, it's fine. No, no, no, it's fine. Keep doing that. And it's like, meanwhile I'm like inside, I'm like fucking seething and I'm like, no, no, no, it's fine. Yeah, don't worry about it. Yeah. So it's, the word fine is a 4-letter word.

Okay.

Anything important, any topic that's important, any debate, argument, discussion, fight, the word fine's not allowed.

Okay.

It's what do you feel? Mm-hmm. Do you like it or dislike it? It, it, no, there's no fine. You either like it or hate it. Tell me now. And it's so like, that's actually been incredibly useful because it, it kicks me outta my defense mechanism and it like, prevents her from getting triggered. All right, so another example from my relationship. I am definitely, like I said, I'm a suppressor. I need time to process emotions. I get angry very slowly, very seldom, but when I do, it's like, it's like a very slow, intense experience for me. And so my default as a suppressor, as an avoidant, sometimes I just storm out of the fucking house. I'm like, I'm like, "Mm, peace.

I'm out of here." I've been there too, yeah.

Yeah, I'm like, "Don't fucking talk to me." And I go outside and I'll walk around the block or something. And in previous relationships and the first couple times it happened in this relationship, they'd call me, they'd come out, run after me. And of course that just makes me even angrier. At some point along the way, my wife learned, just let me go. I'll be back in an hour and I'll be like, way calmer and I will like process things and I'll like have the right thing to say. Whereas if you just like pressure me in that moment, I'm probably gonna say something that I regret or that is like not actually reflective of how I feel overall. So that's another one. Similarly, you know, I, it takes me a long time to get upset, but then once I get upset, I get over it pretty quickly. Whereas my wife, like, she is a slower processing on the backside of a fight. So I used to, early in the relationship, I used to like always try to make things okay. I'm like, hey, we're okay, right? Like, it's okay. And she'd be like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now I just know, I'm like, okay, just leave her alone. Like, when she feels better, she'll come to me.

Yeah.

Like, she'll come say she's sorry when she's like, when she's gotten to that point. But it's like, she just, Travis just needs a few hours and I'm going to go in the garage or something and find something to do. So those are some examples from my own personal relationship of recognizing each other's patterns, creating little rules and principles, agreeing on certain things. There are plenty more examples. I'm curious if you've had any rules or principles like that in relationships in the past that have been effective.

I mean, for me anyway, it was definitely like I was more quick to anger or quick to get emotionally charged up. And I would also take a while to get over it as well. What I've gotten better at though is when those emotions do come up is I've gotten a lot better at pausing and being like, okay, what's the actual best way to do this? Again, it goes back to that gap we've talked about. You know, you have the emotional reaction the behavior, and then you have that interpretation within between. And I've gotten better at expanding that gap in there. And that has helped tremendously in all sorts of relationships that I've had. Whereas before, if somebody would say something that I found like insulting or it was very, I'd take it very personally, then I would just immediately react and lash back out and, you know, do the avoidant thing and be like, "I'm putting up a barrier here." And now I've been way better at just kind of like stopping And then, again, this kind of goes back to the avoidant thing, avoidant versus anxious thing, and the avoidant kind of taking the lead here is I stop and like, okay, what does this person need right now? And I can like kind of stop and let's address that. So like just an example, like I just remember like when I was younger, somebody would like, a romantic partner or somebody would snap at me for something, you know, I was doing something stupid or something that'd annoy them, it'd snap at me and I would just I would just go right back at him and be like, "Okay, put up my defenses and I'm gonna fight back." More recently, what's though in the last few years, I've learned to, okay, stop, apologize to them. Like, "I'm sorry that like upset you, obviously. Can we talk about why that was?" And I've gotten a lot better at that anyway. So that's kind of like one of my rules right now anyway is just like, don't, just if you're feeling big emotions, just stop. And that takes a lot of practice. Practice, obviously. But if you're feeling, uh, like even upset or something like that, I've just noticed that in the past when I've reacted in those moments, that's always— almost always led to just a worse relationship just from that point forward even. So for sure, yeah, there's that for sure. But one thing too I want to ask you about in this though, how much of the relationship— like the, the idea of kind of like the shared emotional experience, like how much of the other person's emotional life is your responsibility when you are in a close intimate relationship with them? Because I think there's people who are like, well, but your emotions aren't my responsibility, right? True, they're not ultimately, but at the same time too, you're in a relationship with somebody at the same time. So where do you think the boundary is for that?

My just off the cuff thinking about it, like I don't feel responsible for my wife's emotions because obviously I can't control those. I do feel responsible for the relationship though. Right, right. So it's like, let's say she gets super upset. I don't feel responsible for her being upset, but I do feel responsible for supporting her or doing whatever I can or being available to her because that is in maintenance of the relationship. That is in the interest of the relationship. Right. Yeah. So I do think that is a very subtle and meaningful distinction. Because it's like if she started just getting upset all the fucking time, I like, I can't do anything about that. Like, it's, it's, you can't decide for other people what they should be feeling, should and shouldn't be feeling, but you can communicate. Well, again, it comes right back to the same point. It's like you can't change the emotion, but you can, you can adapt to the emotion and you can react to the emotion. And so the adaptation and the reaction are your responsibility. Okay.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

Okay.

I guess it's worth saying, and this is probably like the main point to wrap up on before we get to the final takeaways. Ultimately, the goal in all of this is kind of a regulatory flexibility. You know, we've now talked through probably half a dozen items in our emotional toolkit. Different skills that you can develop. In the relationship section, we've talked through different frameworks, you know, learning how to identify like what your personal proclivities are. And I think it's ultimately, it's not about changing yourself, it's just like becoming more, developing a wider range of emotional skill sets. So the same way it's like, you know, like if you're a very introverted person, The correct advice is not, oh, you should be extroverted, 'cause that's impossible. Right. No, the correct advice is it's great you're introverted, but you need to at least develop the skill of being extroverted for a short period of time when the situation requires it, because that flexibility is gonna serve you really well. There are gonna be moments in your life where you need to talk to a lot of people and to accomplish the things that you care about. And so if you don't develop that skill, then you're gonna be severely limited. And I think the same is true here. It's like, as a natural suppressor of my emotions, I had to spend many years developing the skill of expressing myself. It's not what comes naturally to me. It's not what I'm good at, but I learned how to do it because I'm often in situations, both in my marriage and other relationships where it's like, okay, like, this is a moment— like, here's a moment where I need to say what I feel. I need to speak up and say something, otherwise it's going to cause more problems, right? So it's developing that, that flexibility and that range of, um, of skills, uh, around these emotions that is like— I think that is kind of the end goal with all of this.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm similar where I tend to be more of a suppressor as well. And it's still, I'm still very bad at the expression part of it. But when I do it, even when I do it bad and clunky and awkwardly, it's still like better than not doing it.

Yes.

Right? So yeah, I totally agree with the, you need to have this toolkit and use it in a flexible way for sure.

Yeah.

But also, this is one thing I thought about. When we do talk about this emotional flexibility, Can you be too flexible? Can you, like, when you start pulling out like little Swiss Army knife of your emotional toolkit and you're using this little strategy over here and this little strategy over here, can you just become too flexible and not, like, that's kind of boring, right? In a relationship, if you're just always like, "Oh, I'm gonna be super flexible and we're gonna address this," right? Like, I don't know, part of what makes relationships interesting is This is the, you know, we've already talked about, this is the way how many years.

This is how challenging it is, right? Yeah. And that experience of growth together.

Yeah.

I mean, first of all, I don't think there's anybody who's like nails all this stuff all the time. For sure, yeah. I don't know, I'm like, it's reminding me of, and I think I talked to him about this on the podcast, I'm sure he wouldn't mind me talking about it, Derek Sivers. Yeah. He's one of the wisest people I know. And I think one of the reasons for that is that he does seem so skilled and flexible. At all this stuff and it does seem to come very naturally to him. I even asked him once, I was like, "Have you ever like not been happy?" And he was like, "Very rarely." Like there's been like very brief moments of unhappiness in his life. And he's like, "Yeah, it's—" I remember talking to him and I was like, "Do you think that's actually been kind of a problem?" And he was like, "Actually, yes, particularly in relationships." He's like, "I'm generally always happy. And so if my partner's not," I can draw. He's like, I can just kind of put myself in a little pretzel and be whatever they need me to be. And he was like, yeah, it's almost, it just creates like a very weird dynamic. I think there needs to be an interesting balance in a relationship in that both people need to be both self-sufficient and better with each other. Like, I think if either one of those things isn't true, then the relationship's probably not long-term sustainable in a super healthy way. And I guess if you are like so adept at regulating solo, then it's gonna be very, very hard for you to ever find a relationship that like makes you better. Mm-hmm. You're always gonna be the one giving and they're gonna be the ones receiving. And you're probably also gonna attract people that need a lot of help with regulation. So I don't know, that's like a spitball answer, but When you said that, the first person that came to mind was Derek.

Yeah, yeah, I do remember we talked about that. Yeah, yeah, interesting. Okay.

All right, so that is all of the relationship stuff. Before we wrap up here with all of our, our 80/20 and our takeaways and everything, I do wanna remind everybody that if you do wanna start implementing this stuff into your life and get better with your emotional regulation, improve your emotional toolkit, develop these skills, we have a 30-day challenge in the Momentum community. It's at findmomentum.com/emotions. It is— we've broken everything down from this episode into single daily practices or challenges. They are relatively easy to do. You can usually do them in 10 or 20 minutes each day. They're super helpful. We've like, we've really dug into what are the most useful exercises that you can get from this entire episode. And then you get to do it with the support and accountability of a community of thousands of people around the world. Who are working on the same shit as you. So it's, it's an awesome community. I'm in there every week. I'm interacting with people, giving people feedback, helping out, answering questions. So go to findmomentum.com/emotions. See you there. All right. It's 80/20 time, Drew. What is the— we covered a lot as usual, and we've now distilled at the end of every episode. We like to distill all of the advice, all of the most useful stuff that we've talked about into the 80/20. That is the 20% of the episode that will get you 80% of the results in your life. Why don't you kick us off with, with the most basic one that everyone hates hearing?

That's right. That's the physical side. That's the physiology, right? Yes. Getting, getting that, it's a, it's a foundation of emotion regulation. So, So for instance, your sleep, exercise, diet, those types of things. And yeah, you're right, people don't like hearing this necessarily, but I will say—

I'm already sick of hearing it. Yeah.

You can say this for just about any problem in your life, right? Like, probably just get your, get your, the physical side of everything kind of down.

But the cool thing about this episode is that it dovetails nicely into the point that we made at the top of the show of like, the mind-body problem is not like, it's the same thing. Your mind and body are the same thing. And if you're not taking care of your body, your mind is gonna suffer. And if you're not taking care of your mind, your body's gonna suffer. So it's a two-way street. And really just sleep, exercise, basic nutrition. And like even within this 80/20, there's another 80/20 here of like, I think when people hear exercise nutrition, they're like, oh God, I gotta go on a diet. I gotta join a gym. It's like, no, actually there's a huge 80/20 to sleep, exercise, and diet itself, right? So it's like something as simple as like going for a 30-minute walk every day, that like, there's tons of research showing that a 30-minute walk each day gets you like 60%, 70% of the results of like a hardcore workout program. Something as simple as like cutting out sugar 6 days a week will get you like 50% of the results of like this like hardcore diet regimen that you go on. So it's like, just do the basic things, do the small things, the simple things. It really is just about the small, easy wins day after day. They accumulate over time. That's why we built our whole fucking community around it. It's like, it is not complicated. No. It just requires consistency. Right, right.

The consistency is key there. And It's also like, I don't wanna overstate it necessarily, but it is, it's foundational in that, you know, you get these things right, you get your sleep right, you get your diet, you get some exercise. They don't have to be crazy like you said. And it's not that like these are gonna fix your emotions. I think what it does is it gives you like the space to manage your emotions a lot better. You're better able to handle emotional ups and downs when you have these things right. These things right. Okay, so all the other things we're going to talk about, um, come easier if you get this right first. So that's why we're starting with it. For sure. Yeah, for sure. Um, but yeah, with that, so like, your, your sleep, as we all know, I'm terrible at this sometimes. Uh, I've been better at it lately, but it's huge. Like, when you get worse sleep, I mean, there's all these studies that show like your brain suffers because of it, right? There's less connectivity from your prefrontal cortex, that thinking part of your brain to the rest of your brain. So whether that's any sort of emotional regulation network or whatever, there's just less talk with the thinking part of your brain. Yeah, you notice this, I'm sure, if you are tired. You're just, you're more reactive to things. I noticed this the other day. I was just getting annoyed with somebody who, they weren't doing anything annoying, but I was tired and I was like, every little thing they said frustrated me. I was like, okay, I'm just, I'm tired.

I, I tend to, I've noticed that I get pessimistic Yes. If I don't sleep, like I'm generally—

It's optimistic and pessimistic.

I'm generally a very optimistic person. I'm like pretty much always excited about something in the future. And so when there are times where I'm like, oh, this sucks, it's not gonna go well. Oh, what am I doing? Why am I here? Like it's generally 'cause I didn't sleep. Right, right.

We go back, we talked about emotions versus feelings versus moods versus affect. And that really affects your mood. Mood, I would say. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, 100% with that.

Number 2, verbalize your feelings. And we talked about this in the constructivist view of emotions. We talked about this some with the cultural influence of emotions. Language as well, yeah. With the how much language determines emotion. And then of course we got into this with the psychodynamic school of thought, the old Freudian, old school Freudian talk therapy. It's stuck around for hundreds of years for a reason. It works. It's like, honestly, to this day, it is still one of the simplest, most consistent, most effective interventions that we have for emotional problems is like, just sit your ass in a chair and talk about it for a couple hours. Use your words, yeah. And it doesn't have to necessarily be a therapist. It could be a friend, a partner, a confidant. A family member, uh, it could be a journal. Um, it's, it's basically taking all the messy stuff in your head and trying to structure it and, uh, verbalize it, you know, put it into a container that is a little bit more manageable. And that is what the process of, of putting language around sentiments and feelings actually does. And there's just something about it that makes it feel less overwhelming. Less out of your control, and it helps you plan around it, adapt to it, mitigate it, so on and so forth.

Yeah, we mentioned emotional granularity, and a lot of that comes from the language research that they've done is if you can put words to your emotions rather than this is, I feel good or I feel bad, it's like, okay, what are you feeling? Angry? Are you feeling depressed? Are you feeling upset about, or feeling joy? Are you feeling happiness? Whatever it is, if you can label those emotions, that affects the experience. Again, we're going back to the constructed view of emotions. That affects your emotional experience and it kind of creates a container for you to be able to manage those emotions a lot better. Yeah.

And again, similar to the physiological stuff, there's an 80/20 with this as well. Like you don't need to sit down with a therapist for 25 hours. Right, right. Like just journal for 5 minutes. Like make this a small daily practice. You know, journal for 5 or 10 minutes each morning. You know, catch up with a friend each week, confide in them, talk about some of your problems. Like, it is actually super simple. And again, it's more about consistency and developing the habit than like, you know, cornering somebody and emotionally dumping all over them. And you know what else involves daily small journaling and verbalizing of your thoughts and feelings? The Momentum Community, the 30-day challenge in the Momentum Community. And if you go to findmomentum.com/journaling, www.travisbradberry.com/emotions, you too can verbalize your thoughts and feelings in a constructive and productive way to increase your emotional toolkit. All right, I promise I'm done promoting now. What's the next one?

The next one, we have cognitive reappraisal. So we talked a lot about this, especially like in the context of like the CBT therapy, right? The cognitive behavioral therapy. That's kind of where this comes from. And we talked about, was it Aaron Beck? In your back as well. The, a very simple entry point into emotional regulation is around your thoughts. Yeah. You can do this at any time. It's not like with the way you're feeling or the way you're behaving necessarily, but when you can control or have some influence in any way over the thoughts you have around your emotions. Yes. And you can reappraise what those mean to you. And that's really what reappraisal is, is reframing the meaning around these emotions. Your emotions. And that's very powerful when done consistently. It's not, you know, 1 or 2 times you do it, okay, fine. But when you do, when you really practice this consistently, then your mind really starts to change over time. So cognitive reappraisal, just to recap, is when you take, let's say you have a thought like, you know, these people are ignoring me. You can reappraise and say they might be distracted or stressed out in some way. Or, you know, I'm behind in life or something like that. Well, I'm progressing at my own pace. You could start reframing things like that. Or just what an emotion means. Like, this person made me very angry and said, well, okay, I'm feeling angry right now. That's kind of a Buddhist way to reappraise things as well, to kind of detach yourself from the emotion. There's all sorts of little exercises around cognitive reappraisal that you can do that reframe the meaning of emotions in the moment. And like I said, when you practice that consistently, then your mind starts to change around these and you start to see, oh, these emotions, I do have some influence over these just by thinking about them differently. It's crazy. By telling yourself a different story.

You know, there's a kind of a subclass of therapies called narrative therapy that's built around this. And a lot of it is around written exercises of basically what is your story? What is the story you've told yourself about this area of your life? Again, the meaning, right? It's like, what happened to you? What caused it? And what does that mean? And then there are a number of exercises that have been developed over the years that just help you poke at that story, change the story, rewrite the story. And again, some of this stuff is very academic, like it's been academically validated. Some of it, like I would say, this is an area that the self-help space does well. I'll give you an example from each school. So, and on the academic side, there's a process called Pennebaker journaling. And it's basically, it's a specific journaling prompt sequence that begins with essentially asking you to write about one of the hardest experiences of your life. And then it takes you through a few follow-up questions and it just gets you to look at that experience in different ways. And question whether it potentially means something different, whether you could have approached it differently, whether, you know, it may or may not be true. And there's tons of data backing up showing great results from that, you know, that sequence of journaling. On the self-help side, I'm a huge fan of Byron Katie. She's got this method called The Work, and it's a series of 4 questions And it always, as always, it starts with the problem in your life. And it says the first question that you have to ask yourself is, you know, you write out the problem or the story around the problem. And the first question is, is this true? And the second question is, yeah, but are you sure it's true? How do you know it's true? And then of course you have to answer that. And then I believe the third one is, is like, okay, invert it now, right? And the inversion is a technique that she teaches that is just really, it's kind of just playing with the language in interesting ways. And so for example, like let's say, let's say the problem I'm dealing with is like, you know, my brother hates me. And you get to the third question and it's like, okay, now invert it. And what you do is you play with the language and you take my brother hates me and you turn it into I hate my brother. And you write, "What if that was true?" And then you turn it into, "My brother loves me," and you write, "If that was true?" And then it takes you through all of these alternate scenarios and then forces you to kind of do the mental exercise of like, "Okay, what if I've been looking at this completely wrong?" And generally by the time you get to the end of the sequence, you've had a bunch of epiphanies and ahas and like, "Oh my God, I never thought of it that way before." So cognitive reappraisal, There's tons of stuff everywhere, um, and it is, it is super effective, um, and it is a mainstay of the mental health space.

Do you remember, I think, uh, we've shared this I think before, is this one picture, this meme going around, and there's a top and bottom picture part to it, and there's the top part is it's like, oh, nobody gives a shit, and this guy's like, he's really bummed out, and then the bottom one's nobody gives a shit. Yes, exactly. That's one of my like That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, totally.

Yeah, totally. Good cognitive reappraisal there. Uh, so the next one in our 80/20 list is mindfulness. Um, this could be meditation. I mean, there are a number of mindfulness practices that don't necessarily involve classic meditation, right? Um, it's really anything that just gets you to focus closely to yourself and your surroundings, your thoughts, your feelings, your sensations. So this could be anything from like a body, a 5-minute body scan that you find on YouTube to actual like Zen meditation practice to like a full-blown, you know, Tibetan Buddhist retreat, whatever you want to do like to develop this, this muscle in your brain. But ultimately what we're doing here is like as you develop this, this internal self-awareness, you start to see gaps emerge between And with the CBT stuff, we talked about how interrelated thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are. And I think by default, we see most of us kind of feel like those three things are merged. Like they all happen simultaneously and like one leads to the next and there's not really anything we can do to like pry ourselves in between them. Mindfulness spreads those three things out. Like the gaps between those three things get wider and wider. The more mindful you are of your thoughts and experiences, the larger the gap emerges between thoughts and a thought and a feeling, a feeling and an action, and an action and a thought. You start to develop the ability to look at an experience and be like, well, I actually don't know what that means. Or to look at a thought and be like, well, I actually don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Or look at a feeling and be like,, "Yeah, I actually don't know what I should do about this," and then being okay with it. Like that's ultimately, that's the goal that we're going for.

Yeah, what I've started doing with this too is I call it minding the gap actually. It's like a little mindfulness practice I do.

Shout out to all the UK listeners. That's right, yeah, mind the gap.

That's right, on the subway there, the tube. The tube, yes. Again, I kind of mentioned this is what I've trained myself to do and it's a practice, it's a over time, but like when an emotion comes up, you feel that, and then that I kind of insert into my mind, mind the gap. Yeah. Where's, okay, here's the gap. Yeah. What can I do now? And you stop and you're like, okay, that's when the mindfulness kicks in and now I can reappraise, I can redirect, I can suppress, I can choose whatever to do in that situation. But that's where I have that control. Yeah. Is in that gap. So mind the gap. Yeah. That's what I like to do. What's next? Leveraging better relationships. So getting your relationships done. We spend a lot of time on relationships. And there's this co-regulation aspect to it. Being around the types of relationships that do help you regulate your emotions better and finding those secure bases, those sources of growth in your relationships versus the vampires, right? The drains. And limiting those and setting stronger boundaries around those. That's gonna get you a long ways just in your social life of being able to regulate, of putting yourself in situations that are more conducive to regulating your emotions in a positive way versus avoiding the situations that don't and the people that don't. Sometimes you just have to put those boundaries around them like we've talked about. Yeah, there's just, there's a calming presence too. If there is a calming presence that you can find in your life, try to, try to lean into that more than all the energy drains and all the toxic relationships and everything that we talked about as well.

There's an old cliché that you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. And I think it's a cliché because it's, there's a lot of truth to it. I think for me, one of the coolest concepts that I came away with researching this podcast is this idea of co-regulation that like, You know, you always hear this phrase like humans are social creatures and it's like, oh yeah, okay, sure, whatever. What does that mean? You know? And the co-regulation thing like really drove it home for me. It's like, no, we have these, our nervous systems, we have these like, these emotional systems that are largely built on our own nervous systems, but actually like connect and branch with other people's nervous systems and we like, regulate each other's systems effectively. And so if you are surrounded by a bunch of people with dysfunctional nervous systems, chances are it's going to influence your own nervous system and vice versa. So, and I know like sometimes I run into people who are like, they hear that phrase that you're the average of the 5 people around you and they're like, well, you know, they're not great influences, but they're good people. And I'm like aware of their faults and like, I don't think I don't think people realize how much of the social influence happens on an unconscious level. It's not even like you can look at her, like let's say you have a friend who's like a junkie. Like you can look at him and be like, well, he's a junkie, but I still love him and I'm not gonna do any drugs and whatever. But it's like there's a certain standard or expectation that is being lowered constantly when you're around them. It will make things that are for you the bare minimum will feel like overachieving when you're around that person, where what you really want to find is, is where your overachievement feels like the bare minimum, because those are the people who are going to like bring you up and help you grow and help you become a better, stronger version of yourself. So, right. Yeah, relationships are huge. The last one we talked about, emotional flexibility. So again, looking at expression, suppression, being prevention-focused versus being promotion-focused, attachment types, like looking at all this stuff and understanding that like, okay, it's not about changing who you are, but it's about developing the flexibility to engage in your relationships in different ways. Like having the ability to acknowledge like, okay, this person in my life, suppresses and avoids very deeply, but I do want to have a relationship with them. So when I'm around them, I'm going to have to be more expressive and I'm going to have to be more promotion-focused. And that's going to be uncomfortable, but like, I'm willing to do that to like maintain that relationship in my life or stay connected with that person. And like, ultimately, that is what being a very healthy, emotionally healthy, well-adjusted person is, is like, because ultimately, like, coming full circle, emotions are adaptations to our environment. It is, they are feedback mechanisms that are generated to inspire certain behaviors that promote health, wellbeing, reproduction, and survival. And so the ideal here is to develop the ability to adapt your behaviors and your emotional engagement with the world around you in such a way that you can can thrive in almost any environment that you're put in. That is the end goal. It's not to stop being angry or stop being anxious or get over your sadness or stop regretting so much stuff. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Still feel those things, but develop yourself to a point where they no longer hold you back. Mm-hmm. Your anger is no longer holding you back. It is now propelling you because you found a productive conduit to channel it through. Your anxiety is no longer holding you back. You found a productive channel to channel it through. This is ultimately the goal of our emotions. Like, this is where we want to get is it's to that Jeet Kune Do, you know, the be like water, my friend. You don't resist the water, you flow like water.

Yeah, and you might have one, you might have a propensity to use one emotional strategy over another, and I get that, that's fine. But it's like, you know, if you're only using that one, you know, you're always angry or you're always just, expressing your emotions freely and not never kind of strategically suppressing them or anything like that, that's kind of like, you know, golfing with one club, you know? Like you need a whole set to manage the golf course, right? And you need a whole set of emotional strategies in order to navigate your life as well. And just getting better, like find the ones that you're bad at and practice those first, I would say. And then yeah, you can go from there.

Yeah. Yeah. All right, last question, Drew. How has preparing for this episode— what have you implemented or taken away from this episode and hopefully implement into your life? Right.

Yeah, well, so the big, big kind of, I guess, lessons I learned were the culture stuff, like I said, was just amazing to me. Like, that to me really drove home. I mean, I knew culture influenced emotions. Mostly I thought it was like through how we express our emotions and everything like that, but it's actually the culture that you're around, whether it's your immediate culture, that your family, your friends, and everything like that, or the larger culture itself, really influences not only how you express your emotions but the emotions you even feel as well, which I just thought was crazy. This is the water we are swimming in and we don't realize it. Yeah. And it's only when you like enter another culture and really embed yourself in it that you start to realize how influential that is and just how, if you have a mismatch between your own personality and your culture, how the problems that arise from that, that's blown my mind a lot. And so being more aware of that, like if you are someone who's not super emotionally expressive or you don't feel a whole lot of like positive emotion a lot and say you're in a place like the United States and you feel like, oh, I just don't fit in. And I just don't belong. Well, know that that's just like a, it's not a you thing necessarily. It's a cultural mismatch that you're having. I think a lot of people, and then you could just be okay with that. You know, like it's okay, I don't fit into this culture of that thing. I'm just not gonna participate. That's fine. So for me, that was one of like the big kind of like aha moments I had was like, oh, this is like way more important than I thought. Like the culture around emotions is way more important and way more fundamental than I thought. So that was one big thing just from a kind of big picture view anyway. Yeah. Yeah.

For me, I just felt like studying all this stuff, it gave me a lot of clarity on my past. Like looking back at some of the stupid things I did in my 20s or how I used to be when I was a teenager or why my first relationship was such a mess. There were a lot of things in the stuff that we did for this episode that just like, it helped me make sense of a lot of stuff over the years and really understand myself and be like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's totally me and that explains why I fucked up with this girlfriend when I was 24. Like it just, it connected a lot of dots for me. So that was very satisfying. And then I'll just say that I am, I was familiar with most of the therapeutic modalities that we went through here, but it was cool to really dig into how they, I guess, the timeline or the progression of the different schools of thought of like why certain things became popular in certain decades and how different practitioners built off of each other over time. So that was like my nerdy satisfaction on this episode.

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to, you know, like we kind of started the episode out with the fact that we kind of got emotions wrong for a very long, like just up until like the last 50 years or so that we really started to understand them. And I still think there's a long, long ways to go. So I'm kind of like, I'm like, what are we gonna figure out? What do we think now that's just like way off? I have no idea. And that's gonna be very interesting to see too because I did find again, And it was like, we still, I don't think, have a good definition of what emotions even are necessarily. We kind of have different levels of analysis we can look at them, but you know, what are we missing? I don't know. We don't know what we don't know yet. That's, I think that's exciting. I don't know.

Yeah. Stay tuned then, I guess. Right? Yeah. All right. I said I wouldn't promo Momentum anymore, but I fucking lied. We're promoting Momentum again. But seriously, if you want to have a step-by-step process have all this stuff broken down, put into little bite-sized chunks, and, and, and take a little bit of it each and every day, um, please go to findmomentum.com/emotions. We don't run ads on this podcast for a variety of reasons, um, and some of them ethical. And, uh, so if you get a lot out of the show and you want to actually start practicing this stuff in your life, the best way to do both of those things is to go to findmomentum.com/emotions. And next time, Drew, what are we going to be talking about?

Oh, Mark, we're going to be talking about happiness.

I can finally be happy. Well, I don't know.

Stay tuned. Stay tuned. All right.

Thanks, everybody.