How to Identify Your Negative Emotions

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As a professor who teaches about the science of well-being. I spend a lot of time thinking and talking and also podcasting about how to feel happier. But in spite of all that, I'm not exactly happy 100% of the time, I to still feel guilty and anxious. I get angry and sad and jealous and with so many responsibilities. I often feel overwhelmed and frustrated, all this makes sense. I mean it,

Creating negative emotions is part of what it means to be human, but actually having to go through all these bad emotions that kind of sucks. If I'm being honest. I pretty much hate going through these negative feelings. And so my first instinct is always to push them away. As soon as I start to detect that I'm feeling frustrated or sad or a little pissed. At someone I try to avoid the experience completely. I pretend it's not happening or distract myself or dive into my work so I don't

I have to experience that not so nice feeling but the science shows. This isn't the smartest strategy. There's lots and lots of evidence that suppressing and avoiding. Our - Sensations is ultimately only going to make us feel worse in the long run. So my New Year's resolution for 2022 is to stop running away. From all my difficult emotions. I want to allow an Embrace and maybe even learn from the yucky or Sensations in life.

But that's easier said than done. So I decided to call in some reinforcements.

In this special new season of the happiness lab, I'll chat with an amazing group of experts about how we can learn from our negative emotions over the next few weeks. We'll explore strategies. We can all use to navigate the feelings. We'd rather not feel. We'll see how we can make peace with the emotions we hate and we'll see that they may even have something important to teach us. But learning from our worst, emotions can be a challenge. Even for the

experts. I think I came from, you know, fifth generation Texan. I just came from a family.

Lee that really perceived emotion in general as weakness and as threatening, we grew up with the belief that we are thinking doing people who on occasion feel and that can get us sidelined. And so obviously no neuroscientist in my family. This

is five-time New York Times bestselling author brene Brown. Renee is one of my Idols. She's an internationally recognized expert.

Spurt on navigating emotions and these days she's begun, helping people figure out how to name their motions, to Renee's. New book is called atlas of the heart mapping meaningful connection. And the language of Human Experience. Her book has a huge number of important tips. For understanding our complex emotional landscape, which is something Bernays been interested in for a really long time, for name learned as a child that she wasn't supposed to talk about or even acknowledge her feelings, but she also discovered that she was surprisingly.

Observing what other people were feeling especially when it came to adults? It just became actually

kind of a form of psychological safety. For me, growing up to know the relationship between behavior and language and thinking and feeling I think today a therapist would probably just say an over diligent kind of hyper Vigilant way of thinking about emotion and cognition and I got really good at it. To the point where I could predict behavior is like a superpower. I had a swim coach,

Who was really volatile? I mean, he just would lose his shit in really inappropriate ways. And everyone would always try to figure out, like, who is he after? Who is he after? But it only took me like, a couple of practices to realize. He didn't love the fastest kids. He liked the kids, who tried the hardest? And he also had a penchant for backstroke. I think whether he was a backstroker in college, so I would just always get in the lane with the people who weren't the best swimmers, but who really tried hard, which was good, because I wasn't one of the best swimmers

Worked and I never got in trouble and I never shared with anyone. What the secret was either because it was you know, every person for themselves terrible

experiences like this made Brunei. Wonder why couldn't her peers see what to her was. So

obvious. I spent a lot of time thinking to myself. Holy shit. Do they not understand what's getting ready to happen? Like, do they not see what's happening here?

Bernays fascination with emotion and behavior. Let her on a path to becoming a social worker. The research.

Eventually did on emotions helped her understand why her superpower was so

rare. We asked people to make a list of all the emotions that they could recognize in themselves as they were experiencing them. And the mean, number was three,

just three like until one, two, three.

Yeah, happy sad and pissed off, always call it the bad sad. Glad Triad, and that was really shocking to me. Now, they could list a lot of other emotions, but they couldn't recognize when they were in them. They just knew that those emotion feeling.

Words existed that got me thinking back shoe, a quote that I came across when I was in college by ludvig Vic and Steen that the limits of my language mean, the limits of my world and I just spent a lot of years. Thinking what happens when our language is not as expansive as our Human Experience. What is it mean when we have to shove an experience of despair?

R or disappointment into one of these three buckets. And I always knew that it completely crippled our ability to own and communicate, but I think it was probably four or five years ago. When we started seeing some of the research on how language doesn't just communicate emotion, but shape it that I started thinking. Oh God. Holy shit.

We are individually and collectively in trouble if we don't have

language. Yeah, I mean part of our task is recognizing emotions in other people. But how on Earth are we going to fulfill that task? When we can't even recognized our own emotional experience when it's happening and categorizing it. I mean, you know, it's one thing to think about not being able to recognize positive emotions, right? You know, that it was June, say, joy and ha and amusement, but it feels sort of different not be able to recognize negative emotions and I could think of a couple reasons why, you know, people

Don't do that. You know, the biggest one is it just sucks to reflect on anything, that's painful. Right? We tend to avoid it. It's deep part of human nature, if it sucks, just don't think about it. And so, do you think that's part of

it? I think it's probably the biggest driver. I mean, as someone who is like studied and written about shame for 15 years. I can tell you that, no one wants to talk about it. You know, the bad news is the less we talk about the more we experience it, but no one wants to talk about it. People will do just about anything.

To avoid pain, including cause pain,

right? I mean, it's so that seems to be part of it is that, you know, we're avoiding these negative emotions. But another I think is just a misconception about experiencing emotions, which is that if you look deep into the void, the void looks back at you, right? If we, if you really dig into, you know, anguish and sadness, and despair, and all these things that it won't feel good, or it'll amplify these emotions. So, talk about why that's a little bit of a misconception, that labeling them can shape them, but maybe not in the way we

Often think. Yeah. I know. It's a

huge part of the mythology around emotion that if we look it in the eye it gives it power when the reality is, if we look at the eye and name it it gives us power. And so I think it's to your point. Exactly. It's just human nature to avoid what hurts even if and this is the cognitive dissonance part, even if we no avoiding, it will exacerbate it.

You know, our oceans are such a big part of it.

Human behavior, human nature. They affect so many parts of our life. So you might think that academics. Had them reasonably sorted out that people across disciplines agreed on a definition and these kinds of things, you know, talk about wave. When you really look into this, especially academically things are much more complex than they might seem to lie, folks.

Yeah. I don't think there is a consensus on even the definition of emotion. In fact, I'm really careful in the book. The Middle of the book is exploration of 87, emotions and experiences.

Has and I say, emotions and experiences very purposefully because I don't want to get into that kind of academic pissing match about what is an emotion and what isn't an emotion because I'm a mix, like, terrible metaphors here, but there's bigger fish to

fry, you know, one of the big questions that really comes up is this this issue of like how many emotions are there, which I think is, you know, something else academics fight about it. So, you know, what are the some of the ideas you came up with and what have you found in your own work? In terms of the like the number

the way we came up with the 87 was

Really straightforward. It was a continent analysis of comments from 70,000 people who took an online course that I did with, in partnership with Oprah Winfrey Network, and we went in asking, what are the emotions? People are struggling to name and identify and when they do name and identify them, help them move through them. So then we came up with a collection of emotions and experiences. Then we brought in a focus group of therapists who spent hours kind of ranking around the same question.

These are critical for our clients to understand in order to heal and move through them, or to experience more of it. And these are less critical. And these are not critical. And this is the illicit ended up with and then I added a couple for comparative reasons like Freud and Freud. It wasn't on the list, but schadenfreude was just to compare. So, when people say, how many emotions are there, my answer is, I have no idea. We're exploring 87 of the one of the emotions and experiences, We Believe are helpful to be able to name to move.

Rhythm. I think that's an awesome answer and it gets it this cross cultural issue, right? Because those are the 87 emotions that you're my guesses. Western mostly American participants, you know, came up with right where you to do the same analysis somewhere else. It might be a different set of them to.

I mean, just as a shame researcher, man, English is one of the only languages that has one word for shame. And when we were translating into Spanish, there was a debate for three months about whether we should use the word for sin for shame the ghoul like no. And then

Then is it Bell wins? I you know maybe but it's in context because at that can also mean embarrassed, you know, it's like it's really tricky emotions happen in the context of culture. So this is the first book and all my books that I have really put my foot down. We're not allowing it to be translated and that's you know, that's hard with your publisher. Right? A lot of the books are translated, 30 40 languages and I didn't collect the data cross-culturally therefore just because we can translate it using a computer program. Does it make it right? Does that make

Totally a bigger goal of the new book is really to do something that's important for all of us. But we rarely do, which is to kind of get into emotional granularity. Right? Like really map out the tiny emotions and how they move through space. And so, I wanted you to talk a little bit about this idea of an atlas, you know, and how you got to this metaphor of making a map. Yeah,

when I interviewed cardiologists, they said, when you build a map, a map is just a collection of layers you first go. And you get the topography, then maybe you get where the water is and maybe where you get the

Roads are, and the story of a map is in the layers. And I really thought this is the right metaphor for this work because the story of our emotional lives is in the layers, which is why I think have you ever seen the movie

Chef know? I actually really want you to watch it. Okay, I will go, I will go the next

part to you on Chef. Well, there's this great scene where Jon Favreau. He's losing his shit.

Critic is in his restaurant tasting, his food and his sticking, his fingers in the skies food. He's yelling at this guy and it was such a great example of if I just saw you doing that, like, Lori was doing that. I would say, oh, he's so angry. But is it anger? Because grief could present the same way as could shame as could humiliation as could Despair. And so I was really wrong about something. I have said probably a thousand times.

We need to learn how to recognize emotions and self and others and I actually coming to the end of this process, don't believe that we can actually recognize emotion and others in. If anybody could, I think I would be somebody at least in the top, 100 or so. I don't think we can read emotion in people, but I think we can do is get curious connect with them deeply as opposed to diminish question challenge.

And listen, we get back from the break. We'll hear more about this idea that emotions. Come in layers and how understanding those layers can help us get better at describing the things we're feeling.

The happiness lab will be right back.

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I've been talking with social worker and best-selling author brene, Brown about how important it is to recognize and communicate our emotions, especially the difficult ones. But the language we use to talk about our feelings doesn't just shape us. It also influences our relationships.

This idea that language doesn't communicate solely. It also shapes. It's like the benefit or that's come to mind is if you're baking cookies, you know, your grandma's best recipe.

And the flavor changes radically dependent on the bowl, you use. I mean, that's the power of language. And so what happens if what you're experiencing is actually disappointment, but the only language you have available to you is sad, I can't as your friend call you and say, Lord, you have a second. Sure. I'm so disappointed. If you and I both understand what disappointment is somewhere in our conversation. We're probably going to get to the expectation that got betrayed.

Which because there's a relationship between disappointment and expectation. And that's where the healing is. That's where the learning is. I'll call you and say I'm so pissed off, you know, like that's more my modus operandi, but it doesn't get too. Wow. I set an expectation that I had no control over and I put a lot behind it.

And so you've given us a nice guide to kind of figure out how we can get that granularity, you know, to what our kind of roads and elevation is in the emotions map. In this comes for you.

Idea of the user for bees as it were not sure if you call them, the Four B's. But yeah, so walk me through some of the things that are kind of in the emotion map. These four B's.

Well, I think and I don't know that they work in a linear way. Biology biography behavior and backstory. So I think biology look, they call them feelings because our bodies the first to respond. I mean, this emotion is physiological. And so to be able to understand where in your body are you feeling this, and what are you feeling even? Just in a more, you know?

Kind of less granular, more chunky level. I'm triggered by something. I'm something's got me hooked. I'm in a motion and then biography, you know, I was raised in a family where you don't feel and if you feel anything, the only thing that's really okay to feel is anger, like we could be pissed, but we could never say my feelings are hurt because that would be too vulnerable into week, probably. So what did I grow up? Understanding are believing or learning about this feeling?

And then the next is behavior. How am I showing up right now? You know, like, I'm coming out of my skin. I want to punch the wall. I just want to hide and cry. And then I think this last be is the one that really changed my mind about my belief, that we can really understand what other people are thinking without stories, which is the backstory. Like, if I see you in tears, I can't assume that it's grief. I can't assume that it's disappointment. I can't I need

Need to be so other focused. And so curious that I want to know what it's about. And so yeah, I think they're complicated and I think that we, I know enough now from Neuroscience to know that unlike how I was raised. We are emotional beings. We do a lot based on emotion. And when we're feeling cognition is not even in the passenger seat. It's like hogtied in the trunk,

you know, but part of the insight for me and I think the insight for

A lot of people reading this is first, just realizing how little they thought, carefully, thought about their emotional landscape that all like, how very little they knew about the specific places. One of my favorite things about reading the book is that I like to think that I'm learning all this stuff, but then when you, you know, amazing social worker and five-time best-selling New York Times author brene Brown, when you're learning stuff about emotion, when you're getting it wrong, you know, that makes me feel really, really good, or at least it makes me feel like I'm not, like, completely messing

Yeah, I mean, you know, we bucketed at the 87 in two different families and different maps, and there's not a single grouping where I did not make at least two or three mistakes. And how I use language constantly. Like I didn't understand the difference between jealousy and envy and I didn't understand that MV was wanting something someone else had.

And jealousy is the fear of losing something. You have to someone else. Now. I understand it, but I'm not going to stop saying jealous. So if you, because I give you show me your vacation pictures. I'm like, hey, Lori, you like. How was Greece and you're like, oh my God, let me show you, and I'm like, oh my God, I'm so jealous. I'm so jelly, you know, that's what I would say. And I've tried to figure out why I would never say, God Lori. I'm really envious. First of all, that sounds terrible, right?

Yeah. It sounds more like you're going after my vacation or something, you know, something -

of like that.

Well, I think that's because there's two types of Envy, there's kind of benign, Envy, which means, I want something you have, and I'm so glad you had it. But there's also malicious in be where I want something you have, and you're going down for getting it one of the ones that was a life-changing for me, to be honest with you, is comparison to compare is to be human. Basically, we compare involuntarily. It's just part of our wiring, like, I did not know that and so where the

Action point comes where the self determination comes, is what we choose to do with the comparison. So the story I tell them, my book is, I swim laps a lot, and if I happen to sync up with someone in the lane next to me, and we push off the wall at the same time. I'm racing them and I don't care if it's a 25 year old triathlete or an 85 year old woman. I'm racing you. But now since doing this research I'll say to compare is human to let go of. It is divine. That's what I say to myself. So,

Oh, now I'll push off at the wall. And then I just look at the person and underwater. I just say have a good swim friend. And so the intervention point is not to not compare because apparently we just do that as humans. Probably related to like safety,

right? Yeah. I mean these there's evidence for example that even non-human primates and animals compare. They see really but he also is getting a better. You know, you're only getting a cucumber for your work on some project, you know, you're doing some reward task and you get a cucumber, but somebody else gets a great even though cucumber would have

You know, find delicious food to get all of a sudden you're like mad that you're getting a grape and so you can see monkeys like throwing the cucumber and rejecting and you know, shaking the bars of their enclosure, you know, so it's not even that comparison is human comparison might be primate or maybe. It's even mammal. We don't know, like but it's deep

Gat like a social species. Yeah. Oh my God. I am the Cucumber

wielding. One of the you know, ironically surprising ones for me. It was thinking about surprise, you talk about how we should pay attention to surprise because it's this really

Weird emotion, because it has an incredibly short duration, you know, we wait for like sadness, you know, grief for a long time, does his dissipate but surprise one second, you realize what's happening, and then it's over so fascinating from, like a cognitive science perspective, that there's just one emotion. That's just really short lived.

It's like the shortest. And this also taught me something about myself. So it's very short and then it's a bridge to other things. Other cognitions and emotions that follow, right? It's a bridge. I call it a cannon like you get shot out of this thing, emotionally.

It's over like that. But then you're in something else, the emotion that follows a surprise are normally exacerbated by surprise. You feel the more deeply, what's happening. So I hate surprises. Like even I'm a huge mystery reader and a huge mystery Watcher and I will read a plot or the back of a book before I start. And people think God what is wrong with you? Like if there's no joy in that. I'm like, well they may not be doing that for you. But for me to sit in a theater for two hours, not knowing what's going to

Ian, I can't that's not fun for me. That's anxiety-producing for me so I can really enjoy the film if I understand who's going to die or who did it or who's the bad person or, you know, whatever. But now I understand better that it's not surprised that I mind so much. It's the fact that it heightens the emotions that follow. And I do not like heightened emotion.

This was really clarifying for me because I'm with you not not for all films, but definitely for scary films. I'm really even, I like love Halloween. I'm obsessed with Halloween.

I hate scary movies and to watch on with my husband. I have to like go on Wikipedia and read the plot. So I know when the jump scares are coming so that I can like be like it's coming. I'll be okay. I'll just be a little bit afraid. So it was nice to hear that. I'm not alone in that. So those are cases of like realizing more about these emotions, you know, surprises this cannon that shoots you into other things. I thought another deep Insight of your book was all these cases where we just fail to tell emotions apart, you know, you mentioned this with jealousy and envy, right? Another

One, I love learning about was this distinction between worry and rumination. So talk a little bit about why those are so different

man. I did not know a lot about ruminating and the dangers were rumination. Before I went into this. It came up as kind of the variable that predicts whether a Nostalgia is going to be healthy, psychologically are dangerous because honestly, I think of nostalgia as a dog whistle for white supremacy, most of the time, to be honest with you like back then it was so good.

Soft karma, when people knew their place, you know, and so I came in, to Nostalgia, like loaded for bear. I was like, there's nothing good about Nostalgia, but I think it was Sandra garrido. Who said in her research, Nostalgia can be beautiful and wonderful, which is good because it gives me permission to film last object again about some things like a childhood smell or something that is makes me feel warm and fuzzy but it's the ruminating that makes it really psychologically unhealthy and I think it can be dangerous collectively.

After the break, Renee will walk us through, even more of these emotions that we think we understand. But we kind of just don't. We'll also see the understanding, the nuances of these emotions might be the key to Breaking Free from some pretty negative patterns of behavior, the happiness lab. We'll be right back.

As a professor of psychology and host of this podcast. I had always assumed that I knew a lot about my own feelings. I'm not totally sure how many emotions I could have named before talking with Brunei, but it was probably weigh less than the 87. She identified in her book, but Brunei admitted that some of these emotions were pretty tricky for her to disentangle to one of the cool differences between rumination and worry is kind of which direction they're pointing which is something

I'd never really thought about before your rumination is kind of pointing towards the past. Whereas were he is pointing towards the future. I mean, both are bad, but that means you deal with them in slightly different ways. Yeah, and how would you

define ruminating?

Yeah. I mean, I think of rumination is like, you know, a thought pattern that you get stuck in, you know, a lot like worry, right where your kind of your thoughts are going back to this over and over again, you're not actually making progress in terms of dealing with it, but it was funny to realize that one of those thought patterns is about the

Suture, you know, I tend to have a lot of health anxiety. So I'm like, oh my gosh, I know I see the symptom. Is it cancer? Your, you know, like I'm worrying worrying about the future, but then you also have rumination, right? That thing that I did before. I can't believe, I said that to that person, like I wonder how they're going to react and did it. Oh God, but it was funny to realize that the, the form of those feel so familiar and I would have used those words interchangeably, but they map onto totally different things, right? Like, would worry. I need to deal with my anxiety or make take control about the future or kind of allow that with

Nation. There's something about the past that I might need to deal with and get over and allow in a different way. And so, it's sort of different paths forward with each of them.

It's holding on to something different and then different paths out of them. Worry. I'm a warrior like I can really worried with the best of them but some of them mythology that worriers carry felt like I felt like I was really being read. It was terrible because you know worriers believe that worrying is helpful. It's not worriers believe that they cannot change that.

About them we can and then how dangerous it is to worry about worrying in. And so I have to dispel the mythologies about worried because I do tell myself it's good. And I do tell myself that I can't help it when I can. I also, before I wrote this book, I use the word overwhelmed, a lot. And I used it when I was actually just stressed. And I think when I tell my body that I'm overwhelmed, it has a protocol that it follows, where that is, just shut down protocol.

It's Jon kabat-zinn that has this. Beautiful definition of overwhelm where life is unfolding at a pace faster than my nervous system or psyche can manage and so overwhelmed. I need to reserve that term for when. I mean

it, these are all cases, where the active, not telling emotions, apart allows us to miss Nuance. That's that's critical for kind of figuring out how to deal with these emotions, but there are other cases where we don't realize that two emotions are very close on a map and that can help us, miss cases. Where

Maybe thinking about emotions in, in that different way, might help us. And so, I thought about this, in the context of anxiety versus excitement, you know, if you told like anxiety versus excitement. I'm like, you know, 100% excitement, you know, the heck with anxiety, but like, in emotional space on your Atlas, they're kind of close and that might give us some insights about how to kind of navigate anxiety. That we didn't think about

before. Yeah. I mean, I'll be honest with you. I'm still wrestling with this, and I write about wrestling with it because I think, when we think about the Four B's in biology,

Those I think are physiological response to excitement. Anxiety, can be very similar, kind of coming out of our skin a little bit, just that just. And then with a research shows is that when we're torn between what we're feeling but we label it anxiety. The outcomes are more positive. They've been we label. What we're feeling is anxiety. It's more negative. So I'm trying to figure out for myself, what that means. And when that's helpful without

Shushing. The fact that anxiety is a real thing and when we're in it just calling it something else doesn't make it go away. Does that make sense?

Yeah, totally. I mean it suggests that we might be able to prepare ourselves better, you know with the backstory ahead of time. Yeah, you know, I'm going into this job interview and you know, if you can work on the backstory to be what a cool challenge to meet these new people. I'm so excited that kind of backstory might lead to a different outcome than if the backstories. Gosh. I need this job, you know.

I'm worried that I don't have the right qualifications that back story. Even though biology is the same, right? Your fight or flight systems activated, you know, your hearts racing, you can see it and he's totally different ways, you know, so those are cases, where, you know, see, recognizing these are emotions are close. And if we just push one of the babies, you know, push the backstory so many different way I can help but another one of the biggest insights I got from your book. Perhaps the biggest Insight is these cases where we just don't remember where the emotions are on an emotional map and thinking about them.

Currently completely change the way we respond to them. And so you talked about one of the big insights you had in this domain when thinking about the emotion of resentment, you know, do you want to talk about the kind of insight? You got their

resentment was living on the wrong continent in my life. Like oh my God, this was real. This is still hard for me. The long story short is that I've struggled a lot with resentment and I can really feel it. So I was interviewing me.

Racket from me, all about his book. And before we went on the air, I said, hey, can I just ask you a personal question like for me personally and he's like, yeah, sure. And I said, resentment is from the anger family, right? And he goes, no resentment is actually a function of envy and then it was like, time to go on and I was like, oh, holy shit. And you know, we did this podcast, it was great. I call my therapist, like, on the way home. I said, I really need to talk to you and as we started to unpack,

At that, what I realized is the times when I was the most resentful is, when I'm deep into burnout. I'm exhausted and I don't think everyone else is working as hard as I am. And it turns out that I'm not mad because people aren't working as hard. I'm envious because they're taking care of

themselves. And what's so surprising about that is that it gives you like it plops in your lap, a solution, which is not yell at them. And be like, hey, you work more, you know, dang it. It's to say, actually I need to set up my own boundaries like

What I'm jealous of that Scenic has is you talk about Envy, has a kind of content in it. There's a thing that you're envious of, it might be those other people's boundaries or there, you know, time affluence the fact that they have some space and hopefully and so that one was profound for me because it made me realize the way I go about solving at and my teams in my life with family members, it's wrong, right? It's about me and the changes. I need to make for myself rather than changes. I need to make sure the

relationship. Yeah, and now, and when I felt envious, I don't say what is this person doing to piss me off?

Which is an easy question for me to ask it's how I was raised. Its my biography. You know, now I ask what do you need that? You're afraid to ask for and it's hard. No, it's just hard. It's hard for me because it's very vulnerable. I'm tired anymore. Joy. I need more play anymore connection with Steve and my kids. It's all the stuff. I'm really scared

of. So disappointment was another one for me that kind of had this aha moment where you I think it's about sadness, but

The content of disappointment is that it's really about your expectations. It's a reaction to a violation of expectation and that felt like yet another one that maybe you could work on yourself, like, you know, because I control those expectations. So maybe there's a point where I need to update my expectations. You, you kind of had the same aha moment when you're thinking about disappointment to, right? Yeah,

I mean, Steve, and I have been together for 30 plus years may be the biggest threat to our marriage is kind of what I call stealth.

Haitians these expectations that I have our he has that, we don't communicate with each other, but then we're just reeling and disappointment and blame and anger. And I mean, I tell Simple Story in there about packing for Disney, you know, and I have five books in my carry-on and he's like she doing. I said, I'm just bringing all these books and he's like, should we talk about that? And I said, no, it's just, I'm so excited. We're gonna be gone for a whole week and this is so cool. And he's like, we have seven kids at Disney World.

For six days. The only thing you're going to read is you have to be this tall to ride. And I was like, what? And he goes. I just want a reality check these expectations with you. If that's what kind of time off, we need. We picked the wrong place, you know, and we end up having a great time, but it wasn't just riddled with disappointment. And I think this is

really the power of the book you had 387. We probably just had time to go through 10, but what we're seeing is like knowing where emotions are, what other emotions they're near, making sure were distinguishing them when they

Require distinguishing and kind of recognizing their definitions. The this is really helpful for figuring out. The kind of thing you need to do to make sure your Disney vacation is working in the way you want. Right? And so, you know, do you think that having this better map is really going to help us in terms of flourishing, not even changing our emotions, but just better understanding them can really help us navigate them.

Yes, I think that we are really desperate to find our way back to ourselves and to each other. I think it starts with

Wij and self-awareness and some deep breaths. And just trying to understand that were emotional beings. And if we don't have the language that reflects our experiences, it gets really tricky to talk about how we feel and ask for what we need. And I do feel like there's some hope there. And I what I hope is, I hope that couples read it together and I hope friends talk about it and I hope that there are some real conversations. And I think there are so many people out there yourself included.

Trying to make a dent in a world that says how we feel doesn't matter when really nothing matters. If we don't understand how we

Speaking with Brunei, really drove home, the importance of trying to commit to recognizing, and describing my feelings more precisely, especially when their feelings that I'd kind of prefer to run away from. So I hope you'll join me in trying to better map your emotions in the New Year. The next time I'm having a bad day at work. I'm going to try to put my emotional thinking cap on and identify what's really going on. Whether I'm dealing with frustration, or disappointment or overwhelm or boredom. I'm also going to try to more

Quickly notice what my body is experiencing and to see if there's some wiggle room and how I described it. The next time my heart is racing before big new project. I'll try to reframe that as excitement rather than anxiety and if nothing else I'm going to hold on to brunei's wonderful metaphor. That my feelings are part of a vast and layered and perhaps even beautiful emotional landscape. When I start to feel lost or overwhelmed by a certain feeling in the New Year. I'm going to take a moment to be grateful.

That I get to experience such a spectacular emotional landscape in the first place. I might even pause to Marvel at the scenery. Now that Britney has helped me recognize a name. My emotions with more Precision. My next task is to figure out how to deal with all the icky ones. I am said, I'm noticing that I'm feeling