Dr. Marc Brackett
Appearances
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And so I'm in a room filled with lawyers or executives and I ask them how they're feeling. Nobody's really sure how they're feeling, like you were saying. And then I'll do these little kind of quizzes with them. Tell me the difference. You've got three minutes in a group. Anxiety, stress, pressure, fear, overwhelmed. And they come back, and the number one response is, they're all the same.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I'm like, really? Take another few minutes. Just try to define them. They can't even define them. They say things like one is internal, one is external, one is higher energy and lower energy. I'm like, I get that, but what do these concepts mean to you? What do they mean to you? Anyhow, finally we get to the definitions, and then I say, who cares?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Why am I asking you to understand these differences? Go back to your groups and talk about it. And then after like, this is like a 45 minute, like I thought this was going to be like a two minute activity. It turns into like a 45 minute to an hour exercise because they finally realize, oh yeah.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So if I'm anxious because I'm worrying about the future, you know, maybe the breathing exercise is not going to be as helpful, right? Because maybe I need a cognitive strategy to say, you know, Mark, stop worrying about the stock market. Mark, stop worrying about the university closed down because of the pandemic. You've got no control over the university's decisions.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And so helping people make connections between the feeling and the reason for the feeling, from my perspective, has been very helpful to help them learn how to regulate the emotion.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I mean, I haven't done the research, but from my perspective, it's not helpful because the goal is to get granular. You know, think about the difference, and I'm not going to quiz you right now, but anger and disappointment. Do you know that 95% of the people that I asked to define those two things cannot do it?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So I got an F. But you have a growth mindset, so you're okay. There you go. So disappointment, unmet expectations. Everything was legit. It just didn't work out. Anger, perceived injustice. And that's a really important distinction.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Because if you're a parent or someone at work and someone is like yelling and screaming, first of all, we grossly, you know, make mistakes in terms of labeling emotion from behavior. We got to just throw that out. There's no correlation really between behavior and emotion.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I can stomp my feet, you know, as a boy because I'm feeling sad just because it's more culturally acceptable for me to stomp than to cry. And so why are you so angry? Maybe I'm feeling shame. which is my experience, you know, I was yelling and screaming as a kid because I was being bullied so much. And then my mother would be like, you know, who do you think you are talking to me that way?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And then my father would say, go to your room. And I'd be like, is anybody reading my emotions properly or asking me how I'm feeling? Because you would know that I'm acting out because of fear and shame. Never happened because of a variety of reasons of, you know, triggering my parents and they didn't have such high emotional intelligence. They love me, just didn't have high emotional intelligence.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And so going back to the anger-disappointment one, unmet expectations versus perceived injustice. And so when you think about it in terms of the strategy, like for example, my other career, just as a martial arts teacher, So I have a fifth degree black belt in a Korean martial art called Hapkido. So if this podcast doesn't go so well.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Anyhow, I was an awkward kid, had a very insecure, low self-esteem. I got into the martial arts. I thought, I'm going to get my yellow belt and I'm going to feel tough and proud. Failed my freaking yellow belt test. I mean, at 13 years old, you couldn't imagine like, there's nothing worse than for a 13-year-old kid who's feeling shame and being bullied to fail a yellow belt test. So what do I do?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I go home. I hate karate. I'm never going back to karate. Everybody's in uproar. I'm getting yelled at. I'm paying for your karate. You're going back to, you know, whatever. And the truth was, let's think about that for a minute. So I go to take the test, and I've got to do my blocks and my kicks, you know, my punches. I know there's five kicks. There's five punches. And let's say...
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I do them the best I can, but the sensei just says, you know, Mark, it's just not good enough. You're not ready yet. That's legitimate disappointment. I expected to pass. I didn't pass. I'm feeling disappointed. So the strategy for that is what? Tutor, help. Show me what I have to do better.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
On the other hand, let's say, which was true for me, that some of the kids who were the bullies in my middle school also took karate.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And let's imagine they're watching me take my test, and they're giving me some dirty looks because they're going to, you know, threaten me, which did happen, you know, getting changed, going, you know, wait till you see what it's going to be like for you tomorrow on the way to school. Now how am I feeling? Terrorized, fearful. And I failed my test because of that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So you can see how I could show up with a particular behavior. People are attributing emotion to me. They're labeling my emotions for me because they don't have the skill to deactivate as a parent or a teacher or a partner, to be present, to help me understand my experience and then label my experience, understand where it's coming from, and then strategize accordingly.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I think what you're getting at, though, is this, like, not knowing how you're feeling, because I was never taught language, right? And having an experience that is, you know, could be many feelings at once, which could be disappointment, could be anger, could be embarrassment. But you got to unpack the situation. You know, what was the real event that happened? What really happened in that moment?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And so if it were legitimate, like legitimate test, and I just, you know, I blocked the punch and I just didn't have the strength to block it, you know, like to really stand firm. it's disappointment. It's like, son, you know, like you thought, you know, your blocks were strong. Unfortunately, you need some work. Let's practice every day after school together.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
We're going to get these blocks down so you can get that yellow belt test. There's no other reason. If it's because the bullies are staring at me and I'm not capable of dealing with those piercing eyes that are at me and I'm feeling so anxious and overwhelmed and I just Can't block because I'm just freaked out. That's a whole other story.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Do you see how like a parent or a teacher would have to really differentiate their support? But you have to really get at the experience, which means we have to have relationships that are loving, caring with all people because otherwise we don't build that connection to really understand how people feel. We just take the kind of behavior and we're like, why are you behaving that way?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Go to your room or just practice. It's like, no, I've been bullied at school and now the bully is threatening me. That's serious stuff that needs to be taken care of.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah, I think it's fun. Maybe it's just – if you want to just use it for fun, not a problem. If we're going to use it to really communicate, not so great.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And amenity causes challenges. It's funny because I gave a speech at Twitter, now known as X, about five years ago and had analyzed quite a lot of data You know, it was actually the year that Mariah Carey sang and it got messed up. And I just, it was like the week before I was going in January, it was like New Year's Eve. And I just was curious because it really was a mess up.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I said, how are people going to respond? And it was 99.99% ripping this track.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
amazing diva to shreds so she i don't recall this incident so she's obviously phenomenally talented but she made an error there was something with the mic she made an error yeah there was something or someone else oh goodness you know and she just basically like the mic wasn't working the way she wanted it to work and she's like i'm out of here just like i'm not singing and you should have seen how people just i mean millions and millions and millions of of
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
comments, you know, like, and I'm not going to repeat what people said because it was really disgusting. And I got really curious, like, what about things like, gosh, you've like won 15 Grammy Awards, like this must really sting for you. Maybe one post like that. And so it does make you wonder about, A, the type of person who is interested in commenting. Like we may have a bias there.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I do think we have a bias there. People who feel protected by something. If it's a more famous person in politics, obviously people are very clear how they feel.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
It's not pretty and it's not emotionally intelligent to go back to the concept, right? It's like what's your goal here? Like I always ask people that like what are you getting out of being nasty?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
In my earlier research with Facebook, we analyzed millions and millions of posts. And You know, people can be intentionally mean and hurtful. Just people want to rip people to shreds and they want to instill fear. And, you know, it's very hard to disentangle that too, just to be honest.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So like what we found in our research was that I could say, if you're like, Andrew's wearing a black shirt, you'll see that. I could say like, nice shirt. And it might mean nice shirt or it might mean I'm making fun of your shirt. And it's just hard, like that's the problem, you know, with social media in terms of posts.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
We don't really know because the person who's receiving it has a story, right? That was one challenge we found around like getting posts taken down.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
was that it was hard to have that objective criterion of what was painful to a person, which is why what we tried to do was help the person who was receiving the content communicate in a way with the person who posted the content to get them to take it down. And what we found was that it actually worked really well.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
If you taught a teenager, for example, to say, hey, Andrew, that comment you made really was hurtful. Would you please take it down? We were more likely to get people to take it down. And what we found in experimental research was that If we just let people go on their own devices, it tended to be more retaliatory. Like, who the heck do you think you are? You want to fight back.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And that did not motivate the person to take it down. So even meeting gross behavior with compassion can be helpful.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Like happiness and contentment. Yeah, that's a tough one.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah, this is why I do what I do.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yes, you are. When you think about happiness, it's usually about when you're achieving something. I'm going to be happy when this will bring me happiness. Contentment is the opposite. Contentment is everything is just great as it is. I feel complete. I have enough. And part of my argument against the happiness research is
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
is that we don't spend enough time helping people strive for contentment and we push people to strive for happiness, which there's research to show, you know, backfires. You know, if you're waking up every day saying, what am I going to do to be happy? What am I going to do to be happy? Chances are, you know, it's not going to work out a lot. And that kind of backfires to create more despair.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Exactly. I think the idea that we have to be happy all the time is also ridiculous. I mean, I'm a neurotic professor. I'm never happy. It's tough. And also, I don't know about you, but given that my dispositional affect, another term, is more on the lower energy, kind of contented, a little anxiety. When I'm around the people who are high energy and pleasant all the time, I have a difficult time.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
No, I just feel overwhelmed and smothered by it. It's like, stop being so happy all the time.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
That's okay. That's you. You know what I mean? Part of being emotionally intelligent with colleagues, romantic partners, with children, whoever, is picking up on that. Now that I know that about you, it makes me think differently about you in terms of what your needs are. That's emotional intelligence. And for me, I am like I wake up every morning like having an existential crisis.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I'm like, what am I doing with my life? And, you know, what am I doing this today for? And then I got to publish this paper. I got to finish my book. I got to run my team. Like what do I want to do? And, you know, then I'm doing it. And then I'm like when I'm doing one thing, I think I should be doing the other thing.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
This is just who I am, and I've tried everything, and that's my operating system. I'm more aware. I'm working on another book, and as I was working on it, I'm in a chapter, and all I could think about is the next chapter. And I started like, Mark, give yourself permission to be with this freaking chapter. It's okay. You can focus on one thing and not worry about the future.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I had to literally kind of do that for myself. That's how I am. And so knowing that about myself is useful because it helps me find the strategies that work for me. And going back to the happiness thing, it's because I'm also introverted. And so when I'm around extroverts a lot, I'm drained. You know, I just like after something like this, this is an intense conversation.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I'm not going to go to a sports bar, you know, like have a beer and like watch the game. I would never do that anyway. But anyway, that's just not my thing. You know, like that would make me I would like my brain would be burnt. Like my dream would be to leave here, go take a hot yoga class and take a walk, have a glass of wine, maybe by myself or with a friend and then end the day.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I mean, for some people, it's very clear. You know, they are a clear, treated introvert. And for some people, they're just like endlessly extrovert no matter. They wake up wanting to be with people. At the end of the day, they want to go out with people more. And so what research shows, for example, with creative people is they tend to be both.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
They tend to be high introverts and high extroverts, which is interesting, right? They're introverts when they're doing their art, and then they're extroverts when they're out there selling their art, which is hard for some artists, right?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Because a lot of artists are kind of introspective and they're creative types, but they really struggle with getting out there and being that extroverted, like, look at my art. And so you're the lucky artist if you are treated in both directions. I think the easiest way to think about it is just it's a proclivity. It's a proclivity to how you want to use your energy.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And the introvert is more a container, wants to contain their energy. They want to be in small groups. They want kind of less frenetic environments. And the extrovert just has a proclivity for more sensation-seeking, larger social groups. And again, it's a preference. I always say I'm an introvert with pretty good social skills. Like I can appear to be extroverted. Most people think I'm outgoing.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I always tell like, I don't even like people that much.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah, I'm not. You know, it's just not, it's not my natural, like if I'm at a party, I struggle with like, What am I going to do here?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Exactly. If you're running a campaign to run for mayor of your town, you want to hire an extroverted PR person, an extroverted person to do marketing because they're going to be out there banging on the doors, not very comfortable talking to people. The introvert is going to be better at doing the accounting and doing the planning. And we've done this research, actually.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
If it had been fun with my students, I would have them take their take measures that are valid measures of introversion and extroversion. I would score them into groups, like the really extroverted group and the really introverted group, and I'd have them plan a party. Just go plan a party. And the group of extroverts is bonfires, there's beer, they're
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
loud music on the beach and the introverts are like, we had to make sure we have good napkins. We want to, you know, we're going to have four people, you know, it's going to be quiet music. That's just, you know, how we're built.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
The research shows that the extroverts tend to have a little bit more success because they're more willing to get out there and ask for it. They get raises more quickly. I see. Yeah. And, you know, in my work in schools, you know, I always ask teachers to pay attention to the personality of their students because the introvert has a lot of great ideas.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
They're just not dying to raise their hand and get the attention. So don't just call on the kids who are raising their hands because you're missing out on getting some great information.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I mean, I set expectations, you know, around that. Because I'm really particular about that because, you know... It drives me crazy when the talkative extrovert is always getting their thing said. I think there's good instructional practices that can help with that. One thing I'm thinking about, though, is this intersection of personality and emotional intelligence.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
You just kind of brought that up for me. And people confuse those a lot. So, for example, I even confused it when I was younger, before I studied it, Because I'm high also in neuroticism, meaning I am more mercurial in terms of I worry about things and I'm fine, then I worry again. That's who I am.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I just always assumed that someone who is high in neuroticism or more, as I said, kind of volatile emotionally, that was just low emotional intelligence. Because like... How could you be emotionally intelligent if you're emotionally volatile? And then I did all this research and found there's pretty much no correlation between personality traits and emotional intelligence. And why is that?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Well, think about it. If you're someone who is more even keeled, maybe you don't even have that much of an opportunity to regulate your emotions, right? But then if you get triggered, you've never had experience, so it's actually harder for you. Someone like me, I'm practicing it all the time. I'm always like, I'm in a bad mood and I've got to give a meeting.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I'm irritable, I've got to give a presentation. So I'm constantly figuring out how to deal with my emotions. And that's why they're separate concepts. And in addition to it, just to build on this, Knowing your personality traits can be extraordinarily helpful for choosing the best strategies to regulate your emotions. Why is that?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I was traveling in Australia recently, and I gave this speech to a group of people. The person who was the person in charge of the speech was about an hour from Melbourne. And I took the train because I preferred to stay in the city. Took the train out, I was planning to take, I had bought my train ticket back. The convener said, you know, Mark, I just really would love to be with you.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And can we just, you know, can I drive you back to your hotel? And I'm thinking to myself, like, that is the worst thing you could ever ask me.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah. And I had my train ticket. I really, it was a full day of presentations and stuff. I really wanted to be by myself to decompress, but I felt bad. And I said, sure. Sure. The guy talked to me for an hour. He just nonstop talked to me. I got back to my hotel. I was like, I am going to have a nervous breakdown. I need another day to recover.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And it just annoyed me about myself not practicing what I teach, which was, Mark, know thyself. You're drained. Be polite. You know, it was my insecurity of just saying, you know, I really appreciate you wanting to drive me back, but, you know, I really have a lot to do tomorrow. I need to rest my voice. I need to, you know, do some prep.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Instead, I just sat there like, you know, shaking and like, you know, having like, just went crazy. So do you see what I'm getting at? Like really knowing yourself in terms of like what drives you and what you're, you know... Your personality traits, just introversion, extroversion alone, and how that relates to your selection of strategies is so important.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah, I mean, certainly. You could imagine also, though, that the introvert might be more comfortable texting because it's less stimulation. So I think it could work in both directions. I think the problem with text messaging is that it's decreasing emotional intelligence because you really can't communicate the same way through a text message. Thank you. Can you repeat both those things again?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
There's good research on even like teens right now prefer to text than to be face-to-face, which is not helpful to building like good relationships.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
disconnected and alienated and lonely people feel these days, that's not necessarily going to help make things better. I have an example. When my father passed away a number of years ago, I got all these text messages, I'm so sorry for your loss, I'm so sorry for your loss. From people who I thought were really good friends of mine. Like 20, 30-year friends.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I'm like, you're not going to pick up the phone and listen to my voice and ask me what can I do to support you right now? And it's so strange. And actually, one of my closest friends didn't even text me. She texted my assistant and said, please go into Mark's office and tell him that I love him. I'm like... This is really weird. I picked up the phone. I'm like, what is happening right now?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
What is happening right now? And people have preconceived notions. Maybe she thought I was overwhelmed and devastated and needed space. But at the same time, make a phone call, leave me a voice message, and give me some options. I had one friend. She's like, Mark, I know you're going through a lot right now. I just want you to know, if you want to talk, anytime you want to call me, call me.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
If you want to text, text. If you want me to come out and stay with you for a couple of days, I'm there.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah. That was like, that was exactly what I needed to hear. I wanted, you know, someone to offer, provide options or just do. But we're so hesitant these days. It's kind of. scary to me, and it makes me fearful about the future of our relationships in general.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And by the way, text messaging, it's fine. I'll be home in a little while. Can you please pick this up? Whatever. Great. There's nothing wrong with text messaging. But when it replaces intimacy and when it replaces building strong bonds, that's where I see the largest problem.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
It's easier because you don't have to feel the feelings. That's what it is. I can be psychologically distant from that person and say what I want to say, where if I have to say it face-to-face, I'm going to have to face a response, and that response may be very uncomfortable for me, and I probably don't have the strategies to deal with it because I never learned them.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Which is diminishing. You know, there was a good study done about kids in camps, and they randomly assigned them to be with their phones, not with their phones, and showed that after a couple of weeks of camp, kids who had their phones decreased in their emotion perception skills. So it makes a difference. You know, we need to Give children and adults more face-to-face time.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah. So we have horizontal, we'll call that pleasantness. And this is going back to something else that we talked about earlier. It's called pleasantness, not goodness or badness. It's in this moment, am I feeling highly pleasant or Or am I feeling unpleasant? Do I feel like approaching my day, my colleagues? Do I feel like avoiding my colleagues? Do I feel safe and comfortable?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Do I feel uncomfortable? That's the x-axis. And the way I like to think about it is that from the moment we wake up in the morning until the time we go to bed, that is activated. We're just, you know, you wake up in the morning and you're all of a sudden in a thought process like, yes, I want to get out of bed. No, I want to pull the covers over my head. On the y-axis is energy or activation.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
The technical term is arousal or activation, but I think energy is a better term. And so it's either you're highly energized or you're deactivated or low in energy. That's mental energy. It's physical energy. It's kind of like how much fuel you have. And then we cross those two axes to create what we call in our work the mood meter. And there are four quadrants.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
We got high pleasant, high energy, yellow. So think about emotions there. Happy, excited, elated, ecstatic, optimistic. We got the green. So that's low energy and pleasant still. That's the calm, content, tranquil, peaceful, relaxed quadrant. And then we have the unpleasant side. And I'm going to Repeat myself, it's not the bad emotions or the negative emotions.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
We're going to call them unpleasant because it's not generally pleasant to be sad or down or disappointed or hopeless or feeling despair, which is the blue or that low energy unpleasant. And we've got our red quadrant on the mood meter, which we'll call the high energy, highly unpleasant emotions, which are feelings of anger and anxiety. So it's very helpful for people.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Because, you know, when you're, like you even said this yourself, like you're not really sure how you're feeling. And we know our inner lives are complex. So to be able to have a tool that has four quadrants where you're like, I don't know, am I pleasant? I guess I'm kind of pleasant, but my energy is low. All right, I'm in the green. All right, now what are my options there?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
No, I'm feeling quite energized and pleasant. Oh, what are my options there, etc. ? We find that for both preschoolers and CEOs, very helpful, extraordinarily helpful. And then, you know, going back to Ruler for a minute, we might talk about the quadrant as being the R for self-awareness, right? Recognizing, like, where am I in emotion space?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And then you might ask yourself like, all right, well, what's going on? Why am I thinking that I'm in the yellow or red or blue or green? What just happened? What might be happening? Oh, I'm about to be on a podcast. Oh, I'm about to take a test. Oh, I'm about to go into a difficult meeting with a colleague. Oh, I'm about to go home and my partner is going to be mad.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Okay, now I understand why I'm feeling the way I'm feeling. I put a word to it. I'm more precise. I'm not enraged. I'm irritable. I'm not blissful. I'm just content. I'm not depressed. I'm just feeling down. I'm not overwhelmed. I'm just feeling a little uneasy.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
That's helpful because that helps you go into the E and the R of ruler, which is, all right, is this an emotion I need to express or do I keep it to myself? Does this emotion need help? Do I need support right now? Or am I okay with what I'm feeling? I have a great story about this, actually.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
We're born to be fixers, I think, especially in my role as a teacher or if you're a parent with a kid or a teacher, partners, right? And so I go to visit this school where my program is. It's called Ruler also. And we're in about 5,000 schools now across the United States. And I'm visiting this school, kindergarten,
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I do this check-in, and the little boy says he's in the blue, which means unpleasant, low in energy. And, of course, my little five-year-old, he's in the blue. I feel terrible. And then my fixer, like, I want to fix this kid. I don't want this kid to be in the blue. And so I know I can't do that because it's like the rules of ruler. You don't fix people's feelings.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
You don't fix people's feelings. So I just said to the boy, I'm just curious, you know. Do you need a strategy? And he goes, no. And I'm like, no. I said, I'm just curious, you know, why don't you need a strategy? He goes, because I know it's impermanent.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
If they are, if they get direct instruction. That's my vision for the world is that everyone gets an emotion education. And the boy says, no, you know, I know it's going to go away. I'm fine. I'm like, okay. I'm just bad at this kid. Like, you're my teacher. You know, it was amazing.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And to think that that five-year-old had that insight, that he had an unpleasant feeling that didn't need to be fixed, that it was okay, that he just knew he was in a little funk, but he has already experienced that emotions are ephemeral, you know, and he can just let it go and he'll be in the green a little later or the red or whatever else. It was really kind of mind-blowing.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Sure. I think, you know, at the simplest level, it's how we reason with and about our emotions and feelings. That's like the simple definition. The way I talk about it is as a set of skills. And we use the acronym RULER to describe those skills. The first is recognizing emotions. So I'm trying to read your facial expression right now. Are you interested? Are you bored already?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
It tends to grow. There are cultural differences, just to be frank. But in, you know, Western culture, suppression tends not to have great outcomes. Finding ways to reappraise tends to be more helpful and This really gets into, though, for me, the core of my work because, you know, for 20 years of my life, I was running a center for emotional intelligence and teaching skills.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I would go around and I would see a lot of resistance, a lot of resistance, whether it was, you know, the hedge fund manager or the superintendent of schools or a parent. I've had fathers come up to me, say things like, Mark, you're so vulnerable. You shared your whole story about being bullied. I would never in my wildest dream ever share with my own son that I was bullied as a kid.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I'm like, tell me more, of course. I'm a psychologist. And in the end, the guy was afraid that his son would think he was weak. And so we have a mindset about feelings that we have to talk about. People have feelings about their feelings. Sometimes we call those meta-emotions or meta-feelings. Sometimes it's just that happy is good, anger is bad. It's that simple.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
My whole recent research is focused on something I call permission to feel. You know a little bit about my own story. I had a pretty rough childhood that included abuse. It included a lot of bullying. And I had two parents who loved me. But, you know, my mother was a very anxious woman who never had strategies. So, you know, she was always saying, I'm having a nervous breakdown.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And she'd lock herself in her room and she wouldn't come out for a few hours. My father was, as we might call today, you know, the tough guy who was kind of toxically masculine. Son, you got tough enough. He even said to me once, you know, He's gone now and we had a good relationship. But I'll never forget, he said, son, I used to beat kids up like you. He said that? He did.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And he thought that was a message that I needed to hear to toughen up. He was doing that through love. I mean, it was not emotionally intelligent parenting. But that was the way he thought. And he did love me. He just didn't have a Be a parent in that way. And so think about that. Bullied, shame, fear, abuse, all kinds of stuff going on in my head. Mom having nervous breakdowns, father toughen up.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
What happens? You suppress. You deny. You ignore. You eat. You do all kinds of weird behaviors because you have nowhere to go with your feelings. And I fear that way too many people feel that way right now. And I have good research to show that. Um, you know, you've read my book, you know, I had an uncle Marvin.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
He was a middle school teacher who, you know, by some wave of a magic wand was staying with my family one summer when I was 12. And he noticed something in my facial expression, my body language, he knew something was off. And he was the first adult who sat with me and said, Hey, Mark, how are you feeling?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I'm trying to understand emotions, where they're coming from. Like, why am I feeling this way? What's the consequence of that feeling? The third is labeling emotions, so being precise with the words that we use to describe our feelings. The fourth is expressing emotions, knowing how and when to express emotions with different people across context and culture.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I don't know if it was his facial expression, his body language, his vocal tone, but that was the opener for me. I'm not doing so well. I don't really like life very much. I'm scared. And he didn't say, I'm going to have a nervous breakdown or toughen up. He said, we're going to get through this. I got you. I'm with you. And it's really interesting to me because, you know,
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I feel like we're so focused on skill building, which is really important, but I want to take a step back and say, are we giving ourselves, are we giving our colleagues, our partners, our children the permission to feel? And I feel like a lot of people don't have that permission.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Now, my research shows with tens of thousands of people across cultures that only about a third of adults felt that they had someone when they were young, who created the conditions for them to have permission to appeal. I mean, 70% of the people walking around here right now, in our corporations, in our schools, in our homes, 30% felt like they had that.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And then you wonder, what do you think the characteristics are of these people? The characteristics of the Uncle Marvin's or Aunt Maria's or the colleague at work, by the way. This also works in the adult workforce. You can have an emotion mentor or a feelings coach at work. There's three characteristics. Do you want to take a guess?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah. You're getting – like you're really nuanced, which is – that's why you're a scientist too. The three broad characteristics, the first one that shows up cross-culturally, nonjudgmental. Like when we think about the people who gave us permission to feel, they just had no judgment. They let me be who I can be or who I am.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
The second is empathic and kind of coupled with compassionate, which is kind of the different form of empathy. The third primarily is active listening. People want to be around people who don't judge them, who listen actively and show that they care. It's that simple.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I'll tell you, it's really interesting to me because, you know, I do a lot of public speaking and often my new strategy is I do surveys where I'm going to be presenting so I can present the audience themselves with their data. And so I'm giving this speech to a bunch of adult parents, high school parents. And I'm showing the data from them. They filled out the survey.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And then the big one is the final R, which is regulating emotions. What are the strategies we use to help us deal with everyday emotions?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Nonjudgmental, active listening, empathy, compassion. And I show, just like my national study, a third of you said yes, two-thirds of you said no. So this mom, and she's like, just like impulsively jumps out of her seat. She's like, I'm having an epiphany. I'm like, okay. And she's like, I know. I'm certain that my daughter has an Uncle Marvin. I know it. And I'm also certain that my son doesn't.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And you know something, Mark? I am leaving your presentation today and I am finding my son his Uncle Marvin. I'm like, lady, it could be you. And it was like- It's sort of interesting.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
It's like outsourcing. Right. Like there's your karate teacher, there's your feelings mentor. And it's interesting to me, and I push on this in my research now, what is the resistance? Like, what are people so afraid of? I mean, they're so afraid of feelings, their own and their children's or their partner's.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And so I ask, you know, I push on this, and what's really interesting and sad to me is that adults today, the two barriers, and I'm going to push you again, what do you think the two things that get in the way of giving other people permission to feel.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
You're right there. The first one, though, is just a really interesting one, which is time. People, I don't have the time. You don't have the time to be nonjudgmental. Like, can you talk to me about that one, please?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah, I agree. The second really goes back to the skills. So I've had parents say things like, I'm afraid to ask my child how they're feeling because I'm not going to be able to handle it. I mean, think about that for a minute. I'm not going to be able to handle it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So you'd rather your son or daughter suppress their fears or whatever they're feeling because you haven't developed the skills that you need to help co-regulate and support them. This is, again, going back to my mission, vision, is that we need a world where everyone gets an emotion education.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Preschool to high school, and it's got to continue in college, and it's got to continue in the workforce, and it's got to continue as we grow older. Because as a 54-year-old person right now who leads a large group of people, COVID hits, I had a complete meltdown. I didn't know how to lead during COVID. I was trying to figure it out, doing Zoom meetings and crazy stuff.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And then my mother-in-law got stuck with me. And that was a real kind of wake-up call in terms of like relationship building. It was really rough for me, actually. She came for a wedding. One of my colleagues got married on March 3rd of 2020. Well, my mother-in-law is from Panama. And so just so you know, all flights to Panama got canceled by March 13th. And they didn't open until September.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
if you were to take a test from like 20 years ago yes we try to be a little bit more innovative now in our measurement of the skills so for example i just finished with a bunch of colleagues publishing a test of emotion perception but it's not static images it's video clips that are around three to four seconds that show subtle emotions it's about vocal tone it's about body language and we're trying to get people to
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So we had this 81-year-old lovely, lovely woman. But like, you know, it's a lot for your mother-in-law to live with you for eight months. One little quick side story for this. I just, I think it's, it's relevant. So like it was getting really, you know, I'm working from home. My mother-in-law was there. She wants me to make her a cappuccino every morning. which I like to do for the first week.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
But after the fourth month, learn how to use the machine. And I don't want to do it myself. I'm afraid of the machine. I'm like, sorry, I didn't mean to laugh out loud.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
They can be, but growth mindset, right? Watch me, I'll help you do it. No, I want you to make the coffee. I'm like, you got to make your own coffee. I told you, I don't like people in the morning. You got to make your own coffee. Anyhow, one night we're at dinner. And she looks at me and she speaks Spanish. I speak Spanish.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And so she said, you know, in Spanish, are you really the director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence? And I looked at her and I'm like, not tonight, not tonight. Like it's, we're going down. And it was a mess.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah. I mean, and there it was. Like, yes, my day job is I run a center for emotional intelligence, but like I'm a human being who had strong emotions and I didn't have the strategies. And I needed to cultivate a whole new set of regulation strategies to deal with that new aspect of my life.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah, there are strategies. Correctness is a tricky term. It's a game. It's no matter what, it's going to be a game because you can't predict how people will respond. But I couldn't agree with you more. I'll give you another example. My father, who, like you, we ended up having an excellent relationship. My mom died when I was young. And he remarried. And he had moved to upstate New York.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And he had this lovely wife. And she called me.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
about two years after they were married and she's like mark i can't take it anymore your father is driving me out of my mind like what do you mean he's angry all the time he's just really making me miserable and she's like i think you know i might have to leave him and i'm thinking to myself oh my goodness like you know he's older and if she leaves him he's going to want to move in with me so like road trip
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And so I went on a road trip, took my father out to the local coffee shop. We're sitting down. I can't take it anymore. This is what he's telling me. I can't take it anymore. I'm like, Dad, like, tell me more. I can't take it anymore. I'm like, that's not enough information, Dad. Like, what can't you take anymore? In the end, what I learned was that my father has three sons.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
accurately kind of label these emotions in BASE's body and voice?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
All of us have doctorates. We're all independent. We're all successful doctors. Her children were having struggles, and she was needing to babysit her grandchildren. My father didn't like that. My sons are all taking care of themselves. He's not realizing this, but what he's saying is, I don't like the idea of you spending so much time with these grandkids because I want your attention.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Now, why do I tell you that? Because after my father and I spoke for about a half hour about this, I said, Dad, you know, it sounds like you're jealous. He said, what do you mean I'm jealous? I said, well, you're upset that Jane, your wife, wants to spend more time with the grandkids, and that's not time with you. In my emotion lexicon, I didn't use that term, that's jealousy.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I can't believe you're telling me I'm jealous. I'm like, I'm not telling you you're jealous. You're telling me you're jealous. I'm just giving you the concept. He starts crying, hysterical crying, because he had awareness for the first time of his emotional experience. He was so emotionally illiterate. He just didn't know what he was feeling, and he was just acting out.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Once he sat down and understood the experience of, like, wife wants to be with child because they need support. I'm not happy with that because I don't know what to do with myself when she's spending time with the grandkids. It's jealousy. All of a sudden, we had a pathway to helping him regulate.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Now, I'll finish this story by saying about two months later, Jane, she calls me, she's like, Mark, I don't know what you did at that coffee shop, but like your father's a changed man. And, you know, I don't take all the credit, take some credit, but it just shows you the power of emotional self-awareness. Like once you really know how you're feeling, it can be liberating.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And then you can figure out what you need to do with those feelings.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So here I am, a professor at Yale. I'm teaching courses on emotional intelligence. Now, I should just let you know there's resistance oftentimes, and my students are fantastic in general, but there's a resistance to wanting to learn about emotional intelligence. What they want to do in general is get an A in my course,
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
But they don't – and they want to memorize like, oh, so the theory was written in 1990 by Mayer and Salovey.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I have stories about that too. But – And so I say, no, this is about you developing the skills. You're going to think really critically about it. And part of the essays you're going to write are going to be your action plans for building your own emotional intelligence. I don't want to do that. I want to get the test and get the A. After a month, I get them bought in.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Interestingly, though, because I make my courses into research, and I ask them to fill out surveys, how they're feeling, every class. Number one emotion, stressed. Everybody's stressed. I'm thinking to myself, like, stressed out? Like, you've got a good life here. But nevertheless, stressed, you know, I have to have empathy. I get it. But I decided that I really had a hard time.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Remember, I defined stress as having too many demands and not enough resources. I didn't feel like that was the actual feeling. Now, who am I to judge? But one way to get better at it was to have my students do journaling. When you're stressed... Write about it. What's on your mind? What are you thinking about? Take a guess what the number one emotion was after we did the qualitative analysis.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
What they were really feeling. Fear. Okay. Envy. Oh, interesting. Envy. Envy. Your father is richer than my father. Your mother is more connected than my mother. You've got better hips. You've got better lips. It was endless social comparisons, right? And so envy, right, is wanting what someone else has. Anxiety is about uncertainty. Stress is about too many demands, not enough resources.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And so here I was. you know, having deeper knowledge of what was the underlying feeling or emotion that they were having, which was envy, not stress. And so I had a conversation with the counseling department, and I made a joke about it, and I was like, you know, What's our university's envy reduction program? It wasn't the most popular conversation.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I just think it's interesting to think about it in terms of helping people to learn what to do with their emotions. Right now, there's a mindfulness craze. Everyone's doing mindfulness, and I do mindfulness, and I appreciate mindfulness. But let me tell you, when you're feeling chronic envy, Doing breathing exercises is not going to decrease the envy.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
You're going to have to work on your construction in your mind of your relationships with people. And so I just feel so strongly that we help people pause a little bit, reflect a little bit, think about how they're feeling as a pathway to just having well-being.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Well, I think, again, like all emotions, envy is not a bad emotion. You know, the way I think about emotions as being, you know, when we need to get help with our emotions is when, if it's an unpleasant one, it's intense in long duration. Right? Momentary envy. You know, I get envious all the time. I get envious. I watch TED Talks. I'm like, oh, that timing was amazing.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
You know, and I'm like, I'm going to try that out. You know, so I use that envy of someone else's skill, you know, as a way to grow.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So that's the difference between, you know, the envy that leans toward admiration versus the envy, like what you're referring to, that leads to resentment. Right.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
right it's if i if i hate you because you have you know what i want now we're talking you know pathological envy potentially and so that's the self-awareness piece you know if that's the part of really getting you know that differentiation of emotion that granularity um Because again, it's like anger. It's not a bad emotion. Anger is okay. There's reasons to be angry in the world.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
When we get treated unfairly, we should be angry. It doesn't mean that we have to be dysregulated. There's an assumption that we make that when we experience unpleasant, strong emotions like anxiety or anger, that we're going to be dysregulated. I have a whole new relationship with my anxiety. very different relationship. I may have spent years working on it.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I notice it and I'm like, hi anxiety, how you doing today? And then it just, it's okay. I can even be giving, you know, here with you or giving a speech or teaching, have that anxiety come in and not allow it to have power over me. because I can observe it, I can welcome it. And then if it's in the way, I can say, you know, anxiety, you're going to go back there for a little while.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Or, you know, Mark, I mean, sometimes, you know, when I give speeches, like it's the same speech, right? You think redundant. And it's like, I can't believe I have to talk about this again. And then I'll look at the audience and like, it's their first time. You know, it's like all of a sudden, like my despair turns into optimism and hope.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
His feelings meant she was going to go, you know, buy his feelings mentor.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Hey, that's another one of my goals.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Great. That's fantastic. Because that's empathy without emotional intelligence. Mm-hmm. And so I work with a lot of doctors. I've done quite a bit of work with the cancer hospital at Yale. It's called Smilo. And doctors have been taught from early on, leave your empathy at the door. And I challenge that.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
When you're a patient with cancer, knowing that you may pass, the last thing you want is an unempathic You want a relationship with someone who's treating you. And the assumption is that you get lost in your empathy. And people have written about that. And it's true. There is overzealous empathy. You can have compassion fatigue. But again, it's in the absence of emotional intelligence.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
What do I mean? Well, part of emotional intelligence is regulation. And so if I see my work as a cancer doctor as helping people have the best last few months of their lives, that's a really interesting way to think about it. So as I'm in relationship with my patient, my mindset is I've come to the understanding that my job, people pass.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
but I could go down a rabbit hole of despair because everyone potentially may pass. Or I can see this as I'm giving someone a gift. I'm giving them a gift of my presence. I'm giving them a gift of them feeling held and cared for. And so to me, it's all about the framing, you know, of empathy.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yes, of course, you know, if you're just, you can lose yourself in someone else's shoes, but that's not emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence saying, you know what, I'm noticing myself, I'm getting lost in your feelings. I need to pull back a little bit.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So the whole set of skills are intra and interpersonal. That's really important. It's about self and others always. for example, right now we are co-regulating each other's emotions, right? Our facial expressions, our vocal tones, we're influencing how we each other, how we feel. When you think about the recognition piece, we'll just start there, right?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I don't know much about that to be honest. What I know more about is the kind of psychological experience of empathy and that there are multiple forms of it. So for example, there's the cognitive empathy piece where I've never had your experience, But intellectually, I get that you've suffered or intellectually, I get your experience.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
There's the emotional empathy, which is when I meet other survivors of abuse who have felt shame, I understand what that means because I've lived there. And not that our experience was the same, but our feeling was the same. We have a shared emotional experience. And then on top of that, that compassionate kind of form of empathy is what I think is what we need much more of in our society, which is
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
We don't just cognitively understand where someone is or relate to their experience, but we feel compelled to be in relationship with that person and be supportive. I'm thinking about something else that you spoke about earlier, which is this idea that like, and this is a misconstrual of my work and others' work, that the goal of this is to talk about feelings all day long.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Like the last thing I want to do is talk about my feelings all day long. Like that is not helpful actually. And I've had some experiences in my life, you know, where like some, just to be blunt, shit happens, you know, and I call everybody I know, like my best friends, my family, can you believe this happened? I mean, I can't take it anymore.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And then I hand up the phone and I do the same thing and they all listen to me. And then I've spent two hours on the phone telling the same thing over and over again, talking about my feelings. And I feel worse because I've rehearsed it 15 times. That's not emotional intelligence. When we're emotionally intelligent, we recognize and we know that just talking about it is actually not helpful.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Like we need to be with someone who's that active listener, who's nonjudgmental, who shows compassion. But when you're compassionate, you actually are bringing you back to the person saying, you know, is this, you know, the right thing right now for you? You know, what else might you think about?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
You know, I know when I've had really difficult experiences, you know, the person who says things like, Maybe could you just jump in the hot air balloon for a minute, Mark, and look down at your life? And besides this one thing that you feel like is the worst thing that's ever happened to you in your whole life, anything else going right? I mean, yeah, my partner loves me.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
My dogs love me unconditionally. I got great friends. Oh, yeah. all of a sudden that little thing that's activating you is not so big anymore. That's emotional intelligence, right? Is not getting lost in the empathy, not just endlessly talking about feelings to the point where there's no strategies. And I think that that's really interesting because it goes back to something important, which is
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
The permission to feel characteristics of non-judgment, active listening, and empathy, compassion? Never. And I'm talking I have tens of thousands of people who have done this. Does anyone say fixer? problem solver, I don't even get smart or wise.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
When we think about the people who create the conditions for us to be our true selves, we don't think about the wisest, smartest, fixer, problem solver. We think about the nonjudgmental listener who shows compassion. And I think that has to be reinforced that some of the fear that
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
There's self-awareness like, Mark, how are you feeling right now? And I'm, you know, I'm having mixed emotions, right? This is, a great podcast. I want to be articulate. I'm excited, but I'm a little overwhelmed because I got so much I want to share, but I don't know how much I'm going to share. So there's all that awareness of my emotion. Sometimes I have language for it.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
that we have is that we're gonna get lost in all these feelings, but no one's asking you to get lost in their feelings. What they're asking for is support. They're asking you to just listen and to maybe ask me a few questions to help me clarify my experience and then help me on a path towards feeling better.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Sometimes I don't, like any of us. And that's why it starts off with kind of just a general awareness. Like, am I pleasant? Am I unpleasant? Do I have a lot of energy or do I feel depleted? And we call that your core affect. And then I could start asking myself questions like, well, what are you doing right now, Mark? Well, I'm sitting across from Andrew.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Questions to yourself. Say things like, Mark. I mean, I travel a lot and, you know, I was just in Washington state for some presentations before this flight delays and my flight got canceled. I missed a dinner and I used to get really worked up about it. And I would just, and I just, take a seat at the airport, take a nice long inhale.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I'm like, Mark, is this really going to be something that's going to bother you next week? I'm working on a book. I'm like, I got another night in hotel to work. I actually reframed it as an opportunity to like have some space and write. And so you can use these techniques a lot going back to my dad.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So my dad, as he got older, his anger did come back and he was kind of, there were, I remember this one, you know, time where we're at a family dinner and And I had already been in my position for a while. And there was a little bit of resentment with my father because he was a a blue collar worker and a very, very talented air conditioning repairman and had a good career.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And, but all of a sudden, you know, went to graduate school and got PhDs. And that was, you know, it was a little bit difficult for my father at some time. And so when I got a job at Yale in particular, you know, he got a little, there was some emotions about that.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I remember we were at this one dinner and basically he, I'm not going to repeat what he said because it's really gross, but he said something like, you know, Mark, you think your blank doesn't stink anymore. And I was like, eesh. And then he just kind of went on and on and on. And I had to make a choice.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Like, do I start crying, you know, like in the middle of this dinner because I feel so violated by my father? Do I like tell him to go blank himself and walk out of the room? And I decided to use a distancing technique. I decided to make him into a movie. I decided that he was now a TV show. And that TV show was something I was observing and not feeling.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And that has proven to be one of the most powerful strategies for me, is when I'm in a position with someone who has a lot of negative energy. And as a kid who was bullied, I'm more affected by these things, I think. I create that psychological distance by just putting that picture frame up there and I just observe it. And I kind of ask myself questions about it. I'm like, wow.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Or I say things like, you know, wow, that's really interesting. I wonder where that, I get curious about it. Like, I wonder where that's coming from. You know, what was his childhood like that he's so angry? And it really is helpful. So these are very powerful techniques. That can be used in real time, as you just described. Very real time. I use them all the time.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
You know, I'm at the grocery store, you know, I'm not going to get into my issues, but, you know, I'm like, and I grew up with, you know, I would say lower middle class. We were very, we didn't have a lot of money. Everything was on a budget. And, you know, I'm fortunate to be in a different circumstance now, but I'm still cheap. And so my partner, I'm like, I don't understand.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
We're not buying that. That is ridiculous. We're not spending $7 on a bottle of organic almond milk. I'm not doing it. We're not doing it. And then I have to move away from the islands, take a little walk. I'm like, Mark, you know. Is this worth your relationship, the almond milk? Really? Is this what you're going to do? I don't know.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Being interviewed, okay, well, how does that, what comes up for you with that? And then I try to label that feeling. So that's like the R, the U, and the L of emotional intelligence for the self. And I'm doing the same thing for you. I'm looking at your facial expressions, your body language, I'm listening to you. I'm trying to understand if I say something, do you shift?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Maybe I'm just the only one who needs regulation 300 times a day, but I find that different strategies, like the picture frame works when I'm angry or someone is angry with me. My anxiety, I get into the hot air balloon and I look down. When I'm like irritated with someone, I just take the walk away and I ask myself, is this really that important?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And that's what I hope people will learn is that there's so many amazing strategies out there and that we use them interchangeably with different emotions and different contexts.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Well, emotional is like historically like you're hysterical. It means that you are not in control of your emotions. I don't like to use that term ever. I just find it a useless term. And because that's when oftentimes when people think about emotions, they think of people being emotional. And I just don't even know what that means.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
It has like just connotations from the past that I don't think are helpful.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah, exactly. You'll hear people say, why are you so emotional? And again, that's a place of judgment. What they're saying is that you're experiencing a strong emotion that's making me uncomfortable. I don't know what to do with that feeling. So by me labeling you as emotional, I can alienate you. where's that going to lead to? Not good communication, right? Not healthy relationships.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I'm trying to put language to it. So it's self and other.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
It's more of the emotional, the emotional is the judgment. When I say, Andrew, you're so emotional. It also can be a form of gaslighting, which is I'm trying to get you to believe something about yourself that I want you to believe, which may not be a reality at all, which is usually problematic in our society. I think most of our low self-esteem comes from gaslighting in our childhoods.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah, I think that's the beginning of bullying, which is that Mark, you're too skinny. Mark, you're too overweight. Mark, your nose is too big. Mark, your nose is too small. Mark, you're too feminine. Mark, you're too masculine. And then all of a sudden, there's no feelings mentors. There's no education. And I just start believing it. And then it becomes my reality.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it's awful. I mean, you see it all the time. We're not born being self-critics. We're born being experience-dependent, right? We depend on relationships. And if those relationships are meaning cruel and people are gaslighters, well, guess what? That's going to end up being how we think about ourselves.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Let's think about right now, right? Our interaction, right? As a teacher, right? I mean, how many of you have ever been, meaning your listeners and you, like how many of us have ever been in a situation in a classroom where it's like, all right, everybody, let's turn to page 357. All right, Mark, you're gonna read paragraph one and Andrew, you're gonna read paragraph two.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And your brain is immediately gone. So emotions drive our attention. It's so clear, right? If we're not feeling engaged or curious, we're gonna be bored. And again, boredom, not a bad emotion. It just means like what's being presented to me and the way it's being presented is not meeting my needs. It's not engaging me. So my brain needs to do something. I'm just gonna go doodle.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I'm gonna go push the kid here. I'm gonna get on my phone. It's just where we wanna, our brains are wanting to do things. When we're in environments where there's a lot of curiosity, where there is high engagement, attention is much better. So that's the simplest thing to think about.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
In my work, my whole career has been about building curriculum to help educators integrate emotions into their everyday classroom. And part of what we help them understand, going back to that mood meter, think about that for a minute. You know, a lot of us, because of our dispositions, we tend to speak with a certain cadence. We tend to present in a certain way.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And if you're someone who like lives in the green, right, you're just calm and content and tranquil and peaceful. The spa people. All right. Some of the yoga teachers, right? Let's all turn our attentions to ourselves. They're great. I love yoga. But my point is, if you're always in that green quadrant, like for me, even though I'm like living there a lot, it's like, Give me some energy, please.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And then there's like, I have a friend who is a principal of a middle school in San Francisco, and she's a former tennis coach. And she walks into the school, team, let's go, go, go every day. It's like, Heather, come on. You're overwhelming me. And then you've got people who might be in that kind of, you know, blue quadrant.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
You know, it's like, we've done some education work in the past, you know. And let's be real, how much education reform really matters? Mark, you do all this research, but who's reading it? Is anybody really reading it? Such a downer. Yeah. Or that person who's always in the red. that's activated, like it's caustic.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And so my point here is that we're going to default in many ways to being in one of these quadrants, maybe all day long, maybe part of the day. But as someone who is leading, because I consider leadership teaching, someone who's managing a team as a teacher in a classroom, as a parent, couple, whatever, I've got to be aware of kind of where I live emotionally
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I've got to be aware that not everybody wants to be with me where I'm at. And my job is to create an emotional rollercoaster ride for people, to bring people on an emotional journey, because that's what's going to keep them interested. And believe it or not, from our research and others' research, we know that certain emotions are better for certain things.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So, for example, if I want my high school students to be like really brainstorming ideas, I'm not going to put on like a Gregorian chant. You know, da, da, da, da. It's like, ugh. I'm going to put on, you know, go back to Lady Gaga, you know, I'm on the edge of glory. And like, let's get pumped up and like, everybody, let's get the post-its out there.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And everybody's excited and just brainstorming. But then, you know, which one are we, like, what's going to be the project? You can't be all hyped up because then your brain is not in a very kind of... a building consensus kind of model, mode. So when we bring our energy level down, it's like, oh, let me think about it for a minute. You're more thoughtful. You're more careful.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
You're more like, I don't know. And people would say, well, why would blue, why would unpleasant, low energy be helpful? Well, believe it or not, oftentimes we can be much more detail-oriented when we're in that low energy, unpleasant place. It's like writing, I do a lot of grant writing, right? It's like, I think it's great. Not a great idea. Yeah.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Mark, put on the classical music, zone everybody out, get into that place where you are going to look for every i to dot, every comma that should be a semicolon, every dash that should be this, paragraph matching. You can't do that when you're really super excited. Your brain doesn't operate that way. And then people say red. Why would red be great?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
The best story I have for that is, so I actually did a collaboration with Lady Gaga. and her foundation, Born This Way Foundation, many years ago. And we did a study of thousands of high school students across America. And we looked at how do they feel when they're in school. And what we found was 77% of the feelings, and I repeat that, 77% of their emotions at school were unpleasant.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Tired, bored, and stressed were the top three back then. So we did this study. We were working on it as a big project called the Emotion Revolution. And we ended up going to the White House to present our findings. I had to make a decision. Like I had the Secretary of Education at that time in front of me. I'm presenting this big study on the emotional lives of teenagers.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Do I want to go in there like, you know, I've got an amazing study to share with you. I'm like, hmm, not so great. Do I want to go in there like, Secretary, let's just take a nice long inhale and an exhale. That's not gonna go over so well. Do I wanna go in the blue? Like, you know, it's pretty bad out there. No, I decided that red was my quadrant.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I wanted the people in the education department to be fired up by this research. I want them to feel the passion that I had and the anger that I had, that it is an injustice for kids to feel that way in our nation's schools. We need to figure out what to do to create a more engaging learning environment. And so I decided to really present that in that way.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Well, I think another big deal about emotional intelligence is that we like to think of it as, or people think of it as, this construct. I don't think that's the best way to look at it. I think it's much more interesting to look at it as a set of discrete skills that come together. They're not that highly correlated. And so I really like to think of them as emotion skills.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I didn't present the findings and like look at the data. I'm like, I want you to really take a look at these data, please. 77% of the, I mean, I'm saying 77% of the emotions, tired, bored, and stressed. How is that going to lead to a nation filled with people who are innovative and creative and making a difference in the world? Think about it. We know how emotions drive the way we behave.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
If you're tired, bored, and stressed all day long, what's the result? And so I presented it that way. And I did the best I could. And I think that's the magic of understanding emotion. Does this resonate?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
That we're going to be intentional about the emotions that we feel and that the emotions that we create in environments, whether they're at home or at school or in the workplace, because certain emotions work better for certain things.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Well, because he's checking in daily. Right. Right. So in this school, which we call a ruler school, that's what they do. Kids check in.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
in the morning and other times throughout the day and they start to recognize that I can feel this way at one point of the day and I can feel this way at another point of the day and if I'm feeling this way and I'm about to do something where that feeling is not great, I can shift out of that feeling or I can still feel that feeling and still be a good learner.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I mean that's incredible to me that we can do that and I see it in thousands of schools and it's done remarkably well.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
It's called how we feel.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Um, well, what's really cool about the app and the reason why we have an app is that technology can be super helpful in this instance for building self-awareness. So if I set reminders, which you can do on the app to check in in the morning, maybe after lunch or right before I go home, you know, you pick whatever works for you, or you can do it randomly.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And then you aggregate your data across time. Right now you have instances of your emotions over time. But what's also cool about it is that you can disaggregate your data by things like who you're with or where you're at or what you're doing. And then you can analyze that.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And that within the R, the U, the L, the E and the R that I described, there are sub skills. And so part of what you're talking about is the body awareness. Some people are more cognitive, you know, they're just very language oriented. Some people, you know, a lot of therapists, somatic, you know, talking about somatosensory things, all good.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So you get your little mood meters that are all different colors because, wow, I thought I was more in the yellow at work, but I'm actually more in the blue at work. Or I thought when I'm with this person, I'm actually feeling calm.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
actually when i look at my data i'm always anxious with that person so it runs a reverse correlation yes fantastic and then you can just look at your report and then it asks you questions to get more insights and also importantly we've embedded a lot of the strategies that i've been talking about so like these distancing strategies or the breathing exercises or the mindfulness exercises or gratitude exercises which by the way i was thinking in the back of my head as we were speaking about the envy reduction program i think the number one thing is gratitude
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
that like if our brains are just endlessly searching for what's better that's out there than what I have, we're not experiencing any gratitude for what we have. And so I spent a lot of time helping people really understand, like, take a look, like look where you're at as a student. Think about what you have the opportunity to learn. Think about the opportunities you have in life.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And all of a sudden it's like, oh yeah, my life is pretty good. As opposed to everyone else's life is better than mine. So gratitude for me is, Sometimes it feels cliche these days, you know, you've heard so much about it. I know I can't talk strongly enough about both the practice and the science that supports it.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah, exactly. These are all evidence-based strategies to help us have a better life.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I think at the end though, you know, this is why I teach this stuff is that we have to know how we feel. We got to know what we want to do with those feelings. And we have to know how the people we live with and love and work with and teach how they feel too. And so we need language in the end.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah, we're going to have a couple of days together for this. I think when I think about my eight-year-old self, 10-year-old self, 11-year-old self being bullied. Remember, bullying is about a power imbalance. That's one of the core elements of it. It's about the intent to harm. It's not conflict. It's not like sibling rivalry.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
It's intention to harm where there's a power imbalance and the repetition of it. Those are the three key factors in bullying. It's repeated. It's intended to harm and is a power imbalance. And so that puts you in a really powerless position when you think about it.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
When you have nobody to support you, no upstanders, no one else around you to help you get out of the situation, what happens is that you feel fear. And what I felt, and it's been the emotion that I've struggled with my whole life, is shame. Because what happens when you're bullied often is that you are made to feel like you are not worthy. It's diminished self-worth.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Because I've got power over you. I'm going to do whatever the hell I want to you. I'm going to say whatever I want to say. I'm going to spit on you. I'm going to throw you into the locker. I'm going to do crazy stuff, which is what happened to me. And guess what? There's nothing you can do about it. And when you're in an environment where nobody does anything about it, it creates despair.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So you can see how there's a lot of emotions there. And I'll tell you right now, one of my... hardest memories of being a student when I was around 10 years old is that I remember being in a classroom in math, and I was wearing like a vest, like a down vest as a protection. It was like my thing to hold on to, like my little vest was going to be protective of me.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
The only problem was I had two bullies sitting on either side of me, and what they did throughout the entire class was was they used pen and they just wrote things about me on my jacket. And I can still remember, like you're sitting across from me, you being my teacher, and I can still remember locking eyes with my teacher and him just looking away.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And that feeling that you have of complete despair, like how is it that I'm not being protected by this adult in my community? And so... That's the issue that we're trying to solve for. Now, I could make all kinds of excuses about the teacher. Maybe he didn't really notice. I don't buy it because it was repeated over time and it was happening a lot.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I could also say that, you know, maybe he misread my facial expression. I'm not buying that either. I think it was either he had a mindset, you know, this is a rite of passage. You got to toughen up, kiddo, or you're not going to survive in your Clifton High School mindset. Or another point is that he just was like, I have no idea what to do about it and I'm just going to let it go.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
None of those are an option for me anymore. It's just not acceptable. And so we need to teach people skills. People need to be emotionally perceptive. Emotions are signals. I mean, that's an important point of this conversation. My facial expression, which was probably one of depression, fear, and shame, which is not one of a big smile in general. Obviously, there's variability.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
But point is that... It's pretty clear when you're wearing a jacket and sitting like this in your classroom with a hoodie on, you know, doing your work and people are writing on you, you're not in a good place. How that perception of my experience, my emotion, was not a signal to do something blows my mind. It blows my mind, I'm just saying.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I can't imagine an adult being in a situation with a child that is being treated that way and not thinking action. But yet we see it all the time. All the time we see it. Even nowadays? All the time. By the way, the research shows that bullying has not really decreased in the last 30, 40 years. Really? No. It is not.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
It's pretty much about a third of middle school, high school kids get bullied each day in school. And so this is the point of my work, which is that a lot of the programs out there are like, let's create school rules. All right, who's going to follow these rules? How are rules teaching people skills? It's not working.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
My whole thinking about this is that we need to teach the things that we've been talking about, empathy, perspective taking, doing role plays, having people understand what it feels like to be in that situation.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Like you said, you've never been bullied and never have bullied, which is great for you, which means it might be harder for you to understand that because the empathy for you might be a little tougher.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I'm sure you might've witnessed it.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I experienced that too. I remember when I was younger in my career, I was giving a speech and people were like, oh, he does the field research, you know, like in school, that's soft science. And I was very, very fortunate.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I was hurt by it because it's like, by the way, like doing your, you know, experiment in the laboratory with your sophomores in college is a lot easier than trying to randomize 60 schools in Brooklyn and Queens, New York and try to find effects of your program. It's hard research, really difficult.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Exactly. But I was very fortunate that there was a professor, a very senior professor, his name was Ed Ziegler. He was one of the co-founders of Head Start. And he was like my, he became my adult Uncle Marvin. And I'm giving this speech and all his people are like trying to like, really like demolish you know, the presentation and my research.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And he was revered because he was like this famous developmental psychologist. And he just stood up and he's like, he slams the table. He's like, I like this research. And I love you because like I needed you to stand up for me because I'm like the stupid, not the stupid, I'm like the little postdoc here, right? Like I need support.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And so, you know, my argument is that it's a human right to be protected, right? Now I could protect myself now, right? Of course I can. But I'll give you another example of this. Gosh, this is a really tough one for me. I would say eight years ago, I was giving a speech at our university to a bunch of funders.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And it was me and another professor who I will not name, who is bigger than I am and bigger personality than I am and has a kind of rough reputation of being kind of a bully. I went on first. Now, granted, I'm a pretty good presenter. And he was going on after. And I just, thank you, I went to the side. He gets on. Now, I actually did a presentation on bullying. That's why I'm thinking about it.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
All right, I get off stage. I'm sitting, you know, at everybody else. He gets on stage and changes his presentation and shows a video of a kid being horrifically bullied, which has nothing to do with his research. And I'm thinking, what the hell is going on here? And he plays a video. He's like doing that, like laughing to himself.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And he's like, you know, I just wanted to let people know that was Mark before he got his black belt. And I'm like – What a dick. Yeah. It was not cool. And I felt like – firstly, what was really interesting to me as a psychologist is that in that moment, I regressed to 10 years old. It was psychologically – All the memories of all the feelings and the bodily reactions. I was like, boom.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And then, you know, luckily, you know, I do have a fifth degree black belt. Luckily, I have a PhD in psychology. Luckily, I've had 10 years of therapy and I've been teaching emotional intelligence for 25 years. I'm like, Mark.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
50 you've got a black belt like it took me a lot to recover and i had to make a choice because like i'm still intimidated by that and i it makes me sad to even admit it because i don't like that i'm at this place in my life where i still can be intimidated by the bullies but it's how i feel and i have to just accept that and i decided though in that presentation was like mark like
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
you got to say something. You're going to prove to yourself that you can do it. And so after he was over, you know, I waited a little while and I just went up to him and I said, you know, I have no idea what motivated you to show that video. But number one, it was not cool. And number two, it can never happen again. Never.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I can cry now thinking about it because it was very difficult for me, even as an adult. And, of course, then I ran away. I didn't run away. But I, you know, I took my breaths. I felt proud, you know, that I was able to handle myself, which, you know, may sound strange to some people.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
You know, being an adult who's a psychologist, you know, who has a fifth-degree black belt, I have to reinforce that now to make myself feel strong. But it was such a powerful – it was a great moment for me, one, of, like, having the courage to face the bullying –
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Um, and interestingly enough, uh, the guy never, he was, he turned his, he, he treated me like I was like the president of the university after that. And so my point of telling that story is that like I was 50, like that's old to only to, to cultivate the skills that I needed, right. To be able to deal with that very difficult situation. And my dream is,
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
is that you know i always i you know i say i tell people i'm so envious of that kindergartner because i've been lucky enough to be the developer of the curriculum but i didn't live it and so it talking about neuroscience like i'm not wired like that five year old is going to be wired because they're growing up in an environment Or every day they're checking in on their feelings.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
It reminds me of just another story. I was in a school in Brooklyn. And I mean, kids, this one school has been using our program for a decade. And the kids wanted to meet me. And the principal of the school, who's my former student, he said, you can ask Mark anything. And it's like, why do you do this? And what motivates you? And I was telling these kids the story of my childhood.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And this one girl, she must have been in sixth grade, She said, I mean, it's really hard for me to understand your experience. I said, why? She's like, I've been going to this school since I'm in kindergarten, and I can't think of a day that someone didn't ask me how I was feeling. It's powerful.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
You know, when you think about like her neural development, right, all the pathways that are being built for this person or these children in thousands of schools to be learning their feelings, understanding why they're feeling the way they're feeling to
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Interact with other kids and see how they're feeling and how they express their feelings and how they deal with their feelings and learning strategies together in a cooperative environment to cultivate and how that gets more complex with development, right?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Because in kindergarten, you're learning about sadness and disappointment, but then you're learning about despair and alienation and exclusion. That's what makes this work so interesting is that these concepts evolve throughout our lives, right? Think about it. I mean, what anger meant to me when I was five is not what it meant to me when I was 10 or 15 or 25 or now 55.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I thought it was an embarrassment for the university.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah. He needed to be educated. about boundaries and about how this game of being a colleague is played.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
yeah and i think that we should spend a minute on punishment because it never works you know unless it's consistent harsh and nobody wants to be punished because it doesn't feel good and it doesn't teach people anything right go to your room what does that teach me teach me to go to my room and ruminate and get angrier i've been in schools that are not using our model
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
You know, I'll never forget this one moment where I was in a principal's office, a kid had given the teacher the finger, and he got thrown to the office, and it was a Tuesday. And it was Tuesday before the next week was going to be a holiday break. And the, you know, it was a two-day suspension, you know, for giving the teacher the finger. But that was going to be till Thursday.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And then Friday, you know, after that, there'd be a week break. And the, I literally heard the principal say, let's just make it three days. So we don't have to see this kid for 10 days. And I'm thinking, what is this person learning about empathy, about self-regulation, about emotional awareness? They're learning nothing.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
They're going to be thrown out with no skills in an environment that's probably not supportive. And so I just think this has to change. And it still does happen. Not as often, thank goodness. I'm a prevention scientist, so I don't want to wait until everyone has an anxiety disorder and everyone's been bullied.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I want to cultivate a society where people have the skills they need to navigate their emotions and know how to build healthy relationships and make sound decisions and have good mental health and achieve their dreams.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
You know, God bless Uncle Marvin. I have a, you know, as you know now, the storyteller. One of the most profound moments of my career was just after I had written my book and I was on my book tour. I'm in Westchester, New York, and I'm giving a speech. And I had never spoken about my uncle in that level of detail, nor my abuse, by the way. I'm talking about courage.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
It was not until 48 writing this book that I decided, like, people ask me, like, why are you so passionate? And I would say I hated school, I was bullied, but I believe I was robbed of my emotional life as a child because of the abuse. And
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
know my circumstances and i felt i need to just share that a little bit not the focus but i needed to be i need to be real so i'm sharing about uncle marvin the sixth grade teacher from monticello new york state and this guy has this like like that woman in the audience he had an epiphany he's like are you talking about marvin moore the sixth grade social studies teacher from monticello new york i'm like yes he's like mark you're not going to believe this but your uncle marvin was my uncle marvin i'm like are you kidding me he's like
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
your uncle was my sixth grade teacher 45 years ago, and he's the reason why I teach. I was blown away. I was shaking so excited that I never met one of my uncle's actual students because we worked when I was older. He was older. And so I said to the guy, I've got to finish my speech, but can I interview you afterwards? He's like, yeah. So I interviewed this guy. I have it on tape.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
45 minutes, what he remembered about his sixth grade social studies class. I mean, I have no memories of my social studies class. This guy remembered details of my uncle's facial expression, body language, the way he taught feelings, the way he taught history. It was on and on and on. But here's the kicker.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So we're done with this conversation, and he looks at me, and he's like, you know, Mark, it's really clear that your uncle had a profound influence on your life. And so I just have one question for you. For whom are you an Uncle Marvin? And it just like, oh, like I'm the professor here. I'm the one who does the teaching, right? I do the research. You don't ask me questions like that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And it was so eye-opening for me about just, you know, my life in terms of how I spend my time with my own family. And am I...
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
giving that non-judgment am i giving that act of listening am i showing my empathy and compassion i'm like i'm a workaholic you know i write the papers i'm not living it and it really has made a profound difference for me you know i really try hard uh to be an uncle marvin and it's tough because time right all the factors that we talked about earlier but gosh you know if we only had more of those in our world
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah, so I'm very similar to Lisa in terms of there are emotion concepts or categories. Well, let's use the anger category. If you only have one word for anger, that means all you know is there's one form of anger. But if you start teaching people, well, there are other words that we could use like peeved, irritated.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
angry, enraged, livid, and you have rich conversations, which is what I do in schools with kids and teachers themselves. Like what is, when you're feeling peeved, like what are the things that make you feel peeved versus the things that make you feel enraged? What does it feel like in your body when you're feeling that way? Granted that everybody feels things differently in their bodies.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
That really doesn't matter. What matters is that we have a common language and a common understanding of what these emotions are, because otherwise we can't communicate. This is a big deal for me in terms of having a common language within a community to talk about emotion, because right now we're in a crisis of anxiety. I'm not 100% bought into that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I think that people use the word anxiety improperly. Anxiety is about uncertainty about the future, if we're going to define it. It's different than stress. There's different forms of stress, as you know. But the distress is usually when you have too many demands and not enough resources, which is different than when you're overwhelmed, which is my emotion of the year, which is I'm just saturated.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I can't even figure out what's going on anymore. which is also different from fear. And we call that emotion differentiation or granularity, people call it. They're slightly different. The differentiation is like between emotions and the granularity might be within the emotion. But from my work, just to go on about this for a moment, the best example I have is I do a lot of corporate training.