Once there was a farmer whose horse ran away, now
he could not plow. His neighbors came to him, and said "How horrible for you, this is terrible, this
is awful, you lost your horse!" the farmer replied "I don't know, we'll see", and he went back to work
on his farm. The next day, the farmer's son went to find the horse. Not only did he find the horse, but
two additional stray horses followed them home. The neighbors came over, and said "Oh this is wonderful
for you, this is so good, you found your horse, and got two new ones!" The farmer replied "I don't know,
we'll see", and he went back to work on his farm. The next day the farmer's son decided to break in
one of the new horses, a few days in, he got thrown off of the horse, and he broke his leg. He had to
get a cast, and stay off the leg, so he couldn't help work on the farm, and once again all the
neighbors come over, and they say "Oh my gosh this is horrible, this is so bad!", and the farmer replied
"I don't know, we'll see", and tried to get back to work on his farm. Now one of the neighbors insisted
"How can you be so relaxed about this? Without your son's help, you'll have to work long into the
night to get all the work done, you don't seem to understand that this is a catastrophe!",
and the farmer calmly replied "We'll see", and went back to work. The next day, the emperor decided
to implement a draft for a war that was starting, all of the eligible men in the whole village were
dragged off to war, because of his broken leg the farmer's son was spared from the draft. All the
neighbors came over, and told the farmer "Oh my goodness you're so lucky, you're so fortunate, this
is so good for you!", and the farmer just replied "I don't know, we'll see", and went back to work. Now
no one likes to think of themselves as judgmental right, you probably don't think that you are, but
let me ask you a question. Do you label emotions as good, or bad emotions? Do you often tell yourself
'I shouldn't be feeling this way', or 'suck it up buttercup', or do you apologize if you're sad, or if
you're crying? You know, many boys have been taught to never cry, and girls have been taught to never
feel angry. A lot of us have been taught to "just be positive" all the time, and never make anyone
else feel bad either. In this video, you're going to learn how to get better at feeling by learning
to describe, instead of judge, your emotions. This video was sponsored by Better Help, where
you can get professional, affordable, licensed counseling from the comfort of your own home,
starting at around $65 dollars a week. Better Help pairs you with a licensed therapist in your area
who you can work with through video chat, and other forms of messaging, to get personalized, and
customized support, to learn how to work through, and process these intense emotions. So if you'd
like to learn more about Better Help, please check out the link in the description below for 10% off
your first month. One of the main reasons why most people aren't good at processing their emotions
is because of how our culture has trained us to think. In western society, we've been trained to
think of "positive", and "negative" emotions. I got a chart in the mail the other day, and it's got these
so-called "positive" emotions on one side, and these "negative" emotions on the other, and this is a super
common approach to thinking about emotions. This way of thinking partly stems from the ideas of a
popular theorist Paul Ekman, and he was one of the first to label the "six primary emotions", and what
he thought they were was: anger, happiness, surprise, disgust, sadness, and fear, and then people took
it a step further, and divided them into groups you've got your "bad" emotions, like: anger,
sadness, fear, and disgust, and your "good" emotions: happiness. Now out of the six primary emotions,
five of them would traditionally be considered negative. The only emotion that we are
"supposed" to approve of is happiness. This is a setup for failure, it's just not
helpful to think this way. When we label the majority of our emotions as "bad", we end up
putting tons of energy into trying to shut down the other 90% of emotions, and this usually leads
to people feeling miserable, and it's a waste of energy. This is the first real obstacle to working
through emotions, to processing them. If we judge emotions as "bad", just because they're uncomfortable,
this limits our options for how we can respond. It's not that we want to feel bad, it's not that
I'm encouraging you to feel sad all the time, but what I'm saying is that judging your emotions
just isn't helpful, it generally makes you feel worse. Generally when people think of "negative"
emotions, or "bad" feelings, then their automatic response is trying not to feel them, it's you
know, trying to suppress them, and I call this the suppress-react habit. You can push down your
tender feelings, the ones that make you hurt, or the ones that feel vulnerable. You can try to not
feel sad, or to not feel disappointed, but the more we suppress, the more pressure there is to
explode. The more we explode, the more pressure there is to suppress, and then we get trapped,
we think that if we just had more willpower, or more mental strength, that we could somehow
balance between denying our emotions, and acting on them. Unfortunately, this this reaction, this way
of thinking, just doesn't work very well. I'm going to ask you to step off of this teeter-totter of
suppress-explode, of fighting your emotions, and to instead focus on acknowledging them, developing
emotional muscles to experience them more fully, and more deeply, and then to make a conscious
choice about what to do about them. Right? So what I just described there, this is the beginnings of
how to process your emotions. When you get better at feeling, you're going to be more likely to feel
peace, and calm, and happiness, more of the time. One of the ways that we do this is by developing
a non-judgmental attitude about emotions. So instead of labeling emotions as "good", or "bad",
or "should", or "should not" emotions, we're going to instead just focus our energy on acknowledging
them for what they are, and noticing them as they exist, and letting go of that battle with
them. In order to put all of that energy we were putting into suppression, we're going to take
that energy, and we're going to put it towards living the life that you want to live. In the
next section, we're going to talk more about how so-called "negative" emotions can actually be really
helpful, but let me give you a quick example of how "negative" emotions could have been helpful by
sharing with you a story from Humans of New York. If you're not familiar with this blog, check it
out Brandon, uh what's his name?.. Brandon Sanderson? Brandon Stanton. There you go, right, okay, "I smoked
dope every day for 20 years I thought I was pretty slick. I could smoke while working. I could get high,
and still run my company. I could pour concrete. I could roof a building. I felt like I could do
anything, but it ruined my marriage. I didn't even realize it until years after my wife left me,
but the dope ruined my marriage, because it made me content. Nothing could bother me. Her feelings
didn't bother me. Her needs didn't bother me. The dope put an emotional cover over what should
have been obvious. I told myself that if I didn't see the problem, then it didn't qualify as a
problem. All I ever did was give her advice, I never asked for it. I never once felt the inspiration to
say "Darling, I know there's something wrong. What can I do differently?" In this story, because the man
suppressed his uncomfortable emotions with drugs, the man felt great all the time, nothing bothered
him. He didn't feel sad, or stressed, or upset, when his wife was bothered, because he didn't
feel worried about her, or worried with her, or he just felt great all the time, and this
ruined his marriage, which he obviously feels bad about now. The more we suppress emotions, the more
likely it is that our life is gonna not line up with the kind of life we want, and it's
gonna lead to us not feeling as good. Instead of judging emotions, describe them.
Uncomfortable emotions like worry, disappointment, guilt, or fear, they can serve a really important
function, and labeling them as "bad", or "negative", really limits our ability to live a full, and
productive life. So, I personally do not believe that there are "good", and "bad" emotions. There are
comfortable emotions, and uncomfortable emotions. There are exaggerated emotions, there are distorted
emotions, there are emotions built on falsehoods, but there aren't fundamentally "bad" core emotions.
So instead of saying 'This is bad, or this is negative', be a little bit more descriptive,
say 'This is uncomfortable, this is painful, this is difficult." While this may seem
like just a technicality, it really matters, because when we label or judge something as "bad",
then we again, we're limiting our options for how to respond to it to just a few tools like: avoid,
cope, and distract. Which you're gonna learn later, make things worse in the long run. If instead we
describe a feeling as uncomfortable, or difficult, it opens up space to do something with it. You
could ask yourself- 'Is there something that needs to change?', or 'How can I build my resilience to
hard things?', 'How can I, you know, get better at feeling?' It makes room to develop your emotional
capacity, and it gives you time to breathe, and calm yourself, and make a conscious choice, instead
of, you know, reactively suppressing those emotions. And instead of suppressing emotions, be curious
about them. Sometimes it helps to slow down, and to imagine yourself as a curious scientist describing
a new species that no one has ever seen before. What does anger feel like? Where do you feel
it in your body? What do you notice about it? The more you can describe your feelings, the
more you can notice what's going on with them, the more power you'll have to act, and you may
be surprised to find that many intense emotions are really just asking to be noticed, and
acknowledged, and then they dissipate on their own. So this is a crucial step of processing emotions. People who focus their lives on avoiding
sadness, and feeling happy, tend to be miserable. People who focus their lives on purposeful
action, tend to be happy. Research shows over, and over again, that people who judge their
emotions as "bad" make themselves feel worse. So this does not mean that you let your emotions
control your behaviors. It doesn't mean that I'm saying it's okay to fly off the handle with
anger, or to act out, now obviously that's not going to make your life better. In this course
we're also going to work through the process of, you know, having overall happier, more peaceful
emotions, and less intense, less painful emotions in the big picture, but the process of getting
there is a paradox. People who struggle to suppress their negative emotions usually feel worse
in the long run, and people who learn to process through painful emotions tend to feel more
relaxed, and more joyful day-to-day, and people who learn to work through their emotions are
generally better at controlling their behaviors than people who focus on controlling those
emotions. So instead of fighting our emotions, we're going to increase our ability to say 'This is what
I'm experiencing, and that's okay, because this is what I'm going to do about it.' Noticing, and naming
emotions is the first step to resolving them. We often interfere with this process by reacting to,
judging, or suppressing our emotions. In this course you're going to learn to develop the emotional
muscles to sit with your emotions long enough to choose purposeful, and peaceful action. You're
not going to just learn to feel better, you're also going to learn how to get better at feeling. Your
homework for today is to write in your workbook about which emotions you tend to believe are "good",
and which emotions you tend to believe are "bad". Where, or when, were you taught that you
need to be positive all the time, or that anger is unacceptable to feel? Which
emotions were you not allowed to feel? When you do your emotion check-in today, take
a moment to carefully describe an emotion; What does it feel like to feel this way? Where do
you feel it in your body? What thoughts come with this emotion? Pretend like you're the first
person in humanity to feel this way, and you want to describe it to someone who has never felt
like this. How would you tell them what it is like? In the next couple of videos you're going to
learn about how to stop struggling with your emotions, and what to do instead. You'll learn some
practical exercises for calming yourself down, and going through a pause, and calm down
step of the emotion process. So, thank you for joining me, and we will see you soon. Check out this
video from Star Trek with Data. Data is an android, he's a robot, he doesn't have feelings, but he
developed his own emotion chip. He puts it in, and for the first time in his life he feels an intense
emotion. MOVIE: (Guinan) Gentlemen, something new from Frocus 3? (Geordi) What? (Data) I believe this beverage has produced an
emotional response. (Geordi) Really? What are you feeling? (Data) I am uncertain, because I have had little
experience with emotion, I am unable to articulate the sensation. (Guinan) Emotion? (Geordi) I'll explain
later. (Data) Oh (Guinan) Well, it looks like he hates it. (Data) Yes, that is it. I hate this. (Geordi) Data,
I think the chip is working. (Data) Oh yes, I hate this, it is revolting. (Guinan) More? (Data) Please.
