How to Understand Emotions and the Effect of PTSD on the Brain | Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett

the more you ruminate the easier you make it to ruminate in the future like it's it's like your your um kind of deepening the TR you know tracks in the sand kind of thing your brain is always remembering always remembering it's always Rec Conjuring signals ensembles from the past in order to make sense of the immediate future which will become your present Dr Barrett it's really a great privilege to welcome you to the podcast I'm so glad you're here it's great to meet you thank you thank you so much for having me on your podcast ah you're welcome well I want to start today in our conversation really this deep dive on emotions that I'm so excited to uh to take a a deep dive into I want to start by asking you to unpack really the core components of emotions there's been such a great debate I think about the building blocks of emotions how they're constructed I'd love to hear your take and expertise and we can parse F sure so the debate's been going on for probably a century and a half at least as long as psychology has been a science um and I would say the debate there are a number of debates but they all kind of boil down to um are you born with uh a handful of ancient circuits one for anger one for sadness one for fear you know um scientists debate about how many there might be and which you know but the idea is that each emotion category you you know conveniently named with English names um are uh Universal because each person has is born with these circuits and so the idea is that you know a circuit your fear circuit triggers this causes something to happen in your brain and in your body it causes a Feeling these are obligatory in some way they could be regulated but they're kind of triggered um and so everyone around the world can experience these emotions will Express them in a similar way and so on and so forth and so that's one kind of view um you know for as long as these ideas have been around in science scientists have been trying to find those circuits they've been trying to find those Universal Expressions they've been trying to find those Universal body patterns and they've never really been able to do it um even the people who claim they do it don't really do it um when you look really closely and so for example really careful studies show that when people are angry they scowl 35% of the time and scowling is supposed to be the universal expression of anger well 35% of the time means that 65% of the time people are doing something else with their face that's meaningful when they're angry and about half the time when people scowl they're not angry so what this means is that if you used scowling as the universal expression of anger and by the way we're just talking about Urban cultures here we're not talking about people who live in remote cultures where they're they have less access to um us uh you know practices and Norms that's a whole different ball game there's nothing that looks Universal in terms of categories of emotion there um but um but even in the west and and in urban cultures in the East that are familiar with Western categories people scowl about 35% of the time that's more than chance for sure so scowling is one expression of anger but it's not the only one and in fact 35% is considered would be low reliability that means that you that that people on average scowl in Anger more than chance but not in a reliable way and half the time the false positives are are about 50% half the time when people are scowling they're not angry they're concentrating really hard they're you know um in discomfort of some sort or they're signaling dis that they don't like something or that you told a bad joke or what have you so so scientists have propose been trying to figure out so if that's the case then how you know how do we experience emotion how do we express emotion how is it that we it can experience you know anger as distinct from fear and how is it that some people in other cultures experience other categories of emotion we don't experience here in the in in the west um and and the there for a very long time there' have been this idea that what's happening is that emotions are being constructed on the spot and there are different versions of constructionist theories some people talk about the role of the importance of social relationships and social cultural um knowledge and rules and so on in in shaping what people feel some scientist that's called social construction some scientists talk about the psychological ingredients of emotions and um those are called psychological constructionist views we take a view that really goes from the structure and function of the brain all the way up to culture and so we take a what's called a constructionist View in our view is that the brain doesn't have built-in emotions the brain is building emotions on the spot as they're needed and it's not doing it's doing it not in a special way but in it's doing it in the way that it that your brain deals with all experiences and actions it's doing exactly the same thing in Emotion as it's doing every other instance of your life um and that's really hard for people to accept because it feels really unintuitive because emotions feel so distinct as events right they feel really really different than thinking or perceiving or deciding but the fact is that under the hood emotions are whole brain events and they work pretty much the way your brain is doing the same thing pretty much all the time the outcomes are very different obviously because the the the um events that your brain is assembling differ but the process by which that assembly happens is pretty much the same you've given us a treasure Trove already and I'm so fascinated by this I think I'll I'll go back into some of your earlier comments and I want to ask this um when we think about our primitive neurobiology then is this constructed emotion Theory so to speak perhaps blowing the cover on what we thought was primitive in our neurobiology in terms of things like fear shame guilt uh the expression of those things because it makes me wonder and please correct me because I'm such a novice in this um cultural nuances as as your example cultural nuances say what about the expression and presence of emotions in and of themselves I'm fascinated by that but you know I know that's a bit of a two-part question but maybe we could start with talking about blowing the cover on the Primitive neurobiological assumptions about emotions yeah so there's this you're you're bringing up a great question and and it's um there's been this idea around for a really long time it's actually much older than Neuroscience it's like neur it's like Neuroscience sort of imported this this idea that you know if you go all the way back to Plato I mean um you know Plato um when Plato talks about a psyche or you know a mind in modern day terms we would say um they're not exactly equivalent but close close enough you know Plato talked about there being um you know um that the mind could be described as two horses and a charioteer so one horse the black horse are instincts you know um like feeding fighting fleeing mating um that's a neuroscience joke you know the four FS um then there's the White Horse for um emotion sentiment and they're both controlled both these beasts are controlled by a human charioteer rationality this is not a story about the evolution and the structure and the function of a brain this is a morality tale it's an origin story of what it means to be a moral person in ancient Greece and so this idea though is percolated its way through the centuries and um in the 20th century the this idea emerged that you know we must have if you look at the N with the naked eye at a brain at a human brain it looks like there are these structures in the subcortical parts of the brain underneath the cerebral cortex that um are for instincts like fight and flight circuits you hear people talking about these fight and flight circuits there are no fight and flight circuits in the brain there are certainly circuits that are important when an animal is fleeing or fighting but they're not like for that only that purpose um and they just happen to be circuits that are driven really hard when an animal is fleeing or dealing with a predator but I can tell you that okay I'm going to tell you right now I'm going to say um Christopher recite a phone number of someone that you know right now yeah just do it okay um you have to tell me who just just recite a seven digigit number great perfect okay what you did there is harder than the tasks that we give our subjects and we see activation in these fight andf flight circuits what do you mean by that that what I mean is that like if I give you a if I give you a letter if I show a letter on the screen and let's say it's a p and then I show you another letter and it's an n and I say Christopher were these the same or different and you say different and then I show you another letter it's an n and I say Christopher were are these the same was the last one that you saw the same as this current one or different it's this they're the same this is called an an NB back task where you're remembering some number of moments back and in this case it's a one back when we give people a one back task we see changes in these fight and flight circuits just because they're their um breathing is changing and their heart rate is changing and so what these circuits are doing is they're modulating the body and they're modulating the body always they just happen to be driven really hard right when animals are preparing to deal with a threat but they're not for threat they're just for regulating the body more generally and so but anyways th this idea there's this idea that um that we have these ancient animalistic you know um instinctual circuits and then on top of that evolved um you know these um circuits for uh emotion from ancient mammals um in a what's called a limic system and and um you know we could we could have a whole conversation for an hour about what the word lyic means where it comes from and what that you know but anyways the idea is that you know so you've got these you've got this instinctual layer and then on top of that evolved this emotional layer and then on top of that evolved a a cognitive or rational layer in the cerebral cortex and you hear people talk about the neocortex like it's new well that whole story is a myth it's it if you look at the evolutionary Ary biology evidence if you look at like the if you peer into the cells and you look at the molecular genetics of of uh the cells and in in different neurons in in different parts of the brain what you find is that um first of all the brain did not evolve in layers there is no a you don't have an ancient Beast brain deep inside you know the human brain um that has to be controlled by you know this miraculous um rational brain that uh only humans have I mean it's just it's a story um that um is more about what it means to be a healthy human a good human a moral human um it's not really about how the brain evolved or how it's structured or how it's function and and it and if you look at how brains evolved and how they are structured and how they function you come up with a little bit of a different I would say very different um understanding of what might be happening um when the brain is doing its thing okay I want to go back to a couple things you said earlier in the conversation and they're related to this the first thing that we can drill down on is this the brain is building emotions on the spot take some time with that what do you mean well I'm going to tell you what the brain is doing and then um what I think the brain is doing I should say it's not just me but my my my best guess based on the evidence and and I'm certainly not alone here um but then I'm going to have to unpack what I say because this idea that we've got these like we've got like an ancient lizard brain um that we have to you know or ancient lyic system that we have to kind of put the brakes on that's a very intuitive idea this all this other stuff that I'm about to say is going to be like gobbledygook to people until I actually explain it so but here's what I would say I would say a a human brain actually all brains really are constructing categories they're category Constructors and they're constructing categories to predictively to make sense of signals that are coming from the sensory surfaces of the body and they are attempting to give meaning to those signals so as to guide action and um create experience in an efficient manner and that's really the Crux of what's happening so what is that mean well let's take the brain is constructing categories if we step back and we think about things from the perspective of a brain your brain is receiving signals all the time from the retina of each eye and the CA in each ear and basically every sensory surface in your of your body is sending constantly signals to your brain and it's also true from signals inside the body you've got sensory surfaces inside your body that track glucose and oxygen and salt and um other electrolytes and so on so the stretch of muscles um all kinds of things so the these sensory signals are streaming to the brain all the time these sensory signals are the outcomes of some set of changes that are happening so there's something happening in the world that is your eyes are detecting and your ears and so on there's something happening in your body lots of things that um are being detected by those sensory surfaces that are sending those signals to your brain those signals are the outcomes of changes your brain doesn't know what the causes are it only has access to the outcomes so it has to guess at what the causes are because it's in a you know the way I usually say it is you know your brain is trapped in a dark silent box called your skull and it's receiving all these these signals about the effects of some set of causes some set of changes but it doesn't know what the changes are it has to guess this is what philosophers call an inverse problem or sometimes researchers call it a reverse inference problem you basically have to use the outcomes to guess the causes H how do you do that well the brain has one other source of information it can use and that is the past so so for a lifetime for a lifetime your brain has learned right it's learned cause effect relationships it's learned patterns patterns millions and billions and trillions of patterns over a lifetime and so in effect what your brain can do is kind of metaphorically metaphorically say okay well the last time I saw these things and heard these things and felt these things and like the last time I was in this array of I I was detecting this array of outcomes what were the causes and what did I do next to keep myself alive and what did I feel next and what did I see next and what did I hear next now in Psychology a group of things which are similar to each other is called a category so what your brain is doing is it's creating a category from past experience it's remembering basically you don't have an experience of yourself as remembering but you are remembering from past experience things that were similar to the present and those memories are guesses about what you will it's they preparations to act in a metabolically efficient way meaning those memories will be things like we will change your prepare to change your heart rate and your breathing and it will prepare to change your muscle movements and it will prepare for you to see and hear and smell what happened the something similar to the last time and so what your brain is doing is it's making a guess about what the causes are going to be and then when the sensory signals come they're compared and the Brain either if the if the signals are close enough to what the brain guessed that they would be then action proceeds and it feels to you like you've just reflexively reacted to something when in fact the whole thing is predictive if the difference is big enough between what your brain predicted and what actually materialized then your brain can either take in the unexpected information which you know we call learning that's what learning is or it can just decide to go with its own prediction um in which case um you know you will um basically uh misperceive or what you know what's happening and um so what's happening here is that your brain is attempting to give meaning psychological meaning to or I would say let me say it differently the way way we would describe what the brain is doing is that it's giving psychological meaning to incoming sensory signals from the surfaces of the body and those that meaning is literally a plan for action and a a um a a prediction of about what lived experience is going to feel like in a moment from now I hadn't thought about this until you said that but talk about how then traumatic experiences of the past in our lives well right so the thing is remember that okay so one thing that's important to understand is that I said that the I describ what the brain was doing metaphorically it's metaphorically it's asking what was you know what in my past is similar to the present but when we're talking about categories categories are groups of things which are similar to each other in some way and the way that sometimes scientists will talk about this is they'll talk about features of equivalence meaning what are the features of the instances that render them equivalent for a particular purpose so um for example I'm just looking at to give you an example here so um you know uh if I have um I don't I don't think I have anything useful here but to show you but um let's say I had um you know a cup um I had um you know a vase and I had uh you know a planter they have features they have a size they have a shape they can all hold water um they have a certain weight to them right and so um they might be similar to one another in a given instance the brain might wait the feature of equivalence might be the fact that they all hold water and so you could presumably you could drink out of all of them although you know you might not want to drink out of a a um out of out of a planter unless you really pressed right but you could but you could or you could or maybe you know you want to use them as a weapon and so you would be treating them as very different in those in that case and you would be waiting the the weight or the size of the object as important and what makes a vase a weapon is its weight and size compared in other things that are very heavy and very large right a car can be a vehicle it can be a status symbol it can be a home it can be something that protects you from the rain it has a bunch of features and the Brain can choose which features of equivalence it wants to use in in PTSD one idea would be that there are certain features that are so predictive in the past have been so predictive of threat that anytime those features appear could be the color red it could be the color red in in in combination with your heart rate being at a certain level it could be any any set of features if they are frequently associated with threat or even only once or twice but in a really significant way like a life-threatening way then the brain May weigh those features when they appear right they may weigh those the brain might weigh those features is very important and predict the threat even in cases where even in circumstances where it's very very unlikely that that threat will materialize so one of the things I like to say about I like to point out is that the the brain's most important job is not thinking or feeling or seeing or sensing in any way the brain's most important job is regulating the systems of your body in a metabolically efficient way and the most metabolically efficient way is to predict and correct so what's happening in PTSD is the brain attempting to op imize it's not I mean it's PTSD is um it's it's a tragic experience for a lot of people but it's not a sign necessarily that the brain is um it's not a sign of irrationality I guess is what I want to say it's really the the brain the person's brain is functioning the way that it should in certain ways in the sense that it's making it's it's choosing certain C features weighing them import as important and attempting to prepare the body you know prepare for what's about to to predict what's going to happen and prepare the problem in PTSD and as is the problem in many illnesses is that the brain's not updating it's not learning it's not updating its model if you will um so that it learns that those um those features aren't really predictive of threat in all circumstances or in most circumstances wow okay I want to connect this for folks who um might be saying okay how do I stop negative rumination it's just creating so much anxiety and fear in my life so let's talk about the interplay between thoughts and emotions how thoughts affect emotions and then how emotions affect thoughts what's the scientific connection yeah so thoughts and emotions are don't affect each other that's not how it works it's not like you have parts of your brain for thinking and parts of your brain for feeling and that they interact and they influence each other that's our experience of it but that is not what's happening okay yeah unpack this this is great yeah so here's what's happening every waking moment of your well actually every moment of your life your brain is regulating the systems of your body coordinating those systems and every moment of your life your body is sending sensory signals back to the brain to say hey here's how things are going you and I and most neurotypical people are not wired to experience those Sensations precisely the way that we experience them we experience vision and and hearing and touch which we experience very very precisely instead we don't feel every tug every change in glucose every we don't feel every small change instead what we we feel is affect or what what people call mood mood affect this simple feelings feeling Pleasant unpleasant worked up calm um you know fatigued comfortable uncomfortable these are simple feelings that are like barometers for the state of um your brain's basically understanding of what's going on inside your body so when everything's going well um you know everything is metabolically efficient you feel pretty good and when you are spending resources like when you exercise for example you start to feel unpleasant at a certain point and so feeling unpleasant can get very intense sometimes and to us it feels like something's wrong in the world when we get this really intense unpleasant feeling but it could just mean it could mean something's wrong it also could just mean something's hard like really hard that you're doing and there's nothing wrong at all but the point is that it's but affect mood it's always with you all the time 24/7 whether you're emotional or not whether you're aware whether it's in the foreground of your attention or not and when when affect is very strong those are the moments that our brain tends to make sense of them as emotional events and when affect is weak or it's in the background we tend to make sense of those as thoughts but the same thing is happening all the time your brain is using past experience that is similar to the present to make sense of things to construct your experience so rumination for example is I mean the the the tricky thing about rumination is that or not tricky but like the unfortunate thing about rumination is that the more you ruminate the easier you make it to ruminate in the future like it's it's like you're you're um kind of deepening the TR you know tracks in the sand kind of thing um and um remember that that your brain is REM your brain is always remembering always remembering it's always Rec Conjuring signals ensembles from the past in order to make sense of the immediate future which will become your present it's always doing this always doing this and so what are you going to what's more what are you going to remember what is the brain going to you don't experience yourself remembering but that's what's happening and your brain will more easily remember things that have been frequently Remembered in the past so when you when you ruminate the sort of the tragic irony of rumination or having intrusive thoughts is that the more frequently you have them the easier it gets to have them in the future um and it's really important to try to do what you can to deliberately attempt to experience things differently um and the best way to do that because if you you experience things differently if you expose yourself to new ideas you expose yourself to you try to cultivate new experiences for yourself and you do this frequently at first it's hard but then it becomes easier it's like driving a car right it's just like those intrusive thoughts that you're having weren't always intrusive they were like something they had to be repeated again and again in order to be so intrusive um and so it is possible to reduce to turn the dial down on that repetitiveness but it's really hard to do in the moment the time to deal with um the time to deal with with intrusive thoughts is not in the moment you're having them that's really really hard it's really really hard for everybody it doesn't matter how smart you are it doesn't matter how much motivation doesn't matter how tenacious you are it's really hard to do the thing to do is to invest energy in practice ing cultivating other experiences for yourself and practice those so they become equivalently easy to experience so here's an example this is gold you're saving people a lot of money for therapy and you're helping a lot of people this is remarkable I think I I'm certainly not I'm not replacing Psychotherapy a good psychotherapist is is worth and gold you know get it I I I'm you know um but um but I think the key to regulation the key to control is not to try to put the brakes on in the moment that's just really hard it's hard for me it's hard for me you know there are some days honestly there are some days where I get to the end of the day and I'm like I feel I my metabolically I'm just like completely depleted I feel like and to me it feels like the world is ending and in those moments I don't try to talk myself out of that feeling I just you know remind myself that I'm having I'm having a metabolic moment you know like we I the metaphor that I use for is that the brain is running a budget for your body so my body budget is is unbalanced you know I'm like had too many withdrawals I just need to kind of do a little self-care go to bed wake up tomorrow morning it'll feel better in the morning and it always does but the but in the moment Christopher you we all view the world through affect colored glasses no one can take those glasses off and say I'm just going to experience the world you know um objectively it's not how the brain works and you you can't really do it so one thing that I think is really useful is to practice experiencing things your cultivating experiences yourself it's like imagine that you're doing exercise but it's like you're not exercising your muscles you're exercising your brain and so you you can cultivate for example feeling the one that I often recommend to people is awe the experience of awe is a great experience because you experience the Majesty of something else that makes you feel like a speck and if you're a speck then your problems are a speck and it's like gives your nervous system a break for a minute and so I started practicing awe and um I did this in part because a colleague of mine was doing research on awe and it had all these positive effects and I'm just inherently a skeptical person and I'm like yeah okay I understand what the data say but like I'll believe it when I see it myself so I started to practice awe for five minutes a day and um I started with really easy things you know like um the sky at night with the Stars or if I was by an ocean you know the waves of the ocean and then I kind of graduated to Crickets at night in the summer sometimes when you're outside it's like an orchestra of sound you know and eventually I got to harder things like um I'd see my favorite example which I always use is um I saw a dandelion ugly little Dandy gnarled dandelion poking its head out of a broken sidewalk in the city and I thought I exper I try to experience a the awe of the power of nature to be uncontained it's so powerful that it can't be contained by humans attempts to contain it and after some time it became really easy for me just to look around and in my surroundings at anything and pick something and experience the awe of its existence and that is really helpful in circumstances that we that I experience as stressful and stress really is a moment where your brain is predicting that there's about to be a big metabolic outlay maybe because you have to do something hard maybe because you have to learn something something new maybe because you have to deal with someone who's difficult to deal with but cortisol is you know you get a cortisol surge during stress that cortisol surge is not cortisol is not a stress hormone it's a hormone that regulates glucose metabolism basically when your brain thinks you have a big metabolic outlay you have a cortisol release and you get a lot of glucose into your blood to prepare for that big uh you know um metabolic outlay which may never but the point is that you can by shifting your attention to some other set of features in in your surroundings or even imagining something you can cultivate a moment of awe that actually buffers you from the current situation and you can you can just play around like this and it becomes really a really really effective way but the point is that you have to practice it before the Heat of the Moment you know so it like let's connect this to the intrusive thoughts it creates its own neural network its own neural pathway we're digging new trenches right ex yes exactly you're digging new trenches yeah it's good yeah I mean I have in I have moments of intrusive thought like every other human person and um sometimes you know another really good um way of recategorizing is is to say my husband actually came up with this which I just think is so brilliant um these are just um electrical signals in my brain like this is just electrical signals in my brain don't mean anything that feels different that's like oh you know what I don't have to freak out about this or that that just hearing you say that Dr Barrett I'm going huh I actually can manage this uh in a more effective way perhaps yeah but what you're doing is you're you're still making meaning of signals you're just changing you're just changing the meaning you know so now they become merely electrical signals right so when I'm you know when when I'm uh you know faced with a stressful situation I have a bunch of different ways that I can make meaning of what's happening because I've practiced and that and you can do that too anybody can do it it's just you have to just like you wouldn't expect to the first time that you learned to ride a bike or that you learned to drive a car or play an instrument you didn't just pick up and do it you had to practice it and it was hard and it was actually probably harder than you thought it was going to be it required a lot of e effort and investment and that's what this requires too it's just like any skill it's totally buildable skill you just have to invest the energy to do it yeah so if I were to create a distillation of what we've been talking about for the last few minutes what I heard you say in a way is that perhaps mindfulness-based exercises a level of cognitive behavioral therapy Etc um can help Okay in the language of Dr Elizabeth Stanley whose book is also called widen the window we're widening the window in a way we're we're able to regulate and deal with the maladies of life in a more effective way is that is that a decent distillation of what I hear you saying a little bit I think what I'm saying is I mean cognitive behavioral therapy works not for the reasons that cognitive behavioral therapy says it works I mean those they the techniques work but they don't work for the reasons that you know if you think different thoughts you'll feel different feelings or whatever but I would say that what I'm suggesting is um mindfulness what it's useful what I think it's useful for is not decentering your focus on a signal that is stressful it's that you're making meaning of the signal in a different way that's powerful because some sometimes you can't you C you know sometimes you're you're in a situation where you don't have the luxury of um you know changing your focus so when you can't I mean mindfulness is great when you can do it but sometimes you can't and actually you know mindfulness is actually hard for a lot of people to do it requires Great attentional control and what I'm suggesting is that there is another option here it's like an additional option I guess which is to change the meaning of something um so the equivalent would be like okay so here's a glass okay and if I wanted to paint this glass of water on a three-dimensional canvas this is a two you know I'm sorry a two-dimensional canvas so this is a three-dimensional object I want to paint on a two-dimensional canvas I could see it as a glass and I could try to paint it or Draw it on a two-dimensional canvas and it would look like a pretty rendering of a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional canvas but what um artists often do especially um you know classically trained artists is they will look at this object differently they make meaning of the light signals coming off this glass not as a glass but as pieces of light and so if you look at this and you try to deconstructed as pieces of light you can see well here is like this bluish this got some gray and some light gray and some white and there's like white around the rim and so you take this threedimensional object you deconstruct it into piece little pieces of light and then you paint the little pieces of light on the canvas and what you get is a pretty decent looking three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional canvas except if you're me because I'm really bad at this but but the point being that you can train yourself to see this object differently and you experience it differently as a consequence and you can do that with any experience you have have at all every single experience can be you can choose what you focus on choose the features that you focus on and by changing the focus of on your focus of attention you change your experience in the moment that's what I'm suggesting that is somewhat like mindfulness but it's not the same as you know broadening your attention it's actually shifting your attention to different features to change your attention changes your experience with whatever is happening that's what I heard you say correct wow okay then I want to shift this into talking about emotional resilience then um understanding the construction of emotions can enhance from what I take after reading your book how emotions are made can enhance emotional resilience so how can we apply this knowledge to build resilience in the face of life's challenges especially in the context of mental health we are in a worldwide Mental Health crisis right now yeah we are in a worldwide Mental Health crisis for many complicated reasons there isn't just one reason but what I would say is there are a couple of ingredients to managing your um mental health and therefore your resilience one of them is um sounds so mundane that it almost seems like not worth mentioning except it's super important and that is your brain's most important job it's not thinking it's not feeling it's not rationality it's regulating the systems of your body in the most metabolically efficient way it's running your body budget the technical term is allostasis body budgeting is a metaphor and all metaphors are scientifically wrong but this one's useful for this particular purpose um I'll just say did you get eight hours of sleep last night Christopher good for you how but I oh good for you but when I'm in a room full of people and I said well how okay like I get everybody to stand up and I say okay how many of you got eight usually I start with how many of you exercised today how many of you had a healthy breakfast how many of you had you know 8 O you know 6 26 I don't know depends on the time of day but like 64 you know ounces of water today and if you don't you know each time you have to sit down and then the final one is how many of you got eight hours of sleep last night and then basically everybody but two people in the audience are St are are everyone's sitting because we live in a culture that is designed to bankrupt our body budgets nobody Sleeps enough most of the time people eat pseudo food they don't eat healthfully um and I have to say that one of the most expensive things that you can do is live with persistent uncertainty persistent uncertainty for a human is really metabolically expensive talk about why yeah drill that well your brain is what's the most effective thing to do it's to predict and correct and when there's a lot of uncertainty you can't predict well so you have to maintain a lot of prediction simultaneously which is very expensive and it drains a body budget people are exhausted because they're there's so much uncertainty there's uncertainty about really basic things and there's also uncertainty about existential things so the more uncertainty there is the more basically the more metabolically encumbered you're going to feel and the more you're going to have negative mood which then is experienced as becomes you know anxiety depression um you know depression is like a bankrupt body budget it's like if you're it's like being in bankruptcy basically and once you're in bankruptcy it's not so easy to dig yourself out of that because another really expensive thing to do what are the most expensive things your brain can do move your body learn something new deal with uncertainty if you have to learn something new because you predicted incorrectly you need the spoons to do that and if you don't your brain won't correct its model and you'll keep running the same one you'll keep making the same predictions and you'll keep making the same errors and you'll be you'll feel like you're trapped in a dark hole basically um so uh so one thing you have to do is you have to take care of your body budget you you have to make sure that you're sleeping sufficiently that you're eating healthfully it sounds really boring but it's really important and then the other thing that you can do is you canar learn um practice cultivate give yourself a a large treat yourself to a large build a large toolbox of emotion Concepts ways of making meaning of the what's happening in your body in relation to what's happening in the world if you only know some for some people you know they know my husband used to tell this joke right people would say how is it being married you know to Anem motion researcher and he would say well you know before I met her I only knew three emotion words I knew happy sad and hungry and it was a very funny joke except that for some people that's really what they experience when they experience angry anger or sadness or fear it's really what they're experiencing they're using those words as synonyms to mean I feel bad and those are very very general categories like bad could be anything right um so you it's good to get it's good for you to have more granularity meaning that you you can you can construct experiences that are very precisely tied to the situation and that where you have a lot of flexibility in what you experience so that you're not um tied to you have flexibility to experience more than one experience the sensory signals in in more than one way for example people experience anxiety in the face of uncertainty but really what's happening is that there that there's an increase in arousal signals that their brains make sense of as anxiety but arousal signals could be anything they could be determination they could be curiosity they could be you know like one of the things I wrote about in how emotions are made and I talk about frequently this is one of my most favorite examples um when my daughter was 12 years old she was very small and you know barely 5T tall and she was testing for her black belt and her this and she was going to have to spar with these like huge adolescent boys who were so much bigger and stronger than her although she had a very good kick I will say but um but her Sensei basically saers up to her and says he doesn't say calm down he doesn't say don't be anxious he says says get your butterflies flying in formation and I was like that's uh brilliant that is brilliant because she needs that arousal to physically execute the actions that she had to you know that she had to make but he basically was telling her don't experience this as anxiety experience this as being charged up experience this as determination and that was exactly 100% the right thing um you know for her to hear in that moment gosh this is so good okay I want to put a pin in because I do want to ask you just practically like building a toolbox of emotion Concepts requires what how do we do that what does that look like so I want to put a pin in that but I want to ask because you had mentioned and talked about emotional granularity how do we recognize our emotions more accurately well you don't recognize your emotions that's the first thing you construct them well it it's not like emotions are happening to you and then you label them like oh that's anger you your brain is making them you are your brain you are making your experiences so um you know you just have to become more aware of how you are do how you're making sense of things um because you're you're doing it it's you no one else is doing it it's you you're doing it um but but what you know what knowledge are you bringing to bear um and I mean the only way to to really how do you become more aware of anything you first you analyze it after the fact you think about it after the fact and then then you practice doing it in a different way it's really it's exactly what you do in Psychotherapy basically you're acculturating people to new set of Concepts a new set of knowledge so that they can construct experiences in a more beneficial way that's what you have to do for yourself I got it yes and the way you do it you do it all kinds of ways you can read books you can travel you can talk to people who are different than you you can see movies you can act in plays you can anything where you are forcing yourself to cultiv to experience something differently than you normally would it's like exercise basically um You're Building every new experience you have every New Concept you learn is a new opportunity to be flexible you had mentioned Al estasis earlier and it it reminds me of in a way homeostasis versus Al estasis where we have order disorder and our desires to get back to normal you know we experienced this during the pandemic but really it's order disorder reorder XYZ yes and no I mean there are some things that work by homeostasis but most things work by allostasis homeostasis is is reactive allostasis is predictive homeostasis is getting back to a set point allostasis is about efficiency regardless of the output you can be Al estasis is the brain anticipating the needs of the body and attempting to meet those needs before they arise you can be an Al estasis when you're running a mile and you can be in Al estasis when you're asleep you can be in Al estasis when you're doing something really stressful you can be an Al estasis when you're calm it's not about what you spend it's about how you spend it it's really about how efficient you're being as opposed to getting back to a set point I got it yeah okay so let's connect all of this to the dynamic of relationships then um this is a mental and emotional health podcast but relationships are huge part of this overall conversation I have here and so there are there more effective ways perhaps to communicate and understand our feelings our emotions in the context of relationships considering what we've been talking about today I think first thing to understand is that um we are the caretakers of each other's body budgets we don't just you know our brains don't just manage our own body budgets they also create savings and taxes in other people's body budgets too and so that means that other people can be can make can can make can lighten your load can help regulate your body budget but they can also be a drag on that body budget it just depends on what your relationship is with them and that's important to understand and I think that the other thing that I would say is that um we don't read emotions in each other body movements are not a language that can be read like words on a page we just guess at the meanings of other people's movements and if we're in a relationship with someone that we've known for a really long time and we know them really well we might be pretty good at guessing but we're just guessing and we can be wrong so when there's a breakdown in communication that breakdown always has two people involved and when communication is going well that communication always has two people who are you know um participating and so it's important I would say what this suggests this perspective is number one that if if you want to communicate if you want to be clear about how you feel you you it the responsibility is on you to speak to use words because other people are not going to read your emotions for you um and also you know you're really the authority on what you feel um you know the fact that somebody else might be guess in um and have a lot of confidence in that guest doesn't mean that they're right um You Know You're the ultimate Authority on how you feel and so you have to assume that Authority and also assume the responsibility for that Authority is what I would say there's a lot to unpack there but unfortunately we don't have time um and then the final thing I'll just say is be mindful of your impact on other people like you can be you can be a um you can create a um a savings or a tax to somebody else's body budget by the way that you communicate and and you yourself should be I always say you know replace certainty with curiosity I love that that's so good okay we'll land here um you teased a lot of this and I'm so thankful for it um I said I'd put a pin in building a toolbox of emotion Concepts anything else that we can add to that toolbox as we close our conversation today Dr Barrett read book you don't have to buy it just get out of the library I mean you know just but there's a lot of there are a lot of tips in there and and I also have a website Lisa Felman barrett.com and there are a lot of articles that I've written they're all free um you know so um there are a lot of suggestions in those articles wonderful are you on social media I am on um I guess X and I'm on um LinkedIn yeah okay yeah right we'll put uh we'll put links in the show notes Folks at win to.tv the book how emotions are made she is Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett Dr Barrett this has been a riveting conversation today I'm so thankful for your time and expertise I'm fascinated and uh really stirred up so thanks for being here oh my pleasure thanks so much

Channel: Christopher Cook

Views: 2,316

Keywords: christopher cook win today, win today, chris cook, win today with christopher cook, lisa feldman barrett huberman lab, lisa feldman barrett huberman, lisa feldman barrett huberman lab podcast, lisa feldman barrett ted talk, lisa feldman barrett big think, lisa feldman barrett emotions, lisa feldman barrett depression, lisa feldman barrett trauma, scienceofemotions, emotions, brain, psychology, communication, relationships, emotionalintelligence, selfawareness, lisafeldmanbarrett

Id: JPkorMiKv5w

Length: 59min 10sec (3550 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 14 2024