Highlights and Notes from Permission to Feel by Dr. Marc Brackett
Highlights and Notes from Permission to Feel by Dr. Marc Brackett
In the summer of 2023, I attended a “Big Problems” conference at the headquarters of NextJump, an e-commerce company that supports more than half of the Fortune 1000. The co-CEOs invited Dr. Marc Brackett, the director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, to speak on the power of EQ and his book Permission to Feel. I enjoyed Marc’s talk and decided to read his book. I took notes throughout the process and share them below.
An Overview of Feelings
Many of us go through life pretending we don’t have feelings, perhaps because they can be messy, inconvenient, confusing, and addictive, and leave us vulnerable, exposed, and naked to the world.
If we can learn to identify, express, and harness our feelings, even the most challenging ones, we can use those emotions to help us create positive, satisfying lives.
When we ignore our feelings or suppress them, they only become stronger because hurt feelings don’t vanish on their own. They don’t heal themselves. If we don’t express our emotions, they pile up like a debt that will eventually come due.
Using the RULER Method for Emotions
Brackett recommends using the acronym RULER for how to most effectively deal with our emotions. RULER stands for Recognize, Understand, Label, Express, and Regulate.
Recognize: the occurrence of an emotion
Understanding: knowing the cause of the emotions
Labeling: connections between an emotional experience and the precise terms to describe it
Expressing: knowing how and when to display our emotions
Regulating: monitoring, tempering, and modifying emotional reactions
Five Decades of Research into Emotions
Our emotions determine where we direct our attention, affect our decision making, how we interpret other people’s feelings affects how we approach or avoid them, influence our health, and impact our creativity, effectiveness, and performance.
Where there is an emotionally skilled parent, there are children who have a greater ability to identify and regulate their emotions.
Emotions influence thoughts and thoughts influence emotions. They signal valuable information and play an essential role in thought processes, judgment, and behavior.
Negative emotions secrete cortisol, which inhibits the prefrontal cortex from effectively processing information, so our ability to focus and learn is impaired. Conversely, negative emotions also help focus our attention.
Interesting Facts about Emotion
Linking emotion to learning ensures that students find classroom instruction relevant.
Emotions determine our actions because different feelings lead to different actions even though facts remain the same.
Anger makes people more optimistic than sadness.
People with robust social networks enjoy better mental and physical health and even live longer, while unfavorable outcomes are associated with lack of connections to other people.
Our future ability to regulate emotions leads to lifelong resilience, but exposure to extreme or prolonged stresses induces hyperactivity and lifelong susceptibility to stress.
Crying is soothing because it carries stress hormones out of our bodies.
Anticipation of laughter was found to lower the levels of cortisol and adrenaline.
Feeling good encourages us to act creatively, which makes us feel better.
Younger children with more developed emotion skills have fewer conduct problems, are better adjusted, and perform better academically.
Decision Making with Emotions
There are two emotions when making a decision:
Integral: directly caused by the action at hand
Incidental: lingering feelings influence how we deal with things later (things we may not be aware of)
Emotional intelligence enables us to think smarter, more creatively, and to get better results from ourselves and the people around us.
Emotion comes from an appraisal of an internal or external stimulus. They are short-lived, and usually include a physiological reaction.
Feeling is our internal response to an emotion, nuanced, subtle, and multidimensional.
Recognizing Emotion
Emotional judges attempt to evaluate feelings, deem them good/bad, useful/harmful, in reality or made up.
When people are given permission to feel, it opens doors to collaboration, relationship building, improved decision making and performance, and greater well-being.
Words can hide the truth. Physical gestures rarely do.
The emotions we attempt to read in others are more subtle, ambiguous, fleeting, and mixed.
Attribution bias is when we observe someone’s cues or behavior and wrongly attribute them to our own emotional state.
Understanding Emotion
The core part of understanding emotion is the search for an underlying theme or possible cause that fuels the emotion. Themes are universal but their causes vary from person to person.
Stress is a response to too many demands and not enough resources.
Pressure is a situation in which you perceive that something at stake is dependent on the outcome of your performance.
We focus on behavior rather than on what might have caused it.
Understanding emotion requires the use of our storytelling ability, perspective-taking skills, and pattern seeking to piece together the concatenation of feelings and events that led to the current situation.
Labeling Emotion
Labeling legitimizes and organizes our experiences, helps others to meet our needs, meet the needs of others, and connects us to the rest of the world.
We don’t expend much mental energy analyzing why we feel so good.
Affective labeling is linked to lower activation of the amygdala.
Emotionally granular people were less likely to freak out or abuse alcohol when under stress and more likely to find positive meaning in negative experiences.
A common mistake is waiting so long to identify our feelings that they become daunting.
When you can name and understand a specific emotion, your brain circuits and nervous system will calm you down.
In some cases, honest expression has the potential to distance us or make both our lives significantly worse, at least in the short run.
As we acquire the power to express our emotions, we also develop the ability and desire to hide them—to obfuscate, to deceive, to deny.
Expressing Emotion
Expressing emotions yields:
Significant drops in physician visits
Increases in immune function
Lower blood pressure
Long-term improvement in mood
Reduction in stress
Higher grades for college students
Less absenteeism
Suppressing traumatic experiences is debilitating, while confiding them to someone else, or writing them down, can bring relief.
Regulating Emotion
There are five types of emotion regulation:
Mindful breathing – 15 minutes a day has significant positive impacts
Forward-looking strategies – anticipation and change
Attention-shifting strategies – temper the impact by diverting attention. Self-talk is a part of this. Referring to yourself in the third person leads people to think about themselves more similarly to how they think about others.
Cognitive-reframing strategies – Nothing is good or bad…it’s hwo you think about it. Reappraisal is a way to reimagine whatever is triggering an emotional experience and then react to that new interpretation. Reframing anxiety as excitement was found to improve negotiating and public speaking skills.
Meta-moment. Take a moment out of time…the moment about the moment. Pausing helps you refrain from making a permanent decision based on a temporary emotion.
Sense the shift
Stop or pause
See your best self
Strategize and act
Final Thoughts
Along with permission to feel, we also have permission to fail. We need to apologize and forgive ourselves as we’d forgive others.
A charter is a way for groups to validate emotions: This is how we want to feel.
What can we do to experience these feelings as often as possible?
What can we do when we are not living the charter?
Children learn from people they love.
At work, people want to feel excited, joyful, appreciated, supported, fulfilled, respected, inspired, and accomplished.
One study on employee burnout showed that the best, most capable workers suffer burnout because of their high levels of engagement, because they are so committed to their jobs, and so good at them, so they wind up with more responsibilities than they can handle and rather than turn down assignments, they continue to take on more until they are completely overwhelmed.
Where there are supervisors with strong emotion skills, inspiration, respect, and happiness are about 50 percent higher, and frustration anger and stress are 30 to 40 percent lower.
Keeping emotion skills separate from our lives at home, in school, and at work harms us all.
