Tips and Tricks for Managing our Emotions

Redeem your laptops on free-bets, spins, or even cashier in for real money. That's Latisfaction from Latbrooks. And for extra Latisfaction, here's the Tees & Seas. Let's rock! Hey, Clarner here. You probably know Clarner for flexible online payments. But did you know you can get up to 3,880 pounds in annual benefit value with a Clarner membership? Get subscriptions, airline miles, and access to over 1800 airport lounges. Discover more and sign up now at clarner.com or in the Clarner app. Annual value amount reflects your membership's total available benefits, such as subscriptions and discounts. Actual results will vary based on benefit usage. Clarner membership offered for a monthly fee. Council anytime in the Clarner app. Exclusions, conditions, and limitations apply to membership benefits. Clarner membership terms apply. Hi, I'm Raj Binjabi Johnson, head of identity content at Hubposts. And I'm Noah Michaelson, head of Hubpost Personal. Welcome to Am I doing it wrong? The show that explores the all-too-human anxieties we have about trying to get our lives right. All right, Noah, I have an interesting one for you. Okay. Are you managing your emotions wrong? Absolutely. I'm a cancer. I live in a house with two other cancers, one of whom is a dog. So it's just emotions on top of emotions and top of emotions. I will say, and people are going to hear this a lot, but I started therapy in January, so it's been 10 months. I love therapy. So good. And it's helping me to manage my emotions, but I'm not there. I don't think I'm going to ever be there. And I would love to know more about how to do it. I guess maybe I should ask, do you think you're bad at it? And also, what does your husband think about you being bad at it? Of course I want to say you appear to manage your emotions really well from the outside. Thank you. It's just a storm inside of here. I mean, I totally get it. I'm not an astrology girl, but I'm a Scorpio. My husband's a Scorpio. So I feel the stereotype is also a lot of emotions. Look, I think I have a fairly high emotional intelligence, like I know what's going on. Am I able to react to everything in the most adult, well-adjusted way? No, and my husband will confirm. I sometimes want to look at him and be like, panic with me, won't you? Like I will. I know you will. You're left to panic on your own. I panic on my own. And I would love to learn to panic less. I think that's actually probably good, though. You don't need two people panicking. No. So you need someone who's just going to be like, no, we got this. Does that ever come on the burrito? There you go. Well, this is exciting because we have one of our favorite guests coming back. It's Ryan Martin. He is the anger professor. I love that that's his title. He is a psychologist, the dean at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, and he's the author of many books, including a new one. The one we're going to talk about today. It's called Emotional Hacks. Oh my God. Help me, Ryan. He's gone. Okay, Ryan. Thank you so much for being here with us. Yeah, I am thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me. I want to start right at the beginning. We always say that. It's the best place to start. So what the hell is an emotion? And what do they do for us? Why do we need emotions? Yeah, so that's a big, big question. I'm going to try and answer it as simply as I can. And I will tell you that psychologists actually differ on this a little bit. So the definition I tend to use is we think of them as a psychological state that includes physiology, cognitions or thoughts, and then behaviors, or at least action tendencies. Like a desire to do something or act in a certain way. And as far as what they do for us, they're actually super critical sources of information. They're one of the ways that your brain alerts you to your circumstances. So they alert you to danger, and that's why you might feel fear. They alert you to unfair treatment, and that's why you might feel anger or loss, and that's why you feel sad and so on. And then they actually provide you with some energy to respond to those circumstances. So the physiological activation you might feel gives you the energy to confront the injustice or to flee from the thing you're afraid of, or to seek out a way to replace that loss. Okay. All right, so your new book really does touch on the fact or the reality that we can hack our emotions using science. I'm very interested in this because I feel like, you know, in the words of Miss Rachel, I have very big emotions sometimes. I would like to hack them. Please tell me more about that. Yeah, so the idea around the book is that I think a lot of times people fall into the trap of believing that the best way to change their emotions is through some sort of big change, right? And they're like, I'll be happy when, right? I'll be happy when I get a different job, or I'll be happy when I move or in a relationship or finish school or whatever. And the truth is that a lot of times those big changes aren't actually the key to happiness. They aren't really the key to feeling things differently because for a couple of reasons, one, and probably the biggest reason is that those big changes actually usually include a lot of stress, right? So a lot of times those big changes are stress inducing. So ultimately, one of the things I'm trying to convey here is the best way to manage your emotions is through either lots of little changes or a handful of little changes. A really cliché way that people tend to talk about emotions sometimes is you can choose how you feel, right? You can choose not to be angry, you can choose to be happy or whatever. And I don't actually think that's true, but I do think that you make lots of choices in your day to day life that affect how you feel. And so this book is really about here are a lot of choices that you can make that will impact your emotions in not necessarily always a positive way, but in a way that you want to impact your emotions. I love that because yeah, and especially the idea I think so often people do feel like they don't have any agency or they don't have control over their emotions. And so having these, I think they're what, 50 in the book, these little things that you can do that actually do give you some control. But before we get into those, I want to hear you do make some caveats in the book talking about how we shouldn't always hack our emotions or this doesn't pertain to certain things. So before we sort of jump off the cliff and get into this, what should we know about emotional hacking and maybe some of the areas that we want to steer clear of? Yeah, I think one of the first things I would say is that the book isn't designed to address serious or significant mental health problems, right? So when we talk about depression, we talk about post-traumatic stress disorder, when we talk about generalized anxiety, like those are things that should be worked on with a professional. I do think there are things that can, from the book, that practitioners should help people with. And sometimes I actually think that professional sort of tend to neglect particular areas that we probably could be working on. But that isn't overall the point of the book. So that's one really important caveat is this isn't intended to replace therapy for people. The other big thing though is that I do want to acknowledge that not everyone has the privilege of doing all of 50 of these things. And so one of the things I talk about is healthy nutrition. One of the things I talk about is getting a good night's sleep. Being able to do those things means that you have access to healthy, nutritious foods. It means you have health access to a safe, comfortable place to sleep. Not everybody has that. And I'm aware of that. And so I do think it's important to point out that one of the consequences of an unjust society is that it takes a toll on people's mental well-being too. I think it's really important to know. We talked a little bit about this the last time you were here, Ryan. But also how you move through the world and how you're perceived as a woman or as a person of color. This changes really how people react to you. But we'll get more into that. And your emotional up, the emotions that you're feeling as well. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. I love that caveat. And Noah has read the book and I have not yet. I'm so excited too. So I'm learning about this stuff kind of fresh. Tell me about your emotional hack pack that you mentioned. Yeah. So I think what I want people to think about is having this toolkit, right? So a whole bunch of emotion hacks that they can use in particular times. And I think the key to managing emotions is understanding that not every tool is right for every job. And that what you need in one circumstance might be different than what you need in a different circumstance. And so the idea of the emotional hack pack is that you've essentially got this backpack of hacks that you can use when the time and place strikes. I think that's one thing we've learned so often on the show is that there is not one size fits all or one sort of golden answer to anything. And a lot of times having these options that you can choose from. How does an amazing thing to do? It's a holistic approach. It is. I'm probably tired of hearing us say that because we do all the time, but that's just reality. It's true. And it takes self examination, right? I think that's what this whole thing is about that we have to understand ourselves in order to know how to regulate our emotions. But having 50 of these things laid up before you and then you can say, okay, I know that these seven things are things that I want to work on or that maybe help me. I feel like that is useful. Yeah. Yeah. I have a quick question. Is one of the 50, like hyping yourself up, like in situations on TV, like you say, like women sometimes are feeling a type of way in the workplace and then they'll go in the bathroom and be like, I'm a bad bitch. I'm a bad bitch. Yeah. So one of the hacks. Not specifically I'm a bad bitch, but having a mantra is something that we know is effective. And honestly, one of the things I encourage people to do is to put a lot of thought into what that mantra is because some are more empowering than others. And sometimes we accidentally, I think, select a mantra that might even be a little bit disempowering. When we say things like it is what it is, you know, that's a form of acceptance that maybe not every circumstance calls for. Maybe you want something that will encourage you to take action in a different way. It's a change. Yeah. Ryan, why does a mantra like that from a scientific standpoint? Why does that help us from a psychological? Because I also think it's so easy with something like this, like emotions, to get into this land of like influencers, wellness, guys. Got formations. Yeah, where a lot of these people have no actual medical or psychological background. And they're just on the internet telling people that to do things. And I don't know if that's always that useful. So why would something like a mantra actually psychologically or scientifically be good for us? Yeah. So there's two reasons. And one of them is oddly simple. So researchers actually looked at this question. And all they had people do is utter the phrase one over and over. Not even the phrase, right? The word one over and over. And what they found is that when they did that, it helped people essentially focus and it activated the more positive parts of their brain than if they were to not utter a phrase. And they specifically selected the word one because they didn't want anything that had any sort of spiritual elements to it. So that's one thing is that just giving people something to focus on keeps you from focusing on other things. So that's one piece of it. But the other piece here is that your emotions are rooted in part in the stories you tell yourself. That's right. And so if you are telling yourself, I'm a bad bitch. That's a very different story than something else you could be telling yourself. And so having that mantra. Yes, exactly. So having that mantra or having that phrase that you find empowering in those moments can be really critical that way. I'm just thinking of the children's book about the train and saying, I think I can. I think I can. And like how that was just embedded in at least some people of a certain age as mine from the beginning. And this idea, if you think it, you can do it. Yes. And even just not just encouragement, but safety. I know a lot of yoga instructors when you go into child pose will ask you to say, I'm okay. Or like just breathe out and say, I'm okay. And it's the story we're telling ourselves that is like you're safe. Right. You're making your reality. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As I was writing this, I started thinking because I actually tended to have one of those more, maybe passive mantras. And so I, one of the things I, I, I changed mine to do the next right thing, which is my way of kind of both embracing some acceptance of I haven't made every right choice up until now. But also acknowledging that I can make the next right choice and some giving myself some, some agency around that and autonomy around that. I love that. That was balanced. Let's get into some of the hacks. Yeah. I want to start with the stimulus hacks. What are those addressing? Yeah. So anytime we emote, it's sort of a confluence of three different things. There's a stimulus, which is the thing we are responding to. There is our mood at the time of that stimulus. So are we hungry? Are we sleepy? Are we already stressed about something or angry about something? And then there's our interpretation of that stimulus. And so all the hacks are broken down into, to those categories as well as a few others. So stimulus hacks are basically the choices we make around the stimuli that we encounter in our day to day life. And so there are things, for instance, and a very simple example I use is that I used to watch more horror movies than I do right now. When I do that, I'm inviting a certain amount of anxiety and fear into my life. And that's an obvious example that most people understand. But we actually make lots of choices in our day to day life. How much news we consume, whether we watch sporting events, right? How we engage with our family, our friends, or colleagues. All of those are decisions we make that affect our emotional well-being. And we can be far more intentional about those decisions than we often are. And it's not just a question of, do we do those things? It's a question of how do we do those things? So we're recording this shortly after Thanksgiving, that's a time where people often feel sort of, I think, forced to spend time with family that they don't necessarily get along with. We can make decisions not just about, do I go spend time with my family, but how do I do it? Can I let them know in advance? I don't want to talk about politics this year. Can I bring a friend so that I have a trusted person that I can engage with? Can I have a plan to escape if things get uncomfortable? Or if I don't want to do this, can I find ways to distract myself? Those are all some, what I call stimulus hacks, where we can think about how we're engaging in the world and whether or not we're doing so in a way that is emotionally healthy. I love that. I feel like what I'm hearing you say, there's actually two different sort of paths that we can take. One of them is if we have the stimulus that is going to be stressing us out, we think about how we can react to it in healthier ways. The other path, which is just maybe trying to avoid the stimulus in the first place, I came up with this mantra, one of mine, when I was in my 20s, and maybe we've talked about this, on the show, I'm not sure. The idea for me was I was going to all of these events and parties and things that I didn't really want to go to because I felt guilty about not going to them. Then I get to the party and I was like, I don't want to be here. I was so angry that I was wasting my time. I came up with this mantra and it is you can either have a little bit of guilt or a lot of anger. Now, I've stopped going to things that I don't want to go to. I still show up for things where it's really important to someone. Even if I'd rather stay home and watch Netflix, I will go. If it's a party that I'm not going to really know anyone, they're not going to notice if I'm there or not, then I can feel a little guilty about not going, but I'm not going to be there for three hours angry that I want. Is that going to chip away at your soul? So I just avoided that stimulus or that stress in the first place. I'm not there finding ways to mitigate it when I'm in the middle of it. It makes sense. I love that for you. Yeah, it's true. I would highly suggest people take that on if they think they can. Same. Ryan, you mentioned inviting fear into your life a little bit. Can that also be a good thing in a certain way? Yeah, there are times. One of the things I want to be in this really speaks to the importance of having lots of tools. I want to be careful about the idea of encouraging just avoidance too regularly because avoidance can certainly lead to other kinds of problems. That's a great point. One of the things that I do think is important is that people do need to learn to, and this isn't something I talk about as a stimulus act, but do need to learn to sit with some discomfort sometimes. Yeah. Now, we need to get maybe a little better at challenging ourselves, not a lot of discomfort, not so much that it causes us harm or retraumatizes us or anything like that, but enough that we can start to get used to some of that. For me, the most obvious example of this is oftentimes around politics. This is something that I find myself regularly getting angry about and sometimes to a point that it doesn't feel healthy for me anymore to wallow in it too much. But I also know that avoiding all current events wouldn't be healthy for me either. That there's a point at which I need to engage with that sort of thing just to be an informed person and to acknowledge what people are going through and so on. I'm always trying to find that balance of exposing myself to things I know are going to make me angry and things that, you know, and while also trying to take care of myself. I think too, like going back to what we talked about in the beginning, there's a privilege to being able to avoid some things. And so if you are a white, straight, cisgender man of certain means, you're like, I'm not going to look at the news anymore. Like that's great for you. But people in marginalized communities who are going through all of this, they don't just get to tune out when someone's taking their rights away. And so I think that that's really important to me not going to a dumb birthday party, you know, and I want to say I have a lot of discomfort in my life. I'm not avoiding discomfort. But I think that's an important point too. I think also in society, culture now, we are taking a lot of whatever routes we can to not have to engage. And that's causing loneliness. That's causing disconnection. So I think saying a little bit of discomfort, whether that's a social situation, what it is, that's a good thing too. Yeah. I totally agree. I'm hearing that that be able to do, like, manage both, you know, a little bit of avoidance. And I think for people with anxiety like myself, I can catastrophize a lot. So a little bit of avoidance is really helpful to me. If I can take a little distance, manage, take a little distance sometimes, just to re-evaluate my relationship with the thing that's upsetting me. Right. Super helpful. Yeah. I mean, this is this is where, again, I think having lots of tools is so important that one of the things we know is that so later on in the book, I'll talk about the importance of having a social network, right, that your social network is who you can rely on for things, or people who can come and help you. Well, having a social network necessarily requires us to get out into the world and to engage with people in a really meaningful way. And sometimes that's the thing, I mentioned it because we're talking about loneliness, right, that some of the decisions we make discourage us from, and I see this sometimes with my students, you know, they're really reluctant to want to go out and engage with the world. But then what that means is that they have fewer people they can rely on when they need to rely on people. And so trying to figure out when do I check out and when do I engage is part of sort of developing that emotionally mature understanding. 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Some nights I'll come home and I have read too much in the news and something's happening and whatever. I'm like, I would love a scotch right now. Just no ice cubes just straight to the head. Nums you and it does to drink temporarily. I would say a healthier distraction is call my best friend. Ask her to remind me about the time that A, B and C happen and then we laugh till we cry for five, ten minutes. Tell me some more healthy distractions because I think most of mine are unhealthy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As a general rule, we got to watch what we eat and drink as part of this for sure. But absolutely, I love the idea of being able to call a friend and socialize and also remind me of X, Y or Z. Having a show or even short video clips, I actually save on my computer some sort of motivating clips from YouTube that I can just go check out every now and then when I'm feeling down. I recently started coloring. I am not a good artist but I found that I was having a hard time. My brain doesn't like rest as much as I want it to. And so one of the things I started doing was I got an adult coloring book which is not as naughty as it sounds. And I started just doing that for ten minutes a day as a way of sort of giving me some, it's kind of like having a mantra. It gives me something to focus on other than work or problems or politics or whatever. And so I think finding those activities that can be a thing, there's this fascinating study about spending time in nature. Now we know spending time in nature is good for you. We know it is, it's great for your mental health and great for your emotional well-being. However, there is one study that took it a step further and said they had people go spend time in nature and then they had other people go spend time in nature and go bird watching. And what they found is that the people who were bird watching were benefited even more than just spending time in nature and that's because they were giving themselves something to focus on. Instead of being in nature but then still thinking about work, they were thinking about birds. And that focusing on that gave them a meant that they got those benefits even more. Now it doesn't have to be birds, it could be identifying plants, it could be, you know, looking for animals, whatever. That sort of thing, but it gives you something more. We had this amazing researcher on named Dachner Keltner and he was talking to us about wonder and he talked about wonder walks and it was the same idea he had a control group who went on a walk every day and they just went on a walk and the other group spent just a couple minutes on the walk looking at something that gave them wonder and not only did it help them with stress but like it actually lowered inflammation, it lowered pain and so I think you're absolutely right. It also sounds like you're saying to Ryan doing something habitually or having a routine like you're saying you're coloring ten minutes a day. I do a gratitude thing in the morning every morning, just these things that maybe sort of help ground us can also be useful. Yeah, absolutely. I think that, I mean there's different ways that you want to use some of those grounding type techniques. One is to just do it regularly, right? So I use coloring as a thing that I just do, like I said, ten minutes a day. Same thing I do, like a sleep meditation as I'm falling asleep every night. And I just do that habitually. The other way to use it is when you're hitting an emotional high, right? Like when you are feeling really anxious, when you are feeling really stressed to say, okay, in these moments I'm going to color for ten minutes as a way of for deescalating some of that anxiety or I'm going to go through this meditation or I'm going to ground myself. Like those are all mechanisms you can use either regularly or as needed. I feel like pets really help with this. Absolutely. I mean I will grab my kitten and be like, time to make mommy feel better and like, it's the worst. And it works. He's so fully in cute. Yeah, pets are really good if you guys can do it. I'm convinced my dog knows when I need to pet her. So she comes to me in those moments and so yeah, which is very nice. Talk to us a little bit about mood hacks. What are those and what are some of your favorite mood hacks that you found? Yeah, so if we think back to that model I was just writing before where we've got the stimulus and then we've got your mood at the time, a big part of managing our emotions is taking good care of ourselves. Trying to stay rested when we can, trying to eat right, trying to stay hydrated. There's really interesting research on how just simple dehydration can lead to increased emotional reactivity when you experience stressor. This is where spending a little bit of time in nature can make a big difference. Engaging with the arts can make a big difference. So going to show is going to concerts. It's even better if you engage in the creation of art. So if you go to arts and crafts workshops and things like that as a way of taking care of yourself so that when you do face that stimulus, you're better prepared to deal with it. I just have to interrupt real quick because the water thing made me lap the hydration thing made me lap so much because sometimes I'll be in a real pissy mood and my partner goes, have you drank water today and I want to murder? Yeah. What the fuck is that I have to do with anything? But it sounds like he's got a point. It does. This is- The hydration will make you feel terrible. Yeah, this is why you need to do that stuff in advance because if somebody tells you that in a moment, it's sort of like having someone say calm down, right? It's not going to work. I hate when he's right. What about exercise, Ryan? How does that affect our moods? I'm assuming it's good, right? Yes. So it is mostly good. There is one caveat where I'm going to say it is not good and we'll get to that in a second. But as a general rule, exercise is great. And frankly, it is something that this is when we talk about things that I think therapists should probably be prescribing more regularly. This is one of those. And it doesn't have to be super vigorous exercise. It's just getting moving and it has a whole bunch of benefits. It also has a bunch of indirect benefits because a lot of- sometimes when you're exercising it means you're out in nature, right? So it's got that added piece. It means you're socializing, right? Because you go to a gym or to a club or something like that. So it's got these additional indirect benefits that it brings along with it. We know that people who exercise- we know this because just as recently as 2023, it's a big study that's done. Looking at basically every published article out there on exercise and mood or emotions, they found that exercise led to the overall emotional well-being, higher self-esteem, confidence, just a whole bunch of positive outcomes. The caveat here is that- now all of that research looks at people who exercise and is it- does it help them when they sort of experience negative events? That's different from I'm feeling angry right now. So I'm going to go to the gym to work it off. That we actually find- there's a lot of research that says that trying to manage your anger or fear through exercise doesn't necessarily work very well. Wow. Again, it's going to depend a little bit on your goal. If your goal is to de-escalate, right? If your goal is to bring that anger down or that fear down- Killy, yeah. Then going to a place and increasing your heart rate isn't necessarily what you need. What you need is to do the opposite of that, is to deep-rear you that's to bring that down. And so again, that's why the goal piece matters. There might be times where that isn't the goal. Why? Where the goal isn't necessarily to decrease, to regulate that way. Now, where this gets a little bit nuanced is there are some forms of exercise because they don't necessarily increase heart rate in a significant way, like going for a walk, things like that. Those forms of exercise are probably going to be fine and be good for you in those moments. It's really the vigorous stuff that tends to lead to keeping those angry thoughts and angry feelings at the top of mind. Hmm. I can see that. That makes sense. I feel like gentle yoga makes you want to hug the world. Yes. Different than like boxing. You know what I'm saying? Yes, that's exactly it. Things like yoga are probably going to be great. Going for a walk is going to be great. Boxing, going for a run. Those types of things are less likely to work. They feel good though. So people sometimes want to do them, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they help do bring the anger down. What about managing stress? What are some hacks that you have for that? I think we all need that right now. Yeah, we do. Yeah, that's a really important one. And I do think that a lot of the things that I talk about just throughout the book are going to be helpful when it comes to managing stress. I get this question a lot about, are we angry or now than we once were? And I think the truth is that we probably are, though, that's a complicated question. And I think that if we are one of the big reasons is because we're also under a lot more stress than we once were. And I think that what happens is that when we are stressed out, we only have so much capacity to feel kind of overwhelmed. And when we face a negative event, we're just more likely to lose it when we're already feeling stressed about things. So a lot of the things we've been talking about, about finding ways to ground yourself, thinking about exercising, taking good care of yourself, those are all things that I think are really helpful when it comes to finding ways to manage stress. And doing what you can in those areas, including the stories you tell yourself and how you talk to yourself, all of those things are going to be really critical in decreasing that. Can you tell me what an interpretation hack is? Yes. So when you think about those, again, those three sort of core areas we have, the stimulus are moved at the time. A big piece of this is how we interpret that stimulus. And so how do we decide what it means to us? And so this is where you mentioned the word rush. You mentioned catastrophizing before. Catastrophizing is a form of interpretation, right? And it's you've decided, hey, this thing is going to ruin my day. It's going to ruin my week. It's going to, my life, your life, exactly. So an interpretation hack is when we seek to have a realistic understanding, is this thing that's happened really catastrophic? If it is, then by all means, we should treat it as such. Is it a mild nuisance in trying to evaluate that? And there's actually quite a few of these people engage in things like self-directed sheds, which means I make all these decisions about how things I should do in my day-to-day life. Another one of these is labeling, right? We have a tendency to label the people and the circumstances around us in these negative, maladaptive ways. And when we do that, we're now responding to the label. So if I call another driver a total idiot, now I'm thinking of them as a total idiot, instead of just a person out there who made a mistake, right? And that changes how I respond to them in the situation. Can I just tell you this happened to me a couple weeks ago. I was dealing with a woman from Khan Edison. They had overcharged me. And I had to file a complaint with the state of New York. And she was assigned to my case. And she kept screwing things up like the first time she called and she had my phone number wrong, so she hadn't done the research yet. The next time she had the wrong address. And she finally called back and said, you know what? I think I can get this money discharged. And I was so happy. And I went in the other room to tell Benji what had happened. And I was like, she's going to get rid of the money. But she's such an idiot. Like, she kept getting things wrong. I come back to my office and I had not hung up the phone. And she said, I was still there. And so I was like, oh, I'm so sorry. Like, thanks. And she's like, I'll call you back and let you know for sure. She calls me back. And she tells me I got your money discharged. And then she said, I just want you to know that I heard what you said. Oh, my God. I wanted to melt into the floor. Right. We forget that everyone's a human. Exactly. And she said it wasn't my fault. I had been provided, been provided the wrong information. And I was like, that doesn't even matter. Like I shouldn't have said that. And I was so sorry that you heard that. But since then, I've been thinking about it. And like what you just said, Ryan, like the idea of like how we label people or how we label things and is how we see them. And that also then is how we interact with them. That's how we go about our day. And like it seems so simple, but just giving people a little more grace or just not seeing them in a certain way. It's hard. It changes everything else. Yeah, it's really hard to do. But if we can do it, I think it's revolutionary. I know, but we're like wrapped up in a blanket of our own angst sometimes. Yeah. But I also think we're also very quick to do that, to label things or label people in that way. And so that was such a wake up call for me. I'm sorry, Ms. Davis, wherever you are, if you're listening, like I apologize again. But I make mistakes and I also, you think about it, you know, but we're you like, yeah, yeah. But hopefully we learn from them. And I have, I have been trying to be better in the last couple weeks. I trust that. So the other thing I was thinking about to Ryan when you said, you know, these questions that, you know, we can ask like the should questions. Another question that my first therapist, 25 years ago, made me ask myself was, what's the worst thing that would happen if this happened? And she made me actually walk through that. So if I was catastrophizing, she would say, okay, but what's the worst thing? And usually I wasn't going to die or someone I loved wasn't going to die. What are some other questions that we can ask ourselves when we're dealing with emotions that can maybe help us sort of take things down a notch? You know, there's, there's a couple of things I like to say here. One of those is I really think this, this has been really helpful to me. One of the things that I've done is, and this is a little deep, but is to unpack some of my core beliefs. Like what are the things? Because my beliefs about myself or about the world, they serve as a lens by which everything is filtered through. And so I'm going to give you an example from this morning. So I tend to, one of my core beliefs is I, it is just rooted in my DNA is that I am super scared of being a burden to people. I think about it a lot. I don't want, I don't like when I slow other people down. I don't like when I interfere with other people's progress. And this is like, this gets in me in big ways. Like I think about the future and when I'm older and will I be able to, you know, will the people have to take care of me and like that, that stuff scares me? But even in small ways. And so this morning dropping my son off at school, I pull over to get him out and he is not ready to get out of the car yet. Right. And I don't know if you've ever been a school drop off, but it is like the wild west, right? Yes. And so I had this sort of freak out moment where I was like, buddy, what are you doing? You got to be ready to get out of the car. Like there's other people waiting on us, you know, and so, so being able to acknowledge my sort of core belief in that moment and realize that like, hey, we're really talking about 30 seconds, right? There's nobody in this line has such an important life that 30 seconds is that critical. It's okay to enjoy this moment with your son to help him get off and start his school day and taking a moment to like evaluate and to recognize where that was coming from for me and where that like that anxiety comes from is a good way to think through some of these interpretation hacks, right? Is to understand, okay, so why is this such a thing for me? Yeah. This is when we go back to what our emotions do for us. One of the things they do is they tell us what's important to us, what's really important to us. And we can sometimes evaluate whether or not that's what we want to be important to us. One of the questions I can ask myself in that moment is, why am I prioritizing the person behind me getting through this line quickly? Why am I putting that over having a nice goodbye with my son in the morning as he goes off to school? And that's a real question that I've got to interrogate if I want to have that kind of healthy emotional life. I have a question. Can you actually change your behavior, not your core beliefs, but your behavior if you analyze that and act on it? Because I can relate. I have things that I'm aware of about myself. And I know they're happening and I want to be like, Raj, this doesn't have to be who we are. I think you can. And I think it actually comes back to something we talked about earlier, which is the stories we tell ourselves. And a big piece of this is making sure the story we're telling ourselves is one that is accurate, but is also a story about who we truly are versus who we want to be and trying to shift that over time. And I don't want to be someone who is so anxious about being a burden that I fail to engage in my actual current life. Right. I don't want to be that way. And so it takes me reminding myself in that moment, hey, this is the old you. You don't want to be that way. You want to be the person who is having a nice goodbye with their. And you're not stuck. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I feel bad for our listeners. They're going to hear this all the time because I started therapy since we, you know, since we last had our last season. And I think therapy is so good. I love it. It's my favorite. But I learned therapy already, even just like, yeah, I will have those moments. And I will even say, now I'm not at a place yet where I can feel in the moment that I'm not doing the right thing, but I can't stop it from happening. Totally. And my therapist was like, that's fine. The fact that you're even recognizing that feeling, that is the next step. Because eight months ago, you didn't even recognize that. You just were just going through it. And so I think we can, Raj. I think it's just a lot of repetition, practice, and acknowledging what's happening in the moment. Yeah. A plus for you though. I feel good about, I mean, like I said, I'm going to be insufferable, but I'm so happy about it. I'm so happy about it. I'm here for this journey. Thank you. I talked about my, calling my bestie, how can finding community and social engagement help us regulate our emotions? Yeah. Our community is so important to us for, honestly, a couple of different reasons. One is, those are people we can rely on for sort of specific tasks in our life. And it, I don't know, maybe that isn't the nicest way of thinking about our friends. But at the same time, like, you know, if you've got friends that you can turn to when your car breaks down, when you're struggling to, you know, fix something and need some help or help you move, that's probably the best examples. Who can you call on for that stuff? You know, that makes your life easier. And also when you are asked for those things and you provide those services to a friend, it actually builds your own self-esteem and helps you feel better about things. So you know, remember that. When you ask someone to help you move, what you're really doing is building their self-esteem. So, it's really true. You know, if someone, if one of my friends asked me to come to a dental or medical appointment with them, I feel like I have a cape, like I'm a superhero. Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like I'm doing something wonderful for my friend and I love my friend. Yeah. And it's not transactional. It might look like that. It's not. Right. It's just making me feel like a whole human. Absolutely. I will disagree with you though, Ryan. I am never going to ask someone to help move and I'm never going to ask. I will never help someone move. I hate when people are like, oh, but we'll get pizza and beer and it will be fun. It'll be like, you know, and I'm, no, it's not. I'm like, you could have lobster, pizza. Yeah. I will give you, I will chip in some money for you to get a mover. That's true. Or I will buy the pizza for you guys, but I can't do it. Noah has boundaries. I do. And they're pretty healthy. Yeah. I was, I was literally, I was going to end this by asking you if you'd help me move. But now it's, right now. Now, absolutely. I'll help you move. Thank you. All the way to Wisconsin. It's the MS. Yeah. I get that. Yeah. That's fair. The way to end it though, I think Rajan, I want to know, we asked this to most of our experts, what is the number one hack that you would say for people to hack their emotions? Or what's the number one thing you want people to carry away from this conversation? I think there's a couple things. One is I want people to understand the big picture. So one of the first things I talk about in the book is how, why, how and why do we feel? How and why do we emote? And I run through a version of what I've described here of the stimulus, the mood, the interpretation, the feeling, the behaviors, all those things that we engage in. But I think understanding that big picture is really important because once you do, you understand that they're near, I mean, I go through 50, but they're near infinite places that you can intervene anytime you're feeling something. But once you have that sort of big picture, I think it's really empowering to recognize all of the different places that you can make changes. And so I think ultimately that's the thing I would want people to take from this is, yeah, there are lots of specific tools here that you can use, but also just the fact that you have so many tools that you're disposed of as a big part of this picture. Open up that hack sack. I love that hack sack. You start doing some work. Ryan, thank you for this. And I would say, yeah, go get the book. It's going to be out if it's not out already very soon. And we love having you. Thank you for coming. Come back again. Please. This is illuminating. Thank you. Yeah, love talking with you, but thank you so much. What's happening people is Marvin Teaser from our podcast, Free Shots of the Keylar, and we're currently sponsored by the Department for Work and Pensions. Live's busy and admin gets forgotten, but if you're claiming benefits, listen up. If something changes, you need to tell DWP otherwise you could face a penalty. That could be a partner moving in, even if they keep their own place. If your car doubles up as a taxi or family car, you should only report expenses for work trips or forgotten savings like premium bonds. To find out if you need to report a change, search tell DWP. Humans, it is I, if no cat, never been batteries or electricals, they cause fires when crushed in binneries. Always recycle them separately from your regular rubbish and recycling. Search, recycle your electricals to find shops and recycling banks where you could drop them off. Hi, it's Chinsy and Sophia from the Girls bathroom, and we're currently sponsored by Nivia Soft, the iconic moisturizing cream for face, body and hands. Nivia Soft is the timeless iconic moisturizer that's been trusted for decades. Because it's a proper, triple threat. One cream you can use on your face, your body, your hands. It's super lightweight, absorbs really quick, and gives your skin an instant hydration boost. Plus, it's perfect as an everyday moisturizer or an emergency fix, whether you're at home or on the go. Simple, iconic and trusted, it's an absolute essential. Discover Nivia Soft, your go-to moisturizing essential, available at Tesco. And now it's time for better and better. These are your top five takeaways from this episode. All right, number one, emotions are how we understand and interact with the world. Number two, sometimes it's actually your best bet to avoid a negative stimulus before it creates an emotional issue. Number three, but we want to be able to learn to sit with and grow from a little bit of discomfort. Just a little bit. Number four, our internal narrative and the stories we tell ourselves are crucial to how we regulate our emotions. I'm a bad bitch. Yeah, you are. And number five, there's an infinite number of hacks to help manage emotions. Find the ones that work for you and put them in your hack packs. Okay, right. So how are you feeling emotionally right now and do you think you're going to be better at managing your emotions? I feel kind of safe right now. Okay, I think I feel validated. I really think I've got the mantras down for the different moods, different things I need. You are a bad bitch. A bad bitch and then other times I'm like, I'm safe. I'm okay. Yeah, I'm not spiraling into the universe. So that part's good. Everything else, I definitely, I need the rest of the hack pack. I do feel like not being able to regulate your emotions affects every aspect of your health. And I want to be a bad bitch into my 90s. So I'm definitely going to read the book. What about you? I love the idea too that there are things you can do before the emotions happen. Like if you're doing sort of your general holistic hygiene, you know, you're working out, you're getting sleep, you're eating well, that's going to help regulate your emotions right there. Yeah. But then if you're caught in the middle of the nightmare, there are things you can do as well. I also want to be better about sort of taking a little step back. Yeah. And, you know, I love to fire off like an email when I'm angry with someone. A stern email. Yeah, if one comes in, I just respond immediately. Don't do that. No, I do the same thing. Like don't poor, but wait an hour, wait a day. We can all relate to that. Yeah. So I like these ideas like there are questions you can ask yourself. There are all these little things that you can do. Pick one, pick two, and you're probably going to feel better. Yeah. Yeah. I love feeling better. We'll see if it actually works. Anyway, as long as there are things to get wrong and God knows there are a lot of them. We're going to be right here to help you do them better. Feel good, you guys. Am I doing it wrong? Is a co-production between HuffPost and ACAC? Our producers are Eve Bishop, Carmen Borca, Carrillo, and Malia Aguadelo. Our executive producers are Jenny Kaplan and Emily Rudder. Special thanks to HuffPost's head of audience Abbey Williams, Head of Video Will Took, as well as Kate Palmer, Marta Rodriguez and Terry DeAngelo. And we're your hosts, Raj Punjabi Johnson, and Noah Michaelson. Every parent has the key to unlock their child's potential. A future where they'll learn the skills they need to succeed. Whether that's getting a job or further study. But the key isn't a key. It's the support you give them. All right, done. Thanks for your prune and that was fun. I've been reading about technical education and it looks like business. Technical education opens doors for your child. Search Talking Futures to find out how T-levels, apprenticeships and HTC's can unlock their full potential. Hey, it's Anna and Mandy from our podcast Sisters in the City. And we're currently sponsored by the Department for Work and Pensions. Life's busy and admin gets forgotten. But if you're claiming benefits, listen up. If something changes, you need to tell DWP. Otherwise, you could face a penalty. That could be a partner moving in, even if they keep their own place. Or if your car doubles up as a taxi and a family car, you must only report work related costs. Or forgot and savings like premium bonds. To find out if you need to report a change, search Tell DWP. Hello, we're Jane and Fee from the Off-Air Podcast. And we're currently sponsored by Stripenstair. Stripenstair nickers are some of the softest things I've ever worn made from breathable wood fibers. They're perfect for women juggling a million things at once who want to be stylish and comfortable. They've got 10 shapes in size is 6 to 22, so there's a fit for everybody. Plus, their sleepwear is like sleeping in a cloud. Oprah and Vogue are obsessed for a reason. Go to Stripenstair.com and use the code Off-Air 20 for 20% off. Harry Styles is back with his brand new album, Kiss All the Time, disco occasionally. Featuring the number one single, Aperture. Out now.