The Crucial Emotional Skill Most Adults Were Never Taught

Have you ever had one of those days where something just feels off inside of your body? Like you try to push through it? You try to distract yourself or work more or eat something or go for a run or scroll on social media and then tomorrow you feel exactly the same way as you did yesterday. It's still there. And you assume like maybe I need to work harder or I need more sleep or I need a vacation or I need something. But what if the real problem isn't that you don't know how to fix what's going on. What if you've simply been trying to solve the wrong problem altogether? Because after coaching thousands of people over the years, I've realized something that's completely changed the way that I understand human behavior. Most people aren't bad at feeling their emotions. They're bad at identifying what emotions they're actually feeling. And so today, I'm going to show you why that happens, what it's costing you every single day, and then how one emotional skill can completely change the way that you understand yourself, and I'm going to give you a step-by-step process you can follow. So, let's dive in. When you say, "I'm stressed," what have you actually said? Stressed is just a catchall word. It doesn't describe any detailed circumstance of what's going on inside of your body. Because underneath, I'm stressed might be a lot of different things. It might be I'm overwhelmed and I need to take something off of my plate. Or it might be I am resentful because I said yes to something that I should have said no to. Or it might be I am scared that I'm going to fail at this and everybody's going to see me fail. Or it might be, you know what, I'm lonely. Or it might just be I'm grieving something that I haven't let myself admit yet. All of those five situations are completely different problems with five different solutions, but a lot of times we just say, "I'm stressed." And then the next day you feel the exact same way because you treated the wrong thing. You tried to fix stress when you were lonely behind it or when you were scared behind it. It's like going to the doctor and saying, "I don't feel good." Is that doctor going to be able to fix that problem with that very limited amount of information that you gave them? Definitely not. Well, a lot of people don't know what they're feeling. They feel it, but they don't know exactly what it is, and they don't know how to describe it, and then they don't know how to solve it. And it's not that you cannot develop this skill. You can definitely develop this skill set, cuz it's something that I've been working on for years within myself. It's just that right now, you probably don't have the words to sort everything out yet. And it all just comes through to you in one big blur. And if you have a big blur, you can't really do anything with it. And so when you look at emotions, we tend to think emotions just happen to us. But that's not really the truth. There's a researcher named Lisa Feldman Barrett out of Northeastern and her work over the past couple decades has proven completely different than what we think of like, oh yeah, well just emotions happen to me. Her research actually shows that your brain is not receiving emotions at all. Your brain is constructing emotions. Your body is always producing raw sensation. It's basically raw data. It's not labeled in any sort of way. And then your brain takes that raw data and it goes, "Okay, what exactly is this?" And we will be right back. Hey, real quick. 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And now back to the show. and it reaches for a concept or a word or a construct or a category based off of what it's learned in the past. And that's a very very key part based off of what it has learned in the past. And in that moment, your brain then constructs an emotion based off of the raw data that it has and it puts it in some sort of category. So like elevated heart rate, tight chest, butterflies in your stomach, your brain reaches for the word anxiety and then you can have a panic response. Or your brain can reach for the word excitement and you can have a great day. Why? Because there's different concepts. There's a thing that's called anxiety reappraisal. When you look at the feelings of anxiety and the feelings of excitement, the physical signature inside of the body is near identical. What you feel inside of your body with anxiety and what happens to your body with anxiety and excitement is near identical. The only thing that changes it is what you label actually what you're feeling. Now, think about what happens if your brain only has a few different concepts to reach for because you weren't taught in childhood what exactly it is that you're feeling. it's going to grab whichever one that it's closest to and going ah it seems like it's this one no matter what's going on inside of you and so you will live your entire life completely mislabeling your internal world and so Barrett caused the skill of having a lot of concepts a lot of words to grab for emotional granularity like some people have very low emotional granularity I used to have very low emotion I could not I didn't know what I was feeling and I could only feel like three things. I feel like everything was just like good or bad or fine or stressed. That was it. But some people have very high emotional granularity. They can tell the difference between disappointment and discouragement and between anxiety and uh dread, between anger and between resentment, and between lonely and being alone. Because the research on this is kind of amazing when you actually look at it. People with higher emotional granularity have been found to drink less when they're stressed. They're less likely to lash out and retaliate when someone hurts them. They go to the doctor less. They use fewer medications and overall tend to be healthier. Not from being tougher, but because they're able to take their feeling and figure out and have better words and concepts to describe what they're actually going through. they can then label all of them correctly. Like when I was younger, full transparency, when I was in my early 20s, I thought that I could not feel empathy for other people. And the only reason why was because I had closed myself off to feeling feelings because of my childhood. So I couldn't feel like just empathy. I couldn't feel good feelings. I couldn't feel bad feelings. I just shut myself off. And so over the past 15 years, I've had to go on this this journey of allowing myself to feel and to be vulnerable and to understand what I'm going through, what other people are going through. And now, if you were to ask me, I really can understand my emotions at a high level, but it's only because I've actually been working at the skill set, which wasn't really taught to me when I was younger. And there was a study that was done out of UCLA. There's a researcher named Matthew Lieberman. And this study is often called the putting feelings to words study. And they put people in an fMRI machine and studied their brains while those people were looking at faces. And here's what's really crazy about it, right? When participants simply put a label on what they were seeing, when they named the emotion that they felt like that person's face was portraying, activity in the amygdala, which is where your fear center in your brain is, went down. At the same time, activity in the preffrontal cortex, which is your decision-making, executive functioning, went up. So the act of naming the emotion turns the alarm in our brain down and turns the thinking part of our brain up. You're not suppressing the emotion. You're just accurately labeling the emotion that you're feeling and it allows your nervous system to settle. It allows your fear to turn off and allows you actually start thinking more clearly. And so some psychologists call this effect labeling. You might have heard the phrase name it to tame it, right? Because humans hate uncertainty because uncertainty is a threat. And so when you can make something like an emotion certain that threat that you are feeling goes away. So if naming it turns the alarm down, what do you think happens if you never name it? The alarm just kind of stays on and then you walk around every single day being like, I don't know, man. Like I'm just I'm just really tired. You're not tired. You're just carrying something that happened to you two weeks ago that you never fully identified and you never processed. So therefore, your body is still carrying on to it. The question that I always go back to is like, well, why don't we have this? Why didn't I know what I know now about emotions? And it goes back to where almost everything goes back to, as you guys know, your childhood. As a kid, I live with a toddler. They have enormous emotions, right? And you had enormous emotions. and you didn't have words for them when you were younger and you needed an adult to help you put language to your feelings, right? And kids will feel the thing and then the adult says the word and your brain goes, "Oh, that's what it is." It's called emotional coaching. And this is what parents are supposed to be doing, but to be honest with you, most parents don't do this. John Gottman has done a ton of research on this and says some parents are emotion emotion coaches and then there's parents that are emotion dismissing parents. Which one did you have? Right. Like most of us, most parents are emotion dismissing parents because not because they don't love you, but because really crazy loud emotions in public can be a disturbance. They can feel embarrassed. They want to be quiet. Maybe they're having a hard day. And so it sounds like, "You're fine. Stop crying. You're okay. Get up." Or, "Big boys don't cry. Big girls don't cry. Don't be a wussy. You're too emotional." Right? Did you ever hear any of those things as a kid? Listen, I'm not trying to blame your parents and have you blame your parents for the rest of your life. Most of them, they were doing exactly what was done to them. And guess what? Nobody ever taught them either. And in fact, most of us were raised by either parents who went through the Great Depression or their parents went through the Great Depression. Like when my grandma told me what she went through in the Great Depression and her entire family, I realized like, hey, these people didn't have time to go figure out how they were feeling. They were trying to figure out how they were going to be eating in the next couple hours every single day. And so you have to understand when an adult names your behavior instead of your emotion like stop crying instead of honey you're feeling lonely. You didn't learn how to associate the word with the feeling. Do you get that? You learn that the feeling itself is the problem. Which is why so many people apologize for their feelings. And so you never built real tools for what's going on inside of you. So that hopefully this makes sense to you because what's happening is we learn that our emotions are inconvenient a lot of times in childhood and if our emotions are so inconvenient then we want to kind of push them away and not really deal with them and we're not going to really understand them at all. Now we're adults and we're going on feeling something. I don't know what the feeling that's it's just not good, right? So let's talk about the steps to get better at this because it is a skill and if I can do it, I promise you you can do it. I promise you you can. So it's a step-by-step process. Okay. Number one, the first thing you want to do is go to the body first, not the head. Do not start by asking yourself, "What am I feeling?" Because your head will lie to you. And it'll go based off of something that's happened in the past. And usually it'll go back to like, I'm feeling like she disrespected me. Right? That's not a feeling. That's an accusation. Right? But how many times have we done I'm feeling like she disrespected me. No, no, no. I feel like she's talking down to me. That's not a feeling. That's an accusation. So instead, what you want to do is you want to close your eyes and you want to ask, where is it in my body? Once you try to find it in your body, you go, okay, what does it feel like? Is it in the chest or is in the stomach? Is it tight or is it heavy? Or is it hot? Or is it buzzing? Or is it butterflies? You have to understand this. A skill set that we've never been taught is how to really communicate with our body and understand our body. Your body is always ready to talk to you. It's just that very few of us actually listen to our body. So, we start with the body first because that's where the actual raw data lives. Right? So, that's number one. Number two is you've got to get out of what I call the big five. Right? You're not allowed to use the word fine or stressed or tired or frustrated or annoyed. Those are kind of like catch-all words. There's a lot of other catchall words, but those are really probably the most five most common. You have to go a layer deeper than that. And so what I would recommend is when you're trying to like, oh, what the hell am I feeling? Pull your phone out, Google, give me the biggest list of feelings that you can, and try to find one. So you'll there's so many other feelings, right? Like jealous and distant and resentful and violated and bitter and dismissed and betrayed and humiliated and let down and lonely and guilty and ashamed and depressed and bored and isolated and abandoned and inferior and vulnerable, remorseful, grief, insecure, weak, rejected, threatened, overwhelmed, worried, inadequate, excluded, exposed, nervous, helpless. There's so many other things to feel. There's so many words and you want to read through the list after you've identified where in the body it is, what exactly it is that you're feeling, like what it feels like. And you're going to look for a word that makes something in your chest go, "Oh, I think that might be it." And then there's like this physical click when you find the right word. Is it disappointment or is it discouraged? Is it anger or is it hurt? That's like wearing anger as a bodyguard. Is it overwhelm or is it resentment? And so you want to try to get better at naming. This is why it becomes a skill set to take the feeling and to label it because once again, we were never taught this as children. So now we're going to build up this skill set. It's just like learning a new language. Oh, that's how you say apple in Spanish. You do it enough times, you go, "Oh, that's what apple is in Spanish." Right? So that's step number two. Step number three is say it with a little bit of distance. Don't identify with it. Right? Don't say I am angry. Anything that follows I am is an identity statement. It is stating that's who you are. And I want you to understand that you are not angry. You are feeling anger. And so the way that you distance yourself a little bit from your feelings is say something like I'm noticing anger. Right? I'm angry makes it you. I am noticing anger makes it like a cloud passing by. It's just the weather moving through you. Right? Weather always passes. Identity does not. Never use the words I am without it being empowering words that follow. And that tiny little grammatical change is the difference between having an emotion and being an emotion for the rest of your life. Okay. Number three. Number four. Ask what is it asking for? Right? Like it sounds weird, but you're This is a huge piece and people rarely rarely do it. Every emotion is actually a request. It's information. It's not some sort of verdict. Anger is usually asking you to like enforce a boundary that got crossed. Sadness is asking you to grieve something that you lost. Resentment is asking you to say no when you've been saying yes. And so once you've got the accurate word and label, ask yourself, what is this asking me to do? Because every emotion is a request. Stressed has no request. That's why you stay stuck in it because you need to go a layer deeper than just stressed. So you need to find out what it's asking of you. Okay? And so here's the assignment that I want to give you. I don't want you to just listen this podcast and do nothing with it. For the next 7 days, three times a day, I want you to set random alarms in your phone. Don't rely on remembering. And you're going to stop for 30 seconds and you're going to close your eyes whenever your alarm goes off. You're going to take a breath and you're going to ask where is where is this in my body and what is it? Whether you're feeling happy, sad, neutral, try to find what you're feeling in that exact moment. And then what you're going to do is you're going to write down one word. Go to the list of words if you need to Google it and write down one word. the word cannot be part of the big five. And then after seven days, you've written down 21 words and you're going to realize around day three or four, you're going to like catch a word that kind of surprises you. You're going to go, "Oh, like I didn't realize I was actually feeling this way." You know, you're going to be sitting there thinking that you're stressed out about work and you're going to go, "Oh, that's not stress. That's loneliness." And you've been feeling it for eight months. And you will start to build so much awareness as to what is happening inside of you. And so I want you to understand, you're not a person who doesn't feel things. You're a person who has never been handed the vocabulary of exactly what's going on inside of you. You've never been taught. And you have to understand this is something you can teach yourself with this process. When you can name it, you can regulate it. And when you can regulate it, you can think clearly. And when you can think clearly, you can take better action. and better action is the only thing that's ever going to change your life. And so it all starts with one word. Just get the word right. Hey, thanks so much for watching today's video. If you love this video, click this one right here. This is the one that you need to watch next. And if you want to make sure you don't miss any more of these episodes, click that button right there. Make sure you subscribe and check out the next