When I first started blogging about personal growth 8 years ago, I had a glass jar on my kitchen windowsill with a cork bobbing in water. It was my touchstone to remind myself that each of us plays an important role in lifting each other’s cork. We need help to stay afloat.
This morning, I read something in Hidden Potential by Adam Grant, that transported me back to that moment in time. It felt surreal and spine-tingling to be in two places at once. I was at the very beginning of my self discovery journey placing that cork in the jar –AND — I was also fully present in my apartment taking stock of just how far I have truly come on that personal growth journey. A smile stretched across my face as I took stock of how my own cork has risen over 8 years — and most importantly, how so many others’ corks have also risen.
At the onset of my personal growth journey, I felt alone in the work – one cork in a small glass jar. Today the massive ocean is full of corks and I am merely one of many. I could not be happier with the company I am keeping.
For over 20 years, Brene Brown has been planting seeds of the very work we are deeply steeped in today. She braved the wilderness back then, schlepping her first book from the trunk of her car and mustering courage to give a Ted Talk on shame and vulnerability. She did not have a crystal ball to guide her — she just followed her heart and her calling, blazing a path and planting seeds.
There is a Greek proverb that reminds us that wise men plant seeds of trees, the shade of which they will never sit under, bubbled up into my consciousness.
Brene Brown planted the seeds of human connection with an emphasis on vulnerability, the importance of our emotions, and the necessary healing work of addressing old generational patterns — and those seeds took root.
It has taken nearly two decades for the seeds to grow into the full awareness that we got a lot of things wrong about humanity, how the brain and body really work, and what is truly possible for our evolution on so many fronts.
I sat under the shade of the tree that Brene planted just yesterday. I listened to Scott Galloway and Rich Roll openly discuss vulnerability on Rich’s podcast. It was visceral to experience this refreshingly deep and honest conversation with two men in their fifties get real about their emotions and what they want for their sons and daughters.
Even more importantly, is the education and messaging that Rich Roll and Scott Galloway are collaborating on — the need for us all to take very seriously the crisis of loneliness, depression, social isolation and lack of human connection that is paralyzing our younger generations.
When I began my personal growth journey, I read Dr. Bruce Perry’s compelling book, Born for Love. In that book, he was sounding the alarm for our growing empathy poverty, but his voice was drowned out as our collective attention turned to the novelty of social media. We blatantly ignored the warning and gleefully plugged into social media and our devices, so certain that we’d find the connection we craved through technology.
Today, Jonathan Haidt draws a through line from the early 2010’s to today and holds up the reality of our human condition for us to see clearly. Our younger generations need to be unplugged and reconnected to reality. In his book, the Anxious Generation, he is carrying forward the message that Dr. Bruce Perry warned us of in Born for Love. Our growing lack of empathy, our self-imposed social isolation and addiction to devices, has created an epidemic of AI – artificial intimacy. It is Esther Perel who coined that term – Artificial Intimacy. She is the dynamic psychotherapist who fearlessly weeds out conflict between couples to help them discover that plot of ground begging for seeds of love, intimacy and connection to be planted.
We can no longer blatantly ignore what is hidden in plain sight. We must focus our attention, resources and real life support on our children.
Ask anyone who has ever hit rock bottom, and they will tell you that it was in their lowest place that they faced the truth that in order for meaningful change to happen, they had to dig deeper – and do the hard work of rebuilding.
This is where we all are today – collectively at rock bottom with an opportunity to nurture the seeds that have been planted over the past twenty years in psychology, behavioral science, neuroscience and modern medicine.
It is my strong belief that we have reached this breaking point because humans are hard-wired for connection and we do not thrive in continual chaos and uncertainty. If this dilemma were happening in the animal kingdom, our hearts would be breaking open as we watched adult animals leave their young unattended without teaching them any life skills. Their basic instincts would atrophy over time.
If you are familiar with epigenetics, then you may realize that for generations we have passed down unprocessed trauma and overloads of stress and anxiety. Dysfunctional generational patterns are the emotional inheritance that has never been unpacked. Old parenting models failed to install one of the key components of the human operating system — emotional intelligence. This combination is the one-two punch that delivers a compelling warning to us. Unpack the old emotional baggage, heal old traumas. The time has come. Our kids are on overload and they are drowning in cognitive dissonance.
The reality is that we have made this work of unpacking emotional baggage, healing old traumas and installing emotional intelligence so much harder than it needs to be. Psychology has shifted dramatically in the past decade with a focus on somatic healing and understanding how our brains actually work. Neuroscience fires up this better approach by highlighting the neuroplasticity of our brains and how we can re-wire healthier neural pathways in a relatively short amount of time.
As I wrote about in my last blog post, the creative coalescing of so many fields and modalities is helping us fast-track the triage that we need — and can no longer ignore. This creative coalescing is the little forest that has grown from the many seeds that have been planted over the past twenty years.
As many of you know, I am impassioned about teaching our kids all about their innate and integral emotional intelligence. I have a “Marie Kondo” approach to cleaning out generational baggage – let’s stop dragging it around, unpacked and continually weighing us down. Let’s travel more lightly through life and make new discoveries.
By the way, have you noticed how mainstreamed words like vulnerability, mindfulness, self-awareness and emotional intelligence have become? Little seeds have been planted over and over again by people like Brene Brown, Dr. Marc Brackett, Andrew Huberman, Kristin Neff, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, Arthur C. Brooks, Dr. Becky Kennedy, Dr. Peter Attia — and a host of others. They are the corks that jumped into the sea of change and lifted us all up.
So many resources have cross-pollinated that little forest that began with a few seeds several decades ago. We are at the tipping point of a huge, positive human evolution. Just the other day, author Arthur C. Brooks told Ryan Holiday that we now have the neuroscience to prove all the wisdom of the ancient philosophers. His excitement and enthusiasm was contagious.
Here’s what I know — Brene Brown did not have a crystal ball twenty-five years ago, but she felt a nudge so strong she could not resist it. She poured herself into shame and vulnerability and stayed the course because it mattered. She networked the hell out of her platforms during Covid, lifting others up when we were most receptive to learning and discovering all kinds of new things – the missing parts we didn’t know we needed. Brene was planting seeds of awareness all throughout our dormant period.
I used to think that the law of attraction was mostly like wishful thinking — but through Brene I have learned that the law of attraction is sharing, networking and lifting each other up. That is the momentum that brings the changes and opportunities we want.
Michael O’Brien (@the.mindful.cyclist) was also a recent guest on the Rich Roll podcast. His recovery from a near-death cycling experience was the catalyst for his seminal shift that changed his perspective, mindset and actions. He expressed this profound wisdom:
“Things don’t happen for a reason. Things happen….and we give it meaning.” — Michael O’Brien
I am taking this profound wisdom to heart today. Things have been happening FOR us for nearly two decades and we can give it a transformational new meaning and pivotal new direction.
There has been a big clearing of the weeds that prevented us from seeing what was possible for us. Seeds were planted and cross pollinating was happening. mostly in the background.
The self help space got a little traction with mindfulness about a decade ago. It was a wake up call but we kept hitting the snooze button. We turned to devices and poor coping skills; social media was a siren call we falsely believed would bring us the connection we craved. Our attention became a commodity traded in futures markets.
Unfortunately our devices and social media stole our attention and mindfulness; it amplified our disconnection from real life. Highlight reels and filters gave us a very distorted picture of the beautiful complexity and realities of life.
What it also took from us was the fuel that runs our human engines – the neural energy and connectivity we get from being with each other. There is so much that neuroscience has to teach us about how the human brain and body works – how we jumpstart, co-regulate and scaffold each other. We know more about our incredible brains and how to care for them than we ever did before.
So, taking Michael O’Brien’s wisdom to heart, the meaning we can give to this moment is the discovery that we are better together, that human connectivity is integral to our physical, emotional and mental health, and our longevity.
We have the rare opportunity to lift up our kids out of their malaise with greater knowledge, tools and awareness than we have ever had before. We can have a dramatic, positive impact in short order if we meet this moment quite differently than we ever have before.
Do yourself a favor and click that link to read about Michael’s transformational life experience. Then listen to his deeper conversation with Rich on the Rich Roll Podcast.
A few years ago, I started to notice that the more I was really getting to know myself, the greater my curiosity about others. Even when I watched a Netflix series or read a compelling fiction book, I found that I was more empathetic with the characters and their backstories. Truth to be told, I discovered that I could see parts of my own life reflected back to me in their experiences and reactions. It was also easy to see the patterns of cause and effect that we messy human beings bring to our relationships.
It dawned on me that I was now engaging with books and shows on a deeper level and I loved it. I was able to feel and relate to so many characters almost as if I knew them personally. The story lines and plot twists of shows like This is Us or Parenthood were intimately familiar. Some felt like they had been pulled right out of my own family history. It was easy to readily identify with characters and events because I too “have been there”.
Conversations with some of my closest friends revealed that the same thing was happening for them. As they deepened their own self awareness, they too were more intrigued by the complexity of their favorite characters in a book or tv series. They could recognize blind spots and insecurities that contributed to missteps and bad decisions.
Discussing episodes of these shows with friends was much like being in book club with a fascinating twist — our focus was on the whole of the family dynamics and how one issue could cause a cascade of varying problems amongst the family members. We could clearly see the through line that ran from childhood experiences right into the adult lives of each family member.
These mini series became a classroom for recognizing familiar behavior patterns and coping mechanisms. We got a zoomed-out view of how complicated families are. We gained a deeper understanding of what drives people to make some of the choices they do; again, because in many cases, we too “had been there”.
While my friends and I laughed that it is easy to recognize the many fault lines in family dynamics when we simply watching a show, we did agree that we gained from observing the bigger picture. These programs give the viewer a different vantage point; we get an abundance of nuance and context from so many different perspectives and experiences. That is rarely the same lens we use in our own complex family dynamics.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that we rarely know our family members as well as we think we do.
Another is that we rarely know the “whole” of each other.
The Bigger Picture:
I titled this blog post “connective tissue” because that is what we are growing and strengthening when we become cycle breakers and agents of change.
I am a firm believer that replacing that tightly woven yet constantly unraveling fabric of complicated family dynamics with healthy “connective tissue” is the ultimate safety net for our families and relationships.
Dr. Michael Gervais (one of the world’s top high-performance psychologists) shares this wisdom with us: “To lay the foundation for a strong sense of self, the prime dictum is to not focus on the self. The way to do this is not to think less of yourself, but to think of yourself less often.”
The real value of personal growth and self discovery happens in relationship with others. When we truly get to know ourselves well and change how we show up, that’s where meaningful change occurs. When we take Dr. Gervais’ advice to heart, we build a strong foundation of who we are and who we wish to become. We pay attention to how we get unmoored from ourselves in our relationships with others.
This is a giant step in building healthy connective tissue. It’s sticking to our core values and getting more consistent in behaviors and skills that match who we want to be. We can cultivate greater self awareness about how we show up at work vs. how we behave at home, how we act with parents and siblings vs. our own kids and friends. It’s exhausting to shape shift and adapt to all these different relationships if we are constantly matching the environment instead of who we really are at the core.
So often in the self help space, we are told to shed outgrown behavioral patterns that we learned in childhood. Yet they are second nature to us and fit like our favorite pair of comfy jeans. Eventually a good friend or our spouse is going to tell us that it is time to ditch the well worn jeans — they look terrible, no longer fit the body we now have and surely don’t match who we are today.
The same is true with childhood coping skills and poor emotional regulation. They are just old jeans that need to be tossed and replaced with something that makes us feel like a million bucks when we put them on. And while the jeans become a staple in our wardrobe, we can dress them up or down depending on what we are stepping into. Our strong sense of self is that great pair of new jeans. The jacket, the hat, shoes or other accessories are all the skills and tools we use when stepping into relationships with others.
A strong sense of self is our core foundation for everything we do and all the relationships we are in. We become more consistent in how we show up whether we are at home, work or community. When people describe us to others, they capture the essence of who we really are — across all our relationships.
A core reason why family dynamics are the most challenging is that we have a long history of shape shifting, people pleasing, shrinking or puffing up to get our needs met and to also feel a sense of belonging. One false move and we become an outcast. Misunderstandings, rifts and estrangements are so commonplace for this very reason.
Remember that takeaway from the mini series I mentioned above — We have no idea of all the nuance and context of our family members unique emotions and experiences. If we don’t even know ourselves well, how could we possibly know others? And if we are all donning different behavioral patterns to “make things work”, it’s unlikely anything actually stands a chance of working.
A little perspective here: Even if your sibling is only two years older or younger than you, their childhood experiences can be remarkably different. First of all your parents were not the same that they were when you came into the world. They learned a lot from raising you and they adapted in a lot of new ways. What might have changed in your parent’s lives in that time span? Job change, relocation, loss of a parent, health issues, financial struggles? Life events have an impact on parents and kids. If there is a five year or greater age difference in siblings, then essentially it can be like being raised in two remarkably different families.
Healthy connective tissue for family dynamics has to replace the old tangled web we weave by losing ourselves in multiple identities. No wonder our relationships are so complicated.
Our sense of self, our identity, gets shaped and molded like Playdoh when we are growing up. By the time we reach adulthood, we’ve been cut, pounded, stretched and kneaded so many times that we have a hard time figuring out who we really are. It’s unfortunate that most of our self worth and self identity is under constant scrutiny and subject to change at any given moment throughout childhood.
“The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you.” — Carl Jung
Being a change agent and breaking generational family cycles, starts with us. Once we free ourselves of behavioral patterns that keep us stuck, we have more wiggle room for self discovery — and to forge the identity we truly want. We can spend our energy on getting consistent with who we are, rather than exhausting ourselves to fit in.
We need to get very clear on our own identity and self worth. Again, this is a familiar refrain in psychology and the self help space, but it is not cheap talk. It is only when we know our worth and what is critically important to us that we can use a relationship tool like boundaries. Boundaries help others recognize how we want to be treated. Every time you set a boundary, you are getting clearer with yourself about your value and worth.
For the record, when we use boundaries in parenting instead of punishment or dismissive attitudes, we are leading by example. We teach our children not only how to treat us and be respectful, but also how to use this invaluable tool in their own lives (both when they are young and when they are adults).
The fear of other people’s opinions is yet another detriment to really getting to know ourselves intimately.
Most of us lived in this thick fog of other’s opinions all throughout childhood; especially with those old parenting models that did not integrate emotions into our experiences. Kids were told they were too much, too sensitive, too bossy, too timid. First and foremost, we were labeled by behaviors and those identifies stuck with us. — you’re a jerk, you’re a good girl, you’re perfect, you’ll never amount to anything. Secondly, we had to wrestle with these assessments of who we were while trying to figure that out for ourselves. Most of our childhood behavioral patterns and coping skills are rooted in the “fear of other’s opinions” – at home, in school and beyond.
“Identity is our subjective sense of self built on our experiences, beliefs, values, memories and culture. It’s a set of physical and psychological characteristics that is not shared with anyone else. Often derived in relationship or comparison to others, our identity provides a framework to better understand our place in a complicated social world. “ — excerpted from the book The First Rule of Mastery by Dr. Michael Gervais.
“When we have fused ourselves to an identity that is not true to who we are, or to an identity that’s too narrow to contain the whole of who we are, or to an identity incapable of incorporating new information and growing, the opinion of another can feel like an assault where our survival is at stake.” – excerpted from The First Rule of Mastery by Dr. Michael Gervais.
When you let these two excerpts soak in, you can see why we get so confused about who we are. The first excerpt addresses how we make sense of the world when we are kids. It is a private internal narrative we create about who we are. We create it when we are young and powerless and that identify feels vulnerable and in need of protection even when we are older.
The second excerpt reveals why we develop coping skills and behavioral patterns. Our identity does leave us vulnerable to the slings and arrows of other’s opinions so we develop armor to protect who we believe we are.
It’s that armor that gets in the way of us really knowing who we are; and it gets very complicated by the fact that we keep returning to home base to figure it out. Yet, that identity we created at home when we were young no longer feels like it fits who we’ve become.
Without honest self-awareness, it is incredibly hard to see how we stay stuck in an identity we’ve long outgrown and how we stay trapped (especially in our families) in old limiting beliefs about who we are.
We are not the same person we were when we were 5, 10 or 15. We are works in progress throughout our entire lives. A pivotal shift in our mindset around our personal identity is to recognize and embrace this.
We change over time and that is a marvelous thing. We are not forever stuck in an old story, or shackled to a troubled childhood, or doomed to relive an old trauma like a recurring nightmare. We would never want this for our children. When we get clear about who we are, we can parent from our most authentic sense of self. It frees us from protecting our kids unnecessarily from the things that once had a big impact on us.
The benefits of “connective tissue”:
Just imagine the positive difference we are making for younger generations, when we steer them clear of the pitfalls that derailed us from building the life we wanted. Today we have better life skills and relationship tools to teach them. We have a much-improved parenting model and are integrating their emotions into their developing complex brains. We are validating each other’s emotions and experiences which is the preventative medicine for suppressed emotions and unprocessed trauma. We recognize that rupture and repair strengthens our relationships and builds enduring trust. In fact, we normalize the fact that ruptures happen in life and we have a responsibility to repair our most valued relationships. We are learning the integral role body budget plays in our daily lives and the importance of sleep for our brain health.
Most importantly, we can help our young people develop a strong sense of self and be the scaffolding they need through all the growth spurts and life changes they will surely have.
This is an extensive list of key components of “connective tissue” for our families. It’s so much more beneficial than what most of us experienced — because we don’t put each other in boxes, but rather we give each other room to grow – with a big safety net underneath. We encourage each other to explore, discover, stretch, try new things, experiment — with the confidence that they can express themselves honestly and will have the support and guidance they need and deserve.
Dr. Michael Gervais has a nugget of wisdom that he shares on his Finding Mastery podcast that serves as a core reminder for the changes we want to make: No one does it alone.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:
If you struggle with FOPO –the Fear of Other People’s Opinions, you will love this book. Check out Michael Gervais podcast too — Finding Mastery
If you are unfamiliar with Internal Family Systems, you might be surprised to learn that it is all about YOU not your whole family! Discover all the parts of you that have something to offer about what is most important to you and how to best take care of YOU!
Are you starting to realize just how much control you really do have to shape your life and experiences in remarkably beneficial ways? If you have read my last two blog posts about becoming Architects of our Experiences, you may already be discovering some changes in how you “meet the moments” in your life and in your relationships.
The more we know about how our brains and bodies really work – especially how they impact our wide range of emotions – the easier it is to get a little traction implementing better skills and tools for emotional regulation.
My guess is that now that you have learned a little about “body budget”, you are consciously and even unconsciously doing a little check in from time to time to look at your own “battery life”. You may even be catching yourself when you are “hangry” and choosing to be a little more emotionally in control than you would normally do. Congratulations…you are becoming an architect of your experiences!
It shouldn’t come as a big surprise that a balanced body budget is the foundational key to any self improvement initiative we might have. It’s just that we didn’t know about this connection until recently.
Think about how much harder we make things for ourselves in large part because we simply don’t have the energy or power; how often do we push through or burn the midnight oil? No wonder we get in our own way so often. Our best intentions are not enough to integrate real changes in our emotional regulation, relationship skills or healthy habit initiatives. We need a balanced body budget…..full stop.
This reality is bubbling up everywhere now, most notably in modern medicine, psychology and mental health. Although it is basic common sense, we overlooked this foundational principle for far too long. The intake process at the doctor’s, trainer’s or therapist’s office now includes an assessment of how well we are sleeping, eating, exercising and hydrating. In many cases, we are also asked how we are coping with life and navigating our relationships. It’s become evident that our emotional health can have a major impact on our physical and mental health.
Better intake, expanded assessment of our health and well being = more accurate and effective diagnosis and treatments. As Dr. Andrew Huberman has been promoting since the onset of COVID, there are so many no-cost steps we can proactively take to improve our physical and mental health as well as the overall quality of our lives.
The fundamental foundation for becoming skillful architects of our emotions and experiences is a balanced body budget. Sleep is the bedrock of this foundation.
In my most recent blog post about becoming architects of our experiences, I shared the versatile, multi-purpose tool of emotional granularity. Having this tool at our disposable means that we will become much more agile when it comes to emotional regulation. With a balanced body budget and emotional granularity, we are setting ourselves up for much greater success in all areas of our lives. We will be meeting the moments in our life better resourced than ever before.
Just imagine feeling grounded and clear-minded throughout most of your day. What would it feel like to know that you were not at the mercy of an emotional sandstorm that could blow in at any moment? This is what it means to be an architect of your experiences and emotions. You feel in control, you can more accurately assess a situation and more skillfully deal with it and others.
Emotional granularity is analogous to that intake process in the doctor’s office. If all that we can tell the doctor is that we have a pain in our mid-section, the doctor will probe for more clues. A physician always starts with foundational clues like heart rate, lung capacity and blood pressure. She gets more granular by asking about the level of pain, its frequency, any pattern when it flares. We might also go through a battery of tests for deeper investigation.
We can begin a similar “intake process” when we feel a core emotion like anger. If we are angry, it is just a warning light to get our attention. We need the details to clarify what we are angry about. We need emotional granularity to help us find context clues. Just like that investigation in the doctor’s office, we want to explore so we are treating the right problem.
Can you see the distinction? An unskillful “do-it-yourselfer” might run into a heated situation with a hammer and an accelerated heart rate. A skillful architect does a quick assessment of body budget, then reaches for that versatile multi-purpose tool and calmly assesses what the real problem is. A skillful architect develops a viable plan to solve the right problem with the right tools.
Happiness expert, author Arthur C. Brooks taps into this architectural approach by suggesting that we try “substituting” a better emotion for the one that doesn’t feel so good. Just like we choose the healthier option of an apple for dessert versus the cake, we can choose an emotion that will get us a better outcome. In the book, Build the Life You Want, Arthur even uses architectural language:
“Sometimes you want to replace some of your negative emotions with something that fits and is more constructive, leading you to act the way you want to, not the way you feel.” (excerpted from Chapter 3: Choose a Better Emotion in the book Build the Life You Want)
Ok, so let’s just pause here for a moment and really take in just how empowering it would feel to be able to pull this off a few times each day. Simply by paying attention to body budget and choosing emotions that better align with who we want to be, we would proactively practicing becoming an “architect of our experiences and emotions.”
And now, let’s add just one more component that will dramatically enhance your architectural prowess. Drum roll, please…..
Upgrading and Updating Our Brain’s Predictions:
Our brains are prediction machines, not reaction makers. Yet another thing that we got wrong, especially about emotions but also about how we engage with our experiences. Scientists have long believed that brain neurons were dormant until stimulated by something from our outside world. But thanks to major breakthroughs in neuroscience, we now know that this is not the case.
The neurons in our brains are firing constantly, stimulating one another as well as different regions in our complex brain systems. It is this very brain activity that represents the millions of predictions that our brains will make about what we will encounter next — all based on our lifetime of past experience.
This all happens so fast and so automatically that we usually aren’t even aware of it. We might even refer to it as our “unconscious”. The irony is that we can be very conscious of our past experiences –especially when we get emotionally triggered.
Anyone who has ever attempted to free themselves from an old emotional trigger or an overreactive behavioral pattern knows firsthand that it feels like a labyrinth. We even use metaphors in the self help space to talk about how hard this process can be: it’s a journey searching for clues on a jagged, rocky path through the thick entangled forest of our past. The definition of a labyrinth is a complicated, irregular network of passages or paths in which it is difficult to find one’s way. Sounds exactly how we describe self-discovery and behavioral pattern change.
Again, we have made this work so much harder than it has to be – because we misunderstood how our prediction machines work. If we want to vastly improve our predictions, we have to update and upgrade our internal data base. We do this by loading new content; adding richer, nuanced context; and curating a diversity of new experiences.
When we proactively update our inner database — our brains can make predictions that more closely match what we really want our lives to be and feel like and not reruns of unhelpful, old experiences. If we are trapped in the past with old emotional triggers and dizzying rumination loops, it is our brain retrieving old files to make predictions.
Your brain predicts and prepares your actions based on past experiences. Mental distress, anxiety and even old trauma arise from flawed predictions. Of course, these inaccurate predictions don’t feel good or correct in our present moment – they do not accurately fit our current situation. We get caught in a trap of outdated information that produces outdated, ill-fitting, unchecked reactions.
Think about all the ways that we have rather seamlessly updated how we do daily life. We are no longer tethered to land line phones or hanging laundry outdoors on a rope to dry. We aren’t using multi-folded, printed paper maps to navigate from one city to the next. We shop, transfer money, take photos and send emails on our phones all while waiting in a check out line.
We’ve got this — We already know how to update and upgrade our lives – and we have done it rather effortlessly — on the outside.
Now we need to do the same — on the inside.
We simply have to get intentional and proactive about upgrading and updating our internal database for much improved predictions. The bonus is that once we begin to integrate newer, more relevant information and experiences into our brain’s predictive database, we set ourselves up for greater success with each and every subsequent experience and interaction we have.
We begin to operate more fluidly and efficiently from a fresh, current database – not a relic from the past.
We know that our limiting beliefs, outgrown behavioral patterns and childhood social conditioning can be fossilized in our internal database. Because we misunderstood how our brains truly function, we just reinforced that old science too. We simply reinforced the old science by repeating our personal history – over and over again.
We are learning that neurons that fire together, wire together. By getting stuck in the past, we literally were dropping our needle on the same spot and creating a well worn groove for repetitive, familiar predictions. This is what we did with our old vinyl music records back in the day. No wonder those records would skip, slide past the next song or get stuck.
Now we have this groundbreaking neuroscience about how our complex brain circuitry really works. We now know that our brains are prediction machines not reactivity makers – and we are beginning to understand how neuroplasticity helps us to rewire our brains in healthy, optimal new ways. We can actually build new neural networks that operate more seamlessly like streaming music.
Here is an easy example to help us grasp the concept of neuroplasticity — of neurons that fire together wiring together. If we want to break an old habit, we are given all kinds of tips that actually disrupt the related neural pattern: don’t buy the potato chips, take a walk when you get a craving, replace the potato chips with almonds, etc. This is the equivalent of pulling that needle up and off the old groove; that habitual pattern of reaching for the bag of salty chips without much thought. Each time we disrupt the pattern, we tap into our brain’s neuroplasticity and create a fresh, new neural network. As it becomes easier to resist the chips, it is a clear indicator that different neurons are firing and wiring together – making us much more successful at resisting the urge to binge on chips.
For the record, it doesn’t mean that we won’t ever binge on chips in the future. But we will have greater awareness because of the new neural pathway and we might catch ourselves before we consume a whole bag. If we do fall off the wagon and succumb to the whole bag, when we renew our pledge to do better tomorrow, we are starting from a much improved baseline and not square one.
See the difference?
This is precisely what we also want to begin doing with our emotions and experiences. Disrupt the old outdated brain prediction that makes us feel reactive and out of control. Replace it with an emotion and response that feels better and more in line with how we want to show up in life. Create new and improved neural networks that strengthen over time. Toss out the rusty, dusty old files in our internal experience and emotion database – and update them with something fresh, that more closely matches how we want to feel and act, and is much more beneficial for our present moments.
There are two key ways that we can deliberately become proactive in housecleaning and updating our internal database: reframing and adding new concepts.
Reframing is simply getting a fresh perspective on an old familiar situation. Cognitive reframing is a major tool used in psychology for identifying and shifting how events, emotions, beliefs and old narratives are viewed. Reframing also serves to disrupt those well-grooved old stories and ruminative patterns.
When we reframe a situation, we not only get a fresh perspective, we are reorganizing our internal database. Reorganizing an old story or limiting belief, helps our predictive brain to use valuable take-aways from our experiences in more productive ways. This is how we can extract important lessons from our life experiences and learn from them rather than having the same lesson get repeated over and over without any real progress.
The second way to dramatically improve our predictions is by keeping our brains well stocked with new experiences, new concepts, new words and definitions. It turns out that being open-minded, curious and engaged in learning, is the portal for updating our prediction database.
See how we were making our lives, experiences and relationships so much harder than they have to be?
There are very simple things we can be doing on a daily basis to keep our prediction database fresh, updated, repurposed and creative:
Read – read a real book; reading from left to right stimulates the brain, engages learning and builds empathy. Read fiction and try a variety of authors and genres. Read non-fiction to engage learning something new and challenging.
Learn new words – words seed your concepts, concepts drive your predictions, predictions regulate your body budget and your body budget determines how you feel. The more finely-grained your vocabulary, the more precisely your brain calibrates your body budget (excerpted from How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett).
Watch movies or listen to thought-provoking audio content — this will broaden your perspectives and shake you free from old social conditioning. This is a great way to break out of echo chambers where we simple engrain over and over what we once believed or were taught. Often, we are unaware that we unconsciously do this — stay in our comfort zones and look for confirmation for our opinions and beliefs. Think of this like pouring a little water on a very dry sponge….you are just creating softness and the ability to absorb some new, possibly contradictory, concepts.
Be open to paradox — two opposing things can be true at the same time. Begin to notice how paradox shows up in nature, in our families and friendships. What one person finds thrilling, another finds scary (amusement park rides, movies and crazy drivers). Building a repertoire of paradoxical examples, stimulates our brain’s ability to be more creative, relaxed and receptive to contrasts.
If you can reach back and change how you feel about your past, your brain would predict differently – and you might act differently, and experience the world differently, as a result. Your actions today become your brain’s predictions for tomorrow. and those predictions automatically drive your future actions. (excerpted from 7-1/2 Lessons About the Brain by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett)
The Wrap Up:
I hope you are amazed by the new path forward for our emotional intelligence and emotional health. No wonder we have struggled in every sense of the word to live more authentically. We’ve been working so hard to grow, to heal, to understand ourselves and each other – and we’ve been doing it with stale, constrictive, outdated information all while we were attempting to blaze more spacious and engaging new trails.
The springboard for building the life we want and living it with greater fulfillment, is taking care of our brain and body. This is the missing puzzle piece that we have been searching for. Go have some fun implementing these new tools and concepts. Discover the difference it makes today — and how it better prepares you to be flexible, resilient and creative tomorrow.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:
Check out this resource to get some impactful highlights about your brain’s predictions – and dive into some of the resources suggested to learn more: Predicting Better. org https://predictingbetter.org
Can you feel that little updraft in inner drive and determination that comes from a brand new year? There’s nothing like a brand new calendar, clean and pristine, to let our imaginations run wild with big dreams of how well organized and productive we will be. This psychological phenomenon is called the “fresh start effect”. It marks a clear delineation for our “out the old and in with the new” mindset. A brand new year is when we get to double dip in this fresh start effect — it’s not just a new month – it is a brand new year.
I confess that I love a Happy New Year fresh start and I prepare for it as eagerly as I do for Christmas. My desk has stacks of colorful, inspiring blank journals and brand new chunky, spiral-bound idea notebooks; along with an assortment of gel pens and varied sizes of neon post-it notes. And the real gem is that pristine 2024 planner. Thanks to my grandkids who gave me a generous gift card to Quail Ridge, I also have an inviting stack of new books I cannot wait to read. There is a rush of pure joy and an eager excitement every time I look at the endless possibilities that will manifest when I actually use all these tools.
It was in that moment, that it dawned on me that this was the direction I wanted to take my blog in 2024. This year, my blog posts and Daily Gummies of Wisdom, are going to become more relatable and digestible. This is the year where the “rubber hits the road”. I want to share more real life stories, examples and experiences that reveal how beneficial it is to be using better tools and becoming more skillful with them.
This is the year that I want my blog to help others stock their desks, toolboxes and backpacks with diversified resources for building the life they want and showing up more often as their best selves. It is an exciting time to be alive because thanks to science, we have taken a lot of the mystery out of old paradigms about emotional and mental health, parenting and relationships – and yes, even personal growth.
I love diving into groundbreaking and ever-evolving data. I also love distilling it in a way that is easy to understand and implement in real time. I’ve become a bit of a “reverse engineer” with 7 decades of life experiences to draw on. By sharing familiar and relatable real life stories, I can teach and role model how and why these much-improved relationship and life tools are meaningful game-changers.
There is another confession that I have to make: I am over the moon thrilled that it no longer feels necessary to keep self discovery and personal growth under wraps. The proof of this is in our current overuse of the word “normalize”. We toss that word out like a disclaimer reminding us that no one is immune to “feeling” their way through life.
No more cloak of secrecy when it comes to mental and emotional health — it is now fully mainstreamed! And, it is not only mainstreamed, we are making genuine progress in connecting the dots between our physical health and our emotional health. Our eyes are being opened to the many no-cost and low-cost steps we can take to proactively improve both.
The pivot I will be making with my ever-evolving blog will mirror the pivot that is being made in modern medicine, psychology and neuroscience. There is a shift from problem solving to prevention. Many fields, modalities and people are taking proactive steps to improve their physical, mental and emotional health to safeguard against future health and relationship issues. An ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure.
Food for Thought: This is a new element that I will be adding to my blog posts this year. I will wrap each one up with a little food for thought, something to reflect on and then consider putting into practice. The “food for thought” I offer today is to take time to look through – and reflect on – your planners and journals, camera rolls and playlists, on the biggest challenges and fondest memories of 2023. Before you toss them in the trash, or pack them in a box with birthday cards, archived bills and tax receipts — spend some time distilling what mattered most to you in 2023. Use that as a map for where you are headed in 2024.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:
Arthur C. Brooks is a well known happiness expert. His last book was entitled “From Strength to Strength” and it had a big impact on me. That book was really meant for those of us who are transitioning from one stage of life to another. It was such a helpful guide for reflecting on past experiences and using it as a solid foundation for reinventing ourselves for the next chapter.
In this powerful new book, Arthur works his magic once again — and makes it easy to understand the latest breakthroughs in science and how to take that knowledge and weave it into your daily life. One message comes through loud and clear as you read this book – we need to put in the reps – we need daily practice with all kinds of situations and people for these new tools to stick.
THE RICH ROLL PODCAST: Treat yourself to a new podcast in 2024 – and check out the diversity and dynamics of Rich Roll and his inspiring guests.
There is a vast ocean of podcasts these days. It can be both time-consuming and overwhelming to sort through the catalog and find the ones that call to you.
There are times in our lives when we need a little extra knowledge about core physical health tools like quality sleep, nutrition and exercise. Other times, we need some encouragement to get through tough times. We also need to be inspired through other’s stories of how they used all these new tools we are learning about; stories from others help us digest and metabolize new information.
My recommendation is to listen to Rich Roll’s podcasts in chunks. Few of us really have the time to sit and listen (let alone pay full attention) to a lengthy podcast. But if we listen for 15 – 30 minutes at a time on our drive to work or while running errands, we can gain a lot. Instead of scrolling on your phone when you need a break, listen for 10-15 minutes to part of the podcast. This is how we put some really nourishing and healthy content into our brains.
There are so many subjects, modalities and tools to support our self-discovery and personal growth. What captures your attention? What do you want to learn more about? Rich Roll offered two podcast episodes at the end of 2023 that offer a diverse menu of choices. I am sharing the links for these two episodes, rich with guests that we all know and love – and full of inspiration to get you super-charged for the new year.
I’ve been blogging about my own personal growth and self-discovery journey for almost 8 years. Like most people, I probably believed in the early stages of this process, I would be able to identify the habits I needed to change and the skills I needed to acquire in order to check the self help box. Then I could move on into the next chapter of my life – happily ever after.
What I have come to more fully understand and appreciate is that personal growth, self-discovery and human evolution are in a constant state of change. As a direct result, we have to change our mindset about personal growth and self discovery.
The answers to our lifelong, puzzling questions about who we are and why we behave as we do are not to be found in a single book, podcast or workshop. We can’t earn a certification, degree or even a merit badge — and then move on as if our work is forever done.
Personal growth, self discovery, emotional health, relationship skills and mindful self-awareness are our life’s work. It is dynamic, integrated and evolving – because we are.
I’d understand if you were less excited, and more intimidated by this revelation, but take heart – it turns out that this work doesn’t have to be as hard and painful as we once made it. Thanks to neuroscience and the social sciences, we now possess evidence-based knowledge of how our brains work. The incredible discoveries that have been made in very recent years are helping us understand why all the old ways of addressing our behavioral, mental and emotional health were not working very well.
As we gain a greater understanding of how our brains actually work — and how our lifetime of emotions and experiences get created, stored and pulled out for reference — we can begin to see the evolving benefits of incorporating consistent emotional practices into our daily lives.
We don’t workout til we get the strength and flexibility we desire – and then stop. We maintain our physical health with daily commitments and practices. And now, we are learning that we must do the same with our emotional health.
Take a moment to think about the last time you lost your patience or your cool; or when you hit a trip wire and became so emotionally triggered by something pretty insignificant in hindsight. How might it feel to have greater muscle memory when it comes to emotional self control?
It’s the time of year when holidays are really amplifying the hard truth that we get tripped up a lot by unprocessed emotions and old family dynamics. Rather than cringing about having to deal with all this messy stuff, we can use it as an opportunity to become an emotions scientist – and to make some discoveries about how better emotional regulation would dramatically improve our quality of life and our relationships.
Let’s take a closer look at an emotion with which we are all familiar — good old fashioned envy. There’s no doubt that the holidays present us with more than our fair share of opportunities to compare ourselves to others in a whole host of ways. It’s human nature to find ourselves envious of others when we look around at the office party or family gathering, or scroll through the festive photos our friends post on social media.
We may feel that tinge of envy in our bodies as we compare and contemplate what others have that we don’t, or if we let FOMO (the fear of missing out) or FOPO (fear of other people’s opinions) take hold in our minds.
A few years ago, Brené Brown shared that comparison is the thief of joy. She was addressing how this exhausting hustle to keep up the with Joneses can lead us to a dead end (and quite often deep in debt – physically, emotionally and financially). In his latest book Hidden Potential, organizational psychologist, Adam Grant, digs a little deeper. He professes that comparison is not the thief of joy – envy is: “Resenting others’ success breeds misery and rivalry. Admiring their success brings motivation and learning. We all compare ourselves to others. A key to growth and happiness is focusing our comparisons on people who inspire us.”
Envy is an emotion; we feel envy. Comparison is a noun and it is simply a consideration or estimate.
It’s not the comparing that gets us in trouble; it’s the unchecked, disregulated emotion of envy. When our emotions are super-charging us, we tend to lose our perspective and our quite often our self control. Whether it becomes a cycle of rumination or an emotional outburst, we get derailed from our own present moment and we rob ourselves of joy. Sometimes our behavioral actions even rob others of their joy. It’s the collateral damage of us getting caught up in emotions we would rather not be feeling.
Until very recently, we did not fully understand that we actually are capable of much more emotional intelligence and self regulation than we realize. For far too long, we believed that the only way to tame emotions was to use sheer will power or “fake it til you make it.” These old strategies did not pan out so well.
Have you ever witnessed your young child having an absolute meltdown about a toy or a treat that their sibling has — knowing full well that your wailing child doesn’t even like that toy or treat? That is a classic example of unregulated, impassioned envy. A young child’s developing brain does not have the capacity yet….. to engage differently with their big emotions. As adults, we do have this capacity, but many just don’t know it.
As Adam Grant makes so obvious, it’s human nature to compare ourselves to others. The act of comparison is not likely to go away no matter how much we humans evolve. It’s when that comparison stirs up our envy that things actually do come apart at the seams. Now we “devolve” into the little kid who is melting down over something we may not even really want. We may have about as much success controlling our envy as a parent trying to reason with the toddler if we rely solely on sheer will power. We can’t arm wrestle our way out of big emotions any more than a child can.
What’s in that envy cocktail that we shake or stir? Resentment, disappointment, frustration, sadness, insecurity, anxiety – just to name a few.
Have you ever felt envious about a friend or family member but in reality you wouldn’t want to trade places with them in a heartbeat? We cannot make this distinction in the moment that envy has taken over – our brain’s negativity bias and the strong unchecked emotions make it nearly impossible.
If we stay stuck in envy, we become resentful, miserable, and angry; we may fall prey to bouts of superiority just to make ourselves feel better. We run the risk of projecting all we are feeling out onto others. This is the adult version of the toddler temper tantrum.
Adam Grant offers a tool to avoid envy robbing us of our joy: “A key to growth and happiness is focusing our comparisons on people who inspire us.” In other words, he is guiding us to become “discerning” about our comparisons. This makes so much sense because it keeps us grounded and helps us maintain perspective. Think of your inner GPS being your “inner adult”; the voice of reason.
Becoming “discerning” about who and what we are comparing ourselves to is similar to an effective distraction technique often used with young children to help them get out of an emotional spiral. We disrupt the brain’s runaway emotional train with a pause between stimulus and response, and then we use discernment to switch tracks. Simply put, we refocus where our attention is going.
There is another tool we can implement to super-charge self-regulation skills. We can “substitute” a better emotion, on purpose, and in real time.
In his latest book, Build the Life You Want, happiness expert, Arthur Brooks, introduces this dynamic new emotional practice with a very relatable metaphor:
“Most people use caffeine because they aren’t content with the way they feel naturally, and want better outcomes in mood and work. It does so through substitution of one molecule for another. Caffeine is a good metaphor for this principle of emotional self management: You don’t have to accept the emotion you feel first. Rather, you can substitute a better one that you want. ” — excerpted from Chapter 3, Build the Life You Want.
Think about what we are trying to accomplish as parents when our child is over-reacting. We want them to “substitute” a different emotion for the one they are currently feeling. In fact, we mindlessly offer this common refrain to our distressed child: “Oh honey, don’t feel that way” and then we offer them other choices. These choices are often rooted in gratitude — all the things they already have.
Are you surprised that you already possess this skill of “substituting” a different emotion — helping others to see that they can choose an emotion that is more constructive to “act” on? It’s so easy to employ this tactic with our child or friend — and one of the most challenging to rely on for ourselves.
Our Own Social Science Experiment:
Our labs will be well stocked with opportunities for us to practice the pause, discernment and substitution over the holidays. Our labs are our ourselves, our families and our interactions with others as we make celebratory preparations.
What might your hypothesis be about the tiny Petri dish that has no emotional regulation — yet.
What are your predictions about the middle sized Petri dish that ignites quickly and has only sheer will power to overcome the emotional wildfire?
What outcome might be revealed when the larger, more advanced Petri dish, uses a pause between stimulus and response, discernment to shift focus and attention, and emotional substitution — choosing the emotion they wish to act from rather than the emotion they initially feel.
Why Daily Emotional Skills Practices are Needed:
Emotional intelligence and skillful emotional regulation are the natural next steps in our human evolution. Neuroscience and social sciences are giving us the proof positive that our brains have the capacity and neuroplasticy to create new, healthier neural networks, especially when it comes to the complexity of our emotions. With the advent of all these new discoveries, better skills and practices are replacing old paradigms for mental health, parenting, education, modern medicine and psychology.
An Emotional Skills Workshop may provide us with a diverse array of emotional tools like being mindful about where we place our attention and substituting a better emotion — but without consistent, regular practice, we will either forget about them or atrophy our ability to use them skillfully.
As Arthur Brooks underscores: “emotional substitution is a skill that takes practice, not just an insight. With practice and dedication, it can become quite automatic, and you will love the results.”
What really resonates with me about Arthur Brook’s wisdom, is that we are trying so hard to parent our kids to be in control of their emotions but for generations we have gone about it all wrong. Intuitively we sort of know what to do when we are trying to help them, but we were never taught how our brains and bodies work, the mechanics of emotional intelligence and regulation. It’s hard for us to teach what we ourselves don’t fully understand; what we ourselves are not consistently role modeling because we are not yet skillfully practiced.
That old adage “practice what you preach” is more relevant today than ever.
Modern day parents have so many ways to protect their children than we older generations had. Baby monitors, car seats, safety gear for sports, sunscreen, well baby checkups and preventative dental care are some powerful examples. Now they have at their fingertips, scientific breakthroughs about happiness and fulfillment — it is emotional integration.
We can install emotional integration in our young children and we can teach them how to use their innate emotional intelligence in ways that actually support and protect them. We are entering the age of “meta cognition” and it is a game-changer.
Food for Thought:
The reason that a single workshop will never be the answer for personal growth and self discovery is that we are literally changing every single day. Emotional intelligence and skillful emotional regulation is not a quick fix or a workshop — it is a life practice.
Emotions are here to stay – and for good reason. They are the guard rails, channel buoys and lighthouses for our quality of life and meaningful connections with others.
We take our emotional past into our present and we build our futures with our emotional responses in the present moment. We bump into each other every single day, with our emotions, ideas, perspectives and experiences. When we change, others change. We need better life navigational tools and skills to do this in a way that matters most to those we love.
If you don’t want to dive into this big read just yet, listen to Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett discuss emotions in the Huberman Lab podcast shown here. You will discover how integral emotional intelligence is for our children especially.
This is the third part of my latest series of blog posts focused on all that we are learning about the integral importance of our emotional health — and how to proactively engage in a healthy emotional lifestyle.
The first two parts of this series focused on the breakthroughs in psychology, neuroscience and psychiatry that have created better parenting models, vastly improved therapy protocols and perhaps most importantly – destigmatized a lot of what we believed about “mental health.”
If you’ve followed along in this series, you’ll recognize the overarching theme of “mapping how we got where we are, and how we can better prepare for our future journeys through life with the firsthand knowledge we’ve gained from our past experiences, and the newer advancements and tools available to us now pertaining to emotional health.
In each of these posts, I am highlighting two influential change-makers who are instrumental in helping us navigate emotions more skillfully, both individually and within our relationships. You may already be familiar with the change-makers I share today — they are becoming household names- and for good reason. Both Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Paul Conti are having meaningful impacts in our knowledge about preventative mental health care.
“Compassion, community and humanity are intertwined in that they exemplify the full expression of who we are as humans. Compassion enables us to care about other people, to relate to them with kindness, and to consider the world from their perspective. Community is the embodied acknowledgement of our interdependence with other people — our behaviors affect one another.” – Dr. Paul Conti.
Back in 2010, Dr. Bruce Perry sounded the alarm on our escalating empathy poverty in his book Born for Love. It was almost as though he had a crystal ball and could see what our future would hold if we continued to operate without empathy for each other and especially for our most vulnerable – our children. He educated us about the need for relational webbing especially for children since their complex brains develop more slowly than any other species on the planet. He was dipping our toes in the realization that emotional integration was the missing piece in our internal GPS; and that we need to provide scaffolding for each other, especially during emotional duress. Empathy helps others feel seen, heard and believed. It can change lives; even save lives. Empathy is integral for healthy brains, to process and heal emotional trauma, and to be in stable relationships with others.
You’ll recall from my last blog post that this is exactly what Uncle Marvin did for Dr. Marc Brackett when he was just a young adolescent. Uncle Marvin listened to Marc’s stories with empathy and gave him “permission to feel.” It was the empathic support that Marc so desperately needed and it changed his life; it fuels his passion to teach us to become emotion scientists and to help children do the same.
It’s becoming more clear every day that when we know our own inner emotional landscape with greater clarity and understanding, we become more attuned to others’ emotions. We are less judgmental and more curious. Their stories matter to us because they give us valuable information to best support them. Simply put, we become more empathetic and compassionate with others. It has taken a very long time for us to heed Dr. Bruce Perry’s warning about empathy, but at long last we are now paying attention.
Empathy is becoming such a guiding principle that now it is even embedded in Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linked In and Inflection AI, has been instrumental in launching a pilot version of generative AI that is powered by a neural network model built on extensive data about human emotions and interactions. This new AI is Pi, the personal intelligence chat bot designed to respond to your inquiries in an emotionally intelligent manner. Imagine that, even artificial intelligence is being trained to be friendly, compassionate and empathetic.
We have the rare dynamic opportunity to show up more compassionately and empathetically in our personal relationships — and to be positive contributors to the growing data base for artificial intelligence that is also emotionally intelligent. That’s right, we can be part of the change we would like to see in the world — especially for our children — and believe me, our children will be using AI. Just check out Pi for yourself and you will see how young people are actively engaging with it right now — and how thoughtful and emotionally skillful the responses can be.
Today I’ll introduce you to two of my long time favorite change makers. They feel like friends to me because I soak up all that they teach through podcasts, books and interviews. They both have learned so much from each other’s fields of research, and they have supported each other through life’s challenges and healing personal growth work in large part due to their deep, connected friendship. It is not at all surprising that they recently teamed up to present a 4-part podcast series on “understanding and assessing our mental health”.
Dr. Andrew Huberman, Huberman Lab:
Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist and the host of the #1 Health and Fitness Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. He is an associate professor of neurobiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Huberman launched his highly popular podcast, Huberman Lab, in the midst of the pandemic because he wanted all of us to have access to the information we needed to take care of our health in a proactive way. Compelled by a strong desire to make a difference in a time of major crisis, he educated us about how our brains and bodies operate and how to optimally care for them especially during long periods of uncertainty and anxiety. Very few of us really knew just how important quality, consistent sleep is for our brains, bodies and immune systems – but over 4.2 million people do now thanks to the Huberman Lab podcast.
Andrew Huberman heeded his intuition’s call to action to help us learn more about our brains, the breakthroughs in neuroscience and how we can proactively improve our mental and physical health. His podcasts make this learning so accessible to all of us.
In the spring of 2023, Dr. Huberman invited Peter Attia onto his podcast to discuss his book Outlive. Dr. Attia, a Stanford/JohnHopkins/NIH trained physician, has devoted his medical career to enhancing our longevity; most notably our ability to live longer, with a vastly longer health span and much shorter disease span. It was during this podcast discussion that Dr. Peter Attia shared that our emotional health is the most integral part of longevity, health span, and a deeply satisfying life.
Dr. Peter Attia also shared personal stories about his own emotional health and his road to healing with the help of Dr. Paul Conti, Terry Real and Esther Perel. In my first blog post of this series, I highlighted Terry Real, founder of Relational Life Therapy and his ability to help his clients understand how the impacts of their childhood are causing great difficulties in their current lives.
Dr. Peter Attia knew this firsthand – because in spite of building the life he wanted that included a successful career, marriage and children – it was his unchecked emotions that put all of that in jeopardy. He opens up about these painful truths in his book – and he did the same in his podcast conversation with Andrew Huberman.
It is these honest stories about the struggles we all are quite familiar with, that open up the much needed conversations about how we address mental and emotional health, both individually and collectively. Once Dr. Attia shared his emotional outbursts and the collateral damage they were causing to his family and relationships, it made it easier for others to do the same. This is the power of empathy.
Dr. Peter Attia subsequently invited Andrew Huberman to be his guest on his own podcast, The Drive; and it was during that conversation that Andrew opened up about his own struggles in childhood due to family dysfunction and all the trouble he got into as a result of either running from or numbing to the situation. Another relatable story that mirrors so much of what Dr. Marc Brackett experienced in his youth. In Andrew Huberman’s case, it was Tony Hawk’s parents that gave him some much needed relationship scaffolding. They made a lasting impression on a young Andrew stranded in Northern California when they took him in for the night after a skateboarding competition, taking him out to dinner, being empathic and non-judgmental and providing empathy when it was needed most. They were the mentors and role models that Dr. Marc Brackett encourages us all to be.
Can you begin to see how empathy opens us up by reflecting on our own life stories and offering to others what we ourselves also need. We need to be the Uncle Marvin’s who listen to learn what is really going on and to give others permission to truly feel all their emotions.
As Dr. Bruce Perry wrote in his most recent book about empathy, aptly entitled What Happened to You, we need to understand how our childhood shaped us and our emotional mapping. When we hear these vulnerable childhood stories of struggle and disconnection, we see our own more clearly. In turn, we become more aware that everyone has stories about feeling like they didn’t belong, about trauma or abuse of some kind, bullying, body image issues, feelings of unworthiness or not being smart enough, of being too needy or too distant.
Dr. Andrew Huberman launched his podcast in the midst of a pandemic to provide a public service. He believed that if we only knew the simple, no-cost steps we could be doing to help our physical and mental health, we could build stronger immune systems and each be a part of the solution. Using his highly successful podcast platform, he is now turning our attention to emotional and mental health – for this very same reason.
The proof was in the pudding – three friends, former colleagues, all had adverse childhood experiences that lingered long into their adult lives. Andrew Huberman, Peter Attia and Paul Conti all entered the health field but pursued very diverse branches of expertise. Yet now, their fields are converging and they all point to our emotional and mental health. Both Andrew and Peter turned to Paul Conti, a psychiatrist, to help them with counseling and therapy. In the process, they learned his own story, deepened their friendship and began to see how their respective fields fit together to solve another big human problem.
If you look at the trajectory of their work and their platforms, you can plot very clearly that the pandemic was a pivot point for this deeper dive into the prevention and proactivity approach to our emotional and mental health. The proverbial silver lining in that dark cloud.
In recent months, Andrew Huberman has had a number of noteworthy guests on his podcast to discuss how emotions and social factors impact children’s learning; how to foster growth mindsets in ourselves and our children; how to work on behavioral changes; the impacts of social isolation; and how risk taking, innovation and artificial intelligence transform the human experience.
Just a few weeks ago, his guest was the surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, about the challenges we face with public health. Included in this extensive conversation were the impacts of social media and the growing epidemic of loneliness and isolation (especially in teens and seniors).
Dr. Andrew Huberman is most definitely a change-maker — and he has fast become a household name. He has successfully created a huge interest in learning about how our brains work. It is unlikely that any of us would sign up for an adult neuroscience class at the local college, and yet there are millions popping those earbuds in and tuning in to listen to Andrew and his guests teach us what we need to know about our personal data processor.
The best part is that his followers are implementing best practices to improve their mental, emotional and physical health. More sleep, less alcohol, more exercise, less doom scrolling, more empathy, less isolation.
Dr. Paul Conti, Psychiatrist, Consultant, Author:
Dr. Paul Conti’s bio will tell you that he is adept at helping people untangle complex problems. He takes a holistic view of each client, to help them recognize the interconnedness of our past to our present, as well as our work lives and personal lives, of our individuality and our relationships. There is a very complex, integrated, inter-connected system at play in all of us. (Just as Dr. Richard Schwartz espouses with internal family systems and his book, No Bad Parts.)
In 2021, Dr. Conti published his revelational book, Trauma, the Invisible Epidemic. How remarkable that the COVID-19 pandemic would present an analogy that we could all viscerally wrap our heads around:
“A wise response to a viral pandemic is to become more closed until a vaccine becomes widely available. A wise response to a trauma pandemic is to become more open so that we ourselves become the vaccine.” — Dr. Paul Conti
Dr. Paul Conti was a recent guest on the Huberman Lab podcast and over a series of four episodes, he and Andrew Huberman provided an extraordinary public service about mental health. While this deep dive may seem unappealing and overwhelming, what you will discover is that Dr. Conti’s soft spoken demeanor, his humility and humanity, and his simple metaphors make a complex subject very accessible.
Here are highlights from each of the four segments. All of this content comes from Dr. Andrew Huberman’s show notes for each episode which aired throughout September, 2023.
Episode 1 – How to Understand and Assess Your Mental Health:
Dr. Conti defines mental health in actionable terms and describes the foundational elements of the self, including the structure and function of the unconscious and conscious mind, which give rise to all our thoughts, behaviors and emotions. He also explains how to explore and address the root causes of anxiety, low confidence, negative internal narratives, over-thinking and how our unconscious defense mechanisms operate. This episode provides a foundational roadmap to assess your sense of self and mental health. It offers tools to reshape negative emotions, thought patterns and behaviors — either through self-exploration or with a licensed professional.
Episode 2 –How to Improve Your Mental Health:
Dr. Conti explains specific tools for how to overcome life’s challenges using a framework of self-inquiry that explores all the key elements of self, including defense mechanisms, behaviors, self-awareness and attention. We also discuss our internal driving forces, how to align them and ultimately, how to cultivate a powerful “generative drive” of positive, aspirational pursuits. Dr. Conti also explains how to adjust your internal narratives, reduce self-limiting concepts, overcome intrusive thoughts, and how certain defense mechanisms, such as “acting out” or narcissism, show up in ourselves and others.
Episode 3 – How to Build and Maintain Healthy Relationships:
Dr. Conti explains how to find, develop and strengthen healthy relationships — including romantic relationships, work and colleague relationships, and friendships. He explains a roadmap of the conscious and unconscious mind that can allow anyone to navigate conflicts better and set healthy boundaries in relationships. We also discuss common features of unhealthy relationships and clinically supported tools for dealing with relationship insecurity, excessive anxiety, past traumas, manipulation and abuse. Dr. Conti explains how, in healthy relationships, there emerges a dynamic of the mutually generative “us” and how to continually improve that dynamic.
Episode 4 – Tools and Protocols for Mental Health:
Dr. Conti explains what true self-care is and how our mental health benefits from specific self-care and introspection practices — much in the same way that our physical health benefits from certain exercise and nutrition habits. He describes how the foundation of mental health is an understanding of one’s own mind and the specific questions to ask in order to explore the conscious and unconscious parts of ourselves. He describes how this process can be done either on our own, through journaling, meditation and structured thought, or in therapy with the help of a licensed professional. He also explains how unprocessed trauma can short-circuit the process and how to prevent that, and the role of friendships and other relational support systems in the journey of self-exploration for mental health. People of all ages and those with and without self-introspection and therapy experience ought to benefit from the information in this episode.
It is not necessary to listen to all four podcasts in the order in which they were presented to glean valuable insights that we can put into practice right away. However, each one does build on the foundational metaphor of an iceberg — our consciousness being the tip that juts out above the water; and the much larger unconscious part of us that drifts and drags underneath the surface. It is the unconsciousness that gets us into turbulent emotional waters. We’ve all heard this iceberg metaphor used often in personal growth and mindfulness arenas — but Dr. Conti’s explanation will crystalize what once seemed pretty murky.
Throughout the four part series, Dr. Conti anchors us to this important mental health work with two verbs — Agency and Gratitude. Again, we have often heard these two words bantered about a lot as though they are the fast track to personal growth and mindfulness. But they are not adjectives and they are not static.
In his book, No Bad Parts, Dr. Richard Schwartz describes “agency” as being “self-led”. We are adults now who have worked very hard to build the life we want. We are investing time and energy in our careers, we have chosen spouses and are raising our precious children. The catch is that we often self-sabotage our best intentions and hard work because it is the unconscious part of our iceberg that pulls us out of our agency and back into old habits and patterns. As Dr. Conti unpacks this for us, we come to have a greater appreciation for the value of pausing long enough when big emotions are hitting us to course correct. We can make conscious choices to respond more appropriately – and to be consistent with our emotional regulation in order to be good role models for our children; and to be better partners in our relationships.
As for gratitude, Dr. Conti reminds us that it is not just making a list at the end of each day. He stresses the importance of focusing on gratitude as a verb. Showing up in life with gratitude – for what we are able to do, for our diverse resources and tools, and for the people who support us.
We can be enthusiastically grateful for the breakthroughs in neuroscience and psychology that help us actively participate in shifting from old faulty models of parenting and relationships into healthier, integrated ones that break generational cycles.
Dr. Conti invites us to take a serious inventory of the places and times that our life gets out of balance. Are we able to stay more emotionally regulated at work or in public than we are at home and in our closest relationships? Do certain people trigger us and amplify strong emotions, while others seem to have a calming and uplifting influence on us?
Dr. Conti uses a cupboard metaphor as a compelling visual for this inventory. Take a peek inside your various cupboards and discover the different coping skills and self-regulation that you use ion different roles in your life. Investigate how you handle things when you are sleep-deprived, on overload, or feel resentful. What helps you get back to an emotional baseline when you are triggered? Sometimes our cupboards are bare; sometimes they have some expired items that are no longer working.
You will find the PDF’s that Dr. Conti provides in the Huberman podcast series to be very helpful guides for these metaphors and for the proactive, preventative mental health practices he espouses. The 4 part series is a worthwhile investment of your time if you want to gain real insight into a proactive, preventative approach to mental and emotional health.
SUMMARY:
Today, I pulled together a few critical pieces of our collective journey. We now know that Dr. Bruce Perry’s wisdom about our empathy poverty was spot on. Empathy plays a vital role in building the connections we all long for — and that science has proven — supports our most valuable relationships — those with our children and our partners. We live longer and healthier when we are deeply connected with each and supported by each other.
Friendship is often the engine of change and healing. We are not meant to do our inner work and emotional healing alone. It is far better done with others that we trust and who are good role models. We need emotion scientists and emotions mentors. We can become the relational web and scaffolding for our families and friends. It is especially good to have a buddy with whom to do some of this inner investigative work. Why? Because we are not alone — and we do see ourselves in each other’s stories. When we feel heard in a very meaningful way; we feel like we belong.
People who have done their inner work often pursue fields that take what they have learned to a whole new level. All three parts of this current blog post series on proactive and preventative emotional health have showcased such people. What these change-makers need are followers; they need others who take the courses, who soak up the knowledge, who put the practices into action. Then they need us to tell others our experiences with our own changes. When we give each other our personal examples of how this inner work and new tools, have dramatically improved our lives, we offer encouragement for others to try it out as well.
Do you know who the most excited little sponges are? Our children! When we begin to teach our children that they do have permission to feel their emotions and we start having calm, supportive, inquiring conversations about their feelings, we get tangible evidence of the power of empathy.
You can use this link to discover all the episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast. This link will take you to Andrew Huberman’s webpage: https://www.hubermanlab.com/all-episodes
Use this link to go to Dr Paul Cont’s webpage to learn more about him and his book, Trauma, The Invisible Epidemic. Read endorsements from the Greater Good Science Center, Lady Gaga and more. https://drpaulconti.com
My last blog post was all about the importance of unpacking our family and emotional baggage — and the remarkable opportunity we have to involve four living generations in doing just that. This post is going to start by unpacking how we got here.
It is all about this moment in time where there is a growing, diverse community of people who are committed to personal growth and emotional health. Some are far along on their journey, others are just beginning and there are many smack dab in the middle. No matter where we are in our journey, we are all reaching both forward and backward – asking for more help and guidance AND offering encouragement and resources.
We did not get here by accident or all at once. We got here because of collective yearning and learning.
Over the past two decades social sciences handed off the baton to neuroscience to help us better understand what was really happening in our brains, in our nervous systems and neurobiology, and through epigenetics. Incredible discoveries were made that brought us tremendous breakthroughs in our understanding and treatment of trauma, cognitive and mental health disorders, the connection between stress and physical health and so much more. So many fields merged together to reverse engineer what we got wrong.
Ironically it was about this same time that Brene Brown started her deep diving research into shame and vulnerability. Imagine how serendipitous this was?
Of course, no one wanted to talk about shame and vulnerability – those subjects were taboo and cloaked in secrecy. That should have been our first clue she was really on to something. Brene told a hilarious story of how she could shut down a conversation with a seat mate on a plane in under 30 seconds by revealing she was a researcher – of shame and vulnerability.
Flash forward to today and those very topics open up a two hour stimulating conversation between three strangers on a plane, who share vulnerabilities as readily as Biscoff cookies, and become fast friends by the end of the flight, swapping contact information and favorite personal growth resources. (Read my recent blog post Leapfrog for that story)
That is just one shining example of how far we’ve come….and how long it has actually taken. Two decades, multidisciplines and a growing longing we were all feeling but couldn’t quite put our finger on.
Brene started her shame and vulnerability research in 2001, right before 9-11. As devastating as that massive tragedy was, there was an also a collective unity that emerged from it, at least for a while.
A decade later, in 2010, Dr. Bruce Perry published his book, Born for Love, where he warned us about our growing empathy poverty. He was shedding a light in the correlation between an infant’s environment in the first year of life and their ability to emotionally regulate in adulthood. He was sounding the alarm for where we were headed if we did not offer safety, comfort and stability for our children. If you were to go back and read that book today, you would be amazed at the amplified realities of his dire predictions for all of us, and especially for our youth. Back in 2010, we had no clue the negative impacts social media and our political polarization would be having on our mental health and empathy poverty.
Also in 2010, Brene Brown’s infamous Ted Talk on vulnerability went viral. It still stands as one of the most viewed Ted Talks in history. It turns out vulnerability wasn’t such a taboo subject after all. It just took Brene’s courage to put it all out there for us. We may not have recognized that this was a massive “me too” movement as well. It was evident that at a very grassroots level, we were longing for answers to questions no one was asking.
In August of 2010, Brene released her book “Gifts of Imperfection” and invited us to join that grassroots “wholehearted” revolution by finding the courage to tell our truth stories. Mostly she was encouraging us to stop saying (and believing) we were OK when in fact, we were not. She grounded her research in the truth that we were born worthy of love, connection and belonging.
The very same message that Dr. Bruce Perry was also telling us.
Over the coming years, Brene would publish more books including Rising Strong, Braving the Wilderness, Dare to Lead, and Atlas of the Heart. Dr. Bruce Perry co-authored What Happened to You? with Oprah Winfrey. Dr. Dan Siegel published Whole Brain Child, No Drama Discipline, Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain and the Power of Showing Up(with Tina Payne Bryson and most recently he released Interconnected. Dr. Mark Brackett published Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our kids, Ourselves and Our Society Thrive.
Rick Rubin, the renowned music producer and author of The Creative Act: A Way of Being, has a compelling way to make us stand up and take notice of what was happening in this grassroots wholehearted revolution. When an idea’s time has come, it will find a way to make itself known.
The seeds of this wholehearted, emotion revolution were scattered far and wide. They began to take hold not only in the research but within us. The self-help section of our favorite bookstores began to swell – from psychology and neuroscience, to the enneagram, to Untamed by Glennon Doyle and Clarity & Connection by yung pueblo (just to name a few).
Brene’s Netflix documentary, Call to Courage was released in April, 2019, where she invited us to choose courage over comfort in a present day culture that had us divided and disconnected. We should have buckled our seatbelts.
Less than a year later, just as Brene launched her two dynamic podcasts, Dare to Lead and Unlocking Us, the global pandemic was unfolding — and isolating us even more. Perhaps we were listening more intentionally to Brene’s guests and the deeper conversations because they were resonating on many levels.
What we had all been feeling individually for decades, was now also being felt collectively. It was becoming crystal clear that we are not only hard-wired for connection, we are inextricably inter-connected through school, the workplace, grocery store, supply chains etc.
Suddenly the topic of our emotional health was popping up everywhere. What once had only been discussed in the self-help and psychological arenas, was being mainstreamed into business podcasts, education, physical and cognitive medical fields. A magnifying glass was handed to us to see the impacts of emotional health on our children and teenagers; on all of us. Brene Brown confided in her sister series of her podcast that the pandemic puts strains on marriages and parenting we’d never experienced before. We were never meant to withstand long stretches of uncertainty without revealing our vulnerability and need for connection.
The wholehearted revolution that was afoot back win 2010, had been growing slowly. All revolutions take time to build momentum. Surely the global pandemic accelerated the swiftness of of this “wholehearted, emotion revolution.”
Dr. Mark Brackett, author of Permission to Feel, was one of Brene’s podcast guests and he shared so honestly what many already knew to be true: “The mental well being of our children and adults is shockingly poor. We have a crisis on our hands and its victims are our children.”
The warnings that Dr. Bruce Perry had offered in his 2010 book, Born for Love, stressed the importance of our community and relational scaffolding for our children. This wisdom could no longer be lost on us.
There has been a giant step forward and a big pivot in the right direction as we step back out into our new normal and begin reinventing ourselves from the inside out. The books and podcasts that are emerging now are speaking directly to the corrective actions we must take.
We must integrate our emotions in our brains and our experiences. We must unpack family and emotional baggage to stop the trauma cycles and give us space for better quality lives and health. We need to scaffold each other, especially our children, and cultivate growth mindsets. We need to shed the armor that we believed protected our vulnerability and discard outgrown behavioral patterns. We can build life skills, resource ourselves better, and rediscover our empathy and common humanity.
Brene Brown published Atlas of the Heart which helps us expand our understanding of 87 emotions and experiences. It is a family reference guide that supports us in helping our children and partners integrate their emotions.
Kristin Neff released Fierce Self Compassion (How Women can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power and Thrive) which encourages us to treat ourselves as kindly and compassionately as we would a dear friend; and to break free from limiting gender stereotypes that has us all suppressing our emotions in harmful ways.
Dr. Gabor Mate published his phenomenal book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture (a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness and a pathway to healing and better emotional health). His insights into how generational trauma get passed down through our family systems point directly to the need for us to unpack family and emotional baggage.
Dr. Peter Attia very recently released his incredible book Outlive, where he drives home the point that our emotional health is the most integral component of our lives. We can be physically health and emotionally unhealthy and we will be miserable. And in turn, we will make our families miserable. He unpacks the reasons why we’ve long heard the phrase “hurting people hurt people.”
Dacher Keltner, a renowned expert in emotional science, just released his book, Awe: the New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. It is the final chapter of his book, aptly entitled Epiphany, that really brings home the lessons that we have been learning over these past two decades. Dacher Keltner reflects on the work of Charles Darwin whose thinking about the evolutionary science of emotion was shaped as he cared for his 10-year old daughter Annie until her death. Dacher offers that we mimic nature as we move through our evolution (and emotional revolution); there is a decaying (shedding the old that no longer serves us), a composting (extracting the lessons and nutrients we need) and then a regrowth (which is where we are now).
We now possess better insights, research, tools and collective commitment than we have ever had before in this emotion revolution. Young people are hungry for mentors and author Arthur Brooks encourages the older generation to rediscover their purpose by stepping into that role. It is an exciting time to be alive — and be an active participant in such a healthy change.
It is truly remarkable how much we can learn about others and ourselves through storytelling. When we share our life stories with each other, we often find unexpected common threads — and we make discoveries that support our own learning and growth.
This is like playing leapfrog — where some part of our story or experience connects with someone else’s and our shared understanding gets ignited and amplified in the most enlightening ways.
We can each unpack the details of our experiences, the lessons learned, resources we found helpful, what our biggest challenges were and how we faced them.
Storytelling can turn strangers into friends in just one conversation or deepen a decades old relationship with revelational new insights. We come to understand that common, similar life events unfold for each of us and yet it is our personal experiences, resources, and interpretations that create the textured, contextualized unique stories of our lives.
The script doesn’t really change that much. What changes are our stories.
I recently sat with two strangers on a flight from Houston to Phoenix; an energetic, engaging young man probably in his late 30’s who is a husband, a father and an entrepreneur; and a soulful, inspiring woman in her 50’s who is an integral part of PacificHelps.org (a non profit organization founded by her husband to provide education and renewable energy to the Pacific Islands) Over the course of that flight, we talked and listened to each other’s stories with a sense of wonder and awe. So many similarities in our stories yet the backdrop, the cast of characters and the obstacles were vividly different. We connected through a working knowledge of the basic life plot — growing up, finding jobs, getting married, having children, marriage difficulties, divorce, remarriage, life threatening illnesses and financial challenges. So much common ground. We laughed, we empathized, we marveled. The human spirit really is undaunting.
The script and the plot doesn’t change much. But each of our stories were uniquely different at the same time. I viewed our stories through the lens of a 71 year old, excited for what the future holds for both of them because of what they have learned from their personal experiences and how they are proactively embracing their continual self discovery and personal growth.
In that young man, I can see my own grown children who are now in the throes of parenthood but so much better prepared and skillful than all the generations before them. At 71, I can look both ways now — I can look back at what we got wrong in old parenting models and I can also look forward to what is possible with vastly improved parenting and emotional skills.
The conversations and insights that the three of us shared about parenting and emotions would have never happened when I was in my late 30’s or early 40’s.
The ease with which we shared things about our own childhoods that shaped us and then later dropped us into our own self-discovery journey was nothing short of incredible. My generation stuffed our skeletons into closets. Today’s younger generation of enlightened parents are doing their personal growth work early to break generational chains of dysfunction and hand-me-down behavioral patterns.
We’ve come a long way since Dr. Spock. These parents are leaning on Brene Brown, neuroscience, whole brain parenting, the enneagram, Drs. Dan Siegel, Andrew Huberman and Peter Attia. Yes, I was in seventh heaven – both my seat mates were quite familiar with the same resources that I have discovered in the last decade. They are proactively putting into practice what they are learning — for themselves and for their children.
Moreover, they are incorporating greater relationship skills into their marriages, parenting and co-parenting. There has been a huge paradigm shift from unhealthy, contentious fallouts from divorce that often caused a lot of trauma for children, to an intentional focus on providing children of divorce the relational scaffolding they need and deserve. Joint custody is being anchored in healthy, respectful, cooperative co-parenting.
A few years ago, I had started to connect the dots about the intersecting of so many of my favorite resources for personal growth and self discovery — I blogged about it. Researchers, authors and podcasters began to reference each other in their books, and invited each other as guests on their podcasts. I noticed that the topics of the human need for connection, emotional regulation, parenting and relationship skills were being discussed even on tech, business and news platforms. I could feel that the very subjects I was passionate about were becoming mainstreamed.
And now, here I was, on a plane with two strangers and we were talking, laughing, sharing about all of it as easily as we once might have discussed the latest movie or hottest trend. It was one of those compelling “aha” moments that Dacher Keltner describes in his newest book, Awe. I got goosebumps – often. There were just so many similarities in parts of vastly different stories.
Do you know how it feels when you have a really great customer service experience? When you feel like someone has paid attention, gone the extra mile, and earnestly appreciated your business? Well that is exactly what this conversation felt like to me — it was a standout. The positive impact that personal growth work has on our ability to make meaningful connections was not lost on me.
I thought a lot about LeapFrog when I got off that plane. That remarkable two hour conversation had made lasting impressions on each of us. We each left with new resources to check out and inspiring stories to reflect on.
What struck me most was how much space we had created to really hear and engage with others by learning from our experiences. We were not so mired in our problems (and phones) that we missed this golden opportunity. Rich conversations like this are some of the best educational experiences we can get. We gain new perspectives and insights, are reinforced and encouraged about the path we are on, and we build good connections on common ground.
I’m guessing that you know exactly how it feels when you’re emotionally triggered by something — it seemingly comes out of nowhere, sparks intense negative feelings and abruptly makes you defensive.
We get flooded with adrenaline and cortisol when we are triggered which only amplifies what we are feeling. The conundrum with emotional triggers is that they pull us back into the past while we are also experiencing the very present moment. It’s no wonder we are completely off-kilter when we are emotionally triggered.
It’s human nature to blame someone else for pulling our emotional trigger but the truth of the matter is that our emotional triggers are internal; they are ours alone. No one else is pulling that trigger. Most of the time, no one else even knows that we have a strong emotional trigger that has just been engaged. What they do imagine is that we are over-reacting, have lost control or lost our minds.
Many of our emotional triggers are rooted in our childhood, when we had very little agency. Unbeknownst to us, those strong negative emotions that we felt as kids (but were not acknowledged by our parents and caregivers) got lodged into our brains and imprinted with readily accessible information. So when we “feel” a similar experience even as an adult, our brain pulls out that file and reminds us we aren’t feeling safe. An emotional trigger is a red alert warning.
Give some thought to experiences that cause you to become emotionally triggered. What are you really feeling when a strong, uncomfortable, emotional reaction grabs you? Are you feeling misunderstood, abandoned, unwanted, unloveable, or treated unfairly?
These are all very common feelings for young children, especially if we were punished or banished for expressing them. Those experiences got bookmarked in our brains and we developed a sensitivity to be on the lookout for repeated events like this in the future. We were our most vulnerable when we imprinted these experiences. So it stands to reason, that we will become emotionally triggered when we are feeling vulnerable, insecure or irrelevant as adults.
An emotional trigger is defined as having a strong, uncomfortable reaction to a stimulus that wouldn’t ordinarily cause that response. With this framework, it is easy to see that when we are feeling emotionally balanced, a snarky comment or a misunderstanding doesn’t cause us a problem. We aren’t triggered because we have our emotional act together; we can remain flexible and resilient.
Now give some thought to past adult experiences where you were emotionally triggered — and see if you can recognize that you were feeling pretty vulnerable in those moments. Were you overly tired, consumed by anxiety or overwhelm; were you feeling invisible, under-appreciated? We are most prone to getting triggered when our emotional reserves are low. It’s really no different than our being more susceptible to catching a cold when we are physically run down.
The best defense is a good offense. This is a very good strategy to employ for both handling and overcoming emotional triggers. In his book, Permission to Feel, Dr. Mark Brackett explains that when it comes to being triggered by our emotions, we have to “take responsibility for our actions rather than shift the blame elsewhere. ”
“It may not feel like a choice, but it surely is — we decide how we will respond to life’s provocations. Don’t want to explode in rage when your child is disrespectful? Come up with a better way to respond. Clearly the old way, matching nastiness for nastiness, doesn’t work.” –Dr. Mark Brackett, author of Permission to Feel
We don’t judge ourselves when we are physically run down and know we might be more likely to catch a cold. We make a mental note to get more sleep, stay hydrated and wash our hands more often. The best defense is a good offense.
We can take this same approach when we are emotionally depleted. We can make a mental note that we will be more susceptible to knee jerk reactions than skillful responses. We might even make an announcement to our family members that we just don’t have the emotional bandwidth to deal with unnecessary drama. Again, the best defense is a good offense.
We should be normalizing the fact that regardless of our age, we are all humans with similar emotional needs and changing emotional capacities. This is really invaluable to be teaching our children. Dr. Brackett shares that when we try to shield our children from this reality, it has an unintended result. Children will have a hard time acknowledging adults’ feelings, let alone respecting them.
Emotional triggers are an integral part of our self discovery process. They help us identify what is most important to us and what our current needs are. Once identified, we can free ourselves from the “strong, uncomfortable emotional reaction” to something that really shouldn’t set us off. Instead, we can be more skillful with our emotional regulation and more clear about our needs.
If we are on overload because we have been caregiving on steroids all day, one unintended disrespectful remark from a friend or family member is likely to cause us a twitching trigger finger. Dr. Brackett reminds us that we can take preventive measures for moments like this.
When we offer ourselves some self-compassion, we are acknowledging that we are on overload and are susceptible to losing our cool. We can remind ourselves that if we weren’t so physically and emotionally drained, we would not overreact to an insensitive comment. If we weren’t so worried out, we might even have the dexterity to banter about it.
Does the comment hurt? Of course it does. Let’s not dismiss that either.
But here’s the pivot. An emotional trigger never really addresses our true needs. It gets in the way of expressing ourselves in a way that can be heard and taken to heart. Others just react to our “overreaction” and our basic need is lost in the smokescreen. It’s hard to hear a whispered “I could use a little help here” when there’s a lot of yelling or threatening going on.
Have you ever noticed that emotional triggers can also set off a chain reaction? It is not unusual to hear phrases like “you never listen” or “you always do this”. A lot of baggage is often attached to our emotional triggers, so it’s easy to tap into all those previous experiences and dredge up old grievances. Whatever small incident has set off the emotional trigger now cascades into something much bigger.
Instead of being able to focus and attend to one small and manageable issue, we are now knee deep in triage for a major emotional pileup. It’s hard to assess which issue was the catalyst and which one requires immediate attention. All too often, the one small incident that set off an emotional trigger gets lost and never addressed. But it does get baked into that old imprint of the childhood emotional trigger; logged as yet another example in the bulging file.
In a recent blog post entitled Learning What We Need to Teach, I shared how important it is for us parents and grandparents to be the emotional “training wheels” for our children. The best preventative measures for our children is to integrate their emotions into their experiences; to help them name and process them as they are unfolding. The more we are able to do this in real time with our children, the less likely it is that they will enter adulthood with a lot of challenging emotional triggers of their own.
By now, you probably don’t really need a bigger impetus to get serious about attending to your own emotional triggers, but there is something important that you should bear in mind. Our children’s developing brains take a long time to fully develop and integrate. We protect those little noggins with helmets, but we often overlook the impact our emotional reactions are having. Dr. Mark Brackett writes extensively about this in his book Permission to Feel. In the chapter entitled “Emotions at Home” he devotes a lot of time to emotional triggers; and especially how parents get triggered by their kids’ reactions and behaviors.
He reminds us that when we get “triggered” by our kids, our compassion switch gets turned off. We’ve all experienced this – and we’ve often quickly regretted how we did not show up so great in those moments. We can take comfort in Dr. Dan Siegel’s teachings that “rupture and repair” is normal in human relationships and can actually strengthen our bonds with our children, as long as we apologize quickly and sincerely; with a promise to do better in the future.
Which is why Dr. Mark Brackett urges us to get serious about attending to our emotional triggers before they become a chronic reality. Extreme emotional reactions, over the course of time, can actually alter the brain structure of our children. The effects of frequent extreme emotional reactions can cause our children to have emotional regulation issues of their own and a lot of complexities in their adult relationships and quality of life.
“A child’s brain is still plastic, meaning that the structure is always changing. The minute parents start regulating their emotions better, their children’s brains will change to reflect that. If parents start regulating their emotions now, and help their children to regulate theirs, then there’s hope.” — Dr. Mark Brackett, Author of Permission to Feel.
Emotional triggers are a by-product of the old parenting models that did not integrate our emotions into our developing brains when we were kids. When we do our own self-discovery work and identify why and how we get triggered, we are detangling ourselves from the past and owning our agency as adults. We accept that we have choices in how we respond to the things in life that provoke us.
The stuff that initially provokes us is usually pretty minor in the bigger scheme of things. But we can make a mountain out of a molehill with our over-sized reactions. We can meet these moments with greater emotional regulation and dexterity. It will be so much healthier for all our brains — and so much more beneficial for our families.
As many of you already know, I recently launched my Daily Gummy of Wisdom email program and it has been met with so much interest, encouragement and compelling conversations. I wanted to take this time today to highlight a few of the gummies that have really landed with people and the stories they have shared with me. This is exactly what I had hoped would come from the creation of my Daily Gummy of Wisdom. Together, we are all getting better at self awareness and “each other” awareness; we are finding new approaches to old, familiar problems; becoming more skillful in our own emotional regulation and in turn, we are supporting others with their own emotional health — especially children.
I launched the Daily Gummy email program to help those who were dialing back their social media consumption. The Gummy gets popped into your inbox at 6:45 a.m. each day. You can start your morning with this engaging food for thought and find that you just might tap into it for an interaction at home or work. Some are using the Daily Gummy as a mindful break mid-morning or mid-afternoon. A little pick me up and that “refresh” that music producer Rick Rubin says is so invaluable to keep us attentive and engaged with our daily life. Others find it a great way to wind down at day’s end. That’s the beauty of the Daily Gummy — you can use it when it best works for you. Our emotional health can benefit from a supplement morning, noon or night.
Think of the Daily Gummy that lands in your inbox as the physical health supplements you store in your bathroom or kitchen cabinet. It’s on the shelf, readily available, and you can take it when it best works for you. No need to wade through a barrage of social media content.
What has so pleasantly surprised me is how the Daily Gummy is being shared with others. Some of my subscribers have created their own expanded email list of family and friends — and they forward the day’s gummy with some thoughts of their own. A few like to print them out and discuss them with the family at dinner or over coffee with friends. Sometimes they get printed out, tucked in an envelope with a personal note and placed in a teen’s backpack or sent to a family member across the country. They are used to seal a yoga practice, as a prompt for writing classes, to open discussions in support groups, and even incorporated into a pastor’s Sunday sermons.
Sometimes I am the recipient of a Daily Gummy.
A subscriber will write to me and share how a certain gummy landed at just the right time to help them reflect on something that is weighing heavy on their heart. My friend, Diane Brandt, has often said that when we support others, the blessings go both ways and this is exactly how I feel when I hear the stories and learn more about what people are navigating. A mother reached out to me when one gummy was particularly helpful for her in supporting her 10 year old son and his emotional triggers. My photo really spoke to his heart; the image has become a touchstone for him.
When I was in my twenties, the starfish story really resonated with me; that image of a little boy walking on the beach tossing stranded, parched starfish back into the sea. An old man passed by him and questioned why he bothered. There was no way that he could possibly save them all. “Why does it matter?” he asked. The little boy responded, “It matters to this one.”
And that is exactly how I feel about my Daily Gummy of Wisdom. If just one person’s life is touched in a meaningful way by a photo and some insight, it matters. If, in turn, that person can reach out and support someone they love in a tender, compassionate and more skillful way, just imagine the impact it will have — the ripple effect.
Not every Daily Gummy lands at just the right time, but some will.
We are most definitely at the tipping point of remarkable breakthroughs for our emotional health. Quite a few of us are those proverbial stranded, dehydrating starfish on the beach. The more we know, the more we notice. This is how attending to our own emotional health not only helps us improve our quality of life, it raises our awareness of how we can support others in truly beneficial, impactful positive ways.
Here are a few of the Daily Gummies that have landed in recent weeks:
Asking “what the matter” limits our ability to gain real understanding of what another person is feeling — and it often ignites a strong desire in us to fix things right away.
Let’s be honest, how often do we utter “What’s the matter?” with a tone of voice that feels judgmental? Yes — a lot.
Think of asking “what matters to you?” as a much more skillful diagnostic tool. A way to probe a little deeper into discovery and be truly helpful in a meaningful way.
So often, we stay on the surface level of an issue, stating frustration or disappointment, but the real problem causing those emotions is tangled up in misunderstandings, miscommunication, differing opinions or scales of importance. Real problem solving is only possible when we drill down into core issues.
If you want to discover how powerful this diagnostic skill really is, try it for yourself. Next time you are feeling frustrated or annoyed – ask yourself “What matters to me?” Your honest answer will reveal a lot.
One of my close friends reached out to me about this Daily Gummy. She is very active in her community as a leader, a volunteer and a musician. Like me, she is a born helper. She confessed that she often rushes in to fix things, clean up a mess or solve a problem — and quite often without even asking out loud “what’s the matter.” She can see what’s the matter very clearly. (She just described me to a “T”). It dawned on her that quite often she was jumping in before she really understood what was really going on. She often found herself overcommitted, slightly resentful and puzzled why nothing was really changing.
My friend shared that re-arranging words and asking an important question differently, shifted everything. When she enters a situation now, she asks “What matters to you” and listens to learn. As a result, she is accomplishing a few things on her personal growth to do list. She is catching herself before she rescues others; she is becoming a good story steward and listening without judgment and pre-conceived ideas; she is able to set healthy boundaries for her time, energy and interests. And most importantly, those people she loves to help are feeling a deeper and more supported connection with her. Just look at how much positive emotional and relational change occurred by one dynamic question: “What matters most to you?”
Have you noticed how your mood changes throughout the day? It is truly astonishing how much our mood swings around and how little we pay attention to it. Why does it matter? Because our mood influences everything.
When we are in a good mood, we tap into our best natural resources. We are resilient, flexible, creative problem solvers. It’s like sporting a Teflon jacket — nothing negative sticks — not the traffic jam, the spilled milk or someone’s snarky comments. In fact, most events seem less like “problems” and more like “opportunities”.
But a bad mood — yikes! We trade the Teflon jacket for a magnetic catcher’s mitt. Our brain’s default negativity bias looks for — and finds — everything that’s going wrong. That same traffic jam was created just to make us late; the spilled milk is evidence we are doomed for a bad day; the snarky comment sets off a chain reaction critical self talk.
Mood swings can take us on a wild ride. And our mood impacts others. We rarely get the response and support we want when we are surly.
A new subscriber sent me an email with some adorable emojis to thank me for this image and the gummy which she is using in her conversations with her kids. She is helping them to see how a bad mood in one child can take the joy out of something her other child is having in the moment. Evidently they have had some hilarious discussions about being on the “mood swing”. She is so grateful for this image which really resonated for her young children; and how it gave them a way to openly express what they are feeling in the moment with both levity and honesty.
We are in a continuous flow of emotions throughout the day. Just like a whitewater rafting adventure, we never know what lies ahead in our emotional river.
As if it isn’t enough to navigate our own emotional flow, we are often in the same boat with others — each having their own unique experience. It’s a miracle that we can stay afloat!
That is why it’s so important to not “rock the boat” with unnecessary drama and out of control emotions. Every person’s experience is unique. Someone may be lamenting the adventure is coming to an end; and another relieved that it is over. One may be in awe of the expansive view; and another is reading a troubling text. One is tense, another is so relaxed.
The guide plays a key role. He is grounded, calm and has a deep rudder (i.e. skillful emotional navigation). Can you be that guide for others when emotions run high? Staying calm, being skillful with your own emotional flow and helping others with theirs — now that’s earning your emotional fitness badge.
This Daily Gummy reminded me of my life in my mid-40’s, when I was juggling a career change, two teenagers and a five year old, health issues and life in general. Bills to pay, meals to make, vacations to plan, holidays, boo-boos and the many overlapping needs of family members. I used to tell my friends that I was in the white water rapids of life without a paddle. I didn’t know much about emotional health at that time, so I would push through a lot of hard stuff without processing it. I made everyone else my priority firmly believing that if I took care of them, I too would be just fine. But I began to notice a pattern. I could push through for about three months and then I would be in a state of exhaustion that would land me in bed for a few days trying to recover from bronchitis or the flu. I’d recover and jump right back into the white water rapids, powering through and making up for that lost time by overcommitting. A few months later, I’d be tossed out of the raft into the level 5 white water rapids and I’d be sick again. My own version of rinse, repeat.
Besser van der Kolk tells us that the “body keeps the score” – and that is just one of the big lessons I learned the hard way. My body was trying to tell me that I could not stay afloat if I did not attend to myself. A big pivot for me was taking this to heart — both physically and emotionally. Busy parents can struggle a lot with self-care, emotional regulation and work-life balance.
The metaphor for me is that we cannot be skillful guides if we aren’t taking care of ourselves. We are not only better for our partners and children when we take care of our own needs, we are role modeling for our children and grandchildren the importance of physical, cognitive and emotional health for their own.
The white water rapids of life will be ever present. The change occurs when we become skillful life guides, with a bouyant flexible raft and a deep rudder.
I hope you have enjoyed discovering a few new things about my Daily Gummy of Wisdom and that you will sign up for the email program. Click this link to be added to the growing group of folks who are making their emotional fitness an integral part of their well being:
Inspired New Horizons 