Andrew Huberman interviews Dr Marc Brackett on the science and practice of emotion regulation
Andrew Huberman speaks with Dr Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, about practical tools for understanding and regulating emotions.
Summary
Andrew Huberman hosts Dr Marc Brackett, professor of psychology at Yale University and director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, for a wide-ranging conversation on the science of emotion regulation. Brackett argues that emotion regulation is not about eliminating feelings but about developing a different relationship to them — and that the absence of good emotional skills, not the presence of emotions themselves, is what causes harm. He presents a structured framework (the RULER model) covering emotion perception, understanding, labeling, expression, and regulation, and argues that these skills are measurable, teachable, and predictive of well-being, leadership quality, and relationship success. A significant thread of the conversation concerns boys and men, with Brackett contending that the socialization of males to suppress vulnerable emotions — not biology — is the root cause of emotional dysregulation in men, and that schools implementing rigorous emotional intelligence curricula are already producing boys with fundamentally different attitudes toward emotional expression. Brackett also raises concern about the growing use of AI as an emotional companion by adolescents, arguing it accelerates disconnection at a time when human connection is the core of emotional development.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Defining Emotion Regulation
Dr Marc Brackett: A lot of people think emotion regulation is getting rid of a feeling. It's not what it is. It's just having another relationship to it. I've had anxiety — I've lived with it for a lot of my life — but sometimes I just say hello to it. It's like, "Hey, how you doing today?" And it goes away pretty quickly, or it just sits there. I think that's the other thing about emotion regulation that people kind of misunderstand. They think it's like, I've got to check in with how I'm feeling all day long and then regulate. Check in, regulate. You'd become psychotic if you did that all day long.
Most of the time our emotions are in the background. If you thought about your feelings all day long, you wouldn't be able to do this podcast — that's unproductive. Emotions matter when there's a shift in our environment or our relationships. If you said something that offended me, boom, I'm activated. I'm feeling angry or kind of shocked. Then I have to make a choice in that moment: how do I manage it? That's where the magic happens.
Andrew Huberman: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr Marc Brackett. Dr Marc Brackett is a professor of psychology at Yale University where he is also the director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. He is an expert in the science of emotions and how to apply that to improve communication, relationships, and performance in school and work.
One common problem around discussions of emotions and emotional intelligence is that they are often vague and frankly somewhat soft and clichéd. But not when Marc Brackett explains emotional intelligence, as he does today, because he talks about the practical tools that emerge from the science of emotional intelligence that you can use to improve your emotional life both with yourself and with others. And he's not just going to tell us to feel our emotions more deeply. While that could be important in certain settings, his research in and out of the laboratory is really focused on the small things that we can all do — both in moments of emotion, but also on our own — that can greatly increase our ability to understand what we're feeling, communicate it effectively, and to be better listeners, especially in moments that would otherwise create tension or confusion. In fact, what he shares today are life skills — the sort of life skills that make everything: school, friendships, romantic relationships, professional life, and family life far more effective and enriching.
Dr Marc Brackett, welcome.
Dr Marc Brackett: Thank you. Glad to be back. So much to discuss today about emotion regulation, about the kids, the future. Are the kids all right?
Andrew Huberman: They could be better.
Dr Marc Brackett: And our obligation — our generation, other generations — providing a world where kids can thrive and where everyone can thrive. It's a bit of a mess out there, but you're going to put some clarification on things for people. You're doing amazing work to give people tools for emotion regulation and more. So let's start off and define emotion regulation. What is that?
Dr Marc Brackett: The simplest way to define it is using your emotions wisely to achieve your goals in life. It's a little too broad. As I was writing my book, I decided I need a formula. My formula is ER — which is emotion regulation — is a set of goals and strategies. So it's ER, parenthesis G plus S, and that equals a function of E plus P plus C.
Andrew Huberman: Emotion, person, context.
Dr Marc Brackett: What I mean by that specifically is that it's a goal-oriented process. You have to want to regulate. You can prevent unwanted emotions. I have an acronym for that too — it's PRIME. You can prevent unwanted emotions. You can reduce the difficult ones. I think people forget the I — initiate emotions. When you're teaching or leading or presenting, you want to create an emotion in the room. That's upregulating. You can maintain an emotion — you're having a good day, you're going to avoid certain things to just keep it going, savor the moment. And then there's enhancing, which is kind of boosting an emotion. So that's PRIME — that's the goals.
The strategies we can talk about for hours. And then I think what most people misunderstand is that what we regulate and what I do, for example, to deal with my anxiety is really different than what I do for my anger or my worry. It's a function of the emotion you're feeling. It's a function of me as an individual — I am on the neurotic side, I'm on the introverted side, and so my strategy selection would be influenced by that. And then the context: right here, right now, I know you're into fitness and running and all this kind of stuff. If I were anxious right now, it's like, Mark, you've got to use some cognitive strategies or breathing work. I can't go anywhere. I'm stuck. And I think people need to see that kind of full spectrum.
Self-Awareness, Anxiety, and the Mindset Around Emotions
Andrew Huberman: I feel like there's a close tie between emotion regulation and self-awareness. But I feel like there's a tension between self-awareness and being able to experience and enjoy life. For instance, if I'm feeling anxious, I'm thinking about how I'm appearing, how I'm sounding, that it's uncomfortable. But if I get totally outside of that and just be in the experience, there's the potential to say the wrong thing or offend somebody. So when we talk about emotion regulation, what's the best approach that doesn't keep us in a subtext in our mind and sort of out of the room? When we're alone, it's quite a bit different — we can breathe, we can use whatever self-regulation tools we want, ruminate or write or text or call a friend. But when we're at work, at school, on a podcast, if there's that subtext, I'm not locked in here, I'm not in the experience completely, that can be very uncomfortable in its own right. It's work.
Dr Marc Brackett: It's effortful. And not always the best effort if it's going down the rabbit hole. I think you're getting at the mindset piece — the first step is our mindset about our feelings. So let me ask you: what's your mindset around anxiety?
Andrew Huberman: I have assumptions around it. I was telling someone the other day — because I spend a lot of time alone and I'm fairly introverted — if I go into a crowded environment, for the first five or six minutes I'm feeling kind of overwhelmed. There are a lot of people. I actually feel like I have a bit of a social interaction disorder for those first few minutes. But then after about 20 or 30 minutes, I'm in that experience and I feel very comfortable. So I have this mindset that social anxiety is something like wading into water — it's always a little too cold at first, but over time you acclimate.
Dr Marc Brackett: You didn't answer the question. What's your relationship to anxiety?
Andrew Huberman: I hate it.
Dr Marc Brackett: Okay, there you go. See how you automatically were like, I hate anxiety. I did too for most of my life. And then I was with a friend who's a neuroscientist who studies anxiety, and she said to me, "Marc, tell me all the things that make you anxious." I said, "Well, I'm anxious about fundraising — I've got to raise the money to keep the research going. I'm anxious because I want to make sure that everything we do is high quality." And I went on and on. Then she asked me another question: "What do those have in common?" I'm like, "What are you talking about?" And then I thought about it and I said, "Well, those are things that are important to me." And she said, "So why would anxiety be a bad thing?"
I think we have to learn how to adopt a mindset around emotions that there are no bad emotions. It's what we do with our emotions that makes them harmful or difficult for us to live our lives. Anxiety is a good thing. It's saying there's perceived uncertainty around the future. I'm anxious about how I'm going to act in this environment or how I'm going to be perceived. It's not a bad thing, because you want to be perceived well. But if you automatically assume it's bad, then it's going to put you on the path to dysregulation.
Andrew Huberman: So if we accept the idea that all emotions are okay, but that the expression of all emotions in every context is not okay — that it should be context-specific — I actually think that provides some freedom. I can feel that freedom. It's okay to be super angry. It's okay to be frustrated. It's okay to be anxious. But how that's expressed is what's critical. It makes good intuitive sense. I think what's hard to know is what to do with the emotion if there is no outward expression of it — where should it go?
Dr Marc Brackett: It doesn't have to go anywhere sometimes. Sometimes it can just be. And that's a big part of regulation — a lot of people think emotion regulation is getting rid of a feeling. It's not what it is. It's just having another relationship to it. I'm 56. I've had anxiety, or lived with it, for a lot of my life, but sometimes I just say hello to it. It's like, "Hey, how you doing today?" And it goes away pretty quickly, or it just sits there.
I think that's the other thing about emotion regulation that people misunderstand. They think it's like, I've got to check in with how I'm feeling all day long and then regulate. Check in, regulate. You'd become psychotic if you did that all day long. Most of the time our emotions are in the background. If you thought about your feelings all day long, you wouldn't be able to do this podcast — that's unproductive. Emotions matter when there's a shift in our environment or the relationships. If you said something that offended me, boom, I'm activated. I'm feeling angry or kind of shocked. Then I have to make a choice in that moment: how do I manage it? That's where the magic happens. But on a day-to-day basis, thank God we're not doing that constantly.
Mindsets Around Happiness and Emotional Permission
Andrew Huberman: I'd love to poke at some of the assumptions that I know I have, but I wonder if other people have as well. My dad's from South America, and I remember long ago he said — because he went to formal schools — that he was raised with this terrible idea, he called it terrible, that if somebody was happy and smiled a lot, they were stupid. And I said, "What is that about?" And he said it came, in his words, from the British school system, where the idea was that you were supposed to be skeptical of things, and that if you were happy-go-lucky and weren't troubled, people would assume you were an idiot because you weren't bothered by the problems in the world. My dad's a very happy person now, and he's talked about having to break that mold — that it's okay to wake up and take a walk and be happy.
I think I grew up thinking something similar, maybe not to that extreme, but especially in academia — if you're not discerning, if you're happy, you must not be thinking carefully. That's totally false, right?
Dr Marc Brackett: Of course.
Andrew Huberman: The idea nowadays does seem to be that if you're happy-go-lucky and feeling good, you must not be thinking about all the terrible things going on in the world, or that it's insensitive to those who are suffering. I'd love your thoughts on this idea that we don't give ourselves permission to feel as good as we might feel because of some social pressure or assumptions we've internalized.
Dr Marc Brackett: Which is all learned. These are learned phenomena, and sometimes outside influences. When I was writing and doing the chapter on mindsets around emotion — talking about this relationship with different emotions — I would play around with it all day long. I could say, "What's your relationship to anger? What's your relationship to happiness and contentment?" And all of a sudden you start realizing, wow, I have a complicated relationship with my emotions.
With happiness, for me — which is completely different from your dad's experience — because of my tough childhood and a lot of bullying, I would go to school one day feeling happy, and I'd see the bullies, and all of a sudden they'd say things like, "What are you so happy about today, Brackett?" I didn't realize that until I was writing. And then I would get on stage and give a speech — I do a lot of public speaking — and I'd be standing there feeling really good, and then I'd get the applause at the end and I would start looking down. I started realizing I'm uncomfortable being happy. I'm waiting for something to go wrong, because in my childhood, happy meant we're going to bring you down.
We all have these developmental connections to our different emotions. And it gets back to the phenomenon: there are no good or bad emotions. Some of it is genetic and biological — our proclivity to experience certain emotions. The regulation piece is all learned. You're not born with a pocket full of evidence-based strategies to regulate. Growing up, my father was the angry guy. He'd say, "Son, you've got to toughen up." And growing up, when I was struggling, my parents missed a lot of the cues. Because I didn't have my father say, "Son, I'm noticing a shift in your emotions today. Your posture is different. Your facial expression is different. Let me give you a research-based strategy to help you regulate your anxiety, stress, pressure, fear." No. It wasn't even a construct. Did you grow up with a concept of emotion regulation?
Andrew Huberman: Definitely. And there was a big gender split in my home. I had the belief, based on the context, that women could express their emotions — big or small — and that men weren't supposed to lose their temper. Men weren't supposed to be angry.
Dr Marc Brackett: That's interesting. It's kind of counter to the way people think about it nowadays — like, the more power you have, the more anger you can express.
Andrew Huberman: The complete opposite of that. My dad's been on this podcast and we have a great relationship now. I remember when I was a kid, if he got angry, he would blink. I now know that as behavioral suppression. I can't ever remember my dad having an outburst. So I internalized this idea: you don't have outbursts. But I have a certain side of my extended family from New Jersey where words are sometimes used as weapons, and anger is a bit more outward. And then I have a South American side where things are more formal and boxed away. I think I internalized a bit of both — all sorts of constructs around who's allowed to express emotions and to what extremes. I probably averaged the two in my own life. In terms of happiness, I think the same thing — that it was more okay for women to be fully expressive, and for men it was more the 1950s model.
Dr Marc Brackett: With happiness, as with any emotion, it's about the time and the place. We have research that shows that people who strive to be happy all the time actually are more miserable, because it's hard to live up to that all the time. People who strive for more contentment in their life actually seem to have greater well-being. It goes back to these mindsets around emotions — there's no good or bad emotion. Anger is fine. Obviously, if it's too intense and lasting too long, it's probably not going to be good. Happiness is something we should experience, but if we're attached to it, it's going to be problematic, because every day is not a sunny day. There are rainy days too, and you've got to be comfortable with the rainy days.
The important thing also is not just our feelings about our feelings — it's also about our mindsets around our capacity to deal with those feelings. Do I believe I am capable of managing my anger? Do I believe I'm capable of dealing with disappointment? We find a distribution of scores for that too. My father would say things like, "Son, this is the way I deal with my anger. You're going to have to get used to it." I would say now, "Sounds like you've got a fixed mindset, Dad. There are other options." But he was sort of like, "This is the way I am — you're going to have to deal with it." No learning interest. Whereas nowadays, I hope to help people see: wait a minute, is that emotion working for you in your relationships or not? If it's not, there are alternatives.
Boys, Men, and Emotional Vulnerability
Andrew Huberman: We're talking about boys and men quite a bit already. Maybe we just continue in that direction, even though we will touch on girls and women and emotions as it relates to them too. I hear a lot nowadays about problems for boys and young men in emotion regulation, in defining masculinity. I'm obviously interested in this, but I also acknowledge that I'm Gen X — I was born in 1975. Things were very different. And I know I have a giant blind spot to their experience. I don't really have a finger on the pulse of what life is like for a 15-year-old or 12-year-old or 20-year-old guy out there. What are the pain points, and what's going right?
Dr Marc Brackett: There's a lot going on. I think probably the big issue here with gender is vulnerability. Historically — and this is not just now, this goes back to when we were kids, when our parents were kids — vulnerability, especially for men, is considered weak. You've got to be tough. You're the person who has to make ends meet, the hunter-gatherer. And obviously times have changed. What we find is that the thought today for many boys and men is that to be emotional — and firstly, "emotional" alone has a connotation of feminine and out of control — is a negative thing. That's why I like to call it emotion skills, not emotional skills.
So vulnerability is a big piece of it. This is going to be a great conversation between two guys. What's your relationship to vulnerability?
Andrew Huberman: Totally context-dependent. There are people I'm not afraid at all to cry in front of. There are contexts and people in front of whom I would never cry. I've cried on very public broadcasts — maybe two or three times. One here when Martha Beck came on. And on Steven Bartlett's podcast, I think, perhaps on another. It was tough. I didn't want to watch those clips, but I'm glad I did it. So totally context-dependent.
Dr Marc Brackett: And that makes sense. What I'm really pushing for is around emotion and talking about feelings. What we find is that boys generally feel more inhibited just saying how they feel, especially when it comes to the sad, disappointed, ashamed emotions. It's much easier to express anger and the outwardly expressive emotions, but the deep ones that are self-conscious, that make you vulnerable — that tends to be tough. And the question is, why is that the case? Why would so many boys feel like they're going to be perceived as feminine if they say they're disappointed or sad or ashamed?
Andrew Huberman: What immediately comes to mind is that it's somehow linked with the word "incapable" or "incapability."
Dr Marc Brackett: Exactly. There's an incredible video of David Goggins breaking down crying on stage, and he was celebrated for that. But David Goggins did a lot of things beforehand, and no one denies his capability. So when he cried, it was like, awesome — he's willing to go to this really hard place. Yet another difficult thing that David can do that most people can't do.
Andrew Huberman: And you just go, awesome. And I stepped back from that and realized we already knew — former Navy SEAL, went from 300-plus pounds to this fit individual. Goggins is a verb, an adjective, and a pronoun. So if someone else just breaks down on stage, you go, okay, I hope this guy can make it in life. That's the narrative.
Dr Marc Brackett: It's like: weak. He has the permission to do whatever the hell he wants.
Andrew Huberman: This notion of having earned the right — there are people like James Cameron who built a career on certain things and then later made claims that distanced him from that career, and it wasn't taken that seriously. Once you become super famous, I always find it interesting with celebrities — they can now disclose, "I've been depressed, I've been anxious, I've been overwhelmed." But for some reason they didn't want to take that risk when they were younger in their careers, because the perception is that anxiety, depression, whatever it is — that's weak.
Dr Marc Brackett: And so that's the point. We raise kids — boys in particular — to believe that these so-called feminine-type emotions, which are not feminine by nature, they're just human emotions, are weak. And therefore that means I'm going to be perceived as not only weak, but potentially homosexual. And that's also a stigma. So what do I do? I suppress. I deny. I ignore.
Interestingly enough, for women, what the research shows is that they are much less likely to suppress or deny, and much more likely to ruminate.
Andrew Huberman: I feel like the stereotype of gay men being feminine has fallen away somewhat. I grew up in the skateboarding community — there's Brian Anderson, who voluntarily came out in the New York Times, and he's one of the most aggressive skateboarders out there. So I feel like that stereotype has kind of shifted a bit.
Dr Marc Brackett: I think you're ambitious there. Being gay is still difficult for many. If you ask a hundred people to run like a gay man, they're still going to show you someone who's more stereotypically feminine, to be honest with you. I remember when I was 18 I went to a gay bar — I grew up in New Jersey, it was very homophobic. The only gay person I really knew was my mother's hairdresser, who was very flamboyant. And then I went to this gay bar and I was like, oh my god, it's like Wall Street executives, football players. It was a total shift in my perception. Nevertheless, if you ask the majority of people, it's still considered to be feminine.
Andrew Huberman: I guess if you grew up training in gyms, which I did, you're around a lot of very physically strong gay men. They were kind of early to the gym culture. So maybe my lens on that is a little distorted.
There's something interesting around this notion of boys showing emotion. We were talking earlier about the movie Stand by Me — a Stephen King story turned into a movie. What's interesting about that movie is the transition that happens right around puberty, between junior high and high school. Some of those boys are at different developmental stages. A kid who is a little bit more emotional, a little more coddled at home perhaps, cries in front of a group of boys when you're in the seventh or eighth grade. Some of those boys — because of their stage of maturation — are like, "Dude, what are you doing?" And because of the way schools and social dynamics work, that can stay with a kid for a long time. Being labeled as overly emotional can stick with you for two or three years of school. I feel like some of this stuff comes about that way.
Dr Marc Brackett: Again, this is all nurture. If you go to schools that do our work, I just interviewed a bunch of teenage boys — it would blow your mind. They have a whole different perception of emotion. I ask them questions about men and boys and their responses are like, "Huh? What's wrong with crying? If you feel like crying, you cry." No ridicule. I said, "Well, what if you get into a fight — can you talk to the kid about what happened and tell them how you felt when they left you out?" And they're like, "Of course. That's how we grew up. That's what we do." But they grew up in a school that took emotion seriously. They gave them the skills and the resources to do it.
I never forget this — I was in the beginning of my career doing training in emotional regulation in London, outside of London, a very rough-and-tough neighborhood. And the headmistress of the school looked at me and said, "You know something, Marc? This program is going to turn the boys into homosexuals." I'm like, okay, where did that come from? I said, you know, I'm here — can we just go and do it? Let me demonstrate it.
So I'm in the middle of the room like a fishbowl — 25 teachers around me, 20 kids in the middle. I start sharing a story about my life. I was feeling discouraged — it was when I first got into the martial arts. I was not a tough boy, I was afraid of my shadow, I'd had all this bullying and abuse, and going into a karate studio was a big shock for me. I happened to have an amazing teacher who transformed my life and became a career of mine in martial arts. I told a story about how I failed my yellow belt and I just hated myself — not only was I bullied, but I couldn't even get a yellow belt. Discouraged, hopeless. And then I said, "I'm just curious — has anyone else ever felt the way I felt? Just raise your hand if you've had that kind of feeling." Every single kid in the classroom raised their hand.
And of course I look over at that headmistress and I'm like, let's talk later. Kids are dying to express their emotions — boys and girls. We've just socialized it out of them. Even the way fathers talk to their boy children is different — it's the "toughen up." They use more feeling words with girls than with boys. We're not born that way. We are socialized into having these complicated relationships with certain emotions. But it's not something that can't be modified with good instruction.
Andrew Huberman: You're saying this and I'm realizing I internalized so many things that skew my perspective on this. I'm relieved to hear that expression of emotions among boys is more accepted now.
Dr Marc Brackett: The generation that's going through this work — the kids who are growing up in places that are not taking emotions seriously are growing up with a more stereotypical way of viewing it. It's got to be infused into your life. You've got to have these conversations. In our work, we're really rigorous about teaching this stuff. This isn't just kumbaya sitting in a circle. This is like, "All right, everyone, we've got a problem here. There's a kid who nobody is allowing to participate in the gaga pit. That kid feels awful. What's our obligation? What are we supposed to do? Imagine you're that kid." Now we're going to get into groups and think about: what are the feelings? What are the solutions? What do you do for yourself? What do you do for the other person? And they've got to roleplay it. Then we ask questions about the role play — well, what if it goes wrong? What happens if you say this and they say, go blank yourself? What do you do then? That's the kind of complex muscle-building we're giving kids in terms of dealing with emotions.
Rough-and-Tumble Play, Physical Interaction, and Developmental Stages
Andrew Huberman: There is a hardwired bias towards rough-and-tumble play in males of all species, including ours. I think what you're talking about is also a capacity for rough-and-tumble verbal and emotional exchange — which is not necessarily harmful, but some of it can be really damaging. Something interesting that I learned a long time ago — even in academia — I went to my first McKnight meeting and I was so excited to be there. A very famous neuroscientist came over, a pretty large guy, grabbed me, and goes, "So, where are you going to be?" — I was picking between laboratories. That was a very comfortable exchange for me because I grew up with a lot of physical interaction. Often times if I interact with somebody like an old friend, they'll grab my shoulder just walking by. There's a lot of physical interaction that just happens and it doesn't feel weird or aversive.
I could see if somebody was not used to a lot of physical interaction with other people, that could feel like a lot. So I'm wondering — where are things nowadays with respect to the amount of physical interaction between kids? Are they feeling and voicing their emotions but at a physical distance, or are they seeing one another with handshakes and hugs?
Dr Marc Brackett: I think it's cultural. There's a lot going on in terms of the type of school and where it is in the United States or in the world. Touch is a cultural thing. But what I want to say about rough-and-tumble is that it's fine — of course. But when it becomes a power-over dynamic, that's when it becomes a problem. When you have no concern for the emotional life of the other — that's bullying.
Andrew Huberman: The dialogue that sort of establishes hierarchy — I feel like that just sort of happened naturally in my friend group when I was a kid. There were some kids who were more developed, more athletic, better at this or that. And we just kind of all fell into place. It wasn't necessarily about being at the apex or at the bottom. We sort of formed a team where you understood that this kid was fast, this one was strong, this one was clever, this one was creative. There was a goofy kid on our street who was always the comedian — I think he later actually became a comedian — and everyone just kind of accepted that. You didn't expect him to be like the other kid, and you didn't expect yourself to check off all the boxes.
I wonder the extent to which young males in particular nowadays feel the need to check off all the boxes of what it is to be a guy.
Dr Marc Brackett: That's the developmental thing. You watch kids play in kindergarten — they're not thinking about this kind of stuff, although it's seeping in. I was in a school recently and a boy raised his hand to say he was in the blue quadrant of our mood meter — feeling down or sad. I said, "Do you need anything right now?" And he said, "No." I said, "You sure? We can talk about it." He said, "I don't want to bother you, sir." And that was an eye-opener for me — already, his emotions were a nuisance. No one's emotion should be a burden. A kid should be able to talk about it and deal with it. We want that kid to be a good learner, a good friend. And if he's already suppressing, denying, ignoring in kindergarten, it's not going to be a pretty ride.
Those things change developmentally. Kids are much more comfortable talking to each other about their feelings in elementary school and middle school. In high school, you see less and less touching, less of the kind of friendship stuff you might have seen early on. That goes back to toxic masculinity, the manosphere. My hope is that we rethink child development. We have spent so much time thinking about some of the unnecessary things. Reading and writing and arithmetic are obviously important. But if you don't recognize that how we feel and how we deal with our feelings is going to drive the quality of your relationships, your well-being, your ability to deal with life's ups and downs and the harsh feedback you're going to get in life — and ultimately having your dreams come true — then we're missing something.
I work at a university where everyone has perfect SAT scores, everyone has grade point averages better than mine were, everyone plays an instrument I've never heard of before. And I look at them all and I'm like, guess what? Your SAT scores have no predictive validity. None. It's range restriction — like, all basketball players are tall, so height is not going to make or break your basketball performance. Same thing applies in a room filled with people with high academic performance. Well, what is the predictor? It's going to be something else. What are the attributes that employers are looking for? Right now, it's not technical skills as much as it used to be. It's: can this person take feedback well? Can this person lead a team that people will want to be around?
I found in my research that managers and leaders who are good co-regulators — during the pandemic, I did this longitudinal study and found that in schools in particular, when a teacher perceived their leader as both self-regulated and good at co-regulating — what that means is: I'm looking at you right now, thinking, okay, it feels like the world's coming to an end. Are you going to fall apart or are you going to make it? And are you going to be there for me? Are you going to be able to support me and deal with the chaos I've got to deal with? What we found in our research is that this was highly predictive of the culture of a school, highly predictive of burnout, highly predictive of job satisfaction. Frustration levels were 40% lower in schools where there were leaders with these skills.
Calibration, Emotional Expression, and Knowing Your Assumptions
Andrew Huberman: The word that comes to mind is calibration. In anticipation of today's discussion, I was speaking to a friend and I said, where are you at with men expressing emotions? And she said, "Well, I've seen you cry. It can be beautiful." And I said, "But when is a man expressing emotion a problem for you?" — assuming it's not outward anger or abuse, but sadness, as an example. And she said, "If he gets very sad about things that happen a lot, it makes it hard to imagine how he would hold it together if really big stuff happened." So it's exactly what you described in the workplace — this notion of calibration.
If I'm okay with people expressing their emotions, crying when they're sad, but if that's happening a lot under everyday conditions, I could imagine — let's say you're in a work or romantic relationship with this person — thinking, well, goodness, people die as you get older. What's going to happen then? I think there's this underlying question: are you going to be available for all the other things we depend on each other for? People are trying to work out what someone's calibrated to — understanding when they're able to pack it down and deal with it on their own later, versus when it really needs to become the focus.
I have a friend who runs a big scientific laboratory. Their team gathered together and did a presentation for this lab director — a statistical bubble map of their experience of being in the lab. There was a giant bubble in the middle that just said "stress." And I said, "Let me guess — you were probably thinking, what happened to science?" He said, "For a little while, and then I figured, well, this is the next generation I have to work with." They were calibrated to different set points. I could imagine that's hard across generations, but even within a generation, that's got to be really tricky.
So you're all about measurement and creating actionable tools. Is there a language around this? Is there a way that we can learn to process and deal with our emotions, express them in a more healthy way, and also understand other people's emotional calibration point?
Dr Marc Brackett: A couple of things. Going back to the leader position — I think the confusion that people have around vulnerability and emotion dysregulation is that me being vulnerable, me sharing that I'm anxious or overwhelmed or afraid, means that I'm weak. And I think what leaders need to do is recognize that during the pandemic, I knew my team was freaked out. They were stressed about their jobs, dealing with being parents and employees and working from home. Here I was, the head of the emotional intelligence lab, and when people asked, "How you doing, Marc?" I was saying, "Great. Everything's fine." Meanwhile, I'm like, I hate my life and I hate everybody around me. And then I realized one day: I'm being a terrible role model. I'm not being authentic and I'm not demonstrating the skill.
So I decided to be really honest and say, "I'm going to be frank — it's tough right now, but here's what I'm doing. I'm going for that walk every day at 5:00. I can't go to my hot yoga class, but I found new workouts online that I'm doing." The point is that vulnerability — sharing and spewing out all your fears — is not helpful when it's not accompanied by the strategy. The key is: I'm feeling this way, but here's what I'm doing about it. That's what a role model is. That's what a parent needs to do.
The parent has to come home and say — imagine you're a dad trying to be a role model for your kid. Here's my dad: I'd have a hard day at work. "Daddy, let's play." "Son, leave me alone." Done. That was the end of it. As opposed to: "Daddy, let's play." "Son, I have to tell you something. I just had a really rough day at work. I got into a fight with a colleague of mine. Didn't go well. I said something that I really feel bad about. So daddy just needs a little bit of time to process that, to think about what I can say tomorrow to help my relationship. And if you don't mind, I need that time right now. I love you and we'll play later, but right now I'm just not in the right space for it." Okay, son. Okay, Dad.
Let's stop there. What did I just teach my son or daughter about feelings? I'm a dude, a dad who has feelings. I am someone who makes mistakes. I say things that I regret. I reflect on the things I make mistakes about. I problem-solve about the things I make mistakes about. I need time to recoup my energy, and then I can come back and be with you. How much time did that take? Seconds.
Andrew Huberman: But how many of us are around people that can process emotion that way — that have the capacity to say, "I'm in a dark place. Things didn't go well. I made a mistake. I feel bad about it. I need to strategize and then we'll come back and be together"? What happens to most of us is we're activated — I'm pissed off at the person at work and I project it on everybody else in my next situation. And the power of emotional self-awareness, and the power of emotion regulation, is that I notice there's a shift. I notice I'm feeling this anger, this frustration. I'm about to go into a new environment with my family, and I know because I'm emotionally intelligent that it's not going to be pretty if I don't process that emotion before I move into the next situation. So what I'm going to do is take a breath. Take what I call a meta moment. Pause. Take a breath. Think about the best version of Marc — the father I want to be, the husband I want to be — and then open the door and arrive through that lens. That's what this work is about.
I'm fascinated by time perception and I feel like the human brain is so incredible at being in the moment and also getting ahead and thinking behind. What you're really talking about is projecting into the future in a healthy way — not future-tripping, but in a healthy way. To some extent, healthy recognition of one's emotions, healthy expression of one's emotions, is the ability to feel but also split off from the present enough to get perspective — the time perspective. It's all in a shift in the time domain.
Dr Marc Brackett: That is a skill. The way I like to think about it is that we have to move from automatic, habitual, unhelpful reactions to deliberate, conscious, helpful responses — because we become more automatic when we're flooded with our emotions. We rely more on habits, and usually bad habits. And so to build that space between the stimulus and response — the question people always ask is, what do I do with that space? How long is the space? Some people say, "I don't need a meta moment — I need a mega moment." Maybe you do. Maybe you need to take three loops around the house before you walk in the door to get your parasympathetic nervous system where it needs to be. That is the key to emotion regulation right there.
Andrew Huberman: We had Richard Davidson on the podcast and he talked about this myth about meditation — that it's supposed to clear the mind and make you relax. He said it's actually really about stress tolerance. You're supposed to sit there and resist the temptation to get up and move. It's really stress inoculation, which I think is a beautiful and different way of thinking about meditation. So do you recommend that people meditate in order to become better emotion regulators?
Dr Marc Brackett: 100%. Especially because if you can't be still, it's going to be hard to access the good strategies. It's a necessary but insufficient strategy. I know that we're obsessed in our world right now with breathing and mindfulness, and it's great. But it's not enough. At the end, I'm going to have to have the difficult conversation and regulate during that conversation. I can't be in my room by myself meditating. I always joked — I open my book with the story of my mother-in-law — I would take a breath. It's even clearer why you have to get the hell out of my house, right? So the breath may help you deactivate, but it doesn't necessarily shift your perspective. That's the mindfulness work.
And I want to jump in now because I think even the taking of the moment to recognize you need to take this meta moment is a mindset piece. It's saying emotion regulation is important. I'll be a better version of myself if I don't walk into my house in this angry state and project it onto everybody else. But that's only one of about eight domains that I think are important. The next is you've got to know what you're feeling, because the feeling — as I said in my formula earlier — is going to drive the strategy selection. So that labeling piece is really important. And I find that people's vocabularies are just awful. People say: I'm fine. I'm okay. I'm upset.
If I were to push you — anxiety versus fear versus pressure versus stress.
Andrew Huberman: I've thought about these before. Anxiety is a generalized state of too much sympathetic arousal. Stress is one or usually several things I can pinpoint as a source of that elevated arousal. Panic would be if you've gotten so far outside the time-domain perspective that the physiology overtakes and overwhelms.
Dr Marc Brackett: A lot of people say it's all the same thing — it's all one big thing. But in the end, what you're regulating is often the emotion underneath. Anxiety is uncertainty around the future — I get anxious when I can't predict. Stress is having too many demands and not enough resources. Pressure is something at stake that's dependent upon your behavior. Fear is immediate danger. When I give you those core relational themes — the appraisals that are part of those emotions — does it make you see how your strategy choice might be different?
Andrew Huberman: Yeah, definitely. And speaking of — I've heard that some people need to learn to externalize and talk about their feelings more, and others probably less. I'm friends with a couple, and one of them calls herself an external processor. If something's bothering her, she has to externally process. And her wife is an internal processor. They've worked this out, and it's pretty cool to see how they do it. But I was like, is that really a thing? External processor, internal processor? And then of course my gender biases show up — I go, well, you're two women, so maybe that language is used, but in heterosexual relationships it's different. And we laughed about it, and they explained — actually, one of them is a couples therapist, so she has many male-female couple clients. So I got flipped on my back with that one.
The thing I keep projecting into everything I'm hearing — and I want to put the asterisk here and say the reason I share these things happening inside is I like to think they're perhaps a proxy for what some people are thinking — is that we really, at least in the United States, are not a culture that's clearly defined its terms, let alone its ways of being around emotions. Here we've got it all. Men expressing anger — some people call that passionate, depending on what it's about. Other people call that scary and dysregulated.
Dr Marc Brackett: It goes back to your relationship with anger. We construct these emotions in our brains based on our experiences. I grew up with a dad who had pressed lips and a red face and looked like he was going to take his belt off and whack me. So my perception of anger is probably different than yours based on our upbringing. Now, I could be overreacting to anger, which is not going to be helpful in my life. So I've got to learn to realize not everybody's like your dad. Some people can be angry and not aggressive. But that's the emotional intelligence journey of learning. If I had no cultivating of skills, I would just assume that's anger — and that's not anger. That's one way of expressing anger that I learned.
I think people get caught up in that. They get attached to what they learned early in life and don't realize there's another way. It's kind of why people often get stuck with trauma — they are fixated on that experience and haven't learned how to reframe or compartmentalize that particular experience in their lives.
Knowing Your Assumptions and the Value of Emotional Vocabulary
Andrew Huberman: I'd like to layer on something else I'm hearing — that we should all know our assumptions or presumptions based on our upbringing. Like we need to do this for ourselves. No single article is going to spell out the full array of ways that one conceptualizes anger or sadness for men, for women, for straight people, for gay people. But this space is actually worth thinking about. Right now there's a little bit of a battle against introspection — this is not that. This is really just what any good scientist would do: know your assumptions before you generate a hypothesis.
Dr Marc Brackett: I mean, it is introspection. But just like anything, over-introspection leads to rumination. So we're not recommending obsessively checking in with how you're feeling all day long. That is unhelpful. Emotions matter when they're going to either help or interfere with our performance. That's when we have to check in. Most of the time, thank goodness, they're in the background. When you're driving, you're not thinking, "How am I feeling? How am I feeling?" That would be weird. But checking in with one's assumptions based on our upbringing — I think that would be very useful.
Andrew Huberman: Has that been formalized into a questionnaire? About eight months ago, I had this wild experience where I realized I had a massive assumption worked into my framework. I had these friends and I was visiting them and they called me upstairs — there was a bird flying around, flying into the windows. I tried to get him out and couldn't. I said, "I'm just going to open the windows, go downstairs, come back and check." He got out eventually. About two weeks later, one of them called me and said, "I really need to talk to you about something. I was really disturbed by how you reacted." I was like, "What do you mean? I was trying to help the bird." And she said, "Well, you were talking to this bird like he's an idiot."
And I realized in that moment — if she had said, "Oh, that poor girl, she's flying against the window," I'd have been like, "Oh, the poor thing." And with him, same thing — I want to help. But then my assumption was, "You idiot. What are you doing?" I grew up in a big pack of dudes, and if someone does something stupid, you're like, "Dude, you're an idiot." But it was actually a mode of affection. I realized I had this strong sex-gender bias that I hadn't been aware of.
Dr Marc Brackett: This is all going to that mindset area of emotion regulation. Parents have that with their kids. You observe a parent with their son or daughter — the kid is trying to climb a rock, and the parent, because of their own fears, says, "Oh my god, honey, be careful, be careful, be careful." And all of a sudden the kid is losing their self-confidence to climb the thing. As opposed to a parent who's skillful, who checks their assumptions. They're nervous — okay, fine. You're nervous. Your kid's probably not going to get hurt. Take a breath and maybe say something like, "Honey, gosh, that looks like it's really hard. I'm pretty confident you're going to get there. Let me just come a little closer to be there just in case something goes wrong, but I really do think you're going to make it."
What do you think that's instilling in the kid? A totally different way of thinking about it. That parent's assumption and that parent's fears are being projected. If they were more skilled at co-regulating and recognizing that my job is to instill resilience in my kid — my job is to help my kid feel like they can do it on their own — because that's what this work on co-regulation is about. You're being super intentional about supporting other people and managing their emotions, but the whole goal is to support the other person in being capable of regulating on their own eventually. Not codependent, not coddling, but actually instilling the belief in the other person that they can do it.
Andrew Huberman: I love that. Is there a formal process or questionnaire to learning to understand one's own — the word "bias" is so loaded, but — to really parse, oh, this is how I conceive the world in and around emotions, gender-specific emotions? Because I think that would be very useful. It allows somebody to do what you just described and really know the difference between helping somebody get to the point where they can manage their emotions on their own versus projecting our own beliefs around how it's supposed to be done.
Dr Marc Brackett: There are plenty of surveys — actually in my book I give people a list of them. You can play around with that and just look at your mindsets and attitudes about them and you'll see patterns. I had no cognitive awareness that I had this weird relationship to happiness until I did my own exercise. And it was eye-opening for me. I've actually set goals for myself — Marc, when people are applauding you when you're giving your speech, let them enjoy it. If they're applauding, it means it was good. Breathe, be present, and take it in. And actually, it works. It's a beautiful phenomenon.
Andrew Huberman: The awareness of our programming can liberate us from so many painful things.
Dr Marc Brackett: We spent a lot of time on this, which is interesting because I don't usually spend so much time talking about these assumptions and mindsets and beliefs. We spent some time talking about the vocabulary words, which is very important. You've got to be self-aware. Anger is not the same as disappointment. Envy is not the same as jealousy. Happiness is not the same as contentment. Anxiety, stress, pressure, fear, and overwhelm are all different. And I know people listening might be like, "Oh my god, you're overwhelming me." But we have our app — the How We Feel app — to give you that vocabulary. And it really does matter. It matters for communication. It matters for getting your needs met. It matters for choosing the strategy.
But again, it's not enough. You've got to know how to breathe and you have to do your mindfulness work to bring the temperature down, to still your mind. Think about our minds nowadays — the ability to process information has dwindled completely. We used to do two-and-a-half-minute videos for trainings. People won't get through them now. Thirty seconds. This is why people aren't learning anything anymore — how are you going to teach an emotion regulation strategy in 30 seconds? It's like an Instagram post.
My favorite one recently was a very famous influencer teaching about emotion regulation. She said, "I've decided to throw away my anxiety." She's in the car, opens the door, and says, "Goodbye, anxiety." And I'm thinking to myself, that door is going to hit you so hard in the face. But yet thousands of likes, and people are like, "Oh my god, I'm throwing away my anxiety." You can't throw away your anxiety. It doesn't work that way.
The quick-fix thing is an issue. Then we've got to learn how to rethink our feelings. We have to learn some of the things you've spoken about on other podcasts — whether it's cognitive reappraisal, reframing, distancing, having gratitude as opposed to resentment and envy. I never had anyone help me practice cognitive regulation. Nobody ever taught me there was even a thing called reframing, and it's saved my life as an adult, because we go in with assumptions about other people too. If you can say, "Wait a minute, Marc — is there another way to look at this? Is there another story you can be telling yourself around this?" — we want to be careful about that, because in abusive relationships it can become gaslighting. "Honey, you're too sensitive." "No, you're a jerk. I'm not too sensitive. You're trying to make me feel bad about the fact that you're lying to me all the time." That's also reframing, but it's a form of deception where another person is trying to define your reality for you.
Reframing is playing with this idea of telling yourself a new story, but you have to always be a scientist about it. And that's the one thing about all the strategies — you have to come back as a scientist and ask yourself: is this helping me live the life I want? Am I in a better relationship? Am I better able at managing my anxiety applying these cognitive strategies or these labeling strategies?
Contradictions in Psychology and the Importance of Emotional Vocabulary
Andrew Huberman: I find psychology fascinating. The reason I became a biologist, however, is because I got confused by psychology — it's too big a field. And the field wasn't as evolved or as structured as it is now. I remember thinking I could see the argument, maybe even the experiment, for healthy expression of emotion allowing that emotion to move through, allowing us to be healthier physically and mentally. I could also probably find a manuscript that shows that for every minute longer we focus on being angry, our anger grows. I remember being very afraid of the contradictions. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." "Out of sight, out of mind." Which one is it? And of course, it's both, right? That's the complexity of the human mind. So I decided to think about cells and circuits instead.
I remain intensely interested in the sorts of issues we're talking about now, including these generational differences. And here's my question: typically most work, school, and other environments are hierarchical — the older people have more seniority and more power. I sense that nowadays there's an understandable concern and interest in young people's emotions and emotional processing. But I also get the sense from my peers that there's this kind of fear of the younger generation, like they're actually in control.
I just got through doing three two-hour-long trainings because Stanford has you do harassment training, workplace safety, workplace violence — you have to learn what the rules are. And I was very surprised to realize that all faculty and staff and some postdocs take this training. Students don't take it. Meaning you have two completely different views of what the rules are. And this is not unique to Stanford. You would hope that there would be a universal nomenclature — just like we know what mitochondria are here and in Nicaragua, it'd be nice to know that anger and disappointment, while those words are spoken differently in two different countries, have a basic universal understanding of what emotions are, what they're not, how much comes from our past, how much is about our physiology, and how to work with them.
A lot of the problems I see out there are misunderstandings about where the line is. That's healthy emotional expression. Okay, that's anger. No, that's passion. That person's a narcissist. No, that person just isn't spending a lot of time thinking about their own thoughts. I'm certain that one of the reasons your work is so important is because we need a universal nomenclature, an agreement that there's at least a way to understand and navigate this stuff.
Dr Marc Brackett: This is why the work I do in schools is systemic. It's not like a teacher comes to a training and does it in their classroom — it doesn't work that way. I learned this the hard way. The leaders, the teachers, the students, and the parents need all the same language to describe the work we do on emotional intelligence. It makes a huge difference. The superintendent can go into the kindergarten room and have that same conversation. We all know what these emotions mean and we're all thinking like scientists around emotions.
I want to go back to something you said that I think is important to address. I wish there were a correct answer to how we should feel and what we should do with our feelings. It just doesn't work that way. A funny story about this: I'm giving a speech to 500 police officers who I don't think were told in advance that some guy from Connecticut was going to be giving a speech for three and a half hours about feelings. I walk into the room — it was like out of a movie. "We're welcoming Marc to talk about emotions." And all of a sudden you can see these facial expressions. These guys were slouching, there are guns in their pockets. I'm thinking to myself, what have I gotten myself into?
So I start playing around, telling jokes, figuring out how to meet this group. And the thing that struck me was one guy just stood up and said, "I'm not sure I'm interested in this. But I do want to know one thing, doc — what's the only strategy that works?" And of course, I'm a psychologist. It doesn't work that way. There are many strategies. It's an emotion-by-person-by-context phenomenon. People are so desperate for the right answer. I think the beauty of it is that it's messy. The beauty of it is that it's a journey. The beauty of it is that it's a process. We have to ask ourselves questions over the course of our development: is how I'm living my life working for me or against me to achieve my goals?
I worked as a fitness instructor for 10 years of my life while I taught martial arts. I saw so many people use exercise as a way to escape their reality — just on the treadmill for 10 hours a day with an eating disorder, thinking this is their healthy strategy, and they were ruining their lives. The same thing with food. You can trick yourself into believing things. The goal of this work is to help people pause, consider ideas, and then go back and say, "How is my life? How are my relationships? How's my work going?" That's where the real beauty comes out of the learning.
Emotional Expression in the Modern World and the Risk of Fragility
Andrew Huberman: I'm using my checking back into my developmental biases as a way to ask questions that I hope are relevant to everyone. One of the things I've observed is that there seems to be a broadening of the context in which broader ranges of emotions are allowed. Online is a really good example of all of it. And I think the judgments about — well, this person is losing their cool — reflect all these developmental biases. In some cases there's a legal line, and those legal channels are very interesting.
I think we tend to like thick black lines, clear operational definitions. It does seem like the workplace and school and online have become either more accepting of emotional expression, or it just happens that people are bringing more of their own stuff. And the one thing I worry about — I'm showing my age here — is that as people think about their emotions without having really good strategies to work with them, they lose the ability to be effective. I hear from a fair number of friends whose kid is struggling because they're dealing with depression or anxiety or a cannabis use disorder, and time is ticking. Developmental milestones are real. So the question I have is: how should people think about evolving their own ability to work with their emotions? Because you said it's a process, it's a dance, it takes time — but there's also the need to really show up and get things done in life.
Dr Marc Brackett: I always tell people — there's a school I won't mention by name because this is not a good story. Post the 2024 election, they wrote a note to every student and said, "We recognize that some of you may be feeling overwhelmed by your feelings, and if you need to take the day off, it's okay." I almost had a conniption about that. I was like, I cannot believe this. They weren't a school that I work with. I wanted to call the head of that school and say, this is the worst advice you can give people. People have to learn how to live with difficult feelings. And if we're going to give excuses to people to just be overwhelmed by what's happened and not be able to process it and manage it and move forward in their life, we're going to create a generation of very weak people.
And that's not what this work is about. That's the confusion. It's been politicized in many ways. There are groups of people now that say, "You're making kids fragile by having them talk about their feelings." And I say, it's called emotional intelligence, emotion regulation. We're not letting them sit in their feelings all day long. We want them to recognize: is that feeling helping or hurting them achieve their goals? If it's getting in the way, you need to strategize. The goal is to move forward, not to be stuck.
The same thing with discomfort. It's okay to be uncomfortable. My whole career is built upon being uncomfortable. People saying, "I don't like your work. Your program's going to turn kids into homosexuals. I don't want to talk about feelings." I love that feeling, that discomfort. I sit with it. I don't try to push it away. And I think: Marc, what's your creative solution? That to me is the beauty of the work. If I just got paralyzed by that, where would I go in life? I would be frozen. We don't want kids to be frozen. We don't want anyone to be frozen. I want people to be able to live their lives, experience the full range of emotions, regulate effectively, and achieve their goals.
Andrew Huberman: I'm no psychologist — I've said that four times. But I have the strong feeling that your martial arts training prepared you to be public-facing, because it is a relationship. And I'd like to talk a little bit about that specifically, because you've been this amazing ambassador for emotions — what they are, how to work with them in a healthy way, and to also still show up in life. Not necessarily take the day off. I mean, if you lose a close family member, of course — stay home, take a day, take what you need. But eventually come back. It's an important piece too, to not, as one scientist I used to work with said, "dissolve into a puddle." He used to say when someone's paper came back rejected, "Don't dissolve into a puddle of your own tears." It was that kind of old-school harsh thing, but it came from a place of care — listen, it's not the end of the world. And there have been graduate students who have killed themselves on the basis of their PhD not going well. I know stories about this, sadly.
You've taken some heat for both being a champion of this process and also not giving in to this idea that we're all just supposed to take the decade off. You get it from both sides. Some people would say, "Hey, listen, you're teaching people to be soft." And clearly that's not what you're advocating for. And people have also said, "Hey, you're pushing us to push our feelings away. There's a lot we're really angry about in the world." So how have you personally decided to respond to that?
Dr Marc Brackett: I love challenge. I wrote this piece for Time magazine — and of course when you write an op-ed, the publisher decides on the title, and they like to be provocative. So they called it "The Overreaction Epidemic." And I got slammed for it. "We're not overreacting — the world's coming to an end." And it does feel that way for many of us, between wars and everything else happening, political polarization. It does feel that way for many on both sides. And I say, yes, but running around yelling and screaming at people — how is that helpful? Where is the benefit to you and to the other person to move forward? And so to me, it just makes me think more creatively about the work I do.
And the other side — where people have said that I'm now making people fragile because I'm getting kids and boys to talk about their feelings. I saw somebody say recently that this work causes kids to have mental illness. And I was like, wow, that's a good one. Again, this stems from misunderstanding of the concepts. I'm a big stickler for operational definitions. I want to be super clear about what I'm teaching. I'm not teaching LA. I'm teaching you how to be emotionally self-aware. Would you agree that it matters to be clear about what you're feeling?
Andrew Huberman: Yes.
Dr Marc Brackett: Thank you. Okay. So when you're clear about how you're feeling, and if that feeling is disrupting you from being a good student or a good partner or a good manager or leader, do you think that you should use techniques to help you figure out how to manage it?
Andrew Huberman: Yes, absolutely.
Dr Marc Brackett: Perfect. That's what we teach. It's really clear. When you have conceptual clarity, there's less confusion. What happens is that people get confused — it's gotten politicized. Going back to what we spoke about earlier: this is not obsessive checking in. This is not prying into kids' personal lives. Here's the deal: a kid comes to school with feelings. We all have feelings from the moment we wake up in the morning to the time we go to bed at night, even when we sleep. Have you ever been irritable in the morning?
Andrew Huberman: Definitely.
Dr Marc Brackett: And have you ever noticed — we call it incidental leakage, it's not a great term — but you're irritable, you really haven't processed it, and you get to the studio here, and people are trying to interact with you, but you're not the best version of you.
Andrew Huberman: Definitely.
Dr Marc Brackett: Yeah, that's what happens. And that happens to a kid who's gotten bullied on the bus or had a fight at home. And you want that kid — like every parent does — to be a good learner, have good friends, etc. So now I'm teaching you a process, Andrew, that before you walk into the studio, I want you to take 30 seconds — maybe 20 if you get good at it — to just check in. Take a breath. How are you feeling? Gosh, I'm pissed off at that phone call I had. Okay. How do you want to be seen and talked about and experienced in that studio today? Do you see how even saying that makes you stand still and reflect? Well, I'm going to be this cool dude who's compassionate and creative. Okay. Well, what do you need to get there? And then you walk in and all of a sudden you have attributed the emotion to its actual cause — that stupid phone call, whatever happened — and you're no longer going to displace that or project it or take it out on somebody else. Do you think that would be a useful process for kids, couples, leaders to use?
Andrew Huberman: Definitely.
Dr Marc Brackett: How long did it take?
Andrew Huberman: Seconds.
Dr Marc Brackett: There you go. This is not obsession with feeling. This is an opportune moment. When I come home from work, I work long hours and I'm tired and I'm irritable a lot of the time. I've got to switch my mindset to be the best version of myself as a husband. So that's what we're trying to help people do. I want real clarity. It's articulating what your experience is, recognizing that it may be helpful. If it's helpful, you've got nothing to do — congratulations. If it's not going to be helpful, you need to think about those strategies. Is it labeling it? Maybe. Is it taking the breath? Maybe. There have been times I've taken 15 deep breaths and I'm still irritable. I need a new strategy. I need to call a good friend. I just say, "Hey, Doug, I'm really struggling with this right now. You got some thoughts?" Getting social support is not weak. It's smart. Maybe I need to take another walk around the block to just decompress. Maybe I got a really bad night's sleep and I just need to recognize that I'm never going to be the best version of myself no matter how hard I try, because I haven't replenished the resources of my brain.
Positive Emotions, Excitement, and the Risk of Over-Activation
Andrew Huberman: I love it. I have two reflections I'd love your thoughts on. The first one is positive states and emotions that are also dangerous. When people are feeling over-affiliative, over-comfortable, they sometimes say things that get them into real trouble — they either disclose things or they make jokes that later they pay the price for. Given that some very prominent, very smart people have completely destroyed their careers by it — it used to be called tweeting — there was actually a chair of psychiatry who was fired for saying something that was totally inappropriate and lame and stupid. And you just go, but this person is clearly intelligent. They're the chair of an Ivy League school in psychiatry. What happened? And what was interesting to me were the tweets leading up to it — there was this sort of ease and comfort around joking. And there are certain jokes you just don't make. So I think what you're describing is equally important for not overstepping, not hurting oneself or other people.
Dr Marc Brackett: Activation is activation. Your heart rate and different chemicals get released when you're super excited and when you're anxious. The activation might be the same. The psychology of it is different — one is anticipation of positive things, one is anticipation of negative things. And of course, emotions drive our thinking, our decision-making, everything. How many of us have made a mistake when we were too excited, when we were young? Excitement without regulation is not helpful.
It's funny because going back to the school situation — that's a big problem with a lot of teachers. They're like, "The kid is so excited. They're going to see grandma after school and they can't stop talking about it all day long and it's driving me crazy." So positive emotions can be a pain in the butt too. But teachers are afraid they don't want to squash the kid's excitement. And I say, "Well, let's talk about it. What's the challenge?" He just can't stop talking about going to see his grandmother. I said, "Well, he must love his grandmother. That's a great thing. Have you given him an opportunity to stand up in the front of the class and just tell everybody how excited he is and just let him get it out?" "What do you mean? You want me to give him the throne?" I said, "Yeah. When he can't stop talking about it, say, 'Johnny, I'm going to give you a minute to get up and tell everybody how excited you are, but then we're going to go back to math.'" And of course, two weeks later, I go back and visit. She's like, "You're a magician." I'm like, "I'm not a magician. He just needed an outlet for his emotions. Give the kid the one minute to just tell everybody how excited he is, but also let him know that the expectations I have for you are not changing. Just because you're excited about going to see grandma doesn't mean you don't have to focus." That's the magic of the work.
Andrew Huberman: Be a channel, not a dam.
Dr Marc Brackett: There you go.
Andrew Huberman: I didn't make that up. I learned that when I was a camp counselor. You get a kid that — back then we didn't have concepts of ADHD — you got a kid that would just not settle down. You can't just say, "Hey, sit down." That kid would always be getting in trouble, get sent home. So you give them an opportunity to do something, but then you have to let them settle down. Likewise for the kid that was more creative and less physical. If your entire bunk was a bunch of kids who were super physical, that always would happen, but then you find out this kid had something of value to share with the other kids, and then it would establish his place in the group.
There's a very weird thing happening lately online, which is this obsession with the '90s. I grew up in the '90s, so I was a teen in the '90s. And there's an example I saw recently that I think is really relevant to what you're describing. It was a picture of a classroom sitting around listening to a radio. I remember doing this. It was an actual picture and it said: when the Challenger space shuttle blew up, we all listened to it with our teachers because we were listening to that space shuttle launch. And afterwards, we went back to our lesson plan. We didn't process it for weeks and weeks. And someone said, "Gosh, I missed the '90s."
At my school it was a little bit different. I actually remember the teacher going around the room the next day and asking people if they had anything they wanted to share. And people would share their thoughts. One kid said, "I heard they found a foot." And she was like, "Okay, Garrett, settle down." Some kids were being a bit morbid. But there was an opportunity. And I think that was the last it was ever discussed. We witnessed with our ears — it's not the same as seeing it — a bunch of people blowing up. And it was like, okay, this happened, this is tragic, we're going to talk about it for a bit, and then we're not going to talk about it anymore.
Love your thoughts on that picture. What happened? What's happening now? This kind of emphasis on "let's get back to when things were not as coddled."
Dr Marc Brackett: The world that kids are growing up in now is different. I was not thinking about climate change when I was a kid. I really didn't worry about who was president or not president and whatever's going on politically. I wasn't thinking about wars as much as people are thinking about right now. I wasn't thinking about artificial intelligence and technology taking over my career. So there are real concerns that high schoolers tell me they're feeling, and it's really causing them a lot of stress. We haven't created solutions. We're not teaching them how to manage it. We're going to have to learn how to manage it in this world we're living in.
I want to say one thing that's related, which is the artificial intelligence piece that is obviously prominent right now. About 20% of adolescents now report using technology and AI as a therapist, as a companion. Do I think you can get advice from AI about stress? Definitely. Do I think it's going to help a little bit? Yes. Do I want people to be in relationship with a chatbot? Absolutely not. When I was a kid who was being bullied — spit on in the bus, my head being banged against the windows — and I came off the bus, what I needed was a human being to say, "I love you." A human being to grab my hand. A human being to say, "We're going to get through this together." There's no way technology can replace that.
And I would argue that this obsession with technology to solve our emotional problems is a symptom of the thing we started talking about from the beginning — this fear of intimacy, this fear of connection, this fear of being present with people's emotions. It's so scary for parents to be with their kids' emotions. They never learned how to deal with their own anxiety. They can't deal with their kids' anxiety. They'd rather not know that their kids are feeling anxious. And then I say, "Do you want your kid married to a chatbot?"
The real issue, in my humble opinion, is that we are cultivating more and more disconnection. I think about this developmentally. I was stressed out as a kid, and I was at the age where video games were becoming popular. I got that first little football game — I could spend 10 hours a day on that. That was my way of not being in the real world, of not dealing with my challenges, of my parents not connecting with me. Then I got a Walkman, and then the internet came, and then I got email, and then I got social media, and now it's AI. This is just an endless trajectory of outside influences that are pulling us away from being in relationship. I wouldn't say this publicly — well, this is a podcast — but I never thought evolution could move so quickly. But I do feel that way. All of a sudden, what's happening now — this chronic disconnection, kids preferring to text instead of communicate with their friends — there's research showing anxiety, stress, and depression are increasing consistently, and it comes back to connection and strategies.
Andrew Huberman: A good friend of mine who's a geneticist said it takes a very long time to evolve a species. It doesn't take very long to devolve a species. You can crash a species very quickly.
In terms of people feeling overwhelmed and saying, "I can't do anything right now because of what's happening in the world" — I remember when I was an undergraduate, the '90s were a pretty peaceful time. We had the Gulf War and things like that, but relatively speaking. And a professor whose lab I worked in told me — this was in Santa Barbara, where they burned the bank down during the Vietnam War protests — that in the early '70s and late '60s, you'd be giving a lecture and students would just stand up: "What about the war in Vietnam?" And he's like, "This is a physiology class." And the students would start protesting. So this is not a really new phenomenon.
Dr Marc Brackett: I agree. People feeling overwhelmed, people feeling like the campus was theirs, they're going to make noise — I'm not justifying unlawful protest. I'm certainly not justifying any kind of protest where certain students are being restricted. I'm fundamentally opposed to that. But this notion that people are feeling overwhelmed and young people are full of energy and want people to know how overwhelmed and angry they feel — in the backdrop, the lines are moving, the conveyor is moving forward.
Andrew Huberman: I agree. But I think that in order for people to feel heard and understood in their reaction, I think it's also important that our society just can't sit around protesting all day, and we can't dissolve into a puddle of our own tears. I do want to talk to you about the ways you're formalizing this work, because one thing that I think is wonderful that's happened in the last 10 years or so is that we've moved from the language of consciousness and mindfulness — which I think are great terms — to long-exhale breathing, to the notion that stress can be adaptive, to an understanding that there's a way of working with your physiology to be stronger and yet acknowledge your physiology. I'm feeling stressed now. I need to bring my stress down. I'm exhausted. I need to figure out a way to have more energy, work on sleep, etc.
I don't think it's happened yet, but I think it's starting — that psychology needs the same kind of organizational principles so that people can move past narcissism, gaslighting, claiming everyone they don't like is being abusive. There's been a sort of psychological — I don't want to say collapse, but I don't think people know how to navigate this space. Whereas mindfulness, consciousness, and the idea that we need to take care of our sleep, we need to exercise, we need sunlight — I and others have worked very hard to try and get people to understand: you need to work with your body. You're not trying to conquer your body, but you do need to nudge it and sometimes push it. You don't want to be that person 10 hours on the treadmill who's suppressing everything.
So along those lines, if you are told, "So-and-so's gaslighting me, they're a narcissist, fascism is taking over, and you expect me not to be outraged — we're not overreacting, we're underreacting" — you're a martial artist, you're a very steady guy. Where do you start? What do you say to that person?
Dr Marc Brackett: Well, I think we have to ask them if they're being effective. Is whatever you're doing leading to the change that you want it to have? When someone is yelling and screaming at me, I shut down. I'm no longer present. So they're actually not getting their goal achieved. If they're asking me to do something different or trying to help me understand something, if they can't communicate in a way that I can understand it and want to actually listen, it's not going anywhere.
So I think people need to recognize that I'm a person who is both-and. To give you a concrete example: our program RULER, which is the school-based work that we do, is in all the schools in one district of Harlem, New York — 21 schools, thousands of kids, the teachers, the leaders. The deputy superintendent, Dawn, is my former student. They're facing food scarcity. These are really troubled families in many instances. They're facing racism, poverty, home insecurity. Of course I want to solve for that problem. I would do anything I could to make sure everybody has a meal. At the same time, every one of those kids is being dropped off at school, and we're expecting that kid to thrive for eight hours a day in that classroom. How could I not teach that kid skills to thrive? It's my moral obligation to help that kid be the best version of themselves, no matter what their background is, no matter what their circumstances are. It doesn't mean I'm not also thinking about the larger issues.
And I think that people in our society today are so focused on the big change. Many of us have very little control over the big change. I feel blessed that I have some control over the lives of thousands of kids that are waking up every morning and trying to be the best version of themselves. But they need help. They need strategy. They need teachers who are well, who can be the best version of themselves for them. They need leaders who care about the teachers. The more well people are, the better they're able to be at problem-solving around the larger societal issues. I don't think a dysregulated society is going to solve its problems.
Andrew Huberman: I agree completely and I'm grateful for the work you're doing. I feel like there's always resistance at the beginning. Like, what is this stuff? I don't want a morning routine. I just want to get up and do my thing. I don't want to hear that alcohol is bad for me. When I was coming up in academia, alcohol was everywhere. The happy hour was a source of a lot of problems. I was never a big drinker, so for me it was a great opportunity to go do something else. But if you didn't drink with your senior colleagues, people were like, "What's wrong with you?"
I think what causes a tide change is when first of all someone creates a structure around things that science shows work. You've been doing that, and I love that you're taking this broader through books, through podcasts, into the school districts. I think at some point a few brave individuals start incorporating a structure — oh wow, maybe Matt Walker's right. Maybe "sleep when you're dead" is not a good philosophy. And now the mindset is, well, if you sleep, you're smarter. If you're smarter, you're more effective. And so the people who are doing best are incorporating a structure.
I also think inevitably what happens — and we're kind of edging up against this now — is a pushback: okay, enough structure. I need some freedom. I'm sensing that now. People are like, how many things am I supposed to do? And the idea is, you're not supposed to do them all. You're supposed to do what you need. I feel like the structure is there. I think great examples of people — kids and adults — who are really not just succeeding, not just getting by, but are really kicking butt by virtue of doing the things that you're talking about — that's what's going to lead to systemic change. I think about Steve Kerr talking about meditation. He's Steve Kerr. So people who like basketball are like, "This guy's a stud and he meditates." And so meditation is no longer considered magic-carpet stuff.
For every one of these things, that's kind of how it is. Breathwork — everyone does that now. So I think with what you're talking about, I feel like it's central to everything. I actually worry about our species if we don't incorporate the sorts of things that you're talking about. Could you give us a couple of examples of the concepts that are just core concepts, and then maybe a few practical tools so that people can start to think about this?
Practical Tools: The Dealing-with-Feeling Wheel and the Meta Moment
Dr Marc Brackett: In my book, I have something called the Dealing with Feeling Wheel. This goes directly to what you're thinking about. When people are dysregulated — when parents are dealing with a kid who's dysregulated — they get desperate. "Let's take a deep breath. No, let's go for a walk. No, let's cook together. No, let's play a game." And you go crazy. That's not helpful.
I'll give you an example for myself. For about a couple of months, I've had so much work and I haven't slept well. The last week I've prioritized going to bed early, prioritized a really dark room. I woke up today at 7:30 — it's a miracle. I feel energized. I've felt that way for about a week now. I recognize I'm building new patterns for my sleep. There are some days where I just can't think straight — I'm all over the place. I realize I've been on social media too much, I have 85 things on my to-do list. And I'm like, Marc, you've got to go back to your mindfulness work. You need some breathwork. You need to sit around. You need to take that space. You need to get to that hot yoga class. You need this back into your routine. There are other days I sit around and think, I'm so lonely. I don't talk to anybody anymore. And I'm like, I need connection. I'm desperate for connection.
I think that's the way we have to look at it — there are these components of our well-being that are correlated with what we do to regulate our emotions. There's the self-awareness piece. There's the breathwork piece. There's the cognitive work. There's the relational work. There's the biology of it — the sleep, the nutrition, the physical activity.
One of the things that happened for me in writing this new book was that I became very committed to my own fitness. Martial arts was like teaching 10 karate classes a week — I was younger and in the best shape of my life. Then I got professor-dumpy-professor syndrome. I was like, that is not happening. I'm not getting on that stage looking that way anymore. And I made this major commitment. One of the things that happened was that it became my go-to strategy for my overwhelm and stress while writing my book. I remember saying to myself one day, "Marc, you may not finish this book, but you're going to be in the best shape of your life." And truthfully, it transformed my life.
Here's why I'm telling you that story. In conversations with my friend Marco, who is a trainer, we started having these conversations around fitness identity and how it relates to emotional intelligence identity. And I realized something magical: now at 56, it's been four years that I've done my four workouts a week. I cannot not exercise. This morning — I woke up at 7:30, I've got to get there by a certain time, but I can't show up not having done my workout. I knew I would feel better. I knew I'd be more present. And I did my hour back workout.
But the point I'm really making here is that I identify as a person who exercises. My vision for the world is that we cultivate people who identify as well-regulated. Because if you walk into a room thinking to yourself, "I've got this. Nothing you can say can trigger me. I can manage my emotions" — life is going to be completely different.
And that's why I end my book with this concept that people talk a lot about — being your best self. It really does relate to emotion regulation, and there's good research to support it. The concrete technique is what we call the meta moment. I cultivated this technique with my colleague Robin. She was a therapist working with patients in New York City and she's like, "I teach them all strategies and then they go home and they yell at each other." And I'm a scientist working in schools and everybody's like, "This is boring and nobody wants to do this." The motivation is not there. People don't see the benefit. People don't see that their life is going to be better, that they're going to make better choices, have better relationships.
So what's going to make a difference? Well, as we know, between stimulus and response, there is space. So what do I do to fill the space? The first step is I've got to sense that something's going on. I've got to be aware. Wow, that just triggered me. My automatic habitual response is going to be, "Who the f do you think you are? Don't talk to me that way." But Marc — who identifies as the most well-regulated person in the whole wide world, the feelings master, the emotional guru — he has a process. He automatically takes the breath. He automatically builds a space. He automatically takes a step back. He does not go on that gut. He says, "There's a better way."
But that's not enough. Now I have to think about my best version of myself in my role as a husband. How do I want to be seen? How do I want to be talked about? How do I want to be experienced? Different roles, different selves. And I've helped millions of people engage in this process. When you build the space to think about your best self, what it does is it pulls you away from the trigger and it brings you back to your values. And then through the lens of Marc, the director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence — he's a totally different guy than Marc who grew up in New Jersey being bullied and is triggered. Marc who's a center director is like the Yoda of emotional intelligence. How would he respond to this moment? This is a beautiful challenge. I love it.
And so my point is that we can do that for ourselves. We can help other people do it. We can do it in a moment. Ideally we'll do it proactively. So when you go home or when you come into work, you pause, you identify, and you think about the best version of yourself and you enter through that lens.
My favorite story about this: we teach this in schools, and this one kid — you know when people joke about things, you know they got it. I'm in this school and this teacher is like, "Marc, you know, this stuff is really funny." I said, "What do you mean?" She goes, "Well, this kid was being really not kind to someone on the playground. And I called him out on it and he came over and I said, 'I need to know exactly what happened.'" And the kid said, "Mrs. Johnson, I'm going to tell you what happened, but I need you to take a meta moment first." The kid knew that if she were looking at what he had done through the lens of the best version of herself, she would respond differently. That's the magic of the work.
Andrew Huberman: I think the language around meta moment is something that I'm going to — with your permission — help propagate, because I do think languaging and labels are very important in terms of getting useful tools out more broadly. It occurred to me at some point that there's genuine power for mental and physical health in these practices, and I had to have a conversation with myself and go, you know what, I'm going to take some heat for this, but I'm not going to call it yoga nidra. I'm going to call it non-sleep deep rest so more people do it. The languaging is so key for people to adopt these concepts, and they can't drink from the fire hose. They can't take it all at once. But you're building a curriculum for people, and it's so important.
I'm also so struck by the link you discovered and clearly embody — of internalizing a fit-person identification. You're a coach of a team. You're not going to be a slovenly coach. You're going to show that you also did all this and could continue to do it. Identifying with a certain emotional maturity and regulation level — that is also key. For myself, many years ago, I remember thinking, I don't miss workouts. I just decided I just don't miss them — to the point where sometimes I probably should miss them. I probably overshot the mark at times. I learned I don't train sick. I now take weeks off every once in a while. So those are structured around that. It's not push-push-push to the point of self-destruction.
David Goggins talks about having to have the old Goggins and the new one in order to be the new one, because both live inside his head. He sat in that very chair and explained both of them are in here, but he has to take actions to be one and not the other every single day.
I have a theory right now — tell me where it's wrong, because it's almost certainly wrong. Many people are very in touch with their extreme emotions of anger, sadness, feeling like they're too woke or they're a fascist. And we're really good at putting labels on other people's identities — they're a narcissist, they're a fascist, they're extreme woke — but we don't really think about our own identity as much. We're kind of lost in the emotions. Political parties, people usually know where they stand. But what would it look like to come up with — I'm not asking you to do this on the fly, but I'm asking you to do this on the fly — is there a label that we can internalize? Like, I'd like to be in shape. I kind of know what that is. I want a certain amount of strength, a certain amount of endurance. I want to be able to run for the plane and not cough up a lung. I also want to be able to open the pickle jar. I want to be able to go up the stairs without pain. I have a concept of what that is for me. What is a label that works really well that people can start to fill in the bins of what it is to be an emotionally intelligent person?
Dr Marc Brackett: I think it's emotional intelligence, because again we need concepts that are clear, that can be defined, that can be measured, and that demonstrate predictive validity. Every one of the skills — I wrote a book on emotion regulation because that was the area I wanted to focus on right now, because that is at the top of the hierarchy. It's what you do with the feelings. That's the regulation piece. But to do that you need to recognize your feelings, understand them, label them, decide whether you want to express them or regulate. It's the RULER framework.
Emotion perception — yes, it's complicated, but at the end it's about building relationships. I can't know how you're feeling by your facial expression — you know that from Lisa Feldman Barrett's work. But I can make a hypothesis and I can check in and say, "Hey, did what I say land on you well or not so well? Let's talk about it." The intelligence is the courage to engage.
The understanding is: listen, because of my childhood, I have a different relationship to anger than you do. We learned that today together. I see anger and fear comes into my blood because I knew I was going to get hit or yelled at or punished. You have a different relationship with anger. Anger still is about injustice — period. We have to agree that the definition is about perceived injustice. However, my relationship to that and yours is different. Just like whether you're gay or straight or bi or trans — homophobia to someone who is LGBTQIA is different than to someone who's not. I can't relate if I'm not you, but I can have the courage to have empathy for your experience. That's the understanding piece. I'm not going to ever be fully empathic to your life because I didn't live your life. But I can be curious about it and not judge it.
The labeling piece is having that language — what is really happening here? What is the experience? The expression piece is knowing how and when to express with different people across contexts. Is how I'm communicating landing well? Is my intended outcome a possibility here, or is the person going to just run away? And then the last piece is the regulation — in the end, is this emotion helping or hurting me achieve my goals in life? And if it's going to hurt your goals, you need strategies to deal with it.
Life is difficult. I don't know about you, but this journey of becoming an emotion revolutionary ain't easy. Now it's politicized. But I feel very confident that what I teach is easily defined. It's measurable. And I can show you my own and thousands of other studies where these skills predict the things that we care about in life — whether it's well-being, whether it's leadership, whether it's decision-making, whether it's mental health outcomes. So it's — I kind of have incontrovertible evidence for the effectiveness of it. And so you can still say you're not into it, but you have to be educated first. And once you really understand the value proposition, the why behind learning the skills, I can't imagine that every parent in the world wouldn't want their kid to develop these skills, especially if these skills are going to be the defining skills of who succeeds and who doesn't.
Andrew Huberman: I feel like that's when a culture evolves. I'm just imagining a future not too long from now where the debate — one group is saying they're all fascists with no empathy, and the other side is saying, "Well, they're so caught up in inclusivity that nothing's getting done and people are being treated unfairly." That's the dialogue. And at some point we've got to go, okay, everyone, we understand your positions, but what are we going to do? We've got to move forward. I don't know that there's going to be a meeting in the middle for a while. What is going to happen, I think, is that young people will strive — hopefully — or they'll give up. And I think if the people who strive incorporate these tools and are rewarded for them, then that will become the standard.
Dr Marc Brackett: Exactly.
Andrew Huberman: The obesity crisis was real. And there was also a discussion around inclusivity, and that has now shifted in part because of the GLP-1s, but there's now this idea that being obese is unhealthy. You couldn't say that five or six years ago. I remember during the pandemic a very senior colleague of mine said, "We're seeing people dying of COVID and it's people who are obese." And he said, "But you can't say that publicly." So now there's this acknowledgment that physical health is important and people are striving for that more. I think that's generally a positive shift — it can be taken too far. But there's this weird moment we're in where the name-calling and the labeling of others is not getting us anywhere. The opportunity cost is that we're not actually figuring out what we're responsible for. And I'm pointing fingers at both sides and also at myself.
Dr Marc Brackett: Something important about that is that you don't know someone until you know their story. Once you know someone's story, you start having more interest in them, more compassion for them. My partner made a movie during the pandemic called America Unfiltered — him and his friend, a gay Panamanian running around with a straight Russian around America for a year, interviewing people about what it means to live in America today. They went to Trump rallies and Biden rallies, into poverty, all over America — gun shop owners and Black moms whose kids had been murdered by the police and people who wanted to become American citizens. It was a listening journey. And it was remarkable.
I did a study on this actually. I showed people the expressions of people and had them judge — would you want to get to know this person, how warm is this person — before they watched the movie. And what we found was that people were very judgmental based on race, based on whether they were holding a gun or not. And then you watch the movie and you see the gun shop owner cry when he's talking about his relationship with his father — that the only way he and his father could bond was over guns — and you start hearing his story and you're sort of like, this guy's a really nice guy, actually. And then we tested people afterwards and found that people had completely different judgments of people after hearing them and listening to their stories. That's what we need in our society. We need more curiosity and less judgment. And that goes to ourselves — we'll be much more regulated, we'll have better relationships. We don't have to agree. There's no need to agree. But there is a need to be civil.
Andrew Huberman: What you're talking about are standards. I think what you're talking about is some standards of emotional intelligence, or at least standards for striving. Because if we say there are standards of physical presence — and then you have older people trying to reverse their age and ending up looking totally artificial — it can go too far. But I think having standards of striving, like every kid does physical education because even if you're not going to be a great athlete, it's good to develop a relationship to your body and take care of it — every kid should do emotional intelligence training. Even if you're not going to become Marc Brackett, you can learn to regulate better than your parents. And if you're rewarded — we love rewards, we're obsessed with promotions and money and status — let's face it, people care about that stuff. If it comes from being healthier physically and emotionally, who wouldn't want that?
Dr Marc Brackett: I agree. And it goes back again to being a scientist about yourself. You said this earlier — based on whatever, working out is your big thing, but then you realize, like, I need a little break. It's okay to take a day off. I can go walking on the beach or whatever it is. But that's the reflection process. That's you having that metacognitive ability to say, "Let me evaluate my life right now." I have to ask myself when I don't do my workout: is this an excuse? What's really under this? Am I really tired or am I just lazy right now? That's the work.
I was thinking about this as we were talking — it's a process. In the beginning with the workouts, you look in the mirror. By the way, I took photos of myself every month, religiously. The proof is in the photos. And then sometimes I look at them and I'm like, wow, Marc, you really did a good job. I really got out of shape and I was not happy with myself. I was used to being an athlete as a martial artist. Now I have four years of photos — front, side, back every month. You look at day one and you look at today and it's a completely different human being. I have to look at that once in a while because I still have weird issues and I look in the mirror and I'm like, wait, the picture tells the truth.
But the phases of that are important. The first phase is: can I get through this? Can I go from 3,500 calories a day down to 1,800 calories a day? There's no way to do all that at once. Just like you can't take every strategy in my book and be obsessive about it — I'm going to breathe, I'm going to walk, I'm going to sleep, I'm going to talk positively, I'm going to reach out. You go nuts. It's a process. This is life's work. The good news is you've got your whole life to work on it, because you're going to need it forever.
The first phase is the learning phase — what are the little steps I can take? The second phase is you start seeing a little bit of change. My life's a little bit better. I feel a little better. I'm sleeping better. My relationships are better. I'm more positive. Even during that phase of my workouts, I went through this whole phase of negativity — Marc, you're married for 30 years, you're 56 years old, who gives a damn about your body? And I would do deadlifts and I'm like, this is ridiculous. Deadlifts at 55 years old. And I would catch myself every time: Marc, this is what you do. You are a self-saboteur right now. You've got to pause. Where is this coming from and how are you going to get that self-saboteur self out of here? The best version of you is not someone who does just two sets of those deadlifts. You do all four. But it was so much work. The beauty of working through the discomfort is that identity phase — because now it's not an option.
Andrew Huberman: And so if you just do it and it becomes part of your identity, you don't have those struggles anymore. I love it. And the parallel between physical fitness and emotional intelligence is not something I predicted before this conversation, but I love it and I'm certain it's resonating with people because physical stuff is just so tangible, so concrete.
I just want to thank you for making the emotional intelligence piece so concrete and for laying out these steps. We'll obviously provide links to your books.
The Point of Connection Game
Dr Marc Brackett: I want to play a game with you for a minute though.
Andrew Huberman: Okay.
Dr Marc Brackett: Because one of my former colleagues and I got together a couple of weeks ago — about a month ago — and we decided, people are so disconnected, so we took all the contents of my books and we made a game. It's called the Point of Connection. And it doesn't involve an app or a Wi-Fi connection — you've got to be with people. So here's your first card: what's the best advice a mentor ever gave you and how has it shaped the way you live or work?
Andrew Huberman: Two pieces, briefly. Mike Mentzer, one of the great trainers, gave me the advice to do low-volume, high-intensity resistance training — each body part once a week, train only three times per week, maybe four, never more than 75 minutes, but to really learn to enjoy training extremely hard. I followed that advice for 30-plus years. I look forward to workouts, so I don't work out every day. Amazing advice.
And then the other advice, which is separate from fitness, comes from a guy named Bob Knight, who is a neurologist at UC Berkeley, who said, "Figure out how much work you can do each week consistently, and then find some way to reset yourself each week that is not destructive." And I said, "What's yours?" And he said, "Fishing." And I was like, okay. I've done a lot of fishing because my mom's side, all the men went fishing. I like it — I'm a decent fisherman. But I thought, what is that for me? For me, it's hiking. So for someone else it could be something else. But I taught my lab that — I would teach a career development course where I would pass that on at Cold Spring Harbor during the summer, which is kind of geek summer camp. And I said, that doesn't mean drinking, but maybe one or two drinks — someone said, "Okay, fine." But as long as it's non-destructive, find a way to reset every week and just keep coming back. So both of those things were about consistency and intensity. Two mentors.
Dr Marc Brackett: All right, last one, because I think this one is more relevant to our specific conversation.
Andrew Huberman: I thought you were going to answer a question.
Dr Marc Brackett: What's one emotion you've been carrying a lot lately that you'd like to experience less often? And what might help soften it?
Andrew Huberman: Oh, man. Um, I don't know the name of this emotion. Maybe you can help me. I'll try and describe it briefly. Lately I've been having these moments of feeling so much love and affection for someone, and it opens — and then it shuts. But it's not opening and shutting because of them. And I know this feeling because in a different version of it, I'm about to get a new puppy. He's already picked out, he's already waiting. And I know the difference between what I just described and the puppy — two different things, person and dog. I acknowledge there's a fundamental difference. But I feel this sort of like — I shut it down. So what is that emotion of closing down? I guess love — like shutting off to love. Is that an emotion? Or did I just reveal way more than —
Dr Marc Brackett: Well, love is a feeling obviously. But I think we're going to go back to that opening a little bit about that fear and vulnerability — just allowing yourself to be with it. There's something that's getting in the way there.
Andrew Huberman: So what might help soften it?
Dr Marc Brackett: Time. Yeah, just be with it. Let it ride.
Andrew Huberman: Man, thank you for that opportunity. I actually really appreciate it. I hadn't thought about that until I read this card. Are you willing to answer one?
Dr Marc Brackett: Yeah, sure.
Andrew Huberman: You're the guest. I feel like you should speak last. I spoke a lot today. Who is one of your heroes and what does that reveal about what you value?
Dr Marc Brackett: Well, as you know from our prior conversation, the hero in my life was my uncle Marvin, because he helped me get through my very traumatic experiences as a kid. And what I value about him now that I think about it more was that nothing I could say could startle him. Nothing I could say would make him run away. He was just fully present — a listener and a learner — and provided steady support.
Andrew Huberman: Well, clearly you've internalized that. Marc, thank you so much for coming back. Your work is evolving so fast and you're doing such good in the world. Do come back again. I feel like you're clearly on the move and doing amazing things. And again, I'll put links to your book — your books, plural — and other work. But just want to say thank you as a co-public educator and as somebody who's really doing important work in the world. Thank you. You're a really good man.
Dr Marc Brackett: Thank you. Appreciate it. Appreciate you.