Hey, what’s up?

These insights will help you upgrade and maintain your health and performance even when you’re crazy busy.

Today, you’ll get

1. A summary of the latest Huberman episode with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett (author of ‘How Emotions Are Made’)

2. Actions to take away from it

Note: We will continue with the fitness tips tomorrow (and you’ll get a cheatsheet at the end)

Anyway, let’s understand emotions.

Episode length: 159 minutes. Summary length: 5 minutes.

Have you ever felt so sad you just wanted to sit in your room all day? Or so angry that you want to let off steam with exercise or music?

In this episode, Lisa Feldman Barett explains what your emotion is (and isn't) and how to deal with it (and how not to).

Of course, I can't include everything from the podcast. But by the end of this, you'll know everything you need to know from the episode. There are 4 parts. Let's start.

Part 1: How you misinterpret emotions

We assume emotions are an entity. Like an object, or a chemical. But there’s no scientific data to back that up.

You only have words to describe emotions. And when you say you’re ‘angry’, it could be different from what I feel. There’s no way to measure it. We only know how each other feels through language, facial expressions, or slight shifts in behavior. But all these are unreliable:

1. There’s no fixed meaning for facial expressions. Lisa studied them and found that even frowning isn’t related to anger. A frown = anger is correct only 30% of the time.

2. There are no universal emotions. Each culture expresses internal sensations differently. Some places have terms that describe feelings of things like ‘wanting to squish a baby’s cheeks because they’re cute’ (gugel in German, pronounced Geegil).

3. Scientists oversimplify terms to make them accessible. When you hear someone saying, you get stressed and cross your arms when you’re feeling stressed, etc. etc. it’s not really what’s going on in the brain. But they make up these simplified terms for clearer, albeit inaccurate info.

Put simply, we like to infer what emotions are. But up till now, we never really understood them. We just assumed based on the data. We assume we understand what anger and happiness are.

But these are so broad. To understand yourself more and others understand you more, Lisa recommends you get super-specific with how you feel.

So explain what you mean by sad, disappointed, excited, interested, curious, overwhelmed, whatever. This is hard because the brain loves categorizing. It’s built to condense things down into electrical signals. It’s simply more efficient to do that.

When you look at a building, you don’t pay attention to every single detail of the windows and structure, you just see a building. And that’s how your emotional construct is too. It’s time to break that construct.

Part 2: What an emotion really is

Our brain does something called motor reactions. Some are unconscious, like the cells moving through your intestine right now. Others are more on the surface, like moving your arm or accelerating your heart rate.

Here it gets crazy. Sometimes, after your brain sends a motor response, it immediately receives a sensory response. Let me repeat that.

When something external happens (ex you hear bad news), your brain sends a signal to your heart for what to feel. At the exact moment, your brain is sending a signal back up to itself predicting what it will sense (your heart beating faster). So even before your heart rate accelerates, you feel it.

You created the emotion before the sensory response actually happened. Mind-blowing.

How we teach ourselves to feel the internal things in our body determines how we react to them; before we even get a body response. So it all starts with the brain first, before the body.

If you can pinpoint your habitual thought process and emotional response, you can start to change it.

And now that you understand your emotions better, it’s time to know how to deal with them.

Part 3: How to use emotions to improve yourself

Feelings are there to navigate how we’re supposed to act. Should we fight or hide? Work or rest? This helps you find out what’s best.

Before anything, you need to be ready to change. You can’t think that if X happens, you should feel Y. And it’s 100% justified. It’s not. We spoke about this, it’s what you learned in your culture and with the things you experienced.

That being said, your body doesn’t keep the score. Your trauma in 2006, does not stick and affect everything else (unless you create that emotion for yourself of course).

Emotions are the stories you tell yourself about these sensory experiences. You can learn how to respond to your heart rate increasing. Here’s a story Lisa shared:

It doesn’t mean that you should always flip emotions like this. Sometimes you should allow yourself to experience them. Other times going for a run or listening to music is fine.

When should we do what? Lisa didn’t tell us 🫣 She said it’s just emotional intelligence. I really wish she talked more about this.

It helps to know. Like, how much should we grieve? What can we ignore and what might come back to haunt us later? I have no clue.

Anyway, there’s still some way to have agency over your emotions. You do that by changing the narrative. In some cultures, they celebrate grieving. When someone dies, they don’t cry, they smile. They have a different story.

Last part: How to optimize your emotional states

Your hormones, blood level, and neurotransmitters are constantly talking to your brain. You’re not aware of them. They’re playing under the surface and affect how you feel.

Your brain’s beliefs about the state of your body are important. The function of your liver can change the ‘homeostasis’ of your brain, which can lead to worse emotional reactions.

So keep your body healthy. Lisa calls it the ‘body budget’.

Sometimes you really have a bad day because of your body budget. So to make sure you’re better, on most days, you know what you gotta do. The basics. Good sleep, healthy eating, good exercise.

Tips for a healthy body budget:

• Choose the people around you. “The best and worst thing for someone’s nervous system is someone else’s nervous system”. Choose wisely.

• Know psychiatrists’ new theory on SSRIs: Psychiatrists are noticing that drugs and SSRIs may work for improving emotions. But they start to chip at the neural mechanisms that create those good feelings. Hence, harming the body budget.

• Learn to be flexible on bad days: Instead of optimizing everything, look for ways to maintain the top 3 things even during times of stress, travel, and limited time availability.

That’s a lot. Let’s do a quick summary

1. Words and facial expressions are bad at predicting real emotions.

2. Feelings are body sensations. Emotions are what you believe these feelings infer.

3. You infer them differently based on culture, language, and body budget

4. This leads you to bad self-awareness, faulty decisions, and sub-optimal performance. Which can take a toll on your health.

5. You can change these by explaining feelings in detail, challenging your habitual responses, and improving your body budget 

okay now, how are you supposed to remember all of this? How will you use it to actually improve?

😊😊

You shouldn’t try to do and remember everything. Or keep reading more about it. To get neuroplasticity, you need a slight shift in one thing. So let’s do that now and turn this summary into a quick improvement.

Section 2: Action for right now

Your emotions are always on autopilot. You think ‘Oh I’m feeling good today’ or ‘I’m a bit down’. But these phrases are useless. They put you in the passenger’s seat and are inaccurate.

When you say ‘good’, it can literally mean anything. So, from now on, challenge yourself to go inward and find the real emotion.

For example, I could say I’m feeling frustrated. But what I’m really feeling is, ‘writing this is taking too long and I don’t see the point of it. No one’s gonna read it or get help from it. There are millions of people who can do this better. Lisa has a whole book . I should not be spending this much time.’

I could’ve just said I’m feeling frustrated. But, having the full story helps me navigate my emotions, and maybe even change them to create a better story.

If we don’t know the story you have, you can’t change it.

So find the story.

Hubermanner, what is the emotion/story going on in your head right now?

Answering this will give you a ton of perspective about what you really want and what to do about it.

The simple terms like happy, sad, and tired. Use many words that show you real feelings and desires

Good job

That was long but insightful. Till tomorrow!