Hey, it's friend Mel and welcome to The Mel Robbins Podcast. I am so excited to talk to you today because today I got a topic that I've been thinking about for a while. Have you noticed that people seem way more emotional right now, like fragile? And even in some cases unhinged? And by the way, I would include myself in that description. I mean, just the other day I was standing in line at the grocery store.
And I just started feeling so impatient with how long it was taking. It's not like I had to be somewhere.
I went from feeling perfectly fine to all of a sudden I'm rocking back and forth, I'm looking at my phone, and then I'm looking at my phone again, then I'm just looking around, and then I'm staring at the person in front of me and shooting them that kind of like, come on, come on, look, as she's taking one potato and putting it on the conveyor belt, and then reaching in, grabbing another potato and putting it on the camera. And look, I'm normally a really chill person.
But sometimes I wonder, have the last four years and the pandemic, has it created so many unexpected detours and changes in your life that there's just all of this emotional baggage that's built up for each and every one of us. And now all of a sudden, you're getting derailed by them as you're standing in line at the grocery store? I mean, it's one thing to wear your emotions on your sleeve, but there are some days that I'm like, am I feeling more emotional?
I wish I could be better at responding to my emotions. I'm sure you do too, especially. You want to know the situations where I really wish I had more control over how I'm feeling. It's in those situations where somebody else is making me feel overwhelmed. You know, like when somebody erupts at you because they're frustrated, or do you have somebody in your life that the second that they're mad or upset about something, they give you the silent treatment or make you feel guilty.
Or maybe they apologize all the time. I'm really sorry I was tired. I was frustrated. I didn't mean to act like that. But it doesn't change how controlling or stubborn or volatile they act. And it doesn't change the very real emotions that you now deal with.
And it's easy when it's your sister, because you can turn to your sister and be like, we stop like playing the victim, but you can't turn to the supervisor of the floor in your nursing department or the principal of the school that you work in and say those things. So today, I'm so excited for both of us because you and I are getting a master coaching session and how to understand your emotions and deal with people who cannot tolerate their own.
Hey, it's Renmel and I'm so glad that you're here, whether you are listening for yourself or because someone that you loved shared this episode with you, I want to welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast. Family. It is such an honor to be able to spend some time with you today. And I also want to acknowledge you for something. You could be listening or watching a million things right now, but you chose to spend time listening to something that can help you create a better life.
That is so cool. And in today's episode, you and I are learning a research back method for dealing with difficult people and all of the emotions that you feel when someone is passive aggressive. Stubborn controlling or always the victim and whenever you try to bring up how you feel they are shut down or erupt at you.
Well, today, you're going to learn the mistakes to avoid and more importantly, exactly what research says you can do about it because the fact is you can learn how to navigate this and you can strengthen the skill of what our expert today calls emotional agility. Susan David is an award winning Harvard Medical School psychologist who has been studying emotions, happiness and achievement from more than 20 years.
Her groundbreaking research has concluded that it is your ability to navigate your inner world, meaning your thoughts and feelings and self talk because that inner world ultimately impacts your outer world of actions, careers, relationships, happiness and health. Her TED Talk has been viewed by more than 10 million people. Her bestselling book is emotional agility and Harvard Business Review awarded her the management idea of the year.
She is also the co-founder of the Institute of Coaching, which is a Harvard Medical School affiliate and today. She has taken time out of her busy schedule and she is here in Boston breaking down the science of emotions for you and me and giving you the tools to better navigate your own emotions and exactly what to say to other people when you don't know what to say. So without further ado, please let's give a warm welcome to Dr. Susan David. Thank you. I'm so delighted to be here today.
I am so excited to talk to you. It's good. So is it just me, Dr. David, or is everybody a little bit more kind of uneasy or emotional these days? Absolutely. Someone described this as the word untethered. And to me, that's often what it feels like that there feels like there is an untethering. And it's not an untethering that's a general untethering.
It's I think often an untethering from the self. Really what I mean by this is the world has been changing so quickly. There's a pandemic you mentioned earlier. There's been a war. There's this so much that's going on. And we assume in beings we're not taught in school the science of how to navigate emotions effectively. We're not taught this in the workplace. And so we come to a changing world that feels out of control. And we then are more likely to feel out of control as well.
And so just from the basic research, we know that there is a huge increase in people's experiences of depression, anxiety, burnout, lashing out at others like this is this is real. This is real. This is not just you in your grocery store. This is a real phenomenon. And I think it's a tragedy that we don't speak to these in a skills more.
I love that you use the word untethered because I know for me personally when I all of a sudden have an emotional operas like even standing in line at the grocery store. And I feel this wave of I'm frustrated. I'm impatient. I'm judgy. And then I start to feel judgy of myself and mad at myself for being that way. Whenever I snap at my kids because I've had a stressful day at work, which is not an excuse to snap at somebody else.
Yeah. I feel bad. And I really resonate with this idea that when you cannot navigate the inner world, your emotions, your feelings, you do feel disconnected from yourself. You feeling disconnected because you disconnected from your values. And also there's we often talk about this word hustle and we talk about hustle in relation to work in relation to the external world. But a lot of what we do is we hustle with ourselves. Should I feel this am I allowed to feel it is this okay?
You know, if I'm accepting of myself does this mean that I'm not allowed to think or want bigger things like we have this hustle with ourselves. And the more we hustle with ourselves, the less we are able to be connected with our values, who we want to be grounded and I often think of this metaphor, Mel of of gymnast.
So if we think of a gymnast, a gymnast is a dial, a gymnast is able to respond to what's going on in the external world to the crowd that's clapping or the loud music that doesn't play exactly as she wants. But what keeps the gymnast grounded is the strong inner core. It's this core that allows us to be able to respond to the world effectively.
And so much of my work is focused on how to develop this inner core so that we can navigate what's going on in the outer world with a greater level of being centered and connected and breathing in ourselves. That sounds amazing. Can you give me an example, Dr. David from your own life, where you let your emotions get the best of you. You didn't have that solid core that you're talking about a couple of years ago.
I was writing a book, not emotional agility, another book, and I had worked long and hard on this book. And I went to a conference where a professor, a far more powerful, famous than I will ever be, asked me what I was working on and I told him.
And I'm not going to say who he was, but essentially this professor betrayed my trust and six months later, I was working in Starbucks and I got a text from this professor or a voicemess message actually saying, I hope you don't mind if we use your concept as the title for my book. What? Okay, so I was like, mind, of course, I'm mind, okay, of course, I'm not and I'm giving you this example, because I think it's a real life example of how not to do it.
So I was outraged and the trap door to my heart opened when I realized that this professor's question was not a question, the voice, the book was available that day for presell on Amazon. So I did what many of us were doing the situation, I called my husband to bitch. Okay, and my husband was his a physician and he had a patient lying on the table, waiting for an emergency procedure and he answered the call like this.
Susie can't speak no, got a patient on the table waiting for an emergency procedure. So now what do we do? We're like the one time, the one time I needed him, he's unavailable, you know, the one time when he's called back comes in three days, I'm not going to take it now. I'm going to be this is this is reactive. This is emotional immaturity. Yes, I want to highlight that absolutely everything that you felt. I felt as you were telling that story.
I felt a deep sense of injustice because I felt all the emotions that you felt and I'm the kind of person that when I get triggered like that, I don't call my husband, I send like text and text and text and text, I like text vomit at him.
As you're listening, I know you're not because you're like, Oh, I do that too, I do that too. But the problem with that is that while the texting or the frantic phone call may help you relieve the pressure of the emotion of the moment, it didn't actually help you sell the problem. Yeah, I can see how when your emotion starts swirling or life starts swirling around you, you lose that centering.
And that's why you become super reactive. And so it's super helpful to think about the fact that you could actually teach yourself the skill of a solid emotional core that allows you to stay grounded and in control.
I love that. Yeah. And I think you're highlighting something really important, which is the superpower that you're talking about is being able to experience the wave of anger, hatred, injustice, sadness, feeling defeated, feeling powerless, feeling small, feeling like you're robbed in one instance, to validate it, to notice it.
And then where the opportunity is is to then learn how to strengthen your connection to yourself and to the emotions that you feel so that no matter who is freaking out around you or what you're going through in your life that you are able to find a sense of calm to navigate this skills are powerful.
They are science based and they are practical. So wherever people are right now, whether you rushing around, whether you on your walk, whatever you're doing, I'll just give you one example of what this looks like. Yeah. So when we're rushing around, often what we've done is we've lost a sense of our own connectedness. So we are tactile human beings. And over the past couple of years, we've become more and more disconnected. We match more on our phones, we had social distancing.
There was all of this that went on that disconnected us. And there is something so powerful and so grounding in just putting your hands on your heart. And saying it's hard to human right now. It's hard to be worrying about the lunch box and getting my kids to school and it's hard to human right now. So that is a skill in compassion. And obviously the work goes much deeper, much broader.
But this is a powerful way of being with ourselves, which is completely distinct from, and I allowed a few that well, I should be grateful. And the stuff that we are often taught to do or what social media would tell us to do. When we've got doctors who are going into patients rooms to give bad news, we remind them of their feet on the ground. And we will often ask them, and if you're watching on YouTube, or if you even just listen to this, I've got my hands over my chest.
But yeah, these skills are powerful and they are the absolutely skills that we can develop. Well, I can see in the scenario that you just gave because you do do so much consulting and teaching and advising in the corporate space, in the healthcare space.
And I can see how if you're somebody working in the healthcare field and you're about to walk into a treatment room, and you know that you've got bad news to deliver, that the fact that you're a human being means you're going to feel something about what's about to happen. And you're saying that simply reminding a nurse, a doctor, a healthcare professional to take a breath, feet on the floor, arms across the body. It's hard to be human right now.
And that even just that grounding moment is something that helps you really tolerate the emotion, or like maybe you should just talk a little bit about what are emotions. Yeah. And what purpose do they serve so that as everybody's listening, they kind of understand what you're talking about when you say feeling an emotion.
The purpose of our emotions is to help us to adapt to the world around us. Like that is the purpose of our emotions. So our emotions have evolved to help us to adapt and survive. So what does this mean from the perspective of like how we connect with ourselves. Yes. What this means is that a lot of the language that we have around emotions has actually not been from this functional perspective.
It hasn't been from the perspective that actually emotions are human and healthy and normal and beautiful instead what we have is this idea that emotions are weak emotions are feminine emotions are bad. You know, that's the history that we come with when we think about emotions. And so when we see emotions in that way, we start this hustle with well, if I'm feeling anything other than a so called positive emotion. Right. Then it's bad. That makes so much sense. We have every day thoughts.
The thought might be I'm not good enough. I'm a fraud. We have emotions. We have emotions of anger, fear, grief, all of these experiences that we have. We have stories. Some of our stories were written on our mental chalkboards when we were five years old, you know, stories about whether we good enough, whether we deserve to be loved.
And the pops are college you were viewing these is that they good or bad positive or negative in other words, if you have a thought that's negative, put it aside, it doesn't belong. Think about something positive, right? What my work does is it actually says these thoughts emotions and stories are normal.
They are helping you to understand the world to see what you need a paid engine to adapt to the world. So these are normal. We don't need to get into a hustle with ourselves as to whether we should or shouldn't be allowed to think or feel a particular thing. They are normal. These are beautiful. These are human. If we turn against that and say, I shouldn't think this or I shouldn't be allowed to feel that we unsee ourselves.
Now emotions are data. Right. Emotions are data. They're not directives. In other words, it doesn't mean because I feel something. Now I need to act out. Like tell everyone how I feel because there is a difference between feeling our emotions with compassion, with curiosity and being able to be grounded in them. And then that allows us the space, the distance from the emotion because now we're not hustling to be able to think about who do I want to be?
In this relationship, how do I want to come to the circumstance so that we coming to the world, not in a way that's reactive, but rather coming to the world in a way that is clear sighted and centered within the self.
I was really interesting. So let's talk about how you do this in real life. And I've got a ton of questions from our global audience when they heard that you were coming on, Dr. David, we've got a ton of questions about how you manage your own emotions, particularly in situations where other people are triggering you.
I want to take a quick moment so we can hear a word from our sponsors. And for you listening, don't you dare go anywhere. And I'm not trying to let guilt you into anything. I really want you to stay and listen. I have an incredible question coming up. It's something that you're going to relate to. You need to hear this. We also have more tactics. So please, I'll be waiting for you after a short word from our sponsors after the break.
We're going to pick this right back up. Stay with us. Welcome back at your friend, Mal. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for still being here. You're going to be so glad that you are because Dr. Susan David is here from Harvard. She's talking about how you deal with these difficult situations with other people. And we're going to jump back in. So Dr. David.
This particular question comes from Tina. Tina writes that her son is struggling with anxiety and depression. And she wants to know, Dr. David, how do I separate my emotions from my sons when he's so low. I try so hard not to, but I find things such as struggle when he feels low. And when he's OK, I'm OK. I just don't even know where to start. And it's not just kids. This is for your partners or if your parents are struggling.
I think we all want to know how to support somebody, but not get sucked into their emotions. So how do you do that, Dr. David? Yes. Well, I mean, anyone who's parent hurt anyone who's looked after elderly parents, anyone who's been in relationship with anyone recognize the some of the truth that is said, which is, you know, as a parent, for example, you only tend to be as happy as your most unhappy child.
Yeah, because of course, when we see people in pain, it evokes pain in us. We are social creatures. We, of course, are going to experience pain, grief, agony when we see some adults in pain. So at the same time, what happens when we get stuck in my experience of what that other person is experiencing, we become both unable to manage our own health and well-being, but also we can't really be functional effect of parents, because we are now reactive within the pain.
That is created in that world. So there are a couple of things that I would say firstly, if we think about how to think about children's emotions, because that's probably a really good place to start, we can then start thinking about our own. So children's emotions, often as a parent, it becomes really tempting when we see our children in pain to Russian and fix. I remember Mel Yosega, me taking my son to the pediatrician. He had just been born.
And I remember going and my son was Gugu and Gaga and smiling and happy, and I handed him over to the pediatrician for his shots, and he started to scream. He started to be out rage and he was crying. And I jumped in and I said to him, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay. And the nurse so kindly, so empathetically, said to me, Susie, it's not okay. Your child is in pain. Okay, it's not okay. Your child is in pain. It will be okay. But your child is in pain.
And I was like, I've got a flipping PhD in this stuff, and I did the one thing that you're not allowed to do, which is invalid. So the point that I make here is one of the first things we often try to do with others is we try to control what emotion we think they should or shouldn't be allowed to feel. And often we do it. I can see it's resonating. I can see it's getting off and we do it with good intention. Okay, we do it with good intention.
Now, what is that teach our child? What it teaches our child is what we call display rules. Display rules are the implicit rules that we often have of what emotion is it okay for me to feel in my family. Or what am I allowed to experience? So how does this impact on the child? What it basically does is a display rule.
If every time a child comes home and is upset, you said of the child, oh, you're not allowed to be upset. And you might not be saying that overtly, but you might be signaling that what that's into the child is sadness has no place here. Okay, I need to turn away from myself because sadness is not allowed in this family or anger isn't allowed or emotions aren't allowed.
So now what is the longer term impact of that? Well, how do we become good at regulating emotions? We become good at regulating emotions when we say, hey, this is what sadness feels like. And you practice feeling sad and you practice the sadness that I felt 24 hours ago. I did a I did be I did see now no longer feel sad by allowing our children to feel all of their emotions.
We're not just allowing them to feel all of their emotions. We are actually doing the core work of parenting, which is helping our children to be with discomfort. Helping our children to recognize and be with uncomfortable emotions. And so I think one of the most powerful ways for Tina and for every single person listening is any emotion we experience rather than judging that emotion as that's positive, that's negative, that's wrong, that's right.
It's hard to human. And so for Tina creating a little bit of space where she sees that experience in herself with compassion is very powerful. Because now it's already moving you into the space of the self where you're not in this vortex of both of you struggling, you know, in with yourself. So that is first year, very important skill. Secondly, is often when people experience tough emotions, whether that's with a child or at work or any other relational context.
So start getting hooked by the emotion and there's no space for anything else. So, you know, I'm angry and I'm feeling overwhelmed and there's all the stuff going on for me and there's no space in that for the wisdom that I believe every single one of us has we all have wisdom. All in the piece of night when we are lying in bed and it's just us, there's this part of ourselves that is just us and it's wise and it's capable, beautiful, centered.
And so we need to create this space for that. And when we being clouded by being hooked by a difficulty motion is not space. So some practical strategies is when we are hooked by a difficulty motion. So, what we need to do is to recognize that often we use very big labels to describe what we're feeling. If you just think about something as simple as saying I'm stressed, okay? A lot of people come home and someone says, how was your day? Stressful.
Now, let's deconstruct that a little bit. Your body, your psychology doesn't know what to do with the word stress. There is a world of difference between stress and disappointment. Okay? Stress and I feel unsupported. Stress and I feel unseen. Stress and I'm bored. Okay? There's a world of difference. What we know is that when we label our emotions with greater levels of accuracy, with high levels of granularity, that what it starts to enable us to do is to understand the cause of the emotion.
It's not just stress. It's I'm feeling unsupported. And it also allows us to develop what psychologists call our readiness potential. You know, the readiness potential, when you move away from, I'm not stressed, actually I'm bored. When you're starting to label it in that way, you also starting to say, gee, what do I need to do to now not be bored? So it starts to move you towards goals.
We know that children as young as two and three years old, who have greater levels of emotion granularity. In other words, they're not just saying, I'm mad or I'm sad, but they're able to say, I feel a bit upset. I feel a bit disappointed. I feel even children as young as two and three years old, obviously within their language capacity.
Those children who have greater levels of emotional granularity, 10, 20, 30 years later, those children do better. So again, coming back to Tina, we've got this gentle acceptance of emotion that is crucial in my work. I call it gentle acceptance. It's about showing up to all of our emotions with acceptance and curiosity, not the same as passive resignation, but it's this gentle acceptance.
We also want to start creating space because we can't be wise. We can't be intentional when we just don't autopilot or react. I want to lean into the word, how do I separate my emotions? Yeah. And whenever I use that in my own life, I want to separate my emotions from a child that feels anxious or a husband that is struggling with depression or going through something really difficult.
When you feel that sense to separate, is that a signal that you're getting kind of sucked into and triggered by someone else's emotions and you need to now take a breath and come back into your own body? Because if I listen closely to what you're saying, you're basically saying that of course, if there's somebody in your life that is struggling, it's going to make you sad and make you feel grief and make you feel all these complicated things, which is absolutely normal.
And that hustling with our emotions and being in conflict with what is coming up for you is part of the problem like resisting the actual feelings that you have. How do you separate though? What your son or daughter or significant other is dealing with and needs to deal with and feel for themselves and what you need to deal with for yourself?
I'll just explain in case it's helpful to you listening, when one of our kids is struggling with anxiety, which all three of them have in various levels throughout their life, where my husband is struggling with depression. The emotions that come up for me are so uncomfortable that the way that I would normally deal with them Susan is first try to swoop in and remove all the discomfort for my kids.
I'll take care of it. I'll get you the therapist. We're going to talk about this. You're going to be okay. Because I can't deal with my own emotions. Yeah. And then as soon as I have just barfed all that out at somebody, because I'm going to fix it, fix it, fix it, because I don't want to feel what I'm feeling, because it scares me to death that you're like anxious, because I love you and I don't want you to be in pain.
And now I'm upset about it. Then I go for a drink, because I don't want to feel those things. Yes. I love that question. And I think there's a separation that happens. And by separation, we don't mean disengagement. By separation, we don't mean I don't care about you. Okay. By separation, what we mean is healthy levels of boundaries between me as a person who is allowed to want and need and love and be.
And you, your own person who is allowed to have all of those things and boundaries don't mean that I remove my compassion boundaries with my child. That basically say, I am safe as a person. And you, my beautiful child, are safe as a person, because I'm not going to let your anxiety derail me and make us both unsafe. Because it's a really important thing. So what are we doing when we're setting a boundary? You are wanting to see your child's need to recognize that need and to state that need.
I can see that you need me right now while I'm cooking dinner. So we want to state the need. Okay. We want to number two empathize. Okay. I love you. I care about you. I empathize with you and I can see that what you're going through is really tough right now. Okay. So we're doing all of this need empathy. And third is we are stating what we can and cannot do. I can't deal with this now. I'm cooking dinner.
Can we have this conversation in an hour? Now in that way, you're not being in human. You're not walking away from your compassion. What you're doing is you coupling your compassion with a strong sense of groundedness in yourself and your ability to set boundaries.
Separation is not about distance or I don't care, but it is the most important skill set. What I found in my work is that usually when people have these difficult emotions and you kept to the so beautifully in the example that you gave is often what we have is one of two reactions and people sometimes jump from one to the next. But first is what I call bottling difficult emotions. Bottling difficult emotions is when we experience these emotions, but we start engaging in emotional suppression.
We can do it with our source. We can do it with others. Ignoring and going and watching Netflix. So I don't need to deal with it is an example of bottling doing that once is fun. But when it becomes a default coping strategy, you aren't going to be effective at the world at all. So bottling is this idea that of suppressing difficult emotions.
Pushing it aside in myself, pushing it aside in others, forced positivity trying to fix trying to say to someone, don't worry, it'll be okay. Sometimes you know, leaders will say when people are going through difficult situations, it work. And then you know, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Everything will be okay. Everything will be fine. And I'm like, that is not leadership. That is what we call denial. You know, forced positivity is not leadership.
Force positivity is denial. It's denial. That's like wrapped up in rainbows and sparkles. And then the opposite is brooding and brooding is where we lack this feels terrible is feel so difficult. We get stuck in our difficulty motion. So what we want to do with our difficulty motions to create that distance is firstly this gentle acceptance that I spoke about.
Secondly is when we start getting granular with our emotions, we are now not in the space of like, everything stressful and my whole family life is, you know, up the creek. Right. Instead what we're doing is we're saying, like, I'm feeling disappointed because this is hard. Right. Okay. And just that starts to create a sense of liberation in ourselves and a sense of separation.
And this I think is one of the most powerful things that we need to recognize. I own my emotions. My emotions don't own me. I mean, that sounds great. I don't know that I feel that way someday. I'm like, think about our language. All right. I am said. What are we saying when we say I'm said, we're saying all of me.
100% of me versus I feel sad versus I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. When we say I feel sad when we've said I feel angry, what we are literally doing is saying, I am all of me is defined by the sadness. And well, the metaphor that I use sometimes is, you know, imagine there's a cloud in the sky. When you say I am sad, I am angry. You know, I'm a bad parent. Okay. What we are doing is we are almost being the cloud. All of me is that cloud.
But when we instead start start noticing our thoughts, our emotions and our stories for what they are, I'm noticing that I'm feeling grieving about what I'm seeing in my child. I'm noticing my sense of disappointment that I need to go at a loan here. Okay, that I'm the person that's holding the family together.
Okay. I'm noticing a story, which is that I need it to be a perfect parent here. Okay. So when we move away from I'm a bad parent into I'm noticing my thoughts emotions and stories for what they are, which is they thoughts, their emotions, their stories, their parts of us, they're not all of us.
We've also got our wisdom. We've got our values. We've got our intentions. We've got our wants our dreams. So we need to create that separation and a really powerful way of doing that is using this linguistic separation.
So this linguistic separation, instead of I am said, I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. What you're doing here is you are not the cloud. You are the whole damn sky. You are powerful enough to experience all of your emotions and then to choose who you want to be in that situation.
I'm going to really drill down into this example a little bit further because I think what you've just shared is super helpful when you're the one who is getting brought down and overwhelmed by somebody else who's really struggling.
And it's super helpful to see the need to like literally kind of separate a little bit have some compassion for yourself. Use the linguistic separation of I'm noticing this and myself, which even just acknowledging it does that readiness in terms of pointing you in the right direction to know what kind of support you need.
Is there any thing in your research or recommendations that you have for how you can use even that linguistic separation or what you could say to somebody in your life who's struggling who is stuck in their own emotions. How can I be better at helping someone in my life who is overwhelmed in their own misery or their own anxiety or their own low emotion.
Can you help them like what do we do. So firstly, we're not trying to sense make with anyone while they're lying on a supermarket floor having a tantrum. Like what what what we know from our work is that the simple presence, the the the simple willingness of one individual to be human with another individual. To not try jostle and fix and distract but simple presence automatically de-escalates those difficult emotions.
So we know that. Okay. You can't react with intentionality when you are reacting. In other words, when you being reactive rather than responsive. When we granted ourselves we can respond we we've got our feet on the ground and we are responding. Now there are a couple of mistakes that people make with us. Okay. The first is a spoke about brooding earlier where we get stuck in our difficulty motions. There is something called co-brooding.
Co-brooding is when someone said a really bad day and you come home from work and they come home from work and you have a big fat moan about what's been going on in the day that's co-brooding. So what we're doing here is we are both now stuck in these difficulty motions and there's fascinating research on co-brooding. You know the idea that you got with your best girlfriend you have a big fat moan about your father-in-law and what do you do when you leave that rest on conversation.
You love your best friend. You feel better about your best friend but what is the longer term impact of your behavior on your father-in-law it actually is worse. So co-brooding is where you both now get stuck in a little vent and we know that co-brooding and brooding is actually predictive of longer term depression, of longer term anxiety and it is unhelpful. So this is where this labeling comes in that's very very important.
Dr. David this feels like a great moment to hit the pause so we can hear a word from our sponsors and when we come back we're going to be getting into very specific situations. What do you do when somebody's passive aggressive? What are the specific things that you can say to somebody who is having trouble with their life or their emotions. So many more tactical things that you can actually do are coming up don't go anywhere. I'll be waiting for you after a short break.
Welcome back it's your friend Mel Robbins and today we have Dr. Susan David from Harvard here and she is sharing research about emotional agility and more specifically she's teaching you and me. How to deal with those situations in life where your emotions are taking over. So Dr. David I would love to hear you help us understand what some emotional
and laced behavior in other people is signaling to us because I don't think most adults go up to other adults are like I'm really lonely. Here's an example. If this happened to a friend of mine where she just wanted to have a couple people go out for her birthday just three or four friends. Yeah and some other friends found out about it and she gets a passive aggressive text thanks a lot for inviting me.
That is clearly behavior by another adult that is driven by emotions that are uncomfortable for them when somebody kind of is emotionally volatile or passive aggressive in the way they communicate with you. What is the deeper thing that you could probably assume somebody's feeling or dealing with so that you can tap into that compassion instead of like oh she's jerk you know.
So I think this is really important people don't aren't going to say like I'm lonely but if we think about for example the loneliness then move it into that example. What is learning a son posting loneliness is unposting the greater need for intimacy and connection okay that's what it's unposting yeah boredom is often son posting a greater need for growth anger you know this idea of we've got to like not have anger.
So if we're doing this often sign posting a need for equity or fairness or that some values are being traversed so if we move away from the idea that emotions are good or bad or that I'm only a lot of them actually what we do is we move into the space where we start saying for me as well as for the friend in the restaurant is like these emotions are sign posting our needs and our values.
It's very very powerful now the person might not say I'm lonely or gee I feel excluded instead they're doing it in this passive aggressive way. But you are able to as a human to another human start saying like instead of what I'm seeing about the emotion what is the function of the emotion what is the emotion trying to tell us about our needs and our values. And the space of compassion is the space of saying gee.
It is actually hard to human and gee it actually when when you feel like you part of. Our group of friends and you came out to dinner and you happen to see me with a smaller circle of this group having a birthday party and you realized you were invited that kind of hurts okay a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot so what is the function of the emotional what is the function of the text. The function of the text is saying do I matter or am I am I a small part of us.
And we we often what we're doing in reactive mode is what do we do we get the text we say oh my god can you believe she didn't understand that I just wanted to be a by myself we maybe text our other friends we start labeling them as toxic. We start there's a there's a very powerful way that we often we call it the fundamental attribution bias where we start saying what that person's experiencing is now her personality.
She's needy she's all of these things okay so what we often do when we react of mode is that person's defensive now I'm defensive and now we in this weird escalation. Something that doesn't need to be a different way of being in that space.
I want to know how you handle that because I love the word escalation because you're right I think we all have someone in our life where you've been on the receiving end of oh see your embossed in Mel thanks for calling me like I get one of those right now I'm not calling you by the way but exactly that's an analogy just certain your immature emotion my immature emotion escalates and so all the time how do you I think this is like I think this moment right here
whether it happens at work yeah or it happens with a friend group or it happens with a significant this is everything so you see the dishes in the sink with your roommate and you emotions fly up because they didn't do it again and you had I think if we can give the person and me escalation how do you escalate this moment because it is so easy to just go like what the like when this happens to you and you feel someone else's emotional reactivity yeah you deal with it well just
to be clear I've got an if and PhD and this stuff but it doesn't mean that I get it rattle the time okay just but the approach do you explain yourself or do you just validate the emotion I think it depends on this the situation I think sometimes it's completely okay to say you know Georgia was in town and the three of us decided to go out right I don't think you have to explain but the the crux here is understanding the emotion behind the surface level pass of aggressiveness is what engages you
in in a clean relationship and so much of my work is about moving into cleanness with ourselves and with others accepting my emotions all of my emotions okay I don't need a hustle separation between me and my difficulty motions because I own them that don't own me what is that look like it's the granularity it's the instead of I am noticing what I'm feeling okay then understanding the
why behind difficult emotions what the funk what is the emotions signaling to you about your needs and your values and then lastly how can I move forward with those difficult emotions even if it's uncomfortable even if it requires huge amounts of courage because it's walking towards my values and these skills are skills that enable us to be clean with
ourselves but also to be clean with others okay you are allowed to feel what you feel I'm helping you in this text message and whatever example I'm helping us to understand what's going on for you that you're not just being a silly little bit actually you heard because you care about me I'm helping you to notice that you are feeling that but I love you okay and I'm helping us to also think about how do we want to be as friends
like what is friendship look like friendship often means that we go towards the values of having a difficult conversation I want to just highlight this part of the conversation because this is an example of what you are dealing with in life every single day it's an example of these moments that I deal with every day in my life where something happens someone has an emotional response and now you're either going to react or you're going to take all this and put it in
pausing I want to just share what I just got from you doctor David it's so easy to roll your eyes and why is this person text me this person so dramatic this person is always the victim and start to label them and push them away and what I just got listening to you is if you practice these skills and you come back to this emotional core think about the gymnast center yourself pause
and then you can ask yourself what might this person be feeling like the passive aggressive the immature behavior there is something deeper underneath that and if I had to guess what's underneath somebody who's even texting me I see your boss and things is they're trying to connect even though the way they're doing it blows that deeper and more profound
underneath either the silence passive aggressive all this stuff that irritates us is just another human being who can't process their emotions and who wants to somehow connect with you yeah and I think having that reframing helps me be a better human it helps me bring more compassion and it also helps me diffuse the emotion in the moment and be able to reach out to this friend of mine
and say you know something like I can see that you're upset let's have a conversation about it tomorrow because I certainly don't want you to feel that way thanks for reaching out what a wonderful way to handle it certainly beats turning your friends at the tail and you're like what a jerk that is more emotional immaturity like I feel like there is an epidemic of avoiding difficult feelings and avoiding difficult conversations and shoving it down
and of coding and then twitching and of bitching and of whatever yes I'll tell you what I do I literally will go on text and we've all been on the receiving end of the turn like you just fit it fit and why am I venting because I can't tolerate how I'm feeling yeah so I dump it on somebody else
yeah I have one other question I wanted to ask you what is the connection between emotions and people pleasing brilliant question love it a huge part of the connection relates back to what we described with display rules if we think about our most vulnerable place we've been in the world it has been typically with our caregivers okay and so what we learn with our caregivers is these subtle cues about which emotions will get us the kind of love that we need
and which emotions are too much for them need to be hidden from them and will ultimately threaten the most important relationship in our life so we start often attaching experiences of difficult emotion to caregiving so when I feel sad which was something that I was not really a lot of feel when I was when I was younger
but now I'm seeing that in someone else I need to take it away a lot of people pleasing stems from a discomfort with being with discomfort of course I want to disappoint you that's why I'm going to bend over backwards I don't want to disappoint I don't want to be sad I don't want to so all of these
display rules of things that we didn't want I don't want to be angry I don't want you to be angry because I didn't want my parent to be angry a huge part of the emotional work is to go beyond the surface reactivity the emotional immaturity that you spoke about earlier and to develop a deep ability to be with discomfort especially emotional discomfort because in the space of discomfort is where you develop the skills that help you with distressed tolerance help you to understand your values
help you to understand other people's values help you to have a difficult conversation I think the work is about being able to be with discomfort but it's not discomfort for the sake of it it's not I'm just getting up and I'm just pushing myself to burn out it is discomfort because it aligns with who you want to be as a person it is discomfort that moves you to your values to the things that you care about in your life
I have this question and I'm curious if you have a specific strategy somebody could use she writes in my brother-in-law is it a relationship with my best friend they've been dating for two years I'm trying to process my emotion about it but I'm constantly experiencing anger annoyance and emotional discomfort and I think we see this when a parent remarries we see this with stepkids we see this with a new manager
so if you've been trying to process emotions and you can't seem to stabilize them or like what would be a strategy as a psychologist you would recommend somebody do a lot of the important part of my work is not to try force positivity in yourself a lot of us try to say I shouldn't feel that I should just be happy for them
force positivity again rainbows unicorn sparkles but it makes us less resilient it makes us less effective second is we can look at it as discomfort and I think it's powerful and it's true I'm trying to change the emotion granularity piece what is it that is leading to the this discomfort is it a sense of loss in your girlfriend in the relationship is it a sense that you were once thickened together and now it feels like there's an interloper
I think there's something so powerful in just understanding what is it that is happening here I think a lot of people feel very territorial about where they're at and whether it's a friend coming into work at the same restaurant or it's now somebody dating someone that's connected to the person that you're dating or working like that you start to get really threatened by it
and it's often coming from insecurity and I'm not saying this case it's insecurity but it's often this this idea of you know remember when we were at school and people kept saying our teachers kept saying keep your eyes on your own work keep your eyes on your own work
it's very important for us to keep our eyes on our own work and what I mean by that metaphorically if you know what you stand for if you know what you care about if you have your own back if you love yourself if you kind to yourself and compassionate to yourself if you understand what your values are you are going to be more able to keep your eyes on your own work
because you're not insecure about how your work compares to someone else's so I think that very often when there's this insecurity or where it's a sense of being territorial it's coming from pain in the self from lack of groundedness in the self
and part of the work thing is understanding the what's and the wise of that so that you can move forward not driven by your emotion but stepping into your values about how you want to be with this person how you value the friendship what boundaries look like in that friendship asking the difficult questions that we all need to do
and I often think about this idea which is solving and fixing and controlling or a core part of the problem how so how is controlling we live in a world that tells us that when we don't like our cell phone we can buy you one if we don't like our friend we can just cut them off
okay if we don't like our difficulty motions and thoughts we can just replace them with positive ones controlling actually paradoxically makes us weaker and what I mean by controlling is not saying like what can I control what I'm trying to control what you are doing is you are gripping the steering wheel as you drive down the street trying to control but actually most of the ability to manage the world effectively is moving away from trying to control is a false horizon
life's beauty and its fragility are interwoven and the only way we can be whole healthy people is when we move away from trying to control and instead try to be with what is the skills of emotion agility or the skills that help us to look inwards not judging ourselves with our difficulty motions think about who we want to be and it's about this level of compassion how am I feeling how's the other person feeling it's about curiosity
what's going on what's the function what's really happening here and it's also about courage because we don't live in a perfect world and sometimes people will say I just wish the stress would go well wish the stress of the difficult relationship would go away I just wish the stress of my difficult job would go away and I understand that
the idea of never having your heart broken of never not getting the job you wanted that is it did persons goal what is a dead person's goal we will have and I'm saying this facetiously you know we will have many years when we are dead not to have a hearts broken never to be stressed never to not get the job
we don't get to have a meaningful career to meaningful relationships to raise a family we don't get to leave the world a better place without stress and discomfort discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life and these emotional jealousy skills of the skills that in able us to navigate these difficult emotions to connect with who we want to be and to move forward with courage did you hear that
discomfort is the price of admission for life so when dr. David is saying you don't want a dead person's goals a dead person doesn't feel anything you want to live a full life you got to lean into the discomfort you want to have better friendships you got to be willing to have the uncomfortable conversation about the deeper thing you're feeling or the deeper thing that your friend might be feeling yeah you want to be more successful
the number one skills she said it over and over and over again is learning how to tolerate change learning how to tolerate difficult emotion and what I love about what I'm learning what I hope you're taking away from this is that you can feel all the emotions which we've learned or valid
their natural part of life but you don't have to act on them immediately you can come back to your center and you can feel something that's uncomfortable and you can still then choose and decide to make a decision or support somebody or respond in a way that is aligned with your values
what is the closing wisdom that you have for the person listening what I would say is this when I was little when I was around five years old I experienced what so many young children experience which is you start becoming aware of your own mortality at around five at five at around five you are a serious old kid oh is a serious kid but but but it's it's it's a lot of work shows that at around five years old
children start to become aware of others yeah aware of others mortality and of their own mortality it's a developmentally normal phase that kids go through there's a lot of anxiety that comes with that when I was five you can imagine I was fun to be with I started to recognize that my parents wouldn't be around forever and I would not often night often night find my way into my parents bed I would lie between them and I would say to them promise me you'll never die
promise me you'll never die now as it turns out 10 years later my father when I was 15 did die of terminal cancer my father could have done the avoidance he could have said don't worry about it everything's fine you know don't be such a baby there's nothing to be scared if you could have done all the stuff that we've spoken about which is the avoidance
the avoidance the emotional immaturity the pitta pitta of you know text to text like all the stuff the groups spoken about but my father didn't my father said this to me he said to me Susie we all die it's normal to be scared
and what he was doing was number one saying to me there's no emotion that you need to fear okay I see you I see your fear and I'm with you in that fear what I understood he was saying is courage is not the absence of fear courage is fear walking courage is the ability to hold the difficult emotions
the upset the anger that you or someone else feels the anxiety it's holding those things and walking towards what matters to you in your life in your love in your relationships and your work and what matters to you is what is of values to you so courage is not the absence of fear courage is holding that fear and moving towards what is important Dr. Susan David thank you so much for spending so much time with us today
thank you thank you thank you for having me and to you listening I want to make sure that in case nobody else tells you I wanted to be sure to tell you that I love you and I believe in you and I believe in your ability to take everything that you just learn today
and support yourself in being emotionally agile and show up to life in relationships with greater compassion for what other people may be signaling and use all of this wisdom to create a better life all right I'll talk to you in a few days what up girl yeah let's do that let's do exactly what you're doing here where I'm like sitting and talking and walking and here we go don't go anywhere I'm going to be waiting for you after a short break
wait hold on you know what I mean or something like oh oh fabulous oh and one more thing and no this is not a blooper this is the legal language you know what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you this podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes I'm just your friend I am not a licensed therapist and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician
professional coach psychotherapist or other qualified professional got it good I'll see you in the next episode ditcher