Permission to Feel

Marc Brackett (2019).? Permission to feel: Unlocking the power of emotions to help our kids, ourselves, and our society thrive.? Celadon Books: New York

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1? Our emotions are a big part – maybe the biggest part – of what makes us human

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2? When we deny ourselves the permission to feel, a long list of unwanted outcomes ensues

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2-3? According to a 2014 Gallup poll, 46 percent of teachers report high daily stress during the school year.? That’s tied with nurses for the highest rate among all occupational groups … From 2016-2017, more than one in three students … reported diagnosed mental health conditions … Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the U.S., affecting 25 percent of children between thirteen and eighteen years old … Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide

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3? We seem to prefer spending more money and effort on dealing with the results of our emotional problems rather than trying to prevent them

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11? if we can learn to identify, express, and harness our feelings … we can use those emotions to help us create positive, satisfying lives

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12? we’re losing the habit of pausing to look inward, or to one another, for answers

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12? It’s one of the great paradoxes of the human condition – we ask some variation of the question “How are you feeling?” over and over, which would lead one to assume that we attach some importance to it.? And yet we never expect or desire – or provide – an honest answer

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13? aside maybe from physical health, our emotional state is one of the most important aspects of our lives

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17? remake education so that it includes emotion skills – so that professional interventions become less necessary

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17? emotional intelligence … Peter Salovey … Jack Mayer … Daniel Goleman

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19? five skills … recognize … understand … label … express … regulate

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23? Our emotional lives are a roller coaster … We can’t spend every minute focused on our emotions … However, we can’t go through life ignoring what we feel or minimizing its meaning.? All emotions are an important source of information about what’s going on inside us … We call that a feeling

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24? in 1990 … Peter Salovey and John Mayer … emotional intelligence … They defined it as “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.”

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25-26? Emotional intelligence was a synthesis of three burgeoning areas of scientific research, which demonstrated that emotions, when used widely, supported reasoning and complex problem solving.? First … Charles Darwin’s functional view of emotion … emotions signal valuable information and energize adaptive behavior central to survival … Next … Research showed that emotions give purpose, priority, and focus to our thinking … third … a search for “alternative” intelligences … intrapersonal … interpersonal … “successful intelligence” … creative and practical abilities … “social intelligence” … By the late 1990s … Neuroscientists, psychologists, and intelligence researchers came to agree that emotion and cognition work hand in hand to perform sophisticated information processing

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27? five areas where our feelings matter most … First … our attention, what we remember, and what we learn.? Second is decision making … Third is our social relations … Fourth … our health … fifth … creativity, effectiveness, and performance

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27? All learning has an emotional base.? – PLATO

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27? our emotions affect our attention and our memory, which together determine our ability to learn … emotions determine what we care about in the moment

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28? negative emotions … our brains respond by secreting cortisol

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29? positive emotions … serotonin, dopamine, and other “feel-good” neurochemicals

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29? different emotions serve different purposes for learning … Negative emotions have a constructive function: they help narrow and focus our attention

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30? students are tired, bored, and stressed … teachers are frustrated, pressured, and overwhelmed … emotions determine whether academic content will be processed deeply and remembered … it’s what drives our persistence

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31? Most decisions are attempts at predicting future outcomes … In reality, our emotions largely determine our actions.? If we’re feeling something positive – confidence, optimism, contentment – we’ll come to one conclusion about what we ought to do.? If our emotions are negative – anxiety, anger, sadness – our decision may be quite different … Negative emotions make us weigh facts carefully and err on the side of caution.? Positive emotions, on the other hand, fill us with the sense that life is going our way

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32? in a study on medical school admissions, it was found that applicants were more likely to be admitted on sunny days than when it rained

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32? teachers … The positive-mood group marked the essay a full grade higher than the negative-mood group

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32? “the incidental mood bias.”

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33? anger makes people more optimistic than does sadness

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33? “thinking fast and thinking slow” concept … quick decisions are particularly susceptible to our moods and unconscious biases

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34? No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care. – THEODORE ROOSEVELT

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35? our strongest emotional reactions dictate the nature of all our relationships

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35? Human relations are infinitely complex … but the basic dynamic is rather simple: approach or avoid … Relationships are the most important aspect of our lives

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36? When we’re expressing positive emotions … we do so in a way that draws in other people … but that depends on their emotional state

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37? for many people on the autism spectrum: they have difficulty reading the cues and coming up with a fitting response, and they have difficulty sending cues that other people understand

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38? physiological reactions in our brains … affect our physical health, which has an impact on our emotional state.? It’s all connected

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39? The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis … is where certain hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol, originate

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39-40? The difference between good stress and bad stress mainly has to do with duration and intensity … short bouts of stress can boost immunity and raise levels of cancer-fighting molecules

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41-42? In one study, people who scored low on positive emotions were three times as likely to become sick after exposure to a virus than those who scored higher.? When the latter group did get sick, their symptoms were less severe

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43? Daily, each of us has many chances to be creative, to act in new and thoughtful ways.? It’s what makes life an adventure.? But there can be something scary about creativity too

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44? In a poll, fifteen hundred corporate CEOs said that an employee’s creativity was the single best indicator of future success … Creativity also includes two other factors: performance and effectiveness … The creative process needs to be followed by concrete action

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44? Kyung Hee Kim … Creativity among school children … has been in decline for the past two decades

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45? Paul Torrance … found that scores on his famous creativity tests were a better predictor of adult creative achievements than IQ

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45-46? convergent and divergent thinking … In schools, it’s hard to be creative when convergent thinking … is most highly rewarded … project-based learning and design thinking … includes (1) defining a problem; (2) understanding the human needs involved; (3) reframing the problem in human-centric ways; (4) generating a multitude of ideas; and (5) a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing

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46? divergent thinking results in feelings of joy, pride, and satisfaction … feeling good encourages us to act creatively, which makes us feel even better

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46? modest levels of stress have been found in some cases to significantly improve creative performance

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46? Creativity is especially important in the face of adversity

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47? Zorana Ivcevic Pringle … “Emotions are both the spark that fires the engine of creativity and the fuel that keeps the firing burning when other people try to douse it, or the kindling runs low.”

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49? When we are making a decision, there are two kinds of emotions: integral and incidental.? Integral emotions are directly caused by the action at hand … Incidental emotions have nothing to do with what’s going on

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55? acronym – RULER

The first skill: Recognizing the occurrence of an emotion …

The second skill: Understanding … the cause of emotions and better predictions …

The third skill: Labeling … precise terms … reducing misunderstandings …

The fourth skill: Expressing … understand … unspoken rules for emotional expression …

The fifth skill: Regulating … monitoring, tempering, and modifying emotional reactions in helpful ways

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56? emotional intelligence is as important as IQ

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57? male students’ estimates of their scores were significantly higher than those of the women, despite the fact that men did worse than the women when they took a performance-based test

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58? “emotion” and “feeling” … there are some subtle and important distinctions

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60? meta-emotions

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60? A mood is more diffuse and less intense than an emotion or a feeling but longer lasting

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61 ?On the road to becoming emotion scientists, we need to avoid the temptation to act as emotion judges

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62? Carol Dweck … book Mindset … fixed … growth

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63? social media … amplifies anxiety

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63? Well-being depends less on objective events than on how those events are perceived, dealt with, and shared with others

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63? Young school-aged children with more developed emotion skills have fewer conduct problems, are better adjusted, and perform better academically than children with less developed skills

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64? There is also data suggesting that emotional intelligence is related to higher SAT scores, greater creativity, and better grades among high school and college students

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64-65? In two studies, emotion skills correlated with leadership emergence … Other studies have shown promising associations between emotional intelligence and “transformational” leadership

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72? RULER … Recognition … how to recognize emotions in ourselves and others with accuracy

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72? until we can recognize our own emotions, we can’t learn the skills necessary for regulating them

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74-76? The Mood Meter … James Russell … The horizontal axis represents the degree of pleasantness … The vertical axis represents the degree of energy … The top right quadrant is yellow … happy, excited, optimistic … The top left quadrant is red … angry, anxious, frustrated, or scared, but also passionate, assertive, competitive … The bottom right is green … peaceful, contented, serene – and mellow … And the bottom left is blue … sadness … apathy … depression, but also empathy and concern

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80? studying facial expressions for their emotional content … [is] the basis for all human relationships

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80-81? Paul Ekman … 1970s … all human faces express six “basic emotions” in much the same way:

Happiness

Sadness

Anger

Fear

Surprise

Disgust

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81? Dacher Keltner … twenty-two emotions are recognized in the face at above-chance levels (that is, above 50/50) across different cultures

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81? We also rely on sound for hints of someone’s emotional state

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82? emotions also can be detected in touch

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83? a sincere smile tends to last for a few seconds, whereas a polite or disingenuous smile tends to last for just a quarter second

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84? Our perception of emotion is easily swayed by the opinions of others

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84? There are also other prejudices – gender stereotypes and racial implicit bias … that influence how we read emotions

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84? “attribution bias,” meaning we observe someone’s cues or behavior and wrongly attribute them to our own emotional state

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85? Are we actually getting worse at reading one another’s emotions?? There’s evidence that says we are

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86? We … have to allow for the possibility that we can be wrong

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88? We adults want to believe that the emotional lives of children are less complex and messy than our own, but it’s not so

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89? “understanding” … Of all the five RULER skills required to be an emotion scientist, this is one of the most challenging to acquire

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89? Understanding emotions is a journey.? Possibly an adventure

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90? If we’re faced with the emotions of someone close to us … there’s a distinct possibility that we are somehow complicit

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95? joy … contentment … the constant pursuit of happiness can be self-defeating … the more we value happiness, the more likely we are to feel disappointed … we need to distinguish between the different kinds of happiness

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98? Understanding is where the science of emotion really becomes a pursuit

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99? We focus on behavior rather than on what might have caused it.? It’s like treating the symptom and not the disease

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100? If you aren’t asking questions, you haven’t acquired the skill yet.? If you aren’t listening to the answers, you aren’t using the skill

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102? Each emotion has what psychologist Richard Lazarus termed a “core relational theme” – a meaning.? The only way to get at the meaning of an emotion is to learn the why – how someone perceived the situational factors that produced it.? Behavior alone is a clue to the riddle, not an answer

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103? Why?

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105? In recent years there’s been discussion of a “vocabulary gap” between rich and poor families.? Children growing up in higher-income environments are exposed to more words than their poorer counterparts, and this gap may help account for future educational performance, earning power, even intelligence

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105? “if you can name it, you can tame it.”? Labeling an emotion is itself a form of regulation

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105? Labeling is … when we zero in on exactly the emotions we’re experiencing, to the point where we can name them precisely

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106-107? Labeling our emotions with precise words does four main things:

·??????? It legitimizes and organizes our experiences …

·??????? It helps others to meet our needs … empathy is more available.

·??????? Similarly, it helps us to meet the needs of others …

·??????? Finally, it connects us to the rest of the world

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107? There are … around two thousand words in the English language that broadly refer to emotion … But then there’s the question of how many of those words we actually use … our emotion vocabulary is woefully insufficient

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108? our brains process positive and negative feelings differently … we experience negative emotions more deeply

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108-109? There’s ample research showing that children who can accurately label their feelings enjoy more positive social interactions than kids who cannot, who experience more learning and behavioral problems

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109? Matthew Lieberman … “incidental emotion regulation,” … Labeling had reduced the unpleasantness

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110? The term granularity provides a useful way of thinking about how we label our emotions … Lisa Feldman Barrett … participants who were deemed granular were better able to differentiate their emotional experiences.? Subjects who were low in granularity – called clumpers – were less skilled at differentiating emotions … granular individuals were … more likely to find positive meaning in negative experiences.? They were also better at emotion regulation

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110? The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis … maintains that the language we speak determines our worldview and even how our minds work

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111? Anna Wierzbicka … contends that we rely too heavily on the English language, which might actually keep us from attaining greater self-awareness

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111-112? German … schadenfreude … no such term in English …

Litost … Czech …

Iktsuarpok … Inuit …

Hygge … Danish …

Kvell … Yiddish …

ya'arburnee … Arabic

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112? there’s no word for emotion in Tibetan, Tahitian, Bimin-Kuskusmin, Chewong, or Samoan

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112? In Mandarin, there were more than one hundred different shame-related terms and phrases found in one research article

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113? Imprecise Labeling can lead us astray as we search for ways to resolve negative emotions

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114? anxiety, fear, pressure, and stress … distinct feelings, each with its own source

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115? jealousy and envy … are often confused.? They’re not interchangeable terms

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116? difference between anger and disappointment

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121? With Expression, we reveal ourselves.? Now we’ll have to decide: Can I share this?

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122? E can be the scariest of the five letters … On the one hand, it’s important to be honest and forthcoming.? On the other … honest expression has the potential to distance us or make both our lives significantly worse

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124? We have a natural bias in favor of displaying positive emotions, especially in the United States, which … often backfires and makes us less happy

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125? we’re so reluctant to share how we feel

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126? Emotional suppression is a major force in schools

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126? The research is clear: the best way to engage students is to develop relationships, not prevent them, and the currency of relationships is emotional expression

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127? Researchers have identified the following in the newborn’s supply of emotional expressions:

·??????? Interest

·??????? Enjoyment

·??????? Surprise

·??????? Sadness/distress

·??????? Anger

·??????? Discomfort/pain

·??????? Fear

·??????? Disgust …

Infant emotions are focused on the basics of survival … This underscores the primary purpose of emotional expression: it keeps us alive … demanding attention to our feelings is a necessity, not a choice

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127? it’s scary to hear other people express their feelings, because we may have to accept some hard truths about ourselves

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128? we find it oddly ennobling when someone hides their unhappiness

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129-130? Psychologists and social workers use the term emotional labor to describe the effort required to manage the way we express our feelings … Arlie Hochschild … managing how and when we express emotions does require sustained effort, and it wears us down … Research shows that this so-called surface acting leads to burnout, lower job satisfaction, and even increased anxiety and depression

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130? “display rules”

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131? We’re all expert at sending the unmistakable signals of indifference … And so a key skill involved in Expression is listening.? Not just hearing

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132? men … likely feel as much as women do but keep more pent up inside

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132? Women have always been expected to smile … women … see [this] … as a form of harassment

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132? Both genders cry

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132-133? Race is another strong influence … African Americans … the group most entitled to anger feels least able to express it, while whites enjoy what’s known as “anger privilege”

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134? Power inequality is a strong influence

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134? Culture is another strong influence

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135? Jeanne Tsai …. Cultures are more likely to express the specific emotions they value

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137? Expression doesn’t affect just our emotional lives – there’s abundant research into the physical and mental benefits of expressing emotions

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141? Emotion regulation is at the top of the RULER hierarchy.? It’s likely the most complex of the five skills and the most challenging

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141? Every emotional response is a unique experience

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142? Regulation … James Gross … “the process by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions.”

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143? The initial goal of Regulation is to manage our own emotional responses, but then this skill makes a leap into even greater complexity: co-regulation … caregiver and infant … co-regulation is the precursor to healthy self-regulation

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144? anger is how we respond to unfairness

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145? emotion regulation starts with giving ourselves and others the permission to own our feelings

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146? five broad categories of emotion regulation … The first category … mindful breathing … second … forward-looking strategies … third … attention-shifting strategies … fourth … cognitive-reframing strategies … Finally … the Meta-Moment

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147? Mindful breathing helps us to hit the brake on the activation of our stress response system … it is important to have good posture whether sitting or standing

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148-149? the benefits of mindful breathing … can positively affect our attunement to family and friends, emotional reactivity, attention, memory, immune function, hypertension, asthma, autonomic nervous system imbalance, and mental health

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149? Forward-looking strategies … require enough self-awareness for us to know what exactly will set us off, or bring us joy, and why

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150? Attention-shifting strategies

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153? Jason Moser … third-person self-talk is a way of being empathetic to ourselves

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153? “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” says Hamlet

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154? cognitive-reframing strategies, better known in the research literature as reappraisal

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154? The basic principles of reframing are that we consciously choose to view a situation in a way that generates the least negative emotion in us or we attempt to take the perspective of the person who is activating you and assume the best intention

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155? Students who were asked to think of pretest anxiety as being beneficial performed better on exams than a control group

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156? reframing has the potential to harm as well as help

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158? the Meta-Moment.? In simplest terms, it’s a pause

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158? Justin Bariso … “Pausing helps you refrain from making a permanent decision based on a temporary emotion.”

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159? Visualizing our best self redirects our attention away from the “trigger” and toward our values

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160? “Feedback is a gift, there is always something I can learn.”

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160-161? the steps to take so you can begin practicing the Meta-Moment.

1.????? Sense the shift …

2.????? Stop or pause! …

3.????? See your best self …

4.????? Strategize and act

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161? moving from automatic and unhelpful to deliberate and helpful strategies is hard work! – it depends on seemingly unrelated factors such as diet, exercise, and sleep

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162? We are hardwired to seek social contact and support

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162? practice mindful breathing

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163? developing emotion skills takes time.? It takes work.? It takes practice.? It takes openness to feedback.? It takes refinement

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163? Mike Tyson … “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

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163? along with permission to feel, we must also give ourselves permission to fail

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163? We’ll never stop having to work at being our best selves

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174? children feel unimportant when parents use electronic devices during meals or conversations

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178? trigger … We have to take responsibility for our actions rather than shift the blame elsewhere … we decide how we’ll respond to life’s provocations … the single most powerful force in our arsenal, is … The pause for a breath (or two) when we’re about to react in a way we’d really rather avoid

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178? Now what? … your best self

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180? what’s your reputation at home? … Doesn’t your family deserve the same effort you give to the rest of the world??

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181-182? a charter … three questions.? The first is: How do we want to feel as a family? … The second question is: What can we do to experience these feelings as often as possible? … The third question … is: What can we do when we are not living the charter??

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185? to learn strategies for helping their kids regulate their emotions … parents first have to regulate their own

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191? The teaching profession is known for being highly rewarding and extremely taxing

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191? If we want children to flourish, we have to begin taking care of our teachers

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193? January 2019 report from the Aspen Institute’s National Commission on Social, Emotional, & Academic Development … The promotion of social, emotional, and academic learning is not a shifting educational fad; it is the substance of education itself

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194? David Brooks … “A key job of a school is to give students new things to love – an exciting field of study, new friends …”

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195? Mary Helen Immordino-Yang … children learn what they care about

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195 ?The three most important aspects of learning – attention, focus, and memory – are all controlled by our emotions, not by cognition

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200? We failed because we focused solely on the students.? The missing piece was educators’ own emotion skills

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202? The most effective educators recognize that social, emotional, and academic learning are intertwined

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202? So what exactly does a school that prioritizes SEL look like? … It’s a school where “children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.” … the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL)

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202? SEL recognizes that three intertwined factors – cognition, behavior, and emotion – must all be considered in order to create emotionally healthy environments where learning can take place

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206? “Everyone, we all know that emotions matter, so let’s talk about the feelings that we all want to experience as students in this classroom.”

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215? It’s the social and emotional skills that give today’s college students the competitive edge

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219? emotions are the most powerful force inside the workplace

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221? when so many jobs require the ability to communicate, our emotion skills determine how we’ll perform

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222? business is anything by businesslike

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222? “emotional contagion,”

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223? David Caruso … effective leadership … It’s critical … to match the emotion to the task at hand

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228? there’s a precise emotional balance that must be struck – employees must be sufficiently engaged to do a good job, but not to such an excess that it causes burnout

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230? I had to learn to operate with less authority and more humanity

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231? Jack Welch … “No doubt emotional intelligence is more rare than book smarts, but my experience says it is actually more important in the making of a leader.? You just can’t ignore it.”

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231? Stéphane C?té … emotional intelligence … correlates with a wide range of important workplace outcomes, including the following: ?

·??????? Creativity and innovation

·??????? Organizational commitment

·??????? Job satisfaction

·??????? Customer service ratings

·??????? Managerial performance

·??????? Social support from team members

·??????? Leadership emergence – the extent to which someone not in an official leadership position exerts influence over colleagues

·??????? Transformational leadership, including greater motivation and inspiration

·??????? Job performance, particularly in jobs requiring more emotional labor

·??????? Merit pay

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232? if there’s higher than normal turnover, it’s usually because somewhere there’s a bad boss.? As the saying goes, “People don’t leave jobs, they leave bad bosses.”

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236? businesses that wish to remain relevant and competitive in the workplace can’t ignore the power of emotions

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237? when we’re being considered for a job … ask, “Honestly, how does it make you feel to work here?”

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240? what we do with our feelings determines, to a large extent, the quality of our lives