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welcome to hubman lab Essentials where
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[Music]
performance my name is Andrew huberman
and I’m a professor of neurobiology and
Opthalmology at Stanford school of
medicine so let’s talk about emotions
emotions are a fascinating and vital
aspect of our life experience it’s fair
to say that emotions make up most of
what we think of as our experence of
life even the things we do our behaviors
and the places we go and the people we
end up encountering in our life all of
that really funnels into our emotional
perception of what those things mean
whether or not they made us happy or sad
or depressed or lonely or we awe
inspiring now one thing that is
absolutely true is that everyone’s
perception of emotion is slightly
different meaning your idea of happy is
very likely different than my idea of
what a state of happiness is and we know
this also for color vision for instance
even though the cells in your eye and my
eye that perceive the color red are
identical right down to the genes that
they express we can be certain based on
experimental evidence and what are
called psychophysical studies that your
idea of the most intense red is going to
be very different than my idea of the
most intense red if we were given a
selection of 10 different Reds and asked
which one is most intense which one
looks most red and that seems crazy you
would think that something as simple as
color would be Universal and yet it’s
not and so we need to agree at the
outset that emotions are complicated and
yet they are tractable they can be
understood and today we’re going to talk
about a lot of tools to understand what
emotions are for you to understand what
your emotional states mean and what they
don’t mean and in doing that that will
allow you to place value on whether or
not you should hold an emotional state
as true or not true whether or not it
has meaning or it doesn’t as well as
whether or not the emotions of others
are important to you in a given
context we’re going to talk a lot about
development in fact we’re going to
center a lot of our discussion today
around infancy and puberty we’re also
going to talk about tools for enhancing
one’s emotional range and for navigating
difficult emotional situations I’m not a
clinical psychologist I’m not a
therapist but I do have some background
in Psychology and today I’m going to be
drawing from the psychology greats not
me but from the greats of psychology who
studied emotion who studied emotional
development and linking that to the
Neuroscience of emotion because nowadays
we understand a lot about the chemicals
and the hormones and the neural circuits
in the brain and body that underly
emotion so while there’s no one single
universally true theory of emotion at
the intersection of many of the existing
theories there are really some ground
truths if we want to understand emotions
we have to look at where emotions first
develop and the rule that every good
neuroanatomist knows is that if you want
to understand what a part of the brain
does you have to address two questions
you have to know what connections does
that brain area make and you need to
know what’s called the developmental
origin of that structure what are the
brain areas for emotion and nowadays
there’s a lot of debate about this for
years it was thought that there might be
circuit meaning Connections in the brain
that generate the feeling of being happy
or circuits that generate the feeling of
being sad
Etc that’s been challenged and yet I
think there’s good evidence for circuits
in the brain such as lyic circuits and
other circuits that shift our overall
States or our overall level of alertness
or calmness or whether or not they bias
us toward viewing the outside world or
paying more attention to what’s going on
inside our bodies but the important
thing to understand is that emot do
arise in the brain and body and if we
want to understand how emotions work we
have to look how emotions are built and
they are built during infancy
adolescence and puberty and then it
continues into adulthood but the
groundwork is laid down early in
development when we are small children
you were born into this world without
really any understanding of the things
around you now there are two ways that
you can interact with the world and
you’re always doing them more or less to
some degree at the same
time those are interoception paying
attention to what’s going on inside you
what you feel internally and
exteroception paying attention to what’s
going on outside you hold that in mind
please because the fact that you’re both
intercepting and exter accepting is true
for your entire life and it sets the
foundation for understanding emotions
it’s absolutely critical as an
infant you didn’t have any knowledge of
what you needed you didn’t understand
hunger you didn’t understand cold or
heat or any of that when you needed
something you experience that as anxiety
you would feel an increase in alertness
if you had to use the bathroom you would
feel an increase in alertness if you
were hungry and you would vocalize you
would cry out you would act agitated you
might coup you might do a number of
different things and then your caregiver
whoever that might have been would
respond to that so this is actually
really important to understand that a
baby when you were a baby and when I was
a baby we didn’t have any sense of the
outside world except that it responded
to our acts of anxiety essentially all
developmental psychologists agree that
babies lack the ability to make
cognitive sense of the outside world but
in this feeling of anxiety and
registering one’s own internal State and
then crying out to the outside world
either through crying or subtle
vocalizations or even just cing making
some noise we start to develop a
relationship with the outside world in
which our internal States our shifts and
anxiety start to drive requests and
people come and respond to those
requests and this gets to the basis of
what emotions are about which are
emotions are really about forming bonds
and being able to predict things in the
world and at this point I actually just
want to pause and mention a really
interesting tool that is trying to
address this question of what are
emotions and what do they consist of
that you can use if you like this is an
app I didn’t develop it I don’t have any
relationship to them but the app was
developed by people at Yale and it’s
called mood meter what they’re trying to
do is put more Nuance more subtlety on
our words and our language for for
emotions and be able to to allow you to
predict how you’re going to feel in the
future I’m on the app right now and I
know you can’t see this but it’s called
mood meter you know it says to me hi
Andrew how are you right now and I click
the little tab that says I feel and I
can either pick high energy and
unpleasant high energy and pleasant low
energy unpleasant or low energy Pleasant
and I would say right now I feel high
energy Pleasant so I just revealed to
you how I feel so I click on that and
then it gives you a gallery of colors
and you just move your finger to the
location where you think it matches most
and as you do that little words pop up
so say motivated cheerful inspired I
would say I’m feeling right now cheerful
so you click that and then you just go
to the next window and it just says what
are you doing and I this feels like play
to me but I’m going to call it work and
then that’s it and then um what it does
is it basically starts to collect data
on you you’re giving it information and
it starts to link that to other features
that you allow it access to if you like
and it starts helping you be able to
predict how you’re going to feel at
different times a day and
it points to a couple really interesting
features which is that we don’t really
have enough language to describe all the
emotional states and yet there’s some
core truths to what makes up an emotion
this can really help people kids and
adults understand better what they’re
feeling and why and when best to engage
in certain activities and thankfully
when best to avoid certain activities
too so the way this works is the
following you need to ask yourself at
any point you could do this right now if
you like what’s your level of autonomic
arousal autonomic arousal is just the
Continuum the range of alert to calm so
if you’re in a panic right now you are
like 10 out of 10 on the arousal scale
if you’re asleep you’re probably not
comprehending what I’m saying although
maybe a little bit but let’s say you’re
very drowsy you might be at a one or a
two and then there’s this other axis
this other question which is what we
call veilance now veilance is a value do
you feel good or bad I would say I feel
pretty good right now on a scale of 1 to
10 I’m like a I don’t know I feel like a
seven so I’m alert and I feel pretty
good and then there’s a third thing
which is how much we are intercepting
and how much we are excepting all right
so how much our attention is focused
internally on what we’re feeling and how
much it’s focused exter internally and
this is always going to be in a dynamic
balance so for instance if you’re really
really stressed often times that puts
you in a position to be really in touch
with what’s going on in your body if you
start having a lot of somatic a lot of
bodily Sensations like your heart is
beating so fast that you can’t ignore it
then you’re really strongly interceptive
so there these three things how alert or
sleepy you are that’s one how good or
bad you feel that’s two and then whether
or not most of your attention is
directed outward or whether or not it’s
directed Inward and much of what we call
emotions are made up by those three
things let’s return to the infant
there’s the baby in the crib it’s mostly
intercepting as caregivers bring it what
it needs you hope milk diaper changes
Etc a warm blanket if it’s cold pull off
the blanket when the baby’s fussing and
it’s too warm because babies get too
warm also it starts to exter roep the
baby starts to look into the outside
world and start making predictions it
starts wondering how much it needs to
cry or predicting well if I cry like a
little bit then Mom comes over and I get
my milk babies are starting to evaluate
and do all this but they’re not doing it
consciously they’re doing this in order
to relieve anxiety as a young creature
an infant and young toddler you were
mainly focused Inward and you started to
understand what was going on outward as
a way of predicting what would bring you
relief what would remove your anxiety
and that’s where the fundamental rules
of your experience your emotional
experience were laid down so now let’s
talk about what kind of baby you were
because that actually informs your
emotionality now these are classic
they’re actually famous experiments done
by bulby and answorth this is this
classic experiment of the what was
called The Strange situation task in
which
and I’m describing it very coarsely here
I realize but a mother and child come
into the
laboratory the baby and the mother or
father play together for a bit and then
the mother
leaves the mother leaves for some period
of time and then comes back and the
research is devoted to understanding the
response of the child when the caretaker
the mother or the father returns Balby
and answorth and many of their
scientific Offspring and
colleagues identified at least four
patterns that babies display when their
caretaker returns and they group these
into group a b c d so much so that the
kids were referred to as a babies B
babies C bab or D babies the first
babies are the a babies when their
caretaker would return the infant would
respond with happiness with what looked
like Delight they would go to the
caretaker they seemed happy these are
referred to as secure attached kids the
B babies as they’re called
were less likely to seek comfort from
their caregiver when the caregiver would
return so they would sometimes continue
to play with their toys or they would uh
be with the they had an adult in the
room while the parent was gone they
would stay with them these were referred
to as avoidant
babies the ca babies
would respond to the return of the
caregiver with acts of annoyance they
seemed kind of angry and those were
referred to as ambivalent babies and
then the third category the D babies
were the disorganized babies the child
avoided interactions with everyone and
their behavior didn’t really change
whether or not the caregiver was there
or not this work this classic work
opened up a huge set of important
questions that relate to what is the
reestablishment of the bond really about
I mean what’s actually being figured out
here is not whether or not there are
four categories of babies that’s
interesting but it presumably is more
interesting to focus on what is it that
defines a really good Bond a secure
attachment or an insecure attachment or
an avoidant attachment and the four
things are
Gaye literally eye
contact VOC vocalizations so what we say
how we say it affect or emotion so the
way that we express you know crying
smiling Etc and touch but gaze
vocalization affect and touch are really
the core of this thing that we call
social bonds and
emotionality and it’s clear from most
all of the theories of emotional health
that an ability to recognize when your
own internal state is being driven
primarily by external events as
important for being able to emotionally
regulate right people who are constantly
being yanked around by the external
happenings in the world you would say
are emotionally labile they are not in
control of their emotions even if
they’re calm all the time if that
calmness only arrives because they’re in
a Placid environment and then you put
you know a cracker in that environment
and they freak out well then they’re not
really calm so how much your the outside
environment disrupts your internal
internal environment has everything to
do with this balance of interception and
exter reception and it very likely has
roots in whether or not you were secure
attached or insecure attached
disorganized or ambivalent as a baby so
while we can’t travel back in time there
is an exercise that you can do to
address at least in this moment whether
or not you have a bias for exteroception
or a bias for
interoception if you close your eyes
right now and concentrate on the contact
of any portion of your body and trying
to bring as much of your attention to
that point of contact as possible and
then from there you’re going to move
your attention even more deeply into say
the sensation of what’s going on in your
gut Are You full are you empty are you
hungry are you not uh is your heart
beating at what rate what’s the Cadence
of your breathing basically bringing
your focus and attention to everything
at the surface of your skin and inward
so I I’m going to do a rare thing on the
hubman Lab podcast I’m going to
introduce about 5 to eight seconds of
Silence um in order to allow you to do
that a little
bit now try and do something that for
most people actually is a little bit
harder which is to purely extero put put
your eyes or your ears or both on
anything in your immediate space I would
say look across the room pick a panel on
the wall or a you know a leg of a table
or something and try and bring as much
of your attention to that as possible
and again I’ll take about 5 Seconds of
Silence to allow you to
exospeed it’s hard to place 100% of your
attention on something externally unless
it’s really exciting really novel if
you’ve ever watched a really great movie
presumably you’re exter accepting more
than you’re intercepting until something
exciting happens and then and then you
feel something you’re actually tethering
your emotional experience to something
external and now you can also do this
dynamically you can decide to focus
internally and then externally you can
decide to split it 50% 50% or 70 30
one can develop you can develop a
heightened ability to do this and the
power of doing that is actually that
when you are in environments where you
feel like you’re focused too much
internally and you’d like to be focused
more externally you can actually do that
deliberately but as you notice it takes
work these exercises are really what are
at the core of these development of
emotional bonds because as we mentioned
before these four things the gaze
vocalization touch and affect those are
happening very dynamically so if
somebody Winks at you you’re paying
attention to their wink but then you
also notice how you feel this is very
Dynamic so if it seems overwhelming to
try and intercept and exter and then
shift the balance you do that all the
time your brain and nervous system are
fantastic at doing this now some people
have a very hard time breaking out of a
very strongly interceptive mode some
people have a harder time breaking out
of their extra receptive mode it’s very
interesting to note the the extent to
which we have biases in how interceptive
or exter receptive we are remember those
three axes that we talked about earlier
you have veilance good or bad you have
alertness alert or calm and you have
interceptive or EXT receptive bias early
in development you start off with this
interceptive bias you are starting to
develop expectations predictions about
how the outside world is going to work
and you are trying to figure out the
reliability of outside events and people
and where things are reliable when
people are reliable we are able to give
up more of our interoception there’s
literally trust that our interceptive
needs our internal needs will be met
through bonds and actions of others this
starts to Veer toward the discussion
about neglect and Trauma we are going to
devote entire episodes probably an
entire month to trauma and PTSD but
these those have roots in what we’re
talking about now and it’s important to
internalize and understand what we’re
talking about now in order to get the
most out of those future conversations
so now I want to just
pause just shove the discussion about
interception exter reception for a
moment and I want to talk about what is
arguably the second most if not equally
important aspect of your development as
it relates to emotionality and as it
relates to this what I called trust but
this ability to predict whether or not
things in the outside world are reliable
or not Rel reliable in terms of their
ability to help you meet your
interceptive needs and that period is
puberty so up until now we’ve been
talking mainly about psychology not a
lot of biology not a lot of mechanism
and now we’re going to transition into
talking about mechanism hormones
receptors Etc puberty is a absolute
biolog iCal event it has a beginning and
it has a specific definition which is
the transition into reproductive
maturity so there are a lot of hormonal
changes yes there are also a lot of
brain changes and most people don’t
realize it but the brain changes occur
first the brain turns on the hormone
systems that allow puberty to occur one
of the more interesting molecules that
triggers puberty in all individuals is
something called kisspeptin k i SS p p e
p t i n kisspeptin kisspeptin is made by
the brain and it
stimulates large amounts of a different
hormone called
GnRH gonadotropin releasing hormone to
be released gonadotropin releasing
hormone then causes the release of
another hormone something like called
luteinizing hormone or LH which travels
in the bloodstream and stimulates the
ovaries of females to produce estrogen
and the testes of males to produce
testosterone now this is interesting
because at this point the testes in M
start churning out tons of testosterone
in order to trigger the development of
secondary sexual characteristics body
hair and all the others deepening of
voice Etc and in female’s estrogen is
doing various other things breast
development Etc so that’s how puberty
happens at the biological level gets
triggered by leptin and kisspeptin and
then this young child
is now a different creature to some to
some extent not just because they’re
reproductively competent of course but
because there’s a shift in a number of
the things that underly these social
bonds there are there’s a market shift
in a number of the things that allow
children and adults to engage in
predictive Behavior about each other and
most of what consumes the minds and
waking hours of adolescence and children
who have gone through puberty and going
through puberty is questions about how
they relate to social structures who
they can rely on and how they can make
reliable predictions in the world now
that they have more agency that they are
physically changed in fact you could
argue that puberty is the fastest rate
of maturation that you’ll go through at
any point in your life it’s the largest
change that you’ll go through at any
point in your life in terms of who you
are because your biology has
fundamentally changed at the level of
your brain and your your bodily organs
all your organs from the skin inward so
I want to visit a little bit of the
research about some of the core needs
that occur during puberty and
Adolescence so there’s a terrific review
article that was published in the
journal Nature about the biology of
adolescence and puberty as well as some
of the core needs and demands that have
to be met for successful emotional
maturation during that time we we will
provide a link to that but I’m I just
want to highlight a few of the things
that they place in the final table I
don’t want to go through all the results
right now because you could do that on
your own if you like they mainly
highlight a lot of the changes in
neurons and neural circuits for instance
I’ll just highlight one there’s a
connection between the dopamine centers
in the brain and an area of the brain
that’s involved in emotion and dispersal
dispersal is very interesting What You
observe in animals and
humans is that around the end of
adolescence and during the transition to
puberty both because of changes in the
brain and changes in
hormones there’s an intense desire on
the part of the child to get further and
further away from primary caregivers
mostly there’s a desire to start
spending more time with friends more
time with peers and less time with
adults so there’s something about these
hormones that don’t just allow sexual
reproduction they don’t just change the
brain and bodily organs in the shape of
of us they also bias us towards
dispersal getting further and further
away from primary caregivers in
particular and what’s interesting is
during puberty there’s increased con
connection connectivity as we call it
between the prefrontal cortex which is
involved in motivation and decision-
making being able to suppress action for
making long-term uh goals possible uh as
well as dopamine centers and the amydala
so there’s this really broad integration
and testing I think this is the key
element here testing of circuits for
emotions and reward as they relate to
decisions and I think that’s useful
because when you look at the behavior of
Adolescent and teens they are testing
social interactions they are testing
physical interactions with the world
often times they’re engaging in unsafe
behavior and you can’t um just I I would
never try and justify that with with the
underlying neurology but the
Neuroscience points to increased
connectivity between areas of the brain
that are related to emotionality and uh
to threat detection like the amydala but
also reward so it’s a time of testing
behaviorally how different behaviors
lead to success or not it’s how
different behaviors lead to fear States
or not you can start to map the
neurology onto some of this emotion
exploration I do realize that this
episode is about emotions puberty is a
time in which the internal state of the
person or the animal is being sampled
and tested against different extra
receptive events only now they are able
to guide those events with more agency
the child or the Adolescent is now able
the teen really is able to Now sample
many many more extra receptive events
through behavior and so ad Ence and
puberty is really seen as the period of
development in which one self- samples
for these two elements that we talked
about at the beginning which are how do
I form bonds and how do I make
predictions about what will make me feel
good at a level of interoception but in
terms of the biology it’s clear that
there’s this stage of development where
more autonomy more physical capability
is triggered by these hormone changes in
the brain and these peptide changes in
the brain and body and that nonetheless
brings us back to the exact same model
that we started with an infancy of alert
or calm feel good or feel bad primarily
exter accepting primarily intercepting
so I keep going back to this I’m sort of
like a repeating record on that because
the same core algorithm the same core
function is at play throughout the
lifespan and that’s a useful framework
in my opinion because it allows you to
sort through through all the data and
information that’s out there about well
this area the stat terminalis is active
or the basolateral amydala is active or
gry matter thickening or this hormone or
that hormone and return to a kind of
Kernel of certainly not exhaustive truth
it doesn’t cover all aspects of
emotionality but at least establishes
some groundwork from which you can start
to evaluate how different behaviors
might or might not make sense how
certain emotional responses might or
might not make sense regardless of the
age of the person or the organism
there’s a theory of emotional
development that I find particularly
interesting which is from Allan Shore at
UCLA that talks about how most of our
testing of bonds and relationships is
this seawing back and forth between very
dopaminergic so driven by dopamine or
serotonergic driven by serotonin States
and this starts with infant and mother
or infant and father healthy emotional
development
clearly begins with an ability for the
caretaker and child to be in calm
peaceful soothing touch oriented eye
gazing type of behaviors those really
Drive serotonin the endogenous opioid
system uh oxytocin things that are very
calming and are centered around pleasure
with the here and now as well as excited
states of what we’re going to do next
there’s actually a a kind of
characteristic sign of the dopaminergic
interaction where both car AK and child
have are wide-eyed the pupils dilate
that’s signature of arousal they get
really excited often times the baby will
look away if it gets really excited that
those are signatures of dopamine release
in the body and in adolescence these
same things carry forward where their
good bonds are achieved through hanging
around watching TV just kind of being or
you know playing video games or texting
together or talking whatever it is that
the the soothing local activity happens
to be as well as Adventure and things
that are exciting and so this kind of
seawing back and forth between the
different reward systems seems to be the
basis from which healthy emotional bonds
are created we can’t have a complete
conversation about emotions and bonds
and social connection without talking
about oxytocin oxytocin has come to such
prominence in the last decade or so and
seems to be everywhere anytime you hear
a discussion about neuros signs in the
brain or hormones in the brain
oxytocin is released in response to
lactation in females it is released in
response to sexual interactions it is
released in response to nonsexual touch
it’s released in males and females and
indeed it’s involved in pair bonding and
the establishment of social bonds in
general how it does that seems to be by
matching internal state it seems to both
increase synchrony of internal State
somehow maybe it sets a level of
calmness or alertness that seems like a
reasonable
hypothesis as well as raising people’s
awareness for the emotional state of
their partner and again this brings us
back to this alertness calmness axis and
this inter receptive extra receptive
axis in order to form good bonds we
can’t just be
thinking about how we feel we also need
to be paying attention to how others
feel and we’re evaluating a match we’re
trying to see whether or not there seems
to be some sort of synchrony between
states and oxytocin both seems to
increase that synchrony and increase the
awareness for the emotional state of
others so here are some experiments that
involve the administration of of
intranasal oxytocin what’s been reported
is increase positive communic unication
among couples that study just if you for
those of you like was published in
biological Psychiatry which my
Psychiatry colleagues tell me is a fine
journal and the title is intranasal
oxytocin increases positive
communication and reduces the stress
hormone cortisol levels during couple
conflict they have them fight with and
without oxytocin so interesting very
much in line with the idea that oxytocin
is the quote unquote trust hormone the
other molecule that we make that’s
extremely important for social bonds in
emotionality is one that we’re going to
talk about more in the month on hormones
and that’s vasopressin vasopressin has
effects on the brain directly it
actually creates feelings of giddy love
it also has very interesting effects on
monogamous or non- monogamous Behavior
this again we will revisit in the future
but there’s a beautiful set of
experiments that have been done in a
little rodent species called a prairie V
it turns out there are two different
populations of prairie some are
monogamous they always mate with the
same other Prairie V and some are very
robustly non- monogamous they mate with
as many other Prairie vs as they can and
turns out that levels of vasopressin
Andor vasopressin receptor dictate
whether or not they’re monogamous or not
there’s actually some interesting
evidence in humans when you when people
report their behavior assuming they’re
reporting it accurately that vasopressin
and vasopressin levels um can relate to
monogamy or non- monogamy in humans as
well we’re going to talk about this in
the month on hormones if we’re talking
about the Neuroscience of emotions we
have to talk about the vagus nerve I
described what the vagus nerve is in a
previous episode that’s these
connections between the body and the
viscera including the gut the heart the
lungs and the immune system and the
brain and that the brain is also
controlling these organs so it’s a
two-way street there’s this big myth out
there that I mentioned before that
stimulating the Vegas in various ways
leads to calmness that it’s always going
to calm you down and that is is false
now this is interesting in light of
emotionality because of work that’s been
done by many groups but in particular
I’m going to focus on the work of a
colleague of mine Carl daero at Stanford
who’s a psychiatrist but has also
developed a lot of tools to adjust the
activity of neurons in real time using
light and electrical stimulation and so
forth I’ll refer you to an article in
the New Yorker that was published about
this a few years ago I’m going to read a
brief excerpt but I’ll put the the link
in the caption as well he’s talking to
an extremely depressed suicidally uh
depressed patient who has a small device
implanted that allows her to adjust her
vagus nerve activity they’re in his
office and they’re talking and he asks
her how she’s doing and she she
describes how she’s been doing as um
previously as quote unquote going
pancake which for her just means totally
laid out flat not much going on she
talks about how she doesn’t want to
pursue a job but she’s really depressed
um and he says in you know typical good
psychiatrist fashion you know well
that’s a lot to think about that’s
actually the quote um uh and they talk
about her blood pressure Etc and then
she says you know mood’s been down just
spiraling down talks about insomnia bad
dreams low appetite so this is severe
depression this is what we call major
depression and then she requests can we
please go up to 1.5 on Vegas stimulation
she’d been receiving 1.2 milliamps of
stimulation every 5 minutes to 30
seconds but was no longer able to feel
the effects so he says okay I think we
can go up a little you’re tolerating
things
well they
start the stimulation and quote in the
course of the next few minutes her name
was Sally underwent a remarkable change
her frown disappeared she became
cheerful describing the pleasure she had
had during the Christmas holiday and
recounting how she’d recently watched
some YouTube videos of D
she was still smiling and talking when
the session ended and they walked out to
the reception area so this is just by
stimulating and activating the Vegas now
why am I bringing this up well for
several reasons one is the Vegas is
fascinating in terms of the brain Body
Connection two I’d like to uh keep
trying to dispel the myth that Vegas
stimulation is all about being calm it’s
really about being alert I don’t know
how that originally got going backwards
but it’s about being alert and once
again level of alertness or level of
calmness is impacting emotion that this
access of alertness and calmness is one
primary axis in Emotion it’s not the
only one because there’s also this
veilance component of good or bad and
it’s those two aren’t the only ones
because there’s also this component of
inter receptive exter receptive that we
talked about earlier and there will be
others too again it’s not exhaustive but
I find it fascinating and it really
brings us back to where we started which
is what are the core elements of emotion
and what can you do about them this
business of how you conceptualize
emotions is really the most powerful
tool you can ever have in terms of
understanding and regulating your
emotional state if you’re willing to try
and wrap your head around it I realize
it’s not the simplest thing to do but
rather than think of emotions as just
these labels happy sad awe depressed
thinking them thinking about emotions
excuse me
as elements of the brain embody that
Encompass levels of alertness that
include a dynamic with the outside world
and your perception of your internal
State and starting to really think about
emotions in a structured way can not
only allow you to understand some of the
pathology of when you know you might
feel depressed or anxious or others are
depressed and anxious but also to
develop a richer emotional experience to
anything so I offer it to you as a as a
source of knowledge from which you can
start to think about your emotional life
differently I hope as well as others in
a way that builds more richness into
that experience not that detracts from
it I want to thank you for your time and
attention and thank you for your
interest in science
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