A (115:01)
Yeah. I think firstly, you know, in my book I have something called the dealing with feeling wheel. And this goes directly to what you're thinking about when people are dysregulated. When parents are like dealing with a kid, for example, who's dysregulated, they get desperate. Let's take a deep breath. Breathe, breathe. No, let's go for a walk. No. Let's cook together. No. Let's play a game. No, let's do this. And you go crazy. That's not helpful. I'll give you an example for myself. For a couple of months, I've been just. I have so much work and I have not slept well. The last week. I've prioritized going to bed early. I prioritize like real dark, you know, the darkened room. And like, I got like. I woke up today at 7:30. I was like, it's a miracle. Like 7:30. It's like, you know, it's the middle of the afternoon and I feel energized. Today I feel, you know, and I'm in a good place. And I felt that way for like a week. Now I recognize I'm building new patterns for my sleep. It's no longer in my wheel a priority. I figured it out. There are some days where my. I just feel I can't think straight. I'm like all over the place. I realize that I've been maybe on social media too much. I realize I have like 85 things on my to do list. And I'm like, mark, you gotta go back to your mindfulness work. You need some breath work. You need to just sit around. You need to take that space. You need to get to that hot yoga class. You need to do this. You need this back into your routine. There are other Days I sit around and think. So lonely. I don't talk to anybody anymore. I feel so whatever. And I'm like, I need connection. I'm desperate for connection. I think that's the way we have to look at it, that there are these components of our well being and that are correlated and are the same as what we do to regulate our emotions. There's the self awareness piece. Am I at all like paying attention to my emotions right now? There's that breath work piece. There's the cognitive work, there's the relational work. There's the biology of the sleep, the nutrition, the physical activity. Like for example, one of the things that happened for me in writing this new book was that I became very, very committed to my own fitness. Much martial arts was like, you know, that was like teaching 10 karate classes a week. I was younger than I was, in the best shape of my life. Then I got like Professor Dumpy professor syndrome. I'm like, that is not, I'm not getting on that stage looking that way anymore. I was like, whoa. And I made this major commitment and one of the things that happened to me was that it became my go to strategy for my overwhelm and stress while writing my book. And I remember saying to myself one day like Mark, you may not finish this book, but you're going to be in the best freaking shape of your life. And truthfully, it transformed my life. Now here's why I'm telling you that story. Because in the conversation with this friend Marco, who is a trainer, we started having these conversations around fitness identity and how it relates to emotional intelligence identity. And I realized something magical, which is that now at 56, it's been four years that I've like done my four workouts a week. I mean I haven't really missed a workout unless I'm like on a vacation. But I'll still do something else. I cannot not exercise. And this morning just to be talking about coming on Uberman Lab, I'm like, I Woke up at 7:30, I'm like, I gotta get there by this time. But I can't work out. I have to work out before I go to Uberman. Like I can't show up not doing my workout. And I knew I would feel better, I knew I'd be more present and I did my hour back workout. But the point I'm really making here is that I identify as a person who exercises. It's like just who I am. My vision for the world is that we cultivate people who identify as well regulated because if you walk into a room thinking to yourself, I got this, nothing you can say can trigger me. I can get through this or I can manage my emotions, life is going to be completely different. And that's why I end my book with this concept that people talk a lot about, like, be the best self, and everybody's talking about their best selves, but it really does relate to emotion regulation. And there's good research to support it that you asked me for, like, a concrete, like technique. Well, this is that thing we call the meta moment. And I cultivated this technique with my colleague Robin. She was a therapist working with patients in New York City. And she's like, I teach them all strategies and then they go home and they yell at each other. And I'm like, I'm a scientist working in schools. And everybody's like, this is boring and nobody wants to do this. I'm like, the motivation is not there. People don't see the benefit people, they don't see that their life is going to be better, going to make better choices, have better relationships, et cetera. So what's going to make a difference? Well, as we know, between stimulus and response, there is space. Okay, so what do I do to fill the space? Well, well, the first step is I gotta sense that something's going on. I gotta be aware. Wow, that just triggered me. Wow, that was not cool. My automatic habitual response was gonna be, who the f do you think you are? Like, don't talk to me that way or whatever it might be. Mark, who identifies as the most well regulated person in the whole wide world. The feelings master, the emotional guru. He has a process. He automatically takes the breath, he automatically builds a space, he automatically takes a step back. He does not go on that gut. He says there's a better way, but that's not enough. So now I have to think about my best version of myself in my role as a husband. How do I want to be seen? How do I want to be talked about? How do I want to be experienced? And my role as a professor and my role as a presenter, different roles, different selves. And I've helped millions of people engage in this process, by the way. And when you build the space to think about your best self, what it does is it pulls you away from the trigger and it brings you back to your values. And then through the lens of Mark, the director of the center for Emotional Intelligence, like, he's a different dude, he's a totally different guy than Mark, who grew up in New Jersey being bullied and is triggered. Mark, who's the center director, is like Oz, the Yoda of emotional intelligence. Oh, well, how would he respond to this moment? This is a beautiful challenge. I love it. And so my point is, is that we can do that for ourselves. We can help other people do it. We can do it in a moment. Ideally, we'll do it proactively. So when you go home or when you come into work, you pause, you identify, and you think about the best version of yourself and you enter in through that lens. My favorite story about this was, you know, we teach this in schools. And this one kid, you know, when, you know, when people joke about things, you know, they got it. So I'm in this school and this teacher is like, mark, you know, this stuff is, you know, it's really funny. I said, what do you mean? She goes, well, this kid was really, really not being kind to someone on the playground. And I called him out on it and he came over and I said, you know, I need to know exactly what happened. And the kid said, you know, now, Mrs. Johnson, I'm going to tell you what happened. But an agent take a meta moment first. Like, the kid knew that if she were looking at what he had done through the best version of herself, she would respond differently. That's the magic of the work.
