← Office Hours with Arthur Brooks
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Experian and I'm going to focus today on how to move emotions, the experience of emotions from their limbic origins to where you can manage them, decide what they mean and how to act, which is really a prefrontal cortex function. That's an executive function of the brain. How do you do that? And the answer is, well, to begin with time, you gotta give yourself time to catch up. Now you have heard, cause your grandma told you, or your mom or somebody wise in your life told you that you should count to 10 when you're angry. That's what you should do when you're angry. I looked up the origins of that at one time, and as close as I can tell, that's Thomas Jefferson, which kind of makes sense. I mean, he talked about the pursuit of happiness and the Declaration of Independence, after all. And he said this. He said, when angry, count to 10. When very angry, count to a hundred. What was he really saying? Don't leave the experience of anger just in your, in your amygdala. Let it get to your prefrontal cortex, where you can decide why and what you want to do as opposed to what you're actually feeling. Now, there is one paper we go on, the show notes, of course, that asks what's the right number so you can save yourself a lot of embarrassment and heartache. And the answer is kind of, kind of 30. Count to 30. And then while you're counting to 30, imagine the, the. The outcome that would occur from doing that thing that you want to do that your amygdala is telling you to do. So here's how to do it. This is the first metacognition, putting time between your limbic system and your prefrontal cortex. Metacognition, side note, means thinking about thinking. That's really what it means. But practically speaking, metacognition involves giving your prefrontal cortex time to catch up and register what's going on with your emotions. That's really what I'm talking about. Here. Okay, back to the study. 30 seconds. While thinking about the. About the repercussions from doing what your amygdala wants you to do, you're sitting in a meeting at work and somebody is really getting on your nerves. I mean, somebody's treating you with great disrespect and you're getting mad and you say to yourself, you know what? I'm going to tell her she's a moron. But instead of getting. Instead of doing that, I'm going to count to 30 and imagine the implications of doing that. So she makes me real mad and I start to count. 1, 2, 3. I imagine myself saying, you're a moron. 5, 6, 7. Wow. Look at her face. She's shocked. 9, 10. She's getting up. She's calling the boss. They're calling human. Human resources. 17, 18. I'm going down to human resources for blowing up and insulting a colleague, making my case. 21, 22. This is bad. By 30, you just saved yourself a trip to human resources. Congratulations. That's kind of how metacognition works in giving yourself time for your prefrontal cortex to catch up to what your limbic system is experiencing and the data that it's actually sending up. That's how counting to 10 is an example of this particular technique. But that's not the only example. There are really three categories of techniques that you can use, because what are we all about? We're all about being self managing. I don't want you to have less emotion. I don't want me to have less emotion. What I want you to understand is that you can manage your emotion such that it's not managing you. You're understanding it. It's working for you and not against you. And you're learning and growing as a result. That's really what we're talking about. There are three ways for you to become more metacognitive. Systematically, beyond. Just count to 10 or 30 or 100. Okay. The three categories that metacognition fall into are knowledge, contemplation and documentation. Okay? Now first, knowledge. That's everything we've been doing here. I'm going to give you an example of how knowledge is power and metacognitive power. I talked a minute ago about disgust. Disgust stimulates the insular cortex, AKA the insula, in the brain. And it's not just from smelling something rotten in the back of your fridge. That's amazing enough. You know, three weeks ago, the chicken in your fridge made your stomach growl, and now it makes your stomach Turn. Which is why you say, oh, I forgot about that. You take it to the trash, right? Your insular cortex is entirely in charge of that, of that distinction. But your insular cortex can be stimulated not just by that, by other people, about people. Let me give you an example. Let's think of your favorite. Let's think of a politician who's controversial and bombastic that you like, okay? Now, maybe you're. I know, a superior human. You're like, I hate them all, or inferior human. I don't know. You decide. But I bet there's somebody, because you have opinions, and so do I, that says the things that are kind of limbic for you and, and, and it's sort of satisfying to hear them say those things on tv. And. Yeah, you got one of those right. What they're doing for you is that they're trying to stimulate your insular cortex against other people by convincing you that those people should be stimulating your disgust reflex. Anytime somebody says those people are disgusting, those people. Can you believe the terrible, disgusting thing? That those people think they're trying to manipulate your disgust reflex. They're trying to manipulate your insula. It's true. And there's a lot of studies that show this. There's a lot of research that shows that disgust language about other people does just that. And we see this throughout history. Dictators and demagogues always vilify other people by stimulating the disgust reflex in the population. During the Rwandan genocide in the 90s, the Hutus who are conducting a massacre of the Tutsis, they had a word for the Tutsis that meant cockroaches. Why? Because they wanted to refer to the Tutsis as cockroaches, thus dehumanizing the Tutsis and, and, and. And stimulating the disgust reflex of people who might have been on the fence. The, The Nazis talked about Jews by calling them rats. It's the same thing, that they're vermin who bring these pathogens into our society because they wanted to stimulate this primordial part of the limbic system of the brain, and so hijack the brain so that people could do otherwise unthinkable things to their sisters and brothers. Because you got to make them think they're not sisters and brothers, they're pathogen carriers, is the way that that works. Well, there's a milder version of that going on in American politics today or wherever you live in politics that's going on. But knowledge is power. Why? Because next time you turn on the television or read your favorite columnist who says those forbidden things that you secretly think and they try to stimulate your disgust reflex against a fellow human being. You're going to say, yeah, I know what's going on here. Hands off my insula, man. It's unbelievable. You're going to see this because you're going to start to recognize this thing going on, and you're going to have more power. You're going to have more metacognitive power than you've had before. The same thing is true when you feel great sadness, even grief. You're going to understand that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is going because it's supposed to, or that your amygdala is working over time. That's the important thing that we're talking about here. This knowledge is so transformative. It's also interesting, I hope, giving you basic positive emotion. But this has completely changed my life. I no longer feel like my insular cortex and my amygdala and my dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and all the other parts of my brain that are responsible for producing negative emotionality in intense, intense quantities. That those things are managing me because I have the information. I have the knowledge to understand what's really going on. And that, per se, is. Is. Is allowing my prefrontal cortex to be doing what it's supposed to do, the C suite of my brain to be making executive decisions. That's number one. Number two is contemplation. Contemplation is how is contemplative practices that allow you to understand your emotions in a different way? There's kind of two, as a matter of fact. Meditation is one. Insight meditation. Often some people call it the pasana meditation. It's a different word in many different Eastern contemplative practices. But it really is insight about yourself. It's the kind of thing where, I mean, you don't have to go sit in an ashram to learn how to do this. You can sit quietly in the morning and say, arthur's feeling a little sad and angry today. Why might that be? Well, it kind of makes sense. Arthur's worried about a couple of things and went to sleep, or tried to go to sleep last night and didn't sleep well. And Arthur knows perfectly that when he sleeps less than five hours a night, his negative emotionality is turned up a little bit higher than it would have been otherwise. It actually makes perfect sense. Now what am I doing? I'm analyzing myself. I have insight about myself in this contemplative way. And there are organized meditation traditions that do just exactly that avail yourself of these things. Another way to do this, if you're traditionally religious like I am, is prayers of petition. Why? Because you can't pray. Put into words explicitly what's written on your heart without using your prefrontal cortex, you know, So I bring things to prayer every day because I have a religious practice that I engage in every single morning. And I'll have prayers of petition. I won't say, please take away my negative emotionality, but I'll say, lord, these are things that I'm feeling, these are emotional experiences that I'm having, and just offer them up. Offer these things up by observing them in the presence of the divine. And that in and of itself is a highly metacognitive experience. Whether you're religious or not, you have to recognize that I can't be saying those things without using my prefrontal cortex. So there's a range of contemplative experiences that you can engage in where you're. You're observing yourself in a quiet, serious and methodical way. That's what that gets down to. Now, the third is documentation. Write it down. Have you ever noticed that when you write your feelings on a piece of paper, they don't seem so threatening and weird? There's a reason for that. With the pencil, you have to use your prefrontal cortex. You can't write limbically. It's an executive thing because you're writing down letters. You're moving things to the most salient, conscious, executive parts of your brain when you're writing things down. So when you put things into words, when you journal things, you're exercising an extremely high level of metacognition, and that's why it makes you feel better. And the better you get at it, the better it's going to make you feel. I'll give you an example of something that I ask my students to do, and that's to keep a fear journal. Now, I've talked a couple of times in this show, and I'll talk more in the future about the concept of anxiety. Anxiety is something that a lot of people are diagnosed with generalized anxiety. Anxiety is a clinical matter, and it's no joke. If this is something you're experiencing, you have to talk to your doctor about it. But as a definition, anxiety is really unfocused fear. Fear is something in the ancestral environment that once again indicates that there's a threat that you need to avoid. But among our ancestors, fear was, as far as we know, and any good anthropological study really shows this, fear was episodic and intense. But episodic is the key word. Most of the time, your ancestors weren't afraid, but when they were afraid, they were really afraid and reacted. That's the reason that the amygdala is a hair trigger. If you're walking across the savannah and a stick snaps behind you, the first thing you don't think is, huh, I bet that's a friend. No, no, no. You take off running. That's the reason that things startle you, is because it's. This is. Your fear reaction is stimulated. That's what keeps you alive. But it shouldn't happen very often that a twig snaps and you take off running and climb a tree and look down and say, it was. It was either a leopard or my friend. That doesn't happen very often. Most of the time, your ancestors were sitting around the campfire, shooting the breeze and sharing stories. The problem in the modern environment is, is that fear has become less intense because the threats are less intense, but it's become chronic because of the stimuli that are surrounding us. You know, it's like bad emails and ringing phones and delayed flights and arguments at home. And pretty much everything in the news and everything times two on social media is kind of lightly scratching the amygdala with kind of a weak but constant signals through the hypothalamus to the pituitary gland, stimulating weakly the adrenal glands with a drip, drip, drip. And it's kind of ruining your life a lot of the time. Anxiety is this unfocused fear. So here's one way to actually make anxiety better. Don't try to wipe it out. I mean, doctors will try sometimes, even with pharmaceuticals, to do so. But here's a way that you can right now make anxiety better. It's counterintuitive. Turn it back into fear. Turn it back into fear. Turn it into what is supposed to be, which is very explicit and more intense, but more occasional. And here's how to do it using documentation. The third metacognitive technique. You're stressed out. You're stressed out. I mean, you got this like, your HPA axis is active and you're dripping stress hormones all the time. Let's think about the five things that are stressing you out the most that are making you anxious. My guess is that they're inchoate. They really are pretty unfocused, but their fears underneath them. So let's make them explicit. Let's make them explicit. Let's say that, you know, something's. Something's not right, and you Went to the doctor, and you're kind of waiting for a test, and you're not really afraid, but you're kind of afraid. Well, let's write that down. Let's write that down in your journal. Document it. You've now moved the experience of it into your prefrontal cortex on a line underneath that fear of the fear. It's like, I'm afraid because I don't know what my test, what's gonna happen for my test. I'm gonna get my results back in a week. I'm afraid. I'm afraid of that. It's bothering me. Write down the worst thing that it could be, right? But also write down the best thing it can be and the most likely thing that it can be. And you know, you're plenty sophisticated to do that. And then subjectively guess what the probabilities are of each of those things. And my guess is in almost all the cases, that the worst case, the nightmare scenario, is a really pretty low probability. The, the best probability might be small, too. The most likely case, what is it? Put it down then under that, right? If it were the worst case, literally, what would I do? What would I do now? In the most likely case, what would I do? What will I do? And write down what your strategy is. Now what you've done is you've made it into a realistic scenario, kind of like what an insurance company does. An insurance company takes inchoate fear and it turns it into manageable risk. That's its whole gig. This is one of the reasons that the insurance industry is truly a happiness industry. It's transferring fear from uncertainty into risk that can be managed. That's the whole job of insurance. And they're doing that by saying, okay, okay, what are we worried about? What's the best case, worst case, most likely case, what are the probabilities and what are the strategies if that happens? That's all insurance people and, and are doing all day long. Biostatisticians and all those people that are crunching the numbers on that and then selling your policies, that's what they're doing. And that's one of the reasons that people are so much happier after they buy insurance. Well, this is your insurance policy vis a vis your prefrontal cortex. And that's all through documentation, that's all through journaling. And it's a miracle. I promise you, my friends, this is going to be a game changer. Do that with number one and two and three and four and five, and do it once a week. And look at the fear journal every single day. And you're gonna sleep a lot better. You're gonna sleep a lot better. Now, this is a beginning on this. This is not the last time I'm gonna talk about these subjects. I'm gonna talk more about emotional self management because it's super important and it's so awesome. So I'm gonna come back to this in a later episode. Let's call this emotional self management part one. Later, I'm gonna come back and talk about issues like how do you repair negative emotions and memories? How do you do metacognition in reverse? For example, I'm going to talk about how to do joint metacognition, where the most powerful way that you can do it is with your partner, where you're jointly, metacognitively making explicit, powerful emotions that you're feeling together and together making them better than they ever could have been before and learning and growing together. So there's lots and lots of cool stuff that actually goes into this, but this has been the primer on it, and I hope it's been really useful for you. It really is something that's changed my life a lot. And if you take this stuff seriously, this is something that can change your life.
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