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Yale professor Dr. Laurie Santos has studied the psychology of happiness for years, and has discovered that – surprise, surprise – human beings often work against our own best interests. So she set out to change the way we think about happiness with this podcast, The Happiness Lab. This season, she’s focusing on negative emotions. Everyone experiences loss, disappointment, bereavement, anxiety, anger, despair, and stress – but we don’t tend to deal with them very well, if at all. So she sits down with a bunch of experts to have fascinating and engaging conversations about their research into why we feel what we feel, how to handle these emotions when they come up, and even what they can teach us. Let this be the year we reset our relationship with negative emotions.
She kicks off the season by sitting down with America’s favorite academic Brené Brown, bestselling author who has spent a lot of time studying shame and other negative emotions. In this episode, Brené explains the power of being able to identify our emotions and label them properly. If we chalk everything up to “sad,” “happy,” and “angry,” we’re not only limiting our experience of our emotions, we’re making it impossible to effectively deal with them. “Language doesn’t just communicate emotion, but shapes it,” she tells Laurie. And it’s just human nature to try to avoid things that hurt, but “the bad news is, the less we talk about it, the more we experience it.” They get into the science of emotions, just how many emotions there are, and how expanding our vocabulary literally expands our emotional capacity.
Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David also thinks we need to expand our emotional capacity, because our emotions are actually trying to tell us something important. In this episode, she tells Laurie why being able to read our emotions is a superpower. Neglecting or suppressing our emotions “undermines our capacity to be whole human beings in the world,” but it also prevents us from getting important signals from ourselves. If we’re able to read those signals clearly, we can make changes that will lead to a better life for ourselves. She also shares strategies for how we can distance ourselves from our feelings, rather than ignoring them, so that we can make a healthy space to feel them without being too reactive, and think through what they might be trying to tell us. Even our worst feelings can be nudging us in the right direction. Hear all this fascinating information about dealing with negative emotions – including the monster of them of all, grief – on this season of The Happiness Lab.
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