9
Every time you bite into a juicy peach or munch a bag of crunchy potato chips, you’re not simply replenishing your energy. You’re having an experience that is pleasant, unpleasant, or something in between. You bathe not only to stave off disease but also to enjoy warm water against your skin. You seek out other people not to stand in a herd for protection from predators but to feel the glow of friendship or to unload when you’re feeling burdened. And sex is clearly for more than propagating your genes.
These examples show that you have a special link between the physical and the mental. Each time you perform a physical act for your body budget, you’re also doing something mental with concepts. Every mental activity has a physical effect as well. You can put this connection to work for you, to master your emotions, enhance your resilience, become a better friend or parent or lover, and even change your conception of who you are.
Change is not easy. Ask any therapist or Buddhist monk; they’ve trained for years to become aware of their experiences and control them. Even so, you can take small steps right now based on the theory of constructed emotion and the new view of human nature it implies.
Some of the suggestions I propose in this chapter will sound familiar, like getting enough sleep, but with new scientific justification to motivate you. Other advice will probably be entirely new, like learning words from a foreign language, which you’ve probably never associated with emotional health. Not every suggestion will be right for you; some will fit your lifestyle better than others. But the effort can lead to greater well-being and success. Students with a richer emotion vocabulary do better in school. People with a balanced body budget are less likely to develop serious illnesses like diabetes and heart disease, and as they age, their mental abilities will stay sharper for longer. And life may become more meaningful and fulfilling.
Can you snap your fingers and change your feelings at will, like changing your clothes? Not really. Even though you construct your emotional experiences, they can still bowl you over in the moment. However, you can take steps now to influence your future emotional experiences, to sculpt who you will be tomorrow. I don’t mean that in some vague, pseudo-spiritual, let’s-illuminate-your-cosmic-soul kind of way, but in a very real, predicting-brain way.
Everything you’ve read so far about interoception, affect, body budgets, prediction, prediction error, concepts, and social reality has broad and deep practical implications for who you are and how you live your life. That’s our theme as we enter the final part of this book, which begins here with emotional well-being and then continues to health (chapter 10), the law (chapter 11), and non-human animals (chapter 12).
For the remainder of the book, we’ll apply our new view of human nature, especially the porous boundary between the physical and the social, to architect a recipe for living. The major ingredients in that recipe are your body budget and your concepts. If you maintain a balanced body budget, you’ll feel better in general, so that’s where we’ll start. And if you develop a rich set of concepts, you’ll have a toolbox for a meaningful life.
Typical self-help books focus on your mind. If you think differently, they say, you will feel differently. You can regulate your emotions if you try hard enough. These books, however, don’t give much consideration to your body. If there’s one thing that (I hope) you’ve learned from the past five chapters, it’s that your body and your mind are deeply interconnected. Interoception drives your actions. Your culture wires your brain.1
The most basic thing you can do to master your emotions, in fact, is to keep your body budget in good shape. Remember, your interoceptive network labors day and night, issuing predictions to maintain a healthy budget, and this process is the origin of your affective feelings (pleasantness, unpleasantness, arousal, and calmness). If you want to feel good, then your brain’s predictions about your heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, temperature, hormones, metabolism, and so on, must be calibrated to your body’s actual needs. If they aren’t, and your body budget gets out of whack, then you’re going to feel crappy no matter what self-help tips you follow. It’s just a matter of which flavor of crap.
Modern culture, unfortunately, is engineered to screw up your body budget. Many of the products sold in supermarkets and chain restaurants are pseudo-food loaded with budget-warping refined sugar and bad fats. Schools and jobs require you to wake early and go to sleep late, leaving over 40 percent of Americans between the ages of thirteen and sixty-four regularly sleep-deprived, a condition that can lead to chronic misbudgeting and possibly depression and other mental illnesses. Advertisers play on your insecurities, suggesting you’ll be judged badly by your friends unless you buy the right clothing or car, and social rejection is toxic for your body budget. Social media offers new opportunities for social rejection and adds ambiguity, which is even worse for your body budget. Friends and employers expect you to be surgically attached to your cell phone at all hours, which means you never truly relax, and late-night screen time disrupts your sleeping patterns. Your culture’s expectations for work, rest, and socializing determine how easily you can manage that internal budget. Social reality transmutes into physical reality.2
Your body budget, you may remember, is regulated by predictive circuitry in your interoceptive network. If those predictions become chronically out of sync with your body’s actual needs, it’s hard to bring them back into balance. Your body-budgeting circuitry, the loudmouth of your brain, doesn’t respond quickly to counterevidence (prediction error) from your body. Once the predictions have been off-base for long enough, you will feel chronically miserable.
When people feel crappy on a regular basis, quite a few of them self-medicate. Thirty percent of all medications consumed in the United States are taken to manage some form of distress. For these sufferers, their predictions are regularly not calibrated to their bodies’ actual expenditures, likely because their brain is misestimating the cost. So they feel miserable and take medication, or they turn to alcohol or certain street drugs like opiates.3
That’s the bad news. What can you do, practically speaking, to keep your predictions calibrated and body budget balanced? I apologize if I suddenly sound like your mother, but the road begins with eating healthfully, exercising, and getting enough sleep. I know, I know, it sounds mundane or even trite, but sadly there is no substitute, biologically speaking. A body budget, like a financial budget, is easier to maintain when you have a solid foundation. When you were a baby, your caretakers entirely managed your body budget. As you grew, they gradually transferred more and more responsibility for maintaining your budget to you. Today your friends and family might pitch in a little, but its nourishment is pretty much up to you. So to whatever extent you can, eat your greens, go easy on the refined sugars and bad fats and caffeine, work out vigorously and regularly, and get plenty of sleep.4
This advice might seem impossible without significant changes in the structure and habits of your life. For some people, the difficulty comes in resisting junk food and excessive TV time and other temptations of mainstream culture. Other people who struggle to make ends meet, who have to choose between eating and paying the bills, might not have the luxury of making lifestyle changes. But please do what you can. The science is crystal clear on healthful food, regular exercise, and sleep as prerequisites for a balanced body budget and a healthy emotional life. A chronically taxed body budget increases your chances of developing a host of different illnesses, as we’ll see in the next chapter.
A next line of attack is to modify your physical comfort if you can. Try a massage from a lover, a close friend, or a paid massage therapist (if you can afford it). Human touch is good for your health—it improves your body budget by way of your interoceptive network. Massage is especially helpful after vigorous exercise. It limits inflammation and promotes faster healing of the tiny tears in muscle tissue that result from exercise, which you might otherwise experience as unpleasant.5
Yet another budget-balancing activity is yoga. People who practice yoga long-term are able to calm down more quickly and effectively, probably due to some combination of physical activity and the slow-paced breathing. Yoga also reduces levels of certain proteins, called proinflammatory cytokines, that over the long term promote harmful inflammation in your body. (We’ll learn more about these proteins in the next chapter.) Regular exercise also increases the levels of other proteins, called anti-inflammatory cytokines, that reduce your chances of developing heart disease, depression, and other illnesses.6
Your physical surroundings also affect your body budget, so if possible, try to spend time in spaces with less noise and crowding, and more greenery and natural light. Not many of us can afford to sculpt our environment by moving into a new house or redecorating, but it is amazing what a simple houseplant will do. Environmental factors like these are so important to your body budget that they even appear to help psychiatric patients recover more quickly.7
Diving into a compelling novel is also healthful for your body budget. This is more than mere escapism; when you get involved in someone else’s story, you aren’t as involved in your own. Such mental excursions engage part of your interoceptive network, known as the default mode network, and keep you from ruminating (which would be bad for the budget). If you are not a reader, see a compelling film. If the story is sad, have a good cry, which is also beneficial to the budget.8
Here’s another simple budget-booster: set up regular lunch dates with a friend and take turns treating each other. Research shows that giving and gratitude have mutual benefits for the body budgets involved, so when you take turns, you reap the benefits. (And over the long run, it costs the same as splitting the checks.)9
There are many more things you can try that I haven’t mentioned yet. Adopt a pet, which gives you touch and unconditional adoration at the same time. Take walks in a public garden or park. Look online for research on your favorite hobbies, to see if they’re beneficial for stress, or just try things out and see what works. Knitting works, apparently; for me, it’s counted cross-stitch.10
Changing your habits to suit your body budget is never easy, and sometimes it’s impossible, but try these techniques wherever you can. They will lift your mood and you’ll feel less stressed more of the time.
After attending to your body budget, the next best thing you can do for emotional health is to beef up your concepts, otherwise known as “becoming more emotionally intelligent.” People with a classical view mindset think about emotional intelligence as “detecting” other people’s emotions “accurately,” or experiencing happiness and avoiding sadness “at the right time.” With our new understanding of emotions, however, we can think about emotional intelligence in a new way. “Happiness” and “Sadness” are each populations of diverse instances. Therefore, emotional intelligence (EI) is about getting your brain to construct the most useful instance of the most useful emotion concept in a given situation. (And also when not to construct emotions but instances of some other concept.)
Daniel Goleman, bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence, argues that higher EI leads to greater success in academics, business, and social relationships. “For star performance in all jobs, in every field,” he writes, “emotional competence is twice as important as purely cognitive abilities.” So you might be surprised to hear that science still has no generally accepted definition or measure of EI. Goleman’s books offer a lot of reasonable, practical advice, but they don’t properly explain why his advice works. Their scientific justification is heavily influenced by the outdated “triune brain” model—if you regulate your alleged emotional inner beast effectively, then you’re emotionally intelligent.11
Emotional intelligence is better characterized in terms of concepts. Suppose you knew only two emotion concepts, “Feeling Awesome” and “Feeling Crappy.” Whenever you experienced emotion or perceived someone else as emotional, you could categorize only with this broad brush. Such a person cannot be very emotionally intelligent. In contrast, if you could distinguish finer meanings within “Awesome” (happy, content, thrilled, relaxed, joyful, hopeful, inspired, prideful, adoring, grateful, blissful . . .), and fifty shades of “Crappy” (angry, aggravated, alarmed, spiteful, grumpy, remorseful, gloomy, mortified, uneasy, dread-ridden, resentful, afraid, envious, woeful, melancholy . . .), your brain would have many more options for predicting, categorizing, and perceiving emotion, providing you with the tools for more flexible and functional responses. You could predict and categorize your sensations more efficiently, and better tailor your actions to your environment.
What I’m describing is emotional granularity, the phenomenon (described in chapter 1) that some people construct finer-grained emotional experiences than others do. People who make highly granular experiences are emotion experts: they issue predictions and construct instances of emotion that are finely tailored to fit each specific situation. At the other end of the spectrum, there are young children who haven’t yet developed adult-like emotion concepts, and who use “sad” and “mad” interchangeably to mean feeling unpleasant (as we discussed in chapter 5). My lab has shown that adults run the whole range from low to high emotional granularity. So, a key to EI is to gain new emotion concepts and hone your existing ones.12
There are many ways to gain new concepts: taking trips (even just a walk in the woods), reading books, watching movies, trying unfamiliar foods. Be a collector of experiences. Try on new perspectives the way you try on new clothing. These kinds of activities will provoke your brain to combine concepts to form new ones, changing your conceptual system proactively so you’ll predict and behave differently later.
For example, in our household, my husband, Dan, is in charge of recycling because I am forever placing inappropriate items into the bin, like cellophane or wood, because by God, they should be recyclable. Instead of getting frustrated by the extra work I make for him, Dan applied a concept from his childhood, when he collected superhero comic books. My fruitless attempts at bucking reality became a “Superpower” that he calls wishful recycling. An irritating habit was thus transformed into an amusing foible.
Perhaps the easiest way to gain concepts is to learn new words. You’ve probably never thought about learning words as a path to greater emotional health, but it follows directly from the neuroscience of construction. Words seed your concepts, concepts drive your predictions, predictions regulate your body budget, and your body budget determines how you feel. Therefore, the more finely grained your vocabulary, the more precisely your predicting brain can calibrate your budget to your body’s needs. In fact, people who exhibit higher emotional granularity go to the doctor less frequently, use medication less frequently, and spend fewer days hospitalized for illness. This is not magic; it’s what happens when you leverage the porous boundary between the social and the physical.13
So, learn as many new words as possible. Read books that are outside of your comfort zone, or listen to thought-provoking audio content like National Public Radio. Don’t be satisfied with “happy”: seek out and use more specific words like “ecstatic,” “blissful,” and “inspired.” Learn the difference between “discouraged” or “dejected” versus generically “sad.” As you build up the associated concepts, you’ll become able to construct your experiences more finely. And don’t limit yourself to words in your native language. Pick another language and seek out its concepts for which your language has no words, like the Dutch emotion of togetherness, gezellig, and the Greek feeling of major guilt, enohi. Each word is another invitation to construct your experiences in new ways.14
Try also to invent your own emotion concepts, using your powers of social reality and conceptual combination. The author Jeffrey Eugenides presents a collection of amusing ones in his novel Middlesex, including “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age,” “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy,” and “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar,” though he does not assign them words. You can do the same thing yourself. Close your eyes and imagine yourself in a car, driving away from your hometown, knowing that you will never, ever return. Can you characterize that feeling by combining emotion concepts? If you can employ this technique day to day, you’ll be better calibrated to cope with varied circumstances, and potentially more empathic to others, with improved skill to negotiate conflict and get along. You can even name your creations, like my word “chiplessness” in chapter 7, and teach them to your family and friends. Once you’ve shared your creations, they are just as real as any other emotion concept and bring the same benefits to your body budget.
An emotionally intelligent person not only has lots of concepts but also knows which ones to use and when. Just like painters learn to see fine distinctions in colors, and wine lovers develop their palettes to experience tastes that non-experts cannot, you can practice categorizing like any other skill. Suppose you see your teenage son heading out to school looking like he just rolled out of bed: hair unkempt, clothing wrinkled, and remnants of last night’s dinner dotting his shirt. You could berate him and send him back to his room to change, but instead, ask yourself what you are feeling. Are you concerned that his teachers won’t take him seriously? Disgusted by his greasy hair? Nervous that his attire will reflect badly on you as a parent? Irritated that you spend money on clothing he never wears? Or perhaps you’re sad that your little boy has grown up and you miss the exuberance of his childhood. If all this introspection sounds implausible, realize that people pay good money to therapists and life coaches for exactly this purpose: to help them reframe situations, that is, find the most useful categorization in the service of action. You can do it yourself and become an expert categorizer of emotion with enough practice, and it gets easier with repetition.
Fine-grained categorizations have been shown to beat two other popular approaches for “regulating” emotions, in a study about fear of spiders. The first approach, called cognitive reappraisal, taught subjects to describe the spider in a nonthreatening way: “Sitting in front of me is a little spider, and it’s safe.” The second approach was distraction, having the subjects pay attention to something unrelated instead of the spider. The third was to categorize sensations with greater granularity, such as: “In front of me is an ugly spider and it is disgusting, nerve-wracking, and yet, intriguing.” The third approach was the most effective in helping people with arachnophobia to be less anxious when observing a spider and to actually approach spiders. The effects lasted a week beyond the experiment, too.15
Higher emotional granularity has other benefits for a satisfying life. In a collection of scientific studies, people who could distinguish finely among their unpleasant feelings—those “fifty shades of feeling crappy”—were 30 percent more flexible when regulating their emotions, less likely to drink excessively when stressed, and less likely to retaliate aggressively against someone who has hurt them. For people who suffer from schizophrenia, those who exhibit higher emotional granularity report better relationships with family and friends, compared to those who exhibit lower granularity, and are better able to choose the correct action in social situations.16
In contrast, lower emotional granularity is associated with all sorts of afflictions. People who have major depressive disorder, social anxiety disorder, eating disorders, autism spectrum disorders, borderline personality disorder, or who just experience more anxiety and depressed feelings all tend to exhibit lower granularity for negative emotion. People who are diagnosed with schizophrenia exhibit low granularity for distinguishing positive from negative emotions. To be clear, nobody is claiming that low granularity causes these disorders, but it conceivably plays some role.17
After improving your emotional granularity, another way to hone your concepts, which is popular with therapists and self-help books, is to keep track of your positive experiences each day. Can you find anything that can make you smile, even briefly? Each time you attend to positive things, you tweak your conceptual system, reinforcing concepts about those positive events and making them salient in your mental model of the world. It’s even better if you write about your experiences because, again, words lead to concept development, which will help you predict new moments to cultivate positivity.18
In contrast, when you ruminate about something unpleasant, you cause fluctuations in your body budget. Rumination is a vicious cycle: each time you dwell on (say) a recent breakup of a relationship, you add another instance to predict with, which expands your opportunity to ruminate. Certain concepts about your breakup, such as your final shouting match, or the look on your lover’s face as he or she walked away for the last time, become entrenched in your model of the world. These concepts, as patterns of neural activity, get easier and easier for your brain to re-create, like well-trodden walking paths that grow deeper with each passerby’s footsteps. You don’t want them to become paved roads. Every experience you construct is an investment, so invest wisely. Cultivate the experiences you want to construct again in the future.
Sometimes it’s helpful to construct instances of unpleasant emotion on purpose. Think about football players who cultivate anger before a big game. They shout and jump and pump their fists in the air to get themselves in the right frame of mind for crushing the competition. By elevating their heart rates, breathing more deeply, and generally influencing their body budgets, they create a familiar physical state and categorize it in the context of the sports stadium, based on their knowledge of past situations where a particular emotion helped with performance. Their aggression also strengthens bonds with their teammates and tells their opponents to beware. This is EI at work in a somewhat unlikely place.19
If you are a parent, you can help your children develop the skills to become emotionally intelligent. Speak to them about emotions and other mental states as early as you can, even if you think they are too young to understand. Remember that infants develop concepts well before you realize it is happening. So look children straight in the eye, widen your eyes to grab their attention, and speak about bodily sensations and movements in terms of emotions and other mental states. “See that little boy? He is crying. He is feeling pain from falling down and scraping his knee. He is sad and probably wants a hug from his parents.” Elaborate on the feelings of storybook characters, on your children’s own emotions, and on your emotions. Use a wide variety of emotion words. Talk about what causes emotions and what are their consequences to others. In general, think of yourself as your children’s tour guide through the mysterious world of humans and their movements and sounds. Your detailed explanations help your children build a well-developed conceptual system for emotion.20
When you teach emotion concepts to children, you are doing more than communicating. You are creating reality for these kids—social reality. You’re handing them tools to regulate their body budget, to make meaning of their sensations and act on them, to communicate how they feel, and to influence others more effectively. They will use these skills their whole lives.
As you teach your children about emotion, try not to limit yourself to essentialist stereotypes: smiling when happy, scowling when angry, and so on. (This may be difficult, as you’re competing with TV cartoons that stick to Western stereotypes of emotion.*) Help them understand the variety of the real world, that a smile may mean happiness, embarrassment, anger, or even sadness depending on context. Try also to admit when you aren’t sure how you feel, when you’re guessing how someone else feels, or when you guess badly.
Carry on full conversations with your young child, taking turns, even when she is a baby who cannot respond verbally yet. By the time a child is a toddler, the conversational pattern matters as much as the words themselves for building emotion concepts. My husband and I never used “baby talk” with our daughter but spoke to her in fully formed, adult sentences from the time she was born, pausing afterward to let her “respond” in whatever way she could. People around us in the supermarket thought we were crazy, but we did wind up with an emotionally intelligent teenager who actually talks to adults. (And she can torture me with three-decimal precision. I’m so proud.)21
Do your children have screaming fits or throw tantrums? You can help them master their emotions and calm down by using social reality to your advantage. When my daughter, Sophia, was two and in her tantrum phase, telling her to calm down had no effect, of course. So we invented a concept called the “Cranky Fairy.” Whenever Sophia launched into a tantrum (or if we were lucky, slightly beforehand), we’d explain to her, “Oh no, the Cranky Fairy is visiting. She’s making you feel cranky. Let’s try to make the Cranky Fairy go away.” Then we directed her to a particular chair—a fuzzy red one with a picture of Elmo from Sesame Street—as her special place for calming down. (No, it didn’t have little fuzzy red manacles.) At first we carried her to the chair, and sometimes she’d pitch a fit and kick the chair over, but eventually she would walk to it unasked and sit until her unpleasant feelings subsided. Sometimes she’d even announce that the Cranky Fairy was on her way. These practices might sound silly, but they have tangible effects. By inventing and sharing the concepts “Cranky Fairy” and “Elmo Chair” with Sophia, we created tools to help her calm herself. To her, these concepts were as real as money, art, power, and other constructions of social reality are to us.
In general, children with richer conceptual systems for emotion are poised for greater academic success. In one study conducted by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, schoolchildren were taught to broaden their knowledge and use of emotion words for twenty to thirty minutes per week. The results were improved social behavior and academic performance. Classrooms that employed this educational model were also better organized and were rated by blind observers as having better instructional support for students.22
In contrast, if you don’t talk to a child about his sensations in emotional terms, you can actually hamper his developing conceptual system. After four years of life, children in higher-income homes have seen or heard four million more words than their low-income counterparts, and they have better vocabulary and reading comprehension. Children with the fewest material advantages therefore lag in the social world. A simple intervention, like advising lower-income parents to communicate with their children more, improves the children’s school performance. In the same manner, using more emotion words should improve children’s EI.23
The same principles apply when you give your children feedback about their behavior. Studies show that children in low-income homes hear 125,000 more words of discouragement than praise, while their higher-income counterparts hear 560,000 more words of praise than discouragement, all by age four. That means children from lower-income homes have a more taxed body budget but fewer resources to deal with it.24
We all criticize our kids now and then, but try to make your feedback specific. If your daughter is whining incessantly, instead of yelling “Knock it off,” try something like, “Your whining is irritating me, so stop it. If you are having a problem, use your words.” When your son suddenly smacks your daughter in the head, don’t call him “a bad boy.” (That’s not a concept you want him to develop.) Be specific: “Stop hitting your sister; it hurts her and makes her feel sad. Tell her you are sorry.” The same rule holds for praise: don’t call your daughter “a good girl.” Praise her actions: “You made a good choice not hitting your brother back.” This wording helps children to build more useful concepts. Your tone of voice matters too, since it easily communicates your affect and directly impacts the child’s nervous system.25
By regulating your children’s body budgets effectively, you guide them not only to a richer conceptual system for emotion but also better overall language development, which prepares them for better academic performance in school.
Okay, now you’ve done your best to revamp your lifestyle for a balanced budget, and you’ve beefed up your conceptual system to transform yourself into an emotion expert. You’re still going to have ups and downs. You’ll still have to deal with the compromises demanded by love, the ambiguities of your social life, the insincerity of the workplace, the fickleness of friendships, and your body slowly failing you as you age. What can you do to master your feelings in the moment?
The simplest approach, believe it or not, is to move your body. All animals use motion to regulate their body budgets; if their brain serves up more glucose than their body needs, a quick scamper up a tree will bring their energy level back into balance. Humans are unique in that we can regulate the budget without moving, using purely mental concepts. But when this skill fails you, remember that you too are an animal. Get up and move around, even if you don’t feel like it. Turn on some music and dance around your home. Take a walk in a park. Why does this work? Moving your body can change your predictions and therefore your experience. Your movements may also help your control network to bring other, less bothersome concepts into the foreground.26
Another approach to mastering your emotions in the moment is to change your location or situation, which in turn can change your predictions. During the Vietnam War, for example, 15 percent of U.S. soldiers were addicted to heroin. When they came home as veterans, 95 percent of them stayed off the drug in their first year back—an astounding figure compared to the general population, where only 10 percent of users avoid relapse. The shift in location changed their predictions, which lessened their craving for the drug. (I sometimes wonder if midlife crisis is a drastic attempt to change one’s predictions by changing the context.*)27
When changes in movement and context fail to help you master your emotions, the next big thing to try is recategorizing how you feel. This will require some explanation. Anytime you feel miserable, it’s because you are experiencing unpleasant affect due to interoceptive sensations. Your brain will dutifully predict causes for those sensations. Perhaps they are a message from your body, like “I have a stomachache.” Or perhaps they’re saying, “Something is seriously wrong with my life.” This is the distinction between discomfort and suffering. Discomfort is purely physical. Suffering is personal.
Imagine what your body looks like to an invading virus. You are just a big bag of DNA, proteins, water, and whatever other biological stuff it must steal to replicate itself. An influenza virus doesn’t care about your beliefs, qualities, or values when it infects your cells. It does not make moral judgments on your character, like “Oooh, she’s a snob with a bad haircut . . . let’s infect her!” No, a virus is egalitarian toward its victims. It brings discomfort, but it’s nothing personal. All humans who haven’t slept enough, with a nice wet set of lungs, can apply for the job of host.
Affect, on the other hand, transforms interoceptive sensation into something about you, with your particular strengths and faults. Now the sensations are personal—they reside inside your affective niche. When you feel wretched, the world seems like an awful place. People are judging you. Wars are raging. The polar ice caps are melting. You are suffering. Most of us devote a lot of time to relieving suffering. We often eat for pleasure or to soothe ourselves, rather than for the nutrients. I think drug addiction is often a misguided attempt to relieve the suffering from a body budget that’s chronically out of whack.28
It’s tricky to distinguish discomfort and suffering in the moment. Are you feeling irritated or just having caffeine withdrawal? If you are a woman, you probably have ambiguous physical symptoms related to your menstrual cycle or during menopause, and you may categorize the sensations as having emotional meaning when they do not. I remember in 2010 when my whole lab was moving from one university to another, including twenty researchers and hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment. Everything seemed to be going wrong, plus I was about to leave for a two-week trip. Somehow I was holding myself together, extinguishing each fire as it ignited . . . and then my laptop died. I sank to the floor in the middle of my kitchen and started sobbing. At just that moment, my husband walked in, noticed my state, and asked innocently, “Are you premenstrual?” Oh. My. God. I lashed out at him, the goddamn sexist pig and how dare he be so smug when I’m barely holding my life together?? My fury shocked us both. And three days later, I discovered that he was right.
With practice, you can learn to deconstruct an affective feeling into its mere physical sensations, rather than letting those sensations be a filter through which you view the world. You can dissolve anxiety into a fast-beating heart. Once you can deconstruct into physical sensations, then you can recategorize them in some other way, using your rich set of concepts. Perhaps that pounding in your chest is not anxiety but anticipation, or even excitement.
Look around right now and find an object to focus on. Try recategorizing it not as a three-dimensional visual object but as the individual pieces of differently colored light that your perception is constructed from. Tough, isn’t it? Nevertheless, you can train yourself to do it. Pick the shiniest part of the object and try tracing its outlines with your eye. With a lot of practice, you can learn how to deconstruct objects like this. Great artists like Rembrandt could do it and realistically render objects in paint on a canvas. In a similar manner, you can deconstruct your emotions.
Recategorization is a tool of the emotion expert. The more concepts that you know and the more instances that you can construct, the more effectively you can recategorize in this manner to master your emotions and regulate your behavior. For instance, if you’re about to take a test and feel affectively worked up, you might categorize your feeling as harmful anxiety (“Oh no, I’m doomed!”) or as helpful anticipation (“I’m energized and ready to go!”). The head of my daughter’s karate school, Grandmaster Joe Esposito, advises his nervous students before their black belt test: “Make your butterflies fly in formation.” He is saying yes, you feel worked up right now, but don’t perceive it as nervousness: construct an instance of “Determination.”
Recategorization of this kind can bring tangible benefits to your life. Numerous studies have looked at performance on math tests such as the GRE and found that students achieve higher scores when they recategorize anxiety as merely a sign that the body is coping. People who recategorize anxiety as excitement show similar effects, with better performance and fewer classic symptoms of anxiety when speaking in public and even when singing karaoke. Their sympathetic nervous system still creates those jittery butterflies, but with fewer of the proinflammatory cytokines that lower performance and generally make people feel crappy, so they perform better. Studies have shown that remedial math students at community colleges can improve their exam grades and their final course grade through effective recategorization. This significant development can change the trajectory of a person’s life, given that a college degree can be the difference between financial success and a lifelong struggle to make ends meet.29
If you can categorize your discomfort as helpful, say, when you’re exercising hard, you can cultivate greater stamina. The U.S. Marine Corps has a motto that embodies this principle: “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” Whenever you exercise just until you feel unpleasant and then stop, you’re categorizing your physical sensations as exhaustion. You’ll always exercise below your threshold, despite the health benefits of continuing. Through recategorization, however, you can continue exercising and feel even better later, as you reap the benefits of a stronger, healthier body. The more you do it, the more you tune your conceptual system toward longer exercise in the future.30
Lower back pain, sports injuries, soreness from arduous medical treatments, and other ailments offer similar opportunities to distinguish between physical discomfort and affective distress. People who live with chronic pain, for example, commonly have catastrophic thoughts that appear to impact their lives even more than the intensity of the pain does. When they learn to separate their physical sensations from their unpleasant affect, they may use fewer opiate drugs and crave them less. This is a significant finding considering that nearly 6 percent of Americans use prescription medication for chronic pain each year, mostly addictive opiates that are now known to enhance pain symptoms with long-term use. According to Deborah Barrett, author of Paintracking (and my sister-in-law), when you can categorize pain as physical, the pain need not be a personal catastrophe.31
The notion of recategorizing suffering as discomfort, or deconstructing the mental into the physical, has ancient origins. In Buddhism, some forms of meditation help to recategorize sensations as physical symptoms to reduce suffering, a practice Buddhists call deconstructing the self. Your “self” is your identity—a collection of characteristics that somehow define you, like your assorted memories, beliefs, likes, dislikes, hopes, life choices, morals, and values. You can also define yourself by your genes, your physical characteristics (weight, eye color), your ethnicity, your personality (funny, trustworthy), the relationships you have with other people (friend, parent, child, lover), the roles you hold (student, scientist, salesperson, factory worker, physician), your geographic or ideological community (American, New Yorker, Christian, Democrat), even the car that you drive. A common core runs through all these views: the self is your sense of who you are, and it’s continuous through time, as if it were the essence of you.32
Buddhism considers the self to be a fiction and the primary cause of human suffering. Whenever you crave material things like expensive cars and clothes, or desire compliments to enhance your reputation, or seek positions of status and power to benefit your life, Buddhism says you are treating your fictional self as real (reifying the self). These material concerns may bring immediate gratification and pleasure but they also entrap you, like golden handcuffs, and cause persistent suffering, which we would call prolonged unpleasant affect. To a Buddhist, a self is worse than a passing physical illness. It is an enduring affliction.33
My scientific definition of the self is inspired by the workings of the brain yet is sympathetic to the Buddhist view. The self is part of social reality. It’s not exactly a fiction, but neither is it objectively real in nature like a neutron. It depends on other people. In scientific terms, your predictions in the moment, and your actions that derive from them, depend to some extent on the way that others treat you. You can’t be a self by yourself. We can understand why Tom Hanks’s character in the movie Cast Away, who was marooned alone on a desert island for four years, needed to create a companion named Wilson out of a volleyball.34
Certain behaviors and preferences are consistent with your self and some are not. There are foods you enjoy and others you’d prefer not to eat. You might call yourself a “dog person” or a “cat person.” These behaviors and preferences vary quite a bit: your favorite food might be French fries, but not at every meal. The most enthusiastic dog lovers know a couple of dogs that they can’t stand and are secretly fond of a few cats. Overall, your self is like a collection of dos and don’ts that summarizes your likes, dislikes, and habits in the moment.
We’ve seen something like this before. These dos and don’ts are like the features of a concept. So in my view, the self is a plain, ordinary concept just like “Tree,” “Things That Protect You from Stinging Insects,” and “Fear.” I am quite sure you don’t go around thinking of yourself as a concept, but just go with me for a bit on this.35
If the self is a concept, then you construct instances of your self by simulation. Each instance fits your goals in the moment. Sometimes you categorize yourself by your career. Sometimes you’re a parent, or a child, or a lover. Sometimes you’re just a body. Social psychologists say that we have multiple selves, but you can think of this repertoire as instances of a single, goal-based concept called “The Self” in which the goal shifts based on context.36
How does your brain keep track of all the varied instances of your “Self” as an infant, a young child, an adolescent, a middle-aged adult, and an older adult? Because one part of you has remained constant: you’ve always had a body. Every concept you have ever learned includes the state of your body (as interoceptive predictions) at the time of learning. Some concepts involve a lot of interoception, such as “Sadness,” and others have less, such as “Plastic Wrap,” but they’re always in relation to the same body. So every categorization you construct—about objects in the world, other people, purely mental concepts like “Justice,” and so on—contains a little bit of you. This is the rudimentary mental basis of your sense of self.37
The fiction of the self, paralleling the Buddhist idea, is that you have some enduring essence that makes you who you are. You do not. I speculate that your self is constructed anew in every moment by the same predictive, core systems that construct emotions, including our familiar pair of networks (interoceptive and control), among others, as they categorize the continuous stream of sensation from your body and the world. As a matter of fact, a portion of the interoceptive network, called the default mode network, has been called the “self system.” It consistently increases in activity during self-reflection. If you have atrophy in your default mode network, as happens in Alzheimer’s disease, you eventually lose your sense of self.38
Deconstructing the self offers a new inspiration for how to become the master of your emotions. By tweaking your conceptual system and changing your predictions, you not only change your future experiences; you can actually change your “Self.”
Suppose you are feeling bad—worried because you are struggling with your finances, angry that you did not receive the promotion you deserved, dejected because your teacher believes you are not as intelligent as other students, or heartbroken because your lover abandoned you. A Buddhist mindset would describe these feelings as the suffering that results from clinging to material wealth, reputation, power, and security in an effort to reify the self. In the language of the theory of constructed emotion, wealth, reputation, and the rest are firmly within your affective niche, impacting your body budget, which ultimately leads you to construct instances of unpleasant emotions. Deconstructing the self for a moment allows you to reduce the size of your affective niche so concepts like “Reputation,” “Power,” and “Wealth” become unnecessary.39
Western culture has some common wisdom associated with these ideas. Don’t be materialistic. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Sticks and stones. But I am asking you to take this one step further. When you are suffering from some ill or insult that has befallen you, ask yourself: Are you really in jeopardy here? Or is this so-called injury merely threatening the social reality of your self ? The answer will help you recategorize your pounding heartbeat, the knot in the pit of your stomach, and your sweaty brow as purely physical sensations, leaving your worry, anger, and dejection to dissolve like an antacid tablet in water.40
I’m not saying this kind of recategorization is easy, but with practice it’s possible, and it’s also healthful. When you categorize something as “Not About Me,” it exits your affective niche and has less impact on your body budget. Similarly, when you are successful and feel proud, honored, or gratified, take a step back and remember that these pleasant emotions are entirely the result of social reality, reinforcing your fictional self. Celebrate your achievements but don’t let them become golden handcuffs. A little composure goes a long way.
If you are interested in taking this strategy further, try meditation. Mindfulness meditation, just one type of many, teaches you to stay alert and present in the moment but to observe sensations as they come and go, non-judgmentally.* This state (which requires tremendous practice) reminds me of the quiet, alert state of newborn babies when they observe the world, their brains comfortably awash in prediction error, with no anxiety in sight. They experience sensations and release them. Meditation achieves something similar. This state may take years of practice to achieve, so the next best thing is to recategorize your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions as physical sensations, which are easier to let go of. You can use meditation, at least at first, to prioritize categorizations that focus on the physical, and deprioritize those that add more psychological meaning about you or your place in the world.
Meditation has a potent effect on brain structure and function, though scientists have not sorted out the exact details yet. Key regions in the interoceptive and control networks are larger for meditators, and connections between these regions are stronger. This matches what we might expect, since the interoceptive network is critical to constructing mental concepts and representing physical sensations from the body, and the control network is critical to regulating categorization. In some studies, we see stronger connections even after only a few hours of training. Other studies find that meditation reduces stress, improves the detection and processing of prediction error, facilitates recategorization (termed “emotion regulation”), and reduces unpleasant affect, although the findings are often inconsistent from one study to the next because not all the experiments have been well-controlled.41
Sometimes deconstructing the self is too challenging. You can achieve some of the same benefits more simply by cultivating and experiencing awe, the feeling of being in the presence of something vastly greater than yourself. It helps you get some distance from your self.42
I experienced these benefits firsthand when my family spent a few summer weeks at a beach house in Rhode Island. A symphony of crickets surrounded us each evening, resonating with an intensity I’d never heard before. I hadn’t paid much attention to crickets before that, but now they entered my affective niche. I began to look forward to them every evening and to find their song comforting while falling asleep. When we returned from our vacation, I discovered that I could hear crickets through the thick walls of my home if I lay quietly enough. Now, whenever I wake in the middle of a summer night, feeling anxious after a stressful day in the lab, the crickets help me drift back to sleep. I developed an awe-inspired concept of being enveloped within nature and feeling like a tiny speck. This concept helps me change my body budget whenever I want. I can notice a tiny weed forcing its way through a crack in the sidewalk, proving yet again that nature cannot be tamed by civilization, and employ the same concept to take comfort in my insignificance.43
You can experience similar awe when hearing ocean waves crash against rocks on a beach, gazing at the stars, walking under storm clouds in the middle of the day, hiking deep into uncharted territory, or taking part in spiritual ceremonies. People who report feeling awe more frequently also have the lowest levels of those nasty cytokines that cause inflammation (though nobody has proved cause and effect).44
Whether you cultivate awe, meditate, or find other ways to deconstruct your experience into physical sensations, recategorization is a critical tool for mastering your emotions in the moment. When you feel bad, treat yourself like you have a virus, rather than assuming that your unpleasant feelings mean something personal. Your feelings might just be noise. You might just need some sleep.
At this point you’ve seen how to work on becoming more emotionally intelligent about your experiences. Now let’s turn to perceiving emotion intelligently in other people around you, and the subsequent benefits for your well-being.
My husband, Dan, went through a brief, difficult time a few decades ago, before we knew each other, and was referred to a psychiatrist. About thirty seconds into the first session, Dan knitted his brow and scowled, as he often does when he is concentrating, and the psychiatrist, trusting his perceptions as accurate, pronounced that Dan was “filled with pent-up anger.” The thing is, Dan is one of the calmest people I know. When Dan assured the psychiatrist that he wasn’t angry, the psychiatrist, confident in his ability to read his patients, insisted, “Yes, you are.” Well, Dan was out the door before the second hand had completed its first revolution. He may well hold the world record for the shortest therapy session.
My point here isn’t to knock the mental-health profession but to illustrate the false confidence that one’s perceptions of other people’s mental states are—or ever can be—“right.” It comes from the classical view, which proposes that Dan broadcasts anger with a distinct fingerprint and the therapist detects it, even if Dan is unaware. If you want to gain mastery at perceiving other people’s emotional experiences, you must let go of this essentialist assumption.
What happened during Dan’s minute in therapy? He constructed an experience of concentration, and the therapist constructed a perception of anger. Both constructions were real, not in the objective sense but in the social sense. Perceptions of emotion are guesses, and they’re “correct” only when they match the other person’s experience; that is, both people agree on which concept to apply. Anytime you think you know how someone else feels, your confidence has nothing to do with actual knowledge. You’re just having a moment of affective realism.45
To improve at emotion perception, we must all give up the fiction that we know how other people feel. When you and a friend disagree about feelings, don’t assume that your friend is wrong like Dan’s ex-therapist did. Instead think, “We have a disagreement,” and engage your curiosity to learn your friend’s perspective. Being curious about your friend’s experience is more important than being right.
So, if our perceptions are just guesses, how do we ever communicate with each other? If you tell me that you’re proud of your child’s accomplishments in school, and “Pride” is a population of diverse instances with no consistent fingerprint, how can I know which “Pride” you mean? (This question doesn’t arise in the classical view, where pride has a distinct essence; you simply broadcast pride and I recognize it.) You and I communicate emotion, in the face of huge variability, by way of the brain’s predictive machinery. Your emotions are guided by your predictions. And as I observe you, the emotions I perceive are guided by my predictions. Emotional communication happens, therefore, when you and I predict and categorize in synchrony.46
Scientists and bartenders know that people synchronize in various ways when they communicate, especially if they like or trust each other. I nod, then you nod. You touch my arm and a moment later I touch yours. Our nonverbal behaviors coordinate. There’s also biological synchrony; a mother’s and child’s heart rates will synchronize if they are securely bonded, and the same can happen to anyone during an engaging conversation. The mechanism is still a mystery. I suspect it’s because their breathing synchronizes as they unconsciously observe each other’s chests rising and falling. When I was a training therapist, I learned to intentionally synchronize my breathing with my clients’ to prepare them for hypnosis.47
We likewise synchronize our concepts for emotion. My emotions are guided by my predictions. And as you observe me, the emotions you perceive are guided by your predictions. The sound of my voice and the motions of my body, as they are perceived by your brain, either confirm your predictions or become prediction error for you.
Suppose you tell me, “My son got the lead in the school play. I’m so proud.” Your words and actions launch a population of predictions in my brain, helping to coordinate a shared concept of “Pride” between us in the moment. My brain computes probabilities based on past experience and winnows down its predictions to a winning instance, perhaps leading me to say, “Congratulations.” Then the process repeats in the other direction as you perceive me. We’ll be more in sync if we share a cultural background or other past experiences, and if we agree that certain facial configurations, body movements, vocal acoustics, and other cues have certain meanings in certain contexts. Little by little, we co-construct an emotional experience that we both identify with the word “proud.”
In this scenario, our concepts don’t need to match exactly for me to understand how you feel; they just must have reasonably compatible goals. On the other hand, if I construct an instance of the unpleasant kind of pride, in which you’re arrogant and dismissive, I might obtusely fail to comprehend what you are saying, because you’ve used a concept that does not match mine in that instance. Note that our mutual construction is a continuous process with both brains in constant activity, even though I’m portraying it here as a simple back-and-forth sequence of events.
The co-construction of experience also allows us to regulate each other’s body budgets; this is one of the great benefits that we get from living in groups. All members of a social species regulate each other’s body budgets—even bees, ants, and cockroaches. But we are the only species who can do so by teaching each other purely mental concepts, and then using them in synchrony. Our words allow us to enter each other’s affective niches, even at extremely long distances. You can regulate your friend’s body budget (and he yours) even if you are an ocean apart—by phone or email or even just by thinking about one another.48
Your choice of words has a huge impact on this process, as those words shape other people’s predictions. Parents who ask a child, “Are you upset?” instead of the more general question, “How are you feeling?” are influencing the answer, co-constructing emotion and honing the child’s concepts toward being upset. Doctors who ask a patient, “Are you feeling depressed?” likewise make a positive response more likely than if they’d said, “Tell me how you’ve been.” These are leading questions, the same sort that attorneys utilize (and object to) with witnesses on the stand. In everyday life, as in the courtroom, you need to be mindful of influencing people’s predictions by your words.
Likewise, if you want someone else to know what you’re feeling, you need to transmit clear cues for the other person to predict effectively and for synchrony to occur. In the classical view of emotion, the responsibility is all on the perceiver’s end because emotions are supposedly displayed universally. In a construction mindset, you also bear the responsibility to be a good sender.49
Suppose you hadn’t read this book, and someone said to you, “Pssst! Wanna be the master of your emotions? Then eat less junk food and learn lots of new words.” I admit, it sounds unintuitive. But healthful eating leads to a body budget that is easier to balance and to more calibrated interoceptive predictions, and new words seed new concepts that are a basis for constructing emotional experiences and perceptions. Many things that seem unrelated to emotion actually have a profound impact on how you feel, because of the porous boundary between the social and the physical.
You are a remarkable animal who can create purely mental concepts that influence the state of your body. The social and the physical are intimately linked via your body and your brain, and your ability to move effectively between social and physical depends on a set of skills that you can learn. So grow your emotion concepts. Cultivate opportunities for your brain to wire itself to the realities of your social world. If you feel unpleasant in the moment, then deconstruct or recategorize your experiences. And realize that your perceptions of others are just guesses and not facts.
Some of these new skills are supremely difficult to cultivate. It’s one thing for a scientist like me to tell you, “That’s how the brain works.” It’s another thing entirely to up-end your whole lifestyle to take advantage of the science. Who has time to revamp their eating and sleeping habits and get more exercise, let alone learn new concepts, practice categorizing, and occasionally step back from the fiction of the self ? We all have jobs and schoolwork and time constraints and all sorts of personal and home situations. Also, some of these suggestions require an investment of time or money, which might be in short supply for the people who could benefit most. But . . . everyone can find something they can try in this chapter, even if it’s just taking walks or combining some emotion concepts before you go to sleep. Or giving up potato chips. (Okay, maybe not completely.)
Emotion concepts and body budgeting can improve your health and well-being, as you’ve just seen, but they can also be a catalyst for illness. Emotions are said to influence a variety of debilitating medical disorders like depression, anxiety, and unexplained chronic pain, as well as metabolic dysfunctions that lead to type-2 diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer. At the same time, new discoveries about the nervous system are dissolving the sacred boundary between what we think of as physical and mental illness, in the same way that the theory of constructed emotion blurs the boundary between the physical and the social. That is the next topic we’ll visit.