What are emotions? Yeah. And what purpose do they serve so that as everybody's listening, they understand what you're talking about when you say feeling an emotion?

The purpose of our emotions is not to get us all hooked or get us all frazzled. The purpose of our emotions is to help us to adapt to the world around us. That is the purpose of our emotions. Our emotions have evolved to help us to adapt and survive. What does this mean from the perspective of how we connect with ourselves? What this means is that a lot of the language that we have around emotions has actually not been from this functional perspective. It hasn't been from the perspective that actually emotions are human and healthy and normal and beautiful. Instead, what we have is this idea that emotions are weak. Emotions are feminine. Emotions are bad. That's the history that we come with when we think about emotions. When we see emotions in that way, we start this hustle with, Well, if I'm feeling anything other than a so-called positive emotion, then it's bad. We have every day thoughts. A thought might be, I'm not good enough. I'm a fraud. We have emotions. We have emotions of anger, fear, grief, all of these experiences that we have. We have stories. Some of our stories were written on our mental chalkboards when we were five years old, when we were this high.

Stories about whether we're good enough, whether we deserve to be loved. The pop psychology way of viewing these is that they're good or bad, positive or negative. In other words, if you have a thought that's negative, put it aside, it doesn't belong, think about something positive. What My work does is it actually says these thoughts, emotions, and stories are normal. They are helping you to understand the world, to see what you need to pay attention to, to adapt to the world. So these are normal. We don't need to get into a hustle with ourselves as to whether we should or shouldn't be allowed to think or feel a particular thing. These are normal. These are beautiful. These are human. If we turn against that and say, I shouldn't think this, or I shouldn't be allowed to feel that, we unsee ourselves. Now, emotions are data. Emotions are data. They're not directives. In other words, it doesn't mean because I feel something, now I need to act out, and now I've got to tell everyone how I feel, because there is a difference between feeling our emotions with compassion, with curiosity, and being able to be grounded in them.

Then that allows us the space, the distance from the emotion, because now we're not hustling, to be able to think about, who do I want to be? Who do I want to be in this relationship? How do I want to come to the circumstance? So that we're coming to the world not in a way that's reactive, but rather coming to the world in a way that is clear-sighted and centered within the self.

That was really interesting. Let's talk about how you do this in real life. I've got a ton of questions from our global audience. When they heard that you were coming on, Dr. David, we've got a ton of questions about how you manage your own emotions, particularly in situations where other people are triggering you. This particular question comes from Tina. Tina writes that her son is struggling with anxiety and depression, and she wants to know, Dr. David, how do I separate my emotions from my son's when he's so low? I try so hard not to, but I find things such a struggle when he feels low and when he's okay, I'm okay. I just don't even know where to start. It's not It's just kids. This is for your partners or if your parents are struggling. I think we all want to know how to support somebody but not get sucked into their emotions. How do you do that, Dr. David?

Well, I mean, anyone who's parented, anyone who's looked after elderly parents, anyone who's been in relationship with anyone, recognizes some of the truth that is said, which is, as a parent, for example, you only tend to be as happy as your most unhappy child. Because of course, when we see people in pain, it evokes pain in us. We are social creatures. We, of course, are going to experience pain, grief, agony when we see someone else in pain. At the same time, what happens when we get stuck in my experience experience of what that other person is experiencing. We become both unable to manage our own health and well-being, but also we can't really be functional, effective parents because we are now reactive within the pain that is created in that world. There are a couple of things that I would say. Firstly, if we think about how to think about children's emotions, because that's probably a really good place to start, we can then start thinking about our own. So children's emotions. Often as a parent, it becomes really tempting when we see our children in pain to rush in and fix. I remember Mel years ago, me taking my son to the pediatrician.

He had just been born. And I remember going and my son was gogo and gaga and smiling and happy. And I handed him over to the pediatrician for his shots And he started to scream. He started to be outraged, and he was crying. And I jumped in and I said to him, It's okay, it's okay, it's okay. And the nurse, so kindly, so empathetically said to me, Susie, it's not okay. Your child is in pain. Okay, it's not okay. Your child is in pain. It will be okay, but your child is in pain. I was like, I've got a flipping PhD in this stuff, and I did the one thing that you're not allowed to do, which is invalid. The point that I make here is, one of the first things we often try to do with others is we try to control what emotion we think they should or shouldn't be allowed to feel. Often we do it. I can see it's resonating. I can see it's connecting. Often we do it with good intention. We do it with good intention. Now, what does that teach our child? What it teaches our child is what we call display rules.

Display rules are the implicit rules that we often have of what emotion is it What am I okay for me to feel in my family? Or what am I allowed to experience? So how does this impact on the child? What it basically does is a display rule. If every time a When the child comes home and is upset, you say to the child, Oh, you're not allowed to be upset. You might not be saying that overtly, but you might be signaling that. What that's saying to the child is, Sadness has no place here. I need to turn away from myself because sadness is not allowed in this family, or anger isn't allowed, or emotions aren't allowed. So now, what is the longer term impact of that? Well, how do we become good at regulating our emotions? We become good at regulating our emotions when we say, Hey, this is what sadness feels like, and you practice feeling sad, and you practice the sadness that I felt 24 hours ago. I did A, I did B, I did C. Now I no longer feel sad by allowing our children to feel all of their emotions, we're not just allowing them to feel all of their emotions.

We are actually doing the core work of parenting, which is helping our children to be with discomfort, helping our children to recognize and be with uncomfortable emotions. And so I think one of the most powerful ways for Tina and for every single person listening, is any emotion we experience, rather than judging that emotion as that's positive, that's negative, that's wrong, that's right, it's hard to human. And so for Tina, creating a little bit of space where she sees that experience in herself with compassion is very powerful because now it's already moving you into the space of the self, where you're not in this vortex of both of you struggling, you're now in with yourself. So that is, firstly, a very important skill. Secondly, is often when people experience tough emotions, we start getting hooked by the emotion, and there's no space for anything else. So I'm angry, and I'm feeling overwhelmed, and there's all this stuff going on for me, and there's no space in that. For the wisdom that I believe every single one of us has. We all have wisdom. We all, in the peace of night when we are lying in bed and it's just us, there's this part of ourselves that is just us, and it's wise, and it's capable, beautiful, centered.

And so we need to create the space for that. And when we're being clouded by being hooked by a difficulty motion, there's not the space. So some practical strategies is when we are hooked by a difficulty motion is to recognize that often we use very big labels to describe what we're feeling. If you just think about something as simple as saying, I'm stressed. A lot of people come home and someone says, How was your day? Stressful. Now, let's deconstruct that a little bit. Your body, your psychology doesn't know what to do with the word stress. There is a world of difference between stress and disappointment. Stress and I feel unsupported. Stress and I feel unseen. Stress and I'm bored. There's a world of difference. What we know is that when we label our emotions with greater levels of accuracy, with high levels of granularity, that what it starts to enable us to do is to understand the cause of the emotion. Gee, it's not just stress, it's I'm feeling unsupported. And it also allows us to develop what psychologists call our readiness potential. The readiness potential, when you move away from, I'm not stressed, actually, I'm bored, what that boredom does is when you're starting to label it in that way, you're also starting to say, Gee, what do I need to do to now not be bored?

So it starts to move you towards goals. We know that children as young as two and three who have greater levels of emotion granularity. In other words, they're not just saying, I'm mad or I'm sad, but they're able to say, I feel a bit upset, I feel a bit disappointed. I feel even children as young as two and three years old, obviously within their language capacity, those children who have greater levels of emotional granularity, 10, 20, 30 years later, those children do better. Again, coming back to Tina, we've got this gentle acceptance of emotion that is crucial. In my work, I call it gentle acceptance. It's about showing up to all of our emotions with acceptance and curiosity.

So is it just me, Dr. David, or is everybody a little bit more uneasy or emotional these days?

Absolutely. The world has been changing so quickly, and we as human beings, we're not taught in school the science of how to navigate emotions effectively. And so we we come to a changing world that feels out of control.