Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 69-70 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:49:35 PM
given that it’s something we’re asked so often in one form or another, that should make it the easiest question ever,
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 71-72 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:49:47 PM
psychologist and director of a center devoted to emotional well-being but also as a fellow human.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 79-79 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:50:28 PM
they had at least one thing in common: no clue about how to deal with feelings—neither their own nor mine.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 86-87 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:51:16 PM
Without meaning to, they taught me a powerful lesson. Keep my feelings to myself. Definitely do not allow my parents to see them.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 93-95 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:51:48 PM
Suddenly, the source of my constant emotional meltdowns was clear to my parents. My bad grades. My bulimia. My social isolation. My despair. My rage. My parents did what many people do under similar pressures. They freaked out.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 96-97 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:52:03 PM
They were too overwhelmed by their own problems, just trying to survive, to be able to deal with anybody else’s emotional life.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 98-99 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:52:15 PM
Maybe they were afraid of what they’d find out—afraid that once they knew, they’d have to do something about it.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 107-107 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:53:26 PM
Your life didn’t have to be tragic for you to feel as though your emotional life didn’t matter to anyone but you.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 108-108 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:53:37 PM
Here’s how I responded: I became numb to how I felt. I was under emotional lockdown.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 113-115 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:54:15 PM
Uncle Marvin was trying to create a curriculum that would encourage students to express how they felt. He believed it was the missing link in their education—that emotion skills would improve their learning and their lives.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 121-123 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:55:14 PM
That one little question was all it took to change my life. It wasn’t just what he said, it was the way he said it. Truly wanting to hear the answer. Not judging me for what I felt. He just listened, openly and with empathy, to what I was expressing. He didn’t try to interpret me or explain me.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 128-128 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:55:57 PM
Uncle Marvin gave me permission to feel.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 128-130 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:56:11 PM
Given all that, it’s no surprise that for the past twenty-five years I’ve been researching and writing about emotions and running around the world talking to people about their feelings.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 130-131 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:56:17 PM
I’m a professor in the Yale Child Study Center and founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 132-133 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:56:28 PM
Our center’s goal is to use the power of emotions to create a healthier and more equitable, innovative, and compassionate society.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 135-136 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:56:43 PM
My message for everyone is the same: that if we can learn to identify, express, and harness our feelings, even the most challenging ones, we can use those emotions to help us create positive, satisfying lives.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 139-140 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:57:08 PM
we don’t even have the vocabulary to describe our feelings in useful detail—three-quarters of the people have a hard time coming up with a “feeling” word.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 142-142 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:57:47 PM
It makes you wonder: Do I even know how I’m feeling? Have I given myself permission to ask?
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 148-149 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:58:29 PM
The instinct to protect ourselves by hiding our vulnerability is natural. Even animals in the wild do it. It’s self-preservation, pure and simple.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 154-155 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:58:59 PM
It’s one of the great paradoxes of the human condition—we ask some variation of the question “How are you feeling?” over and over, which would lead one to assume that we attach some importance to it. And yet we never expect or desire—or provide—an honest answer.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 159-160 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 2:59:48 PM
aside maybe from physical health, our emotional state is one of the most important aspects of our lives. It rules everything else. Its influence is pervasive.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 164-166 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 3:00:26 PM
We all believe that our feelings are important and deserve to be addressed respectfully and fully. But we also think of emotions as being disruptive and unproductive—at
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 167-168 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 3:00:51 PM
We’ve all heard the message: Get over it. Stop focusing on yourself (as though such a thing were possible!).
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 168-169 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 3:00:55 PM
The irony, though, is that when we ignore our feelings, or suppress them, they only become stronger.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 172-174 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 3:01:33 PM
We may also fail to understand exactly how we feel when things are going great. We’re content just to enjoy the emotions and not probe too deeply. It’s a mistake, of course. If we’re going to make positive choices in the future, we need to know what will bring us happiness—and why.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 202-204 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 3:05:57 PM
If we don’t understand emotions and find strategies to deal with them, they will take over our lives, as they did for me as a child. Fear and anxiety made it impossible for me to try to deal with my problems. I was paralyzed. The science now proves why.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 227-228 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 3:08:34 PM
remake education so that it includes emotion skills—so that professional interventions become less necessary.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 232-235 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 3:09:09 PM
Feelings are a form of information. They’re like news reports from inside our psyches, sending messages about what’s going on inside the unique person that is each of us in response to whatever internal or external events we’re experiencing. We need to access that information and then figure out what it’s telling us. That way we can make the most informed decisions.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 236-237 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 3:09:30 PM
Our thinking and behavior absolutely change in response to what we’re feeling. But we don’t always know why or how best to address our emotions.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 245-247 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 3:11:17 PM
When it’s an adult who’s angry, our response isn’t much different. We immediately pull back. We stop listening sympathetically. We feel under attack, which makes it nearly impossible for us to deal with the information the person is conveying. But that anger was an important message.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 250-250 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 3:11:37 PM
We are not born with an innate talent for recognizing what we or anyone else is feeling and why. We all have to learn it.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 251-251 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 3:11:49 PM
As with any science, there’s a process of discovery, a method of investigation.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 252-260 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 3:12:25 PM
the talents needed to become what we’ve termed an “emotion scientist.” Here are the five skills we’ve identified. We need to recognize our own emotions and those of others, not just in the things we think, feel, and say but in facial expressions, body language, vocal tones, and other nonverbal signals. understand those feelings and determine their source—what experiences actually caused them—and then see how they’ve influenced our behaviors. label emotions with a nuanced vocabulary. express our feelings in accordance with cultural norms and social contexts in a way that tries to inform and invites empathy from the listener. regulate emotions, rather than let them regulate us, by finding practical strategies for dealing with what we and others feel.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 269-270 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 3:13:24 PM
Educators and parents have to demonstrate the ability to identify, discuss, and regulate their own emotions before they can teach the skills to others.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 274-277 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 3:14:06 PM
learning the skills and improving the way we respond to our feelings doesn’t mean we’ll suddenly become happy all the time. Perpetual happiness can’t be our goal—it’s just not how real life works. We need the ability to experience and express all emotions, to down- or up-regulate both pleasant and unpleasant emotions in order to achieve greater well-being, make the most informed decisions, build and maintain meaningful relationships, and realize our potential.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 285-286 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 3:14:58 PM
Emotion skills are both personal and mutual. They can be used privately, but their best application is throughout a community, so that a network emerges to reinforce its own influence.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 290-293 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 3:15:37 PM
We all want our lives, and the lives of the people we love, to be free of hardship and troubling events. We can never make that happen. We all want our lives to be filled with healthy relationships, compassion, and a sense of purpose. That we can make happen.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 293-294 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 3:15:44 PM
It starts with the permission to feel, the first step of the process.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 297-298 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:30:18 PM
We’re always feeling something, usually more than one thing at a time. Our emotions are a continuous flow, not an occasional event.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 306-310 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:32:31 PM
Our emotional lives are a roller coaster, climbing high one moment and plunging the next. Imagine how it must be for children. The same constant flow of feelings, running the gamut from crushingly negative to euphorically positive—from the moment they wake up in the morning, through the entire school day, to the moment they fall asleep. Except that children haven’t learned yet how to manage their emotions—how to suppress and compartmentalize whatever’s inconvenient at the moment, how to channel useful feelings for maximum benefit. They experience everything so intensely—boredom, frustration, anxiety, worry, excitement, elation.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 315-317 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:33:20 PM
All emotions are an important source of information about what’s going on inside us. Our multiple senses bring us news from our bodies, our minds, and the outside world, and then our brains process and analyze it and formulate our experience. We call that a feeling.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 323-324 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:34:30 PM
Scientists didn’t like emotions because, unlike intelligence, they can’t be measured with standardized tests.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 329-332 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:35:28 PM
in 1990, psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer introduced the first formal theory of emotional intelligence to the scientific literature. They defined it as “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.”
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 337-338 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:36:14 PM
emotions, when used widely, supported reasoning and complex problem solving.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 338-340 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:36:40 PM
Charles Darwin’s functional view of emotion. Back in the nineteenth century, he pioneered the idea that emotions signal valuable information and energize adaptive behavior central to survival. Fear finally got its due as being very useful indeed, especially in our species’ early, threat-dense environments.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 343-344 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:37:13 PM
emotions interact with cognition and behavior. Research showed that emotions give purpose, priority, and focus to our thinking. They tell us what to do with the knowledge that our senses deliver. They motivate us to act.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 350-353 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:38:20 PM
showed some participants a comedy film and others no film at all and then tested them all for creative thinking. Results indicated a clear increase in creativity for those who saw the film—the ones in a “positive affect condition”—compared with the people in the other group. It’s a natural bias—we all perceive and retrieve “mood-congruent” information most easily.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 363-364 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:39:40 PM
emotion and cognition work hand in hand to perform sophisticated information processing.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 367-368 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:40:04 PM
from an evolutionary perspective, emotions have an extremely practical purpose: They ensure our survival. They make us smarter. If we didn’t need them, they wouldn’t exist.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 369-369 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:40:33 PM
five areas where our feelings matter most—the aspects of our everyday lives that are most influenced by our emotions.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 369-376 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:40:59 PM
First, our emotional state determines where we direct our attention, what we remember, and what we learn. Second is decision making: when we’re in the grip of any strong emotion—such as anger or sadness, but also elation or joy—we perceive the world differently, and the choices we make at that moment are influenced, for better or for worse. Third is our social relations. What we feel—and how we interpret other people’s feelings—sends signals to approach or avoid, to affiliate with someone or distance ourselves, to reward or punish. Fourth is the influence of emotions on our health. Positive and negative emotions cause different physiological reactions within our bodies and brains, releasing powerful chemicals that, in turn, affect our physical and mental well-being. And the fifth has to do with creativity, effectiveness, and performance. In order to achieve big goals, get good grades, and thrive in our collaborations at work, we have to use our emotions as though they were tools. Which, of course, they are—or can be.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 381-381 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:44:26 PM
If we’re fearful, the source of that fear occupies all our thoughts.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 384-384 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:44:33 PM
Nature has wired our brains this way, and it’s a good thing: any distraction in that moment could prove fatal.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 387-388 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:45:03 PM
When we anticipate an unfavorable outcome under any circumstances, we’re inhibited from thinking about much else.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 389-392 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:45:17 PM
Strong, negative emotions (fear, anger, anxiety, hopelessness) tend to narrow our minds—it’s as though our peripheral vision has been cut off because we’re so focused on the peril that’s front and center. There’s actually a physiological side to this phenomenon. When these negative feelings are present, our brains respond by secreting cortisol, the stress hormone. This inhibits the prefrontal cortex from effectively processing information, so even at a neurocognitive level our ability to focus and learn is impaired.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 392-393 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:45:26 PM
moderate levels of stress—feeling challenged—can enhance our focus. It’s chronic stress that’s toxic and makes it biologically challenging to learning.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 402-404 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:46:34 PM
Instead of stimulating the production of cortisol, positive emotions are generally associated with the excretion of serotonin, dopamine, and other “feel-good” neurochemicals that exert their influence on thinking and behavior.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 406-409 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:47:02 PM
Pessimism can make it easier for us to anticipate things that could go wrong and then take the proper actions to prevent them. Guilt acts as a moral compass. Anxiety keeps us trying to improve things that a more generous mood might be willing to accept. Even anger is a great motivator—unlike resignation, it drives us to act and perhaps to fix what made us angry in the first place.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 411-413 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:47:33 PM
Negative emotions have a constructive function: they help narrow and focus our attention. It’s sadness, not happiness, that can help us work through a difficult problem. It’s excitement that stimulates lots of ideas.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 420-422 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:48:44 PM
Whenever we notice that we’re suddenly having difficulty paying attention, or focusing, or remembering, we should ask ourselves: What emotion information is there, just beneath the surface of our thoughts? And what if anything can we do to regain a handle on our minds?
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 429-429 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:49:40 PM
We believe that our ability to reason and think rationally is our highest mental power, above our unruly emotional
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 429-431 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:49:47 PM
side. This is but a trick our brains play on us—in fact, our emotions exert a huge, though mostly unconscious, influence over how our minds function. This fact is especially evident when it comes to the decision-making process.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 434-438 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:50:41 PM
Most decisions are attempts at predicting future outcomes: We ought to buy this house. I’m not going to take that job. Pasta is a great choice. In every case, we consider all the options and choose the one that seems most likely to result in a favorable outcome. In theory, at least. In reality, our emotions largely determine our actions. If we’re feeling something positive—confidence, optimism, contentment—we’ll come to one conclusion about what we ought to do. If our emotions are negative—anxiety, anger, sadness—our decision may be quite different, even though we’re working with the same set of facts.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 443-445 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:51:19 PM
If we’re feeling strong, exuberant, energetic, we’re more likely to base our decisions on heuristics—our gut instinct at that moment—than on careful reasoning.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 457-458 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:52:37 PM
our feelings can linger long past the moment that inspires them—influencing subsequent behavior without us knowing—it’s known as “the incidental mood bias.”
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 459-460 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:52:51 PM
When we recall happy moments from our past, we’re likely to make decisions based in optimism and confidence. If we’re remembering negative things, we’ll feel skeptical and pessimistic, and we’ll decide things differently.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 468-469 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:53:47 PM
These quick decisions are particularly susceptible to our moods and unconscious biases, especially when additional information is unavailable. We decide often with minimal conscious thinking.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 470-473 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:54:09 PM
In fact, with greater emotional awareness, just the opposite may be true: our feelings can serve as another form of information, telling us important things about how we’re responding to any given situation. When we are faced with a decision, anxiety may tell us one thing, enthusiasm something completely different. Knowing this, we can take our emotional state into account before choosing a course of action.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 499-502 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:57:06 PM
Human relations are infinitely complex because we ourselves are, but the basic dynamic is rather simple: approach or avoid. We tell people to come closer or we tell them to back off. People communicate the same thing to us. So much of what happens between human beings is a result of how we communicate our emotions. And it all depends on something deep inside us, perhaps hidden from our own view: our emotional state.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 502-506 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:57:33 PM
Relationships are the most important aspects of our lives. There’s plentiful scientific research showing the enormous influence they have on our well-being—people with robust social networks enjoy better mental and physical health and even live longer, while unfavorable outcomes are associated with a lack of connections to other people. The purpose of relationships can be seen in all societies, even among animals: being surrounded by allies is a form of protection that can mean the difference between life and death. Our need to attach ourselves to others isn’t solely sentimental,
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 529-530 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 9:00:26 PM
Sometimes the emotions we feel send signals that elicit the opposite of the response we want and need.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 532-533 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 9:00:50 PM
This dynamic rules much of human interaction—when we need emotional support most is when we’re least likely to receive it.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 548-551 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 9:03:31 PM
When considering the influence of emotion on our well-being, we must first remember that our brains—where most of our feelings originate—are as much a part of our bodies as any other organ, fed by the same flow of blood, oxygen, and nutrients. Our emotions are linked to physiological reactions in our brains, releasing hormones and other powerful chemicals that, in turn, affect our physical health, which has an impact on our emotional state. It’s all connected.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 552-553 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 9:03:55 PM
That’s why physical sickness can be caused by a mind under emotional stress. But there’s also the opposite phenomenon: physical wellness that’s fostered by positive feelings. Both kinds underscore the importance of managing our emotional lives.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 558-559 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 9:05:13 PM
Inside our brains, hormones and other neurochemicals are being turned on and off depending on what we’re feeling at any given moment.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 559-563 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 9:05:33 PM
The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, located in the midbrain, is one of the major neuroendocrine systems that controls how we respond to stress and also regulates emotions and moods. The HPA axis is where certain hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol, originate. Researchers studying this region of the brain have found that early-life exposure to mild, everyday stressors enhances our future ability to regulate emotions and confers lifelong resilience. But exposure to extreme or prolonged stress does just the opposite—it induces hyperactivity in the HPA axis and lifelong susceptibility to stress.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 563-564 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 9:05:49 PM
The difference between good stress and bad stress mainly has to do with duration and intensity.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 569-570 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 9:06:22 PM
We have evolved to handle short-term stress—hormones are released, allowing us to respond successfully to the crisis, and then turn off at the tap.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 571-573 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 9:06:36 PM
Many of us spend hours and entire days under emotional duress, until it becomes a chronic condition. Our brains are bathed in a constant flow of stress hormones, for which evolution has definitely not prepared us. We don’t suffer only emotionally in those instances—our physical health is affected too.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 574-575 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 9:07:45 PM
Robert Sapolsky, a professor at Stanford University, in his book Behave.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 573-575 | Added on Thursday, December 23, 2021 9:07:53 PM
“Stress leaves you in a fight-or-flight state in which your body turns off long-term building and repair projects,” said Robert Sapolsky, a professor at Stanford University, in his book Behave. “Memory and accuracy are impaired. You tire more easily, you can become depressed and reproduction gets downgraded.”
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 579-583 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 5:54:43 PM
Feeling “down”—pessimism, apathy, depression—is linked to low levels of serotonin and dopamine, the so-called feel-good neurotransmitters. Serotonin plays a role in pain perception, which may be why people experiencing negative emotions report more severe symptoms of illness, and nearly half of patients with depression also suffer aches and pains. Negative emotional states—anxiety, anger, sadness, stress—are closely associated with unhealthy behaviors, such as poor diet, smoking, excessive drinking, physical inactivity, and social isolation,
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 594-596 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 5:57:10 PM
We can see the influence of our emotions on our physical health in less dire ways too. The stress associated with knowing you have to deliver a speech can double the severity of allergy symptoms for two days. Feeling sad makes symptoms of illness seem more severe and cause greater discomfort.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 598-601 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 5:57:40 PM
But our emotions can also prompt the release of beneficial neurochemicals and hormones. Crying is soothing because it carries stress hormones out of our bodies. Feelings of gratitude increase oxygen levels in our tissues, speed healing, and boost our immune system. Being in love was found to raise the level of nerve growth factor, a hormonelike substance that restores the nervous system and improves memory.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 603-604 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 5:58:09 PM
Feeling good, therefore, may encourage healthy behaviors, which in turn can promote greater emotional well-being and physical health.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 607-609 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 5:58:53 PM
We’ll never eradicate negative emotions from our lives or those of our kids. Nor should we. But we need to attend to the play of positive and negative emotions, which is out of balance for too many of us.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 610-611 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 5:59:09 PM
What will it take to switch the ratio of negative-to-positive emotions? What’s your ratio?
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 617-619 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:00:06 PM
creativity is much more universal than that. It’s an important element of every human life. Whenever we make a decision or face a challenge, we have an opportunity to be creative—to respond to the moment in a way that doesn’t just repeat what’s always been done before
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 638-640 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:02:37 PM
We all go through tough times, but most of us believe that if we persevere, we can find solutions. That’s another form of creativity: everyday creativity, the ability to keep discovering new answers when the old ones no longer work.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 664-665 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:05:29 PM
As with so much about our emotional lives, there’s a feedback loop at work: feeling good encourages us to act creatively, which makes us feel even better.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 680-681 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:07:51 PM
Now do you see how complex that simple question “How do you feel?” really can be? That emotional roller coaster is no small matter—it has an enormous influence over the most important areas of our lives.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 689-691 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:08:34 PM
it’s a safe bet that no one in the history of the human race has ever known precisely what she or he is feeling, in all its complexity and contradiction and chaos, at all times.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 692-693 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:08:46 PM
Scientists refer to intelligences as hot or cold, hot being the emotional one and cold, of course, the rational one. But they don’t take turns operating.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 695-695 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:09:13 PM
We have one brain made up of several regions, each with its own functions, and sometimes they pull us in different directions.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 704-706 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:10:26 PM
Feelings motivate us to do things that improve our lives and those of the people around us, but they can also adversely influence our actions—without us even realizing it. In fact, that’s when we’re most vulnerable to emotion’s impact: when we fail to detect
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 707-708 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:10:39 PM
When we are making a decision, there are two kinds of emotions: integral and incidental. Integral emotions are directly caused by the action at hand—we’re
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 709-711 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:10:54 PM
Incidental emotions have nothing to do with what’s going on—as we described earlier, we had an argument with our kids, and our lingering feelings of frustration and anger influence how we drive to work or interact with colleagues at the office. These are the emotions that infiltrate our thinking without us being aware.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 711-712 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:11:01 PM
Only by becoming emotion scientists will we learn the skills to use our emotions wisely.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 714-714 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:11:50 PM
Knowing what emotions tell us is the first, necessary part of the process.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 718-719 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:13:04 PM
Becoming an emotion scientist will help us to recognize the physical symptoms that sometimes accompany strong feelings.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 720-723 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:14:13 PM
when our “body budget” is running low and we feel distressed, our brains search around for things that might be wrong in our lives to make sense of the distress. When these symptoms present themselves, we don’t always pause to ask: Is there an emotion behind this, and what can I do about it? Or am I just dehydrated or hungry or tired and need to drink or eat something or just go to bed?
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 724-725 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:14:29 PM
What am I reacting to? We can learn to identify and understand all our feelings, integral and incidental, and then respond in helpful, proportionate ways—once we acquire emotion skills. But what exactly are they?
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 729-731 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:15:06 PM
emotional intelligence, which Salovey and Mayer defined as the ability to perceive accurately, appraise, and express emotion; the ability to access and/or generate feelings when they facilitate thought; the ability to understand emotion and emotional knowledge; and the ability to regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 735-735 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:16:01 PM
some of us are more fluent and intuitive than others when it comes to emotional matters. But we can all learn and improve here
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 765-768 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:19:31 PM
First, emotion skills must be acquired. Nobody is born with them all in place and ready to work. Emotion skills amplify our strengths and help us through challenges. If I’m an extrovert and need to shine, then I must learn to read my environment, so I can see when I overwhelm others and tone myself down. If I’m an introvert, my tendency to be quiet and subdued might underwhelm people at home, school, or the workplace, so I will need to amp myself up at times, so the world can see my enthusiasm.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 789-789 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:23:06 PM
we’ve developed an approach for making emotion
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 789-790 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:23:14 PM
we’ve developed an approach for making emotion skills an integral part of education
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 792-794 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:23:32 PM
They’re known by an acronym—RULER. The first skill: Recognizing the occurrence of an emotion—by noticing a change in one’s own thoughts, energy, or body or in someone else’s facial expression, body language, or voice. That’s the first clue that something important is happening.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 794-796 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:23:46 PM
The second skill: Understanding, which means that we know the cause of emotions and see how they influence our thoughts and decisions. This helps us make better predictions about our own and others’ behavior.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 796-799 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:23:59 PM
The third skill: Labeling, which refers to making connections between an emotional experience and the precise terms to describe it. People with a more mature “feelings vocabulary” can differentiate among related emotions such as pleased, happy, elated, and ecstatic. Labeling emotions accurately increases self-awareness and helps us to communicate emotions effectively, reducing misunderstanding in social interactions.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 799-802 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:24:07 PM
The fourth skill: Expressing, which means knowing how and when to display our emotions, depending on the setting, the people we’re with, and the larger context. People who are skilled in this area understand that unspoken rules for emotional expression, also called “display rules,” often direct the best way to express what they feel and modify their behaviors accordingly.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 802-805 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:24:26 PM
The fifth skill: Regulating, which involves monitoring, tempering, and modifying emotional reactions in helpful ways, in order to reach personal and professional goals. This doesn’t mean ignoring inconvenient emotions—rather, it’s learning to accept and deal with them. People with this skill employ strategies to manage their own emotions and help others with theirs.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 805-807 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:24:34 PM
In the RULER framework, the first three skills—Recognizing, Understanding, and Labeling—help us to accurately identify and decode what we and others are feeling. Then, the two remaining skills—Expressing and Regulating—tell us how we can manage those emotions to achieve desired outcomes—our ultimate goal.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 814-815 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:32:58 PM
Think about it: How much formal instruction, at home or at school, did you receive in the five key emotion areas described above?
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 818-820 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:33:28 PM
a simple self-test you can take to measure your own. You’ll have to score yourself from 1 (very unskilled) to 5 (very skilled) on five statements that neatly sum up what it takes to be an emotion scientist:
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 820-825 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:33:50 PM
I am able to accurately recognize my own and others’ emotions. I am aware of the causes and consequences of my own and others’ feelings. I have a refined emotion vocabulary. I am skilled at expressing the full range of emotions. I am skilled at managing my own emotions and at helping others manage theirs.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 826-827 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:34:40 PM
Let’s admit the fatal flaw in this test: none of us is completely unbiased when it comes to estimating our own mental skills, emotional or otherwise.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 842-845 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:36:40 PM
The test has been an important tool for research purposes, but even the most sophisticated test can’t predict how someone would respond in real-life situations where emotion skills are required. The real test of emotion skills isn’t while reading on the beach; it’s when someone kicks sand in your face!
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 846-848 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:37:05 PM
There’s another reason why defining emotional intelligence is so elusive: the lack of clear terminology. Most of us use words such as “emotion” and “feeling” more or less interchangeably, with a general understanding of what they mean.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 849-857 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:38:19 PM
An emotion—happy, sad, angry—arises from an appraisal of an internal or external stimulus. By appraisal I mean an interpretation of what is happening in the world or my mind through the lens of my present goals or concerns. We hear, see, feel (through touch), taste, or smell something that alerts us to a shift in the environment. We are provoked by a memory or sensation, or an event, something someone says or does, or something we witness or experience. I think about someone who treated me unfairly or someone actually treats me unfairly, and I feel angry. Emotions are mostly short-lived (have you ever felt surprised for an hour?). They usually include a physiological reaction, such as a blush, chills, or an increased heart rate, and a release of neurochemicals to prepare you for action. They are often expressed automatically in our facial expressions, body language, and other nonverbal cues. Emotions also are accompanied by a subjective experience in our conscious minds. When we feel happy we have positive thoughts. Being upset turns us into pessimists. Finally, emotions mobilize us into action—to approach or avoid, fight or flee.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 858-859 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:38:33 PM
they were evolutionary adaptations and that people across all cultures experienced and displayed the same basic emotions in the same ways.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 860-861 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:38:46 PM
Today, our understanding has become more nuanced. Recent research emphasizes that emotions are fully intertwined not only with our biology but also with our individual life experiences and culture.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 864-866 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:39:16 PM
As we mature, our emotional repertoire becomes more precise (one hopes). Preschoolers have one word for angry: mad. Older children in schools where we work learn to make fine distinctions, using concepts such as annoyed, aggravated, irritated, livid, and enraged.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 866-870 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:39:42 PM
A feeling is our internal response to an emotion. I’m angry about something that’s happening between us, it’s caused me to give up hope, and I can’t keep going this way. That’s a feeling. It’s nuanced, subtle, multidimensional. When you ask someone how they’re feeling, the answer is sometimes an emotion, such as happy, sad, afraid, angry. But they may also say they’re feeling supported, connected, valued, respected, and appreciated. These words do not refer to emotions per se but are motivational and relationship states that are steeped in emotion.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 872-873 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:40:30 PM
We often have more than one emotion at the same time. I’m excited about my new job, and I’m anxious over whether I can handle it. I’m angry at how you’re treating me, and I feel superior because I’ve never treated you so badly.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 876-877 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:40:44 PM
We can even have emotions about emotions. We call them meta-emotions. I could be afraid of public speaking and embarrassed about being afraid.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 878-879 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:40:57 PM
A mood is more diffuse and less intense than an emotion or a feeling but longer lasting.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 880-882 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:41:35 PM
Moods also can be the aftermath of an emotion. Have you ever been annoyed at someone, couldn’t stop thinking about it, and ended up in a bad mood? Often, it doesn’t feel as though anything caused it—it’s just a state of being, but one that’s completely tied in with our emotional responses to life.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 883-886 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:42:07 PM
In addition to emotions, feelings, and moods, there are emotion-related personality traits. This feels like who we are, at our core—our predisposition to feel, think, and act in a particular way. We’re optimists or pessimists, we’re take-charge types or fatalists, we’re introverts or extroverts, we’re calm or hyper. To be sure, personality traits can change over time, but when they do, it happens gradually.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 890-891 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:42:44 PM
we’ll all better understand our emotional lives if we have the vocabulary to express every nuance of what we feel.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 894-895 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:43:04 PM
an emotion scientist seeks to understand without making value judgments or rendering opinions about whether feelings are justified or not, beneficial or not, or reflecting an objective reality.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 898-898 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:43:42 PM
An emotion judge wants the power to validate feelings or negate them—to pass judgment.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 904-905 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:44:50 PM
Carol Dweck, a professor at Stanford University and author of the bestselling book Mindset, has shown in decades of research how our beliefs about skills determine our success or failure at developing them.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 906-908 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:45:10 PM
If we think that our emotional makeup is more or less fixed and unchangeable, we’re less likely to invest much time or effort in developing our own skills or teaching them to others.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 916-918 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:46:13 PM
We base most of life’s decisions on how we think our actions will make us feel. But without emotion skills, research shows that we are notoriously bad at predicting what will make us happy. Many of us have spent time chasing the wrong goals or refusing to engage in activities that actually might make us feel better.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 918-919 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:46:24 PM
We eat sugar to lift a depressed mood when exercise likely will do a better job; we engage with social media to feel connected when we know it amplifies anxiety.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 925-927 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:47:23 PM
Emotionally intelligent individuals had an intuitive understanding of one of the central conclusions of happiness research: Well-being depends less on objective events than on how those events are perceived, dealt with, and shared with others.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 964-965 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:52:45 PM
You’re a work in progress. If you mishandled it today, and you have sufficient emotion skills to recognize that, you may do better tomorrow.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 973-975 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:54:07 PM
By failing to address the most significant element of what makes us human, we are choking off the fire of passion and purpose, stunting and distorting the growth and maturity of entire generations,
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 994-995 | Added on Saturday, December 25, 2021 6:55:34 PM
we can’t get there without first being here.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 988-991 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 12:08:14 AM
How are you feeling? This time, before you answer, stop and don’t think. Just sense it. Feel it. It might help to take a slow, deep breath. My guess is that if you can turn off your analytic mind for a moment, you will get a clear—visceral—sense of your underlying emotional state.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 997-998 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 12:08:53 AM
Next, let’s check for physical clues. Am I energized or depleted? Is my heart racing, am I clenching my fists, is there a knot in my stomach, or am I feeling balanced, cool, and at ease?
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 999-1000 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 12:09:07 AM
Recognition. That’s what we’re learning in this chapter: simply how to recognize emotions in ourselves and others with accuracy.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1032-1035 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 12:12:15 AM
In my childhood, I was a textbook example of self-defeating outbursts and calculated seclusion. But these are the times when we need to try hardest to break through the displays of rage or self-alienation. This is when we must remember that our behavior sometimes sends the exact opposite message of what we really need. Our actions scream, “Get away!” or, “I’m fine!” while our emotions beg for attention.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1037-1039 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 12:12:36 AM
The Mood Meter was built based on what is called “the circumplex model of emotion,” as developed by James Russell, a professor at Boston College. He said that human emotions have two core properties or dimensions—energy and pleasantness.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1039-1040 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 12:12:59 AM
The horizontal axis represents the degree of pleasantness, from very unpleasant to very pleasant.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1040-1041 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 12:13:04 AM
The vertical axis represents the degree of energy, from very low to very high.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1047-1048 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 12:14:23 AM
The Mood Meter is designed to chart every feeling a human being can experience
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1051-1052 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 4:29:32 PM
the Mood Meter is a square divided evenly by the horizontal axis (pleasantness) and vertical axis (energy) into four quadrants.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1076-1077 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 4:31:43 PM
Recognition is the key first step toward understanding anyone’s—our own or someone else’s—present emotional state. Unfortunately, it’s not foolproof.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1118-1119 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 4:35:26 PM
we are making these automatic judgments about how people feel all day long—and we’re often wrong.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1137-1140 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 4:37:33 PM
Ekman and other psychologists ran a series of cross-cultural studies in the 1970s, making the case that all human faces express six “basic emotions” in much the same way: Happiness Sadness Anger Fear Surprise Disgust
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1169-1172 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 4:40:41 PM
If I show you a face with furrowed eyebrows, piercing eyes, and pressed lips, you don’t have to be a genius to see anger. Still, they don’t reflect real life—how often do we see full-blown anger in a business meeting? In real time, the emotions we’re attempting to read in others are a good deal more subtle, ambiguous, fleeting, and mixed.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1184-1184 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 4:42:36 PM
Our perception of emotion is easily swayed by the opinions of others.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1193-1195 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 4:43:36 PM
How was I to know that he had just come from a tough meeting with his boss? The term psychologists use for this phenomenon is “attribution bias,” meaning we observe someone’s cues or behavior and wrongly attribute them to our own emotional state.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1198-1199 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 4:44:20 PM
the poet Alexander Pope said it well: “All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.” If you go through life angry, you will see anger everywhere you look.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1196-1198 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 4:44:31 PM
In my relative’s case there’s an even more precise term: “hostile attribution bias,” since his own anger causes him to see that same emotion everywhere, even where it may not
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1200-1201 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 4:44:52 PM
It’s human nature to pay more attention to negative emotional information than positive. Starting in childhood, it’s how we rely on the reactions of other people to measure the danger in any given situation.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1207-1208 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 4:50:29 PM
The more time we spend communicating through electronic screens, the less face-to-face (or even voice-to-ear) time we spend and the less practice we get at reading the nonverbal cues.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1216-1217 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 4:50:57 PM
we’re not looking to nail down the precise emotion, just the general area where it exists—the quadrant of the Mood Meter. Are we feeling up or down? Pleasant or unpleasant? It’s the kind of question you can ask yourself every hour on the hour and get a different answer.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1223-1224 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 4:51:38 PM
in order to know an emotion, our own or someone else’s, we need to know what’s behind it—its causes. For that, we need the U—as in Understanding emotion.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1240-1241 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 4:53:07 PM
one of a couple of possible attribution biases: either they’re inferring how I’m feeling based solely on my behavior—or they’re labeling my emotions based on how they believe they’d feel in that situation.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1254-1255 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 4:55:05 PM
In the previous chapter, we learned about the importance of being able to discern our own feelings and to read, at a glance or soon thereafter, someone else’s overall emotional state.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1261-1263 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 4:56:01 PM
Understanding emotions begins when we start to answer that question—why do you or I feel this way? What is the underlying reason for this feeling? What’s causing it? It’s rarely a simple matter.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1271-1272 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 4:57:05 PM
The core skill of Understanding is the search for the underlying theme or possible cause that fuels the emotion.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1281-1283 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 4:59:10 PM
We also need to keep in mind what psychologists refer to as “appraisal theory.” Many emotions—both positive and negative—have universal, underlying themes, but their individual causes vary from person to person.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1285-1287 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 4:59:23 PM
That’s another part of the emotion scientist’s skill set—the ability to put aside one’s own appraisals so we can comprehend and empathize with those of other people.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1309-1314 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 10:56:44 PM
These are some of the questions we can ask when we’re trying to understand our own feelings: What just happened? What was I doing before this happened? What might have caused my feelings or reaction? What happened this morning, or last night, that might be involved in this? What has happened before with this person that might be connected? (In the event that your emotion has to do with a relationship.) What memories do I have about this situation or place?
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1326-1327 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 10:58:49 PM
Shame is a judgment, but from the outside—from our perception that other people believe we broke a moral or ethical rule or some shared convention.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1329-1329 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 10:58:58 PM
Guilt is a judgment we make of ourselves when we feel remorse or responsibility for something we did,
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1330-1331 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 10:59:05 PM
Embarrassment is when we’ve been caught violating some social norm, such as how to dress for an occasion,
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1335-1336 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 10:59:20 PM
Jealousy is a form of fear—fear of losing someone important to you, especially to someone else.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1339-1340 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 10:59:44 PM
Envy, on the other hand, has to do with wanting something that someone else has.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1341-1341 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 11:00:04 PM
Envy could lead us to focus our efforts and work harder to attain something
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1346-1348 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 11:00:45 PM
Joy feels energetic and contentment feels calm, and joy is caused by a sense of getting what one wants and contentment is caused by a sense of completeness (not wanting or needing anything).
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1380-1380 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 11:04:18 PM
Stress is a response to too many demands and not enough resources—managing
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1381-1382 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 11:04:30 PM
Pressure is a situation in which you perceive that something at stake is dependent on the outcome of your performance
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1397-1398 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 11:06:34 PM
His sincere interest in me and how I felt and his obvious desire to help me were all it took. It’s impossible to fake.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1409-1410 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 11:07:52 PM
An emotional outburst signals that something is going on, but it doesn’t tell us what.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1421-1423 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 11:09:12 PM
We focus on behavior rather than on what might have caused it. It’s like treating the symptom and not the disease. As a result, the best we manage to do is modify behavior—by force. And this distracts us from the underlying causes.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1433-1434 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 11:10:26 PM
Understanding requires the use of our storytelling ability, perspective-taking skills, and pattern seeking to piece together the concatenation of feelings and events that led to the current situation. It begins with being an emotion scientist, not a judge.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1436-1437 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 11:10:38 PM
Until we understand the causes of emotion, we’ll never really be able to help ourselves, our kids, or our colleagues.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1459-1461 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 11:12:48 PM
Each emotion has what psychologist Richard Lazarus termed a “core relational theme”—a meaning. The only way to get at the meaning of an emotion is to learn the why—how someone perceived the situational factors that produced it. Behavior alone is a clue to the riddle, not an answer.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1475-1476 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 11:14:00 PM
But I can’t regulate my reactions until I know what I feel. And it will be hard to do that if the adults who are raising me don’t model the skills first or ask the right questions.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1481-1482 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 11:14:56 PM
What caused this emotion? Once we find an answer, the next question instantly arises: Why, of all the possible reactions, that particular one?
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1483-1483 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2021 11:15:06 PM
Sometimes, granted, it takes real bravery to follow the investigation to the end.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Bookmark on Location 1488 | Added on Monday, December 27, 2021 2:50:49 PM
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Bookmark on Location 1490 | Added on Monday, December 27, 2021 2:56:43 PM
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1516-1518 | Added on Monday, December 27, 2021 10:16:57 PM
This is why the Mood Meter is such an important tool: we start with a quadrant, visualized as a basic color, and then narrow the search for a particular shade. This isn’t just a device to help us visualize emotions—it’s how we discover and label which emotions we’re truly experiencing.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1518-1520 | Added on Monday, December 27, 2021 10:17:44 PM
L—Labeling—is the pivot point, the hinge. It connects Recognition and Understanding with Expression and Regulation, which is where we take the actions necessary to draw strength from our emotion lives. Without
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1530-1532 | Added on Monday, December 27, 2021 10:19:27 PM
Labeling our emotions with precise words does four main things: It legitimizes and organizes our experiences. When we attach a word to a feeling, it gives emotion substance and creates a mental model of the word, which means it can be compared with other feelings we have and also with other people’s feelings.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1533-1534 | Added on Monday, December 27, 2021 10:20:13 PM
It helps others to meet our needs. Once we are able to communicate, with specificity, what we’re feeling, the people in our lives can look beyond our behaviors to understand their causes. Now, empathy is more available.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1535-1536 | Added on Monday, December 27, 2021 10:20:38 PM
Similarly, it helps us to meet the needs of others. Once we know how someone is feeling, it’s easier for us to support them.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1536-1538 | Added on Monday, December 27, 2021 10:20:59 PM
Finally, it connects us to the rest of the world. Our emotions become a form of communication, a way to share the experience of being alive. There’s a body of research showing the health benefits of social connectivity, and this is where it begins—in being able to identify with one another.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1548-1550 | Added on Monday, December 27, 2021 10:22:28 PM
One possible explanation for the preponderance of words defining negative emotions is that our brains process positive and negative feelings differently. We tend to give our positive emotions superficial attention only; we see no need to modulate them, just cross our fingers and hope they last. We don’t expend much mental energy analyzing why we feel so good.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1551-1552 | Added on Monday, December 27, 2021 10:22:41 PM
But we experience negative emotions more deeply—they slow our processing down because they indicate a problem. Out of necessity we devote more words to their description.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1568-1569 | Added on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 11:27:18 PM
greater use of words such as “anxiety” and “fear” during exposure to the spider was associated with reductions in those emotions.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1572-1574 | Added on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 11:28:07 PM
Other research has shown that affective labeling is linked to lower activation of the amygdala, the brain region that’s activated when we feel negative emotions, and higher activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC), which supports emotion regulation.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1574-1575 | Added on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 11:29:22 PM
And just as our brains make use of neural pathways to connect one region to another, our emotions travel on pathways too. If we’re disposed to anger, then certain kinds of stimuli will routinely trigger it, and anger becomes our immediate, go-to response.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1575-1577 | Added on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 11:29:44 PM
But if we are able to define multiple shades of that low-pleasantness, high-energy emotion—such as annoyed, disgusted, irritated, frustrated, and so on—then we can modulate our responses and in doing so stop ourselves before we hit full-blown rage at every provocation.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1580-1582 | Added on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 11:42:54 PM
Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote, in The New York Times, that what she calls emotional granularity is the “adaptive value of putting feelings into words with a high degree of complexity”—complexity
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1587-1588 | Added on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 11:43:47 PM
There’s even a term for people who have the slimmest vocabulary to describe emotions: alexithymia (the term also refers to the difficulty in recognizing and expressing emotions).
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1591-1592 | Added on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 11:44:29 PM
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, named for a pair of linguists, maintains that the language we speak determines our worldview and even how our minds work.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1600-1601 | Added on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 11:45:44 PM
One word that gets a lot of attention in psychology textbooks describes the feeling of happiness or satisfaction caused by someone else’s misfortune, or what is known in German as schadenfreude.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1606-1608 | Added on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 11:46:21 PM
Iktsuarpok is the Inuit word that describes the anticipation you feel when you’re so impatient for a guest’s arrival at your home that you keep going outside to check.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1621-1622 | Added on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 11:47:43 PM
The more words we can use to describe what we feel, the better able we’ll be to understand ourselves and to make ourselves understood to others.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1637-1638 | Added on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 11:49:45 PM
The full Mood Meter with one hundred words appears on the endpapers.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1638-1639 | Added on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 11:49:56 PM
In collaboration with HopeLab, we’ve also developed an app (www.moodmeterapp.com) so you can track your emotions over time.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1653-1657 | Added on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 11:51:33 PM
Anxiety, as we learned earlier, is worry about future uncertainty and our inability to control what will happen to us. Fear is the palpable sense of a danger that lies just ahead and will eventually strike at us. Pressure is the force from the outside that tells us something important is at stake, and whether we succeed or fail will depend on how we perform. And, finally, stress is what we feel when we’re facing too many demands from all of the above and fear we may not be up to it.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1678-1679 | Added on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 11:54:10 PM
anger is usually a response to unfair treatment or an injustice. Disappointment is about an unmet expectation.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1684-1687 | Added on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 11:55:12 PM
Another common mistake is waiting so long to identify our feelings that they become daunting. We skip over irritated or nervous or apprehensive and, left unattended, they turn into livid or panicked. We ignore apathetic or drained until they metastasize into hopeless or depressed and we’re forced to deal with them.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1700-1701 | Added on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 11:56:53 PM
Once they had irritated and frustrated and annoyed in their vocabulary, they were able to acknowledge what was going on before it zoomed all the way to enraged.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1708-1710 | Added on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 11:57:47 PM
when you can name and understand a specific emotion, your brain circuits and nervous system will calm you down. Language skills facilitate executive control and metacognitive processing. Thus, the simple act of acknowledgment creates a shift, and change becomes possible.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1739-1740 | Added on Wednesday, December 29, 2021 12:00:03 AM
When we don’t have the words for our feelings, we’re not just lacking descriptive flourish. We’re lacking authorship of our own lives.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1746-1747 | Added on Wednesday, December 29, 2021 12:00:47 AM
How am I feeling? And try coming up with as many words—more thoughtful and precise ones than you usually deploy.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1753-1755 | Added on Thursday, December 30, 2021 12:05:46 AM
Digging deep into feelings isn’t always easy, but there’s not much external risk involved. With this chapter, that changes. With Expression, we reveal ourselves. Now we’ll have to decide: Can I share this?
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1759-1760 | Added on Thursday, December 30, 2021 12:06:48 AM
E can be the scariest of the five letters, because here’s where we take what we’ve discovered in RUL—the intimate things we’ve learned about ourselves—and begin to do something about them.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1762-1765 | Added on Thursday, December 30, 2021 12:07:48 AM
In a sense, expressing emotions is like a transaction between people. You express, and I react. In that back-and-forth, we may come to understand each other and be better off for it. But the opposite could also be true—your emotions might provoke something negative in me, something I’m not prepared to deal with or control. In
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1788-1789 | Added on Thursday, December 30, 2021 12:10:51 AM
During those times when we suffer in silence, we make it impossible for anyone to truly know us, understand us, empathize with us, or—the big one—help us.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1881-1883 | Added on Thursday, December 30, 2021 12:20:16 AM
We need to clear up a misunderstanding that may have been building in your mind: that permission to feel means license to let it all hang out, to whine, yell, act on every emotional impulse, and behave as though we have no control over what we feel, so we should just go for it and freak out.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1885-1886 | Added on Thursday, December 30, 2021 12:20:41 AM
Psychologists and social workers use the term emotional labor to describe the effort required to manage the way we express our feelings. The sociologist
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1889-1891 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2021 1:11:33 AM
It may not sound like labor in the usual sense, but managing how and when we express emotions does require sustained effort, and it wears us down, especially when there’s a big contrast between what we express and what we actually feel.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1910-1911 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2021 1:14:06 AM
a key skill involved in Expression is listening. Not just hearing. We must be conspicuously open, patient, and sympathetic to whatever’s being said.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 1989-1991 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2021 5:45:59 PM
Permission to feel can sometimes mean expressing an emotion we don’t necessarily feel—it’s not being dishonest but rather finding a way of communicating that takes other considerations into account.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2015-2016 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2021 5:48:25 PM
suppressing traumatic experiences is debilitating, while confiding them to someone else, or writing them down, can bring relief.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2019-2021 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2021 5:48:54 PM
Are you comfortable expressing the emotions in each quadrant: yellow, red, blue, and green? What rules have you created about what you’ll express to whom? How much emotional labor are you putting in each day? Is it affecting your performance at work, your relationships, your overall well-being?
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2060-2061 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2021 5:51:52 PM
Emotion regulation is at the top of the RULER hierarchy. It’s likely the most complex of the five skills and the most challenging.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2060-2062 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2021 5:52:01 PM
Emotion regulation is at the top of the RULER hierarchy. It’s likely the most complex of the five skills and the most challenging. It’s nearly impossible to imagine what life would be like without the power to regulate our emotions. You’ve been doing it since you were born—and you’ve done it, to some degree or other, every minute of your waking life.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2075-2076 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2021 5:53:33 PM
James Gross, an authority on emotion regulation, defines it as “the process by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions.”
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2080-2080 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2021 5:54:06 PM
The strategies that work for you today might not work for you tomorrow.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2086-2087 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2021 5:54:53 PM
We start regulating early. Babies suck their thumbs because it provides emotional comfort. Distressed infants will turn their faces away from the source of their displeasure, another rudimentary form of Regulation. So you see, you’ve been doing it all your life.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2095-2096 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2021 5:55:45 PM
In adult relationships, co-regulation can be intentional, as when we speak soothingly to someone who’s upset or try to inspire someone into action.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2135-2136 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2021 5:59:14 PM
Too often we look for strategies that will shift people out of negative emotion spaces, but that’s not always possible. During difficult times, sometimes we just need to be there for one another.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2139-2140 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2021 5:59:35 PM
The first category is a strategy that literally keeps us alive: breathing. Specifically, mindful breathing helps us to calm the body and mind so we can be fully present and less reactive or overwhelmed by what’s happening around us.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2141-2148 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2021 6:00:22 PM
The second category we’ll call forward-looking strategies. This simply means that we anticipate something will cause an unwanted emotion and either steer clear of it or modify our physical environment. The third category is attention-shifting strategies. This takes many forms, but all are based on the same principle—that we can temper the impact of an emotion by diverting our attention away from its source. It can be as simple as turning on the TV, walking away from a stressful encounter, or repeating a positive phrase to ourselves. The fourth we’ll call cognitive-reframing strategies. We first analyze whatever’s triggering an emotional experience and then find a new way of seeing it—essentially, transforming our perception of reality as a way of mastering it. Finally, I’ll introduce the Meta-Moment, a tool which helps us to act as our best selves would, as opposed to reacting (and overreacting) to emotional situations.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2154-2155 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2021 6:01:11 PM
Our brain responds to intense emotions by activating the sympathetic nervous system: our heart rate goes up, stress hormones and/or endorphins are released depending on the emotion, and (when pressured)
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2154-2155 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2021 6:01:24 PM
Our brain responds to intense emotions by activating the sympathetic nervous system: our heart rate goes up, stress hormones and/or endorphins are released depending on the emotion, and (when pressured) we prepare to flee or freeze.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2157-2160 | Added on Saturday, January 1, 2022 12:33:38 AM
And when we count our breaths or repeat a calming phrase while breathing, we regain balance and control because the area of the brain in charge shifts from the brain stem to the motor cortex. Breathing also helps us to reset the autonomic nervous system by activating the parasympathetic nervous system and inhibiting the sympathetic (excitatory) one.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2181-2182 | Added on Saturday, January 1, 2022 12:35:37 AM
Today, dozens of experiments demonstrate the benefits of mindful breathing on our emotional, social, and cognitive functioning. Over time, not only do we deactivate more quickly, but our ability to focus and to be present grows stronger.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2194-2196 | Added on Saturday, January 1, 2022 12:37:08 AM
if we can predict which situations or encounters will provoke an emotional reaction, we can take measures to prevent them from happening. When it’s impossible to avert the future completely, we can still anticipate it and change it. Your
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2210-2211 | Added on Saturday, January 1, 2022 12:38:39 AM
As a rule, doing something you enjoy is a very effective strategy for regulating negative emotions.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2212-2213 | Added on Saturday, January 1, 2022 12:39:09 AM
but all are based on the same principle—that we can temper the impact of an emotion by diverting our attention from it.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2226-2228 | Added on Saturday, January 1, 2022 12:40:36 AM
It’s possible to distract ourselves to such a degree that we avoid dealing with anything difficult—even when our lives would be improved by facing reality and doing something about it. What we commonly call “denial” is just an extreme form of distraction—akin to burying our heads in the sand during a crisis.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2229-2229 | Added on Saturday, January 1, 2022 12:41:00 AM
Procrastination is a popular way of creating some emotional distance using time rather than space.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2238-2240 | Added on Saturday, January 1, 2022 12:42:05 AM
Harsh self-criticism activates the sympathetic nervous system (fight/flight) and elevates stress hormones. Self-compassion, on the other hand, triggers the mammalian caregiving system and hormones of affiliation and love such as oxytocin.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2247-2249 | Added on Saturday, January 1, 2022 12:42:48 AM
referring to yourself in the third person leads people to think about themselves more similarly to how they think about others, and you can see evidence for this in the brain. That helps people gain a tiny bit of psychological distance from their experiences, which can often be useful for regulating emotions.”
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2261-2263 | Added on Saturday, January 1, 2022 12:44:29 AM
Cognitive-reframing strategies “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” says Hamlet. That idea is the basis for our fourth, most sophisticated, intellectually engaged method of emotion regulation—cognitive-reframing strategies,
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2306-2307 | Added on Sunday, January 2, 2022 12:47:06 AM
Which means that reframing has been allowing you to live in denial or disavowal about something unspoken and unhealthy that’s going on between the two of you.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2312-2315 | Added on Sunday, January 2, 2022 12:48:28 AM
Am I doing this simply to justify avoiding a difficult, sensitive problem? Am I doing this because I know that addressing the issue is going to lead to a long, tortured, anguished conversation? In that case, reappraisal may be a useful short-term solution—you’re on your way to a party, not the ideal moment for an ugly face-off. But it’s also a poor long-term strategy, because ducking the issue now will only ensure that it will reemerge later on.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2333-2333 | Added on Sunday, January 2, 2022 12:50:17 AM
The Meta-Moment involves hitting the brakes and stepping out of time. We call it meta because it’s a moment about a moment.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2338-2339 | Added on Sunday, January 2, 2022 12:50:51 AM
As the author and consultant Justin Bariso wrote, “Pausing helps you refrain from making a permanent decision based on a temporary emotion.”
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2340-2341 | Added on Sunday, January 2, 2022 12:51:06 AM
Pausing and taking a deep breath activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which reduces the release of cortisol, a major stress hormone, and naturally lowers our emotional temperature.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2346-2348 | Added on Sunday, January 2, 2022 12:51:42 AM
Visualizing our best self redirects our attention away from the “trigger” and toward our values. This helps us to choose a helpful regulation strategy such as positive self-talk or reappraisal and then respond accordingly.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2365-2365 | Added on Sunday, January 2, 2022 12:53:57 AM
How skilled are you at taking a Meta-Moment? What adjectives characterize your best self?
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2371-2379 | Added on Sunday, January 2, 2022 12:55:04 AM
Here are the steps to take so you can begin practicing the Meta-Moment. 1. Sense the shift: You are activated, caught off guard, or have an impulse to say or do something that you might regret. There is a shift in your thinking or physiology or both. 2. Stop or pause! Create the space before you respond. Step back and breathe. Breathe again. 3. See your best self. You imagine your best self. You think of adjectives or even an image that helps your best self appear in vivid detail. You might also think about your reputation: how do you want to be seen, talked about, and experienced? What would you do if someone you respect were watching? 4. Strategize and act. You reach into your RULER tool kit (for instance, positive self-talk or reframing) and choose the path that will support you in closing the gap between your “triggered” self and your emerging best self. (Always the last step.)
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2380-2382 | Added on Sunday, January 2, 2022 12:55:47 AM
brainpower—moving from automatic and unhelpful to deliberate and helpful strategies is hard work!—it depends on seemingly unrelated factors such as diet, exercise, and sleep. When we eat poorly, our minds don’t function properly. Too much sugar or refined grain causes our blood glucose to spike and then plummet, which affects cognitive functioning and self-control, especially around healthy eating.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2384-2384 | Added on Sunday, January 2, 2022 12:56:05 AM
Too little physical activity has a negative effect on our mental capacity and moods.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2386-2386 | Added on Sunday, January 2, 2022 12:56:14 AM
Even anxiety and depression can be reduced by exercise.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2387-2394 | Added on Sunday, January 2, 2022 12:56:42 AM
Poor quality or insufficient sleep has similar effects on our emotions—when we’re tired, our defenses are down and our ability to function mentally is low. Sleep serves a restorative function. When we don’t get enough, or we get too much, we show more symptoms of anxiety and depression, greater fatigue, and hostility. Inadequate sleep is associated with reduced connections between brain regions responsible for cognitive control and behavior and the use of effective emotion regulation strategies. There are two more measures we can take to safeguard our overall well-being. The first is by doing things we love. Spend time with family and friends, pursue passions and pastimes, get in touch with your spiritual side, immerse yourself in nature, read a good book, watch a funny movie. We build up cognitive reserves that way, which will help us when emotional turmoil inevitably strikes. We are hardwired to seek social contact and support—people who lack it are prone to anxiety, depression, and cardiovascular disease.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2395-2395 | Added on Sunday, January 2, 2022 12:57:11 AM
The second measure is to practice mindful breathing, which is perhaps the ultimate prevention strategy.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2402-2403 | Added on Sunday, January 2, 2022 12:57:47 AM
Like learning a martial art, developing emotion skills takes time. It takes work. It takes practice. It takes openness to feedback. It takes refinement.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2411-2414 | Added on Sunday, January 2, 2022 12:58:49 AM
else—it’s easy to say that from now on we’ll master all our emotional responses, until our significant other or cranky child or unreasonable boss triggers us with a word or a look, and suddenly all the RULER training goes out the window. So, along with permission to feel, we must also give ourselves permission to fail. When that happens, we can only try again—take
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2414-2415 | Added on Sunday, January 2, 2022 12:59:10 AM
At such moments, we also need the courage to apologize and to forgive ourselves as we’d forgive others. Courage can even mean seeking professional help when all else fails.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2434-2435 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:20:52 AM
We all arrive in this world programmed differently where emotions are concerned. Each of us has a different threshold for being provoked, activated, aroused, startled.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2436-2437 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:21:03 AM
But these individual differences don’t determine whether we will develop emotion skills. Research shows that even highly reactive kids who are raised in nurturing families can turn out just fine.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2464-2464 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:23:20 AM
opposite—teaching the ability to get through those moments, to learn from them, and to continue to function normally.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2471-2472 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:24:12 AM
ways that parents’ own emotions affect their children’s: Beliefs about feelings.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2473-2474 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:24:27 AM
parents who value emotions tend to be aware of their children’s feelings and are able to act like coaches.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2475-2476 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:24:41 AM
Parents who view emotions as harmful or disruptive are the ones who command their children to “suck it up” and see their kids’ emotional
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2475-2476 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:24:47 AM
Parents who view emotions as harmful or disruptive are the ones who command their children to “suck it up” and see their kids’ emotional expressions as manipulative.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2485-2486 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:25:39 AM
Emotion vocabulary. Most of us are unaware of how important vocabulary
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2487-2489 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:25:57 AM
If we can’t discern the difference, it suggests that we can’t understand it either. It’s the difference between a rich emotional life and an impoverished one.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2492-2493 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:26:51 AM
if mothers and fathers use many words to describe emotions rather than just a few basic ones, their children will be better able to express their feelings to others.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2493-2494 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:27:05 AM
Co-regulation. Researchers use the term co-regulation to refer to how we affect one another’s feelings,
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2537-2539 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:31:24 AM
Take a moment and think back to the home you grew up in. Consider how it felt to be in your home, your relationship with your mom, dad, or caregiver. With that in mind, what’s one word you would use to describe the emotional climate of your childhood home?
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2539-2540 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:31:39 AM
summary of thousands of responses from people across the globe. They fall into three categories: about 70 percent of the terms were negative, 20 percent were positive, and 10 percent were neutral.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2554-2555 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:33:20 AM
Now, see what connections, if any, you can make between those moments, good and bad, and the adult you are today and the emotional life of your family.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2583-2584 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:36:18 AM
When I tell audiences how extreme reactions, over the course of time, can actually alter the brain structure of their children, the room goes quiet.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2588-2590 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:36:38 AM
a child’s brain is still plastic, meaning that the structure is always changing. The minute you start regulating your emotions better, their brains will change to reflect that.”
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2595-2596 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:37:15 AM
the trigger is inside us, not out there. We have to take responsibility for our actions rather than shift the blame elsewhere. It may not have felt like a choice, but it surely was—we decide how we’ll respond to life’s provocations.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2631-2631 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:39:49 AM
Doesn’t your family deserve the same effort you give to the rest of the world?
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2634-2635 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:40:12 AM
At work, we’re on our best behavior, which often means sublimating our natural emotional responses and pretending to be the person who is always calm,
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2655-2656 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:42:09 AM
The charter is created by asking three questions. The first is: How do we want to feel as a family?
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2658-2659 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:42:16 AM
What can we do to experience these feelings as often as possible?
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2661-2662 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:42:26 AM
What can we do when
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2661-2662 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 1:42:30 AM
What can we do when we are not living the charter?
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Bookmark on Location 1748 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 4:23:23 PM
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2855-2857 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 9:22:38 PM
brain scientists have found that depending on our emotional state, our chemical and hormonal profiles change dramatically and our brains function differently. The three most important aspects of learning—attention, focus, and memory—are all controlled by our emotions, not by cognition.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2873-2874 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 9:23:54 PM
they told me how insecure they were about their ability to teach emotion skills until they realized how much those skills resemble science, math, or any other academic subject.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2874-2875 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 9:24:05 PM
The goal isn’t to tell children what to feel or what specific strategy to use to regulate—it’s to turn them into caring citizens who are emotion scientists, with tools for gathering important information and putting what they discover to good use.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 2933-2934 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 9:29:15 PM
Over time, we learned, as with everything for children, it takes a village. If children are to develop emotion skills, all the adults around them need these skills too.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3088-3091 | Added on Monday, January 3, 2022 9:41:43 PM
The lists of prompts on the blueprint required each boy to say how the other might have felt, the possible cause of the feelings, and how each of them expressed and regulated their emotions. The act of taking each other’s perspectives helped Jorge and Ali move from the red quadrant to the green, so they could begin to think clearly.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3182-3183 | Added on Tuesday, January 4, 2022 11:54:01 PM
only 42 percent of top employers believe new graduates are adequately prepared for the workforce, especially with respect to social and emotional skills.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3186-3187 | Added on Tuesday, January 4, 2022 11:54:15 PM
IQ no longer has much predictive value. In other words, it’s not a high IQ that gets you places. It’s the social and emotional skills that give today’s college students the competitive edge.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3188-3189 | Added on Tuesday, January 4, 2022 11:54:29 PM
Emma Seppälä, author of The Happiness Track,
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3198-3199 | Added on Tuesday, January 4, 2022 11:55:39 PM
I learned that sometimes you have to be as gentle with yourself as you are with others, and be as understanding with others as we are sometimes of ourselves.”
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3235-3237 | Added on Tuesday, January 4, 2022 11:58:39 PM
we spend half our waking hours there, surrounded by people we didn’t choose to hang around with and who don’t necessarily share our habits, our values, or our tastes. And yet we need to get along with them, and find a way to cooperate and collaborate,
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3241-3243 | Added on Wednesday, January 5, 2022 12:00:30 AM
emotions are the most powerful force inside the workplace—as they are in every human endeavor. They influence everything from leadership effectiveness to building and maintaining complex relationships, from innovation to customer relations.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3267-3268 | Added on Wednesday, January 5, 2022 12:03:45 AM
Today especially, when so many jobs require the ability to communicate, our emotion skills determine how we’ll perform. If we can’t recognize and understand our own feelings, label them, and then express and regulate them successfully, we’ll struggle.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3277-3279 | Added on Wednesday, January 5, 2022 12:08:57 AM
These are typical workplace minidramas, and like it or not, you’re involved—emotionally. You’ll have to take the bad with the good and deal with it. Developing emotional intelligence will help. And creating an emotionally intelligent ecosystem will yield even greater benefits.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3293-3294 | Added on Wednesday, January 5, 2022 12:11:49 AM
As we develop emotion skills, hopefully we become more aware of how we are actively creating emotional contagion and understand its impact on others.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3306-3308 | Added on Wednesday, January 5, 2022 12:13:11 AM
emotionally intelligent workplaces are distinguished by how people behave at work, and that behavior is heavily influenced by structure—the way people are organized, meaning hierarchies—and by culture—what people believe is appropriate.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3314-3315 | Added on Wednesday, January 5, 2022 12:14:10 AM
Oji Life Lab, which offers emotional intelligence training to businesses.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3317-3318 | Added on Wednesday, January 5, 2022 12:14:36 AM
By exploring emotion skills over time, people retain more and develop habits that become automatic.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3328-3330 | Added on Wednesday, January 5, 2022 12:15:51 AM
when you sense that a co-worker is in a foul mood. It immediately changes the office vibe. No one wants to get too close. Communication falters. There’s a nervous pall over everything that saps the psychic energy from the place.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3369-3371 | Added on Wednesday, January 5, 2022 12:19:57 AM
Those employees suffer burnout precisely because of their high levels of engagement; they are so committed to their jobs, and so good at them, that they wind up with more responsibilities than they can handle—and rather than turn down assignments, they continue to accept them until they are completely overwhelmed.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3429-3431 | Added on Wednesday, January 5, 2022 12:24:38 AM
Emotional intelligence in the workplace doesn’t merely mean providing comfort and sympathy; sometimes it requires the ability to deliver difficult feedback to help people build greater self-awareness and skills.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3500-3501 | Added on Thursday, January 6, 2022 12:19:11 AM
businesses in which positive emotions prevail have significantly lower levels of employee exhaustion and fewer sick days.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3501-3502 | Added on Thursday, January 6, 2022 12:19:22 AM
Another study found that amplifying positive emotions at work reduced employee burnout and absenteeism and increased commitment, but suppressing negative emotions did just the opposite and decreased customer satisfaction.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3528-3528 | Added on Thursday, January 6, 2022 12:22:45 AM
What would be different if everyone was taught to be an emotion scientist?
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3544-3545 | Added on Thursday, January 6, 2022 12:24:10 AM
Keeping emotion skills separate from our lives at home, in school, and at work harms us all. We need to launch an emotion revolution in which the permission to feel moves us in ways we have yet to imagine.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 3562-3564 | Added on Thursday, January 6, 2022 12:26:18 AM
Emotion skills are the key to unlocking the potential inside each one of us. And in the process of developing these skills, we each, heart by heart, mind by mind, create a culture and society unlike anything we’ve experienced thus far—and very much like the one we might dare to imagine.
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Permission to Feel (Marc Brackett)
- Your Highlight on Location 4902-4903 | Added on Thursday, January 6, 2022 12:28:38 AM
He also is co-founder of Oji Life Lab, a digital emotional intelligence learning system for businesses.
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