How to Better Regulate Your Emotions | Dr. Marc Brackett

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Emotion regulation means changing your relationship to a feeling, not deleting it

  Brackett, who has lived with anxiety for much of his life, sometimes simply greets it ('Hey, how you doing today?'), and it either fades or just sits there. Checking in on your feelings all day would be paralysing. Emotions mostly matter when something shifts, such as an offensive remark, and the choice you make then is 'where the magic happens.'

• 02

  His working formula: regulation = goals + strategies, chosen according to emotion, person and context

  Brackett writes it as ER(G + S) = f(E + P + C). The goals follow the acronym PRIME: Prevent unwanted emotions, Reduce difficult ones, Initiate emotions (for example, creating energy in a room when teaching or leading), Maintain a good state, and Enhance or boost one. Which strategy works depends on the specific emotion (anxiety and anger need different tools), on the person (he describes himself as neurotic and introverted) and on context. Leaving a podcast mid-recording to go for a run isn't an option, so in that setting he needs cognitive or breathing tools.

• 03

  Start with your mindset: there are no bad emotions, only unhelpful ways of handling them

  When Brackett asked Huberman about his relationship to anxiety, the reflexive answer was 'I hate it.' A neuroscientist friend once had Brackett list everything that made him anxious (fundraising, research quality) and then asked what those things had in common. The answer was that they all mattered to him. Brackett frames anxiety as a signal of perceived uncertainty about something you care about. Treating it as bad by default 'puts you on the path to dysregulation.' The two agree that every emotion is acceptable to feel, but its expression has to fit the context.

• 04

  Precise labels matter because each emotion carries a different underlying appraisal

  Brackett calls most people's emotional vocabularies 'awful' ('I'm fine,' 'I'm upset'). He separates terms by their core relational themes. Anxiety is uncertainty about a future you can't predict or control. Stress is too many demands for too few resources. Pressure means something is at stake and depends on your performance. Fear is immediate danger. Anger isn't disappointment, envy isn't jealousy, and happiness isn't contentment. The right label points to the right strategy, but he says labeling is 'necessary but not sufficient.'

• 05

  Boys are socialized, not born, to suppress emotion

  Brackett argues that boys learn early that sadness or fear signal weakness, and sometimes homosexuality, which is its own stigma. So they suppress, deny and ignore, while research shows women suppress less but ruminate more. Fathers use more feeling words with daughters than with sons. Teenage boys at schools using his program couldn't see what was wrong with crying, which suggests the pattern can be retrained.

• 06

  Leaders who co-regulate measurably change the culture around them

  In Brackett's longitudinal study of schools during the pandemic, teachers who saw their leader as both self-regulated and good at co-regulating reported better outcomes. That perception strongly predicted school culture, burnout and job satisfaction, and frustration was 40% lower where leaders had these skills. He tells Yale first-years that SAT scores predict little among admitted students because of range restriction, and that skills like taking feedback now matter more.

• 07

  Intentional co-regulation aims for the other person's independence, not dependence

  Brackett contrasts a fearful parent at the playground ('be careful, be careful') with one who acknowledges their own nervousness, moves closer just in case, and says 'I really do think you're going to make it.' Projecting your fear undermines a child's confidence. Skilled co-regulation supports someone through an emotion so that they eventually regulate on their own. He calls this 'not codependent, not coddling.'

• 08

  Know your assumptions, but don't turn introspection into rumination

  Both men stress auditing the beliefs about emotion you absorbed growing up. Huberman's father was taught that smiling a lot meant you were stupid. Huberman also caught himself thinking 'you idiot' when a friend's bird kept hitting windows, a habit from growing up in a 'big pack of dudes.' Brackett compares this to a scientist knowing their assumptions before forming a hypothesis, but warns that too much introspection becomes rumination.

• 09

  Breathing and meditation lower arousal but don't change your perspective

  Brackett fully endorses meditation, echoing Richie Davidson's point (from an earlier episode) that it trains stress tolerance, but calls it necessary but insufficient. His joke from his book: a deep breath around his mother-in-law only made clearer why she had to leave his house. Lasting change needs cognitive strategies such as reappraisal, reframing and distancing, or sometimes calling a friend after 15 deep breaths have failed.