--:-- Mel Robbins: Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I am so excited to talk to you today because today I've got a topic that I've been thinking about for a while. Have you noticed that people seem way more emotional right now? Like fragile, and even in some cases, unhinged? And by the way, I would include myself in that description.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I mean, just the other day, I was standing in line at the grocery store and I just started feeling so impatient with how long it was taking. It's not like I had to be somewhere. I went from feeling perfectly fine to all of a sudden I'm rocking back and forth. I'm looking at my phone, and then I'm looking at my phone again. Then I'm looking around, and then I'm staring at the person in front of me and shooting them that kind of "come on, come on" look as she's taking one potato and putting it on the conveyor belt, and then reaching in, grabbing another potato and putting it on the camera.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And look, I'm normally a really chill person, but sometimes I wonder, have the last four years and the pandemic created so many unexpected detours and changes in your life that there's just all of this emotional baggage that's built up for each and every one of us? And now all of a sudden, you're getting derailed by them as you're standing in line at the grocery store.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I mean, it's one thing to wear your emotions on your sleeve, but there are some days that I'm like, am I feeling more emotional? I wish I could be better at responding to my emotions. I'm sure you do, too. Especially, you want to know the situations where I really wish I had more control over how I'm feeling? It's in those situations where somebody else is making me feel overwhelmed.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You know, like when somebody erupts at you because they're frustrated. Or do you have somebody in your life that the second that they're mad or upset about something, they give you the silent treatment or make you feel guilty? Or maybe they apologize all the time. "I'm really sorry. I was tired. I was frustrated. I didn't mean to act like that." But it doesn't change how controlling or stubborn or volatile they act. And it doesn't change the very real emotions that you now deal with.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And it's easy when it's your sister, because you can turn to your sister and be like, "Will you stop playing the victim?" But you can't turn to the supervisor of the floor in your nursing department or the principal of the school that you work in and say those things.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So today, I'm so excited for both of us because you and I are getting a master coaching session on how to understand your emotions and deal with people who cannot tolerate their own.
--:-- [Theme music plays]
--:-- Mel Robbins: Hey, it's your friend Mel, and I'm so glad that you're here. Whether you are listening for yourself or because someone that you loved shared this episode with you, I want to welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family. It is such an honor to be able to spend some time with you today. And I also want to acknowledge you for something. You could be listening or watching a million things right now, but you chose to spend time listening to something that can help you create a better life. That is so cool.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And in today's episode, you and I are learning a research-backed method for dealing with difficult people and all of the emotions that you feel when someone is passive-aggressive, stubborn, controlling, or always the victim. And whenever you try to bring up how you feel, they either shut down or erupt at you. Well, today, you're going to learn the mistakes to avoid. And more importantly, exactly what research says you can do about it. Because the fact is, you can learn how to navigate this and you can strengthen the skill of what our expert today calls emotional agility.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Dr. Susan David is an award-winning Harvard Medical School psychologist who has been studying emotions, happiness, and achievement for more than 20 years. Her groundbreaking research has concluded that it is your ability to navigate your inner world—meaning your thoughts and feelings and self-talk—because that inner world ultimately impacts your outer world of actions, careers, relationships, happiness, and health. Her TED Talk has been viewed by more than 10 million people. Her best-selling book is *Emotional Agility*, and *Harvard Business Review* awarded her the management idea of the year.
--:-- Mel Robbins: She is also the co-founder of the Institute of Coaching, which is a Harvard Medical School affiliate. And today, she has taken time out of her busy schedule, and she is here in Boston breaking down the science of emotions for you and me. She's giving you the tools to better navigate your own emotions and exactly what to say to other people when you don't know what to say.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So without further ado, please, let's give a warm welcome to Dr. Susan David.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Thank you. I'm so delighted to be here today.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I am so excited to talk to you. Let's do it. So is it just me, Dr. David, or is everybody a little bit more kind of uneasy or emotional these days?
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Absolutely. Someone described this as the word "untethered." And to me, that's often what it feels like. That there feels like there is an untethering. And it's not an untethering that's a general untethering. It's, I think, often an untethering from the self.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Really?
--:-- Dr. Susan David: What I mean by this is the world has been changing so quickly. There's a pandemic you mentioned earlier, there's been a war. There's so much that's going on. And we as human beings, we're not taught in school the science of how to navigate emotions effectively. We're not taught this in the workplace. And so we come to a changing world that feels out of control. And we then are more likely to feel out of control as well.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: And so just from the basic research, we know that there is a huge increase in people's experiences of depression, anxiety, burnout, lashing out at others. This is real. This is not just you and your grocery store. This is a real phenomenon. And I think it's a tragedy that we don't speak to these inner skills more.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I love that you use the word "untethered" because I know for me personally, when I all of a sudden have an emotional outburst, like even standing in line at the grocery store, and I feel this wave of "I'm frustrated, I'm impatient, I'm judgy." And then I start to feel judgy of myself and mad at myself for being that way. Whenever I snap at my kids because I've had a stressful day at work—which is not an excuse to snap at somebody else—I feel bad.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I really resonate with this idea that when you cannot navigate the inner world, your emotions, your feelings, you do feel disconnected from yourself.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: You're feeling disconnected because you're disconnected from your values. And also, we often talk about this word "hustle," and we talk about hustle in relation to work, in relation to the external world. But a lot of what we do is we hustle with ourselves. "Should I feel this? Am I allowed to feel it? Is this okay?" You know, "If I'm accepting of myself, does this mean that I'm not allowed to think or want bigger things?" Like we have this hustle with ourselves. And the more we hustle with ourselves, the less we are able to be connected with our values, who we want to be, grounded.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: And I often think of this metaphor, Mel, of a gymnast. So if we think of a gymnast, a gymnast is agile. A gymnast is able to respond to what's going on in the external world, to the crowd that's clapping or the loud music that doesn't play exactly as she wants. But what keeps the gymnast grounded is the strong inner core. It's this core that allows us to be able to respond to the world effectively. And so much of my work is focused on how to develop this inner core so that we can navigate what's going on in the outer world with a greater level of being centered and connected and breathing in ourselves.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That sounds amazing. Can you give me an example, Dr. David, from your own life where you let your emotions get the best of you? You didn't have that solid core that you're talking about?
--:-- Dr. Susan David: A couple of years ago, I was writing a book—not *Emotional Agility*, another book. And I had worked long and hard on this book. And I went to a conference where a professor, far more powerful and famous than I will ever be, asked me what I was working on and I told him. And I'm not going to say who he was, but essentially this professor betrayed my trust.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Six months later, I was working in Starbucks and I got a text from this professor—or a voice message actually—saying, "I hope you don't mind if we use your concept as the title for my book."
--:-- Mel Robbins: What? So he asked you?
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Okay, so I was like, "Mind? Of course I mind!" Okay, of course I mind. And I'm giving you this example because I think it's a real life example of how not to do it. Okay, so I was outraged. And the trap door to my heart opened when I realized that this professor's question was not a question. The book was available that day for pre-sale on Amazon.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: So I did what many of us would do in this situation. I called my husband to bitch. Okay. And my husband, he's a physician, and he had a patient lying on the table waiting for an emergency procedure. And he answered the call like this: "Susie, can't speak now. Got a patient on the table waiting for an emergency procedure." *Click*.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Okay, so now what do we do? We're like, "The one time, the one time I needed him, he's unavailable." You know, "The one time when his callback comes in three days, I'm not going to take it now." This is reactive. This is emotional immaturity.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yes. I want to highlight that absolutely everything that you felt, I felt as you were telling that story. I felt a deep sense of injustice because I felt all the emotions that you felt. And I'm the kind of person that when I get triggered like that, I don't call my husband. I send like texts and texts and texts. I like text vomit at him. And as you're listening, I know you're nodding because you're like, "Oh, I do that too. I do that too."
--:-- Mel Robbins: But the problem with that is that while the texting or the frantic phone call may help you relieve the pressure of the emotion of the moment, it didn't actually help you solve the problem.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I can see how when your emotions start swirling or life starts swirling around you, you lose that centering. And that's why you become super reactive. And so it's super helpful to think about the fact that you could actually teach yourself this skill of a solid emotional core that allows you to stay grounded and in control. I love that.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Yeah. And I think you're highlighting something really important, which is the superpower that you're talking about is being able to experience the wave of anger, hatred, injustice, sadness, feeling defeated, feeling powerless, feeling small, feeling like you're robbed in one instance—to validate it, to notice it. And then where the opportunity is, is to then learn how to strengthen your connection to yourself and to the emotions that you feel so that no matter who is freaking out around you or what you're going through in your life, that you are able to find a sense of calm to navigate.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: These skills are powerful. They are science-based and they are practical. So wherever people are right now, whether you're rushing around, whether you're on your walk, whatever you're doing, I'll just give you one example of what this looks like.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: So when we're rushing around, often what we've done is we've lost a sense of our own connectedness. So we are tactile human beings. And over the past couple of years, we've become more and more disconnected. We're much more on our phones. We had social distancing. There was all of this that went on that disconnected us. And there is something so powerful and so grounding in just putting your hands on your heart and saying, "It's hard to human right now. It's hard to be worrying about the lunchbox and getting my kids to school. And it's hard to human right now."
--:-- Dr. Susan David: So that is a skill in compassion. And obviously the work goes much deeper and much broader, but this is a powerful way of being with ourselves, which is completely distinct from, "Am I allowed to feel that? Well, I should be grateful." You know, the stuff that we are often taught to do or what social media would tell us to do. When we've got doctors who are going into patients' rooms to give bad news, we remind them of their feet on the ground. And we will often ask them—and if you're watching on YouTube or if you're even just listening to this, I've got my hands over my chest—but yeah, these skills are powerful and they are absolutely skills that we can develop.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, I can see in the scenario that you just gave, because you do so much consulting and teaching and advising in the corporate space, in the healthcare space. And I can see how if you're somebody working in the healthcare field and you're about to walk into a treatment room and you know that you've got bad news to deliver, that the fact that you're a human being means you're going to feel something about what's about to happen. And you're saying that simply reminding a nurse, a doctor, a healthcare professional to take a breath, feet on the floor, arms across the body, "It's hard to be human right now." That even just that grounding moment is something that helps you really tolerate the emotion.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Or like, maybe you should just talk a little bit about what are emotions? And what purpose do they serve so that as everybody's listening, they kind of understand what you're talking about when you say "feeling an emotion"?
--:-- Dr. Susan David: The purpose of our emotions is to help us to adapt to the world around us. Like that is the purpose of our emotions. So our emotions have evolved to help us to adapt and survive.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So what does this mean from the perspective of how we connect with ourselves?
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Yes. What this means is that a lot of the language that we have around emotions has actually not been from this functional perspective. It hasn't been from the perspective that actually emotions are human and healthy and normal and beautiful. Instead, what we have is this idea that emotions are weak. Emotions are feminine. Emotions are bad. You know, that's the history that we come with when we think about emotions. And so when we see emotions in that way, we start this hustle with, "Well, if I'm feeling anything other than a so-called positive emotion, then it's bad."
--:-- Mel Robbins: That makes so much sense.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: We have everyday thoughts. The thought might be, "I'm not good enough. I'm a fraud." We have emotions. We have emotions of anger, fear, grief. All of these experiences that we have. We have stories. Some of our stories were written on our mental chalkboards when we were five years old. You know, stories about whether we're good enough, whether we deserve to be loved. And the pop psychology way of viewing these is that they're good or bad, positive or negative. In other words, if you have a thought that's negative, put it aside. It doesn't belong. Think about something positive.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Right.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: What my work does is it actually says these thoughts, emotions, and stories are normal. They are helping you to understand the world, to see what you need to pay attention to, to adapt to the world. So these are normal. We don't need to get into a hustle with ourselves as to whether we should or shouldn't be allowed to think or feel a particular thing. These are normal. These are beautiful. These are human. If we turn against that and say, "I shouldn't think this" or "I shouldn't be allowed to feel that," we unsee ourselves.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Now, emotions are data. Emotions are data. They're not directives. In other words, it doesn't mean because I feel something, now I need to act out. And now I've got to tell everyone how I feel. Because there is a difference between feeling our emotions with compassion, with curiosity, and being able to be grounded in them. And then that allows us the space, the distance from the emotion, because now we're not hustling, to be able to think about who do I want to be? Who do I want to be in this relationship? How do I want to come to the circumstance? So that we come to the world, not in a way that's reactive, but rather coming to the world in a way that is clear-sighted and centered within the self.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That was really interesting. So let's talk about how you do this in real life. And I've got a ton of questions from our global audience. When they heard that you were coming on, Dr. David, we've got a ton of questions about how you manage your own emotions, particularly in situations where other people are triggering you.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I want to take a quick moment so we can hear a word from our sponsors. And for you listening, don't you dare go anywhere. And I'm not trying to guilt you into anything. I really want you to stay and listen. I have an incredible question coming up. It's something that you're going to relate to. You need to hear this. We also have more tactics. So please, I'll be waiting for you after a short word from our sponsors after the break. We're going to pick this right back up. Stay with us.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Welcome back. It's your friend Mel. Thank you, thank you, thank you for still being here. You're going to be so glad that you are because Dr. Susan David is here from Harvard. She's talking about how you deal with these difficult situations with other people. And we're going to jump back in.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So Dr. David, this particular question comes from Tina. Tina writes that her son is struggling with anxiety and depression and she wants to know, Dr. David, how do I separate my emotions from my son's when he's so low? "I try so hard not to, but I find things such a struggle when he feels low and when he's okay, I'm okay. I just don't even know where to start."
--:-- Mel Robbins: And it's not just kids. This is for your partners or if your parents are struggling. I think we all want to know how to support somebody, but not get sucked into their emotions. So how do you do that, Dr. David?
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Yes. Well, I mean, anyone who's parented, anyone who's looked after elderly parents, anyone who's been in relationship with anyone recognizes some of the truth that is said, which is, you know, as a parent, for example, you only tend to be as happy as your most unhappy child. Because of course, when we see people in pain, it evokes pain in us. We are social creatures. We of course are going to experience pain, grief, agony when we see someone else in pain.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: So at the same time, what happens when we get stuck in "my experience of what that other person is experiencing," we become both unable to manage our own health and well-being, but also we can't really be functional, effective parents, because we are now reactive within the pain that is created in that world. So there are a couple of things that I would say.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Firstly, if we think about how to think about children's emotions—because that's probably a really good place to start, we can then start thinking about our own. So children's emotions. Often as a parent, it becomes really tempting when we see our children in pain to rush and fix.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: I remember, Mel, years ago, me taking my son to the pediatrician. He had just been born. And I remember going and my son was goo-goo and gaga and smiling and happy. And I handed him over to the pediatrician for his shots. And he started to scream. He started to be outraged and he was crying. And I jumped in and I said to him, "It's okay. It's okay. It's okay." And the nurse so kindly, so empathetically said to me, "Susie, it's not okay. Your child is in pain. It's not okay. Your child is in pain. It will be okay, but your child is in pain."
--:-- Dr. Susan David: And I was like, "I've got a flipping PhD in this stuff and I did the one thing that you're not allowed to do, which is invalidate." So the point that I make here is one of the first things we often try to do with others is we try to control what emotion we think they should or shouldn't be allowed to feel. And often we do it—
--:-- Mel Robbins: I can see it's resonating. I can see it's connecting.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Often we do it with good intention. Okay, we do it with good intention. Now, what does that teach our child? What it teaches our child is what we call "display rules." Display rules are the implicit rules that we often have of what emotion is it okay for me to feel in my family? Or what am I allowed to experience?
--:-- Dr. Susan David: So how does this impact the child? What it basically does is a display rule. If every time a child comes home and is upset, you say to the child, "Oh, you're not allowed to be upset." And you might not be saying that overtly, but you might be signaling that. What that's saying to the child is sadness has no place here. I need to turn away from myself because sadness is not allowed in this family. Or anger isn't allowed. Or emotions aren't allowed.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: So now what is the longer term impact of that? Well, how do we become good at regulating our emotions? We become good at regulating our emotions when we say, "Hey, this is what sadness feels like. And you practice feeling sad and you practice the sadness that I felt 24 hours ago. I did A, I did B, I did C. Now I no longer feel sad." By allowing our children to feel all of their emotions, we're not just allowing them to feel all of their emotions, we are actually doing the core work of parenting, which is helping our children to be with discomfort, helping our children to recognize and be with uncomfortable emotions.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: So I think one of the most powerful ways for Tina and for every single person listening is any emotion we experience, rather than judging that emotion as "that's positive, that's negative, that's wrong, that's right"—"It's hard to human." And so for Tina, creating a little bit of space where she sees that experience in herself with compassion is very powerful because now it's already moving you into the space of the self where you're not in this vortex of both of you struggling. You're now in with yourself. So that is firstly a very important skill.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Secondly, often when people experience tough emotions, whether that's with a child or at work or any other relational context, we start getting hooked by the emotion and there's no space for anything else. So, you know, "I'm angry and I'm feeling overwhelmed and there's all this stuff going on for me" and there's no space in that for the wisdom that I believe every single one of us has. We all have wisdom. We all, in the peace of night when we are lying in bed and it's just us, there's this part of ourselves that is just us and it's wise and it's capable, beautiful, centered. And so we need to create the space for that. And when we're being clouded by being hooked by a difficult emotion, there's not the space.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: So some practical strategies: when we are hooked by a difficult emotion, it's to recognize that often we use very big labels to describe what we're feeling. If you just think about something as simple as saying, "I'm stressed," okay? A lot of people come home and someone says, "How was your day?" "Stressful." Now, let's deconstruct that a little bit. Your body, your psychology doesn't know what to do with the word "stress." There is a world of difference between stress and disappointment. Stress and "I feel unsupported." Stress and "I feel unseen." Stress and "I'm bored." There's a world of difference.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: What we know is that when we label our emotions with greater levels of accuracy, with high levels of granularity, that what it starts to enable us to do is to understand the cause of the emotion. "Gee, it's not just stress, it's I'm feeling unsupported." And it also allows us to develop what psychologists call our "readiness potential." The readiness potential when you move away from "I'm stressed" to actually "I'm bored." When you're starting to label it in that way, you're also starting to say, "Gee, what do I need to do to now not be bored?" So it starts to move you towards goals.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: We know that children as young as two and three years old who have greater levels of emotion granularity—in other words, they're not just saying "I'm mad" or "I'm sad," but they're able to say "I feel a bit upset," "I feel a bit disappointed"—even children as young as two and three years old, obviously within their language capacity. Those children who have greater levels of emotional granularity, 10, 20, 30 years later, those children do better.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: So again, coming back to Tina, we've got this gentle acceptance of emotion that is crucial. In my work, I call it "gentle acceptance." It's about showing up to all of our emotions with acceptance and curiosity. Not the same as passive resignation, but it's this gentle acceptance. We also want to start creating space because we can't be wise. We can't be intentional when we're just on autopilot or react.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I want to lean into the word "separate." How do I separate my emotions? And whenever I use that in my own life—"I want to separate my emotions from a child that feels anxious or a husband that is struggling with depression or going through something really difficult"—when you feel that sense to separate, is that a signal that you're getting kind of sucked into and triggered by someone else's emotions and you need to now take a breath and come back into your own body?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Because if I listen closely to what you're saying, you're basically saying that, of course, if there's somebody in your life that is struggling, it's going to make you sad and make you feel grief and make you feel all these complicated things, which is absolutely normal. And that hustling with our emotions and being in conflict with what is coming up for you is part of the problem. Like resisting the actual feelings that you have.
--:-- Mel Robbins: How do you separate, though, what your son or daughter or significant other is dealing with and needs to deal with and feel for themselves, and what you need to deal with for yourself?
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Because for me, I'll just explain in case it's helpful to you listening. When one of our kids is struggling with anxiety—which all three of them have in various levels throughout their life—or my husband struggling with depression, the emotions that come up for me are so uncomfortable that the way that I would normally deal with them, Susan, is first try to swoop in and remove all the discomfort from my kids. "Okay, I'll take care of it. I'll get you the therapist. We're going to talk about this. You're going to be okay." Because I can't deal with my own emotions.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And then as soon as I have just barfed all that out at somebody, because I'm going to fix it, fix it, fix it, because I don't want to feel what I'm feeling because it scares me to death that you're anxious because I love you and I don't want you to be in pain. And now I'm upset about it. Then I go pour a drink because I don't want to feel those things.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Yes.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So how do you separate?
--:-- Dr. Susan David: I love that question. And I think there's a separation that happens. And by separation, we don't mean disengagement. By separation, we don't mean "I don't care about you." By separation, what we mean is healthy levels of boundaries between me as a person who is allowed to want and need and love and be, and you, your own person, who is allowed to have all of those things. And boundaries don't mean that I remove my compassion.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Boundaries with my child that basically say, "I am safe as a person and you, my beautiful child, are safe as a person, because I'm not going to let your anxiety derail me and make us both unsafe." Because it's a really important thing.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: So what are we doing when we're setting a boundary? You are wanting to see your child's need, to recognize that need, and to state that need. "I can see that you need me right now while I'm cooking dinner." So we want to state the need. We want to, number two, empathize. "I love you. I care about you. I empathize with you. And I can see that what you're going through is really tough right now." So we're doing all of this—need, empathy. And third is we are stating what we can and cannot do. "I can't deal with this now. I'm cooking dinner. Can we have this conversation in an hour?"
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Now, in that way, you're not being inhuman. You're not walking away from your compassion. What you're doing is you're coupling your compassion with a strong sense of groundedness in yourself and your ability to set boundaries. So separation is not about distance or "I don't care," but it is the most important skill set.
--:-- What I found in my work is that usually when people have these difficult emotions—and you capture this so beautifully in the example that you gave—is often what we have is one of two reactions, and people sometimes jump from one to the next. The first is what I call bottling difficult emotions. Bottling difficult emotions is when we experience these emotions, but we start engaging in emotional suppression. We can do it with ourselves, we can do it with others. Ignoring and going and watching Netflix so I don't need to deal with it is an example of bottling. Doing that once is fine, but when it becomes a default coping strategy, you aren't going to be effective in the world at all.
--:-- So bottling is this idea of suppressing difficult emotions, pushing it aside in myself, pushing it aside in others, forced positivity, trying to fix, trying to say to someone, "Don't worry, it'll be okay." Sometimes leaders will say when people are going through difficult situations at work, something like, "It doesn't matter, everything will be okay, everything will be fine." And I'm like, that is not leadership. That is what we call denial. Forced positivity is not leadership. Forced positivity is denial. It's denial that's wrapped up in rainbows and sparkles.
--:-- And then the opposite is brooding. Brooding is where we like, "This feels terrible. This feels so difficult." We get stuck in our difficult emotion. So what we want to do with our difficult emotions to create that distance is, firstly, this gentle acceptance that I spoke about. Secondly, when we start getting granular with our emotions, we are now not in the space of, "Oh, everything's stressful and my whole family life is up the creek." Instead, we're saying, "I'm feeling disappointed because this is hard." And just that starts to create a sense of liberation in ourselves and a sense of separation.
--:-- Another thing, and this I think is one of the most powerful things that we need to recognize: I own my emotions. My emotions don't own me. I mean, that sounds great. I don't know that I feel that way some days. So let's just think about our language. "I am sad." What are we saying when we say "I'm sad"? We're saying all of me, 100% of me, is sad. Versus "I feel sad." Versus "I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad." When we say "I am sad," when we say "I am angry," what we are literally doing is saying that all of me is defined by the sadness.
--:-- And Mel, the metaphor that I use sometimes is, imagine there's a cloud in the sky. When you say "I am sad, I am angry, I'm a bad parent," what we are doing is we are almost being the cloud. All of me is that cloud. But when we instead start noticing our thoughts, our emotions, and our stories for what they are—"I'm noticing that I'm feeling grieving about what I'm seeing in my child. I'm noticing my sense of disappointment that I need to go it alone here, that I'm the person that's holding the family together. I'm noticing a story, which is that I needed to be a perfect parent here." So when we move away from "I'm a bad parent" into "I'm noticing my thoughts, emotions, and stories for what they are," they are parts of us. They're not all of us. We've also got our wisdom. We've got our values. We've got our intentions. We've got our wants, our dreams. So we need to create that separation.
--:-- And a really powerful way of doing that is using this linguistic separation. Instead of "I am sad," "I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad." What you're doing here is you are not the cloud. You are the whole damn sky. You are powerful enough to experience all of your emotions and then to choose who you want to be in that situation.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I want to really drill down into this example a little bit further because I think what you've just shared is super helpful. When you're the one who is getting brought down and overwhelmed by somebody else who's really struggling. And it's super helpful to see the need to literally kind of separate a little bit. Have some compassion for yourself. Use the linguistic separation of "I'm noticing this in myself," which even just acknowledging it does that readiness in terms of pointing you in the right direction to know what kind of support you need.
--:-- Is there anything in your research or recommendations that you have for how you can use even that linguistic separation, or what you could say to somebody in your life who's struggling, who is stuck in their own emotions? How can I be better at helping someone in my life who is overwhelmed in their own misery or their own anxiety or their own low emotion? Can you help them? What do we do?
--:-- Dr. Susan David: So firstly, we're not trying to sense-make with anyone while they're lying on a supermarket floor having a tantrum. What we know from our work is that the simple presence, the simple willingness of one individual to be human with another individual—to not try to jostle and fix and distract—simple presence automatically de-escalates those difficult emotions. So we know that.
--:-- You can't react with intentionality when you are reacting. In other words, when you're being reactive rather than responsive. When we ground it in ourselves, we can respond. We've got our feet on the ground and we are responding.
--:-- Now, there are a couple of mistakes that people make with this. The first is I spoke about brooding earlier where we get stuck in our difficult emotions. There is something called co-brooding. Co-brooding is when someone's had a really bad day and you come home from work and they come home from work and you have a big fat moan about what's been going on in the day. That's co-brooding. So what we're doing here is we are both now stuck in these difficult emotions.
--:-- And there's fascinating research on co-brooding. The idea that you go out with your best girlfriend, you have a big fat moan about your father-in-law. And what do you do when you leave that restaurant conversation? You love your best friend. You feel better about your best friend, but what is the longer-term impact of your behavior on your father-in-law? It actually is worse. So co-brooding is where you both now get stuck in a little vent. And we know that co-brooding and brooding is actually predictive of longer-term depression, of longer-term anxiety, and it is unhelpful.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Dr. David, this feels like a great moment to hit the pause so we can hear a word from our sponsors. And when we come back, we're going to be getting into very specific situations. What do you do when somebody's passive aggressive? What are the specific things that you can say to somebody who is having trouble with their life or their emotions? So many more tactical things that you can actually do are coming up. Don't go anywhere. I'll be waiting for you after a short break.
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--:-- Mel Robbins: Welcome back. It's your friend Mel Robbins. And today we have Dr. Susan David from Harvard here. And she is sharing research about emotional agility. And more specifically, she's teaching you and me how to deal with those situations in life where your emotions are taking over.
--:-- So Dr. David, I would love to hear you help us understand what some emotionally laced behavior in other people is signaling to us, because I don't think most adults go up to other adults and are like, "I'm really lonely." Here's an example. If this happened to a friend of mine where she just wanted to have a couple people go out for her birthday, just three or four friends. And some other friends found out about it and she gets a passive aggressive text: "Thanks a lot for inviting me." That is clearly behavior by another adult that is driven by emotions that are uncomfortable for them.
--:-- When somebody is emotionally volatile or passive aggressive in the way they communicate with you, what is the deeper thing that you could probably assume somebody's feeling or dealing with so that you can tap into that compassion instead of, "Oh, she's such a jerk"?
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Yeah. So I think this is really important. People aren't going to say, "I'm lonely." But if we think about, for example, the loneliness, then move it into that example. What is loneliness signposting? Loneliness is signposting a greater need for intimacy and connection. That's what it's signposting.
--:-- Boredom is often signposting a greater need for growth. Anger—this idea that we've got to not have anger—anger is often signposting a need for equity or fairness or that some values are being transgressed. So if we move away from this idea that emotions are good or bad or that I'm only allowed some of them, actually what we do is we move into the space where we start saying, for me as well as for the friend in the restaurant, these emotions are signposting our needs and our values. And I think this is very powerful.
--:-- Now, the person might not say, "I am lonely" or "Gee, I feel excluded." Instead, they're doing it in this passive aggressive way. But you are able to, as a human to another human, start saying, instead of what I'm seeing about the emotion, what is the function of the emotion? What is the emotion trying to tell us about our needs and our values?
--:-- And the space of compassion is the space of saying, "Gee, it is actually hard to human. And gee, when you feel like you're part of our group of friends and you came out to dinner and you happened to see me with a smaller circle of this group having a birthday party and you realized you weren't invited, that kind of hurts. A lot. A lot, a lot, a lot."
--:-- So what is the function of the emotion or what is the function of the text? The function of the text is saying, "Do I matter? Or am I still part of us?" And we often, what we're doing in reactive mode, is what do we do? We get the text, we say, "Oh my god, can you believe she didn't understand that I just wanted to be by myself?" We maybe text our other friends, we start labeling them as toxic. There's a very powerful way that we often, we call it the fundamental attribution bias, where we start saying what that person's experiencing is now her personality. She's needy. She's all of these things.
--:-- So what we often do when we're in reactive mode is that person's defensive. Now I'm defensive. And now we're in this weird escalation of something that doesn't need to be.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Talk to us because I want to know how you would handle that. Because I love the word "escalation" because you're right. I think we all have someone in our life where you've been on the receiving end of, "Oh, I see you're in Boston, Mel. Thanks for calling me." I get one of those and I'm like, "Now I'm never calling you, by the way."
--:-- Dr. Susan David: [Laughs] Exactly.
--:-- Mel Robbins: But so now all of a sudden, guaranteed, my immature emotion, your immature emotion escalates. And it's all the time. How do you... I think this moment right here, whether it happens at work or it happens with a friend group or it happens with a significant other, this is everything. You see the dishes in the sink with your roommate and your emotions fly up because they didn't do it again. And you had... I think if we can give the person and me de-escalation. How do you de-escalate this moment? Because it is so easy to just go, "What the F?" When this happens to you and you feel someone else's emotional reactivity, how do you deal with it?
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Well, just to be clear, I've got an effing PhD in this stuff, but it doesn't mean that I get it right all the time.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Do you explain yourself or do you just validate the emotion?
--:-- Dr. Susan David: I think it depends on the situation. I think sometimes it's completely okay to say, "Georgia was in town and the three of us decided to go out." I don't think you have to explain. But the crux here is understanding the emotion behind the surface level passive aggressiveness. That is what engages you in a clean relationship.
--:-- And so much of my work is about moving into cleanness with ourselves and with others. Accepting my emotions, all of my emotions. I don't need to hustle. Separation between me and my difficult emotions because I own them, they don't own me. What does that look like? It's the granularity. It's the "instead of I am, I'm noticing what I'm feeling." Then understanding the why behind difficult emotions. What the funk? What is the emotion signaling to you about your needs and your values? And then lastly, how can I move forward with those difficult emotions, even if it's uncomfortable, even if it requires huge amounts of courage because it's walking towards my values?
--:-- And these skills are skills that enable us to be clean with ourselves, but also to be clean with others. "You are allowed to feel what you feel. I'm helping you in this text message or in whatever example, I'm helping us to understand what's going on for you. That you're not just being a silly little bitch. Actually, you hurt because you care about me. I'm helping you to notice that you were feeling that, but I love you." And I'm helping us to also think about how do we want to be as friends? What does friendship look like? Friendship often means that we go towards the values of having a difficult conversation.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I want to just highlight this part of the conversation because this is an example of what you are dealing with in life every single day. It's an example of these moments that I deal with every day in my life where something happens, someone has an emotional response, and now you're either going to react or you're going to take all this and put it in pause.
--:-- I want to just share what I just got from you, Dr. David. It's so easy to roll your eyes and say, "Why is this person texting me this? This person is so dramatic. This person is always the victim." And start to label them and push them away. And what I just got listening to you is if you practice these skills and you come back to this emotional core, think about the gymnast, center yourself, pause. And then you can ask yourself, "What might this person be feeling?" Like the passive aggressive, the immature behavior, there is something deeper underneath that. And if I had to guess what's underneath somebody who's even texting me, "Hey, I see you're in Boston," is they're trying to connect, even though the way they're doing it blows.
--:-- That deeper and more profound thing underneath either the silence, the passive aggressive, all this stuff that irritates us, is just another human being who can't process their emotions and who wants to somehow connect with you. And I think having that reframing helps me be a better human. It helps me bring more compassion. And it also helps me diffuse the emotion in the moment and be able to reach out to this friend of mine and say something like, "I can see that you're upset. Let's have a conversation about it tomorrow because I certainly don't want you to feel that way. Thanks for reaching out." What a wonderful way to handle it. Certainly beats turning to your friends and being like, "What a jerk." That is more emotional immaturity.
--:-- I feel like there is an epidemic of avoiding difficult feelings and avoiding difficult conversations and shoving it down, and of calling people toxic, and of bitching, and of whatever. I'll tell you what I do. I literally will go on text and we've all been on the receiving end of the vent, vent, vent. And why am I venting? Because I can't tolerate how I'm feeling. So I dump it on somebody else.
--:-- I have one other question I wanted to ask you. What is the connection between emotions and people pleasing?
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Brilliant question. Love it. A huge part of the connection relates back to what we described with display rules. If we think about our most vulnerable place we've been in the world, it has typically been with our caregivers. And so what we learn with our caregivers is these subtle cues about which emotions will get us the kind of love that we need and which emotions are too much for them, need to be hidden from them, and will ultimately threaten the most important relationship in our life.
--:-- So we start often attaching experiences of difficult emotion to caregiving. So when I feel sad, which was something that I was not really allowed to feel when I was younger, but now I'm seeing that in someone else, I need to take it away. A lot of people pleasing stems from a discomfort with being with discomfort. "Of course, I don't want to disappoint you. That's why I'm going to bend over backwards. I don't want to disappoint. I don't want to be sad." So all of these display rules of things that we didn't want—"I don't want to be angry. I don't want you to be angry because I didn't want my parent to be angry."
--:-- A huge part of the emotional work is to go beyond the surface reactivity, the emotional immaturity that you spoke about earlier, and to develop a deep ability to be with discomfort, especially emotional discomfort, because in the space of discomfort is where you develop the skills that help you with distress tolerance, help you to understand your values, help you to understand other people's values, help you to have a difficult conversation.
--:-- I think the work is about being able to be with discomfort, but it's not discomfort for the sake of it. It's not "I'm just getting up and I'm just pushing myself to burn out." It is discomfort because it aligns with who you want to be as a person. It is discomfort that moves you to your values, to the things that you care about in your life.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I have this question and I'm curious if you have a specific strategy somebody could use. She writes in, "My brother-in-law is in a relationship with my best friend. They've been dating for two years. I'm trying to process my emotion about it, but I'm constantly experiencing anger, annoyance, and emotional discomfort." And I think we see this when a parent remarries, we see this with stepkids, we see this with a new manager. So if you've been trying to process emotions and you can't seem to stabilize them, what would be a strategy as a psychologist you would recommend somebody do?
--:-- Dr. Susan David: First important part of my work is not to try force positivity in yourself. A lot of us try to say, "I shouldn't feel that. I should just be happy for them." Force positivity, again, rainbows, unicorn sparkles, but it makes us less resilient. It makes us less effective.
--:-- Second is we can look at it as discomfort, and I think it's powerful and it's true. But getting to the emotion granularity piece: what is it that is leading to this discomfort? Is it a sense of loss in your girlfriend, in the relationship? Is it a sense that you were once thick together and now it feels like there's an interloper? I think there's something so powerful in just understanding what it is that is happening here.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah, I think a lot of people feel very territorial about where they're at. Whether it's a friend coming into work at the same restaurant or it's now somebody dating someone that's connected to the person that you're dating or working, you start to get really threatened by it. And it's often coming from insecurity. And I'm not saying in this case it's insecurity, but it's often this idea of, remember when we were at school and our teachers kept saying, "Keep your eyes on your own work, keep your eyes on your own work." It's very important for us to keep our eyes on our own work.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: And what I mean by that metaphorically: if you know what you stand for, if you know what you care about, if you have your own back, if you love yourself, if you're kind to yourself and compassionate to yourself, if you understand what your values are, you are going to be more able to keep your eyes on your own work because you're not insecure about how your work compares to someone else's.
--:-- So I think that very often when there's this insecurity or where it's a sense of being territorial, it's coming from pain in the self, from a lack of groundedness in the self. And part of the work then is understanding the whats and the whys of that so that you can move forward, not driven by your emotion, but stepping into your values about how you want to be with this person, how you value the friendship, what boundaries look like in that friendship, asking the difficult questions that we all need to do.
--:-- And I often think about this idea, which is that solving and fixing and controlling are a core part of the problem.
--:-- Mel Robbins: How so? How is controlling?
--:-- Dr. Susan David: We live in a world that tells us that when we don't like our cell phone, we can buy a new one. If we don't like our friend, we can just cut them off. If we don't like our difficult emotions and thoughts, we can just replace them with positive ones. Controlling actually paradoxically makes us weaker. And what I mean by controlling is not saying, "What can I control?" But trying to control. What you are doing is you are gripping, gripping the steering wheel as you drive down the street, trying to control. But actually, most of the ability to manage the world effectively is moving away from trying to control everything. Trying to control is a false horizon.
--:-- Life's beauty and its fragility are interwoven. And the only way we can be whole, healthy people is when we move away from trying to control and instead try to be with what is. And the skills of emotional agility are the skills that help us to look inwards, not judging ourselves with our difficult emotions, thinking about who we want to be. And it's about this level of compassion. "How am I feeling? How's the other person feeling?" It's about curiosity. "What's going on? What's the function? What's really happening here?" And it's also about courage because we don't live in a perfect world.
--:-- And sometimes people will say, "I just wish the stress would go away. I wish the stress of the difficult relationship would go away. I just wish the stress of my difficult job would go away." And I understand that. But the idea of never having your heart broken, of never not getting the job you wanted—that is a dead person's goal. What is a dead person's goal? We will have—and I'm saying this facetiously—we will have many years when we are dead not to have our hearts broken, never to be stressed, never to not get the job. We don't get to have a meaningful career, to have meaningful relationships, to raise a family, to leave the world a better place without stress and discomfort. Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.
--:-- Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. And these emotional agility skills are the skills that enable us to navigate these difficult emotions, to connect with who we want to be, and to move forward with courage.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Did you hear that? Discomfort is the price of admission for life. So when Dr. David is saying, "You don't want a dead person's goals," a dead person doesn't feel anything. You want to live a full life, you got to lean into the discomfort. You want to have better friendships, you got to be willing to have the uncomfortable conversation about the deeper thing you're feeling or the deeper thing that your friend might be feeling.
--:-- You want to be more successful. The number one skill, she said it over and over and over again, is learning how to tolerate change, learning how to tolerate difficult emotion. And what I love about what I'm learning and what I hope you're taking away from this is that you can feel all the emotions, which we've learned are valid. They're a natural part of life, but you don't have to act on them immediately. You can come back to your center and you can feel something that's uncomfortable and you can still then choose and decide to make a decision or support somebody or respond in a way that is aligned with your values.
--:-- What is the closing wisdom that you have for the person listening?
--:-- Dr. Susan David: What I would say is this. When I was little, when I was around five years old, I experienced what so many young children experience, which is you start becoming aware of your own mortality. At around five, you are a serious little kid. I was a serious kid. But a lot of work shows that at around five years old, children start to become aware of others, aware of others' mortality and of their own mortality. It's a developmentally normal phase that kids go through. There's a lot of anxiety that comes with that.
--:-- When I was five, you can imagine I was fun to be with. I started to recognize that my parents wouldn't be around forever. And I would night after night after night find my way into my parents' bed. I would lie between them and I would say to them, "Promise me you'll never die. Promise me you'll never die." Now, as it turns out, 10 years later, my father, when I was 15, did die of terminal cancer.
--:-- My father could have done the avoidance. He could have said, "Don't worry about it, everything's fine. Don't be such a baby, there's nothing to be scared of." He could have done all the stuff that we've spoken about—the avoidance, the emotional immaturity, the pitter patter of text to text, all the stuff that we've spoken about. But my father didn't. My father said this to me. He said to me, "Susie, we all die. It's normal to be scared."
--:-- And what he was doing was, number one, saying to me, "There's no emotion that you need to fear. I see you. I see your fear and I'm with you in that fear." What I understood he was saying is courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is fear walking. Courage is the ability to hold the difficult emotions—the upset, the anger that you or someone else feels, the anxiety—it's holding those things and walking towards what matters to you in your life, in your love, in your relationships, and your work. And what matters to you is what is of value to you. So courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is holding that fear and moving towards what is important.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Dr. Susan David, thank you so much for spending so much time with us today.
--:-- Dr. Susan David: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And to you listening, I want to make sure that in case nobody else tells you, I wanted to be sure to tell you that I love you and I believe in you. And I believe in your ability to take everything that you just learned today and support yourself in being emotionally agile and show up to life and relationships with greater compassion for what other people may be signaling and use all of this wisdom to create a better life. All right, I'll talk to you in a few days.
--:-- [Outro music begins]
--:-- Mel Robbins: [To producer] What up, girl? Yeah, let's do that. Let's do exactly what you're doing here where I'm like sitting and talking and walking and here we go. Don't go anywhere, I'm gonna be waiting for you after a short break. Wait, hold on. You know what I mean? Or something like, "Oh, fabulous!"
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, and one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language, you know what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist, and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode.
