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Hello and welcome to the effective living podcast. A podcast for ideas, strategies, insights, and conversations all about how to live a more effective and more prosperous life. Once again, I am your host, Nathaniel Nunziante. And today we are delving into the complex world of feelings. Oh, man. Feelings are something. They are an integral part of the human experience. For, for sure. But what a two edged sword. I mean, on the high end, joy, happiness, pleasure, right? But on the low end, fear, despair, pain, suffering, feelings truly do add the color to our lives. But in today's society, there's a concerning trend of giving feelings. Far too much power when it comes to how we make decisions. A study by the University of Scranton revealed that only 8% of people achieve their new year's resolutions. Why do you think that is right?
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I'm sure you've had a new year's resolution. I know I had. Where I'm sure I'm going to do this. And then you give up. Why did you give up? Most of the time it's because we feel like giving up. We just don't feel like doing it anymore. We abandon diets because we feel like eating more. We end relationships because we feel uncomfortable dealing with the issues. We give up on goals because we just feel like quitting. It's not exciting anymore. I'm just not feeling it. In these moments, our feelings are running the show. They're in control. And what even are they? This is the thing that always gets me about feelings, right? We know they're essential to our existence, and they're kind of like internal guides because they help us interpret the world around us, right?
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They shape our interactions with other people, with all the stimuli around us. So whether it's joy, sadness, anger, fear, all these feelings, these emotions, they do play a role in how we understand and connect with our environment and all the people in it. But they're not really real in the sense that no decision has been made when a feeling happens. So the challenge arises when feelings start to dominate the process of making decisions. And this becomes particularly problematic in situations that really require discipline or long term planning or commitment, because letting feelings alone dictate our actions will lead to choices that tend to feel really good now or feel really good soon, but are just not beneficial in the longer run. So it's about finding a balance.
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It's about acknowledging and understanding our feelings, but also considering that our long term goals are our prominent values, our responsibilities, they should be informing our decision making, not our momentary feelings. Now, renowned psychologist Dr. Susan David wrote a book called Emotional Agility. And I love what she says. She writes that emotions are data, not directives. This is a crucial perspective. While it's important to recognize and understand our feelings, right, to interpret that data should not be dictating our actions. Now, this has led, this feelings ruled trend is leading to an increase in mental health. And the rise in issues of mental health, especially among young adults, is alarming. According to the American Psychological association, the prevalence of depression among teens increased by 63% between 2009 and 2019.
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That is a massive surge, and I believe that surge is at least partially attributed to an overemphasis on how we feel about everything, rather than a growing resilience in young adults, fostering the ability to develop coping strategies. Right. So a question that I've asked myself and I've looked into, and I think everyone should ask, is, how do we find this balance? How do we respect our feelings as being legitimate, as being something that does play a role without being completely ruled by them? Well, I think the first step is acknowledging them, right. You have to recognize that they are what they are. These are transient, momentary, temporary, non permanent states of being. So when I say acknowledge your feelings, recognize your feelings, I don't mean acknowledge it, and then treat that feeling like it's the definition of you. It's not.
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It is a momentary, non permanent state. We know this to be true because literally every feeling that you've ever had passed, every single one, now, it may come back, it may persist a little while, and then drop. But when you feel in any moment a certain way, you never continue to feel that way indefinitely. There's always an interrupt where you feel differently. And a lot of times that interrupt is like the opposite of what you were feeling. So step one is acknowledging our feelings, but it's acknowledging that they are not permanent. They are temporary. Next, we really need to assess them. Once we acknowledge, okay, this feeling is not permanent, we have to ask ourselves, is this feeling even an accurate reflection of reality, or am I having some kind of immediate, immature response to these circumstances?
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It's important that we reflect and understand which one it is. It'll help us differentiate between feelings that are insightful. Right. Your gut feelings that you should really be following and going along with for a bit, or those fleeting feelings that are just in the way that you just need to grow out of. You need to put that down. Right. If you tell a young child he can't have another candy cane, he feels like the world is unfair. He feels like you've robbed him of all of his joy. That is a momentary feeling that will go away 30 seconds later when he's paying attention to something else that doesn't define who that child is. Can you imagine if you taught the child that feeling of being disappointed, that feeling of being upset was a definition of them?
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This is just who you are, this upset person who's been robbed of
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joy. How damaging would it be to that child? But no, you teach them, this is no big deal. We teach them that your response, the decisions you're making to this feeling are immature, bad, they're going to hurt you. And it's not about them being bad. It's about this. Deciding to act like that is bad. It's bad for you. So we need to assess our feelings at every moment. We need to say, is this feeling an accurate reflection of reality? Or is it just a fleeting response to my immediate circumstances that I really need to work on? And then the third step, and the most important step, is aligning your actions with your values rather than your feelings. If your value is true health, right?
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If that's a value that you cherish, you want to be a healthy human being? Well, then you have to choose actions that align with being a healthy human being, even if those actions conflict with your immediate feelings. Your immediate feelings is, eat the doughnut, eat the twinkie, eat the candy, eat the chocolate, and maybe in one moment, that would be okay. But if we just go by our feelings always want to eat what tastes good and feels good. They don't want to eat the broccoli at this moment. They want to eat the cake. But because your value is health, you will choose, most of the time to align your actions with that value rather than the feeling.
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And if you do that 95% of the time, then every now and then, you can indulge, you can allow yourself to sate that immediate feeling, but you'll do it from a position of control, not a position of being completely ruled by that feeling. So this alignment ensures that your actions are guided by the deep principles that you hold, rather than the momentary emotions. Now, this brings me to a principle called emotional granularity. I know it sounds like some weird science outer space term, but psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett introduced this term, emotional granularity, which is just about understanding the depth of our emotions. So you could think of it like this. Emotional granularity is being able to tell the difference between two emotions that are really very similar to each other, but they're not the same.
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So it's like knowing the difference between two shades of the same color, right? You have a blue and a slightly darker blue. They seem very similar, but they're not the same. For example, can you tell the difference between when you're frustrated versus when you're disappointed? These are very similar emotions, but they're not the same. Frustration usually comes from something that blocks you right when you're stopped in your tracks. But disappointment is more about expectations. It's more about expecting to accomplish something, expecting to have some, and not meeting that expectation. So recognizing these subtle differences helps you to respond more appropriately and to deal with that emotion more appropriately. If you're frustrated, you likely need to find a new approach to your problem because you have to get around the blockage.
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But if you're disappointed, you might have to rework your expectations the way you're thinking about that problem, which has nothing to do with something being in your way. And can you imagine if you're frustrated, but you think it's disappointment? Right? So you're trying to change your perspective, but perspective change won't get the roadblock out of your way, or vice versa. Right? You're actually disappointed, but you think you're frustrated. So you're trying to move something out of your way. When it's not the object that's the problem, it's your perception of whether or not that object should even be there. So by improving our emotional granularity, as Lisa Barrett says, we get better at responding to our emotions. It's like having a more detailed map of a city, right?
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You can navigate the emotional world more accurately and make decisions that truly fit how you're really feeling, rather than just a general idea of how you're feeling. And that brings us to this idea of coping. In addition to understanding our emotions, it's crucial to develop strategies for coping with them. Here's a big idea, right? I don't know if you'll agree with this, but it's what I really believe. I believe that a lot of the problems we see in the world today and the adults of the world today, like not being able to handle a tough situation or stress or something, not going the way you want it. Those issues did not start when they were adults. They started when they were kids. Why? Because they were not taught as children how to cope with emotions.
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And this becomes a vicious cycle, because kids who don't learn to deal with emotions grow up into adults who then struggle with those same things. And then those adults become parents and are incapable of teaching their own kids those skills. So the cycle continues. And this cycle can dramatically impact society, which I believe is happening, especially here in the US. We are seeing a lot of emotional immaturity throughout this country where people just don't know how to handle their feelings properly. And it's a big reason behind a lot of the issues, political issues, social issues that we're facing today. A simple example in the children terms is how we react when a kid experiences disappointment, right? Let's say a kid loses a race.
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If a kid loses a race and is really upset about it, we need to use that as an opportunity to help them understand and cope with that feeling, because life is going to provide that feeling a lot. They're going to feel disappointed and they need to know it's okay to feel that way. And this is what you do, this is how you act. But instead, we often try to shield them from these feelings. We say, well, just give an award to the kids who finished last two so they feel
good. Now, this avoids that immediate upset because the kid feels really good. But it doesn't use this as an opportunity to teach kids how to handle losing or how to handle being disappointed in the real world. And that by itself may not be that big of a deal.
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But when you play that out over time, in the rest of their lives, hundreds, thousands of those minor lessons not being taught end up giving you, a grown person, an adult who doesn't understand how to cope with their emotions. So it's super important that we break this cycle. We need to teach our children and remind adults that you need to understand and manage your emotions. And this way we can actually help to improve the society, build a society where people are more emotionally mature and better equipped to handle the inevitable stresses of just being alive in this crazy world we live in. And that brings me to another idea, this idea of emotional contagion. Okay, now this is kind of a crazy concept, but think about when you catch a cold, right? Everybody around you has got a cold.
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And it's like, if I don't leave here, I'm going to get this cold. But imagine now it happening with feelings instead of germs. When you're around someone who's really happy for a long time, it actually kind of makes you start to feel happy. When you're around a lot of people who are really sad, you'll start to feel sad. It's like their emotions are contagious. And in today's world, we're not just catching feelings from people, we're catching feelings from social media. Every time we scroll through the feeds, we're getting hit with all sorts of human beings. Experiencing various emotions and the way the algorithms are designed is whatever you engage with, it tends to show you more of that same stuff.
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So it becomes this echo chamber where if you're watching a lot of videos where people are complaining about their spouse, you're just going to hear a lot of frustration with spouse, issues with spouse. Well, think about what that might do about your perspective when you think about your spouse, how you're going to feel toward your spouse. This is why it's super important to be careful about who and what we are allowing ourselves to be surrounded by. What are the voices we are listening to? What are the visuals we are looking at? We have to protect our mind, our spirit, our body, our soul. We have to protect it from all sorts of poison. Because even a little bit of poison administered over a long period of time will kill you. You just won't know what's happening.
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If we spend time with positive people and we follow uplifting ideas, uplifting strategies, uplifting thoughts, it can help us to feel better. And on the flip side, if we're always around negative people or following people on social who make us feel bad, that'll drag us down. So choosing the right emotional environment, both in real life and in the fake life that exists on social media, is key to keeping our own emotions balanced and healthy. And finally, I just want to emphasize that I'm not trying to say that we should be ignoring our feelings. That is not healthy. I'm saying that it's time we stop letting our feelings have the first, second, and final say in our lives. We have to be proactive. We have to take action to do the right thing, even when we don't feel like it.
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And we have to walk away from the wrong thing, even when it feels like we should be doing it. Our lives are not just about what we feel. It's about what we do with those feelings. We have the power to choose actions that align with our values, our aspirations, our principles, the person we want to be, and not just the person we feel like we are. Thanks so much for joining me today. This has been another episode of the Effective Living podcast. Remember, we are more than our feelings. We have the power to act, to change, and to live effectively. Until next time, stay out of harm's way. Once again, I'm Nathaniel Nanziante, and this is the effective living podcast.