[MUSIC] And so, as we think about regulating our emotions and what we can do to make our emotions happier, I think we have to deal with something that is just part of human nature. Which is that negative emotions kind of suck, they just don't feel very good right? So if you're experiencing some situation that makes you angry, that kind of feels awful, feeling kind of sad or depressed, that feels awful when you're feeling upset, overwhelmed, burnt out, none of these things feel really good. And our instinct when we experience something that doesn't feel very good is to push it away, it's to shove it away, pretend it's not happening, squish it down as much as possible. And I get the instinct, right? It doesn't feel good, you're going to try to get rid of it. But the evidence suggests that the strategy kind of just doesn't work, right? So we can really explore, does pushing our negative away actually work. And we get some insight from this, from wonderful teachers who thought about human nature, such as the famous psychologist Carl Jung. Who is famous for saying although it might be apocryphal, whatever you resist, not only persists but grows inside. So the idea is what you resist, persists, it comes back, right? This was kind of thinking about human nature, but we actually have some lovely data on this idea of what we resist persists. From the late Harvard psychologist Dan Wagner, was really interested in what he referred to as ironic processes. What are these? These are cases where when you take something whether it's a thought or an emotion, you try to stuff it down and ironically what you end up doing is causing that thing to research. So when you deliberately try to stuff something down, you unfortunately make it resurface. And he studied this in a very famous series of psychological studies that built on a thought experiment that came out in a famous book in Russian literature. It was a book by Dostoevsky where Dostoevsky character posited this problem, what would it be to just decide not to think of a white bear? And so, all of you can kind of engage in this practice right now. What do you do for the next ten seconds? Don't think of a white bear. My guess is that all day, none of you thought of polar bears, white bears, that bear from Coca Cola. But as soon as I said that, bears popped in your head, right? And this was Dostoevsky's observation. He says, try to pose for yourself this task not to think of a polar bear and you will see the cursed thing come to mind. As soon as you say, don't do something, your brain is like do it, do it, do it, do it. We hate being told what not to do. Wepner decided to study this directly, is this really true? And so he wanted to see this. And so he gave his subjects in his lab the task of verbalizing their thoughts. So if we were in this right now, I would be saying I'm giving you the talk, I'm going to be talking about ironic processing whatever I'm thinking about, I have to say out loud. And he gives the subjects the instruction to not think of the white bear or to think of white bears as much as possible. So in the suppression condition is don't think of a white bear just like we were saying before, and the expression he's like do whatever you can to think of a white bear. Everybody does both of these conditions, but they do them in a different order. And the key is that every time they have the thought of white bear, they have to ring a bell. So it's kind of a funny experiment to listen to because you're hearing the thoughts out loud and like ding, ding, ding every time a bell, every time the kind of bear thought comes through. So I'm going to show you the data that he found in different orders of these conditions. The first condition order is when you have to express all these thoughts of their white bear before you suppress that we're looking at what happens when you have to think as much as possible about white bears. And what you find is like when you're asked to do it, like over time it gets harder and harder because you're forcing yourself to do it. You're okay, I'm running out of white bear thoughts, right? You're supposed to be digging a lot and it actually goes down. But when you do this task of suppressing first, when you tried to squash it, and then it's okay, now you can express what happens is not only is it really easy, but the thoughts keep coming and coming and coming, right? What is this showing us? The more you try to squash something down, the more it comes back, right? So this is ironic processes when it comes to thoughts. But we're on emotions. And I think even more so than thoughts when we try to squash emotions down, they come back. My favorite analogy for my all students, about this attempt to pretend you're not sad or pretend you're not angry or pretend you're not feeling scared. It's like when we have a beach ball and we try to stuff the beach ball under the water. So you probably, maybe some of you have done this at a pool where you take the beach ball and you stuff it and you're moving all around. Because all the beach ball wants to do is to pop back up and eventually it's going to pop back up. And if you're like, me and my family is probably going to hit your little brother in the face and your mom's going to be mad and that's what you're doing with your emotions every time you squash them down, right? And we don't like to think that this is what we're doing here is another meme. You try to suppress your emotions, you don't realize that you're creating an environment that's so toxic, right? But that is what you're doing, you're creating that environment in your brain every time you try to suppress your emotions. And that raises a question like, okay, negative emotions aren't going away. We can't suppress them. How do we deal with them? The good news is that we have psychprotips and the first psychprotips is a hard one. Which is that to deal with your emotions, you don't stuff them away. You non judgmentally accept them. We go back to mindfulness and the definition we heard from Jon Kabat Zinn, where we're going to just acknowledge and intentionally say, I'm going to non judgmentally accept whatever is going on. Or if you pop music from the 1960s, you follow the Beatles and you say, I'm going to let it be. [MUSIC] So I'm feeling really angry and upset right now. I'm just going to let it be, I'm feeling really overwhelmed by this test that's coming up. I'm just going to let it be, right? This is hard because negative emotions, you have to kind of sit there and let them be. But the evidence suggests that it works. And the evidence comes from our favorite thing ever meta analyses you combine all the studies on this process of accepting your emotions in this case they look at 15 different randomized controlled trials. And what you find is that this strategy of just letting your emotions be actually significantly reduces your depression and it significantly reduces your anxiety and this feels weird, right? It basically what these studies are saying is like you're feeling sad and you say you know what I'm just going to sit with and accept these sad feelings, your depression goes down. You're feeling afraid and you're feeling that anxious spiral. You say, what, I'm just going to sit with this and be with what this feels your anxiety actually goes down. It's the opposite of what we think, but it's how the mind really works. So that's one set of strategies. But sometimes it can be helpful to give your brain something to do while you're accepting because accepting is hard. And this is why I like the second psychprotip of using a meditation strategy that's known as RAIN. This is a meditation practice that comes from the meditation teacher Tara Brach and it's an acronym this this phrase RAIN is an acronym for recognize, allow investigate and nurture. And so here's how it goes. Let's say you are looking at your homework assignment and you're starting to feel super overwhelmed or you get a text from a friend that's kind of pissing you off a little bit. You notice there's a negative emotion there and you think this is what I can do, RAIN, you sit down and you commit, I'm just going to sit with this for a second. You start by recognizing that's the first step, recognizing what's happening and this is if you were a little kid, you might have heard this phrase like use your words or maybe. If your parents have like a toddler and they're getting emotion, use your words what are you saying? This is where you use your words, what emotion are you experiencing and go deep. It's not sadness but it's like sadness, it's a little grief and a little bit of piste off or it's overwhelmed with the sense that I'm really kind of grieving how much work I have to be very specific. That's the first step. And then whatever you come up with in that recognized step, you commit to this second letter, that a allow just going to allow the feeling to be there just as it is. Maybe your family has a kind of annoying neighbor who sometimes shows up at the yard when you're outside and talks to you. And you're not going to kick that person out, you just tolerate them for two minutes, they're going to talk to you and then they go away. That's what you do with your emotion. You're, I don't have to love this, but we're just going to hang out, but you give your brain something to do while you're hanging out? And that's the next step, which is the I investigate. This is where you get a nerdy scientist, you're like all right overwhelmed all right piste off with a side of grief, what do you feel like in my body and you just commit to pay attention? You're, I guess my chest is getting tighter, my jaws furrowing or I have a craving, I really want to check Snapchat or I really want to just do something else. Don't act on those cravings. Just notice how when I get this emotion, this is what happens and you just sit there and let the investigation process work. And the the reason this investigate step is so powerful is the evidence suggests that emotions are kind of like a wave, they're going to go up and it's going to feel intense. But then it's going to go down and if you just give your brain something to do, you'll make it through that process. Most really painful emotions if you just kind of let them be, the evidence suggests they're going to run their course in about ten to 15 minutes. They're going to feel bad but then they're going to kind of tail off and so you investigate and pay attention to what they feel like but then you don't stop there. Negative emotions don't feel good as you do this final step of, end nurture with some self compassion, what can you do to take care of yourself. In another video, we talked about self kindness, like what can you do to be kind to yourself? What can you do to be kind to yourself now? Maybe you need to call a friend or maybe you need to take something off your plate and take a break or watch some silly cat videos on Youtube, whatever it is, like what's your nurture? The evidence suggests that practices like RAIN can be really powerful ways to accept our most negative emotions. And in fact, researchers have looked at whether using RAIN can decrease things like trauma and palliative care workers or first responders who are seeing really negative things all the time. And they find that these practices can really help even in those kind of extreme professions where you're dealing with negative emotions on a daily basis. So it can be a powerful strategy for you to not be pushing the beach ball of your emotions down, just kind of allow them and give yourself something to do while you do that. [MUSIC]
