How To Understand Emotions – Lisa Feldman Barrett

I absolutely loved Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s episode on the Huberman Lab podcast—it was my favorite!

Here are my takeaways (see the episode’s AI notes).

1. We don’t read people’s emotions. We infer their feelings based on the context and our interoceptive data. (Snip)
2. When you’re predicting well, your experience is almost entirely constructed by your brain. (Snip)
3. Emotions are recipes for action. Sit with discomfort sometimes to learn about what influences your affect. (Snip)
4. Sometimes when you feel bad, it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong. It can simply mean that you are doing something hard and worthwhile.
5. Wisdom (emotional intelligence) is knowing when it’s useful to sit with emotion and when it’s useful to attempt to change the external world to change our affect (body budget).
6. Our affect/mood is a low-resolution rough global average/summary of our moment-to-moment body budget. (Snip 1 & Snip 2)
7. Emotions are the stories that we tell ourselves about the causes of our affect. (Snip)
8. Increase the resolution of your perception. Dissolve away. Look past the concepts. Observe. (Snip)
9. Learning from prediction error is metabolically expensive. (Snip)
10. Other people’s opinions of you are just electrical activity in somebody’s head.
11. The big five of affective maintenance: (Snip)
    1. Sleep
    2. Food
    3. Movement
    4. Social interactions (Snip)
    5. Sunlight
12. Using more precise language (greater emotional granularity) can help us regulate our emotions. Broad words like bad is worse than using a more specific word such as angry which is still worse than frustrated. (Snip)
13. Collecting emotion concepts from other languages can be helpful. Here are useful/funny examples:
    • Iktsuarpok (Inuit)
      • You know that feeling of anticipation when you’re waiting for someone to show up at your house and you keep going outside to see if they’re there yet? This is the word for it.
    • Lagom (Swedish)
      • Maybe Goldilocks was Swedish? This slippery little word is hard to define, but means something like, “Not too much, and not too little, but juuuuust right.”
    • Hyggelig (Danish)
      • The ‘literal’ translation into English gives connotations of a warm, cozy and friendly demeanor, but it’s more likely it’s something that must be experienced to be known. Think cuddling up with blankets, a good book, and a cup of hot cocoa or hanging out next to a fire with your best friends on a winter night.
    • Tingo (Pascuense – Easter Island)
      • The act of taking objects one desires from the house of a friend by gradually borrowing all of them.”
    • Tartle (Scots)
      • The anxiousness occurring before you have to greet or speak to someone whose name evades you.
    • Backpfeifengesicht (German)
      • A face badly in need of a fist.
    • Greng-jai (Thai)
      • That feeling you get when you don’t want someone to do something for you because it would be a pain for them.
    • Gigil (Tagalog)
      • The compulsion to pinch something compellingly adorable – most likely accompanied by a weird slew of uncontrollable cooing noises
    • Cavoli Riscaldati (Italian)
      • The result of attempting to revive an unworkable relationship. Translates to “reheated cabbage.”
    • Fernweh (German)
      • A longing for distant places—and while the English word wanderlust comes close, fernweh can also refer to a longing for a place you’ve never even been.
    • Packesel (German)
      • A packesel is the person who’s stuck carrying everyone else’s bags on a trip. Literally, a burro.
    • Razbliuto (Russian)
      • The nostalgic feeling you may have for someone you once loved, but don’t anymore.
    • Sentak Bangun (Indonesian)
      • This Indonesian verb means “to wake up with a start.”
    • Treppenwitz (German)
      • It literally means “staircase joke,” because it refers to the moment you think of a comeback way after the fact—usually when you’re in the stairwell on the way out the door.
    • Tsundoku (Japanese)
      • Many of us are guilty of this one—buying new books (or any reading material) and letting them pile up, unread.

Resources

• My AI notes for the episode.
• Emotion concepts from non-English languages
• Lisa’s website
• Episode Link
• How We Feel app
• How Emotions Are Made (affiliate link)
• Snipd app (affiliate link)
• Readwise (affiliate link)
• Athletic Greens – AG1 (affiliate link)