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"What you put into the world with your actions and your words literally shapes the world that you live in. You have to decide what kind of a world you want to live in and what sort of impact you want to have on other people." - Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
The WorkWell Podcast™ is back and I am so excited about the inspiring guests we have lined up. Wellbeing at work is the issue of our time. This podcast is your lens into what the experts are seeing, thinking, and doing.
Hi, I am Jen Fisher, host, bestselling author and influential speaker in the corporate wellbeing movement and the first-ever Chief Wellbeing Officer in the professional services industry. On this show, I sit down with inspiring individuals for wide-ranging conversations on all things wellbeing at work. Wellbeing is the future of work. This podcast will help you as an individual, but also support you in being part of the movement for change in your own organizations and communities. Wellbeing can be the outcome of work well designed. And we all have a role to play in this critical transformation!
This podcast provides general information and discussions about health and wellness. The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast. The podcast owner, producer and any sponsors are not liable for any health-related claims or decisions made based on the information presented or discussed.
The WorkWell Podcast™ with guest Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett (01/030/2025)
Jen Fisher: [00:00:00] The WorkWell podcast series is back, and I'm so excited about the inspiring guests we have lined up. Wellbeing at work is the issue of our time. This podcast is your lens into what the experts are seeing, thinking, and doing. For decades, we've been told that emotions are hardwired reactions in our brains, that happiness, sadness, or anger look and feel the same for everyone.
But what if everything we know about emotions is wrong and what if understanding the true nature of emotions could transform how we think about workplace wellbeing. This is the work well podcast series. Hi, I'm Jen Fisher and today. I'm thrilled to be talking with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. She's a university distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Her groundbreaking research on emotions has earned her multiple awards and her books, How Emotions Are Made, and Seven and a Half Lessons About [00:01:00] the Brain have revolutionized our understanding of how emotions work. Her theory of constructed emotion challenges traditional views and has profound implications for how we think about emotional wellbeing at work.
Lisa, welcome to the show. Oh, it's a pleasure to be with you. Well, thank you so much for being here. I want to start focusing or talking about your research because it challenges this common belief that emotions are universal and fixed. So how does this understanding change how we should think about our emotions, especially at work?
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: I think there are probably two immediate implications. One is that you don't read emotions in other people's faces or in their voice or in their body language. In fact, body language is a bit of a misnomer [00:02:00] because body movements are not a language to be read like words on a page. Your brain is always guessing.
at what physical movements of other people mean. So for example, research, meta analytic research, so this is statistical summaries of hundreds of studies, shows that people scowl in anger about 35 percent of the time. Now scowling it’s been claimed for many years to be the people have claimed that it's the universal expression of emotion that everybody scowls when they're angry and that people are able to look at a scowl and read anger in another person's face.
But actually people only scowl about 35 percent of the time in, in urban, uh, large urban Western cultures, right? So we're not even talking about, you know, cross cultural. Differences in other parts of the world. 35 percent of the time is more than chance. So certainly, scowling is an [00:03:00] expression of anger, but that means that when people are angry, they, even when you yourself are angry, you maybe, you know, people are scowling some part of the time, but 65 on average, 65 percent of the time, people don't scowl.
They do something else with their face. So if you assume that you were reading anger in someone's scowling face, you'd miss 65 percent of the cases where people are angry. And correspondingly, when someone scowls, about 50 percent of the time they're angry, but 50 percent of the scowls that people make have nothing to do with anger.
So for example, if I'm concentrating really hard and we're in a meeting, this actually used to freak my students out, I would be in a lab meeting and I'd be, I'd be concentrating on what they were saying really hard and I'd be scowling and they assumed that I was mad at them when in fact I was just concentrating really hard.
Right. Um, and in fact, this is worse. It's the, the stereotyping and so scowling, the idea that scowling, [00:04:00] a scowl is a, uh, the universal expression of anger is a stereotype. And the stereotype is worse. It's applied more frequently to women than it is to men. That's also what the evidence shows. So we really don't like it when women scowl because it assumes they're angry and, you know, women are.
There are sex based norms for what we believe people should be experiencing in terms of emotion, which is an important part of this equation. But the general point here is that what I'm saying about scowling holds true for every presumed universal expression of emotion. So the point is that you should be curious.
Even if you are very confident that you can read emotions in people, you can't, your brain is just guessing and it's using the context to guess and it's possible that you're wrong. So I think one of the takeaway messages here is to be curious, not confident about other [00:05:00] people's emotional responses, particularly, you know, in places where it counts, at work, at home, um, you know, there are a bunch of domains of life where You know, you don't want to get it wrong and it's, it's important to keep an open mind.
I think the second place, what our research suggests is that you are the architect of your own emotional experience. Like it feels to us, it even feels this way to me. And you know, I've been working in this area for 30 years or more, you know, when you, When you have an emotional response, it feels given.
It feels like a switch flipped, right, or a wire tripped, and you're now, um, reacting to something kind of automatically. And when you experience emotion, you can feel it with really, with a lot of force. It feels, you feel compelled, you know. They're obligatory in this way, but they're really not. Your brain is Making emotion on the [00:06:00] fly.
So emotions aren't built into your brain from birth. They are built by your brain as you need them. in the situation, and you actually have more control over what you experience than you think you do. And I should say what our research suggests is that that control, like nobody has as much control as they would like, that control is harder to get than all of us would would prefer.
Um, some people have more options for control than others, but everybody has more control over what they experience than they think they do. It's just the control doesn't look the way we. Expected to it. It. There are things that you can do in advance of the heat of the moment to give yourself more options in the heat of the moment.
Um, that's what the research suggests.
Jen Fisher: And is [00:07:00] that similar or different to I hear a lot about emotion regulation and the ability to it. Regulate our emotions, is that the same as controlling them, or? Well,
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: yes and no. So, we both research in emotion regulate, so this is now, this is now a, um, like a geeky technical science, you know, science.
Let's go there. Yeah. So, the people who do research on emotion regulation, they typically make a distinction between the generation of emotion and its regulation. So, the idea is that there's some set of neural circuits in your brain that generate the emotion and some other set of neural circuits that can regulate that emotion after the fact, or kind of try to prevent those circuits from firing in the first place.
So the idea is that regulatory strategies are separate from the emotions themselves, so to speak. And that's not what our research shows at [00:08:00] all. Our research shows, and it's not just our research, it's, you know, the research of many, many labs, suggests that what your brain is doing all the time is it's trying to make sense of what's going on inside your body in relation to the world.
Your brain's most important job is not thinking. It's not feeling, it's not seeing or hearing. Your brain's most important job is regulating the systems of your body in a metabolically efficient way. Now we don't experience ourselves in this way, you know, like you and I right now, Jen, we're talking to each other and our listeners are listening to us.
And each and each and every one of us, while this is going on, there's a whole internal drama going on inside our own bodies. Um, our brains are regulating that drama 24 7, and we're largely unaware of the drama, or at least I hope, I hope we're unaware. [00:09:00] If you're not unaware, I, you know, you should not be listening to this podcast.
You should go and lie down and take care of yourself, you know. Um, so we've all had moments where we're Acutely aware of what's going on inside our bodies, but most of the time we're not and in order to regulate the body in a in a metabolically efficient way the brain is constantly Guessing what is going to happen next outside of you in the world to prepare what should happen inside.
And out of this dynamic, this um, knitting together of the outside of the world and what's going on inside you, out of this comes really your entire mind. Um, so what your brain Is essentially doing is remembering instances from the past which are similar in some way to the [00:10:00] present to prepare the body and as a consequence prepare your action for what you need to do next and everything that you see and feel and hear emerges from that transaction.
So there are a couple of things that are important here. One is that every experience you have, every action you take, emotional or not, is a combination of the remembered past and the sensory present. That means if you want to change how you feel right now, then You can change what you remember, um, or what your brain is re reconstituting.
You don't have an experience of yourself remembering, but your brain is doing memory. Memory is, and it's not a necessarily something you experience. Your brain is reinstating Electrical and chemical signals from the past that those patterns that are similar in some way to the present. So one [00:11:00] way to change what you do now and what you experience now is to give your brain options essentially to remember differently another.
way is to change the sensory present, which means literally get up and move somewhere else, or it can mean be mindful in the sense of um, focus on different details without even moving, you can focus on different details in your surroundings, which will change the sensory present for you and therefore change what you feel.
And all of this, of course, is, is embedded in the brain's regulation of the body. So that means that a third piece of this is to take care of that body, meaning there's good evidence for many, many studies to show, for example, that productivity at work, the biggest predictors of productivity at work are.[00:12:00]
Sleep, hydration, you know, exercise, like things that make it easier for your brain to regulate your body, um, freeing up energy, literal energy, like metabolic resources, to do other really hard things, like innovate, or You know, be creative or learn something new or work through a problem because it turns out that uncertainty, creativity, these are very expensive, metabolically expensive things to do.
And another large predictor of productivity at work is trust in your coworkers and trust in, in your management. And that's because we don't regulate. our bodies, our nervous systems on our own, other people can add, you know, taxes or savings to that, um, to that process. You know, the best thing for a human nervous system is another human.
But [00:13:00] also the worst thing for a human. That is my,
Jen Fisher: that, I was, you, you went right there, actually, the next thing I was going to say is you, one of my favorite quotes that you have is the best thing for your nervous system is another human and also the worst thing is, uh, for your nervous system is another human.
So can you explain, I mean, I know you were just talking about this, but can you explain that a little bit more and just in terms of like implication for. Relationships in our life, but in particular, kind of our workplace relationships and I mean, this is, I think this is such a critical point when we're engaging with others and in every aspect of our life.
And I think we can all relate to that quote in so many ways. Oh, yeah, for sure.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: So, so, um, you know, the brain's regulation of the body has a very technical name. It's called allostasis. But, um, it just means that the brain is constantly anticipating the needs of the body and attempting to meet those needs before [00:14:00] they arise.
But I use a metaphor for that process, which is continual, and that metaphor is body budgeting. That your brain is running a budget for your body. So I just want to point out, you know, I'm a scientist. I have to point this out that this is a metaphor. All metaphors are false by design. They're not explanations.
Um, but they are useful, you know, to give the gist of something. And so basically you can think about body budgeting as, you know, your Brain is regulating and tracking water and salt and oxygen and glucose and other resources as you gain and lose them throughout the day. And so you can think about, you know, anything which replenishes resources like eating and sleeping.
like deposits and anything that spends resources like just dragging your ass out of bed in the morning or keeping your heart beating in sync with your lungs and so on as a withdrawal. Your immune [00:15:00] system, for example, protecting you from viruses is a withdrawal. Learning and exercising are. Also withdrawals, they are like investments that pay dividends later, just like your immune system when it's working properly.
But what your immune system when it's in overdrive, that can be an unnecessary expense that can drain your body budget, as can persistent uncertainty, which means that your brain can't make clear moment to moment plans for regulating the body. And unfortunately, we live in a world right now that is Yeah.
Um, full of, of uncertainty in, in many, many, many dimensions of life that adds a sort of a persistent, um, tax really to our functioning. Anything that makes your body budgeting more efficient. Is like a savings and it turns out that other people other people can provide that savings for you. So we evolved to [00:16:00] be so a social species and what that means is we literally have an impact on literally I mean literally have an impact on the efficiency metabolic efficiency of another person right like if you have social stress within two hours of eating.
This, this just kills me, this finding. I think about this every morning as I'm reading the newspaper while I'm having breakfast, thinking, why am I doing this? Um, if you have social stress, meaning that another person is present and is, is, um, and you're having a, a sort of a conflict or a, or you have some kind of a stressful interaction with them, or even the implied presence of another person, like you're thinking about, you know, what you have to do, you know, in your job or you have that difficult meeting with that difficult coworker or whatever, it reduces the efficiency of your metabolism to the cost of 104 calories.
So it means that it's as if you ate 104 more calories than you [00:17:00] actually did. Right. And if you add that up over a year. That's a, that's like 11 pounds. So
Jen Fisher: definitely don't read the newspaper while you're eating breakfast.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: Think about all the times you have, you know, lunch meetings. Yeah. Or, or, right? So it doesn't, it's not that any kind of conflict is going to cause this problem.
It's social conflict. And. I think another thing to point out here is that, you know, stress, all stress really means is that your brain is preparing your body for a big metabolic outlay. That's, that's it. There's nothing special about stress. Good stress is like exercise, right? Or, or learning. Learning is stressful because you, you basically spend more glucose, you spend more.
more resources when you're learning. But it's a, like I said, it's an investment in the future and you replenish what you spend. But if your brain is constantly mispredicting, [00:18:00] or if there's a lot of uncertainty, then the regular body budgeting processes start to break down. And that results in what we call chronic stress, which adds a little tax.
Basically, it makes your metabolism slightly less efficient. And. Over time, this builds up, it adds up over time, so it's, it's a slow process, but over time, when body budgeting is less efficient, um, due to persistent social uncertainty or social stress or even loneliness or social isolation, it can result in a metabolic illness, like this.
Depression, or diabetes, or, or what have you. In the moment, though, it feels, you feel fatigued, you feel like you can't concentrate very well, you feel like you just don't have the spoons, you know, to continue, I mean, because your mood, your mood is not emotion, your [00:19:00] mood is kind of like a barometer for your body budget, momentary barometer for your body budget.
Jen Fisher: And, and so when we have, um, positive relationships or, or, you know, the, the, the, the good humans in our lives, the ones that aren't causing us significant stress in the moment, I guess we don't get to, uh, subtract that 104 calories, right? We still No.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: No, unfortunately.
Jen Fisher: It doesn't
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: work in the same way. No, no.
But it does mean, it probably, this is just my Uh, I don't actually know this for certain, but this is what I tell myself, like, when I'm, you know, when I'm having a pleasant dinner with my husband, I think, oh, I could probably have that piece of chocolate cake every dinner. It's okay if I have an extra piece of chocolate, because right now, um, my body budget is humming along efficiently.
Okay, I'll take it. I, I, I like that a lot. Yeah, that's just my personal, my personal, But it doesn't mean that, um, you know, you should be [00:20:00] snacking, um, on donuts and, you know, other crap that's really delicious, uh, you know, at every opportunity. But my point here is that I'm not reducing everything to the body budget.
I'm just highlighting. This as a factor, a causal factor in your performance at work, in your feelings, in your relationships that you, you know, you probably aren't aware of because we're just designed that way. We're designed to be aware of it. Yeah.
Jen Fisher: So I, I want to go back to something that you were talking about before, especially related to, you know, this, Notion or this idea that we can read people's emotions and how this plays out in our increasingly virtual work environments not just through video But I know something that trips me up all the time is that I [00:21:00] try to read people's emotions through The words in their emails.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: Oh my god, bad, bad. I know. Yeah, it's very bad. It's very bad
Jen Fisher: So, so can you talk about How we how we can not do that, right? I mean, I think you already gave us the the visual I assume it's probably Even more of a no, no, or even more challenging to read people's emotions or to try to read people's emotions when you're on video.
But we certainly shouldn't do it in, in the writing and their email. So can, can you just talk us through some strategies around that, I guess, or for me personally?
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's not, listen, it's not just you. Like, I, I really have to say that, you know, I I have to constantly, I'm also, I mean, scientists are human too, don't tell anybody, but I mean, I have to curb [00:22:00] myself as well.
So here's, I think, the important thing. First of all, we have to stop saying read. Reading is not even a metaphor. It's just wrong, okay? You're guessing. Yeah. That's the first thing to, to just, I often remind myself, I'm just guessing. And I have to say, this is really hard because it's hard to remind yourself that this is guessing, but I think it is, it's important to remind yourself because even I, I mean, I have literally been at the forefront of this work for more than 30 years.
And sometimes I'm talking to my husband and he's scowling and I say, are you, are you okay? Are you mad? Is something wrong? And he's like, Who are you and what have you done with my wife? Like, what? No, I'm not mad. I'm just listening to you, really concentrating, really hard. So, even though I know the science, I also fall back on these, um, these narratives that are, like, [00:23:00] wired into our brains since we were children, right?
So, you have to over, you have to overcome that. So, let's talk, let's not talk about reading. Let's talk about guessing. Okay. That's the first thing. The second thing is, when you look At someone's face and your brains making a guess it's not just looking at your brains not just looking at the face it's taking in an entire context.
An entire context of sights and sounds and smells and also what is going on inside your own body. That is an internal context you carry around with you every moment of your life that your brain is using, even if your, it, your brain doesn't make itself aware. Okay. And there's also a temporal context, something that just happened before and the brain is predicting what's going to happen next.
Okay. So now in an email. What kind of context do you have? Not a lot. Yeah. [00:24:00] You've got words, and you have a context in your moment where you're reading the email that includes what's going on inside your body, but you don't have any other context from that person except what you remember. So, An email is like really impoverished, you know, if you didn't sleep well the night before, if you're not well hydrated, if you are not eating healthfully, if you, you know, just had a moment of stress with someone else, like all of these things can influence.
what your brain is remembering to provide the context that isn't there. When you read an email, you are inserting context, you are inferring context that isn't there, and you can make mistakes. And I'm, I'm a master at that. Yeah, we all, we all are a master, we're all masters at that. And I [00:25:00] will, I'll just say that this is so automatic and so, it happens so fluently that, Yeah.
That even people who, like, two psychologists who know each other really well for 30 years, and who, you know, know this work better than anybody else, make this mistake, right? So, it's just, it's, the, the way that our brains are guessing and providing context, right? Every, every, Experience you have every action you take is a combination of the remembered past and the sensory present when the sensory present is impoverished your brain just will remember more stuff and it will it will fill in that missing sensory present and.
that can lead to real misunderstandings. So the key here is this, I can, all I can tell you is, you know, that's the science, right? Now, how you apply the science is up to you. [00:26:00] The, the science doesn't give you a set of rules to follow. It gives you a set of tools to use. So I can tell you how I use those tools, right?
When I'm reading an email, if it feels to me like somebody is Being critical needlessly or is, um, being thoughtless or, you know, I have some, I'm giving, I'm getting, my brain is making some kind of guess. The first thing I do, honestly, is I check myself, like, how am I, you know, what's the status of my body budget?
Do I need to go to the bathroom? Do I need to get a drink of water? Do I need, you know, a cup of tea? That's the first thing I do. The second thing I do, if there's a real concern, I'll just pick up the phone. All right. I never have. a conversation of import on email ever, like ever. Yeah, it's a great
Jen Fisher: rule of thumb.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: And then another thing that you [00:27:00] can do is you can actually read. And even though you have this urge to respond quickly, you know, like I always tell myself, like people think, you know, they think the, one of the popular Misconceptions is like dopamine is a reward chemical, you know, dopamine is not a reward chemical, but it is a chemical that helps you engage in action quickly So, um, I I you know as I'm reading something and I feel the urge to just fire back a response really quickly I'm like, well, there is a little surge of dopamine that doesn't need to happen.
So Yeah, often that dopamine doesn't
Jen Fisher: lead to a good reward. I know, right?
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: So that's why people are always looking for a hit of dopamine. That's their little metaphor. And I'm thinking, Jesus, hits of dopamine when they, when you don't need them are really, really problematic, actually. Um, it's not, like I said, dopamine is about effort.
It's not about reward. It's just that in most studies, an animal has to exert effort to get the reward. So [00:28:00] that's why you see the surge. of dopamine. And of course, I'm now totally, I mean, it's very, it's much, much more complex. And there are many different kinds of dopamine receptors and blah, blah, blah. But basically, the bottom line is when you feel an urge to respond quickly, don't stop, give it 10 minutes.
Change your context, get up, walk around, do something else, come back to it. I don't know if, how many times have you ever sent an email and then two hours later wished you hadn't sent it? Oh yeah. It's because your, your frame of mind has changed. It's because your experience has changed. That's the first thing.
But even on Zoom, right? Zoom is better. Like, if, if you think about it. Most animals that are social, that is, they regulate each other's body budgets, use, for example, chemicals, like, like social insects, for example, use chemicals. It's not exactly that they smell, they don't have a sense of smell the way that [00:29:00] you, you know, the way that mammals do, but, but they use chemicals to regulate each other.
And mammals also use touch and they use some vision and they use. And primates like us, we also use vision. So we use all of those senses, and we use vision, and we also use words. So words, it turns out, we can tweak each other's nervous systems just with words, right? You can read a text from somebody who's Thousands of miles away and it can affect your breathing.
It can affect your heart rate. It can give you the chills. It can warm you, right? Even listening to this podcast, right? Some people are like, wow, that's amazing. And they're, you know, totally getting into it. And other people are probably thinking, oh, this woman is full of shit. She doesn't know what she's talking about.
So, you know, the point being that just words alone can change your metabolism in, in fundamental ways. And so, Normally, in a face to face interaction, we [00:30:00] have all of that going on, we have all of that sensory context. In Zoom, we, we're not physically present, so we can't, we can see each other's faces, certainly, and we, there's some hearing, but we've lost some of that sensory context.
And so, for example, It would be very hard to synchronize heartbeats. So when two people are in a room together and they're getting along well and they trust each other, their breathing rates synchronize, their heart rates tend to synchronize, even their actions tend to synchronize. If I am talking to someone and they touch their face, you know, then I might touch my hair.
If they cross their feet, I might cross my legs, you know, there's this kind of synchrony that goes on. In Zoom, you've lost some context. On the telephone, you lose even more context. But you still have voice, and you still have some temporal, temporality of the voice. On email, all you have are words. You've lost pretty much [00:31:00] most of the other context, except, of course, the context of your own body, which you carry around with you.
All the time, that your brain is always trying to regulate your body, your body is always sending signals back to your brain about its metabolic state. And your brain uses that, and it influences literally what you see and what you hear and how you feel. Um, which is like a, you know, a set of lenses that influence your guessing.
Yeah, that's
Jen Fisher: so interesting, because for me, I find not being on video, if I, if I need to have a, important conversation. I actually find not being on video is more helpful to me because I find video to be incredibly distracting in so many ways and I just end up, you know, unable to kind of focus on the other person.
Whereas when I'm on the phone, I can turn my back to my [00:32:00] Computer, or I can put myself in a space that, you know, feels more conducive to the conversation that I'm having. So I find it, I mean, I think it's interesting that you think that video is better than being on the phone? I wouldn't say it's better.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: I mean, it's different.
What I'm saying is it gives you, it gives you more context. It gives you more of the sensory present. Okay. Okay. But then, of course, it means there's more for you to guess at.
Jen Fisher: Mm
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: hmm. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. So, for example, I prefer, if I'm having a serious conversation, I prefer to do it face to face in person.
Yes, that's first. Right. Yes. Of course. You can't do that. You can't do that. I actually do prefer video. over phone. But, but it's perfectly reasonable for you to prefer phone over video because, like I said, what it's doing is it's adding more of the [00:33:00] sensory present. And of course, that can be helpful or not.
Your brain is a meaning maker. That's, that's, you know, so a lot of what you take to be Objective facts in the world are really your, your brain making sense of things. Yeah. Yeah.
Jen Fisher: So, two other kind of, I guess, buzzword concepts that are ever present in our workplaces today are psychological safety and emotional intelligence or EQ, especially when it comes to leading and managing other people.
How does your research Help us create psychologically safer workplaces, but also I I mean in many ways. I think this This theory of emotion or, you know, this constructed emotion, how does it change in your mind? How we what we've been told or what we've been [00:34:00] taught about emotional intelligence and I know that was kind of two different questions But both workplace buzzwords, I feel like
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: yeah Yeah, I think it's really it's it's really interesting to to look at these buzzwords in light of what the research says so Personally, I think I want to deal with the psychological safety idea first.
So, you know, evidence repeatedly shows That, um, you will be physically healthier and live longer if you have close trusting relationships with other people. Because those other people, your friends, your loved ones, your co workers, they ease your brain's body budget burden. You know, they create savings and, and make it easier for your brain to, to do what it needs to do.
You will be more effective when you work with peers and managers who you trust. You'll have less body budget [00:35:00] burdening. You'll have, even in like challenging situations and the resources that you save, you can invest in doing other really hard things, things that involve creativity or learning or uncertainty.
So if you feel safe and comfortable with your coworkers and your peeps, these are manifestations of a body budget that's well cared for. So I'm 100 percent on board with that, but there are a couple of bits of fine print about psychological safety that I don't like. One is that the idea is that you should be feeling safe and comfortable all the time.
Mm hmm. You know, sometimes you feel bad, not because something is wrong, but because you're doing something really hard. Okay, so, Negative mood is not to be avoided. It, it, it's not an indicator, um, that something is wrong in the world or said somebody did something that, uh, that, that was inappropriate or, or caused conflict or [00:36:00] strife.
You know, when you're working really hard, like exercising or you're learning something really hard. It can feel like shit for a long period of time, you know, when you're exercising and you start to feel like shit, that's when you know that change is really happening. You know, yeah, you know, the Marines have this saying, which I love, which is, um, pain is weakness, leaving the body.
And what it really means is that when you start to push up, like, you know, my trainer, whenever I, I've been working with the same trainer for, for. Uh, more than 20 years and sometimes he'll push me really hard and I'll get to the point of almost wanting to throw up. And I hate that feeling, but I also know that's when I've really hit a wall and now is when I have to really lean into that and work hard because that's where change is really, physical change is really going to happen.
So my point here is not to be a masochist, but my point is that. This notion of psychological safety [00:37:00] implies other people are responsible for your safety, which I really don't like. Um, the, the evidence suggests that, you know, if someone like, like this concept of microaggressions, I really hate that concept because it implies other people are emitting little signals of aggression to you.
And that's not how it works. How it works, a moment of microaggression means someone acted in a particular way, and you experienced it in a particular way, and both things are true. So, they have an intention behind their action, and you have an experience, and both of those things are true at the same time.
So, the truth of the situation is, they did something, and you experienced it, and the issue isn't who's right and who's wrong, it's that. Both of those things are, are part of what's true in the moment. So psychological safety is as much about you as it is about your coworkers. And. [00:38:00] It's not more of one or more of the other.
It's an emergent condition based on the Brains, you know of a bunch of people basically and so I guess my point is that yes It's good. If you feel comfortable and safe with your peeps and co workers, this is good Also, if you never feel uncomfortable if you never ever strain or stress yourself at work Then you're not going to get anything productive done You know, I tell my graduate students when they start with me, if you don't at some point collapse into a heap of tears and ask yourself, what the hell you're doing here, you're not doing it right.
Oh, we need the discomfort. Discomfort tells you, it can tell you that something is wrong in the world. It can also tell you, That you didn't sleep [00:39:00] enough, or you didn't get enough, you know, you're not hydrated, or it can tell you that you're just working really, really hard on a problem. And the thing with about mood is that it's multiply determined.
So it's not one thing. Your mood is never about one thing. It's about an ensemble of many, many, many little things, you know, so that's the thing that I don't like about. About the concept of psychological safety. It has this baggage that goes along with it like a set of assumptions that you should never be uncomfortable and that and that, you know, discomfort doesn't mean on that.
There's threat. Discomfort can mean that you're doing something hard. And if you're doing something hard in the presence of other people who you trust, you will be able to sustain that difficult task longer. Yeah, yeah. So that's the, that's the key there, and I wrote a piece a number of years ago, which [00:40:00] was like a, a rewrite of emotional intelligence, so, emotional intelligence is, is um, not recognizing scowling faces as anger, or smiling faces as happy, or, you know, whatever the, you know, EQ, uh, training tells you, um, it, the typical EQ training, uh, modules, you know, every preschool in the United States has one of those Posters with like a smiling face is happy and a frowning face is sad and so on and so forth.
Those are stereotypes. Okay, those are Western stereotypes. So I guess from my perspective, emotional intelligence is about knowing that those are stereotypes. It's about knowing that you are guessing, even when you feel confident. It's about being curious. It's about knowing that emotions may feel like they're built in, but they're actually built by your brain.
It's about knowing that, you know, sometimes you have responsibility. [00:41:00] For changing something about your emotional life, not because you're to blame for how you feel, but because you're the only one who actually has the agency to change it. So I think emotional intelligence is a good concept. I just think that the details, you know, the devil is in the details.
And I think our work and the work of the similar work of others. That work suggests that emotional intelligence just looks different than. The kind of standard leadership training programs and such.
Jen Fisher: Yeah. And we'll link to your book and, and your webpage and all of those things in our show notes for people so they can, so they can certainly check it out.
Well, Lisa, this, this has been an incredible discussion. I knew it would be, uh, thank you for your, your wisdom and, and also your, your humor on this topic. 'cause I think sometimes it requires some humor. I don't know if you have any final words. You've left us with a lot to think about [00:42:00] me, especially when it comes to emails.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: I guess I would just say that, you know, one of the findings that we have really impacts me personally the most. I mean, in addition to all these other ones that we've been talking about is when. You make yourself predictable to other people, they are more predictable to you, and that's a body budget savings for everyone.
So what I mean by that is, in a world, you know, we live in a world that is basically designed, most of us live in a world that's basically designed to bankrupt a body budget, right? We, we are bombarded with taxes and withdrawals. A world where, There's expansive uncertainty from economic inequality, from climate change, from polarizing politics, war, school shootings, I don't know, a pandemic that dragged on for a couple of years.
You know, we live in a [00:43:00] world that is designed to bankrupt, um, A body budget a human body budget and that bankruptcy looks like depression. That is what depression is Basically the symptoms of depression are the symptoms of a bankrupt body budget I'm, not necessarily saying That we have to keep each other free from stress or we'll break each other's brains and bodies.
We're not fragile This is not about being a snowflake or a fragile person. This is about being human and I think I'm saying that I guess the the basic Um, the basic thing I want to leave you with is that is, is something maybe subtle, but, but very powerful. And that is karma, you know, is a good metaphor here.
What you put into the world with your actions and your words literally shapes the world that you live in. It shapes the world that you have to deal with. If I have a [00:44:00] migraine and I haven't slept well, and I'm not feeling great. And I have a day full of Zoom meetings, I tell people at the beginning of the meeting, you know what, I didn't sleep well last night, and I have a bit of a headache, so if you see me grimace, or you, you know, you see me looking off to the distance for a minute, that's what you should be interpreting.
Like, I'm giving, I'm actually telling people something to make my, my behavior more predictable to them, so they have They make guesses that are better suited to what's actually going on. That's an example of what I mean. What you put into the world with your actions and your words literally shapes the world that you live in and the immediate world that you have to deal with.
And so You have to decide what kind of a world you want to live in and what sort of impact you want to have on other people. Basically, in evolutionary biology, this is called niche construction. We, all animals, actively [00:45:00] shape the environment that they have to live in. And we do the same and work is a big part of that and I'll just leave it there
Jen Fisher: Hey, that that's a mic drop moment.
So i'll leave it there too. Thank you again for being on the show My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on
I'm, so grateful. Lisa could be with us today to help us understand the revolutionary science behind emotions and its profound implications for workplace well being. Her insights challenge us to think differently about how we experience and manage emotions at work and offer hope in creating more emotionally intelligent workplaces.
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