3 Steps to Managing Your Emotions

Are you managing your emotions, or are they managing you?

In this episode of Office Hours, I explore how to manage your emotions by understanding how they work and what they are trying to tell you. Emotions like fear, anger, joy, and disgust evolved to protect and guide us, yet in the modern world, they often become misaligned, leading us to overreact or lose perspective. The goal is not to eliminate emotions entirely, but to understand that they work for you, not the other way around.

To learn more about how you, specifically, experience positive and negative emotions, take the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) quiz here. 

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In this episode, I cover:

• How to get out of your reptilian brain and engage your reasoning mind

• Why avoiding negative emotions can actually make you less happy

• The evolutionary advantage of rejection and how it protects you

• How politicians exploit the disgust reflex to divide people

• The “count to 30” rule for interrupting emotional impulses

• Three metacognitive techniques for managing emotions in everyday life

• A journaling exercise for reducing anxiety and building perspective

• A Q&A on faith, teaching happiness, and choosing fulfilling work

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We’d love to hear any feedback you have. Please email us at officehours@arthurbrooks.com. And please leave a review on Apple or Spotify. Thanks for listening! 

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Referenced:

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• Leadership and Happiness course

• How to Build a Life

• The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life

• PANAS quiz for gauging your level of emotionality

• The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions

• Cosmos: Carl Sagan

• Jennifer Lerner’s website

• Primary and Secondary Emotions‍‍‍

• Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex: A Bottom-Up View

• Amygdala: What It Is and What It Does

• Understanding the Stress Response

• Amygdala Hijack: When Emotion Takes Over

• How to Stop Freaking Out

• Parahippocampal Gyrus

• Canons of Conduct

• Why We Use Language of Disgust to Describe Political Foes

• In Rwanda, We Know All About Dehumanizing Language

• 'Less Than Human': The Psychology Of Cruelty

• 25 Prayers of Petition When Seeking God’s Help

• Maha-satipatthana Sutta: The Great Frames of Reference

• Reflective journaling and metacognitive awareness: insights from a longitudinal study in higher education

• Memories affect mood: Evidence from covert experimental assignment to positive, neutral, and negative memory recall

• Self-Transcendence and the Pursuit of Happiness

• 5 Ways To Get Happier