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Hi. Welcome back to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining me. I wanna talk today about a question that you may have asked yourself, which is how do you know when to act on your emotions and when not to? We've talked about how emotions are based on stories that are brains tell about how this situation is going to affect me and can affect my affect, my concerns. Well, if you're having an emotion in a response to a certain concern or a value that you have, then doesn't that mean that you should act on it? How do you know when you should act on it and when you shouldn't? We've all had situations where we've acted on emotions, and then in hindsight, we wish that we hadn't because we acted in ways that actually weren't in harmony with who we really wanna be. But sometimes our emotions are really motivating us towards something that's really deep, deeply important to us. So how are we gonna tell the difference? Life is emotions in flux. Your brain is constantly generating different emotions, trying to maximize your chances of survival in the future. So you're always gonna be moving through a large palette of emotions. How do you know what meaning to assign to them? And how to know when to just, you know, look at them like clouds in your sky and assume they're gonna pass, or when you use them to actually direct the course of your life? Are, are they gonna be motivators for big changes in your life or are they, are you gonna just look at them as a glitch on the surface that's gonna pass?

Well, Russ Harris and his book, the Happiness Trap, has a really good key that helps us to understand this, and I'll put his book as a link in the show notes. We talked about it a little bit last week. But one great place to start is to ask yourself, you know, what is it that I really want in my life? A lot of us will find ourselves replying that what we really want is to be happy. Isn't that what we all want? We wanna be happy, right? We want to feel happy. But here's where emotion science can help us. Because emotion science and psychology research has helped us to see that pursuing the feeling of happiness doesn't actually result in feeling very happy. And we had an episode last year where we talked about this. I'll link it in the show notes where we talked about how when you pursue those feelings of pleasure and gratification for their own sake, what happens is that you over time start to feel less pleasure and less gratification, and you tend to be more prone to anxiety and depression and addiction. That episode was called managing your dopamine budget for anxiety relief. But in any case, the point is that pursuing happiness for its own sake, the feeling of happiness, backfires. It doesn't actually work.

So what has emotion science and psychology research actually shown us about what results in people having happiness? We've talked about this some last week. But study after study shows that if want this result of greater happiness, of better health, of better relationships, of even greater academic and professional success, what actually works to give us those results is not seeking the feeling of happiness directly, but actually moving, taking action toward things that matter to us, toward things that we really value, moving in directions that we really value, clarifying what we stand for in life, and acting according to that, that that's what actually gives us a sense of vitality and fulfillment and deep, long-lasting satisfaction. So it's interesting, right? If we go after the feelings that we want, we don't find them. If instead we can trace what it is that is even more important to us than the feeling of happiness and move toward that, then a byproduct of that path will be satisfaction and happiness and health, et cetera. So knowing this can actually help us answer that first question that we asked in the beginning, which was, how do you know when you should act on the emotions that you have and when you shouldn't? Well, again, what we have to do is to get away from focusing on how we're feeling and focusing on wanting to feel a different way, and instead we need to start looking at what is even more important than the way that we feel in this present moment. And Dr. Harris gives a list of questions that can help you to figure out how to transcend what you're feeling in this very moment and locate what it is that is even more important to you than how you would like to feel right now. So for example, what if you're feeling a lot of fear right now? Something you could ask yourself is, what would I do if fear were no longer an issue for me? What if you have a lot of trouble with thoughts of failure? Something you could ask yourself is, what would I attempt if thoughts of failure didn't deter me? What if you're feeling all tied in anxious knots because you're so worried about what other people think of you? You can ask yourself if a miracle could happen so that you automatically had the full approval of everyone who matters to you, and so therefore you wouldn't be having to please or impress anybody, what sort of things would you do with your life and what sort of person would you try to be? Isn't this an interesting question? See how it just helps you transcend how you're feeling right now and identify what it is that you really want in the big picture. Here's another one. If you weren't guided by other people's judgments and opinions, what would you do differently in your life? So let's say you've got a lot of anxiety and depression, you could ask yourself this question, what projects or activities would I start or continue if my time and energy were not consumed by the troublesome emotions of anxiety and depression? If unhelpful thoughts and unpleasant feelings didn't stand in my way, then what sort of relationships would I build and with whom? What improvements would I make to my health and my fitness? What changes would I make at work?

So can you see how all of these questions are taking the present emotion out of the picture and trying to help you to see what it is that you value in the long term? So Dr. Harris says the question that we should examine is not is the way that I'm feeling the truth, but is it helpful in propelling me toward what's really important to me? What's even more important to me than feeling happy right now? So going through this process, right, of asking yourself what it is that you really want, identifying that happiness comes from pursuing what's really important to you despite how you feel, and then asking these questions that take your present emotion outta the picture and help you focus on what is even more enduring to you than your emotion of today can help you to see what it is that you really want. And then once you know what you really want, then you can know whether or not this emotion that you're having right now will help you toward that or not. Then you'll know whether or not you should ride the wave of your emotion and actually intensify it and magnify it, because it'll help you to get toward whatever goal it is that you have, or if you should just be patient with it. Remember that it might be kind of like the flu. You might have it for a few days, but that it'll pass. It doesn't mean anything really important. I can't always feel the way I wanna feel. Sometimes I feel crappy when I'd really like to feel otherwise. Sometimes everything looks gray, but it's all just passing like clouds in the sky. So going through this process can help you to know which fork to take, right? Should I just observe this emotion, let it pass, or should I ride this emotion toward what it is that it is propelling me to?
So that's a measure measurement that I use on days when I wake up feeling off. When I just don't feel right, when I feel like everything's wrong in my life. To be able to decide if this emotion really means that I need to make some change, major changes in my life, or if it simply means that I need to be patient with this emotion and allow it to pass like emotions do.

So I wanted to give you this brief idea today. Now we have our kindness narrative. Stay tuned and don't forget to share yours. Thanks to everyone who has, have a great week.

This experience that I'd like to share with you, is not a personal one, but of a very, very close friend. When and his wife, they were, recently married , you know, both studying going to the university and money so tight. And, um, one day they were, they were really in trouble. They had no, no money and that, that day was a limit date for him to pay, their rental or they would have to move out the apartment. It was, was, uh, $300, but they had no, no chance how to get $300. And, uh, he and his wife, they were taking part of this parade where people go to the streets. So, uh, they were in, in their wagon in the street when a man approached his wagon. And this man shake his hand. When this man did it, he felt, my friend felt, that he was leaving something in his hands and he saw that there was some dollar bills in his hands. So when they have the chance to stop the wagon, he showed his wife, it was three bills, three notes of $100 each. They never knew that man, not personally. And, it was something that when he and his wife told us this, they had tears in their eyes. After all these years, they still remember that with feelings of gratitude.