David Brooks

And the passions are these wild horses that run out of control.

And your job as a rational person is to suppress the passions.

The last 30 or 40 years of cognitive sciences taught us that's complete nonsense.

That if you, people who suffer lesions where they can't process emotion, they're not super smart Mr. Spock's like on Star Trek.

They can't make decisions because your emotions assign value to things.

And if you can't assign a value, you can't decide what you like.

And your desires, your conation, that pushes you in the direction where you want to go.

And so if you wanna be a wise person, it's not enough to be a rational person, you have to be wise about reading your own emotions.

And I think that the shift in that science has made emotional processing seem more relevant, but also more important.

And we're little less prejudiced that the emotions are these primitive, stupid things.

Your emotions are very smart.

They put the mind in a frame of reference

so you know how to think about things.

Learning how to read your body turns out to be just tremendously important.

Knowing when your heart is racing, when your anxiety, knowing a thing called emotional granularity, which is the ability to tell the difference between adjacent emotions, between frustration, anxiety, angst, anger, and stress.

If you can tell the difference between your different emotional states, you're just a lot wiser about how to operate in the world.

Yeah, I would advise, I recommend a book by a guy, Mark Brackett, who's at Yale, called Permission to Feel.

And he says you should check out your mood meter, what he calls.

It's an opportunity to reflect.

You're probably either high pleasure or low pleasure, high energy or low energy.