Iris Mauss

I need to get rid of this anxiety.

Telling myself, it's just a speech.

Come on, get it together.

Try to ignore it.

But, and I think this is pretty common, the anxiety would always return.

And maybe even stronger than before because it would then return along with anxiety.

the feeling that it confirms there's something wrong about me.

Yes.

So these were what's called negative meta emotions.

So feelings about my feelings.

And those were almost worse, maybe, than the initial round of feelings, because

There's a saying that goes, pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

And these meta emotions, that's the suffering that we layer on top of negative emotions.

Yeah, absolutely.

Because giving research presentations is a really big part of the job.

And so it just became so bad that I considered dropping out of grad school.

Yeah, so there's quite a bit of research on this, how suppressing our own emotions can be bad for ourselves, but also especially bad for interpersonal contacts.

So in a recent study, we brought dating couples into the lab.

And we had them carry out two conversations.

The first one, we wanted them to talk about something that is a problem in the relationship.