Modern Wisdom
#910 - Dr Julie Smith - The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding
03 Mar 2025
Dr. Julie Smith is a clinical psychologist, author, and content creator. Discovering who you are is a lifelong journey. Understanding your past, unpacking emotions, and gaining self-awareness are all part of the process. So how do we move beyond our past and emotions that hold us back, to create a fulfilling and happy life? Expect to learn why emotions are so hard to understand, how to better understand your childhood, how to forgive your parents, why people keep saying yes when they want to say no, how to deal with passive-aggressive people better, how to get better at asking for help, why we compare ourselves to others so much, why its so hard to be with yourself, how to work out what really matters in your life and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a 20% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get a 15% discount on your first order from Maui Nui Venison by going to https://mauinuivenison.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
Why are emotions so hard to understand for humans?
Well, we're going to start with a big question, Zoe Cress.
In the deep end.
Yeah, well, I guess I've made a bit of a career out of working with people on their emotions. And as a psychologist, I was in the NHS for 10 years and then worked in a very kind of small private practice. And I would say, you know, all of that work, however diverse it was in terms of what people were dealing with,
mostly the common problem was there's this feeling or set of feelings that I have and I don't want to have them. And there's these other feelings that I would like to have more of the time, but I'm not sure how to access them. And nobody has this sort of manual for how to manage emotions and how to understand them and We don't even really have a great vocabulary for that.
You know, we're quite limited in you think about the sort of the diversity of the different sort of minute feelings that you can have throughout the day that apply to different situations. It was slightly different. You know, if you say, I feel joy one minute. Joy in a certain scenario might feel quite different to joy in a different scenario.
You know, the qualitative differences are there and you can feel that, but we don't necessarily have the words to express it. And we certainly don't have the sort of models to understand it. And, you know, it's only in recent years that people have even started to talk about them. So we're in the early stages, but it's, you know, exciting. Yeah.
Are we doomed to fail in some regard there as humans that we have this very rich inner experience, which is very difficult to communicate, to measure, to understand, to export to somebody else? Hey, this is what I'm...
feeling and then you have just this limited language which is constrained not only by the words you know but even by the like you know german has a ton of words that we don't have in other languages that almost unlocks your ability to understand emotions in that way are we uh fated to kind of always be scrabbling to try and understand emotions but never fully doing it
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