Emotional Awareness

In this episode of the Sage Solutions Podcast, David is joined by his sister Anna to break down the fundamentals of emotional awareness and emotional intelligence. Drawing core insights from Dr. Marc Brackett’s Permission to Feel and the RULER framework, they unpack the first three critical steps to mastering your inner world: Recognizing, Understanding, and Labeling what you feel.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

• The Psychology of Emotion: Why emotional drives sit in the driver's seat of our decisions and actions while the logical brain rationalizes after the fact.
• Demystifying Terminology: Distinct breakdowns separating emotions, biological drives, physical sensations, subjective feelings, states, moods, and long-term affect.
• Mapping Your Emotional State: Using energy levels and pleasantness quadrants (and the Zones of Regulation) to quickly identify where you are in real time.
• Name It to Tame It: The neuroscience behind emotional literacy, how labeling serves as an active tool of regulation, and how precision improves empathy and communication.
• Key Emotion Breakdowns:
  • Stress vs. Anxiety vs. Fear vs. Overwhelm
  • Jealousy vs. Envy
  • Joy vs. Contentment

Whether you want to improve communication in your relationships, navigate daily stress more effectively, or deepen your self-awareness, this episode provides the vocabulary and practical tools to help you understand your feelings with greater clarity.

https://sagesolutions.buzzsprout.com 

If you are interested in one-on-one coaching, email us at:
sagecoachingsolutions@gmail.com

**Legal Disclaimer**
The Sage Solutions Podcast and content posted by David Sage is presented solely for general informational, educational, and entertainment purposes. No coaching client relationship is formed by listening to this podcast. No Legal, Medical or Financial advice is being given. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from this podcast or website is at the user's own risk. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice, diagnosis, or treatment of a psychotherapist, physician, professional coach, Lawyer or other qualified professional. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical or mental health condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions. The opinions of guests are their own and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of the podcast.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

David: Welcome to the Sage Solutions podcast, where we talk about all things personal growth, personal development, and becoming your best self. My name is David Sage, and I am a self-worth and confidence coach with Sage Coaching Solutions.

I'm excited today to have my sister, Anna, joining me. She's normally taking on a role of one of our two reoccurring co-hosts, but today her and I are really working on this one together. We've done a lot of prep. I'm really happy to have her on as a guest. I've really looked to her when it comes to this topic for a long time now. So, really, this episode has been a long time in the making. So, welcome, Anna.

Anna: Yeah, yeah, looked to me for this topic. What you're really trying to say here is I am an emotional creature. [laughs] I have big feelings.

David: You do, but you also have a lot of emotional intelligence, and you use the skills that we're talking about today in the work that you do, and just in the conversations that we've had around it. And yes, maybe part of that is because it's helpful for you to manage your own emotions, but still.

Anna: Yeah, this is true. I've always found the concept of emotions to be very fascinating, and I notice a lot of nuances in every interaction I have, be it through work, my personal life. So, I naturally was the one to be like, "Hey, you got to see this book that we're going to be referring to today." And I hope that you as the listener get a lot of benefit from this discussion, too.

David: But, before we get into it, our goal with this podcast is to share free, helpful tools with you and anyone you know who is looking to improve their life. So take action: subscribe and share this podcast with them.

So we kind of danced around it before, but today's topic is all about emotions. What we're really talking about here today is emotional awareness: how to recognize, understand, and label your emotions.

I want to be clear, though. If you're thinking, "Oh god, an emotion episode, it's going to be all touchy-feely and get super deep and sappy," you're thinking about this all wrong. Emotions and feelings are such a huge component of our lives. If you've ever heard the expression "emotion is the spice of life," your emotions, your feelings, your desires—this is what actually makes life worth living. What's the point of doing anything if you felt nothing always? You would have no drive or desire to do anything. This is why it's a big misconception to think that your thinking brain, your logical brain, is in the driver's seat.

I believe it was Plato that actually talked about this metaphor of a chariot driver and the two horses that are actually pulling the chariot, and he's just helping try and direct them a little bit. Now, I believe one of them was like your soul, which was your values and morality, the things that are important to you, but the other one was your passions, your emotions, your desire, your feelings. This is what actually pulls you.

It's well-documented in psychological research that emotions and feelings are what actually drive our actions, our decisions. And often times it is our logical brain that backwards-rationalizes logical reasons for why we did things. Why we actually did it was we wanted to; we felt like it.

So if you're thinking, "Ah, I don't know if I—emotions, I don't want to deal with that," every action that you take is being driven by your emotions and your feelings. So building the skills that drive all of your actions, decisions, choices—basically that drive your life—is one of the most important things you can possibly do. So that is why we are going to get a good understanding of these things, and then take it practical and learn how to regulate these emotions so that we can shape our lives the way that we want to.

Anna: Yeah, I feel like the topic of emotions and emotion regulation is so often underestimated in its impact on our lives, and given a wimpy connotation.

David: The idea that somebody is unemotional, that they don't have emotions, is just ridiculous. It's a complete fallacy.

Anna: Agreed. One of the biggest criticisms I've gotten as a person, especially when I was younger and hadn't yet developed the skills to understand, regulate, and express my emotions in healthy, more appropriate ways yet, is, "Ugh, you're so emotional." [laughs] And the funny thing about that is like, yeah, and so are you! Like we all are! It's a huge part of our life.

One of the things I'm going to be referencing from in this podcast is so much excellent information from Dr. Marc Brackett's book, Permission to Feel. One thing that I think fits best right now is that he identifies five areas where our feelings and emotions matter most within our lives:

1. They determine where we direct our attention, what we remember, and what we learn.

1. They influence our decision-making.

1. They influence our social relations, because what we feel and how we interpret other people's feelings sends signals whether we should approach or avoid that person, or whether they should approach or avoid us.

1. It is an influence on our health. Both positive and negative emotions cause different physiological reactions with our bodies and our brains, and that in turn releases powerful chemicals that affect our physical and mental well-being.

1. And finally, the fifth way that emotions affect our lives is through creativity, effectiveness, and performance.

If we want to achieve big things, if we want to experience excellence in our work, in our school, in our lives, if we want to be thriving, we have to be able to use our emotions as though they were tools. Which, in this episode, you'll learn that they are tools, and our awareness and regulation of them is a skill that can be refined and strengthened. David, this is where you come in and say, "Like a muscle." [laughs]

David: Like a muscle. [laughs]

Anna: Okay, but seriously. In this episode, we are going to be referencing Dr. Marc Brackett's book a lot and truly using that layout to structure this episode and next episode.

So what I mean by that is Dr. Marc Brackett came up with a tool that has the acronym RULER. In this episode, we are going to be covering the R-U-L of RULER, and in next episode, we'll be doing the E-R. So, in other words, in this episode, we are going to be discussing in-depth how to recognize, understand, and label emotions, which David, you already had mentioned that earlier. And then next episode, we'll look deeper into how to express and regulate those emotions.

David: Yeah, I could not have said it better myself. There's a reason that we're drawing from this book. It was—I believe you first read it in your education for teaching, right?

Anna: I actually wish that was the case, and that preparation for teachers did include a lot more learning about emotional intelligence. It does, don't get me wrong, but not to this extent.

David: Is that what they call SEL?

Anna: Yeah, SEL in schools, but it's more learning the curriculums to be able to help kids understand their emotions and regulate, and less to the extent of like a collegiate level, at least in my experience, in terms of like understanding the depth and nuance of my own emotions and having adult tools to be able to regulate and express and label the nuances there. But I think it was just a book that I like saw at Walmart or Target.

David: Really? Oh, geez.

Anna: Yeah, I think I just saw it at Target and was like, "Ooh!"

David: Was it during that time?

Anna: It might have been. Well, yes. It was—

David: Okay, so it was like a happy coincidence?

Anna: Yeah, I was already interested in it, and I think it was during the time that I was getting into personal growth and development, and I saw the book title Permission to Feel and was like, [gasps] "That sounds like something I'd be interested in." [laughs]

David: You're like, "Please, I want permission!" [laughs]

Anna: Yeah.

David: And just to be clear, is SEL Social Emotional Learning, or what is that? Okay.

Anna: Yep, SEL stands for Social Emotional Learning. There are numerous different curriculums out there for schools, like The Zones of Regulation, that help kids to understand the basic groupings of emotions and understand what they can do to regulate themselves. But sadly, beyond the SEL teaching time, some of our practices still encourage kids to suppress what they're feeling, and teachers to suppress what they're feeling to be able to show up and do your job and get the work done. So it's a little contradictory.

Rather than encouraging kids and adults alike to show up and be positive and give their best regardless of all the other complex things happening in their life, we need to acknowledge that every single part of our day inside and outside of work and school has emotional aspects to it. So teaching kids social-emotional skills needs to be consistently applied throughout all parts of their day, no matter how stressful and exhausting that part of the day may be. And this also includes the adult modeling those things in themselves by being able to be aware of their own emotions, and showing how they can regulate and work through those emotions with those skills and strategies that they're teaching the kids as well.

But I acknowledge at the same time that there are moments where the adult in the room has 26 kids that they're taking care of, and if two, three, four, even just one, are wildly dysregulated and the teacher's already overwhelmed and frustrated and exhausted themselves, they may not be able to effectively support that kid to put what they're learning in that SEL time into practice in real time. And understandably so. I'm not shaming teachers in any way. I'm just kind of identifying some of where, yes, SEL learning is great, but how can we incorporate it into all parts of the day for not just the kids, but the adults to be able to truly apply and understand this for themselves at an adult level?

David: Right, and obviously there's times where the adult has to not really suppress, but just like detach from the emotions that they are feeling, especially because of emotional co-regulation dynamics, where even though the adult may be feeling those things, they may have to set that emotion aside because expressing it at that point in time may further dysregulate the kid. So there is a lot of gray here. It's not just like, "Yes, all emotions, all the time, always good," you know? And there are a lot of jobs where you have to learn how to set those emotions aside, at least in the moment, depending on the situation.

Anna: Right. But there is a big difference between understanding when it's appropriate to set your emotions aside and reflect on that and work through it later versus being encouraged to, "Nope, you need to show up, you got to be positive, you got to be all of these things all the time, and suppress whatever else is going on in your personal life, and just shove that down."

David: Well, and the reality is that that suppression often isn't working. It either isn't working, or it causes it to explode out even more intense later on, or people think that they're suppressing that emotion and it's leaking out everywhere in small ways of everything that they're doing and making things worse. So it really does get complicated, and I know we're getting a little in the weeds here, so we'll get back on track.

So in order to have a full conversation about this, I think we should get clear on the terms that we're going to be using and give them some definitions and explanation.

I think we've all heard the terms "left brain, right brain," where it's like, "Oh, right-brained people are more emotional and left-brained people are more logical." And while it's true that more of your emotions are handled in the right side of your brain, and more of your logic is handled in the left side of your brain, it is a wild oversimplification. And we all use both sides of our brain.

So this actually reminds me of taste buds. I don't know if you remember growing up, they showed your tongue with like different taste bud receptors, and it was like, "Oh, this is where you taste bitterness." Yeah, except you actually taste everything everywhere. It's just like those are the areas that have the most of it. That's kind of how the brain is, too.

So referring to it as right-brain thinking is a little bit of an oversimplification, but for the sake of ease of communication, when we're talking about the emotional side of the brain and emotions and feelings, there are multiple different words that really apply to that. And drives and emotions are super entwined and entangled with that part of the brain. So truly it is the emotional section of the brain that drives our behaviors, not just our emotions.

Anna: Right, but there's—I'm going to be honest, sometimes I get a little bit confused with all the different terminology surrounding emotions. Like the difference between emotions and feelings and moods and—am I missing any?

David: Yeah, so let's just break them down. We'll go through the major important ones in this next section. So the major terms that we need to talk about are:

• Emotions

• Drives

• Sensations

• Feelings

• States

• Moods

• Emotional affect

Let's start with emotions.

Anna: Sure. So emotions are our response to a stimulus. Which "stimulus" sounds like something fancy, but really in this context it just means the cause, the thing that is causing us to experience this objective emotion, right? So that could be a situation, that could be something in our environment directly, or it could even be a thought that we're having.

And something else I want to highlight here is emotions aren't singular. They could be, but often times we're experiencing more than one emotion at a given time. You might be happy, but also a little sad. You might be frustrated and angry and annoyed, all at the same time. Or you may even have conflicting emotions all at one time. You might be feeling grateful and disappointed and excited and kind of resentful or scared, all at the same time depending on what you're going through. Now that's quite the range, I guess, but—

David: Yeah, I was going to say, that was a lot all at one time, but—

Anna: Maybe it's a very complex situation. [laughs]

David: Anna, why are you so emotional? [laughs]

Our emotions are also meaningful signals that shape our worldview and inform our reactions. What emotions come up for us are often influenced by our experiences, our culture, and our individual physiology.

There are six basic emotions that it's generally considered pretty much everyone feels:

• Fear

• Anger

• Sadness

• Disgust

• Joy

• Surprise

Now there is some debate as to whether emotions are inborn or constructed. So we're not going to take a clear stance on that because the research is conflicting and mixed.

Emotions also have a powerful effect on meaning. Generally the more emotional an experience is, the more meaning that we tend to attach to it. So your emotions can drive your action. For instance, if you are angry, that can motivate you to do something out of that strong emotion of anger. And emotions are also pretty good signposts for how you actually feel about something. So after taking an action, sometimes you have an emotion after the fact. So in that situation the emotion isn't necessarily driving your behavior, it's actually telling you something about your behavior. For instance, you take an action and maybe it makes you feel sad. Well, maybe that action wasn't something you really wanted to do.

However, the emotional part of your brain that drives action is not primarily in pure emotions. It's in your drives.

So your drives are motivations that are generated by your needs and desires. There are both physical and psychological drives. Some of your physical drives are things like:

• Hunger: a drive for food

• Thirst: a drive for water

• Sleep: being tired, a drive for sleep

• Sex drive: another physical sensation that drives people to take actions

But we also have psychological needs and desires, like:

• Love and connection

• Certainty

• Safety

• Significance

• Growth

• Contribution

• Mastery

• A desire to do something that's pleasurable, like play a game

It's the emotional part of the brain that drive you to action. Now, both emotions and drives often create physical sensations in your body.

Anna: Right, so the drive of being tired and needing sleep, you feel your eyelids getting heavy, or you feel like your brain's thinking really slowly, or you're yawning. Your drive for hunger, for food, you start to feel your stomach grumbling, or for me, the weirdest thing, I start getting cold in my hands and feet. [laughs]

David: Or let's switch to an emotion. Let's say you get angry. Maybe your ears feel hot, you can feel tightness in your muscles, your heart rate increases, your jaw is clenched.

Anna: Mhm. Or excitement! You start to feel that increased heart rate, that—I don't even know how to describe it—your stomach feels like it's lifting and—

David: Like butterflies, almost?

Anna: Yeah, butterflies! Like you're anticipating something wonderful and you just feel it in your stomach and your body. Maybe even like a sensation of energy rushing through your whole body.

David: And just to be clear, not all physical sensations are caused by drives or emotions. You can just feel something brush up against your arm. It's not like, "Oh, I must be feeling anxious!" [laughs] It's, you know, like you have physical sensations that are unrelated that you are going to notice, and I guess those play in in and of themselves, but we're more talking about how your physical sensations lead to or are caused by your drives and emotions.

Actually, I'm going to take a tiny step back here. You could have a physical sensation cause an emotion, like the feeling of a spider crawling on your arm may cause a fear response, right?

Anna: Yeah, I will scream and try to hit it off of me.

David: So it can go both ways, just to be clear. But really is the culmination of all three that actually create your feelings.

Anna: Mhm. So this is the term that I think most regularly gets confused with emotions. Emotions and feelings, we kind of use them interchangeably. However, there is a nuance here.

David: Your emotions, your drives, and your sensations are all objective. They are things that can be measured in one way or another. They are objective and real. Your feelings, while still real, are your subjective experience of those things. Your feelings are the culmination of your emotions, your drives, and your sensations, but not just combining them—it is your personal, subjective experience of them. Meaning, it is the way that you actually experience them, all together at the same time.

Anna: Can we give an example?

David: My subjective experience of anger, because of my background and experiences and thoughts going through my head, may be different than your subjective experience of anger. There are so many other things that play into the way that we experience our lives that you can't really measure it the same way that you can objective things.

Anna: Gotcha. So the emotion of anger is the emotion of anger, that's not subjective. But my sensations of anger may vary from yours, the things that drive me to feel angry may vary from yours. No? Yes?

David: Kind of. I just want to be a little careful with the wording, because it's not necessarily that a drive causes anger. But yes, the things that make you angry may be different than the things that make me angry. And you may experience a much more intense version of anger, or you may really dislike the feeling of anger, whereas let's say if anger is maybe my emotional home, my comfort place where I go when I get upset, then I may actually feel more comfortable being angry than someone else. 

There's just so many things that affect your subjective experience of reality. Remember, we are the consciousness that experiences our reality. So really, all of it is feelings. We just have objective words that explain these emotions, these drives, and these sensations so that we can measure and understand them and communicate them well with other people.

Anna: All right, so we've covered emotions, drives, sensations, and feelings. What's next?

David: The next topic is states. Now, states and emotions have a lot of overlap, just like how emotions and feelings can have a lot of overlap, and how drives and feelings have a lot of overlap. Let me give a couple examples.

When you're saying, "I'm feeling tired," you are talking about your feelings, which is a combination of the sensation that you're feeling and the drive to sleep. When you're saying, "I'm feeling angry," you're talking about your subjective experience of the emotion. So it is an emotion that's happening to you, but you're experiencing it.

Anna: So it's like a combination of the emotion and the sensation, like we talked about before.

David: This is why feelings and emotions especially are so often interchanged, because the line between whether it's your objective word or your subjective experience of it often times isn't very important in the way that it's being talked about, right? So when you're saying, "Oh, it's my feelings," or "the emotions that I'm experiencing," it doesn't really matter that much whether you're referring to the objective emotion or your subjective experience of them. You're really just talking about the concept that you're angry. It's totally unhelpful to get that in the weeds with it. This is more just for like fully understanding how these all interplay. So there are plenty of times where they are truly interchangeable for all intents of purposes in language.

But states and emotions have a big interplay because there is a huge correlation between an emotion and an emotional state. If you take a given emotion, there is a very correlated high-energy or low-energy state to that emotion, and there is also a very correlated positive or negative aspect to that emotion.

Anna: Right, so excitement would be high energy and positive, whereas depressed, super sad, grieving, you feel low energy, you don't really feel like getting up and doing anything, and it's a negative emotion. It doesn't feel good.

David: Exactly. So the emotional state of being high energy and very positive is very correlated with the emotion of excitement. And excitement may be causing that emotional state, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the emotional state causes excitement.

Marc Brackett uses a quadrant with two different axes determining your emotional state. Picture it like a graph that goes from high energy to low energy, and from negative to positive. He basically charts all of these emotions with where they fit relative to energy and positivity. But that isn't how we define emotions; it's just incredibly correlated. So it's a very quick way for you to determine what emotion you might be feeling. But when we're actually talking about where on that chart you are, it is your state or your emotional state.

And you can do things like change your state with strategies like Tony Robbins' state-change tools, without feeling a specific emotion to get you there. You can raise your energy, you can raise your positivity, and it may lead you towards an emotion, but they aren't exactly the same thing. So we're making a distinction here because there are ways to mess with your state without creating a specific emotion.

Anna: And in terms of being able to simplify this and put it into practice in real time in your life, the way that we explain this to kids—because it's such a complex concept and you're not going to be like, "All right, so let's learn about our state today," right? We discuss this, at least in the curriculum I'm familiar with, which is The Zones of Regulation, we discuss your state as a zone. And similar to Marc Brackett's work, we have:

• The Red Zone: encompassing all of those emotions that are high energy, but negative emotions.

• The Green Zone: those that are low energy, but positive.

• The Yellow Zone: high energy and positive.

• The Blue Zone: low energy and negative.

So it just kind of helps kids to visualize and determine their state first without having to have complex vocabulary around different emotional names, right? Because most people really only know, especially kids, mad, sad, happy, scared.

David: Right.

Anna: So that can at least help them identify, "Okay, how is my body feeling? What zone am I in? What state am I in?" without having to know, "Oh, specifically, I am feeling the emotion of contempt," right? Like all those fancy vocabulary words.

David: No, that makes a lot of sense. Just to undo the work that you just did—I'm just kidding. [laughs] No, but to re-complicate it slightly, for the sake of shades of gray and nuance, the other reason that we separate them is because you can be experiencing multiple emotions at the same time. So your state may not correlate to that one emotion because you're feeling three. And if they're conflicting emotions, you might have a weird state that's kind of in the middle because it doesn't correlate just to one of them. So that's why we kind of have to make that difference.

Now I know that you said especially with children, you're not going to get into all of these different words because it makes it more complicated, but there is something to naming it to tame it. There is something to having a more broad emotional vocabulary. The more different emotional words that you know and use, the more emotional nuance you will have in your experiences.

Anna: No, I totally, totally agree. I don't want to oversimplify anything, especially with wanting to communicate to somebody and feel understood and seen. The more nuanced your vocabulary is, the better you'll be understood for what you're experiencing. But this isn't easy. It's hard to just have all of these emotional words at your fingertips at all times, especially when you're actively feeling them and trying to sort out what are the five things I'm feeling right now.

David: True that.

Anna: So I actually have an excellent resource, which we'll work on linking to this podcast if it's something that you may find valuable, which I truly think you will.

David: Hold on, is this a free resource?

Anna: I hope so! I don't know, I'm not totally sure.

David: Are you paying for it?

Anna: No, I'm not paying for it, but the nice thing is through my insurance, it's a benefit to get for free. So you may want to check into your medical insurance, and it could be something that you could access. If it's not free, I apologize, but it may be something worth investing in, I'm not sure. There may be other platforms that would be an easy resource as well.

David: Maybe we can also include a link to a picture of the chart, which could still be useful compared to the app, which I think makes it a little more interactive. But here, why don't you get into it and—

Anna: Yeah, no, that's a great idea. So Marc Brackett in his book has a chart that outlines this very similarly. We will try to get access to that for you, too, as just a quick reference.

But the nice thing about this app is it is called "How We Feel," and it gives you a platform to be able to check in with, "In this moment, how are you feeling? What's that subjective experience?" And when you press the check-in button, it gives you those state options:

• High energy unpleasant

• High energy pleasant

• Low energy unpleasant

• Low energy pleasant

And when you click into one of those things, in general, it brings you to this giant quadrant that has tons of different emotional words and where they would land in terms of high and low energy and high and low positivity.

So, for example, in the red zone, that upper high energy, but low pleasantness, it has words like apprehensive, jittery, repulsed, anxious, overwhelmed, annoyed, shocked, panicked, enraged, livid, all of these things. And if you're not sure if it exactly names your experience, when you hover over it, it gives a little bit of an explanation. So let's see, what's a tricky one? Content—I don't really fully know what content is.

David: No, that's contempt.

Anna: Content—I'm sorry, not content—contempt! So I'm hovering over contempt, and it gives that it's a feeling that's a combination of anger and disgust. So it really does help you break down: is that kind of matching where I'm at?

And once you click on it and say, "Yep, that's definitely something I'm resonating with," you can give information as far as like, what are you doing right now? It gives you space to journal about it. And like David mentioned, if you're feeling a wide variety of different emotions, it gives you a chance to add other emotions, too, and you may have multiple emotions from multiple states. But it just helps you A, learn some more words to better express your different states and emotions and feelings, and B, help you reflect and become more aware through regularly utilizing it.

David: So we will include those links in the description.

Anna: Whoop whoop.

David: So moving on from states, we have moods. Moods are underlying, persistent emotional states. They are sort of like a state over time. So for maybe, let's say, five hours, or for a whole day, you might just be in a quote-unquote "bad mood." Maybe that's generally low energy and negative. Or maybe you're in a good mood, and that is high energy and high positivity. Or maybe you're in kind of just a like low energy, but positive mood. Like you're in a good mood, but you don't feel like doing a bunch of stuff, you know? It's really an underlying state over time.

So you may actually have an underlying mood that is different than your current state. Something might put you into a current emotional state because something freaks you out, but then your underlying mood for the time being is still sort of there, and then you return back to it.

Anna: Okay, so just for the sake of example, because that always helps my brain, let's say I got terrible sleep the night before. I wake up, and I'm just kind of in a low-energy, grumpy sort of mood, right? Like all morning I've just been kind of grumpy, a little cranky, and then all of a sudden there's a spider on my arm. My state's going to change real fast. All of a sudden, I'm going to be terrified, high energy. And then after I brush it off my arm super fast and it goes away, then I'm going to probably settle back into the mood I was in, or maybe that was enough of a state change that it wakes me up and I'm somewhere else, you know?

David: Shakes it up. I think we all kind of inherently understand being in a good mood or a bad mood. Now let's get to the even longer-term one.

Anna: Yeah, mood we all kind of understand. However, there is a difference between your mood and your affect. So if you think of a mood as like, "Man, all morning or for a few hours, I was feeling this way. This was my state," your affect is like a mood, but even more long term.

David: So it's often over weeks, months even. It's your general emotional disposition over a period of time. So let's say you go through a terrible breakup. That's not going to be a mood. That may be affecting your general emotional disposition for a while, causing a negative emotional affect.

Anna: Mhm.

David: Or maybe you're just happy with life in general, things are going good. When you think back on the last couple weeks, you're like, "Yeah, I'm just happy," you know? That's another way of thinking about affect.

Anna: Mhm. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty clear to me.

David: So to review, we have:

• Emotions

• Drives

• Sensations

• Feelings

• States

• Moods

• Affect

So what is emotional awareness? Emotional awareness is the ability to recognize, understand, and label your own emotions, and the emotions of others in real time. It involves moving beyond basic feelings like just feeling good or feeling bad to identify specific emotional states, such as frustration, anxiety, or gratitude, and understanding how those emotions influence our thoughts, behaviors, and physical reactions.

Some of the major components are:

• Self-recognition: identifying what you're feeling as it's happening.

• Emotional literacy: actually having the vocabulary to differentiate subtle feelings, such as distinguishing anger from underlying hurt.

• Understanding triggers: which is recognizing why a specific situation or thought caused an emotional reaction.

• Empathy: tuning into the subtle visual, vocal, and situational cues to recognize what others are experiencing.

Developing emotional awareness forms the core foundation for developing emotional intelligence. It's pretty hard to manage or regulate an emotion if you haven't even realized that you're feeling it.

So let's start with the R in RULER: Recognize. Recognizing the occurrence of an emotion by noticing a change in one's own thoughts, energy, or body, or in someone else's facial expression, body language, or voice. That's the first clue that something important is happening.

Next we have the U in RULER, which is Understanding your emotions. When we understand our emotions, we build on the first skill of recognizing the cause of the emotion and move on to seeing how they influence our thoughts and decisions. This helps us make better predictions about our own and others' behavior.

And lastly, we have the L in RULER, which is Labeling your emotions. Labeling refers to making connections between an emotional experience and the precise terms that we use to describe it. People with a more mature emotional vocabulary can differentiate among related emotions, such as pleased, happy, elated, and ecstatic. Labeling emotions accurately increases self-awareness and helps us to communicate emotions effectively, reducing misunderstanding in social interactions.

Anna: I'm going to somewhat quote directly from Permission to Feel, specifically Chapter 6 on labeling emotion, not because I don't have things to say, but because what Dr. Marc Brackett says is already so substantial and it just makes sense to use directly from the source.

So there are literally hundreds of words that we could be using to describe our feelings, but there is quite a gap in our general society's knowledge and vocabulary when it comes to the nuance of different feelings. And we see that so frequently when you ask somebody in public, "Hey, how are you?" and they respond with something like, "Oh, I'm good. I'm fine. I'm busy, you know, staying busy. Can't complain."

David: Yeah, there's so many different things that you're used to hearing all the time that genuinely mean nothing. I actually usually default to "can't complain."

Anna: Which tells me like, "Oh, okay, so you just don't actually want to talk to me," or like, "Oh, okay, moving on."

David: No, I think I subconsciously am trying to tell other people that I—

Anna: "Stop complaining." [laughs]

David: [laughs]

Anna: I mean, I hear you there, for sure. [laughs] Yes, but anyways, getting back to this: if we don't have a proper vocabulary, we can't label our emotions, and the problem with that is if we can't label them, then we can't properly consider them or put them into perspective.

But this isn't just rhetoric. We know from neuroscience and brain imaging research that there is real, tangible truth to the proposition that if you name it, you can tame it. In this way, labeling an emotion is itself a form of regulation. And there is quite a big difference between different emotions. Each of them have their own cause, and they require their own course of action.

David: And of course fall in different places on that chart.

Anna: Right. So labeling our emotions with precise words does four really important things that help us in our lives:

1. It legitimizes and organizes our experience. By that I mean it gives the emotions substance, and it creates a mental model of what that word means so that we can compare what we're feeling with what other people feel, and with other feelings that we have, okay?

1. It helps other people to meet our needs. So once we are able to communicate with specificity what we're feeling, the people in our lives can look beyond our behaviors that express those feelings to be able to understand what is causing those behaviors, and therefore be able to be more empathetic towards us. Now, disclaimer: this is not to say that I'm endorsing any and all behavior to express emotion. We'll discuss that later.

David: Yes, and we have a framework that we're going to talk about in our next episode that is a really, really helpful way of doing that, of communicating those.

Anna: Mhm. So the third way that labeling emotions is helpful is that:

1. It helps us to meet the needs of others. So once we know how someone else is feeling and we understand the label they're putting on their feelings, we can also more readily support them and be more readily empathetic to them, right?

David: So just the inverse or the flip side of the last one, right?

Anna: Right, right. And finally:

1. It connects us to the rest of the world. So our emotions become a form of communication, a way that we can share our experiences with other people. And there's a body of research showing that the health benefits of being connected with other people is amazing. I know that you touched on that with Hannah in—which podcast was that?

David: Uh, "Finding Your Tribe."

Anna: Yep. And so if you're interested in that, certainly give that one a listen. But being connected with other people helps us be healthier, and being able to label what we're experiencing is the start of that connectivity.

David: Yeah, this makes a big difference both for yourself, for the reasons that you said, of being able to fully understand what you're feeling by having better words to describe it, right? If you just label everything that's in that state of high energy, low pleasantness "angry," then when it's lower energy, low pleasantness and you're just annoyed, calling annoyed "angry" gives it a lot more power, I guess. You're giving it so much more intensity on both metrics. And to some degree, that can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. You can talk yourself into going from annoyed up to maybe—I don't know exactly the quadrant, but like irritated or frustrated, and eventually all the way up to angry, which is kind of in the middle.

I'm personally not a huge fan of the super generic emotion words being on the chart because I think they're more like categories that these sub-emotions fall in, but that's just more my personal take on it.

But let's dive into an example of how several of them are different. I hear people use "feeling stressed," "feeling anxiety," "feeling fear," and "feeling overwhelmed" super interchangeably. And while they can definitely be linked, and often people are feeling more than one of them, they are also definitely different.

• Stress: It's a psychophysiological response that occurs when perceived demands exceed perceived resources. This is triggered by pressure, workload, expectations, or change. It involves activation of the stress response system. It's not always negative; it can be motivating in moderate amounts. And it's really about imbalance. Like, "This is a lot, and I'm not sure I can handle it." Basically, the demand is more than the resources that you have, or "This is too much for my capacity."

• Anxiety: This is defined as a future-oriented emotional state characterized by apprehension about uncertain or potential threats. It involves negative anticipation. It often includes the process of worry and repetitive "what-if" thinking. Its physical symptoms may include tension, restlessness, and stomach discomfort. It does not require an immediate danger, and the core theme is often an uncertain future threat. It can also be a feeling that something important is out of our control, with statements like, "Something bad might happen."

• Fear: An immediate emotional response to a present and identifiable threat. Some of its key features are that fear is rapid and automatic. It activates our amygdala and puts us into a state of fight, flight, and freeze. It's short-lived once the threat is gone, and highly survival-based. The core theme is that it has immediate danger right now.

• Overwhelm: Overwhelm is a state of cognitive and emotional overload in which a person feels unable to process or respond effectively to the amount or intensity of input. Some key features are that it can include stress and anxiety, but is not identical to either. In fact, there are multiple other emotions that could come in with such intensity that they cause overwhelm. It may result in shutdown, paralysis, irritability, or emotional flooding. It's common when you're facing too many simultaneous demands, and the core theme is too much input or intensity to manage. It's a little different than feeling stressed and comes with phrases like, "I cannot process all of this right now."

So as you can see, they are definitely similar in some ways, but there are some pretty distinct differences between them. And using the right word helps you understand what you're actually feeling.

Anna: But stress, anxiety, fear, and overwhelm are not the only emotional labels that get mixed up. A few other examples include the difference between jealousy and envy:

• Jealousy: According to Permission to Feel, is a form of fear: fear of losing someone important to you, especially to someone else.

• Envy: Has to do with wanting something that someone else has. Now that could be a person, but it could also be a thing, a position, even a reputation. And envy is caused by our coveting something that's not ours. So envy doesn't necessarily always have to be a bad thing. Envy could lead us to focus our efforts and work hard to attain something that we desire, or it could also lead to resentment and even aggression towards the person who has what we desire.

David: And jealousy can also help illuminate our feelings about relationships and make us more aware of how we need to prioritize them. Most people think jealousy is just a straight bad emotion, but there's a reason for it.

Anna: You could leverage it to be good, for sure. And then one other example is the difference between joy and contentment.

Now this is even more so nuanced, because most dictionaries define joy and contentment nearly identically as states of being happy and satisfied. But the difference here is less in the definition and more in how we experience each of these emotions. Because joy feels energetic, whereas contentment feels calm.

David: Mhm.

Anna: So this is where we're really giving consideration to the level of energy in our body with these different emotions. And joy is caused by a sense of getting what one wants, whereas contentment is caused by a sense of completeness, which is more not wanting or needing anything else.

So joy is something we strive for, like the pursuit of happiness, right? Whereas contentment is more of a state of balance, not something that we actively pursue. And I guess the caution here would be if you are actively pursuing happiness, it can become something that's not a positive, because it can become self-defeating. Whereas we want to get to a place of contentment where we are happy with what we have, focusing on the present and cherishing and finding gratitude in that moment.

David: And to some degree, we're actually designed to not always be content, because if we were always content, it would prevent us from striving for things that actually better our lives. So there is a little bit of a balance. Eventually your content will subside, and then you have to strive again, and then you—you know, like a yin and yang.

Anna: It's a gray area. You want to be seeking joy, but you also want to balance it with making sure you're experiencing contentment, too.

David: So we've talked about how to recognize the sensations going on in your body, and then how to understand the situation surrounding the sensations and the feelings that you're experiencing. We then moved on to how to label them, kind of "name it to tame it," so that you have a good understanding of what emotion or feeling that you are experiencing. And this is the R, the U, and the L of RULER: Recognize, Understand, and Label.

We talked about a series of different definitions to make sure that we were on the same page with the terms that we were using. We talked about emotional awareness. We talked about the differences between emotions, drives, sensations, feelings, states, moods, and affect. We talked about how emotional awareness was about understanding your own emotions and having an awareness of them, as well as having an awareness of other people's emotions. Really, emotional awareness is a subpart of self-awareness. It's one of the elements of both internal and external self-awareness.

Now we've been talking quite a bit about emotions, and we're going to continue talking about emotions. Our next episode is going to be about emotional expression, the E of RULER, and the episode after that will be about emotional regulation, the R of RULER. So we'll see you back to talk more about how emotions work in those episodes.

And remember: you are enough, and you deserve to fill up your inner cup with happiness, true confidence, and resilience.

Thank you for listening to the Sage Solutions podcast. Your time is valuable, and I'm so glad you choose to learn and grow here with me. If you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on more sage advice.

One last thing: the legal language. This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. No coaching-client relationship is formed. It is not intended as a substitute for the personalized advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional.