Dr. Marc Brackett — Professor of psychology at Yale and founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. Creator of the RULER emotion-skills framework and author of 'Permission to Feel'.
The gist
Huberman and Brackett explore emotional intelligence as a set of trainable skills rather than a fixed trait, centered on Brackett's RULER framework: Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing, and Regulating emotions. They dig into emotional granularity (the difference between anger and disappointment, stress and envy), the 'mood meter' model that maps feelings on energy vs. pleasantness axes, and concrete regulation strategies like cognitive distancing and reappraisal. The conversation covers how texting and emojis erode emotional communication, the importance of giving people 'permission to feel,' and how only about a third of adults had a mentor figure who created that safety. Brackett shares deeply personal stories of childhood bullying, abuse, his uncle Marvin who saved him, and confronting an adult bully at 50, tying it all to his mission of bringing emotion education to schools and workplaces.
Big reveals
- Brackett defines the key distinction: disappointment is unmet expectations, anger is perceived injustice.
- Reveals his 'permission to feel' research grew from a childhood of abuse and severe bullying.
- Shares that his uncle Marvin was the first adult to ever ask how he felt, becoming his lifeline.
- Only about a third of adults felt they had someone young who gave them permission to feel.
- Argues empathy without emotional intelligence is the real danger, not empathy itself.
- Describes turning his verbally abusive father into 'a movie' as a distancing regulation technique.
- Recounts a fellow professor mocking him with a bullying video on stage and confronting him afterward.
- A student of his late uncle asked Brackett 'for whom are you Uncle Marvin?', reframing his whole life.
Things worth remembering
- In science there are 'lumpers' and 'splitters'; Brackett sees emojis as harmful lumping of complex emotions.
- About 95% of people he asks cannot define the difference between anger and disappointment.
- Happiness is tied to achievement, while contentment is feeling complete with what you already have.
- There is essentially no correlation between personality traits and emotional intelligence.
- Kids at camp who kept their phones showed decreased emotion-perception skills after two weeks.
- When students journaled about 'stress,' the real underlying emotion was usually envy or fear.
- In a study with Lady Gaga's foundation, 77% of high schoolers' feelings at school were unpleasant.
- Bullying has not meaningfully decreased in 30-40 years; about a third of middle/high schoolers are bullied daily.
- An emotion is a problem only when it's unpleasant, intense, and long in duration.
- Gratitude practices boost achievement rather than causing complacency.
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Permission to Feel
Marc Brackett
“My whole uh Recent research has focused on something I call permission to feel you know you know a little bit about my own story” — Marc Brackett 01:08:36Find it on Amazon
Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body
Andrew Huberman
“I have a new book coming out it's my very first book it's entitled protocols an operating manual for the human body” — Andrew Huberman 02:32:43Find it on Amazon