 So thanks for coming everyone. I am indeed going to be talking to you about emotions and what's up with those Which is something that no one ever told me until I had to figure a lot of it out And so hopefully I can save some of you the pain I Thought I would just start right in with a worked example worked example I'm surrounded by spiders for some reason just as well. Visually provoking some strong emotions. No This is my actual worked example, but they weren't kidding about the spiders Which is This talk itself. I was procrastinating all right in this talk. I'm like wondering to you you might have experience of procrastination I know this is like a rare experience, but But I think most people who procrastinate like they have the wrong idea about Procrastination how it works like procrastination isn't something you're doing because like you're lazy It's not some weird mysterious thing going on That you're where you're just like self-sabotaging for no good reason procrastination is mostly just like you don't want to do the thing On some level and that was very much my experience here. Like once I pinned this down I was like I had original plan for this talk and Like I was procrastinating because on some level just like this is a bad plan David You don't want to give this talk this way like what's wrong like something's wrong here and I Despite my claims to be emotionally aware it did take me a couple of weeks to finally pin down what this was So I'm talking through this like there's a strong fear. I wasn't qualified for this talk like I'm just some guy This isn't my this isn't my background like I'm a computer scientist. I am or a software developer I didn't even finish my computer science PhD but like There's definitely some part of me going like no don't get this talk It's not you're not your field and this is like a reasonable concern, right? Like there are definitely talks which if I was going to come up and give you a talk about cell biology I really hope I would be having like this feeling of I'm not qualified to give this talk because I don't know a thing about cell biology I'll ask the biology in GCSE But I am actually qualified to give this talk like I'm not like I have been working on this on my own and with other people for Like most of five years now. I've written about us extensively I'm not telling you this to like show up my credentials like I'm just saying that This feeling that I'm not qualified to give this talk. It's pointing at something But it's not pointing at like I actually can't give this talk There is a problem like which is that they're This taught another I am qualified to give this talk in so far as anyone is qualified to give this talk and also nobody is qualified to give this talk if it was the type of talk I was originally conceiving of because There's a wave engaging with all of this material like from the therapy literature from the psychology literature Which is that basically if you read it and you believe what they are saying You're gonna go wrong because everyone is talking really confidently about how emotions work out here this is like the one theory that fits everything and It were and they tend to work really well for the subset of people they worked really well for and really badly for The subject of people they didn't work really well for Which is it sounds tautological, but I mean like there are people in both groups And I've known a lot of people Sort of in the course of trying to learn about all this who have basically been Messed up because they've gone to all in on some particular theory that wasn't working well for them and so at this point I've got like This starts to be like okay. I'm no longer procrastinating for a mysterious reason I'm procrastinating for a very good reason that I'm about to do that. I was going to do a bad plan So there's a very simple answer to the question like what did they take me to seriously? Let's make sure you don't hardly by giving a worked example about how bad I'm a giving this talk, but more importantly I want to sort of get go in like giving you some Guidelines on how to seriously take this talk I'm pretty sure almost all the things I might be saying to you are useful like this has helped me This has helped other people. I know I'm not going to just be spouting a bunch of nonsense that you can't know that won't help at all Some of the things I say might even be true it's I think like Most of what I'm saying is going to be approximately true and It certainly isn't stuff I've made up like it's based on a whole bunch of different and reading and practice and so on But it's definitely not completely right and I can't necessarily tell you which bits are and aren't right This is just how I currently understand it It is how I currently understand it again like based on all sorts of other work But this is the sort of the bits I've since the size together that work well for me and people like me so Like if you two are a highly analytical nerd who likes thinking about things too much I think we might have one or two of us here Then this should probably be more useful to you than a lot of like the therapy literature If you are very if you think about things very differently, you might want to like a try a different approach This is mostly stuff. I wish someone had told me much earlier than they did Unfortunately, it's gonna be very high level every because I only have half an hour And so I can't like take you through a detailed therapeutic breakthrough in which you like get to the bottom of any emotional problems You may have but like it's sort of I'm trying to point to in the direction of like where I Think healthy emotional brushing lives and like give you some guidelines on how to get there But yeah, I actually you do actually have to do the work if you want to use any of this Like you're not gonna come out of this suddenly like I'm going man emotion snakes. It makes sense now Yeah, so this is stuff I figured out in the last five years or so I got to my mid 30s and went and started a PhD and Was as traditional in the PhD miserable? Went and decided to fix this Sorry, I'm speeding through this slide a bit more to get to the interesting bits, but the I did also go to therapy For me personally the books were useful if you find a great therapist then the therapist will be more probably more useful But this is the path I took Things got better partly because I quit my PhD. It's one of the advantages of being emotionally more emotionally aware is that you can tell when what you're doing is a bad idea and I turned out the PhD wasn't for me And now it's now and I'm gonna tell you about Okay, so we turn to the question like emotions. What's up? What's up with this? I'm now just going to tell you what's up with this So the first thing was like emotions They are fundamental. They start with labeling behaviors like The reason there is an emotion called anger is not because you can feel angry. It's because you can behave angrily It's it's not that you can't feel anger, but the description starts with it starts with the externally visible behavior When you feel it when you're feeling an emotion That is basically saying you want to behave that way in some that on some level Like it may not in the sense that you totally endorse feeling like that feeling that way but Some part of you is going anger anger would be good now or fear fear would be good now like this And this is like the procrastination. It wasn't that I didn't want to write the talk, but some part of me didn't want to write the talk This is because it thinks it's a good idea I think one of the easy traps to fall into is basically going emotions are irrational things They're happening for no good reason that's not true Like almost all the time when you're experiencing some strong emotion It's because like some part of you is like this is a good idea Like this is this is the thing that I need to do right now in order to get what I need That doesn't mean it's right like sometimes An emotion is telling you something useful and important and true and sometimes it's just to get confused like your emotions are you and If any of you are infallible like please come talk to me afterwards because I'd love to know how you did But I'm certainly not When it's wrong and this is like one of the important bits is like you can change this you can Basically go. Oh, right. This is the emotion. I'm feeling right now. I don't need to be feeling an emotion I can feel another emotion And when it's right, you can like improve on your behavior. You don't have to ignore the emotion You and you can Go you could basically go. Oh, right. That's useful information. I'll act on it Like I didn't fix my problems with procrastination on the talk I basically like making the emotion go away I fixed my problems with procrastination on the talk by going ah, this emotion is telling me useful information Let me do something about that Here's another worked example in for the other category of problem again, this one might be slightly relatable Which is help I'm at a festival cool. Lots of full of lots of cool people. I don't know any of you and I should say this isn't a current one for me This one I fit this one out is something that I more or less fixed a couple of years ago, but It's still useful to go through You would presumably like to talk to people at the school festival like we're all here to socialize but Many of you don't know that would be awful. Like can you imagine just going up to someone and saying hi? this is I'm David like the worst right and like what why why is it awful and the This is the sort of that like the core concern I find I or I found is that like you're gonna go up to someone You're gonna make it weird. You're gonna be like fumble. You're going to In some way screw up and But like why is that bad like people make mistakes and And it's not necessarily the end of the world I know it sometimes feels that way, but it isn't I promise But for me like it feels like oh no everyone's gonna laugh at me Everyone's gonna like no I'm one of the weird kids everyone's gonna there's gonna be all sorts of social consequences for this I Don't know if you've noticed but this isn't so this isn't a school like we're not a bunch of food in the word case We're not most of us. We're not gonna see anyone here again unless we really want to the social dynamics are totally different This is very much like a for me for me a school reaction It is a like I'm gonna be seeing this person every day for the next four years And they're gonna laugh at me with all their friends and so on But that's not where we are we're like we're all the weird kids here. Everyone's fine Like Things are basically going to be fine. There will be almost no major social repercussions first growing this up if and when we do and So maybe this isn't so bad. Maybe you can just go up and talk to people and like that's basically okay and For me the going through this sort of thought process genuinely does change the emotional response Like it doesn't suddenly make the emotion go away. I don't suddenly go. Yes, go and being awkward. That sounds great I love being awkward but The sting of it does less and and every time you do this the it does get better And for me personally like it's embarrassing how often this isn't a school is the key emotional revelation revelation I need Because we and I apologize to anyone here who is still in school because I know there are some children in the audience For for you school situations are the learn to do it better rather than they learn to not be in it to recognize the emotional difference But for me like a lot of your sort of patterns of emotional reaction are laid down in childhood If when sort of therapists talk about like small tea trauma Like what they generally actually mean is this is an emotional pattern that you have learned when you were younger and no longer applies to your current situation It's like it's a bad emotional lesson And For some people those come from families for some people those come from school. I'm a school person. My family was great but but school not so much and like Recognizing that this is the sort of shape of the reaction emotional reaction you're having and Noticing the ways in which your current environment is different from where that reaction was learned Really sort of starts to shift your emotions in like a more like situationally appropriate direction Um, I'm just gonna go through like the points of the theory in detail now and Like the first one is just like emotions label behavior This is I think the more counterintuitive most counterintuitive part of my claims because like everyone is very much used to thinking of Emotions as various sort of internal things like the emotions are what you're feeling not what you're doing and It's worth through the labor now Elaborate on like why this is backwards in terms of where emotions come from as a concept The basic answer is like you can tell that emotions are an external thing because there are a lot of words When we have lots of words for things it's because you can point to them If you think about trying to explain pain to someone It's incredibly hard to explain your pain like the current pain you're experiencing because pain is not a shared reference like I can't say it's like it's like this and then Stata beer or whatever like that's considered antisocial so So you end up with very fuzzy references and similarly like flavors are much harder to describe than things you can look at because Like with a thing you can look at you can just point you can say look it's the thing I'm pointing at with flavor like What you're currently tasting you can maybe show you can show the food, but um, it's It's harder and so the more in the share in the shared world things are the more we have words for them and we have a lot of words for emotions and Also like as descriptions, they're clearly made up like it's this does not say that emotions aren't real things but like Where are the boundaries of an emotion are like emotions blur into each other like they're just descriptive words for general patterns of things The word the metaphor I usually like to use is that emotions are like colors and like anger irritation Annoyance are no more real things than like red fuchsia magenta like they They are descriptive Words for observed things, but they just They just they're just sort of described broad regions of the ends of space oops, I thought I have a more point there and so like Often I think what people get hung up on when trying to describe emotions is Like am I feeling angry am I feeling grumpy am I feeling like one of these different fine-grained words and like often The question is about as useful as there's a hot dog a sandwich it's like the thing you were trying to understand when you try to understand your emotions is your behavior and emotional words are Useful labels that those but not necessarily like very clear cut distinctions And Obviously like there is an internal counterparts to emotions. This isn't if your behavioral theory like but You can feel like you can behave angry, but you angrily, but you can also feel angry I keep using angry as an example because it's a really easy example But the same thing applies to any other emotion like similarly you can behave afraid and you can feel afraid Some emotions easier to see what the behavior is like than others, but there's usually an external counterpart and that external part and The way this usually works is that basically the emotion you are currently feeling is the behavior that comes naturally to you so When you feel angry It's very easy to act angrily and it's very hard not about what it's hard not to act Angrily you can you can control your behavior, but if you sort of naturally let yourself do gravitate to a To sorry if you do the behavior that comes naturally like what will come out is anger You will sort of your voice will raise you will sort of take an aggressive aggressive posture, etc and Importantly, this happens even where you're not aware of your emotions I mean, I'm sure like most of us have encountered someone angrily shouting. I'm not angry Or like someone going no, I'm completely calm while their hands are shaking on stage or something and like there is when When like the part of you that is handling these emotions is doing its thing even if it is Even if you're not consciously aware of it doing us thing And in fact most like when you're not aware of your emotions It's very it's even harder to not act on them because if you don't know you're angry You can't withhold withdraw from being angry if you don't know you're anxious you can't take steps to do it like because of the fact that Emotions is doing what comes naturally you have to notice that like what that you could do otherwise and If you want to essentially say, okay, I'm angry, but I don't have to behave angrily Okay, I'm afraid but I can do it anyway. It like it really helps to have that bit where you say I'm angry. I'm afraid When I say you feel emotions I like what I really mean is like literally you feel emotions There's a common experience that people have like assuming that Everyone is using metaphors. I got to experience this with visualization for example Like I don't visualize and so I assume everyone who said they had pictures in the head was using a metaphor I know that they just have pictures in their head and this is the same thing with feeling emotions like When people say you feel your emotions like they are literally talking about physical feelings in your body Like when you feel angry like your skin flushes when you feel afraid you might feel sort of tight-knit here It's not necessarily the same physical sensations. I think there's a lot of commonality, but the If you are currently bad at Noticing what your emotions are the thing you need to do is start paying attention to physical sensations that map to those behaviors There are some subtleties to this and Like not all emotions are like super obvious physically, but if you're not paying attention to physicality of it That is where you need to start The general sense you see acts as this is called inter-reception. It's some it basically is just The way we are aware of internal feelings It's like when you notice you have an upset stomach when you notice that something is hurting that's inter-reception And this is also what you will you use to actually like learn what you're feeling and what emotions are experiencing Sorry, I said this one already, but yeah, like basically The way to notice what emotions you're experiencing is to pay attention to these physical changes and sort of learn to Identify them and recognize them And this is just something you can get better at I will provide a reference to a Book to an annoyingly named therapy technique called focusing later Which is essentially just the skill of getting skilled at inter-reception in order to understand your emotions it's um like it's easier for some people than others, but it's It is just a learnable skill I mean talking about parts like part of me wants this part of me wants and I believe that and This is from this is another therapy thing But it is also just like literally like part of the normal language like people say this sort of thing all the time and It's once you start sort of paying attention feelings like it's really annoying because like the A lot of the things people say about parts sound on tentacle until they sound obvious And like the most nonsensical sounding one is it is useful thinking of these parts as people in their own right Like it's useful imagining like there is a little version inside you that is angry you or their oh and Is currently the bit going no I want to shout I want to do this This isn't literally true probably like some some people experience it is more literally true than others Like I've I've had experiences and sort of doing work with parts and feelings where I know where Like the best way I can describe it is that the part informed me that yes It had a name and this as I say this feels ridiculous until it seems obvious But like don't worry too much by the literalness of it The way I think is most useful in fact is you know the thing that people say if I'm a different person when I'm with my family With them for when I'm with my friends or in this context like your parts are Those different different people like they're different versions of you and those different versions of you are all Simultaneously present and just come out when in situations Needs them and you can access sort of like the feeling of what it would be like to be that version of you you've independently of those situations by just basically poking after with interception and Again, I will provide a reference to a book afterwards for sort of doing parts work but But this but this is what I mean when I say a part I mean like a version of you that you can access in some circumstance Like say feeling an emotion is a strategic choice like the part that the part of you doesn't feel an emotion because like just for the laws, I mean it might if the emotion is humor, but Like it has learned at some point that this is a useful reaction like When I'm scared of screwing up by introducing myself to people That was a legitimate fear back in school like it wasn't that I made up in my own head that No, that that things could go badly wrong. There were actually circumstances in which things could go badly wrong and I learned that in that reaction And yeah, I got ahead of my slides again, and yeah, so so these emotional responses are learned from experience That doesn't mean they're right and it doesn't mean they're right either because like they've over learned them They've learned them in the situation where it doesn't apply It also just it's also just like sometimes they're wrong because like sometimes we're wrong it's Certainly I've learned emotional responses But in response to things that existed entirely in my head at the time and don't actually make sense even in retrospect But like usually they are more right than wrong But most importantly you should probably take it seriously regardless of whether it's right or wrong like one of the reasons why it's useful to Think of emotion of parts as people in their own right is this teaches you how to treat your emotions if Like if a friend of yours is current comes to you and it's just like I'm really afraid of this scenario happening You don't go. Oh, yeah, you don't need to be afraid of that. It's some Nothing's wrong. You're worried for nothing. You're ever reacting like it fuels about as bad when you treat a part like that as it does when someone else roots you like that and so I'm going in and sort of taking these reactions as seriously and treating them as like in principle likely to be right even but Not necessarily completely right is the way to go Sorry, I'm just gonna skim through this. I have slightly missed timed everything Yeah, so one of these sort of important things to access within to reception is like the sense of what feels true it's when you Like when you say something out loud pay attention to the sense of like, ah, is that right? Is that or is it more like this? and so you can basically gain more actual access to a lot of this information by saying things like Part of me believes this part of me wants to do that. I'm seeing like how the feeling changes how the feeling responds And exercises sometimes get people to do is just go around saying like obviously nonsensical things and seeing like what the feeling of like Oh, that's not right is like The population of the UK is 400 million population UK is not flagrantly just to clarify this this guy is pink like Noticing the instantaneous reaction basically, you know, that's not right and correcting from that and you can Do this with emotions as well. You and you see you can see this if you go through some of my work to examples like Trying to pay attention to where the feeling is coming from what it means and honing it home in on a true version And Using this you can sort of take these emotional beliefs these reactions like I should be angry or should be sad and go Like why where is this coming from? Does this still make sense in context and No and What are the emotionally salient differences? It is hard to do this in the moment Usually I find this is better in advance of the thing. I'm worried about or doing essentially a post-mortem of going So that's how this felt. Was that right? Could I have done this differently? But I think like all this actually starts with not like trying to change your emotional responses But basically just learning to treat them as useful information And asking like what do you want to do and then actually doing it? You can I think those of us who are bad at emotions I guess I would pass dense from Sometimes past tense for me Often is very time you just override the emotion and go no, this is what I've got to do But paying attention to these feelings and going okay, how do I take this into account where this is like what what should I do based on that? What I want to do is The first start Often this is pretty quick what would make this feel safer like if some part of us is worried about things going horribly wrong You can just make plans to stop things from going horribly wrong and Yeah So yeah, basically just don't treat your emotions automatically wrong. It's very easy to do that and like Don't and will tend to not help But don't treat them so badly right either like go in with sort of open curiosity and go maybe What's up? What's up with that like? and either and either act on it or Try to it doesn't You have to be prepared to like take it into account with and Act accordingly But you don't have to do sort of a naive thing just because you're angry doesn't mean you have to shout dick And it can mean you calmly explain to someone why what they did was wrong And you're gonna get this wrong It's impossible to get this right all the time because getting it right all the time is essentially acting perfectly in all situations And nobody does that But every time These things come up you can do better for the next time Yeah and so basically what I want you to take away from this is to Integrate your emotions better into your life try to learn to understand them and try to Feel better every time things go wrong Feel better in future Here are some for some further reading I've written an article about this which has some overlap with us talks it elaborates in some bits and this is out some others These are two books. I do recommend I'm sorry. These books are quite woob All of the best books on therapy are a bit strange and you do need to go in taking them not even less or differently seriously than you would me but certainly not too seriously and I wish you all the best of luck Thank you very much, and I will be around for questions afterwards