{"id":7459449,"date":"2026-10-19T13:18:16","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T18:18:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/?p=7459449"},"modified":"2026-10-19T13:18:17","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T18:18:17","slug":"dealing-with-feeling-by-marc-brackett","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/dealing-with-feeling-by-marc-brackett\/","title":{"rendered":"Dealing with Feeling by Marc Brackett"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Halloween is the one day of the year we admit we’re wearing masks. The other 364, we mostly pretend otherwise, and we teach students to build an argument and cite a source while saying almost nothing about the feelings under the costume. Marc Brackett, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, thinks that gap explains a great deal, and not only for students. When he surveyed thousands of people during the pandemic, fewer than 10 percent said they had learned how to manage their emotions at home, and even fewer said they learned it at school. Most of us, in other words, have been improvising. Dealing with Feeling: Use Your Emotions to Create the Life You Want<\/em> is his generous attempt to change that, and it picks up where his 2019 Permission to Feel<\/em> left off. That book was about recognizing emotions. This one is about what we do next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Its starting point is a kind one. We don’t choose what we feel (“We feel what we feel”), but we can learn to choose how we respond. Brackett is refreshingly honest that he is still learning this himself. Stuck in lockdown with his mother-in-law, he lost his temper one night. She asked whether he wasn’t supposed to be the director of a center for emotional intelligence, and he snapped, “Not tonight I’m not!” It is hard not to like an author who leads with that story. The early chapters lean on stories like this one and on big claims about how much of a life turns on emotional skill. That groundwork frames how we authentically experience emotions and anchors the rest of the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The strongest chapter echoes Permission to Feel<\/em> with updates, resting on the Center’s motto, “You have to label it to regulate it.” It opens on a room of engineering executives who insisted there was “no difference” between anxiety, stress, pressure, and worry, and the rest of the chapter gently shows why there is. Labels matter! In Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research on emotional granularity, people who can name their feelings precisely are less likely to lose their cool or reach for a drink under stress. Even a fear of spiders softens with a good label: in a UCLA study, people who named their fear as specifically as they could reacted less physiologically than those who tried to rethink it or distract themselves. The Mood Meter, a simple grid of pleasantness and energy, turns all of this into something you can use at the kitchen table or in the classroom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What follows complicates the usual advice. “You have to deactivate to regulate,” Brackett says, and he spends a chapter on reviewing breathing and mindfulness. In a study of more than 1,400 freelancers asked to recall a time they had wronged someone, those who did breath-based meditation afterward were less<\/em> inclined to make amends than those who did loving-kindness meditation or nothing at all. Calming down, it seems, can quiet the very discomfort that would have nudged us to repair the harm. A study from his own center finds that reappraisal works better the more original it is, which turns reframing into a creative act rather than a forced look on the bright side. And a chapter on sleep, exercise, and nutrition (his “emotion regulation budget”) is a kind reminder that tired people are measurably worse at reappraisal, no matter how many strategies they know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parents and educators will find the chapter on children of all ages the most directly useful, and the most hopeful. Brackett walks through a fifth-grade lesson on gossip in which every student admits to having been gossiped about, and then, eyes lowered, every student admits to having done the gossiping. When the class offers hugs and walks as remedies, he asks, “Then what comes next?” The room goes quiet. His point is that regulation should be “goal-directed, not merely feel-good”; comfort is a first step, not the whole answer. He cites a 2023 meta-analysis led by Yale’s Christina Cipriano showing that social and emotional learning improves students’ grades and relationships and reduces bullying. He also takes a thoughtful, and debatable, position on Jonathan Haidt’s phone bans, arguing that teenagers are better served by learning to notice and regulate how scrolling makes them feel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book is written for general readers. K\u201312 teachers will recognize their classrooms in it, and college instructors will happily translate some of it for older students. Self-assessments, a closing worksheet built around seven areas of regulation, and the Mood Meter make it a book to use, not just read. Much of the research is recent, and most readers won’t have met it before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a teacher and a therapist humbly exploring my own emotions, what stayed with me is the part of the mother-in-law story Brackett says he doesn’t always tell. After storming off, he reflected on it in bed that night, and the next morning he apologized and made her a cup of coffee. That small repair, made with the mask finally off, is the book’s real argument. None of us, not even the director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, gets through life without reacting badly. The skill is in what we do afterward, and the good news, delivered here with real warmth, is that all of us can learn it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Halloween is the one day of the year we admit we’re wearing masks. The other 364, we mostly pretend otherwise, and we teach students to build an argument and cite a source while saying almost nothing about the feelings under the costume. Marc Brackett, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, thinks that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":7459744,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[163,242],"class_list":["post-7459449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-book-review","tag-emotions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7459449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7459449"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7459449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7459794,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7459449\/revisions\/7459794"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7459744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7459449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7459449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7459449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}