Consistently get good sleep, eat healthfully (real food), exercise regularly, get daily sunlight, and cultivate strong social connections. These five pillars are the most impactful foundation for managing your affect and emotions.
Recognize “affect” as your brain’s continuous barometer of your body’s metabolic state (e.g., pleasant/unpleasant, calm/worked up). A deficit in this “body budget” can lead to fatigue or distress, influencing your mood.
To control emotions, focus on changing your underlying “affect” by altering your physical state (e.g., sleep, exercise, nutrition) or your brain’s interoceptive model of it, rather than just trying to change the meaning of the feeling.
Distinguish between “affect” (the continuous, low-dimensional barometer of your body’s state) and “emotion” (the story your brain tells about what caused that affect). Changing your physical state directly shifts affect, which then influences the emotions you construct.
When experiencing negative affect (e.g., from poor sleep or stress), consider it an “emotional flu” or a “bad body budgeting day” rather than immediately interpreting it as an emotion caused by external events. Address your physical state first.
Learn to construct more fine-grained and precise categories for your emotional experiences, as broader categories like “threat” lead to less useful options for action. Expanding your emotional vocabulary, even with words from other cultures, can help achieve this.
Practice deliberately shifting your attention to the specific, high-dimensional sensory details of your body (e.g., heart rate, breathing, muscle tension) to change the dimensionality and richness of your emotional experience. This is akin to a realist painter focusing on light rather than the object itself.
When experiencing physiological arousal (e.g., “butterflies”), reframe it as a source of energy or determination (“get your butterflies flying in formation”) rather than fear. This changes its meaning and allows you to deploy it productively.
Approach difficult feelings with flexibility; sometimes it’s beneficial to “feel your feelings” and tolerate discomfort for learning, while other times it’s better to use words or engage in physical activity to shift your state, depending on your goal.
Actively seek and cultivate social connections with people who provide a “body budget savings” (i.e., make you feel good and supported). Positive social interactions reduce metabolic cost and help regulate each other’s nervous systems.
Engage in acts of kindness, both random and general, as this provides a “body budgeting benefit” (a positive internal feeling and metabolic savings) for yourself, in addition to benefiting others.
Cultivate high levels of trust within your team and with managers, as this is the best predictor of job performance and innovation. Trust allows resources to be spent on challenging tasks rather than managing uncertainty.
Recognize that your brain constructs your experience by making predictions and motor plans first, with sensory signals primarily serving to confirm or update these predictions. Your subjective reality is a “controlled hallucination.”
Learn and utilize emotion concepts and labels from other cultures to expand your understanding and description of internal states, as different languages capture configurations of experience not marked in your own.
When interpreting others’ emotional states, consider the full context of sensory signals (sounds, smells, body language, internal state) rather than relying solely on facial expressions. Facial movements are interpreted within an ensemble of signals.
Recognize that facial expressions for emotions are not universal or fixed; for example, a scowl only occurs in about 35% of anger instances. Facial movements are highly variable and context-dependent.
Do not assume that simply posing a facial expression (e.g., smiling) will directly change your emotional state. The relationship between facial movements and internal emotional states is not a simplistic, mechanistic, one-way causation.
Dissolve one packet of Element in 16-32 ounces of water first thing in the morning and during physical exercise. This ensures proper hydration and adequate electrolytes for optimal brain and body function.
Utilize meditation apps like Waking Up to explore different meditation types and durations, including Yoga Nidra or Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR). Even short 10-minute sessions can restore cognitive and physical energy.
Understand that close acquaintances can make accurate inferences about your internal state based on your unique, learned patterns of facial movements and actions over time, not universal expressions.