The Science Of Emotional Intelligence & Self-Understanding - Dr Julie Smith - #910

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Why are emotions so hard to understand for humans?

**Dr. Julie Smith** (0:05)
Well, we're going to start with a big question, Zoe, Chris.

**Chris Williamson** (0:09)
In the deep end.

**Dr. Julie Smith** (0:10)
Yeah. Well, I guess I've made a bit of a career out of working with people on their emotions.
And as a psychologist, I was in the NHS for 10 years and then worked in a very small private practice. And I would say, you know, all of that work, however diverse it was in terms of what people were dealing with, mostly the common problem was there's this feeling or set of feelings that I have and I don't want to have them. And there's these other feelings that I would like to have more of the time, but I'm not sure how to access them. And nobody has this sort of manual for how to manage emotions and how to understand them. And we don't even really have a great vocabulary for that. You know, we're quite limited in, you think about the sort of the diversity of the different sort of minute feelings that you can have throughout the day that apply to different situations. They're all slightly different. You know, if you say, I feel joy one minute, but joy in a certain scenario might feel quite different to joy in a different scenario. You know, the qualitative differences are there and you can feel that. But we don't necessarily have the words to express it. We certainly don't have the sort of models to understand it. And, you know, it's only in recent years that people have even started to talk about them. So we're in the early stages, but it's, you know, exciting.

**Chris Williamson** (1:37)
Are we doomed to fail in some regard there as humans, that we have this very rich inner experience, which is very difficult to communicate, to measure, to understand, to export to somebody else, hey, this is what I'm feeling. And then you have just this limited language, which is constrained not only by the words you know, but even by the language, you know, German has a ton of words that we don't have in other languages that almost unlocks your ability to understand emotions in that way. Are we fated to kind of always be scrabbling to try and understand emotions, but never fully doing it?

**Dr. Julie Smith** (2:12)
No, and I don't think it's necessarily sort of our failure or our limitation that emotions can't be measured and quantified. I think it's the limitation of the method, isn't it? Why do we want to? We don't have to do that in order to want to. You know, there was that real push actually, you know, in my career where we were asked to sort of, you know, measure things on scales and numbers.
And actually, when you looked at how that would be applied in the room with someone, when you're working with someone, it was sort of really, really limited in how helpful it could be. You know, if someone came back with some kind of mood diary in which they'd kind of added a scale of, and you get this a lot on apps, don't you? You know, rate how you feel today out of 10 and it really doesn't tell you much at all because you don't feel it on a scale. You don't feel a number. You have a set of feelings that are kind of different and sometimes deep and sometimes complex and sometimes confusing. And it's our sort of, often it's when people are trying to kind of sell something around mental health that they try to make it really simple. But it's okay that it's not, I think.

**Chris Williamson** (3:26)
What's your advice for people who are overthinking everything?

**Dr. Julie Smith** (3:31)
Well, I think this is actually a really popular subject online. People, I think it's something lots of people are dealing with.
And that's because I think the way that life is set up now, right? We're all expected to do, all the technology that we have, in theory, life should be really easy. It was all sold to us as if that will make life easier and you'll have more time on your hands. And actually all that happened was we increased our expectation about how much we get done and how much we can handle. And so what we're dealing with in terms of mental load is so much more than what would have, and actually the way that life is set up now, away from traditional roles where a man might go out to work and a woman would take care of the family, those things were separated. But now both people are trying to do both. Actually, you're both taking on two full-time jobs. And so the mental load is there. And so it makes sense that people are living at a higher level of stress. All the time. And when your stress level, your arousal level is higher, you're more vulnerable to overthinking. So a lot of people think, I'm overthinking something because there's something wrong with me, or I'm just a worrier. And I always say to people, don't label yourself as just a worrier because that gives you that sense that you can't overturn it or you can't do anything about it, which is wrong. You know, it's a habit as much as anything else, but it's also something that is more likely to happen when you're already stressed. So, you know, if someone came into the room with me and said, you know, I'm just overthinking everything, what shall I do? Actually, what we would look at is life as a whole, the full context of it's not only what are you overthinking and how can you stop thinking about it in that way. It's, you know, what is going on with your stress levels in general that's causing you to be at that state where you're looking for the worst case scenarios. So, because that's what you're set up to do, right? It's not a fault in your brain. Your brain is doing a really good job. You're probably giving your brain lots of some sort of lots of signs rather that things aren't okay. You know, your maybe your blood pressure is high, maybe you're on the go all day. And so your brain is getting those signals from in your body and from your surroundings that we're not all, you know, not all as well here. That there's a lot going on. We've got a lot to deal with. Be alert because something could be unpredictable here. We need, you know, so that's your kind of state of readiness. So I think when you're dealing with overthinking, it's important not to just deal with overthinking, but to look at everything as a whole.