Craig Vezina Interview with Marc Brackett (abridged), May 16, 2020
Marc Brackett: Anxiety levels in our nation and our world are higher than they’ve ever been before. So we’ve done a number of studies now, I just finished one with 1,000 school leaders from New York City and across the United States. We did a study with 5,000 teachers. We did one with parents and with kids themselves and the number one word that everyone is using to describe how they’re feeling is anxiety, and then it’s stress and then it’s frustrated and then it’s overwhelmed. So we’ve got a lot of negative emotions right now that we’ve got to help people manage. There’s perceptions of uncertainty. You feel like you have no ability to predict what’s going on. You feel like it’s all out of your control and it’s going to last forever. That’s a hard place to be psychologically because our brains start making up information about the future which we know nothing about. I think a lot of what we have to help people with is shifting their thinking and just deactivating in general to reduce the amount of arousal that they’re having that’s causing them in many ways to have catastrophic thinking.

People always say well what’s it going to be like when we go back to school in the fall and I say well, I’m on major committees for New York City and working here in Connecticut and we don’t know yet because we still don’t have any answers.

So my question is what are you doing today to support every child in your school? What are you doing today to support yourself in being the best possible role model for your family and for your children because what we do today is going to impact how we are tomorrow. Your goal can’t be to be happy right now. That’s a weird goal. We are in a place of uncertainty. We’re feeling anxiety. We are stressed out. It’s what we do with that feeling that determines our health and our wellbeing and the quality of our relationships and our success. So it is possible to experience anxiety without letting it have power over you.

Emotions are universal experiences. The difference in the cultural component is how do we express them in the world around us. And so there are nuances there around what’s appropriate. I hate to use that term but that’s the way people think about it. What’s relevant to express based on power dynamics in our society, based on religion, based on cultural roles. I do think, however, that this pandemic has demonstrated the universality of anxiety and the universality of the need for people to manage their emotions with helpful as opposed to unhelpful strategies. One thing we say when we work with parents and teachers is that you have to be the role model. Your kids are listening to you. Your kids are watching you. So if you’re engaging in self-sabotaging behavior, you know, I can’t take anymore. What’s going to happen. They’re learning from you about negative self-talk and it’s hard. It’s hard to use these helpful strategies because they’re more effortful. It’s a lot easier to just sit by the TV and watch the news all night. It’s a lot easier to drink that extra alcoholic beverage. It’s a lot easier to just let your brain run with whatever negative thoughts it might be having.

And it’s a lot harder to take a pause, take a breath. Say wait a minute. This self-talk is not helpful. I need to think of alternative ways of talking to myself. I need to reappraise. It reminds me recently a father came up to me on this online presentation I was doing and he said you know Marc, I’m a father, I’m a teacher, I’m now my school’s tech coordinator, I’m a custodian in my house, I’m the cafeteria worker. I’ve got 15,000 roles. I just can’t take it anymore. And I said to him how about if you take a breath and you reappraise that and say how freaking talented are you. So a lot of this is the stories that we tell ourselves and the reality is that many of us have many more roles than we ever thought we’d have and we can allow that to create havoc in our lives or we can recognize that it it’s a temporary role, things will change. Every crises pretty much in the history of our world has gone through phases and just allow ourselves to be a little hectic. Allow ourselves to be uncomfortable.

It’s all okay. There’s nothing to judge. It is just an experience that we can learn from and hopefully use wisely in the future. We’re starting a number of latitudinal studies, especially with teachers because I’m very interested in the teachers who are dealing with their lives as teachers, as parents, as all these other roles that they have. For me the interesting question is what are the myriad strategies that people who get through this and have resilience. What are they using? What are they doing on a daily basis? Is it about the downtime where they’re enjoying themselves and just taking walks and spending quality time with people? Is it about the cognitive strategies that they’re using to deactivate those strong negative emotions? Is it about the relationships that they’re building? Is it about exercise and sleep and eating healthy foods? Is it about just managing their life smartly and having good routines? So for me the interesting thing is which of all these strategies that we know are helpful to people, which ones are going to play out to be the most important for them in terms of their long term wellbeing, job satisfaction, lack of burnout and all those kinds of outcomes.

Well I was emotionally a wreck as a kid. I had some challenging experiences in my childhood from abuse to bullying and I was a self-saboteur for most of my life. I had a lot of negative self-talk. I was too fat. I was too skinny and my nose was too big. My nose was never too short. I had all these issues and challenges and what I realized is that in our world we oftentimes allow adults to define our realities for us and that’s a big deal. When you think about it, what our parents are saying to us about our height, our weight, our masculinity, our femininity, our ways of dealing with things it all becomes interpreted and then we often have self-fulfilling prophecies. Same thing with peer groups. And so for me what’s so important is to help children and adults be what I like to call emotion scientists. To be real, asking themselves questions about their experiences and learning from those experiences and evaluating them in terms of is this helping me achieve my wellbeing? Is this supporting me in making good decisions? Is this helping me build and maintain positive relationships. Is this way of thinking helping me achieve my dreams or is it interfering? And if it’s interfering the question is all right, so what do we need to do differently to support our health and wellbeing? And that’s what I hope to help people discover is that there are strategies like having more positive self-talk, like this idea of cognitive reappraisal or reframing that can make the difference in terms of a life that’s really difficult or a life where your dreams can come true. How you’re regulating, just be that emotion scientist and say wow, I’m ripping myself to shreds right now. That really cannot be useful.

Like how is that helping me build good relationships and achieve my goals? What do I need to do differently? There’s ways of being more proactive about this so in my book I talk about a tool called the meta moment which is this tool that has these steps to be our best possible selves. And the idea behind being your best self is that you consider how you want to be seen or how you want to be talked about, how you want to be experienced in the world. What are those additives? And then when you wake up in the morning you can literally be more proactive and say you know what? Today is going to be the day that I’m going to be more compassionate to myself or I’m going to be more empathetic to other people or more patient or supportive. And what we find in our research is that people who can activate that best self just make better decisions, they regulate their emotions more effectively which is helpful for their general well being as in contentment. But importantly I think people need the strategies to use their emotions wisely, to become these compassionate emotion scientists who develop the skills of emotional intelligence so that we become more accurate at recognizing our own and others emotions, understanding where those feelings come from, and having the labels to really be precise about our experiences.

Know how to express them in healthy ways to achieve good quality relationships and then finally have the strategies to regulate them, to manage our emotions so that we can achieve our dreams in life. Recently a mom who read my book came up to me at one of my public talks and she said this stuff really works. And I said tell me more. She said I was with my seven-year-old son. He was in the back seat of the car and we were going to the dentist and he was really anxious and he was really worried and I didn’t know what to tell him. Then I remembered what you said. Well you don’t have to tell him. You just maybe ask him what would he recommend to his best friend who was going to the dentist and was really stressed out. So I did that and her son said well mommy, I would tell him that his teeth were going to be cleaner and it’s going to be okay, don’t worry about it. It’s only a half hour visit and he came up with all these strategies. And then his mom said to me, you know Marc, I couldn’t believe he had so many strategies. And then I said to him well honey, do you think you might be able to use those strategies for yourself.

And the kid just stopped and he paused and he took some breaths and then he said mommy, you’re a genius. And so it just goes to tell you that we don’t have to have all the answers. We just have to know the questions to ask and be supportive of our kids. People often ask what are your big takeaways and what I say is that the first step is you have to give yourself and everyone you love and even the people you don’t love so much the permission to feel all emotions. The second is that we all have to work at developing the skills of emotional intelligence. That ability to recognize and understand, label, express and regulate emotions. I think importantly when it comes to intervention we need to have a more prevention focused lens that we need to provide this education to preschoolers, to elementary, middle, high schoolers, college students, the adults who are raising and teaching kids. And I also think that we need to think systemically. One last story about myself is that when I did go through my traumatic experiences as a child my parents they didn’t know what to do. They really didn’t know what to do. Except one thing they put me in therapy which was extraordinarily helpful. However, then I went back to a school where I was being bullied and I went back to a home where there was a lot of anger and anxiety. And so that one hour a week in therapy it was hard really for it to make a difference in my life which is why I argue that we have to create a systemic change in society meaning that it’s about how government policies take it seriously or not children’s emotional health. It’s around superintendents and principals, leaders, teachers, students and families. And in my view that’s when we’ll have what I like to call an emotion revolution.