Courtesy of Marc Brackett

Happy, sad, mad, glad. We all know what these emotions feel like, but do we know how to deal with them?

Last month, Marc Brackett, the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and professor in the Child Study Center, released his second book, “Dealing with Feeling,” which aims to share a set of skills and strategies to assist with understanding and responding to your emotions.

“It was, for me, very important to write a whole book just on one skill, which was to help people learn how to regulate their own emotions, but also importantly, how to engage in healthy co-regulation,” Brackett said. “Meaning, how do you help people to help other people manage their feelings?”

Brackett’s first book, “Permission to Feel,” which was published in 2019, revolved around understanding what emotions are and the value of learning emotional intelligence. It has been widely read around the world, and Brackett said readers then wanted to know how to manage such emotions. In response, Brackett began writing “Dealing with Feeling.”

To begin the book, Brackett said he applied his background in emotional intelligence research toward answering the questions of what people were hoping to learn and what they had not learned before.

The book begins by describing an imaginary world where everyone knows how to regulate their emotions. He then transitions to exploring why emotional regulation is such a foreign topic to many.

The book progresses through answering what emotional regulation is and what current attitudes towards emotions are, then ends with multiple chapters detailing specific regulation strategies.

Brackett ultimately concluded that emotional regulation is the set of learned intentional skills for managing feelings wisely that align with our goals and values.

Brackett said writing this book proved challenging at times. 

“I’m a much better storyteller when I’m on stage than I am sitting around thinking about a story to tell,” Brackett said.

Brackett recalled using the very regulation strategies he describes in the book — such as self-talk, seeking social support and physical activity — to assist in the writing process.

He especially credited Karen Niemi and Robin Stern as colleagues at the School of Medicine who provided support for his book after reading it thoroughly.

“We had never-ending cycles of discussions on how to frame the information to strike a delicate balance in adding humor, relatability and research,” Niemi said. “My focus was always being practical, specific and consistent.”

Stern echoed the idea of helping the book become more relatable. 

“One of the things we have done together is create a space for people to reflect as they’re reading,” she said. “He did a beautiful job of being personal and compassionate while also presenting a strong case for science.”

Brackett stressed that he wanted a way to share this valuable information with more people through this book. Because there were only so many places he could go in one week, he said, “the only way I thought to do that was I had to write a book.”

Brackett said he has three ultimate goals for the impact of “Dealing with Feeling.”

His first goal is that people see the value and importance of emotion regulation in areas ranging from health to academic and workplace performance to longevity. His second hope is that people understand that emotional regulation is learned and refined through practice. 

His third goal, which he called “audacious,” is that people will see emotion regulation as a new definition of success.

“If we define our success by how skillful we are at managing life’s ups and downs and at helping other people to do the same, the world will be a very different place than having our definition of success being how much money you make, the status of your job and the objects that you own,” Brackett said.

Former Yale President Peter Salovey helped develop the concept of emotional intelligence.