Anxiety & Overthinking Are Habits You Can Break - Dr Julie Smith

Why are emotions so hard to understand for humans?

Well, we're s- we're gonna start with the big questions then, Chris. (laughs)

In the deep end.

Uh, yeah. Well, I guess, uh, I've b- made a bit of a career out of, um, working with people on their emotions and, um, y- as a, as a psychologist, you know, I was in the NHS for 10 years and then, um, worked in a very kind of 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, and nobody has this sort of manual for how to manage emotions and how to understand them and, um, we don't even really have a great vocabulary for them. You know, we're quite limited in... Y- you think about the sort of, the diversity of, uh, the different sort of minute, uh, 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, um, joy," one minute, uh, uh, joy in a certain scenario might feel quite different to joy in a different scenario. You know, the qualitative differences are there.

Mm.

And you can feel that, but we don't necessarily have the words to express it, and we certainly don't have, uh, the sort of models to understand it. Um, and, you know, it's only in recent years that people have even started to talk about them, so, um, we're in the early stages. But it's, uh, you know, exciting. It's, uh-

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, uh, export to somebody else? "Hey, this is what I'm feeling."

Mm.

And then you have just this limited language which is constrained not only by the words you know but even by the lang- 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, uh, uh, fated to kind of always be scrabbling to try and understand emotions but never fully doing it?

Uh, no, and I don't think, I don't think it's necessarily, um, sort of, uh, uh, our failure or our limitation that, um, emotions can't be measured and quantified. I think it's, it's a limitation of the method, isn't it? (laughs) That, that, why do we want to? Um, y- uh, we don't have to do that in order to want... You know, there was that real push actually, uh, you know, in, in my career where we were asked to sort of, you know, measure things on scales and numbers and, and actually when you looked at how that would be applied in the room with someone when you're working with someone, uh, it was m- sort of really, really limited in how helpful it could be. Um, you know, if someone came back with some kind of, uh, mood diary in which they'd kind of added a scale of... Uh, and you get this a lot on apps, don't you, with like, 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've, have a, a set of feelings and a, um, that are kind of, uh, different and sometimes deep and sometimes complex and sometimes confusing.