Your brain is not just representing the patterns of sensory information in the world and in the body right now, it's also predicting what's going to come next. It's actually already starting to prepare what you're going to do next, what you're going to see next, what you're going to hear next and so on.

I'm really talking about milliseconds from now and I would tell you that there's really good evidence, for example, with kids who have test anxiety, that you can completely eradicate that test anxiety by teaching them to construct different experiences out of that arousal, to make sense of those arousing affective feelings in a very, very different way.

Hi, this is Dene. I'm the founder of Simple Families. Simple Families is an online community for parents who are seeking a simpler, more intentional life. In this show, we focus on minimalism with kids, positive parenting, family wellness, and decreasing the mental load.

My perspectives are based in my firsthand experience raising kids, but also rooted in my PhD in child development. So you're going to hear conversations that are based in research, but more importantly, real life. Thanks for joining us.

Hi there. Thanks so much for tuning in. We are starting the new year off with a conversation with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. Dr. Barrett is among the top 1% of most cited scientists in the world, primarily for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience.

In addition to being a scientist and a researcher, she's also dedicated to making her work and the work of others more accessible through conversations like this.

Today, she's sharing some of her insights from her best-selling books, how emotions are made, and the secret life of the brain, seven and a half lessons about the brain.

Dr. Barrett also has a popular TED Talk that has had more than 6.5 million views. I'll put the links to all of that in the show notes at simplefamilies.com forward slash episode 335.

It's an honor to be able to talk to Dr. Barrett today about emotions, how they're made, how to understand them, and also a little bit about what she calls the body budget, which I think you're really going to enjoy.

Without further ado, here's our chat.

Hi, Lisa, how are you?

I'm great. How are you doing?

I'm good. Thanks for chatting with me today.

It's my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on your podcast.

Absolutely. So you research emotions. Tell us a little bit about how you got started in this.

Oh my goodness. Well, I was a graduate student. I was studying something else entirely, actually.

But I had to measure people's emotional responses.

And I noticed that the measures weren't performing the way that they were supposed to be performing according to what I had learned in textbooks and, you know, as an undergraduate and so on.

And so mainly I was asking people how they feel and people were telling me, even though they were using words like angry, sad, happy, afraid, and so on.

Really, when you look at the data, what they were saying is they felt happy, they felt pleasant around pleasant, and they were using words like angry, sad, afraid, as synonyms for I feel bad.

And I thought, OK, well, I guess I'll just have to learn to measure emotions objectively by measuring people's facial expressions or their physiological changes.

Because I had learned that there were these universal signatures, you know, for different emotional states, and that they were present at birth, they were innate, and so on.

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