Ep. 268 – Anxiety Series: Emma Seppälä
Metta Hour with Sharon Salzberg
Be Here Now Network
4.6 • 682 Ratings
🗓️ 23 July 2025
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For episode 268, Emma Seppälä returns to the Metta Hour for our ongoing Anxiety Series.
In this series, Sharon is speaking with Mental Health experts, providers and different researchers for tools to work with anxiety in increasingly challenging times. This is the eighth episode in the series.
Emma Seppälä is a best-selling author, Yale lecturer, and international keynote speaker. She teaches executives at the Yale School of Management and is faculty director of the Yale School of Management’s Women’s Leadership Program. She is also the Science Director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. A psychologist and research scientist by training, Emma’s expertise is the science of happiness, emotional intelligence, and social connection. Her latest book, “Sovereign: Reclaim Your Freedom, Energy, and Power in a Time of Distraction, Uncertainty, and Chaos” came out in 2024.
In this conversation, Emma and Sharon speak about:
- Mental Health study on university students
- How self-compassion figures into wellbeing
- Reflective Best-Self Exercise
- How the Dalai Lama made a mistake
- Sovereignty: awareness + courage + energy
- Suppressing emotions makes them stronger
- Emma’s experience with an Eating Disorder
- Working with difficult emotions
- Different regulation techniques
- Breathing techniques for regulation
- Research on Lovingkindness
- Benefits of meditation
- How intuition can help our anxiety
Emma closes the conversation with a guided breathing practice. To learn more about Emma’s work and get a copy of “Sovereign” on her website right here. Learn about Emma’s 6-week course, the Science of Sovereignty right here.
Check out the first episode in the Anxiety Podcast Series with Dr. Jud Brewer on Ep.260 of the Metta Hour Podcast.
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Transcript
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| 0:57.0 | That is the bound state. |
| 0:58.6 | That is the bound state. |
| 0:59.7 | When we're hooked and we don't want to feel, |
| 1:02.0 | because I think, and especially in the U.S., |
| 1:04.6 | there's a sense of, I don't want to feel bad ever. |
| 1:07.8 | Whereas in other cultures, like, you know, in German culture, |
| 1:10.5 | an Indian culture, |
| 1:11.3 | and Chinese culture, there's an understanding that suffering is part of life, right? But in the U.S., |
| 1:19.5 | there's definitely a sense of, okay, if I'm not feeling great all the time, there's something wrong. |
| 1:33.6 | Yeah. wrong. Hello and welcome to the Metta Hour podcast with Sharon Salzberg. |
| 1:39.2 | I'm Lily Kushman. |
| 1:40.5 | I produce this podcast. |
... |
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