How to Manage Your Emotions
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck Podcast
Mark Manson
4.8 • 3.8K Ratings
🗓️ 1 July 2025
⏱️ 263 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What are emotions? Why do we feel anything at all? And more importantly — can we actually get better at feeling?
In this episode, Drew and I dive headfirst into what might be the hardest question in all of psychology: what the actual f**k are emotions? We break down the biology, neuroscience, evolution, culture, and even language that shape how we feel — and why we often don’t understand what the hell is going on inside us. From ancient philosophy to brain scans, this is a deep (and occasionally weird) look into the emotional chaos that makes us human.
We unpack everything from the origins of emotional intelligence (spoiler: it might be BS) to the science of emotional regulation, attachment styles, and the sneaky ways your culture wires your emotional defaults. Along the way, we explore why some relationships make you feel like a better person while others drain the life out of you, and how trauma, genetics, and childhood with your ability to keep it together.
But this episode isn’t just about understanding emotions — it’s about learning how to work with them. And we give you a full emotional toolkit: a set of evidence-based tools to help you manage your emotions, build better relationships, feel more motivated, and yes — even feel more confident in yourself in the process.
We also put together a free companion guide for this episode with all the takeaways, references, and tools to help you get your sh*t together once and for all. Download it here: https://solvedpodcast.com/emotions
Ready to stop listening to podcasts and actually start taking action? Join Momentum, a community of like-minded people who are taking small steps every day to make big changes in their lives: https://findmomentum.com/emotions
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Chapters:
0:00:00 Introduction0:04:47 Chapter 1: What Are Emotions?0:14:04 The Emotional Brain0:22:03 Neurotransmitters0:34:25 Evolution of Emotions0:39:53 How Life Experiences Shape Emotional Regulation0:48:41 Conclusion on What are Emotions0:49:45 Chapter 2: How Culture Influences Our Emotions0:55:44 Vietnam Bike Story1:00:05 Your Culture Trains You to Want Certain Feelings1:06:00 Culture Decides Whether Suppression is a Superpower or a Liability1:07:56 Paradox of Emotional Conformity1:16:36 How Language Shapes What You Feel1:29:23 Emotional Complexity1:36:25 Your Emotions Are Social Currency1:43:00 Conclusion to Culture defines our emotions1:44:08 Chapter 3: Historical and Philosophical Traditions on Emotions1:57:21 Modern Culture1:59:00 Chapter 4: The Four Schools of Emotional Regulation2:00:56 The Heart2:08:55 The Head2:18:37 The Soul2:28:50 The Body2:36:23 The Integrated Toolkit2:48:25 Chapter 5: Brilliant or Bullshit: Emotional Intelligence2:57:31 Chapter 6: Relationships and Emotional Regulation3:09:54 Attachment Theory3:27:29 Toxic Relationship3:36:49 Building Emotional Compatibility3:51:24 Conclusion Relationships3:57:24 Chapter 7: 80/20
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back, everybody, to The Solved Podcast, the last podcast that you will ever need. |
| 0:06.6 | Now, if you're new here, my name is Mark Manson. |
| 0:09.2 | I'm three-time number one New York Times best-selling author. |
| 0:12.5 | And with me is Drew Bernie, a failed neuroscience PhD, a promising young academic until I came along and ruined his life. |
| 0:24.0 | The premise of the show is that we dive deeper, we get more thorough, we give better |
| 0:30.4 | advice than any other podcast out there. |
| 0:32.9 | See, there's too much of the same shit going on in the personal development space. |
| 0:38.3 | There's the same guest showing up on the same shows, saying the same things, and half of the stuff contradicts each other. |
| 0:44.3 | So our goal here at Solved is to take a single topic, go absurdly deep with it, find out everything that is worth knowing about it, and then consolidating it into a single episode that is completely comprehensive, and it's ideally the last podcast you will ever need to listen to on the topic. |
| 1:01.5 | Now, the way this works out is that generally the first half of the episode or so is full of all the information. |
| 1:07.2 | It's all the background research, the history, the culture, the different ideas that you need to be aware of to truly understand whatever we're talking about. |
| 1:15.7 | The back half of the episode is about actionable items, takeaways, practical advice that you can take and implement into your life today. |
| 1:23.2 | And then, of course, Drew and I finish with our own personal takeaways and things that |
| 1:29.5 | have impacted us as we've worked through the episode. |
| 1:32.2 | Now, I understand that this episode is a lot. |
| 1:34.8 | It's very long. |
| 1:35.8 | It's very thorough. |
| 1:36.7 | There's a lot of advice. |
| 1:38.0 | And so there is a free downloadable PDF guide that goes along with the episode. |
| 1:42.2 | It's over 100 pages. |
| 1:43.5 | It has all of our citations and references. |
| 1:45.6 | It has all of the summaries and takeaways of everything that we're talking about here. |
... |
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