Dealing with Feeling
Use Your Emotions to Create the Life You Want
By Marc Brackett
Category: Psychology | Reading Duration: 19 min | Rating: 4.5/5 (93 ratings)
About the Book
Dealing with Feeling (2025) examines the emotional literacy gap, or the inability to recognize and regulate emotions, along with the steep costs this dysregulation creates across all areas of life. It offers a practical system for building the emotional skills that schools and families failed to teach.
Who Should Read This?
- Those struggling with emotional management who recognize patterns of suppression or explosion in their own lives
- People navigating difficult relationships at work, at home, or in their personal lives
- Anyone who feels their emotions control them rather than inform them
What’s in it for me? Learn how to regulate your unmanaged emotions for health and success.
Zuri sat in her car after a meeting, hands gripping the steering wheel as she choked back rage. Her manager had questioned her project timeline in front of her colleagues, and something inside her snapped. She fired back an aggressive email she’d later regret. By the time she got home, she’d picked a fight with her partner over nothing and cancelled dinner plans.
One uncomfortable moment at work had become a wrecking ball through her career and relationship. Most of us live like Zuri, letting unnamed emotions make decisions for us. We think we’re choosing our responses, but actually we’re being hijacked by feelings we never learned to recognize or manage. This Blink explores why some people navigate life with grace while others constantly crash into invisible walls.
It uncovers why success in life doesn’t depend on your education or your intelligence but on how well you handle your emotions. And what you can do about it right now. Your body keeps a running tab of every emotion you ignore.
Chapter 1: What emotional illiteracy costs you
That tension in your shoulders from the argument you swallowed three days ago. The exhaustion that no amount of sleep fixes because you’re carrying unprocessed anxiety everywhere. The headache that arrives every Sunday night before the work week begins. These aren’t random ailments.
They’re your emotional bill coming due. Research on tens of thousands of people shows that those who can’t identify and manage their emotions pay steep prices across every area of life. They earn less money in their careers and struggle to maintain close relationships. They report lower life satisfaction and higher rates of anxiety and depression. Their bodies break down faster under the weight of chronic stress. Most striking of all, their IQ and technical skills make almost no difference in preventing these outcomes.
For example, Zuri was brilliant at her job. She had two advanced degrees and could solve problems that stumped her entire team. But none of that training taught her what to do when frustration flooded her nervous system in that meeting. She only knew two options: stuff it down or let it explode. Both choices were costing her more than she realized. The explosion that day burned a bridge with her manager that was never fully rebuilt.
She was passed over for the promotion she deserved six months later. Her colleague got it instead, someone with half her technical skills but none of her emotional volatility. The suppression cost her too. She stopped speaking up in meetings because she feared another outburst. Her best ideas stayed trapped inside while safer voices filled the room. Her friendships suffered, too.
When her closest friend shared exciting news about a new job, Zuri felt a flash of jealousy she couldn’t name or process. So she withdrew, and avoided calls until the friendship withered. But it was her intimate relationship that paid the steepest price. Zuri’s partner learned to walk on eggshells, never knowing which version of her would come home. The intimacy they once shared was replaced by careful distance. She wanted to be closer but every attempt at vulnerability felt like standing at the edge of a cliff.
Even her dreams became casualties. Zuri had always wanted to start her own consulting practice. She had the expertise and the network. But the fear of failure felt so overwhelming that she couldn’t separate the emotion from reality. Zuri wasn’t weak or broken. Like almost all of us, she was simply never given the tools.
This isn’t a personal failing. It’s a collective blind spot that spans generations and institutions. So why did nobody teach her these skills? A better question would be: Why do most of us reach adulthood completely unprepared to handle the very emotions that shape our entire lives? The answer lies in seven systemic failures that impact nearly everyone. Given the widespread epidemic of emotional dysregulation and the negative consequences it brings, it’s hard to imagine why this goes so unnoticed.
Chapter 2: The seven reasons we don’t regulate
But there are systemic reasons for this, and they create blind spots for most of us. First, we simply don’t value emotions. We treat them as obstacles to overcome instead of information to understand. We praise people who stay cool under pressure and criticize those who show feeling.
The message is clear: emotions are weakness, not wisdom. Second, many just don’t see emotional regulation as a skill. We might assume emotional management is something you either have or you don’t, like being athletic, or musically inclined. That’s likely because, third, nobody taught us at home. Your parents may have loved you deeply, but if you came home upset as a child and they offered you ice cream and distraction, you missed something. They may have meant well or were doing what their own parents did.
But comfort isn’t the same as teaching. Especially if you never learned to identify what you were feeling, why it mattered, or what to do about it. And, fourth, nobody taught us at school, either. The education system measures intelligence with tests and grades but never once asks how we feel, let alone teaching the vocabulary to express it. Schools operate as if students are just brains on sticks, as if emotions had nothing to do with learning or success or well-being. Fifth, we love a quick fix instead of doing the deep work.
Like scrolling social media when we feel anxious, or venting to friends when we feel angry, but not taking time to identify the emotions, their causes, and how to process them. We also treat symptoms rather than underlying causes. Like taking medication for headaches, insomnia, and stomach problems. Doctors treat symptoms separately and rarely ask about the emotional patterns creating them. Few connect the dots between suppressed feelings and a failing body. Lastly, there’s no real institutional support for emotional regulation.
Workplaces offer employee assistance programs after people break down – but provide no training before the crisis hits. Health-care systems prescribe pills for anxiety and depression but rarely treat the causes. Society waits until emotions destroy lives before offering help, and even then the help focuses on damage control instead of building skills for emotional regulation. Emotional intelligence isn’t mysterious or innate.
Chapter 3: Five skills that change everything
It comes down to five learnable skills that work together as a system. They go by the acronym: RULER. Recognizing emotions in yourself and others. Understanding what caused them and what they mean.
Labeling them with precise vocabulary. Expressing them in ways that help rather than harm. And regulating them so they inform your choices instead of making your choices for you. The order matters. You can’t regulate an emotion you haven't recognized. You can’t understand an emotion you haven’t labeled accurately.
Each skill builds on the one before it. Which is why people who try to jump straight to regulation through breathing exercises or positive thinking often fail. They’re trying to build the roof before laying the foundation. Start with recognition. Most people move through their days completely disconnected from their emotional state until something explodes or shuts down. Recognition means checking in with yourself multiple times per day.
Like stopping to notice the physical sensations in your body in the moment. Are your shoulders raised? Is your breathing shallow or deep? Your body knows what you are feeling before your mind does. These physical signals are your first clue. Next comes understanding.
Once you notice you are feeling something, ask why. What just happened in the last few minutes or hours that might have triggered this feeling? Did someone dismiss your idea? Did you see something on social media that sparked comparison? Understanding creates distance between the trigger and your response. Labeling requires expanding your emotional vocabulary far beyond fine, good, bad, or stressed.
The difference between feeling anxious and feeling overwhelmed matters enormously because they require different responses. Anxiety often needs information or planning, while overwhelm needs simplification or delegation. When you can name precisely what you feel, your brain shifts from reactive mode to thinking mode. Research shows that putting feelings into words reduces the intensity of negative emotions by activating your prefrontal cortex. Keep a list of emotion words on your phone or desk. When you notice a feeling, scroll through the list and find the words that fit best.
Expression is where most people derail. We either suppress completely or explode without a filter. Healthy expression means sharing your emotions in ways that create connection and solve problems instead of creating more. The key to good expression is separating the emotion from blame. Notice the difference between saying “I feel disrespected,” and “You disrespected me. ” The first is about your internal experience.
The second is an accusation that will trigger defensiveness. Your emotions are always valid as internal experiences, but how you express them determines whether they build or break your relationships. Regulation is the final skill and the one everyone wants to master first. But regulation only works when built on the other four skills. Once you have recognized what you feel, understood why you feel it, labeled it precisely, and expressed it appropriately, regulation becomes simple.
Chapter 4: Putting it into practice
Just knowing what it takes to regulate emotions won’t make a difference without putting it into practice. But building these skills into your life can start today. For your recognition practice, set three alarms on your phone throughout your day. When the alarm goes off, stop and do a 30-second body scan.
Sit comfortably and run your mind from the top of your head down to your feet. Notice everything: tension or tightness in your chest, butterflies in your stomach, or restlessness in your legs. Write down what you notice in two words or less. Tense shoulders. Racing heart. Calm breath.
The goal isn’t to change anything; just notice. For more understanding, keep a simple log for a few days. Every time you notice a strong emotion, write down three things: what you were doing right before it hit, who you were with or thinking about, and what thought went through your mind. Patterns emerge fast. You might discover that you feel anxious every time you open your work email. Or you feel resentful every time a colleague speaks in meetings.
Understanding your triggers gives you back your power because you can prepare for them or avoid them entirely. To build your labeling skills, expand your emotional vocabulary by learning three new emotion words each week. Go beyond the basics. Instead of sad, try words like discouraged, morose, grief-stricken, or melancholic. Instead of angry, try irritated, livid, or indignant. The more precise your vocabulary, the more precisely you can address what you need.
For expression, practice this phrase structure until it becomes natural: I feel blank, because blank, and I need blank. Fill in the blanks with specifics. For example, “I feel frustrated because this deadline changed three times and I need us to commit to one date so I can plan my work. ” Or, “I feel hurt because you didn’t acknowledge my contribution, and I need you to recognize my work next time. ” Notice how this structure takes responsibility for your emotion while making a clear request that the other person can actually act on. Practice expressing positive emotions too.
“I feel grateful because you stayed late to help me finish that report, and I want you to know it made a real difference. ” Expressing positive emotions strengthens relationships just as much as addressing negative ones. For regulation, use the six-second pause before responding to any strong emotion. Count slowly in your head: one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five one thousand, six one thousand. In those six seconds, run through the first four skills. What do I feel?
Why do I feel it? What is the precise name for this feeling? How would my best self express this? Then choose your response from that place of clarity instead of from the raw emotion.
Imagine a world where acquiring emotional skills is valued as much as reading or math. Where recognition and regulation are taught alongside science and history. This world already exists, but only in isolated pockets. It can become a new reality.
Chapter 5: Recentering emotional intelligence
In one classroom where emotions matter, students arrive each morning and move their photo to one of three colored zones on the picture wall. Green means they feel pleasant feelings like energized or content. Yellow is for unpleasant or low-energy feelings like tired or disappointed, and red means they are having strong unpleasant feelings like angry or anxious. Today, Marcus quietly places his photo in the red zone.
His classmates notice. The teacher asks if he wants to share how he feels. Marcus says his dog is sick and might die. He feels scared and sad. Another student offers empathy, saying that she felt the same way when her kitten was sick last year. A second student asks if there is anything Marcus might do to help him feel better.
Instead of alone with his feelings, Marcus is validated, acknowledged, and offered tools to help him process his valid feelings. In a workplace where emotions matter, when a project falls apart at the last minute due to a vendor error, the team might be called to a meeting in which the manager opens with emotional recognition. He articulates the frustration, disappointment, and worry they feel about the situation. This honesty creates safety. Now team members can recognize, understand, label and express their own feelings. Then they choose together how to do the hard work of brainstorming solutions.
In relationships where emotions matter, a couple in an argument might each first recognize what they feel. One partner might feel anxious and need connection to feel secure. The other partner might be overwhelmed and need space to think clearly. They label these emotions and express them without blame. They understand that both needs are valid. So they create an agreement: when conflict arises, they’ll take 30 minutes apart, then come back together.
The time apart helps the second partner regulate. The guaranteed reconnection helps the first partner feel secure. Their argument pattern breaks not because their needs changed but because they learned to recognize and express them clearly. This is what becomes possible when people learn emotional skills. Not perfection. Not the absence of difficulty.
But the presence of tools that turn emotional challenges into opportunities for connection, growth, and deeper understanding. These skills don’t eliminate hard feelings. They transform how we move through them. Transforming emotions from something that mindlessly controls or debilitates, into a valuable resource for self knowledge, understanding, and connection. In this Blink to Dealing with Feelings by Marc Brackett, you’ve learned that success in all areas of life depends less on innate intelligence or hard work and more on your skills for handling emotions.
Final summary
Yet seven systemic failures have left most of us without these skills. The RULER framework provides what we missed: recognition through body scanning, understanding through pattern tracking, labeling through expanded vocabulary, expression through structured communication, and regulation through the six-second pause. These practices transform how you navigate conflict, build relationships, and pursue goals. Your feelings aren’t obstacles blocking your path; they’re important data showing you the way forward.
Okay, that’s it for this Blink. We hope you enjoyed it. If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always appreciate your feedback. See you in the next Blink.
About the Author
Marc Brackett, PhD is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in the Child Study Center at Yale School of Medicine. He’s published over 125 scholarly articles on emotional intelligence and is the lead developer of RULER, an evidence-based social and emotional learning approach adopted by more than 2,000 schools. His previous book, Permission to Feel, became a best seller and has been translated into 27 languages.