How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence | Dr. Marc Brackett

Huberman opens by saying that emotional intelligence is widely discussed in a way that does not match what it actually is, and he asks Brackett for a definition that can also serve as an entry point into the harder question of what emotions are. Brackett's answer is deliberately modest: at the simplest level, emotional intelligence is "how we reason with and about our emotions and feelings." He then immediately converts the abstraction into an acronym, RULER, in which each letter names a separable skill: recognizing emotions, understanding where they come from and what follows from them, labeling them precisely, expressing them appropriately across people, contexts and cultures, and finally regulating them. He calls regulation "the big one", which is a telling emphasis, because most of this portion of the conversation is spent on the first three letters rather than on the strategies that the fifth letter promises.

So I'm trying to read your facial expression right now. Are you interested, or are you bored already?

That aside is not filler. It demonstrates the claim that recognition is an active, ongoing perceptual act performed on another person in real time, not a personality attribute that one either possesses or lacks. The same passage shows the sequence Brackett treats as a chain: recognition of a signal, inference about its cause, a word for it, a decision about whether and how to show it, and then a decision about whether to change it.

Huberman tests the definition against how such skills might be measured, asking whether a test would involve photographs of faces or vignettes about emotional exchanges. Brackett concedes that a test from twenty years ago would look like that, but describes newer work he has just published with colleagues: a test of emotion perception built from video clips of roughly three to four seconds showing subtle expressions, scored on vocal tone, body language and face together, with the aim, in his words, "to get people to accurately label these emotions in faces, body, and voice." The design choice matters analytically. It treats recognition as an accuracy problem with a correct answer, which makes it testable, but it also restricts measurement to perception and leaves understanding, expression and regulation to other instruments that this conversation does not describe.

Brackett then pushes back on the way the phrase is normally used. He resists treating emotional intelligence as a single construct, preferring "a set of discrete skills that come together", and he notes that these skills "not that highly correlated" This is a substantive claim rather than a stylistic preference. If the components were tightly correlated, a single score would be adequate and a person's profile would be predictable from any one part; if they are loosely correlated, then a person can be excellent at labeling and poor at regulating, or perceptive about other people and blind about himself, and the assessment has to be profile-based.

Huberman offers a working definition drawn from ordinary usage: emotional intelligence as the capacity to tolerate other people's emotions and to make sense of them, illustrated by an adult who sees a screaming child and infers what the child feels instead of filing the child under a dismissive label. Brackett's correction is the pivot of the early exchange. The skills, he insists, are both intra- and interpersonal, and he states it flatly: "It's about self and others, always."

He then makes the claim concrete by pointing at the interview itself. "we are co-regulating each other's emotions" he says, through facial expressions and vocal tone, and he notes that he is simultaneously running the same sequence on himself: noticing a global state of pleasantness or unpleasantness and high or low energy, which he calls core affect, then asking what he is doing, then attaching a label to what arises. The self-description is unusually specific for a podcast answer, and it functions as a worked example rather than a definition: excitement plus overwhelm, both present, one vocabulary item each.

Huberman's follow-up is the sharpest question in this section. He notes that no single brain region governs the process Brackett has described, since it is network-wide, and then asks whether someone with poor somatic awareness, someone entirely "in their head," can nevertheless have high emotional intelligence. Brackett's reply is to multiply the sub-skills rather than to answer directly: some people are more cognitive and language-oriented, some, including many therapists, work through somatosensory description, and both are acceptable. He closes with the requirement that matters most to him, that "we have to know how we feel." The question about a ceiling imposed by low interoception is left open, and the answer effectively relocates the problem from the body to vocabulary.

Huberman reports an exercise from a personal-development course in which participants had to state how they felt without using a valuation such as good, bad or so-so, and says he found it very difficult, partly because he had never been trained to use specific feeling words. He then raises Lisa Feldman Barrett's observation that some cultures carry a dedicated word for the particular sadness that follows a bad haircut. Brackett's response accepts the premise of emotion concepts or categories and turns it into a teaching method: if a person has only one word for anger, then for that person there is only one kind of anger. Supply the family, peeved, irritated, angry, enraged, livid, and the conversation changes, because the causes and bodily signatures of the milder and more extreme members can be compared.

What matters is that we have a common language and a common understanding of what these emotions are, because otherwise we can't communicate.

This is where Brackett's institutional agenda becomes visible. He is not arguing for richer private vocabulary so much as for shared vocabulary within a community, and he treats the absence of shared terms as a coordination failure. It is also where he makes his most contentious move in the batch, declining to endorse the widely repeated claim that we are living through an anxiety epidemic: "we're in a crisis of anxiety. I'm not 100% bought into that." His reason is definitional rather than empirical, that the word is used improperly and covers things that should be distinguished. He offers working definitions: anxiety as uncertainty about the future, distress as too many demands against too few resources, overwhelm as saturation, fear as something else again. He adds that overwhelm is his own "emotion of the year."

He then draws a distinction that is easy to conflate with the previous one: differentiation is between emotions, granularity is within a single emotion. Both are offered as labels used in the literature rather than as findings, and no data are presented for either. The support he does offer is anecdotal and drawn from his own consulting, where he asks rooms of lawyers and executives how they feel and reports that the answers are impoverished. That is a weak evidential base for a claim about population-level vocabulary, though it is consistent with the pedagogical point that prompted it.

Huberman presses on whether the aim is to link a feeling to its cause rather than merely to name it. Brackett agrees without qualification: "You need to know why. It's the why that you really have to deal with." The formulation keeps etiology inside the skill rather than treating labeling as an end in itself, which distinguishes his account from versions of the labeling literature that stop at affect naming.

The most useful analytic work in this batch comes from a single pair of definitions. Disappointment is unmet expectations, where, as Brackett puts it, "Everything was legit, it just didn't work out." Anger is perceived injustice. Two features of the pairing deserve attention. First, both definitions locate the emotion in an appraisal rather than in a sensation, so the difference is available to introspection by inspecting the judgment one has made. Second, the difference predicts different remedies: disappointment calls for revising the plan or the expectation, anger calls for addressing a wrong.

To establish that most people cannot make the discrimination, he cites a striking figure: "Do you know that 95% of the people that I ask to define those two things cannot do it?" The number is presented as a challenge rather than as a study. It refers to people he asks, in workshops and trainings, and no sampling, no comparison group and no measurement procedure accompany it. Huberman's own response is instructive precisely because it is honest about the difficulty: he says he can sense the difference but would need several minutes and a systematic search for an example that fits one and not the other.

The distinction then does real work in the autobiographical material. Brackett describes failing his yellow belt test at thirteen while already being bullied, going home and announcing that he hated karate and was never going back. He now holds a fifth-degree black belt in Hapkido, so the story has a resolution, but the resolution is not the point. Huberman asks whether the reaction was anger, and whether it might be called inappropriate anger because what was needed was the concept of disappointment.

Brackett's answer generalizes the method rather than diagnosing the boy: "What was the real event that happened?" If the test was legitimate and the block simply was not strong enough, the accurate reading is disappointment, and the appropriate response is a practice plan, blocks every day after school until the test can be passed. If the failure came from being unable to perform under the stare of bullies, with anxiety high enough to interfere with technique, then the same failing behavior requires an entirely different response. Same outcome, opposite intervention, and the intervening variable is the appraisal, not the behavior.

We got to just throw that out. There's no correlation really between behavior and emotion.

As stated, that is an overstatement, since some behavioral signatures do carry information about affective state, and he offers no evidence for the absolute version. But the operative claim is narrower and better supported by his own examples: behavior underdetermines emotion, so an inference from conduct to feeling is unreliable without the appraisal behind it. He illustrates with his own childhood, yelling at his mother while being bullied at school, being met with a challenge to his authority and then with a command to go to his room, when what he says he needed was someone to ask what he was feeling, since the acting out was driven by fear and shame. His summary of his parents is careful and worth preserving in its own words: "They loved me, just didn't have high emotional intelligence."

Huberman brings in the lumpers and splitters distinction from taxonomy and applies it to emojis: an icon compresses a set of continua into a single mark, and he suggests this produces confusion in communication and in self-understanding. He then asks directly whether emoji use has degraded emotional intelligence. The framing is his, not Brackett's, and the answer does not fully adopt it.