Dr Marc Brackett How To Increase Your Emotional Intelligence

High-Level Overview

Andrew Huberman speaks with Dr. Marc Brackett, a professor at Yale's Child Study Center and director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, about what emotional intelligence really is and how anyone can build it. Brackett lays out his RULER framework of five skills, explains why precise emotion words matter, and introduces the Mood Meter, a simple grid of energy and pleasantness for checking in on feelings. The two discuss introversion and extroversion, the cost of emojis and texting, happiness versus contentment, empathy without burnout, practical regulation tools like distancing and reframing, how emotions shape learning, and the persistence of bullying among kids and adults.

The tone is warm, candid and often personal. Brackett shares stories of being bullied and abused as a child, of the uncle who first asked him how he felt, of helping his father recognize jealousy, and of confronting a colleague who humiliated him in public at age 50. Huberman is open about his own difficulty naming feelings and his work on codependency. The conversation moves between research findings, classroom and workplace examples, and vulnerable personal stories.

The Discussion Explores:

• The RULER skills: recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing and regulating emotions in self and others
• Why emotional granularity matters, from anger versus disappointment to stress versus anxiety versus envy
• How emojis, anonymous comments and texting may be eroding emotional skills
• Introversion, extroversion and why personality is separate from emotional intelligence
• The Mood Meter's four quadrants and the How We Feel app
• Permission to feel: the three traits of an emotion mentor and why most adults never had one
• Empathy, distancing, reframing and other regulation strategies
• Emotions and learning, gratitude, bullying, and why punishment fails

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

What Emotional Intelligence Is: The RULER Skills

Brackett defines emotional intelligence simply: "it's how we reason with and about our emotions and feelings." He treats it not as a single trait but as a set of discrete skills, captured in the acronym RULER: recognizing emotions in faces, voices and bodies; understanding where emotions come from and what they lead to; labeling them with precise words; expressing them appropriately across people, contexts and cultures; and regulating them with effective strategies. These skills are always both intrapersonal and interpersonal. He notes that he and Huberman are co-regulating each other in real time through facial expressions and tone. Newer tests, including one his team just published, use three- to four-second videos of subtle expressions, vocal tone and body language rather than static photos.

Recognition begins with what he calls core affect: am I pleasant or unpleasant, energized or depleted? From there he asks what is happening and tries to find the right word. Some people are more body-focused, others more verbal, and he considers both valid, but he argues that ultimately we need language to understand our feelings, decide what to do with them, and understand the people we live, love and work with.

Why Precise Words Matter

Huberman describes struggling in a workshop where he had to describe feelings without words like good or bad. Brackett says that if you only have one word for anger, you only know one kind; learning words like peeved, irritated, enraged and livid, and discussing what triggers each, gives a community a shared language. He believes words like anxiety are often misused. In his definitions, anxiety is uncertainty about the future, stress is too many demands and not enough resources, and overwhelmed means saturated. When he asks rooms of lawyers or executives to define anxiety, stress, pressure, fear and overwhelm, most first say they're the same, and a two-minute exercise turns into an hour-long realization: if you're anxious about the future, a breathing exercise may not help as much as a cognitive strategy. Connecting a feeling to its cause is what makes regulation possible.

The clearest example is anger versus disappointment, which he says about 95 percent of people can't define. Disappointment is unmet expectations when everything was fair; anger is perceived injustice. He shares failing his yellow belt test in karate at 13 while being bullied, and how the right response would differ: if the test was fair, the answer is practice and support; if bullies in the room were intimidating him, he was actually terrified, and that needs a completely different response. He warns against guessing emotions from behavior: "There's no correlation really between behavior and emotion." As a child he yelled and acted out, and his parents punished the anger when he was really feeling fear and shame. Both men worry that emojis lump rich emotional distinctions into a few icons.

Online Cruelty, Texting and Face-to-Face Connection

Huberman observes that online, even respected academics behave in ways they never would in person, and wonders whether removing face-to-face contact brings out the worst in people. Brackett describes analyzing millions of comments after Mariah Carey's troubled New Year's Eve performance, nearly all tearing her apart, and research with Facebook showing that intent is often ambiguous online. When teens were taught to calmly tell someone a comment was hurtful and ask them to remove it, posts were more likely to come down than when they retaliated.

On texting, Brackett is direct: "I think the problem with text messaging is that it's decreasing emotional intelligence." Huberman says he feels emancipated hearing it. Brackett notes that teens now prefer texting to face-to-face contact, and cites a study where kids at camp without phones for a couple of weeks improved in reading emotions compared with kids who kept them. When his father died, he received many texts from longtime friends who never called; the best message came from a friend who offered to talk, text or come stay, whatever he needed. Texting is fine for logistics, he says, but not as a replacement for intimacy. Huberman shares his own rule of not arguing over text, and Brackett explains that people do it because it lets them avoid feeling the other person's response.

Happiness, Contentment and Knowing Yourself

Asked for a positive pair that people confuse, Brackett distinguishes happiness, which is usually tied to achieving something, from contentment: "Contentment is everything is just great as it is." He argues we push people to chase happiness, which can backfire, and don't help them seek contentment. Huberman imagines using this to pause in the morning and appreciate a good night's sleep before rushing into the day.

Brackett describes himself as introverted, somewhat anxious and prone to an existential crisis every morning, and says constant high-energy cheerfulness in others can overwhelm him. He defines introversion and extroversion as preferences for how to use energy: introverts prefer smaller groups and calmer settings, extroverts seek stimulation and larger groups, and creative people often score high on both. In a class exercise, extroverts planned a party with bonfires and loud music on the beach, while introverts worried about good napkins and a quiet gathering of four. He tells teachers not to call only on hand-raisers, since introverts often have great ideas. Crucially, he found almost no correlation between personality traits and emotional intelligence; highly emotional people may even get more regulation practice. But knowing your personality helps you choose strategies, as he learned after accepting an hour-long car ride with a talkative host when he badly needed to decompress.

The Mood Meter and the How We Feel App

The Mood Meter crosses pleasantness on the horizontal axis with energy on the vertical axis, creating four quadrants. Yellow is high energy and pleasant, like happy, excited and optimistic. Green is low energy and pleasant, like calm, content and relaxed. Blue is low energy and unpleasant, like sad, disappointed and hopeless. Red is high energy and unpleasant, like angry and anxious. Brackett stresses these are pleasant and unpleasant, not good and bad emotions. Checking in lets you place yourself, ask why, find a precise word such as irritable rather than enraged, and decide whether to express the feeling, seek support or simply let it be. His RULER program is in about 5,000 US schools. He tells of a kindergartener in the blue who declined a strategy "because I know it's impermanent."

The free How We Feel app lets users check in several times a day, then sort their data by who they were with, where they were and what they were doing. Users may discover they're more often in the blue at work than they thought, or always anxious around a certain person. The app also includes strategies like breathing, mindfulness, distancing and gratitude.

Permission to Feel and the Emotion Mentor

Brackett grew up with an anxious mother who would lock herself away saying she was having a nervous breakdown and a father who told him to toughen up, all while being bullied and abused. He learned to suppress, deny and cope in unhealthy ways. Research shows suppression generally has poor outcomes in Western cultures, and reappraisal works better. The turning point came at 12, when his uncle Marvin, a middle school teacher staying with the family, noticed something was wrong and asked how he was feeling, then told him they would get through it together.

In surveys of tens of thousands of people across cultures, Brackett finds only about a third of adults had someone like that growing up. The three traits people describe in these emotion mentors are being non-judgmental, empathic and compassionate, and actively listening. Nobody names being smart, wise or a problem solver. When he asked why adults resist giving others this permission, the two main barriers were lack of time and lack of skills, with parents saying they were afraid to ask their children how they felt because they wouldn't be able to handle the answer. He admits even he struggled during COVID when his mother-in-law was stranded with his family for eight months, and she asked at dinner whether he was really the director of a center for emotional intelligence.

Understanding the Cause: Jealousy, Envy and Stress

Brackett tells how his stepmother called saying his father was angry all the time. Over coffee, his father revealed he resented his wife spending time helping her struggling children and grandchildren. When Brackett named it as jealousy, his father began to cry, aware of his feelings for the first time, and his wife later said he was a changed man. When Yale students constantly reported feeling stressed, Brackett had them journal about it, and the most common underlying emotion turned out to be envy, driven by endless social comparison. Breathing exercises won't fix chronic envy, he notes. Huberman connects this to psychiatrist Paul Conti's view that envy underlies much harm. Brackett distinguishes momentary envy, which he uses to learn from speakers he admires, from envy that turns into resentment. He also describes his changed relationship with his own anxiety: he notices it, welcomes it and sets it aside when it's in the way.

Empathy, Distancing and Reframing

Huberman shares that he was recently told he is codependent and wonders whether strong empathy undermines our ability to help others. Brackett disagrees, calling that empathy without emotional intelligence. Working with oncologists at Yale's Smilow Cancer Hospital, he challenges the idea that doctors should leave empathy at the door, suggesting they frame their work as giving patients the gift of presence in their last months, and pull back when they notice themselves getting lost. He distinguishes cognitive empathy, emotional empathy and compassionate empathy, which moves us to support someone.

He also cautions against endlessly talking about feelings; retelling a bad experience 15 times made him feel worse, and "just talking about it is actually not helpful" without moving toward strategies. Good supporters ask questions rather than tell people what to do. His favorite tools include the hot air balloon, looking down on your whole life to see what is going right, and a picture frame technique he used when his father insulted him at a family dinner: he imagined his father as a TV show to observe with curiosity rather than absorb. Huberman describes a related practice of widening his visual focus from his body to the room to the pale blue dot. Brackett also asks himself whether something will matter next week, reframed a canceled flight as extra writing time, and walks away from grocery-store disputes over $7 almond milk to ask whether it's worth the relationship. He dislikes calling people emotional, which he sees as a judgment and sometimes a form of gaslighting.

Emotions, Learning and Decision-Making

Quoting Plato, "All learning has an emotional base," Brackett says emotions drive attention, and boredom simply means needs aren't being met. Different quadrants suit different tasks: high-energy pleasant states for brainstorming, calmer states for building consensus, and even low-energy unpleasant states for detail-oriented work like proofreading a grant. Leaders, teachers and parents should know their default quadrant and take people on an emotional journey. With Lady Gaga's Born This Way Foundation, his team surveyed thousands of high school students and found 77 percent of their emotions at school were unpleasant, with tired, bored and stressed at the top. Presenting at the White House, he deliberately chose the red quadrant, conveying anger at an injustice to spur action.

He and Huberman also praise gratitude as perhaps the best antidote to envy. Huberman notes the data show gratitude practices improve mood and learning and even increase achievement rather than breeding complacency.

Bullying, Courage and Why Punishment Fails

Brackett defines bullying by three features: repeated behavior, intent to harm, and a power imbalance. Being bullied, he says, produces fear and, above all, shame. He recalls wearing a down vest as protection in a math class while two bullies wrote on it with pens, and locking eyes with a teacher who looked away. He says bullying hasn't meaningfully declined in decades, with about a third of middle and high school students affected, and that rules alone don't work; people need skills like empathy, perspective taking and role play. Huberman, who was never bullied or a bully, realizes he likely missed much of it in high school, and recalls adults intimidating others at academic meetings. Brackett says "it's a human right to be protected," and describes senior Yale psychologist Ed Zigler standing up for him when his field research was dismissed as soft science.

About eight years ago, after Brackett gave a talk on bullying, a senior colleague showed a video of a child being badly bullied and joked that it was Brackett before his black belt. Brackett says he regressed emotionally to age 10, but after breathing and gathering himself, he told the man it was not cool and could never happen again, which Huberman calls the definition of courage. Brackett argues punishment "never works" unless consistent and harsh, citing a principal who stretched a suspension to ten days, teaching the student nothing. He calls himself a prevention scientist who wants everyone to have an emotion education. He closes with a story from his book tour: a man in the audience turned out to be a former student of Uncle Marvin, and asked Brackett for whom he had been an Uncle Marvin, a question that changed how he shows up for his own family.

Conclusion

Marc Brackett's message is that emotional intelligence is a set of learnable skills, not a fixed trait, and that it can grow at any age. It starts with noticing how we feel, understanding why, and finding precise words, which then points to the right strategy, whether that's practice for disappointment, curiosity for anger, or gratitude for envy. Tools like the Mood Meter, distancing and reframing make this practical, while face-to-face conversation and non-judgmental listening make it human. Above all, he urges each of us to give ourselves and others permission to feel, and to be someone's Uncle Marvin. It's a practical and moving episode for parents, teachers, leaders and anyone who wants better relationships with themselves and others.

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