Dealing with Feelings w/ Dr. Marc Brackett

August 28, 2025·56 min·5 clips

Dr. Brackett admits he worries about why he worries, sharing his neurotic inner life.

Avoidance is easier. Brackett begins with the everyday snag: students and teachers may push back on emotional skills because better regulation asks for effort before the payoff feels real. Motivation does a lot of the work here. If problem-solving or meditating does not look like it will lead anywhere good, denial, suppression, or anger can feel like the cleaner bargain. The host keeps it grounded. Emotion regulation is not treated like a tidy classroom trick. The conversation keeps circling back to whether people feel seen enough to try changing. Brackett talks about feelings mentors: people who listen with empathy and compassion, without turning someone else's inner life into a reason to judge them. That kind of person is rarer than it should be. Brackett says his cross-cultural research includes about 30,000 people, and only about a third say they had someone like that while growing up. That absence hangs over the episode. The host connects it to Nathaniel Brandon's phrase psychological visibility, then brings self-esteem into the same conversation. Visibility affects the self. Low self-esteem, in this frame, is not only feeling bad about yourself. It can mean feeling unsure about worth, purpose, and identity. Brackett and the host keep the pace thoughtful, treating emotional intelligence as research and as life history, shaped by schools, colleagues, and mentors. The book gives the episode its spine: so much of a life depends on how someone responds to feelings, whether they are happy, discouraging, satisfying, or painful. The host's praise stays concrete. He says the book will come back into his own teaching, which fits the episode's move from theory into adult practice.

As heard by us

It connects emotional regulation to motivation, then shows how feeling seen can shape self-esteem, purpose, and meaning.

The episode puts emotional regulation where it often belongs: inside motivation, not beside it as tidy advice. Dr. Mark Brackett frames the challenge through school settings, where eye-rolling and a student's blunt preference for punching someone in the face reveal the harder…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want to understand why the easy emotional response keeps winning, even when it costs you.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Psychology Podcast