so I was nearly 2 years old when my
family left my home country of
Yugoslavia it was the first of many such
trips and on my first day of nursery
school in my new adoptive country of
Sweden my mom walked me to the school
she dropped me off and as she was
walking away she turned around as most
parents do to take one more look at me
to make sure that I was okay after all
she was entrusting her toddler to
strangers for the very first time in a
country whose language neither her nor I
spoke well it seems that I was also very
much in tune with the gravity of the
situation because what she saw when she
turned around was a brave little face
wearing a very awkward looking smile and
eyes full of tears that never overflowed
I said hey dog which means by in Swedish
it was the only expression that I knew
and I waved at her signaling that I was
okay that I’ll be fine by myself that
she shouldn’t worry she in turn mirrored
this same response and there you had it
the very first signs of emotional
containment between my mother and I the
exchanging of a message that we must
always show were brave to each other
even when we’re breaking inside and then
we must burden each other with the
heaviness of our emotions there you had
the firing and wiring of neurons that
encoded some of the first shoulds into
my brain the shed said you should always
appear to be strong you should never
show that you’re breaking inside and you
must never burden another person with
your difficult experience now I was too
too young to even know that I was but
such is the emotional mechanism of our
brain and such as the communication
mechanism between our brain and the
brain of our caregiver we are constantly
sending and receiving signals and the
most important one is I’m
safe I’m okay and that’s what I was
trying to tell my mom that day and
that’s what she was trying to tell me
too now my mom and I have since fully
made up for that first tearless
emotional struggle we cry all the time
now so that’s fine but in trying to ease
each other’s distress we unfortunately
also lay the groundwork for a very
narrow array of emotions deemed to be
acceptable and a few specific ones that
were not now if you don’t have your
phone out already I would like you to
take it out now please and in the next
couple of seconds just have a quick
think back to your childhood so what
were some of your earliest emotional
shoulds and should not just a couple of
emotions so which ones were you really
encouraged to express and which ones
were you not so I’m sure you’ll find
that at least some of these shoulds and
should nots are still having an impact
on your life I am still trying to loosen
up the constrictive grip on some of my
heavy emotions and try and create more
of a balance with the lighter ones and I
will do for the rest of my life and it
is because I find there to be so much
beauty in that effort to diversify and
to balance that I’m here with you today
talking about the topic of emo diversity
now here is a thought I so wish that my
child expressed their fear and
devastation and anger said no parent
ever it’s difficult it’s difficult
witnessing children especially our own
going through difficult emotions we want
them to stop it we want to distract them
we want them to just smile we want them
to be brave sometimes we even want to
punish them now for me my earliest
emotional should was being brave this
should not was being afraid and just
earlier you may have found it to have
been something a little bit different in
your own life but we all have
set of rules and they helped to create a
very rigid pattern a habit of
experiencing only a few emotions that
are were allowed to and that we’re
familiar with which then makes us miss
out on a whole range of other ones and
research has shown that we humans do
tend to only experience about two to
four emotions on a regular basis well
I’m here to tell you that that’s a
crying shame because some of the
estimates indicate that we may actually
have as many as 300 so it’s time that we
take emo diversity and add the
dictionary so emo diversity describes
the experiencing of a variety of
emotions on a regular basis both
pleasant and unpleasant that an
individual is able to accurately
recognize label and describe and in the
next 15 minutes or so what I aim to do
is to infuse you with the three essences
of emo diversity the first one is
becoming fluent in the language of
emotions the second one is allowing
yourself to experience your negative
emotions and the third one is to start
making intentional decisions about how
you want to feel now I’m curious and you
can just nod at me how many of you use
the word stressed to describe how you’re
feeling on a regular basis great Oh
hands coming up okay wonderful I wasn’t
expecting that
okay and let me guess how that leaves
you feeling overwhelmed okay and do you
know why well because feeling stressed
it doesn’t really mean anything well and
it potentially means everything you know
that person who can never tell you what
they’re hungry for when you ask them
what they want to eat so it’s a little
bit like that it’s a very general term
that can mean anything
so is your co-worker humiliating you at
work are you nervous about your future
at the company are your parents
undermining your integrity by pressuring
you to get married so I’d want to
continue
raise the stress levels in this room but
you get the gist specificity some people
also call it granularity so you can’t
manage and address your stress without
using the specific emotional language to
describe what is actually going on
beneath and feeling stressed is only one
of the ways in which we tend to over
generalize uh-huh
any lover of disney/pixar would have
seen the wonderful inside out and hands
coming up wonderful yeah I’ve seen it
three times okay me before and knows
that we have a handful of basic emotions
so these are fear disgust joy sadness
and anger so these are the basics that
you must be aware of okay and most
psychological scientists do tend to
agree that this is the correct list of
our basic emotions but some more recent
research at the University of California
Berkeley seems to indicate that we have
potentially as many as 27 basic ones and
I want to list a few of them for you now
because I would like to get you thinking
about if and how often you experience
some of these emotions and as I’m saying
them I invite you to also intentionally
experience them now here in this room in
your minds and your bodies so interest
confusion sexual desire empathic pain in
trance meant now you may have noticed
that if you were to dig a little bit
deeper each one of these emotions then
consists of a number of other ones so
for example if you look at sexual desire
it can consist of excitement
anticipation pining and even sadness if
the object of your desire is not
available to you now if by now it sounds
to you like we’re speaking a different
language your
but it’s not a foreign one it’s a
language that each one of you carries
inside of you it’s actually your first
language it’s just that no one ever gave
you the dictionary and helped you become
fluent and becoming fluent in your
emotional language is the most important
path that will lead you to diversify
your emotional life first because you
have to know that an emotion is an
emotion available to be felt and second
because what is ultimately the aim of
any language communication have you ever
been misunderstood because someone
didn’t understand how you felt have you
ever been misunderstood because you
weren’t able to communicate how you felt
perhaps these two questions are actually
asking the same thing now I would like
to tell you a little bit about the
biggest study done so far on emo
diversity so the researchers looked at
over 37,000 people and collected data
from them and found some really
fascinating correlations so what they
found was that positive emojis so
experiencing a range of positive
emotions was associated with lower
levels of depression which makes sense
what they also found though was that
global emo diversity so experiencing a
variety of both positive and negative
emotions also led to lower levels of
depression and what they also found was
that negative emoji on its own was also
associated with lower levels of
depression now why would it be the case
that experiencing a more diverse range
of negative or unpleasant emotions would
potentially lead to lower levels of
depression it perhaps sounds a little
bit counterintuitive
well the possible explanation I wanted
to offer you now has a little bit to do
with my first tearless day at a Swedish
nursery school and it’s also the second
essence of emo diversity that I had
mentioned earlier and it is this
pressing our heavy negative and
unpleasant emotions leads us to feeling
worse in the long run on the other hand
allowing these emotions to run their
course through us like an electrical
current if you will ultimately leads to
less depression and to greater
well-being as does being able to
identify these with specificity now did
I come to this TEDx talk to be told to
feel horrible
you might be thinking no absolutely not
but here’s the thing we can’t not
experience our negative or unpleasant
emotions why well because significant
parts of our brain are not only
specialized in detecting threatening
stimuli in our environment and reacting
to them with some of our basic emotions
but also laying these experiences down
to memory so that we always know to look
out for them so this is what we call our
negativity bias so for example if at the
end of this talk I get overwhelmingly
positive feedback and I get as few as
two pieces of incredibly negative
feedback which do you think that I will
become focused on for days ok maybe even
weeks so that is our protective survival
mechanism a little bit misplaced perhaps
in this day and age but we don’t have
much choice over it what we do have a
choice over though is what we do with
these emotions and what I propose we
have to do not only with our children
but with ourselves is let these emotions
be now research has shown that
chemically speaking our emotions tend to
last only about 6 seconds inside of our
bodies and then they pass on now I
invite you to not trust me and the other
scientists on this so the next time that
you feel a really heavy or unpleasant
emotion coming on and you catch yourself
thinking things such as oh no I have to
stop it I have to get away I have to get
out I have to turn on Netflix I have to
take another shot freeze and press pause
on those thoughts
and replace them with something like
this hmm I’m curious how long this anger
is going to stick around let me see I’ll
say that one more time hmm I’m curious
to see how long this anger will stick
around let me see
can you feel the difference the
difference between the intention to
become curious and explore this emotion
the way you would a brand new foreign
object put in your hand for the very
first time as opposed to wanting to
stomp it out immediately like a
cockroach now since we’re on the topic
of emotions I have to say that I did
originally want to use a photo of the
real thing but I felt such intense
disgust that I couldn’t I had to settle
for this one but in any case it could
mean the difference between feeling bad
for 6 seconds as compared to feeling bad
for years and I’m sure we’ve all had
some experience of negative or
unpleasant emotions that we didn’t deal
with which then built became stronger
and kept coming back again and again and
this is what we often see with our
clients in psychotherapy as well so what
I’m talking about here is being
emotionally intelligent and that among
other things means being mindful being
aware and being intentional now many of
our emotions come from a place where
these things don’t live a very reactive
place certainly our basic ones do so
again going back to disgust
BAM it’s immediate I don’t really even
have to think about it and our basic
emotions are our first responders or if
you’re a fan of graphic novels you can
think of them as our watchman so they
developed over hundreds of thousands of
years to help us survive in the
wilderness that was our planet back then
and there was so good at it that they
still remain intact which is wonderful
but not if you’re spending all of your
time or most of your time enveloped in
one of them limited to experiencing only
a very
narrow emotional range we all know that
person who loses their temper incredibly
quickly and spends most of their days in
anger or that person who’s incredibly
fearful of everything maybe you’re that
person so how do you diversify that
problem
well it’s somewhat simple by choosing to
when was the last time that you
experiencing are negative or unpleasant
emotions we don’t have absolute control
over but when it comes to the rest of
the spectrum we absolutely do so for
example something that I know with
certainty about myself is that I’m a
huge museum file so museums such as art
Science Museum here in Singapore or the
Met in New York City our places where I
know that I can experience all
astonishment aesthetic appreciation joy
and a number of other positive emotions
so anytime when I’m feeling tired or
hopeless or off balance in some way in
my emo diversity I decide to visit these
beautiful cultural temples and drench
myself in all of those emotions I can
tell you that so far I have had a 100%
success rate with that so this is an
example of how I choose how I want to
feel it’s not a skill that can be
learned overnight but bit by bit one
decision after another you will become
better at recognizing your initial
reactive emotions and purposefully
choosing the emotions with which you
want to respond which you want to spend
time feeling now it’s also very easy to
slip up let’s be real and honest I’m
probably not the only person in this
room today who has plenty of sad
heartbreaking and even devastating
memories in my own past and my family’s
these are available to us at all times
in our memory bank I could reach in
there right now
and pull
an incredibly painful memory and become
fully consumed by it and shift from
feeling very excited about this talk and
frankly still a bit disgusted by the
cockroach and become grief-stricken but
that is a choice which if repeated over
time I would become used to and it would
lead me into great isolation poor mental
health depression and just the absence
of so much that is special in our world
so the great challenge that I’m leaving
you with at the end of my talk and that
we’re all really left with in this world
is finding that balance between allowing
an emotion to run through us and do the
job that it was meant to do and not
allowing that emotion to run for too
long to the point where it becomes
damaging to us and I want to leave you
now with the words of His Holiness the
Dalai Lama who said in order to find a
new world we need a map and in order for
us to find a calm mind we need a map of
our emotions so I wholeheartedly
encourage you to plot your own map of
emotions and as soon as possible begin
expanding it by exploring all of its
diverse hidden and far-out Lance thank
you thank you so much to you Dora [Applause]
family left my home country of
Yugoslavia it was the first of many such
trips and on my first day of nursery
school in my new adoptive country of
Sweden my mom walked me to the school
she dropped me off and as she was
walking away she turned around as most
parents do to take one more look at me
to make sure that I was okay after all
she was entrusting her toddler to
strangers for the very first time in a
country whose language neither her nor I
spoke well it seems that I was also very
much in tune with the gravity of the
situation because what she saw when she
turned around was a brave little face
wearing a very awkward looking smile and
eyes full of tears that never overflowed
I said hey dog which means by in Swedish
it was the only expression that I knew
and I waved at her signaling that I was
okay that I’ll be fine by myself that
she shouldn’t worry she in turn mirrored
this same response and there you had it
the very first signs of emotional
containment between my mother and I the
exchanging of a message that we must
always show were brave to each other
even when we’re breaking inside and then
we must burden each other with the
heaviness of our emotions there you had
the firing and wiring of neurons that
encoded some of the first shoulds into
my brain the shed said you should always
appear to be strong you should never
show that you’re breaking inside and you
must never burden another person with
your difficult experience now I was too
too young to even know that I was but
such is the emotional mechanism of our
brain and such as the communication
mechanism between our brain and the
brain of our caregiver we are constantly
sending and receiving signals and the
most important one is I’m
safe I’m okay and that’s what I was
trying to tell my mom that day and
that’s what she was trying to tell me
too now my mom and I have since fully
made up for that first tearless
emotional struggle we cry all the time
now so that’s fine but in trying to ease
each other’s distress we unfortunately
also lay the groundwork for a very
narrow array of emotions deemed to be
acceptable and a few specific ones that
were not now if you don’t have your
phone out already I would like you to
take it out now please and in the next
couple of seconds just have a quick
think back to your childhood so what
were some of your earliest emotional
shoulds and should not just a couple of
emotions so which ones were you really
encouraged to express and which ones
were you not so I’m sure you’ll find
that at least some of these shoulds and
should nots are still having an impact
on your life I am still trying to loosen
up the constrictive grip on some of my
heavy emotions and try and create more
of a balance with the lighter ones and I
will do for the rest of my life and it
is because I find there to be so much
beauty in that effort to diversify and
to balance that I’m here with you today
talking about the topic of emo diversity
now here is a thought I so wish that my
child expressed their fear and
devastation and anger said no parent
ever it’s difficult it’s difficult
witnessing children especially our own
going through difficult emotions we want
them to stop it we want to distract them
we want them to just smile we want them
to be brave sometimes we even want to
punish them now for me my earliest
emotional should was being brave this
should not was being afraid and just
earlier you may have found it to have
been something a little bit different in
your own life but we all have
set of rules and they helped to create a
very rigid pattern a habit of
experiencing only a few emotions that
are were allowed to and that we’re
familiar with which then makes us miss
out on a whole range of other ones and
research has shown that we humans do
tend to only experience about two to
four emotions on a regular basis well
I’m here to tell you that that’s a
crying shame because some of the
estimates indicate that we may actually
have as many as 300 so it’s time that we
take emo diversity and add the
dictionary so emo diversity describes
the experiencing of a variety of
emotions on a regular basis both
pleasant and unpleasant that an
individual is able to accurately
recognize label and describe and in the
next 15 minutes or so what I aim to do
is to infuse you with the three essences
of emo diversity the first one is
becoming fluent in the language of
emotions the second one is allowing
yourself to experience your negative
emotions and the third one is to start
making intentional decisions about how
you want to feel now I’m curious and you
can just nod at me how many of you use
the word stressed to describe how you’re
feeling on a regular basis great Oh
hands coming up okay wonderful I wasn’t
expecting that
okay and let me guess how that leaves
you feeling overwhelmed okay and do you
know why well because feeling stressed
it doesn’t really mean anything well and
it potentially means everything you know
that person who can never tell you what
they’re hungry for when you ask them
what they want to eat so it’s a little
bit like that it’s a very general term
that can mean anything
so is your co-worker humiliating you at
work are you nervous about your future
at the company are your parents
undermining your integrity by pressuring
you to get married so I’d want to
continue
raise the stress levels in this room but
you get the gist specificity some people
also call it granularity so you can’t
manage and address your stress without
using the specific emotional language to
describe what is actually going on
beneath and feeling stressed is only one
of the ways in which we tend to over
generalize uh-huh
any lover of disney/pixar would have
seen the wonderful inside out and hands
coming up wonderful yeah I’ve seen it
three times okay me before and knows
that we have a handful of basic emotions
so these are fear disgust joy sadness
and anger so these are the basics that
you must be aware of okay and most
psychological scientists do tend to
agree that this is the correct list of
our basic emotions but some more recent
research at the University of California
Berkeley seems to indicate that we have
potentially as many as 27 basic ones and
I want to list a few of them for you now
because I would like to get you thinking
about if and how often you experience
some of these emotions and as I’m saying
them I invite you to also intentionally
experience them now here in this room in
your minds and your bodies so interest
confusion sexual desire empathic pain in
trance meant now you may have noticed
that if you were to dig a little bit
deeper each one of these emotions then
consists of a number of other ones so
for example if you look at sexual desire
it can consist of excitement
anticipation pining and even sadness if
the object of your desire is not
available to you now if by now it sounds
to you like we’re speaking a different
language your
but it’s not a foreign one it’s a
language that each one of you carries
inside of you it’s actually your first
language it’s just that no one ever gave
you the dictionary and helped you become
fluent and becoming fluent in your
emotional language is the most important
path that will lead you to diversify
your emotional life first because you
have to know that an emotion is an
emotion available to be felt and second
because what is ultimately the aim of
any language communication have you ever
been misunderstood because someone
didn’t understand how you felt have you
ever been misunderstood because you
weren’t able to communicate how you felt
perhaps these two questions are actually
asking the same thing now I would like
to tell you a little bit about the
biggest study done so far on emo
diversity so the researchers looked at
over 37,000 people and collected data
from them and found some really
fascinating correlations so what they
found was that positive emojis so
experiencing a range of positive
emotions was associated with lower
levels of depression which makes sense
what they also found though was that
global emo diversity so experiencing a
variety of both positive and negative
emotions also led to lower levels of
depression and what they also found was
that negative emoji on its own was also
associated with lower levels of
depression now why would it be the case
that experiencing a more diverse range
of negative or unpleasant emotions would
potentially lead to lower levels of
depression it perhaps sounds a little
bit counterintuitive
well the possible explanation I wanted
to offer you now has a little bit to do
with my first tearless day at a Swedish
nursery school and it’s also the second
essence of emo diversity that I had
mentioned earlier and it is this
pressing our heavy negative and
unpleasant emotions leads us to feeling
worse in the long run on the other hand
allowing these emotions to run their
course through us like an electrical
current if you will ultimately leads to
less depression and to greater
well-being as does being able to
identify these with specificity now did
I come to this TEDx talk to be told to
feel horrible
you might be thinking no absolutely not
but here’s the thing we can’t not
experience our negative or unpleasant
emotions why well because significant
parts of our brain are not only
specialized in detecting threatening
stimuli in our environment and reacting
to them with some of our basic emotions
but also laying these experiences down
to memory so that we always know to look
out for them so this is what we call our
negativity bias so for example if at the
end of this talk I get overwhelmingly
positive feedback and I get as few as
two pieces of incredibly negative
feedback which do you think that I will
become focused on for days ok maybe even
weeks so that is our protective survival
mechanism a little bit misplaced perhaps
in this day and age but we don’t have
much choice over it what we do have a
choice over though is what we do with
these emotions and what I propose we
have to do not only with our children
but with ourselves is let these emotions
be now research has shown that
chemically speaking our emotions tend to
last only about 6 seconds inside of our
bodies and then they pass on now I
invite you to not trust me and the other
scientists on this so the next time that
you feel a really heavy or unpleasant
emotion coming on and you catch yourself
thinking things such as oh no I have to
stop it I have to get away I have to get
out I have to turn on Netflix I have to
take another shot freeze and press pause
on those thoughts
and replace them with something like
this hmm I’m curious how long this anger
is going to stick around let me see I’ll
say that one more time hmm I’m curious
to see how long this anger will stick
around let me see
can you feel the difference the
difference between the intention to
become curious and explore this emotion
the way you would a brand new foreign
object put in your hand for the very
first time as opposed to wanting to
stomp it out immediately like a
cockroach now since we’re on the topic
of emotions I have to say that I did
originally want to use a photo of the
real thing but I felt such intense
disgust that I couldn’t I had to settle
for this one but in any case it could
mean the difference between feeling bad
for 6 seconds as compared to feeling bad
for years and I’m sure we’ve all had
some experience of negative or
unpleasant emotions that we didn’t deal
with which then built became stronger
and kept coming back again and again and
this is what we often see with our
clients in psychotherapy as well so what
I’m talking about here is being
emotionally intelligent and that among
other things means being mindful being
aware and being intentional now many of
our emotions come from a place where
these things don’t live a very reactive
place certainly our basic ones do so
again going back to disgust
BAM it’s immediate I don’t really even
have to think about it and our basic
emotions are our first responders or if
you’re a fan of graphic novels you can
think of them as our watchman so they
developed over hundreds of thousands of
years to help us survive in the
wilderness that was our planet back then
and there was so good at it that they
still remain intact which is wonderful
but not if you’re spending all of your
time or most of your time enveloped in
one of them limited to experiencing only
a very
narrow emotional range we all know that
person who loses their temper incredibly
quickly and spends most of their days in
anger or that person who’s incredibly
fearful of everything maybe you’re that
person so how do you diversify that
problem
well it’s somewhat simple by choosing to
when was the last time that you
experiencing are negative or unpleasant
emotions we don’t have absolute control
over but when it comes to the rest of
the spectrum we absolutely do so for
example something that I know with
certainty about myself is that I’m a
huge museum file so museums such as art
Science Museum here in Singapore or the
Met in New York City our places where I
know that I can experience all
astonishment aesthetic appreciation joy
and a number of other positive emotions
so anytime when I’m feeling tired or
hopeless or off balance in some way in
my emo diversity I decide to visit these
beautiful cultural temples and drench
myself in all of those emotions I can
tell you that so far I have had a 100%
success rate with that so this is an
example of how I choose how I want to
feel it’s not a skill that can be
learned overnight but bit by bit one
decision after another you will become
better at recognizing your initial
reactive emotions and purposefully
choosing the emotions with which you
want to respond which you want to spend
time feeling now it’s also very easy to
slip up let’s be real and honest I’m
probably not the only person in this
room today who has plenty of sad
heartbreaking and even devastating
memories in my own past and my family’s
these are available to us at all times
in our memory bank I could reach in
there right now
and pull
an incredibly painful memory and become
fully consumed by it and shift from
feeling very excited about this talk and
frankly still a bit disgusted by the
cockroach and become grief-stricken but
that is a choice which if repeated over
time I would become used to and it would
lead me into great isolation poor mental
health depression and just the absence
of so much that is special in our world
so the great challenge that I’m leaving
you with at the end of my talk and that
we’re all really left with in this world
is finding that balance between allowing
an emotion to run through us and do the
job that it was meant to do and not
allowing that emotion to run for too
long to the point where it becomes
damaging to us and I want to leave you
now with the words of His Holiness the
Dalai Lama who said in order to find a
new world we need a map and in order for
us to find a calm mind we need a map of
our emotions so I wholeheartedly
encourage you to plot your own map of
emotions and as soon as possible begin
expanding it by exploring all of its
diverse hidden and far-out Lance thank
you thank you so much to you Dora [Applause]
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