Are you a disgruntled Donald Trump appointee sparring with a CNBC cohost? A momager prepping your kid for Greek life? A newly hired (or fired) employee? Someone just trying to get through the last quarter of 2025 in one piece despite presidential death rumors, wedding announcements, and ICE crackdowns?
Marc Brackett might be able to help. As the founder of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, Brackett has dedicated his career to researching the science of emotions. In 2019, he released his best-selling book Permission to Feel; his follow-up, Dealing With Feeling: Use Your Emotions to Create the Life You Want, hits shelves this month. “There is no such thing as a bad emotion,” Brackett tells me, echoing his book: “Our emotions tell us how we experience our lives—nothing less,” he writes. “They carry important information from our deepest selves to our conscious minds.”
Beyond his work at Yale, Brackett serves on the board of a national organization called Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), and is a senior adviser to the Prince and Princess of Wales’ Royal Foundation Center for Early Childhood. He met with Princess Kate in 2023 while speaking to a group of students in Birmingham; her goals are “beautiful,” Brackett says, “because she really wants to lay the foundation for a future where all kids have good mental health.” He’s also on the Rare Beauty Mental Health Council, founded by Selena Gomez, who’s a fan of his “mood meter” method of using colors to visualize nuanced emotions.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
‘Dealing with Feeling’ by Marc Brackett
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Vanity Fair: The term “emotional” has historically been wielded as a pejorative. You write about this in the book, that having emotions can be seen as a weakness. Why do you think that is?
Marc Brackett: “Being emotional” means that you’re not in control of your life. That’s the beauty of having a concept called emotion regulation—because it’s saying no, actually you have quite a lot of control over your emotional life.
When people use terms like “hysterical,” it’s hard not to see it as a gendered thing. How do you think that comes into play?
I have published research on this which shows that women have been told not to express a lot of strong negative emotions because of the way they’ll be perceived. In turn, [that] makes them feel inhibited. In my research, as women progress in rank in the workplace, they consistently feel more and more inhibited in expressing unpleasant or strong feelings. Which is a problem. And that’s not the world that we want. We want a world where everyone has permission to feel.
How do you define emotion regulation?
In the formal sense, emotion regulation is a set of learned, intentional skills for managing our feelings wisely. I really emphasize that it’s not something that we’re born knowing how to do. There’s no area of your brain called emotion regulation. It’s all learned. And this is learned through adults who are raising and teaching us, being good role models through formal instruction on the skills and through regular practice.
Did Princess Kate have any specific questions or concerns that she raised with you? Were there particular issues that she and Prince William were looking into addressing?
No. Actually, I think what she was reading was the scientific literature. She had read my first book and learned a lot about the science of emotional intelligence. [She] brought together a board of advisers to help think through the best way to organize the skills that could be taught and learned to support kids’ healthy development.
Mental health services are easier than ever to access online, as are online “experts,” whose scientific validity tends to range. What do you think about the current landscape in terms of mental health awareness?
What’s most important is that people become educated consumers. And in many ways, that’s why I wrote my book, because we are a society that is obsessed with quick exits. You go on Instagram and someone will say things like, “Just throw your anxiety out the door.” I’m like, I wish it were that easy. I’m 55 and still the door is open, but it shuts very quickly. I want people to understand that there are tools available to them—but it takes work. It’s effortful. That is our life’s work. You can’t predict life. You’re in a relationship; you’re out of a relationship. You have a parent who’s alive and suddenly they get cancer. You got a job, you get fired from the job. I mean, it’s endless what life will throw at you. And so my argument is that this is a life skill that we have to cultivate, and the quick-fix mindset I think is dangerous.
How do you think that the internet itself, and our access to information and to each other, sometimes anonymously, are affecting our ability to cope with our emotions?
There’s good research to show that in general, the amount of time that we spend on social media is making it harder for us to deal with life in general. It is anxiety-producing. The dopamine hits that come from 3,000 swipes a minute are hard to deal with. And then you have to go to your everyday life, and it’s hard to be present. For me, I think the bigger question is that the nuance is not there. If I am on this phone call with you, and let’s say you say something that I disagree with—even though it’s on the phone, we have a conversation. There’s going to be creative back-and-forth. But algorithms are often programmed to be agreeable. I can go to the algorithm, like, “I’m having stress, and I’m with my partner, and I need a strategy to help me deal.” And I learn whatever that is. But I still have to go into the real world and practice it, and there’s no guarantee it’s going to work. We have to learn this in the real world.
Do you think that a lack of emotional literacy has contributed to our current political landscape?
I couldn’t speak to that. What I can say is that being emotionally literate or, as we like to say, emotionally granular, is a pathway to healthy regulation.
When you ask most people how they feel, they say, “Fine.” “Good.” “Okay.” “Meh.” I do a lot of public speaking. Recently, I gave a speech to about 500 CEOs, and I just said to them, “What’s the difference between anxiety and stress and fear and pressure?’ And most of them say, “There is no difference.” And I say, “Well, this is not a trick question. What’s the difference? Come on, just think about it.”
What I find is that people really struggle defining emotions. The more refined our vocabulary is, the better we are to regulate. So now let’s get to the details. If you’re anxious, it’s about uncertainty. We get anxious when we can’t predict the future. When we’re stressed, it’s not about uncertainty. Stress is real. Right now with my book coming out, I’ve got podcasts and interviews and all this. I have a lot of demands, and I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with it all. That’s stress. You have to get help when you’re stressed out. You can take all the deep breaths you want when you’re stressed, but you’re still going to have too many demands and not enough time to get it done.
Just knowing the difference, for example, with those two—anxiety versus stress—you realize that anxiety is probably going to be alleviated through a shift in your mindset. You need to be able to reframe. You need to be able to say, “Marc, you have no control over that. You got to let it go.”
Two emotions that I’ve been thinking about a lot are anger and fear, and how they’re interlinked.
I don’t see them, to be honest, as highly related. Anger is about perceived injustice. I get angry when I feel like I’ve been wronged or when I feel someone has done something that’s unfair. Fear is when there is impending danger. Those are very different experiences.
There’s been a lot written about the ways in which various leaders—for instance, our own president—tap into anger and fear to rally support. I guess I see them as being connected because fear can morph into anger. Maybe that’s the wrong way of thinking about it.
I don’t think it’s the wrong way to think about it, but most people have not learned the skills of emotion regulation. They’re not good with dealing with anger or fear. Without skills, we rely on automatic, habitual, generally unhelpful ways of dealing with our feelings: We yell, we scream, we drink too much alcohol, we binge eat. We do things that are not necessarily good for our well-being, or solving the problem. But when we become emotionally intelligent, we recognize that, Oh, this outside person is trying to gaslight me, or this person is trying to manipulate me, and the reality they’re trying to create for me is not my reality.
Have you ever worked with politicians on their emotional regulation?
I have not been the coach to a politician yet.
Do you have tips for our politicians? It seems to me that we’re in a highly polarized emotional political landscape.
Yeah, I agree. I have very clear goals in this space, which is that I would like for policymakers, anyone in a position of power or influence to understand how emotion regulation either can help or hinder healthy development. And so my vision is that if you really understood how your policies are either supporting or not healthy child development…well, let me say this a better way. My vision is that policymakers would literally have a checklist, just like we have checklists for emissions in our car to make sure that we’re not polluting the environment. My dream would be that policymakers would have to evaluate whatever policy they’re creating to ensure that it doesn’t have adverse effects on children’s healthy emotional development.
Are there policies now that are directly having an adverse effect?
You can think about it from the perspective of giving parents an opportunity to enjoy the birth of their child for more than two weeks. We know that that bonding time is really important for babies, so could we create policies that give parents more time—more government support for that leave.
If you could give people one emotional tool to bring into the end of 2025 to cope with our ever-more complicated world, what would it be?
Can I make it two?
Yes.
The first one is to just adopt the mindset that there is no such thing as a bad emotion, to accept your emotions are real. They’re not something to get rid of. My emotions are data, information [that] is going to be extraordinarily helpful. Don’t sit in judgment of the feeling.
The second one would be the basics of helping people move away from being the self-critic and the self-saboteur, and just moving towards having more self-compassion.
Let me say a third one, this is a big one, is having an “other” orientation. Oftentimes we ruminate when we’re feeling unpleasant feelings, and we separate ourselves. We don’t want to talk about it, we close ourselves off. If we take a moment and think about someone else’s misfortune or someone who’s having a really tough experience and we reach out to them, there is a dynamic impact. When you help other people and provide that support to other people, you see how much it benefits them. And in turn, you benefit. We don’t automatically go there when we’re feeling sad or angry or overwhelmed. Take some time to think about how other people are feeling, and providing support for them. Not only would they feel better—you’ll feel better too.
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