David Rock
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Matthew Lieberman
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NeuroLeadership Institute
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Excerpt from the NeuroLeadership Institute's "Stay Cool Under Pressure"

Think your emotions run you?  This transcribed excerpt from "Staying Cool Under Pressure" with David Rock and Matthew Lieberman from the NeuroLeadership Institute talk about how simply by naming an emotion allows our brains to control them a bit.  Interesting...

My little interlude in this talk is called D3 theory: disruption, disambiguation and detachment, or “why labeling makes you feel better”.  That’s probably the simple way to remember it.

So, does anyone know what these are?

{Inaudible responses from audience.}

I heard a couple of people say it.  The worry dolls.  OK.  Guatemalan worry dolls.  The legend of the Highland Indian villages of Guatemala is that if you have a problem and share it with a worry doll… They give them to their young children -- they say before going to bed tell one worry to each doll, and then place them beneath your pillow.  Whilst you sleep, the dolls will take your worries away.  OK.  So this is just one more example of the sort of common and received wisdom that we all know that putting your feelings into words can have some really nice salutary effects for us.  There is actually a very old idea both in Western and Eastern cultures. In Western culture -- you can go back more than three centuries to the philosopher Benedict de Spinoza who said that an emotion which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea thereof. And then the founder of my field of psychology, William James, two centuries later -- this is one of the quotes that probably got me most into all the work that I do and his principles of psychology. He said that the present conscious state when I say “I feel angry” is not the direct state of anger; it is the state of saying “I feel angry”.  The act of naming them, these emotional states, has momentarily detracted from their force. And then if we go half way around the world to the East, in the context of Buddhist texts, it has been written that the skillful use of labeling introduces a healthy degree of inner detachment, since the act of apostrophizing or speaking to one’s moods and emotions diminishes one’s identification with them.   So, this is the region of the brain that I tend to focus about 60% of my waking hours on. 

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