Prisoners who appear before a judge right before lunch are denied parole nearly 100% of the time. Prisoners who appear right after lunch are paroled at close to 65% of the time. The judges aren’t corrupt. They’re hungry. Their depleted bodies produce unpleasant feelings, and their brains attribute that unpleasantness to the prisoner:
“I feel bad, therefore you must be bad. You stay in jail!”
This finding, which by the way later have been critiqued as simple time management rather than judicial bias, is a window into how every human brain works. Yours included. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett has spent 30 years proving something that upends everything you think you know about your feelings:
“Your emotions are not reactions to the world. They are constructions of the world.”
Your brain doesn’t detect anger, discover fear, or receive sadness. It builds them from your body’s metabolic state, your past experience, and the concepts your culture wired into your head.
If emotions were fixed reactions like anger circuits triggered by insults or fear circuits triggered by threats, you’d be a passenger. You could suppress them, medicate them, or white-knuckle your way through them, but you couldn’t shape them.
Barrett’s research says otherwise. You are not a passenger. You are an architect. Not because you can snap your fingers and choose joy, but because the ingredients your brain uses to construct emotion are things you can influence.
That’s what this course teaches you to do.
The Emotion Architect is a 19-lesson course built from Barrett’s book How Emotions Are Made and published research on emotions and emotional granularity. People with higher granularity visit doctors less, use less medication, drink less when stressed, retaliate less when hurt, and report richer relationships. Words seed concepts and drive predictions. Predictions regulate your body and determines how you feel. Each new word is a new tool. Each tool changes what your brain can build.
This course moves through 4 phases:
By the end of this course you’ll have a complete system: 4 pillars you can practise every day, a growing vocabulary of emotion concepts, and the understanding that your emotional life is not fixed by your genes, your childhood or your personality. It’s limited only by the concepts you’ve learned. And learning never stops.
“We are not slaves to our emotions; we are architects of our emotional experiences.”
(Lisa Feldmann Barret)
Let’s build.
