Hey everyone,

This week on The Diary Of A CEO, Steven Bartlett dives into the fascinating world of the brain and emotions with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a world-leading neuroscientist and psychologist whose groundbreaking research is changing how we understand ourselves. Forget the idea that emotions are hardwired circuits you’re born with – Dr. Barrett reveals how anxiety, trauma, and even everyday feelings are actively built by your brain based on past experiences and predictions about the future.

This isn’t just theory; it’s a revelation that gives us immense power. Dr. Barrett explains the concept of the “predictive brain,” how it shapes our reality second by second (often faster than we can blink!), and how understanding this process is the key to managing emotions, overcoming trauma, and living a more intentional, meaningful life. She shares practical insights, personal stories (including her own daughter’s struggle with depression), and challenges conventional wisdom about everything from PTSD and anxiety to the very nature of the self.

If you’ve ever felt like a puppet reacting to the world, or struggled to change how you feel, this episode provides a powerful new framework for understanding your brain and reclaiming your agency.

Here are the detailed key insights and takeaways:

1. The Predictive Brain: You Don’t React, You Predict

• Core Concept: Your brain isn’t passively reacting to the world. It’s constantly predicting what’s going to happen next based on past experiences and then preparing your body to act accordingly. What you sense is largely the consequence of the action your brain prepared.
• Efficiency: Predicting and correcting errors is far more metabolically efficient for the brain than constantly reacting from scratch.
• Examples:
  • Thirst: You feel less thirsty almost immediately after drinking water, long before it’s absorbed, because your brain predicts the future hydration based on the action of drinking.
  • Coffee Headache: Your brain anticipates the blood vessel constriction from your daily 8 AM coffee and dilates vessels beforehand. Miss the coffee, and the dilation causes a headache.
  • Muscle Memory: Efficient movement comes from the brain predicting and automating sequences, not conscious thought for each step.
• Alostasis: The process of predictively regulating your body’s internal environment (energy, glucose, salt, water, etc.) to meet anticipated needs. Your “body budget.”

2. Emotions Are Constructed, Not Hardwired

• No Universal Fingerprints: Contrary to popular belief, there are no consistent, universal biological “fingerprints” for emotions like anger, sadness, or fear (e.g., scowling only happens ~35% of the time people report feeling angry). Expressions and physical states are highly variable and context-dependent.
• Brain Constructs Meaning: Your brain takes sensory input (internal from your body, external from the world) and combines it with past experiences (cultural learning, personal history) to construct an instance of emotion. Feeling anxious isn’t a circuit firing; it’s your brain making meaning of physical sensations in a particular context.
• Cultural Inheritance: How we learn to categorize and understand internal sensations as specific emotions (anger vs. fear vs. determination) is heavily influenced by our culture and language.

3. Trauma & Mental Health Through a Predictive Lens

• Trauma Isn’t Just the Event: Trauma isn’t solely defined by the external event, but by the meaning your brain makes of it, influenced by past experiences and your metabolic state at the time. An adverse event might be traumatic for one person but not another, or traumatic at one time but not another.
• Reversing the Narrative: Therapy often involves helping people change the meaning they’ve assigned to past events, thereby changing how those memories influence present predictions and experiences. You can “re-dose” yourself with prediction error by creating new experiences.
• Anxiety/Depression as Body Budget Issues: Dr. Barrett frames conditions like depression and chronic anxiety as problems with the brain’s “body budgeting” – either predicting large energy expenditures that aren’t needed (anxiety) or being stuck in a metabolically expensive, low-return state (depression, related to cutting costs like fatigue, concentration problems).
• Prediction Errors: Getting “stuck” often involves the brain failing to update its predictions based on new information (e.g., continuing to predict threat even when safe). Learning requires taking in “prediction error” – new sensory information that contradicts the prediction.

4. Gaining Agency & Changing Your Experience

• Step One: Awareness: Recognize that your experience is a construction, not just a reaction. Understand the role of past experiences and predictions.
• Step Two: Responsibility (Not Blame): You are responsible for changing your experience, not because you’re to blame for past events, but because you are the only one who can change your brain’s predictions now.
• Cultivate New Experiences: Deliberately expose yourself to new situations, ideas, and people. This provides the “prediction error” needed for your brain to update its models and learn new ways of being. Start small (“baby steps”).
• Dose Yourself: Like managing anxiety through exposure therapy, you can manage difficult emotions by “dosing” yourself with small amounts of the experience, proving to your brain that its catastrophic predictions are wrong.
• Change the Meaning: Actively work to reframe past events and current sensations. Is that high arousal anxiety, or is it determination? The label and subsequent action matter.
• Focus on Action: You change your predictions most effectively by changing your actions. Acting differently creates new sensory input and lived experience for your brain to learn from.

5. Practical Tools & Concepts

• Body Budgeting: Be mindful of your energy levels. Are you running a deficit? Chronic stress and illness deplete the budget. Prioritize sleep, nutrition, movement.
• Social Regulation: Humans are social animals; we regulate each other’s nervous systems. Seek supportive connections; avoid those that constantly drain your budget. Words have a physical impact.
• Proactive > Reactive: Schedule practices that build resilience before you’re overwhelmed (meditation, NSDR, exercise, spending time in nature).
• Use Your Senses: Ground yourself in the present sensory experience (sights, sounds, smells, touch) to counter getting lost in past-based predictions or future anxieties.

Final Thought:

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work is revolutionary. By understanding that our brains actively construct our emotional reality through prediction, we move from feeling like victims of our feelings to empowered architects of our experience. This knowledge provides a science-backed path toward greater emotional granularity, resilience, and intentional living. It’s not about not feeling bad things; it’s about understanding how we feel them and gaining agency over the process.

Find Dr. Barrett: Learn more about Dr. Barrett’s work, her books (How Emotions Are Made, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain), and research at LisaFeldmanBarrett.com.

Until next time,
The Podcast Notes Team