221. Your Emotional Toolkit for Academic Stress - with Dr Jennifer Veilleux

Many of the students and scholars I speak to struggle with stress, anxiety and overwhelming emotions: about exams, assignments, academic pressure or feeling behind.

So today we're chatting with Dr Jennifer Veilleux, clinical therapist and Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Arkansas. 

Dr Jenn explains all her key practical strategies, rooted in scientific research, that can make up an effective emotional toolkit for students. 

We explore how acknowledging, understanding and regulating your feelings can improve your mental health, your exam performance and your enjoyment of academic life at school or university.

Listen in to discover when to listen to your feelings, when to calm them, and how to stop anxiety and procrastination from running the show.

👇Your post-listening task: leave a comment and tell us which of Jenn’s strategies you think will help you in your studies today.

***

⭐About today’s guest, Dr Jennifer Veilleux: 

📖 Find her book, Open to Emotion: How Acknowledging, Understanding, and Regulating Your Feelings Can Improve Your Mental Health here: https://geni.us/drjenn

🌐Discover more: https://emotioncentered.com/

📱Explore Dr Jenn’s recommended app How We Feel, here: https://howwefeel.org/

 ***

🎓About Exam Study Expert: 

Hosted by William Wadsworth, memory psychologist, independent researcher and study skills coach. I help ambitious students to study smarter, not harder, so they can ace their exams with less work and less stress. 

🎯 Book 1:1 COACHING to supercharge your exam success: https://examstudyexpert.com/workwithme/ 

📘Get Outsmart Your Exams, my award-winning exam technique book: https://geni.us/exams * 

** 

Podcast edited by Kerri Edinburgh.

* As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases on suggested books.

Transcript

Why Emotions Matter For Exams

William Wadsworth 0:02

Hello and welcome to the Exam Study Expert podcast. I'm your host, study strategy expert and revision technique speaker and coach, William Wadsworth. Now, taking care of our emotional state is an important, but I think sometimes underdiscussed aspect of performance in exams. Or if it is discussed, you know, it's it's really kind of quite a surface level and we don't really get kind of deep into the practical tools that can actually really make a difference. And of course, you know, I mentioned the idea of you know the impact on your performance, but of course, feeling a bit rubbish is pretty unpleasant when we feel anxious or stressed or down or whatever. And that's reason in and of itself to do something about it, quite apart from the impact on our exam performance, as I'm sure you'll agree. Now, back in episode 211, we met uh the wonderful Dr. Sarah McKay, who gave us a brilliant overview of some of the biggest lessons from the past few decades of neuroscience research that can really help us develop more effective habits as students and scholars. So we've talked about things like maintaining your focus, managing distractions, your sleep habits, uh, we talked about metacognition, which, as you might remember, is thinking about thinking. So, for example, understanding your strengths and weaknesses and prioritizing more effectively. And over the course of the season of episodes, since we met Sarah a couple of months back now, uh, we've gradually been unpacking some of the big messages that she touched on with the help of expert guests doing a deep dive with us on some of those particular topic areas. So we met, for example, Colin Corby in episode 213 uh to help us take a break from those tech distractions. Uh, we met Nathan Burns in episode 215 to teach us all about the word of metacognition and metacognition strategies we can use when we're preparing for exams. Now, one of the other things Sarah mentioned in her uh overview was the research on uh emotional regulation and how that can fairly unsurprisingly have a big impact uh on our ability to show up with our work and how we uh perform as scholars. Now, I think there's some people that have relatively few issues with emotional regulation. I think there's some people for whom this is a really, really big deal. And then many of us are kind of somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. It's a deal in different seasons of our life. Some seasons it's it's not a problem at all. Uh, and then other seasons, perhaps academically, where we're really feeling the pressure, or perhaps we're feeling like we're behind or it's not going very well. Um, or perhaps there's there's other life circumstances from outside the academic world uh that are causing unwelcome pressure uh resulting from adverse life circumstances in other areas of life outside your studies. So today we're gonna learn some really useful tools to help us deal with all of that uh and regulate our emotions uh when they uh when they when they when they come up. So I'm delighted uh that I've got some expert help today uh in the form of Dr. Jen Veyu, uh, who's a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Arkansas and also a practicing clinical therapist. So she combines both academic and real-world wisdom, which I think is always a particularly potent combination. And she recently published a major book distilling uh some of her big expertise in this area. Oh the book was called Open to Emotion: How Acknowledging, Understanding, and Regulating Your Feelings Can Improve Your Mental Health. Uh, very rooted in the science and in the research, but also really, really practical and useful kind of practical steps we can take in the real world as well. So, as always, you'll find that book linked in the show notes if you'd like to check it out. And I'm delighted today to be welcoming Jen to the stage uh here on the podcast to help share some of the big ideas. There are going to be some very useful and very practical tips we can take from today's episode. So let's meet Jen and dive right in. Enjoy. When we think about emotions, I'm I wonder if a good starting point would be just talking a little bit about, you know, what we know of kind of what's going on in the brain when we experience emotions. Like what do we kind of know about the kind of underlying mechanisms, what kind of drives emotion? Yeah. Maybe give us a little bit of those, those kind of theoretical foundations. Sure.

Dr Jennifer Veilleux 4:32

I'm uh not gonna do a great job of explaining what's happening in the brain. That is not my area of expertise, but I certainly can talk about where um emotions come from and kind of what's happening there. So a lot of people think that emotions come from the situations that we encounter, right? Where you you stub your toe and you're angry either at yourself or at the door, depending on the person. Um, or you think that, you know, a lot of emotions happen in interpersonal relationships. And so that someone else might cause an emotion. You know, a student gets a bad grade from their teacher and they, you know, feel uh angry at the teacher for causing that bad grade. But that's not really how emotions work. Emotions are generated through a cycle. So something happens. Um, I call it a trigger, but it it could be an internal or external trigger. So like students, for example, are often um worried about like thinking about what it might be like to talk in class or thinking about that exam that's coming up. Um and so simply thoughts can be a a trigger for an emotion generation cycle. And then once that trigger happens in our minds, we pay attention to some aspect. So if someone's thinking about, okay, I have to give a class presentation, they might be one person might think of like all those faces looking at me, another person might think of, you know, the teacher evaluating me, another person might think of, I get an opportunity to share this content that I've learned, right? We would tend to attend to different pieces of the situation. And then we're going to interpret that situation in some way. And it's that interpretation or that appraisal that's really critical for the emotion that we experience. So for the person that's like thinking about themselves sort of performing for their classmates, and they might think of this like, well, I get an, you know, I get an opportunity to show off. Um, I get to like think about my skills, they're gonna tend to feel excited about a class presentation. Someone who's attending to and sort of picturing those faces of their teacher or their classmates is gonna think like, I'm gonna screw up, and like um, they're gonna be evaluating me and they're gonna think they're gonna poke holes in all of my arguments, and those people are gonna feel anxious, right? So it's that interpretation, like what we pay attention to in the situation, and then how we interpret it that is really how that emotion is generated.

William Wadsworth 6:59

Why do we have emotions?

Dr Jennifer Veilleux 7:01

We have emotions for all kinds of reasons, and humans aren't the only ones who have emotions. Animals have emotions too. Um, there's a really great video of laughing rats out there on the internet. You can like tickle rats and see their feelings. Emotions are um have a lot of functions for us. Um there's several. So we have emotions because they help our body prepare us for action. So most people have heard of the fight, flight, or freeze reflex. Um, that is because emotions help get our body ready for action. If you're being chased by a bear, which for some people that's what a class presentation feels like, um, then you know, your body needs to like generate um nervous system activity so that you can run away quickly. Um, so that's one function the body kind of helps prepare the emotion or the emotion prepares the body for what we need to do next. The second is sort of self-understanding, right? If we didn't have emotion, we would have to use logic or reasoning for everything. Animals don't have the same kind of higher power cognition as humans do. And so emotions help us decide all kinds of things, right? Like, what do you want for dinner? Well, what do you feel like having? Right? That's an important piece of knowing how you're responding to the world, right? You like some people, you dislike some other people, you like some situations, you don't like others. Emotions are at the heart of all of our evaluative judgments, which tells us what we like about ourselves and what we like about other people. And then the third um function of emotions that's really important is communication. So you could watch a movie um in another language and often have a sense of what's going on because you can see the emotions in their facial expressions or body language, or if you have the sound up, you can hear tone of voice even if you don't speak the language. So emotions communicate faster and more efficiently than words. You know, a parent comes home, um, then they see their kid sort of looking dejected and they're like, How are you? The kid's like, fine. But it's obvious the kid is not fine because the parent can tell based on kind of how the emotion is being expressed and kind of leaking out. So that can be a really important clue to sort of try to dig deeper and check a little bit more about what is actually going on with that person.

William Wadsworth 9:19

Really interesting. So I mean, we we obviously evolved to have emotion for a range of important reasons and and we would we would never want to eliminate emotion from our lives, right? It's a really important thing.

Dr Jennifer Veilleux 9:31

Um A lot of people would love to eliminate emo, well, negative emotions from their life, the unpleasant ones, but they serve a purpose too.

William Wadsworth 9:38

Well, talk to us about that then. So I mean, I think we all have this instinct that uh we we'd all kind of have this intuition that emotion in many contexts can be can be a good thing, even a wonderful, joyous thing. Uh and then there come where it's it can be painful or difficult or unpleasant or uh you know, might even kind of get in the way of us kind of pursuing various calls. Perhaps just tell us a little bit about some of the reasons humans um and in particular, maybe if you've got any and it can link it back to any kind of uh sort of the experiences you see your students having as a professor, you know, the times you see your students perhaps struggling with um, should we say unwelcome emotion. Tell us a little bit about maybe the challenges we as humans and perhaps students in particular might have with unwelcome emotion.

Dr Jennifer Veilleux 10:22

Yeah, I think there's like tons of challenges, right? We have emotions for a reason, they serve purposes, even the unpleasant ones. So um what I know the science says that there's I all emotions have a purpose except maybe one, maybe shame. Um, because guilt and shame are very closely related. You know, guilt is sending all emotions are sending a message. And so the message of guilt is I've done something wrong. And guilt helps prompt reparative action. So when people feel guilt, they tend to go then apologize or maybe do something differently the next time. But the message of shame is I am wrong as a person. That tends not to be particularly helpful. It tends to just kind of get people into mental loops of badness and helps people withdraw from others rather than kind of engaging in goal-directed activities. So shame, maybe not great. The rest of the emotions are good. Even anger, a lot of people don't like feeling angry, but angry helps people right injustice. Anger is something's been unfair, something's been unjust, and that can help people. You know, if somebody thinks that they got an un, I mean, this happened to me when I was a student, like got an unfair grade. Like this question, I didn't get this entirely wrong. There were pieces of this, right? Like, I deserve partial credit. Well, you go up and you talk to the professor, and you're like, this isn't fair. Some of this is right. Sometimes you get those points back, right? Anger can actually help fuel correcting and injustice that can be valuable. So, you know, anxiety isn't the emotion I probably see my students struggling with the most. Um, anxiety and depression are way up in um high school and college students compared to starting in about 2010, rates of depression and anxiety started to skyrocket in young people. Um, and they've kept going up. It wasn't just the pandemic. Some people think it's social media. I don't know that there's a ton of evidence that it's like definitely social media. Um, but anxiety is the one I see people struggle with the most. And anxiety can be really problematic. Anxiety can also be useful, right? There's there's this wacky thing called the Yerkes-Dodson curve. Have you heard of that? So it basically suggests about, tell us about, tell us that there's a relationship, uh kind of uh parabolic relationship between anxiety and performance. So when anxiety is really low, performance suffers. You can think about that. Like if you're like kind of lazy and you're like, I don't care, you actually don't focus as well. You don't kind of tune in and try as hard. But when anxiety is really high, then um it's really hard to think clearly. Um, anxiety gets in the way, you know, people kid kids that test anxiety, like really struggle. You kind of go in and see the questions, and your mind just goes blank. All the information that you study for, everything that you knew is gone when anxiety is really high. But a moderate level of anxiety is actually very adaptive. It's like anxiety can help people focus, like, okay, I know this, um, I gotta try hard. Like anxiety can can help at a moderate level. And so I see students a lot struggling with anxiety and struggling with emotions and thinking if they're having these unwanted or unpleasant emotions, that means that they have to regulate and have to get rid of those emotions. And sometimes that's true. Having an emotion regulation toolbox is really important so that emotions don't get in the way of goals, but they can also facilitate goals. And so my overall message that I send to my students and to my clients is that we need kind of both. We need to be able to harness and use our emotions, get the messages that they're giving us, um, and sometimes listen to those and follow the messages. And sometimes those messages are kind of junk mail. And, you know, a student might be getting the like, you can't talk in class because everyone's gonna judge you. And like that will actually stop the student from talking in class, asking questions, going to the teacher and asking for help, or even just having a conversation. I love it when students come to office hours to just chat with me, but it doesn't happen all that often. And I think students are are scared and that that fear uh keeps them away. And so that's problematic when people don't have those regulation skills uh to navigate their unwanted feelings.

Emotional Sensitivity And Being Judged

William Wadsworth 14:41

I think it'd be fascinating to unpack some of those skills in in a moment. Um I one one of the little kind of context to your question first. And it's sort of perhaps slightly implied in in what you've been saying so far, but I I wonder what would we kind of know about uh, you know, the fact of the kind of individual differences here. You know, we are we all equally sensitive to emotion, or are some of us naturally more predisposed to be more sensitive uh to it to emotion than others?

Dr Jennifer Veilleux 15:08

Yeah, we uh definitely vary in emotional sensitivity. So here's the one piece of more biologically based brain information that I that I have. Uh there are tons of people who study emotion from a brain perspective. I am not one of them. Um, but it is the case that people differ in their sensitivities and we kind of have multiple sensitivity systems. So we have a threat sensitivity system and we have a reward sensitivity system. So people who are highly threat sensitive are um going to be more likely to experience uh what we call negative emotions. So things like guilt, sadness, anger, fear, jealousy, kind of those things. The reward sensitivity system, people who have us who are more sensitive there are more likely to experience kind of joy, um, excitement, gratitude, awe, kind of feelings like that. And so a given person could be high in both. One of my kids is definitely high in both. Um, you could be low in both, you could be high in one or low in the other. So we definitely vary in sensitivity, and it's a normal curve, meaning most people on both of these are kind of in the middle. And then there are some people that are very highly sensitive, and there are some people who are very low in sensitivity. Um, and I think what becomes a problem is when people who are wherever they are on the sensitivity spectrum kind of look one direction or the other and then tell people that they're wrong, um, that people are too sensitive, or that they're, you know, some people are called insensitive or that they're like a cold fish or, you know, an ice queen or lines like that. And there's nothing inherently wrong with being anywhere on the sensitivity spectrum, but people get judged or invalidated for their feelings. Often people who are highly sensitive are told that they're too much, um, especially in cultural contexts where not showing emotion and kind of not displaying emotion is more of the norm. I think here in the US, we tend to be a little more like emotionally expressive than y'all are in the UK.

William Wadsworth 17:16

Maybe, maybe.

Dr Jennifer Veilleux 17:17

The stereotype at least.

The Thinking Threshold Explained

William Wadsworth 17:20

That's the stereotype. You you've we've sort of been chatting about some of the um the the kind of I guess the the the uh challenges of of uh emotion that can can can come up for people. Um you you kind I think you couldn't determine the thinking threshold uh when it comes to to uh sort of starting to think about uh against some of the challenges with too much emotion. Um tell us what sort of thinking threshold is is about as a concept.

Dr Jennifer Veilleux 17:45

Yeah, so um my grad students and I came up with this term a couple of years ago when thinking about um working with um therapy clients who often talked about how when they were feeling really strong emotions, or sometimes we would even see it in therapy sessions, um, that it was really difficult to think clearly. And so um emotions are basically like a wave, they rise and fall. And so we sometimes have people chart their emotions. And so if we think about what, we know where a baseline emotion is. So most people, you know, if we think about a scale from zero, not feeling at all distress and a hundred, the most distress that you've ever felt. Most people on a given day hover around like 15, like pretty low distress, uh, sometimes even lower, right? Because people generally live their lives in sort of mild positive affect, most people. And so we tend not to feel a lot of distress, and then something happens and there's sort of a wave of emotion. And people who are more sensitive have a but much bigger wave, right? They tend to react much faster, they tend to get their peak of the wave is really stronger, and then it takes longer for that emotion to come back down. And so we can chart that out and have people kind of look at what their emotional wave looks like. And then I often ask people, like, okay, at what level, you know, from zero to 100, at what level does it become difficult for you to think clearly? And it's not that people who are strongly emotional aren't thinking. People are thinking, but they're not thinking clearly because the emotion is really infusing itself into the thoughts. That's what emotions do. They color our thinking and our perspective. And so at what level do people feel like it's hard to think outside of the emotion, um, that they have trouble thinking kind of holistically and getting perspective? And the answer to that, I've asked hundreds of people that question at this point. And the answer is typically between 70 and 85. That up until that point, people can like kind of retain their thoughts. And then above that, it's very difficult to think clearly holistically. So that's the thinking threshold, that level of which thinking becomes impaired. And what we suggest is that when people are above the thinking threshold, that they don't try to use emotion regulation strategies that rely on thinking because they're going to be impaired. So, for example, the most studied emotion regulation strategy in the last, maybe ever in the but in the last several decades is called cognitive reappraisal. So that is trying to think about the situation from a different perspective, right? I talked about how interpretation or appraisal is really key to the emotions that we experience. And that means if we think about the situation in a different way, if we reappraise, then that actually changes the emotional experience. But that is incredibly hard to do when emotions are really high because we can't think clearly. It's very hard to get perspective. The emotion wants you to just think in the way that it has infused your thoughts into thinking. And so when someone's above their thinking threshold, then they need to do strategies that are more uh behavioral or sensory. So that's the time to um, you know, go on a walk, go outside, do uh, I like to sometimes have my, particularly when someone's angry or anxious when their like body is really activated, to like hold an ice cube in your hand, because that is a cold uh sensation that actually helps start to cool down the nervous system. Um, I've had people had one client once who used to like do a headstand um just to like spiel the blood rush to a different place. Um but something kind of behavioral and sensory tends to be good. And then when the emotion comes back down, and then when you kind of get below your thinking threshold, that's the time to use more thinking based strategies.

Cognitive Reappraisal For Test Stress

William Wadsworth 21:48

Very interesting. Yeah. So being conscious of where you're at in the journey of processing whatever emotion you're you're working through. Uh, you know, if it's at an earlier point where the emotion levels are still quite high, then these these kind of behavioural strategies, the the ice cube, the stand on your hair, uh go for a walk. And and then when when the emotion starts, when the emotional wave starts to starts to starts to wear down a little bit, then we can bring in some of these other thinking tools maybe. So tell us a little bit about cognitive reappraisal men. So you mentioned that as a very well-studied tool. What what is that? And can you teach us how to do it or the basics of how to do it?

Dr Jennifer Veilleux 22:30

Sure, yeah. So cognitive reappraisal is all about kind of trying to think about the emotion from a different perspective. And I think some people don't like cognitive reappraisal. Some people don't like it for all kinds of reasons. And there's pros and cons to pretty much every emotion regulation strategy that's out there. But cognitive reappraisal is about trying to think about the situation from a different angle. It doesn't mean trying to think about it positively. Not all situations are positive, right? So like a classic example that people are thinking of is like you're you know out with your friends and you see like someone you know in the middle of the road because they've just been like knocked over by a bicycle or something. Right. And you might feel bad for the person and feel really angry at the person on the bicycle for knocking them over and not paying attention. Right. That's a pretty understandable reaction. Well how would you think about that situation in a different way? Well like what if that person on the bicycle was rushing home because their dog is deathly ill? Like what you know when you can think about like what the other person might be going through that actually like it still sucks for the person that got knocked over and is kind of discombobulated, but the anger goes down because you're trying to think about what else might have happened in that situation that might have kind of prompted this event. So cognitive reappraisal you could think about like is there a a potential positive outcome? What might be going on in the other person's mind? What would I do differently next time?

William Wadsworth 24:13

Anything that's sort of thinking about the situation from a different angle, being able to think about it more broadly can in counts as cognitive reappraisal How would you apply that to the case that you mentioned anxiety related to to tests and exams as a as a common source of emotional challenge for for some students. How might you suggest we kind of apply the idea of cognitive reappraisal to the idea that I've got an exam coming up and I'm really anxious about it.

Dr Jennifer Veilleux 24:42

Yeah so it it it will depend a little bit on the circumstance, right? Because the nature of the the class or relationship with the pro the professor, how important it is like we can't have emotions about things that don't matter. And so one way to reappraise is just reminding yourself like, okay, this test is coming up I'm nervous about it, but this is not the only test. Sometimes it is um but like there are four tests um this semester if I don't do as well as I want on this test, there are going to be ways to make it up right that's a perspective taking approach. And so thinking about the bigger picture rather than just this one thing. There are uh ways to think about cognitive reappraisal in other ways too right like a a way to reframe a little more positively is that is consistent with some of the literature on kind of mindsets that this test is an opportunity for me to like demonstrate my knowledge and this, you know, people who can approach tests like it's a little bit more of a a game or can be fun tend to enjoy classes and testing better, right? That this is not an opportunity tests are not just about evaluating they're also an opportunity to like think and show what you know even multiple choice tests, right? Of like all right, if I can get down to I know it's these two, um that is showing some thinking and showing learning. And so when people think from a learning perspective rather than an evaluation perspective school tends not to be quite so bad and the anxiety might still be there but it would go down a little bit.

William Wadsworth 26:21

Interesting interesting I I don't know if this wouldn't be an example but something I've sort of long taught my own students I don't tend to be an expert on test anxiety, you know. But you know I work with students preparing for exams and for many there's a conversation that comes up at some point about oh you know feeling a bit nervous I'm feeling a bit anxious. And sometimes something I'll suggest is as is um thinking about your plan B, which feels a bit counterintuitive, but often I've found that there's so much pressure on the plan A. I I've got to pass this to progress with my career and everyone think this is for that or like I've got to you know I've got to pass you know I've got to get this grade to get into university and and like there's such strong focus on that plan A to the point where like the plan B is totally inconceivable that of course we're so you know there's so much pressure and anxiety sort of surrounding plan A. And and sometimes if we just step back a moment and think about that plan B and we think it through and we go well actually what would happen if this didn't work out oh well maybe I might not go here but I might go here instead or or maybe this would kind of be my reset plan. And actually maybe there's a silver lining there because while I wouldn't get this, I would get this and that might be give you know it might be da da da da da da da um and so you sort of make friends with that plan B route and then it just takes a little that weight off your shoulders I think.

Dr Jennifer Veilleux 27:40

Yeah that's a reappraisal that's a perspective taking right when people are really zoned into there's only one possible outcome of course anxiety gets higher. But when there's other outcomes right then there is less pressure on plan A. And you know the thing about anxiety is all about feeling uncertain um and that the the future is potentially threatening or dangerous in some way. And so people are like people want certainty because that feels comfortable but of course the world isn't certain and people don't have as much control over their future as they think right like even if you do great on an entrance exam, it doesn't mean that you're going to get into the school that you want because someone else might have done 14 other extracurricular activities or know someone on the admissions committee. I mean there's just a lot of like luck and happenstance and pretending like it isn't doesn't help. And so having multiple plans and being able to pivot is a form of cognitive flexibility, which is super important. Because when people have their you know only plan A, they're also ruminating about it. And ruminating is an unhelpful strategy. Rumination and worry are when you lump them together they're called repetitive negative thinking. And it's sort of like spinning your tires in the mud not kind of going anywhere, just revisiting I need to have this what does this say about me if I don't um I have like people are lots of shoulds and lots of like why me's and those things tend not to promote growth or movement in any direction. So they're unhelpful. So getting perspective in a plan B can kind of help people get out of that like start to get the car moving again rather than just spinning your tires in the mud.

William Wadsworth 29:31

What else is in our toolbox? What are some of the other tools that we might um find useful today well it might be useful to talk about procrastination.

Dr Jennifer Veilleux 29:39

That's a fun one that comes up a lot because um people procrastination is really emotionally based it doesn't seem like it is but it is so some of the research talks about procrastination as essentially screwing over your future self. So what happens when people procrastinate is they look at this task they have to do like studying for exam or writing a big paper or something that kind of has multiple steps and it's often high stakes. And they look at all those things that they have to do and feel overwhelmed. And so when people feel overwhelmed and anxious, what do they do? They want to avoid it. And so they're like I'll feel like doing this more tomorrow. And so what that does is it sort of assumes that your feeling is going to be different tomorrow than it is today. And the future you is going to just feel more capable of tackling this thing. And so then you go watch TV or like go out with your friends or you know do play video games or just do something else. And all that does is punt all the stress over to your tomorrow self and your tomorrow self is almost certainly not going to feel any more like doing it than yourself today. Now there's a couple instances where that isn't true. So the difference between procrastination and strategic delay is that procrastination you are putting off an important task to the future and there are negative consequences to that and it doesn't feel good. Strategic delay involves putting off something to the future but with a strategy behind it. So like if you are sick like you have COVID or the flu, like can you think clearly? No. Might you feel better tomorrow? Yes. That's a strategic delay when people try to kind of work through um like push through emotional distress or or you know physical pain like that's not maybe going to work so well. So take a break, rest, drink water, go to sleep and then tackle that project tomorrow that's a strategic delay. But procrastination is like assuming that you're going to feel like doing something tomorrow but you're probably not and then tomorrow it's going to feel even more overwhelming. And so procrastination has a ton of like people choosing short-term emotional relief over kind of accomplishing the task. And there's some really interesting psychology behind that that I think that people assume that to do something they have to feel like it. And I see this in therapy all the time and it's definitely applicable to school and like you know people care about their futures but sometimes the class is not that interesting or the you know they're studying for an entrance exam and that's not interesting or they have to fill out applications for college or grad school or whatever and like that's daunting and like not fun, just busy work. And so people don't want to do that which makes sense. And so there's this implication that you have to feel like it to do it. We see it in exercise too right like well I don't feel like running guess what I didn't feel like running this morning either. Like I would have rather hit the snooze button it's raining outside I did not want I did not feel like running in the dark in the rain. And I could have just said well I just won't I don't feel like it so I won't and a lot of people make that choice. But that implies that that feeling is for doing and the reality is that doing is for feeling it's kind of the opposite so this morning when I didn't really want to run I was like well I'm gonna go run on the treadmill instead I dislike running on the treadmill. I don't like it nearly as much as running outside. And I couldn't run for as long because I had to it just took a little bit longer to get things going. But I did it and then I felt good about myself. So when people do things then they feel better. So what we really need to do is pivot our mindset into like doing is for feeling rather than feeling is for doing and that can help offset a bunch of the procrastination there's all kinds of tips and tools to navigate procrastination and kind of that like navigating that short-term emotional relief. One of them is like just do it and then see how you feel afterward, right? Trying to give yourself a reward just even if you don't feel like it, do it and then afterward spend 20 minutes on video games, you know, use the reward after rather than putting it off and also trying to think more about the long-term consequences. So if somebody always makes this like trying to think of like what would if I always made this choice, if I always put this off, what would that say about me in the future? Do I want to be this kind of person? And most people are like no I don't want to be this kind of person. So do the thing now and then see how I feel. And generally people do feel better and they kind of get into a groove once they start working on it. And then they feel better and then they don't feel like as much of a procrastinator. Sorry that was a just that was a long rant.

Label The Feeling Then Choose

William Wadsworth 35:00

No it's really interesting and and one of the top things that our listeners like students around the world say is a challenge is is procrastination. So very interesting to to to bring up thank you for for doing so I think there's a there's an interesting thing in what you were describing there, which is almost that you know you you're kind of doing it anyway, but there's there's there's a little bit of um kind of acknowledging how you feel about it as well. You sort of pausing and stopping and recognizing how you feel and just giving a little bit of space to that, I think, and that kind of helps you then go right. Almost take a step back from you know something like meditation where I've already started step back and kind of just observe it and go, oh that's interesting. I'm feeling that about it. Right, let me get on with it is is there a part of that it's um yeah yeah that is so important.

Dr Jennifer Veilleux 35:49

I think in my book I talk a lot about how you know it's important to build a toolbox of emotion regulation skills, right? Like knowing those grounding skills, knowing how to use cognitive appraisal um you know part of the part one of the things around procrastination is things feel really overwhelming. So I'm sure one of the things you teach your students is like break things down into steps because doing things in small chunks is much easier. You know, if you have an application to fill out well like fill out your name and address and then that section that's like what do you want to do with your life? Okay, that part's a little bit harder how do we break that into differ into sentences, right? So problem solving involves kind of coming up with steps and making things less overwhelming, right? Not just circling around in the dryer in your mind, but putting together a list. So all those things are really useful. Having a bunch of strategies to navigate emotions is important. But it is also really important to acknowledge how we feel if we don't acknowledge how we feel then feelings exert a stronger influence on our behavior. So if we can stop and say wow I'm feeling really anxious about this application and ideally having a little curiosity like isn't that interesting? What is the anxiety trying to tell me? So in my book I talk a lot about like how to learn a more how to how to identify which emotion you're feeling because some people are really good at that and some people struggle. Like they know they're feeling bad but they don't know if they're feeling anxious or angry or disappointed or kind of a cluster of those feelings. And so learning what feeling it is and then trying to sort of learn like okay well what is that feeling trying to tell me if you're having a feeling it means that something matters. So what matters? Well if someone's anxious something matters about the the test or the project or the application whether it's that thing or what it represents. So somebody who wants to go to a particular college or university right that plan A that you were talking about, right? And they feel like if they don't do well in this thing that will have a domino effect on the sort of rest of their life well yeah then a lot of meaning has been put on this one exam. And so when someone realizes that and can say that out loud to themselves, it's actually easier to contradict it and be like, okay, well this exam might matter but it's probably not the only thing in my entire world right maybe I can be a worthwhile person even if I like get a B or a C on this test, I can probably still get into a university without acknowledging the emotion though, the emotion just exerts a lot of influence on behavior. So yes, stopping and kind of attending to what it is that we're feeling and what the emotion is trying to tell you can help you decide if you want to listen to that emotion or not, right? Just like with a friend sometimes friends tell us stuff and like we listen to it and they a friend gives us advice and we take it and sometimes we listen to the friend and we're like that is horrible advice. I am not going to take that well emotions are kind of the same way. They're trying to give you advice they're trying to be helpful but they're not you so they don't always they they are like realistically right they come from you but like emotions are trying to move you in a particular direction and you don't have to listen and sometimes you should so you can't make an informed decision about what the emotion is wanting you to do unless you stop and like reflect on it with a little bit of curiosity.

William Wadsworth 39:12

So this is the tool of emotional labeling.

Dr Jennifer Veilleux 39:15

Emotional labeling is the tool of knowing what you're feeling and then um I would extend that a little bit more into thinking about not just what, but what you're feeling but sort of what's behind it. So in my book I talk about values and sort of like the values that people have, right? Someone might have a value of achievement or they might want to get into university because they want a career as a lawyer because they want to help poor people around the world. And so they have a value of you know social justice. It's not just about achievement but it's about like I want to do this because I want to help people.

indfulness And Support As Training

William Wadsworth 39:51

And so reminding people that like their feelings are coming from somewhere and that can help trying to identify what you're feeling and then sort of what value is underneath it can help people have a little more compassion and curiosity about their emotions, which helps a lot you mentioned earlier that if the you know the emotional state's quite intense, you might do the kind of behavioral sensory strategies. And then when you're you're sort of a little bit more able to have a gauge thinking brain, you know, you you're below the thinking threshold you know you can start to see the cognitive reapraisal things. Where does labeling come in? Can we kind of use that anytime? Does that need to be one bit below the thinking threshold where does where does that come in? That's a great question.

Dr Jennifer Veilleux 40:36

I think that it could be either it sort of depends on someone's practice. If somebody's not very good at labeling their emotions it's effortful and they're going to need cognitive attention. So I recommend like to me labeling is what I like to call a like an emotional conditioning strategy right like athletes go to the gym, they lift weights they do conditioning drills, right? The soccer players like you know, or I guess football over there, right, you know, they um they do like foot exercises so that when they're in a game, they can actually respond in the moment when the ball's coming their way and they can negotiate with their teammates, right? We do conditioning drills ahead of time. I think that emotional labeling is something to practice regularly including when not acutely highly emotional above that thinking threshold, developing an emotional vocabulary so that when the emotion comes around, the labeling is easier and we don't need as much cognitive effort so that it can be done above the thinking threshold. There's a couple strategies to do that. One is like there are some pretty decent apps. The app that I recommend the most is called How We Feel it's a really good app designed by people who study emotional intelligence was originally the the concept was developed for kids in schools to improve socioemotional intelligence. But it it breaks emotions down into kind of four quadrants are you feeling negative and kind of jittery or are you feeling negative and droopy so negative high or low energy or positive high or low energy. And then once you pick a quadrant it bubbles out and you get to pick a specific word and it has definitions of the words it also can ask you to like say what were you doing right before you started to feel this way so it can help people start to understand like what kinds of things trigger their emotional responses. So using an app like that where it prompts you a couple times a day and you can start practicing what emotion words mean and kind of doing a self-reflection on like how positive or negative do I feel, how energetic do I feel right now, those kinds of things can be really useful ahead of time. And sometimes even just using a number right I talked about zero to 100 like even if you don't have a word but you can figure out how distressed you are like okay I am a I am like in an 88 distressed right now that's above my thinking threshold. Sometimes that can be enough and then when you come back down like okay what was that? Was that um was that anger? Was that fear? Was that sort of a combination of a whole bunch of things? Was I feeling jealous and guilty and like angry all at once and you can sort of sift through it later as a way to then teach yourself and kind of learn that labeling so that the next time maybe it'll come, the words will come a little bit faster.

William Wadsworth 43:38

You you're describing emotional labeling as almost like being a like conditioning you might do. So it's it's not just something you do in kind of response reactively, you know, it's something you work on um proactively as a sort of conditioning so you have have have uh almost a stronger muscles to to be able to emotionally regulate I guess. Are there any other conditioning strategies that that might be helpful to to for people to Consider along similar lines.

Feelings Aren’t Facts Plus Closing

Dr Jennifer Veilleux 44:02

Yes. Another one I would recommend is mindfulness. Um, being able to kind of attend to the present moment. You know, we spend a lot of times in the modern age thinking about the past or thinking about the future and not kind of grounded in what is happening in our minds and bodies and environment in the present. So mindfulness is really helpful as a like a brain training, attentional strategy. Um, when people are anxious and they're thinking about the future, and you know, that this test means that can't get into this job or this university and then this job, and then I'll fail at this, and I won't be able to find a partner, right? There's just the train that keeps running. Mindfulness helps people ground it in the moment and like right now, I need to breathe. Um, you know, right now the sun is shining outside, you know, right now my skin is a little bit flaky, like like just trying to ground in the current moment. And so mindfulness is an excellent um conditioning strategy. Another is um building social support, right? Like, and being in in my book, I talk about expression a little bit later, but I think a lot of people, um a lot of students who I work with feel like they can't share their feelings because they think their feelings are really different from everyone else's. And they find when they eventually share that their feelings are not actually that different from everyone else's. Like, you know, in my class, um I taught an emotion class for um undergraduates last spring, and like I think 75% of them had some kind of anxiety disorder diagnosis, which they told me, but they didn't tell each other. They were all so anxious. And I kept wishing that they would just talk to each other. I could like make a class into group therapy, um, and then they could share with each other. Because I actually think if people knew that other people were going through something similar, um, that they wouldn't, I they they they might still feel anxious, but they wouldn't feel bad about their anxiety because it would feel more normative. So practicing expressing and sharing emotions which can feel really uh vulnerable, but I think that is a huge kind of conditioning um strategy to use that really helps people.

William Wadsworth 46:22

Vulnerability is very powerful. Um, fully yeah, echo everything you've you said there, Jen. I mean, uh one one thing that I always notice, almost every student, every scholar I talk to has this sense that they feel behind or they're not doing enough. And and mathematically that can't be true for every single person. That's right. You know, um everybody's feeling bad that they're not doing enough. Everybody's feeling like they're behind. And and really kind of okay, maybe in some specific, very specific cases, uh, there might be a specific where you, you know, if you missed a lot of time through illness or something, they might actually you know became genuinely got a little bit of catching up. But generally, nine to nine times out of a hundred, we're just fine. We've just it's just the feeling. It's not absolutely fine. It's just how we feel about it.

Dr Jennifer Veilleux 47:10

Yeah, which is actually an an important point, right? I think we often assume our feelings are real, so that's important. But our feelings do not necessarily reflect the facts of the world, right? Feelings are feelings, they're not facts. Um, and so someone might feel behind, and like that feeling might motivate them to do more. Like there can be some positives, but like objectively, you're right, not everyone who feels behind that cannot be true. And people are often not as behind as they think. Um, and when as people assume that their feelings are correct, right? That's that that kind of anxiety, like, well, if I talk in class, then people are gonna judge me. Well, like, no, you're gonna talk in class and people are paying far less attention to you than you think. Um, you know, there's a great scene from the TV show Shits Creek where um one of the characters is going for a driving test and his sister's like, they're not listening. They they don't care about you. He's like, they do. They care about everything I do. And she's like, they don't. They don't care. They are paying more attention to themselves than they are to you. And he has this real freeing moment where he realizes that because it's true. People are like, yes, if you're speaking in class, are some people paying attention? Yeah, kind of. But they're thinking about themselves more than they're thinking about you. And we conflate our feelings with what's going on in other people's minds. And it's just not true.

William Wadsworth 48:30

Fascinating stuff. And Jen, there's so many really interesting ones we've we've covered. Is there anything else that we've missed that you think is really important that, you know, perhaps thinking of your students that we haven't touched on today? Is there anything particular that we haven't mentioned that you think we we should have done?

Dr Jennifer Veilleux 48:45

Well, I guess I would just say that like emotions are um, emotions are important to have and they are important to regulate. And so people need to learn flexibility in both, right? We've got to learn how to feel our feelings, harness them, kind of listen to the messages because sometimes they're guiding us in an important direction. And sometimes they are kind of too big or out of whack of the situation. And we actually do need to regulate them to be able to attend to our goals. And so people need both. It's not, you know, a lot of times people come to me and they're like, I need coping strategies. It's like, actually, you need to like lean into your feelings a little bit more and not try to, once you feel something, immediately get rid of it. We need both pieces. And I think that's what makes emotions so difficult and why emotions are really complicated is there's no good recipe for when to feel and when to regulate. Um, it's very person-specific. And so I think that learning more about you know your own emotions, emotions in general, can help people start to figure out intuitively that that that flexibility. And that's what I think is really important. And that's why I wrote my book, is because there's a lot of science out there about emotion that like is hard to get behind paywalls that um I really want people to be able to have access to.

William Wadsworth 50:05

Um well, that brings us nicely to our to our closed Jen. Tell us where we can go to find out more as well as more about the book. Where would you suggest people go for further reading on this subject?

Dr Jennifer Veilleux 50:16

Yeah, the book is called Open to Emotion: How Acknowledging, Understanding, and Regulating Your Feelings Can Improve Your Mental Health. Look at that right there. Um, and so you can get the book on Amazon or on the American Psychological Association website. But if you Google the name of the book or you Google my name, you should be able to find it pretty easily.

William Wadsworth 50:38

We'll pop a link in the show notes as well to help people help help people find it as well. And it's it's very, it's very interesting, very readable, but lots of really good, um, lots of really interesting signs, but also lots of it's very practical. There's a lot of really good practical things in here uh as well, as as listeners probably have got it into our conversation today. It's it's been really applicable, really practical, really useful. Um so I'm sure lots of people will take lots and lots away from it today. Um thank you on behalf of us all, uh, Jen, for being so generous with your time and your wisdom. Um thank you once again. It's been such a pleasure to chat.

Dr Jennifer Veilleux 51:10

Yes, thank you. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 51:13

Well, that was good, wasn't it? I found myself taking notes. If you need a reminder of anything from today, head to the website for a write up of this episode, as well as lots more top knock advice and resources. That's examstudyexpert.com. See you next time.