Why are emotions so hard to understand for humans?

Well, we're going to start with a big question, Zoe, Chris.

In the deep end.

Yeah, well, I guess I've made a bit of a career out of working with people on their emotions.

And as a psychologist, you know, I was in the NHS of 10 years and then I worked in a very kind of small private practice.

And I would say, you know, all of that work, however diverse it was in terms of what people were dealing with,

mostly the common problem was there's this feeling or set of feelings that I have and I don't want to have them.

And there's these other feelings that I would like to have more of the time,

but I'm not sure how to access them.

And nobody has this sort of manual for how to manage emotions and how to understand them.

And we don't even really have a great vocabulary for them. You know,

we're quite limited in, you think about the sort of the diversity of the different sort of

minute feelings that you can have throughout the day that apply to different situations.

It's all slightly different. You know, if you say, I feel joy one minute, joy in a certain scenario, it might feel quite different to joy in a different scenario. You know, the qualitative differences are there. And you can feel that, but we don't necessarily have the words to express it. And we certainly don't have the sort of models to understand it.

And, you know, it's only in recent years that people have even started to talk about them.

So we're in the early stages, but it's, you know, exciting.

Are we doomed to fail in some regard there as humans that we have this very rich inner experience, which is very

difficult to communicate, to measure, to understand, to export to somebody else, hey, this is

what I'm feeling. And then you have just this limited language, which is constrained not only by

the words you know, but even by the language, you know, German has a ton of words that we don't have in other languages that almost

unlocks your ability to understand emotions in that way. Are we fated to kind of always be

scrabbling to try and understand emotions, but never fully doing it? No, and I don't think,

...