Name: How Emotions Are Made: Interview with the Author Part 1 - The Body Budget
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T16:38:46.000Z
Duration: 22 min 34 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic quantifiers

Hello everyone, and welcome to Simon's Book Club, where we'll be discussing some of the best books in psychology, neuroscience, consciousness, mindfulness, relationships, and many ideas that are good for the body.

Gerund

Over the past few weeks, I've been discussing Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions Are Made, and talking about some of the major ideas that could really change how we understand emotions altogether.

Now we've undone some of these major myths about emotions.

We don't have a lizard brain and then a mammal brain like the triune brain model suggests.

Emotions are culturally taught to us, and not all cultures feel the same emotions, and some don't even have the concepts of anger or sadness that we have.

We can't ever know what emotions other people are feeling without them telling us, since we can't read emotions on other people either.

But if you think that people scowl when they're angry, well, according to the data, we only scowl about 30% of the time that we're angry.

But we also scowl when we're concentrating, or when our tummy's hurt, or when we're trying to follow the plot of a bad TV show, which I can't think of anymore because I barely watch any TV.

Emotions instead are a combination of three things.

The first is our interoceptive sense, what it feels like inside our bodies.

The second is a situation and the circumstances that we're in.

And the third is the emotional word that we were taught to associate with these circumstances.

And whenever we feel an emotion, it's our brains making a prediction on what our bodies should feel based on past experiences.

And it's giving us different squirts of chemistry, like cortisol, or oxytocin, or glucose, or whatever our brain thinks our bodies need at that moment.

When we feel this cocktail in our bodies, we apply emotional concepts that we were taught in the situations that we were in, as we think that they're similar enough to label similarly.

Then we usually get the same behavioral patterns that we're accustomed to.

Similar trains of thoughts, similar things we say, similar patterns we follow.

Now, our interoceptive sense is deeply tied into our body budgets.

Basically, our brains act like the finance department of a big company, and it allocates resources when needed based on forecasting.

We don't react to situations as they happen.

Our brains will make a prediction, and then it will send us the resources that our bodies need before the situation arises.

If you want to buy a car, for example, it's better to have the money ready, as opposed to having to take out a loan and then paying for it later, because you have to pay interest on that as well.

Your body doesn't want to pay interest either.

And so your brain is predicting what the body will need beforehand.

So this body budget that the brain manages needs to be replenished, which makes sense.

You need to replenish your financial budget so that you can continue to pay for rent and groceries.

Most of us don't have unlimited funds, so we gotta do the things that replenish our bank accounts.

We need to replenish the resources that our brains are sending to our bodies.

And we do this replenishing, most importantly, through sleep.

If we're not sleeping right, our body budgets will be severely depleted.

And I think that you could agree with this.

Not getting enough sleep feels pretty f*****g brutal.

And for me personally, I know that when I'm operating on six hours of sleep or less, then

I'm a lot more irritable than I usually am.

Now, apart from just sleeping, getting in some rigorous exercise and eating healthily and getting sunlight and connecting with friends and loved ones all also replenish our body budget.

This is what Lisa Feldman Baird suggests in the book.

And it made sense to the friends of mine that I've explained this to.

I've talked about this with a lot of people.

So I hope that this makes sense here as well.

Where I went next with this idea of the body budget is when things started to get hairy.

Not physically hairy, metaphorically, the body didn't get hairy, clearly.

Anyhow, this is where my train of thought went.

With the idea of a body budget, I kept on thinking about how it seems like we're just replenishing our body budgets and we're just getting it back into balance.

It sounds to me almost like we're living paycheck to paycheck and doing what we can to pay back what we've spent.

But that's not a way that I want to live.

So I wondered, can I accrue health like how people accrue wealth?

I wondered, what's it like if we live with a body budget surplus?

What's it like if we do all the things that are good for our health?

Like if we've worked through all of our childhood traumas through therapy and worked through all of our attachment issues, what's it like being a body budget billionaire?

Now I didn't see the answer to this in the book.

I'm having a little bit of difficulty understanding the body budget in some ways.

I know that it's a metaphor and I think I might be pushing the metaphor a bit far.

I'm wondering what would it look like if a body balance is perfectly balanced, if a body budget is perfectly balanced?

Is there a possibility in which it's not just that we're making incremental gains back, but can we operate in a body budget surplus rather than a deficit, so to speak?

So first, let me just reiterate what I've said before in print and in conversation, which is that all metaphors are wrong.

And when you're trying to communicate a complex scientific idea with a metaphor, you choose the metaphor that's least wrong for your purposes.

Everything about body budgeting is metaphorical.

The actual process we're talking about is a process called allostasis.

And allostasis is the process by which your brain anticipates the metabolic needs of your body and meets those needs before they arise or just as they arise, but usually attempting to do it beforehand because that's what's most metabolically efficient.

And really what you're trying to optimize here is metabolic efficiency.

You shouldn't be thinking about a body budget like a bank account that you can fill up or draw down on because literally, that's really not what we're talking about.

More or less, we're talking about maybe like an account where things are constantly flowing in and out all the time.

Maybe the best way to explain allostasis, body budgeting is the metaphor for it, is to compare it to homeostasis, which is the concept that people seem more familiar with, which is reactive regulation to a set point.

So when it gets too cold, you put on a sweater or you turn up the heat or you move around a lot.

You're trying to keep your body temperature within a specific range because if it gets too low or it gets too high, you die.

Temperature regulation is more like a thermostat, more like homeostasis.

But the majority of the brain's regulation of the body is not really around a set point per se.

The goal is not to reach a particular level of surplus.

It's more to optimize the efficiency of spending.

But I think that still some of the metaphor works really well because you can make deposits, you can make withdrawals, you can have savings.

Like if somebody else is helping you with a task, if somebody else is even present, who you trust and who you like, things will be less expensive, metabolically speaking, and things will be more efficient.

And if you're stressed in a moment, like for example, when you eat a meal, if you are stressed socially, somebody's around or you read something or you think of something that is going to make metabolism less efficient, it costs you basically the equivalent of 104 calories.

It's as if you ate 104 calories more than what you actually ate just in loss deficiency.

Really allostasis, I think the technical definition is trying to find balance in change, which means that you're always, like if your cells are working and you're alive, you're spending resources, right?

So your basal metabolic rate, for example, is that's the cost of just keeping your body alive.

You don't move. You don't learn anything.

That's just if you're lying still, not going anywhere, not doing anything, not thinking about anything.

That's the cost of keeping your body alive.

So the idea here in body budgeting is that you're attempting to keep things very metabolically efficient.

And the best way to do that is to get enough sleep and to eat healthily and so on and so forth.

More importantly, the research that exists on what is helpful to your mood, what is harmful to your mood, what behaviors you can engage into that will be helpful to your health or harmful to your health.

That research, I think, is pretty solid and is known pretty well.

And we can interpret that research in terms of allostasis.

But it is useful for people to understand what the behavioral evidence means in the absence of that math.