Episode 40: Why You Feel the Way You Do: The Science of Emotions with Reneau Peurifoy
Discover the science behind your emotions with author Reneau Peurifoy in this inspiring conversation with host Jay DePaolo. Learn why we feel the way we do, how emotional triggers form, and how understanding your inner world can lead to healing, balance, and a more fulfilling life. Gain practical tools to manage anxiety, build emotional intelligence, and reconnect with purpose.
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Podcast Transcript:
Hello world and welcome to the Choices, Books and Gifts for you. Always have choices. My name is Jay DePaolo, owner of Choices Books and Gifts in New York City, a store dedicated to health, wellness and recovery community. For over 30 years, I am the host of this podcast. You always have choices where we dive deep into stories of transformation, healing, and personal growth. We can be found at 220 East 78th Street, between Second and Third Avenues in New York City, or online at Choices gifts.com.
So I'm proud to present our guest, Reneau Peurifoy. I'm going to read a little bio on Reneau. So we know who we're dealing with and it'll help you understand him a little bit better. Today we welcome Reneau Peurifoy, a renowned author, speaker and counselor for over 20 years with experience, who holds a master's degree in counseling and has dedicated his career to helping individuals navigate their emotional well-being.
He is the author of several transformative books, including Why You Feel the Way You Do. When He's Not Writing or Speaking. He enjoys exploring the outdoors, staying active, and continually learning about the mind body connection. Through his work, Reneau continues to inspire individuals to unlock their potential and live a more fulfilling life. Reneau, good afternoon and thank you so much for joining us.
It's a delight to be here. Thank you for inviting me. So great. Great, great. So if it's okay with you, I'm going to go into some questions for you. Sure. All righty. So the first one I have is what inspired you to write, why you feel the way you do and what makes it unique amongst other books and emotions and mental health.
Well, I've always been interested in behavior and emotions. In fact, just as kind of maybe a side note, back in my office in high school. Star Trek first came out and my nickname was Spock. So because I was the science geek, so I was into biology. I had we raised chickens and, you know, different types of animals and stuff.
And, like, I had the only trained chickens on the block. We had grapes. And so with grapes, you'd get them to stand up on boxes and stuff. And. And in high school, Conrad Lorenz just fascinated me. He was the first person to, to, describe imprinting in birds, where the first call note or the first, like a spot on a seagull that they see that imprints is, you know, the parent and just always been interested in the whole idea of emotions and so much misunderstanding of the out there.
So, just over the years, you know, I've just continue to just be fascinated with the whole idea of behavior and emotions. That's great. I like, I like the Spock story. Yeah. Can you explain the core premise of the book, and what do you hope readers will gain from it? Well, I take the readers on kind of a little journey, and we start off with this basically saying, what are emotions?
Why do we have, what are the different emotional circuits we have? Yeah. Then I talk about triggers and, some of the condition, emotional responses that cause people problems. And I get a little bit deeper into some of the core response patterns we have and wrap up with the three things that make people happy. I just find that given all of the anxiety and anger and depression and stuff nowadays, I think it's a very important topic.
So that's that was kind of a last where I wanted to kind of wrap it up with. I definitely, definitely agree with you on everything you just said. The title suggests a deep dive into the why behind our emotions. What is one of the most surprising reasons why people feel the way they do? Well, I think maybe we need to talk a little bit about what our emotions because there's so much misunderstanding.
And when you look, I like to watch movies because they're always displayed as such. It's crazy the way sometimes, you know, especially the robots and stuff. Not. I'm watching the UK series on humans right now with the synthetic beings, and I just find this very interesting. But you have, and up until my 2000, most of the neurobiology research was what we call cognitive.
So why how do we think how we reason? I cite years. But the only guy that was really doing extensive work was Jack Pontzer. And he came up with seven basic core emotional circuits of people have. Now, what is an emotion? Well, neuroscientists look at them the vitamin like three categories or what we call affects. They really use the term affect.
And you start with sensory affects, which are things like thirst, hunger and an affect drives you to do something. In fact, the word emotion comes out of the Latin word to move. And that's what emotions do, is they cause you to move. And the stronger the emotion, the stronger the urge to take some kind of action. So your sensory affects like pain, pressure, hunger, you know, or excuse me, like pain or temperature.
They cause you immediately to move. You know, if you get too hot or too cold or too much pressure and the next set of what they call the homeostatic effects and these cuts create a balance in the body. So that would be like thirst and hunger. So the thirstier I am, the more I want to drink something, right?
Or the hungrier I am, the more I want to eat something. So then on top of that is the next layer. What do we call the emotions. And there's seven basic ones and one of two of the really surprising ones for me. One is that the play circuit and it's an actual circuit of the brain. And one of the first things that Jack worked with was the play in rats.
And he could cut off all the thinking part of the brain and so on to play. And it's a very deep seated desire that all mammals have. If you look at any mammal, infants, you know, babies or kittens or puppies or whatever they want to play. And that's how we learn interactions, social interactions and even as adults, it's something unless it's got them squashed, that we still like the enjoy play, we like joking and that type of stuff.
Another interesting circuit that I found was the second circuit and all babies one explore the environment. If
you've watched any baby, they're out there licking things, chewing on things you'll feel and things walking around. And that's how you want to see what's in the environment. Is it safe or is it some good stuff or some bad stuff?
In fact, that's why when you're sitting in a room, if somebody walks in, the first thing you do without even thinking about it is you look over to see who is there, or you go to a new place. One of the first things you do is you kind of scan around just to kind of check out what's around me, and that's an actual emotional circuit inside of you.
And those are two that we don't think of as emotions. But they're drivers just like anger. And the other type of stuff. Another thing that I found interesting is, you have two fear circuits. You have one which is for danger. And that gets counter. The counter of that is, of course, anger. So anger and fear are kind of flip sides of the coin.
They're both have to do with threat. But then there's another thing that we commonly call, separation anxiety. Jake called it the panic circuit. And so all babies, when they, you know, their parent is separated from them, whether it's a kitten or a human or whatever, they go into distress. And then there's a there's a complimentary circuit called the caring circuit, and the parent which then responds to that.
And that's part of what binds us together as human beings is why we miss people when they're away from us. So, I found those just the neuro neurobiology is interesting when you get into it. It's all about just basically dealing with needs. In fact, if you want to really sum up why do we have emotions?
They're there to take care of needs okay.
Can you explain the core premise of the book? What do you hope readers will gain from it? Just that? Well, I think a couple things. Number one, an understanding of why they feel the way they do, hence the title of the book, but also some real concrete tools for how to manage their emotions more effectively and just a little bit more successful, happier life.
I mean, that's a broad. I do that from a lot of different ways, but that's essentially where I'm about is giving people tools. I've done a lot of teaching in my life, and I'm a teacher and my books reflect it.
Excellent, excellent. Okay. The title suggests a deep dive into the why behind our emotions. What is one of the most surprising reasons people feel the way they do?
See, that's a little hard to boil down in a simple answer, but I think it's we feel the way we do because we have a need that's unmet. In fact, that's essentially if you want to get anything out of the book of a single thing, it would be listen to your emotions because they're telling you about some need that's not being met.
And then the in fact, that's what you do in counseling, right, is you identify somebody has got anger or fear, okay. That means they're being threatened somehow. So what is the threat? How do we deal with it in a realistic way. So all the emotions have some basic need they're addressing. And it's important to listen to those because it's just information.
And so now that I have the information, what I do with it where people get in trouble is to quit listening to the emotions of the or the information they run from the emotion, or can they react the wrong way to certain emotions? Can that be bit? Well, with it, emotions are meant to be acted upon, not acted out.
Okay, so an emotion is simply a need. Now what you do with that, if you're not listening to the emotion, you can either escalated, you can bury it, or you can do something that's destructive. A lot of it has to do with childhood training, you know, the way you were brought up and how you've been taught to deal with stuff.
Okay, good, good, good. How much of our emotional experience is shaped by biology versus environment? Mental. Or, as you said, upbringing? Well, it's you know, it's both, like those circuits I was talking about earlier. The emotional circuits, they can be squashed, just like if you're buying feet like the old Chinese shoes do, well, deform the foot.
Emotions can be turned off, or they can be enhanced. And plus there's, you know, some people have more of one circuit than another, just like some people are better at math or you music or something else. Right. So there's that variation which then interacts with your environment and your upbringing, which either enhances or suppresses, different emotional circuits.
Cool. Very, very cool.
What role does the subconscious play in shaping our emotional responses? This is where I think people we talk about triggers a lot, and a trigger is simply a conditioned emotional response. Now, people have oftentimes heard about conditioned response. If I, hook you up to a wire and every time I say purple, I give you a shock.
Pretty soon when I say purple, you'll start jerking around right now, I can tell you I'm going to disconnect the wire, and I'm never going to give you a shock again. And you can believe me, but I guarantee you next time I say purple. Because that's what we call a conditioned emotional response. And a lot of our life, we have these things.
For example, your taste in food, you know, food from other cultures tastes funny because you haven't been conditioned to it, right? Music. You know, people say, I know what I like when I hear it is smart. Actors say, you like what you know, when you hear it again, what you've what you've been conditioned to say thing with fashions.
You know, the fashions from 100 years ago look funny. The fascists from today are going to look fat and look funny, you know, ten, 15 years from now. Yeah, because that's what you get conditioned too. And so a lot of our response to, to life are these conditioned emotional responses. And most of them service pretty well. It's when you've had some kind of trauma or something and you have a negative conditioned response.
And then there are ways to quiet that down, just like with the wire example, if I keep saying purple and not give you the shock and you know, relax yourself, you can get to the place where you no longer react to that. And that's essentially a lot of what I did when I was working with anxiety disorders is teaching people how to desensitize to the different conditioned responses that they had.
That's terrific. I really I found that a very interesting answer.
In the book you explore the impact of early life experiences on emotions. How can someone begin to heal from emotional wounds from child, childhood? It's a little bit complex to give a very simple answer, but I'll try.
I talk about, core response patterns. So, for example, let's say you had parents who, every time you got angry, they would overreact. And so the child learns that anger is dangerous. And so they develop that that response pattern that whenever anger comes up, they suppress it. We can label that that anger is dangerous. And putting a label on it just gives us a way to think about it.
Right. And so now what we do is we start looking for signs of, where the as an adult, I would say, you know, okay, you're gripping the arms of the chair and you're telling me you're not angry. Okay. Every emotion has some kind of response that we do to it. And so we go back and look the times when was the person aware that they were angry?
What were you doing? What were you thinking? Okay, those that's your language. That's your indicators to tell you that you're angry or sad or whatever. And so whenever you see that the future that tells me that tells you that you're angry about something. So it's just a matter of going through the what's been going on lately, what's going on with my relationships, what's going on with work, what's going on with the kids?
How about my life goals, friendships? Somewhere along the way, you're going to say, well, this happened, but it wasn't that big a deal. Well, the fact that you're responding to it tells me it is a big deal. So do something about it, right? Right. It's so interesting because I'm so curious. You know, I asked that question, and I'm sure the answer is not that simple.
And that's why you should read the book or simply talk to you like, because that was such a good example of a childhood. How do you then heal that? How do you, you know, fix that to you when they sense the yelling and screaming and the overreacting? Is there a way to counter react that as an adult so you don't, you know, jolt every time you hear the word purple?
So we go through desensitization. You can desensitize literally to anything. I mean, look at what people do. And in terms like a war and a war zone or something, the things that people can desensitize to or a hospital ER room or whatever. So it's a process of going through that desensitization. You do it by number one, controlling, your reaction through, like, I might read like with anxiety, I might use relaxation response, but also your self-talk becomes really important.
For example, I worked a lot with people that had panic attacks. Right, right. And so some of the types of things they would say to themselves is anxiety is not dangerous. It's just uncomfortable. They've always been in control, even when they felt like they weren't. So I, I'm even though I feel like I'm out of control, I can still act and respond.
So things that are really reality based that they can tell themselves because otherwise people start doing these things. Oh my gosh, this is terrible. I can't stand I'm going to sound you know, and they start doing that negative self-talk. So you have to have some rational, positive self-talk that's going to counter those fears that are coming up. And you don't believe them at first, but as you practice them and rehearse them and learn more about what's going on inside of you, they become more real to you and then they become really effective.
I would imagine different people have different times, but if I was working on something, when can I expect to get a little ease from it or learn how to deal with it? Is there a pattern three months, six months, a year? Well, it you know, it depends on how severe the program was, right? If it's just like if I ask somebody where they had their panic attack six months before they came to saw me. Hey, that were quick and easy, you know. Three, four months they're doing find somebody where they'd been surfing for 20 years. That was a much longer project. Right? Right, right. So it's hard to give an exact number
For a general audience because.it really has to do with, with the how it started. Absolutely, absolutely. I certainly get that.
You discuss emotional triggers in the book. How can someone identify and manage the triggers effectively? Well, you know, a trigger is just a conditioned emotional response like we talked about with the purple example. Right. And the only triggers you really have to worry about are the ones that are interfering with your life. Because we all have triggers.
I mean, it's they tend to have a negative connotation, but when you're watching a movie and the spooky music comes up, that's the trigger. You've been conditioned to respond to that. Yeah. You or whatever.
Everything is going wonderful, you know, something is going to happen to just a few minutes, right? So likewise, when you're around people, people that you know well, there do certain behaviors that you sort of expect something else to happen and a lot of times something almost unconscious expectation.
But that's just again, our conditioned emotional response. So the only ones that really you need to deal with are the negative ones, the ones that are interfering with your life in some way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Excellent, Excellent. It's just I'm enjoying this conversation a lot. You're a pleasure to talk with. How does improving emotional intelligence help with personal relationships both at home and in the workplace?
Yeah, that's a term. And I don't really address that directly in the book. But emotional intelligence has to do with being able to read people. And I look at it more from the ability to read yourself, okay, can I really figure out what's going on with me? Because again, emotions are messages that you need to listen to.
Yeah. If you don't listen to them, they're going to keep pushing at you harder and harder until you do something. Usually that's self-destructive yourself. You know it's not good for yourself, right? Right. You know, if you got a resentment, you're hanging on to your printing, pretending you're not resenting, you know, at some point in time, you know, you get the over serious effect goes up right?
Yeah, yeah. Is that like a response of ours for to we try to run from these negative feelings we feel or, you know, like you said, you know, try to, you know, I'm squeezing the chair, but I don't even realize I'm squeezing the chair again. That's childhood training, right? If you've been taught either by example or direct instruction that certain things are bad, then you tend to suppress them.
If you grew up in an environment where your emotions are allowed and you're able to say, I'm angry, so what are you angry about? Okay, so what are we gonna do with that? Or I'm a frightened. Why are you frightened? Then we deal with it, and that's. Then you're going to be. Your emotions will be friendly. I used to use the term, you know, get friendly with your emotions.
Yeah. That's a healthy upbringing. Yeah. Which, unfortunately, unfortunately, a lot of people don't have. I didn't get one. Yeah. You know, and culturally, you know, in some cultures, you know, they tend to look at certain emotions negatively. And sometimes that has to do with just the reality of the way it was 100, 200 years ago. You know, you grew up in a very harsh, dictatorship where if you say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing, bad things happen to you, you know, suppress any emotions is really, it's very beneficial right now, even in this country, you know, around the world, you talk about some countries where they're very suppressive, right? Go to China. You're not supposed to feel certain things. You do certain things in the public. Right? So you learn to really keep a tight lid on a lot of what's going on inside of you. Yeah, yeah. You don't get off. You don't have a secret police to come off right? Absolutely. Yeah. In today's fast paced and often overwhelming world, why do you think so many people struggle with, understand their emotions?
Well, I think it's just there's not a lot of good education out there. There's not a lot of. Yeah. And a lot of what's said about emotions really is not that accurate or it's very partial, and people don't have a lot of good information on it. And again, where do we get our emotion from? We get it from TikTok.
We get it from the various social media. And, you know, so a lot of negativity out there. Well, and people are teaching that really don't know what they're talking about. Right. You got some teenagers, got a million followers, you know, talking about things, you know, and then another kid, he knows absolutely nothing about it.
Alright ,How can people strike a balance between validating their emotions and not letting them dictate their actions? It gets to the old, you know, idea of know yourself, right? The more you know yourself and are comfortable with yourself, you accept that. Yeah. I'm just funny that way. You know, one of the things that was most gratifying to me is when I was working with anxiety disorders a lot, and a lot of my people would go to the anxiety conferences.
When you're these people in the self-help group, they have these buttons. So I'm anxious. I thought that was great. You know, they talk about how, you know, I gotta talk tonight or tomorrow. I'm not going to sleep tonight, but I'll probably sleep good. The next slide, that's just. They understood. That's just how I am in the world, you know.
And that doesn't mean you have to again act out your emotions. But understanding that yeah, I get, you know, I get uptight easily. I have a very reactive system, which is why I really enjoyed working with the anxiety disorder people. I play this Asian game called Go, and, and I go down to the golf club, I, I get really excited, you know, it's fun, you know.
Is this thing something you came up with as part of the therapy? No, I just I just enjoy it. My, my wife's Asian American. We lived in Japan for two years. I say so, yeah. It's a real thing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's a about 3000 years. So but that's another, that's another program.
What is the connection between emotions and physical health. And why is it important to address both. Well, it's been pretty well documented that, emotions can have a big impact on your health. Take, for example, if you're, well, look at any president from the time they start office to the time they leave, they've aged about ten years.
And I don't care what president you are. And the reason for that is because they're under constant stress, and that stress is releasing all kinds of corticosteroids, which suppresses the immune system and the body repair system of the body. And so that's probably the simplest example. I think all the presidents need somebody like you to hang out with them.
Well, and if you feel a world crisis that they're dealing with. Alright, can you share a moment in your own life where understanding your emotions led to a transformative change?
Well, the one that I mentioned in the book, that's kind of funny is, I grew up. My dad was military. Right. So it was not okay.
You know, embarrassment was not something I wanted to feel right, doing things wrong. I didn't want to do things wrong. You know, being a perfectionist. And when I was living in Japan, a long time ago with my wife, one of the things I noticed is we'd go to the department store and after a very short period of time, I'd be crabbing at or you picking up things.
You know, I know it's hard. I just think of me be like that right. But, you know, your spouse is nice because they'll point stuff like that out to you, right? Softly, kindly or. Well, anyway, so as I thought about it, I realized what's going on is my Japanese was just very minimal, you know, the culture I didn't understand.
And so I was really embarrassed because I didn't know how to behave. And so what I would do is when I would go in, I start to get uptight, I assess it. What's going on is I'm feeling embarrassment. And of course, as soon as I did that, I could, I experienced it. And while I don't like it, okay, it would pass very quickly.
And now I could. My rational mind kicks in saying, this is what happens when you've got some emotion you're suppressing, is you're putting so much mental energy into suppressing it. Your cognitive ability to think gets suppressed. You're not able to think as rationalization are we are. And so when you are able to just acknowledge the emotion, now, you're able to access the rational part of your brain again.
And that's a real key, key thing. Very, very cool. Have you noticed any recurring challenges that people face when trying to understand their emotions? Well, I think the hardest thing is when you have something that you're not okay with, whether it's, you know, like with me, embarrassment or anger or some aspect of yourself that you're not willing to really face, because again, emotions are just information.
And if you've got some hidden part of yourself, you're not willing to deal with, then that part is going to keep coming up and causing problems in your life. Okay.
What are some of the practical two strategies from the book and listeners can use to better understand and regulate their emotions? I think you more or less answered that one. So I just want to, to ask you just in general what, what should we know? What should we understand? Is there anything that you specifically want to talk about that is, is you know, important to you?
Well, I'd like to talk about the three things that make people happy because there's so much happiness in to that. Yes You mention that. Yeah, they're very you know, when you think about it, they're very easy relationships, purpose of meaning, relationships, purpose and meaning. So meaning relationships are the number one big one, right. If you have a lot of relationships that you can be honest with those people and they can be honest with you if you have a sense of purpose for why I'm getting up in the morning, and if you have a meaning by that, I'm talking about, why am I here?
How do I make sense of things when they go south? You know, what's what's my place in the larger universe, you know, because that's what that meaning and like, why am I getting up? For what reason? What? That's. That's for purpose. Purpose. That's, you know, I I'm getting there because I need to take care of the kids or whatever.
I want to, you know, be a good cook or whatever. Meaning has to do with like, the existential, spiritual side of life again, you know, is there a God is not a god. You know, what is the meaning of life? You know what is what? Why are we here? You know those types of questions, right? Because that gives you a context for everything else.
Your purpose kind of comes out of that a lot of times. But also it gives you a context for when you look around the world, you see all the stuff going on in the Middle East, you know, and in Asia, you know, in this country and stuff. In fact, when you look at people who've gone through really bad things, typically they'll have at least two of those things.
They'll usually have a relationship that serves as an anchor and some kind of a meaning or, religious or spiritual belief system that helps to give them a context to get them through that situation. And when you look at especially younger people today, what do you see? They have no relationship. They have no purpose.
They have no sense of meaning.No wonder there's so much anxiety and depression and anger. Yeah. Oh
Why do you feel the way you do is the book. And, besides getting to choices books and gifts, Reneau is going to tell you where else where you can purchase this wonderful and amazing book.
The easiest place is my website. Why emotions.com same as the name of the book. Why do emotions.com? You've got access to all of my different, books there. Links to Amazon and other places to divorce of the publishers of the audio versions. Plus I got a bunch of freebies up there, so. Well,
you mentioned the, I was it was the three that the three most important things that we just went over relationship purpose and meaning are they discussed in the book.
And that's the last three sections. The last three chapters. Yeah. I, I it's so, so important. Yeah, yeah, I must say I thoroughly enjoyed this and, and I hope if it's okay with you, we can meet up again and go over some of your other books too, or whatever it is you like to talk about. That's how interesting I find you.
Oh, yeah, I'd love to. Yeah. The other ones are on anger and anxiety. I've always said anger. Oh, been good for me in life. So the big ones. Anger. I especially anger in today's world. Oh, yeah. So with that, we will wrap up this episode of choices podcast. I hope our time together was inspiring and motivating. Stay empowered and stay well.
You can, watch this episode on our website at Choices Gift Stock. And, peace and blessings and thank you so much. I want to thank you so much for being with us. And, and I had a great time. So thank you
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