I was lying on a wooden floor in the Amazon jungle, convinced I was finally seeing the truth. The colors were sharper. The connections were obvious. Everything made sense. There was just one problem: I am a psychologist who studies how people get tricked into believing things, and right at that moment, I was being tricked. What the ayahuasca did to my perception that night is a more extreme version of what is happening to every one of us every single day.
Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett calls it affective realism. Your feelings do not just shape what you think. They construct what you see. In 2021, an ecologist named Martin Scheffer tracked emotional versus rational language in books and newspapers from 1850 to the present and found that we are living in the most emotionally engineered information environment in modern history. Most of us have no framework for navigating it.
In this episode of Inner Propaganda, I explore how emotions work as constructions rather than reactions, what the body budget is, and why your physical state determines what you perceive as threatening, and how a 2007 research study revealed that simply naming an emotion precisely is enough to reduce its intensity. I also share the story of Robert Piché, a Canadian pilot who, in 2001, glided a powerless aircraft 120 kilometers over the Atlantic with 306 people on board and landed safely, because he had learned years earlier in a prison cell that fear does not have to steer you in the wrong direction.
What you will discover:
Why the emotional state you are in does not just color your mood but determines the version of reality you actually perceive
How a 2021 study tracking 170 years of language reveals that emotional engineering in media and politics is not accidental, it is systematic
Why modern neuroscience suggests emotions are constructions your brain builds in real time from your senses, your body, and your memories, not reactions to the world around you
What the body budget is and why being tired, hungry, or stressed makes threats appear more real and more serious than they actually are
A practical three-part framework for working with your emotions in any high-stakes moment: Label it, Use it, Change it
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