Tiago Forte's Blog, page 36

Introducing the Forte Labs OneNote Resource Guide

We’re very proud to introduce version 1.0 of the Forte Labs OneNote Resource Guide. It is a public, shared notebook containing videos, tutorials, add-ons, technical and reference information, and other resources. The notebook was created with Microsoft OneNote and is designed to allow anyone to quickly learn the ins and outs of the popular digital note-taking program.

Click here to view the Resource Guide

Watch the video below for instructions on how to view the shared notebook and, if you’d like, save it to your own account. Keep reading below to find out why we created it.

Why have we created it?

Our mission is to enable everyone in the world to build a “second brain” – an external, centralized, digital repository for the things they learn. This starts with digital note-taking apps, which we believe are the category of software best-suited to this endeavor.  

While Evernote was the first official note-taking app we supported, the Building a Second Brain (BASB) methodology doesn’t require any specific app to work. As long as it meets most of the essential requirements, any software program can do the job.

We are beginning to do more live workshops and corporate trainings, and we’ve learned that not everyone has total freedom to use any tool they want. Especially in institutions (from schools and libraries to nonprofits and companies), many people don’t have the ability to install new programs, or work under strict regulatory or privacy rules, or simply don’t want to use something different than their colleagues use.

For that reason, we’re going to be developing resources on how to use a range of the most popular note-taking apps out there, starting with Microsoft’s official note-taking app OneNote. OneNote is installed on many millions of machines around the world, either by itself or as part of the Office productivity suite. It is free to download and use indefinitely, available on a wide variety of devices, and well-supported by an active development team.

We believe that OneNote represents one of the most accessible and widespread opportunities to give everyone the chance to build a second brain of their own. We hope this Resource Guide helps you adopt digital note-taking as an essential part of your productivity, no matter which particular program you use.

Subscribe to Praxis, our members-only blog exploring the future of productivity, for just $10/month. Or follow us for free content via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

Top 10 Things I Learned from Chimp Essentials

I recently completed an online course called Chimp Essentials, by well-known writer and freelancer Paul Jarvis. The course teaches everything you need to know to be able to effectively use the email service provider Mailchimp for your online communication and marketing.

I took Chimp Essentials to finally get serious about email marketing after years of running a (mostly) online business. I had opened a free account years ago and used its basic features to start sending emails to a couple hundred people. But it had grown steadily over the years into a tangled mess.

I had numerous vaguely defined lists, with overlapping subscribers I was paying for two or three times over, and no ability to target specific groups or track their interests. I knew that email could be my most powerful communication and sales tool, and that getting a handle on it was going to be essential for future growth.

The course contains 49 short videos with basic to intermediate lessons on how to use Mailchimp to:

Manage an email list
Send out regular emails for newsletters, sales pitches, or other purposes
Customize an email template and signup form
Create automated email series that are triggered by certain events
Integrate Mailchimp with popular web platforms
Keep your subscriber list healthy and engaged

Below are the top 10 most useful things I learned from the course, and how I’ve put them to use in my business.

If you’re interested in taking Chimp Essentials, just join the waitlist here and you’ll receive an email a few days later with a one-time chance to purchase the course for $30 off (otherwise it opens publicly twice per year). Purchase the course and forward your email receipt to hello@fortelabs.co and I’ll invite you to an exclusive virtual workshop for Forte Labs followers.

My productivity and knowledge management methods are a great complement to email marketing, helping you consistently produce and publish quality work to send to your subscribers. I’ll answer any questions you have, show you my best tips and tricks, and share a few templates and tools I use to make email marketing as easy and effective as possible.

#1 – Authenticate (not just validate) your sending domain

I knew that I needed to “validate” any domain I wanted to be able to “send from.” In other words, if I wanted my mass emails to appear to come from hello@fortelabs, then I needed to validate the fortelabs.co domain.

Here’s what it looks like once that’s done (in Account > Settings > Domains):

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But I didn’t know that, if I wanted the maximum number of my emails to reach subscribers and not be classified as spam, I needed to also “authenticate” the domain. This takes a few extra steps, but will improve my deliverability.

It’s really hard to be successful at email marketing if your emails aren’t even being delivered!

#2 – Redesigning the default email signup form

For years I had used the default email signup form provided by Mailchimp. I thought, “If Mailchimp recommends it, it can’t be that bad right?” Boy was I wrong. The thing is ugly as hell:

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Jarvis led us through the process of making a few simple design tweaks, resulting in an equally simple, yet far more attractive signup page:

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This is now a page that I’m proud to put in my social media profiles and send to anyone who might want to follow me.

#3 – The difference between groups, merge tags, and segments

This terminology had long bedeviled me. No matter how many explanations I read or examples I saw, I could never quite wrap my head around how I should use these features.

But after this course I got it:

Merge tags are specific labels or attributes that are “applied” to a subscriber to save details about them (such as where they signed up or which product they purchased)
Groups can be based on merge tags, and put people who share certain tags into a group that you can send an email to (such as people who purchased a particular product)
Segments are groupings of subscribers based on conditions that you set (for example, people who signed up on a certain page AND haven’t purchased a certain product)

You can think of these three features as “layers” of groups, each one drawing on the one below. So groups can be made up of combinations of merge tags, and segments can be made up of combinations of groups. This allows you to set finely tuned criteria for who receives a given email.

Merge tags

Think of merge tags as changing a single field in a subscriber profile. For the page on my website collecting email addresses for people interested in my coaching program, I set Squarespace to change the “Coaching” field to “Yes.” Here’s what it looks like for one subscriber:

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Now I can add everyone who shares that tag to a group or segment, and send them a targeted email without bothering everyone else.

Groups

Groups are like multiple-answer questions, where every subscriber can choose as many as they want. For example, I set up an integration between Teachable (my online course platform) and Mailchimp to automatically add anyone who purchased a course to a master list called “Teachable students,” and also assign them to a group according to which course or courses they have purchased.

Here are all the groups, with abbreviations for each course name. I haven’t set up the integrations for a couple courses because I haven’t needed to send them an email yet:

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Now I can send specific emails to each of these groups, or see which courses a specific subscriber has purchased:

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Segments

Unlike groups, segments can only be created within Mailchimp. So I was able to “import” people to groups using an external integration with Teachable, but the more sophisticated capabilities of segments are exclusive to Mailchimp.

What are these capabilities? Basically, I can create “conditional statements” to automatically place people into segments based on specific criteria. For example, I created a new segment called “Coaching Upsell,” with the following conditions:

Subscriber HAS expressed interest in coaching (i.e. they have submitted their email address on my coaching page)
Subscriber IS in BASB group (indicating they have purchased the course)

If I save this segment, it will be automatically populated with any subscriber who meets those two conditions in the future. Why would I want to do this? For example, to periodically send an email to graduates of the course asking if they’d be interested in coaching.

#4 – The best strategy for managing email lists: One List

I’ve known for some time that the best strategy for managing Mailchimp is to have a single, all-encompassing list of ALL subscribers, and then to break them into groups and segments based on different criteria.

This is the best strategy because groups and segments can only be created within a single list. So the more you break up your following into separate lists, the more you limit your ability to create broad-based groups and segments that apply equally to everyone.

With separate lists, you might end up sending the same email to the same people multiple times if they have subscribed to more than one list. I found that every time I launched a new product or service and sent it to all my lists, I was “punishing” my best customers by sending them multiple identical emails, since they tended to be subscribed to multiple lists.

Mailchimp’s pricing also penalizes the multiple list approach. Monthly pricing is calculated based on “subscriber per list,” meaning that you will pay for each list the same person is subscribed to. Ugh.

Although I’m not yet able to completely move to One List, due to various restrictions with external integrations, I’ve made considerable progress since taking this course. I merged about 5 lists into other lists, differentiating subscribers by groups instead.

I’m now down to only 5 lists, instead of 10:

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#5 – The 3 ways to add people to groups

One of the biggest challenges I had previously was how to track the various interests and opt-ins of my subscribers. For example, if someone signed up to be a beta tester for a new product, how could I keep track of them until the next time I had something to get feedback on?

The only way that I knew of was to create a completely new email list, send them the signup form to subscribe, and then just pay for that list over months and months until the next time I needed to email them. With all the interests and special projects I am managing at any given time, this was quickly becoming untenable.

The solution was groups. Instead of giving each interest its own list, I could add everyone to my master newsletter list and then assign them to an “Interest group.” This has the added benefit of sending them my occasional newsletters, keeping in touch between long periods of inactivity.

I only have two interests so far, but will add more over time:

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What I learned that made this possible is the three ways to add someone to a group:

Add them in a behind-the-scenes way using WordPress or Zapier (in case you don’t want them to see which group they’re being added to)
Manually add them to a group (if it’s a one-time thing that doesn’t need to be automated)
Let them pick groups for themselves on a signup form (if you’re okay with groups being public)

I’m currently only using “behind-the-scenes” methods of adding people to groups, but eventually I want to allow subscribers to select from a menu of interests, and then only receive emails related to those interests.

Here’s an example of what those checkboxes will look like when someone is subscribing to my list:

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#6 – Landing pages for specific interests

Related to the problem above, I’ve needed a way to allow people to follow certain interests, without me having to pay for numerous lists. I had previously created a new list each and every time, which was breaking the bank.

When I transitioned these interests into groups, suddenly I had a new problem: how could existing subscribers add themselves to these groups? If I sent them the standard signup form for my newsletter list, it would give them a “You’re already on this list” error. This was a big problem, since I tend to have a core group of followers who are involved in many different things I’m doing.

Enter landing pages.

This is a relatively new feature from Mailchimp, which allows me to create dedicated web pages for specific interests. It also allows me to customize the page and make it visually attractive. Here’s the one I created for people interested in the Mesa Method, which I linked to from my blog and from my ebook of the same name:

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On this signup page, even my existing (and most loyal) followers can choose to follow this interest. All I have to do is create a new segment based on this “signup source,” and it will include everyone who signed up on this particular landing page.

#7 – Welcome email

I had heard many times that sending new subscribers a “welcome email” was a crucial practice for keeping them engaged. But in Chimp Essentials I learned just how critical it is. Welcome emails typically have higher engagement rates than any other kind of email, and help new subscribers remember what they signed up for and why.

Instead of the standard, quite ugly “Subscribe confirmation” email, I designed a new welcome email to automatically be sent to every person who subscribes here:

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Besides welcoming them to my newsletter, telling them what they will and won’t be receiving from me, and the purpose of my work, I included links and short descriptions for my top 10 all-time most popular articles. The goal is to show them what to expect, and to get them “hooked” with some of my very best free content.

In the last two weeks this email has been sent out to 158 people, with a 67% open rate and 30% click rate, which is absolutely phenomenal as email campaigns go:

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#8 – Email newsletter template

One of the key principles in effective email marketing seems to be consistency: using the same kinds of words, the same style and tone, sticking to the topic they signed up to hear about, etc.

While I refuse to stick to a publishing schedule, I learned that I could improve consistency another way: through the look and feel of my email design. I followed Jarvis’ instructions and created a very simple, standardized template for all future Forte Labs newsletters. You can see an example here:

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I learned that the best email designs are very simple, without a lot of graphics and ornamentation. I also changed the font and colors to match my website as closely as possible, so it looks like something that came from me.

#9 – Subscriber onboarding

Although most of Chimp Essentials focuses on practical, how-to steps, toward the end Jarvis discusses the psychology of good email marketing. He teaches that when onboarding new subscribers, there are three things you need to accomplish:

Accommodation: Introduce yourself and tell them what to expect from your list
Assimilation: Make them feel like they belong and connect with them
Acceleration: Get them involved by consuming your most popular content or responding to a question

For me this involved making just a few small adjustments in my welcome email:

Accommodation: Promising them my “Top 10 All-Time Most Popular Articles” if they sign up for my newsletter (instead of just “news and updates”), and then delivering on that promise in the welcome email
Assimilation: Including a link to my Manifesto in the welcome email, in case they want to know what I stand for
Acceleration: Encouraging them to read one of my most popular articles with short summaries (and the main topic bolded)

#10 – How to avoid list decay

I learned that typically about 25% of an email list “decays” (or stops reading) each year. This made me feel a lot better about the unsubscribes I regularly receive!

Jarvis explains some of the best ways to minimize list decay:

Determine signup sources that give you the most inactive subscribers (pop-ups often generate signups who are more likely to become inactive)
Check your opt-ins (free bonuses offered in exchange for an email address) to make sure they’re still relevant
Have a more specific or actionable welcome email
Always consider why someone would open your emails
Email them regularly, and not just with pitches

Although I tend to follow these guidelines already, they were a great reminder that someone signing up to my list is a big deal. They are giving me explicit permission to contact them – about the topic of productivity, of course, but also with pitches and launches.

The miracle of email is direct, unfettered, (nearly) free access to people’s inboxes. That is a great privilege in a world of constant noise and competition. The work I did in this course was my effort to honor that permission as best I could, by consistently delivering the value I’ve promised, in the most accessible and consumable way possible.

Looking back on the course, I think the greatest value was simply having a forcing function to sit down and dedicate a solid block of time to reforming my email practices. I already “knew” much of this information and could probably have Googled the rest, but that is not the same as having it all in one place, at one time, in a consistent format. Having a complete curriculum of step-by-step video walkthroughs, along with an extremely active and helpful Slack community channel, made this one of the best investments in online education I’ve ever made.

If you’re interested in taking Chimp Essentials, just join the waitlist here, purchase the course, and forward your email receipt to hello@fortelabs.co. I’ll invite you to an exclusive virtual workshop for Forte Labs followers (or send you the recording if it’s already taken place) where I’ll show you how to use my best productivity methods to make email marketing as seamless and effective as possible.

Subscribe to Praxis, our members-only blog exploring the future of productivity, for just $10/month. Or follow us for free content via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

Real Magick Deconstructed (Interview with Chloe Good)

A few months ago I was wasting time on Twitter as usual, and came across a tweet by an online acquaintance referring to “magick.” I figured it was a typo, and messaged him to find out more.

That was the beginning of my introduction to the mysterious, strange, paradoxical world of “real magick.”

This isn’t about gimmicky magic tricks, hippie drum circles, or small-town goth teenagers on ouija boards. It’s a whole underground subculture of people who freely borrow ideas and techniques from the occult, religion, science, psychology, history, and anywhere else in order to “manifest their will into reality.” They sometimes distinguish their practice by adding a “k” at the end of “magic.”

I was recommended and read the book Advanced Magick for Beginners by Alan Chapman, a self-professed “magician” who recounts some of the history of magick through the ages, right up to the modern movement of “chaos magic,” which has predominated in recent years.

In the book, Chapman demystifies the field, boiling it down to a practical tool grounded in the laws of physics, while also maintaining the mystery and intrigue so necessary to inspire (self-)belief. I found it to be an intriguing mix of fact and fiction, story and theory, means and ends, all tied together as “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.”

Here’s my complete highlights from the book if you’d like a preview.

Sometime later, talking to my friend Chloe Good, I realized that she is an experienced practitioner of this brand of practical magick. She had always displayed a curious mix of hard-edged scientific knowledge with inexplicable metaphysical abilities, and now I understood why.

Chloe has a coaching practice in which she works with high-performers to discover their purpose, overcome internal barriers, and ultimately create the life they want to live. Part life coach, part therapist, part spiritual guide, and part business consultant, she embodies better than anyone I know the post-modern way of life that “real magick” entails.

She’s also a leader in her field, consulting with Silicon Valley leaders and executives at companies like eBay, Accenture, Square, Facebook and various Bay Area start-ups. She also teaches a strengths-based leadership course at Stanford University. Most recently, she has launched an online course called Own Your Magic in which she teaches her methods for living a life of your own creation.

Chloe has generously agreed to join us for the May Town Hall on 5/17 at 9am PST, to share her 4-step framework and extensive coaching experience. Click here to register for the live Zoom call, and come with your best questions!

Subscribe to Praxis, our members-only blog exploring the future of productivity, for just $10/month. Or follow us for free content via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

My Top 10 All-Time Most Popular Articles

These are my Top 10 all-time most popular articles based on number of unique visitors:

1. One-Touch to Inbox Zero

A step-by-step guide to streamlining your email workflow, which will save you hours every week and consistently take you to “inbox zero.”

2. The Rise of the Full-Stack Freelancer

My prediction for the future of jobs, including a “portfolio approach” of multiple income streams instead of one paycheck.

3. The Secret Power of ‘Read It Later’ Apps

My best advice for how to use “Read Later” apps like Pocket and Instapaper as critical tools in your reading and learning.

4. How to Use Evernote for Your Creative Workflow

An essay on the power of digital note-taking for productivity, learning, and effectiveness, including practical techniques for how to effectively organize and use your notes.

5. Building a Second Brain: An Overview

A summary and overview of my online course Building a Second Brain, in which I teach people how to use digital notes as a “second brain” that remembers everything.

6. The Throughput of Learning

A metaphysical journey through the mysteries of flow, and how it ties together old-school manufacturing and modern knowledge work.

7. Progressive Summarization: A Practical Technique for Designing Discoverable Notes

A guide to Progressive Summarization, a method I’ve developed for systematically distilling the things you read into nuggets of actionable wisdom.

8. The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information

A guide to the PARA Method, a method for organizing your digital life across all the platforms you use, and using your files to consistently reach your goals.

9. Theory of Constraints 101: Applying the Principles of Flow to Knowledge Work

My 11-part guide to the Theory of Constraints, a powerful framework for understanding and improving any kind of system (from your to do list all the way to large companies)

10. The Digital Productivity Pyramid

The model I’ve developed for professional development for the modern knowledge worker, each skill and tool building on the one before.

Subscribe to Praxis, our members-only blog exploring the future of productivity, for just $10/month. Or follow us for free content via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

The BASB Customer Persona

I recently compiled all my notes, findings, and ideas about the “ideal customer” for Building a Second Brain, and put them into a single document. I’m working with my editor to narrow down and refine this customer profile from here, so I can have a crystal clear person in mind as I write the sample chapters for the book proposal.

I’m publishing it here to gather any feedback or ideas you may have about the kind of person I should be writing this book for. Hopefully it will also be useful for any creative projects you are working on that require identifying a target customer. The prompts and questions were pulled from various courses, books, and marketing exercises I’ve collected over the years.

To read this story, become a Praxis member.

Praxis

You can choose to support Praxis with a subscription for $10 each month or $100 annually.

Members get access to:

1–3 exclusive articles per month, written or curated by Tiago Forte of Forte Labs
Members-only comments and responses
Early access to new online courses, ebooks, and events
A monthly Town Hall, hosted by Tiago and conducted via live videoconference, which can include open discussions, hands-on tutorials, guest interviews, or online workshops on productivity-related topics

Click here to learn more about what's included in a Praxis membership.

Already a member? Sign in here.

Anti-Book Club 3.0: Group Knowledge Management

Last year I launched the Anti-Book Club, a new take on traditional book clubs in which everyone reads a different book on the same topic, and shares their summary notes. Instead of duplicating time and effort reading the same book, this process allowed us to combine our efforts and create an archive of distilled knowledge in an organized format.

The two rounds of the Anti-Book Club were a great success, and I recently published my learnings about its potential for crowdsourced research. Now it’s time for the next stage of evolution: pushing forward the frontier of group knowledge management for a specific organization.

Forte Labs has been hired by Global IO, a consulting firm that works with large companies with complex supply chains to improve their “integrated operations.” They’ve asked us to develop an “enterprise-grade group knowledge management system” that will help onboard new employees faster, capture tacit learning from projects, and share their most valuable knowledge in an effective way. We’ll use their company as a testing ground, and if it goes well, potentially expand to their clients.

To read this story, become a Praxis member.

Praxis

You can choose to support Praxis with a subscription for $10 each month or $100 annually.

Members get access to:

1–3 exclusive articles per month, written or curated by Tiago Forte of Forte Labs
Members-only comments and responses
Early access to new online courses, ebooks, and events
A monthly Town Hall, hosted by Tiago and conducted via live videoconference, which can include open discussions, hands-on tutorials, guest interviews, or online workshops on productivity-related topics

Click here to learn more about what's included in a Praxis membership.

Already a member? Sign in here.

My interview on the Justin Brady Podcast

Here’s a short interview I recently recorded with Justin Brady on his podcast, about the role of creativity in modern knowledge work. Listen below or click here to visit the official website.

Subscribe to Praxis, our members-only blog exploring the future of productivity, for just $10/month. Or follow us for free content via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

My interview on the Mindhack Podcast: Finding the Achiever’s Mindset

I recently sat down with Cody McLain to talk about productivity, achievement, and personal growth. We went deep on the relationship between internal experiences like personal growth and self-awareness, and external measures of success that people usually associate with “achievement.”

Click here to visit the Mindhack website for the audio recording and full transcript.

Subscribe to Praxis, our members-only blog exploring the future of productivity, for just $10/month. Or follow us for free content via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

Superhuman: The Fastest Email Experience Ever Made

This is a recording of a live walkthrough of Superhuman, an email client that works in the browser and on iOS and connects to any Gmail account.

They have made waves in the productivity world over the past few years for “completely reinventing” the email experience from the ground up. They are also known for their eye-popping price of $30 per month, and a waitlist to even try the product of several hundred thousand people.

To read this story, become a Praxis member.

Praxis

You can choose to support Praxis with a subscription for $10 each month or $100 annually.

Members get access to:

1–3 exclusive articles per month, written or curated by Tiago Forte of Forte Labs
Members-only comments and responses
Early access to new online courses, ebooks, and events
A monthly Town Hall, hosted by Tiago and conducted via live videoconference, which can include open discussions, hands-on tutorials, guest interviews, or online workshops on productivity-related topics

Click here to learn more about what's included in a Praxis membership.

Already a member? Sign in here.

How Emotions Are Made: The Theory of Constructed Emotion

The Theory of Constructed Emotion offers a radical new take on what emotions are, where they come from, and how they shape our lives.

Presented by psychology professor and neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett in her best-selling book How Emotions Are Made (affiliate link), it also contradicts many of our most firmly held ideas about how human emotions work.

For example, it argues that:

Emotions are not hard-wired in an ancient, “reptilian” part of the brain
Emotions cannot be detected through facial expressions or any other physiological measurement
There are no “universal” emotions across people, nations, or cultures
There are no distinct parts of the brain dedicated to specific emotions (such as the amygdala for fear)
Emotions are not “reactions” to external events

Over the last 25 years, Dr. Barrett and her team at the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University have poked and prodded the faces, bodies, and brains of thousands of subjects, trying to unlock the secrets of the emotional brain.

In this article, I’ll summarize the main ideas from the book to help them spread as far and wide as possible. Assume everything below is directly taken or paraphrased from the book, although I’ve tried to explain it in my own words. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine.

Emotions are concepts

The Theory of Constructed Emotion takes its name from its central premise: that emotions are concepts that are constructed by the brain.

Consider your brain for a moment. It’s sitting there in your skull, receiving all sorts of data from your eyes, ears, nose, skin, and mouth. This data is informative, but also ambiguous. It has to be interpreted.

For example, it might think:

What is that rectangular source of light with changing patterns of color? A window!
What is this intermittent pattern of small, cold spots sweeping across my body? Rain!
What is that rhythmic pattern of air pressure changes? A song

In this way, the brain is constantly trying to make sense of the data it is receiving. One of the easiest ways for it to do that is to use past experience as a guide. If it can match the current experience with a past memory, it can save a lot of time and energy.

But it would take too long for it to consider thousands of old memories, one at a time

Instead, the brain uses concepts. A concept is like a compressed version of hundreds or thousands of past experiences. Instead of having to remember every encounter you’ve ever had with a “chair,” for example, your brain stores a concept of a chair. The next time you encounter a chair, your brain only has to match it with this concept for it to understand what it’s seeing.

Concepts are like labels or categories that your brain has created to make sense of the world around you. When you see something new, your brain doesn’t ask “What is this?”; it asks “What is this like?”. In other words, your brain is constantly trying to put everything you perceive into an existing category. This is much easier than trying to figure out what it is from scratch.

The idea that we use concepts to make sense of our experience isn’t new. But Dr. Barrett’s work makes the leap to applying this idea to the messy, subjective world of emotions. Emotions like “fear,” “sadness,” and “disappointment” are concepts just like any other. Just as your brain interprets a pattern of light as a “window,” it might interpret a pattern of bodily sensations as “fear” or “disappointment.” These emotions don’t feel like concepts because we experience them so intensely. But they are.

As an example of how this works, Dr. Barrett tells the story of watching the news about a recent school shooting. It felt in the moment like she was reacting directly to the news. She felt terrible grief and sadness, and tears seemed to come spontaneously to her eyes.

But it would be more accurate to describe what happened like this:

“I learned long ago that “sadness” is something that may occur when certain bodily feelings coincide with terrible loss. Using bits and pieces of past experience, such as my knowledge of shootings and my previous sadness about them, my brain rapidly predicted what my body should do to cope with such tragedy. Its predictions caused my thumping heart, my flushed face, and the knots in my stomach. They directed me to cry, an action that would calm my nervous system. And they made the resulting sensations meaningful as an instance of sadness.”

In other words, her experience of sadness was a “simulation” or prediction of the appropriate way for her body to react to the news. The sadness wasn’t a pure reaction to something happening on the outside. It emerged from a complex interplay of systems making a self-fulfilling prediction about what was needed for her body to cope.

Emotions are predictions

Why does Dr. Barrett use the word “simulation” and not just “interpretation”? Because the brain is not passively observing incoming data from the outside world. That would make its decisions very slow, potentially threatening our survival

In order to act more quickly, the brain starts reacting even before it has received all the data – it creates a “simulation” or prediction of what it thinks might happen next. Basically, the brain is constantly making its best guess of what it thinks is about to occur, and then preparing to act on that guess

If your brain guesses that you are playing soccer, for example, it might start predicting all sorts of likely scenarios based on past experience: opportunities to sprint for the goal, fast-moving balls flying toward your head, or incoming attackers from any direction. The brain might start preparing the body for these scenarios ahead of time, by redirecting blood flow to certain muscles or becoming more vigilant for flying soccer balls.

The same thing happens with purely mental activities. As you read this text right now, your brain is predicting which word or idea is likely to come next, based on a lifetime of reading experience. These predictions save energy and help you read faster than would otherwise be possible. As the largest and most energy hungry organ in the body, the brain greatly prioritizes this efficiency.

And the very same process happens with our emotions. On your way to the airport to pick up a friend you haven’t seen for years, your brain is busy predicting the feelings of joy and happiness you will soon be feeling. Which means you are already feeling happy before the event has occurred, and feel even happier when you actually see her.

Prediction is such a fundamental activity of the human brain that some scientists consider it the brain’s default mode of operation. Your brain cannot help but constantly build predictive models of every experience you have, or any experience it thinks you might have.

This leads to a profound conclusion: that the simulations we create in our heads are more real to us than the physical world. What we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are simulations of the world, not reactions to it. We might think that our perceptions of the world are driven by events in the world, but really, most of what we see is based on our internal predictions. The data coming in from our senses merely influences our perceptions, like a small stone skipping across a rolling ocean wave.

This startling conclusion is reinforced by research on how humans see. The part of the brain responsible for sight, the visual cortex, receives only 10% of its connections from the retina. The other 90% are connections from other parts of the brain, making predictions about what they think we might be seeing.

What does the brain do when its predictions are wrong? It can change its prediction to match what the senses are telling it. But it is just as likely to do the opposite: stick with the original prediction, and filter the incoming data so that it matches the prediction.

In a sense, your brain is wired for delusion: you experience an elaborate world of your own creation, which is held in check by bits of sensory input. Once your predictions are correct enough, they filter your perception and determine what you’re able to see in the first place. This can become a closed loop where the brain only sees what it believes, and then believes what it sees.

Interoception and body budgets

How do emotions fit into this picture?

From the brain’s point of view, the body is just another part of the external world that it must explain. And it uses the very same mechanism we just examined to interpret sensations coming from inside the body – the changing rhythms of your heartbeat, the feeling of breathing, the rumbling of your stomach, and the contraction and dilation of your veins

It’s important to understand that these purely physical sensations from inside the body have no objective meaning. They feel so intense because they’re coming from inside you. But an ache in your stomach, for example, could just as easily be “explained” as:

Hunger (if you’re sitting at the dinner table)
Impending sickness (if it’s flu season)
Heartbreak (if you are going through a breakup)
Certainty that a defendant is untrustworthy (if you’re a judge in a courtroom and haven’t had lunch

The process of interpreting these bodily sensations is called interoception. It is managed by an “interoceptive network” in the brain that takes in information from your internal organs and tissues, the hormones in your blood, and your immune system, among many others, and labels this information with a concept such as “hunger” or “heartbreak.” These emotions may feel like they are coming directly from your body. But in fact they are being constructed by the interoceptive network in your brain, based largely on your predictions.

What is the purpose of interoception?

Everything your body does, inside or out, requires energy. To manage its “body budget” across hundreds of body parts and billions of cells, the brain has to constantly predict the body’s energy needs. Just as a finance department needs a budget to forecast where money will be needed, the brain makes predictions and issues corrections about when and where it thinks energy will be needed.

Many of these “budgetary changes” we experience as emotional experiences. Your muscles running low on energy might feel like “exhaustion.” Too little sleep might be interpreted as “overwhelm.” A lack of positive social interaction might be experienced as “loneliness.” But these emotions are not objective facts. They are concepts built by the mind out of pieces of sensory data, cultural knowledge, and a history of social interactions. Interoception evolved to balance our body budgets. Experiencing emotions is a fortunate (and sometimes unfortunate) side effect.

What this means is that a “bad feeling” is not evidence that there is something wrong. It just means you are taxing your body budget. Emotions are real, but what they seem to be telling you is not necessarily real. Knowing that “negative” emotions are simply our brain’s way of telling us that reserves are running low, we can make intentional decisions to refill those reserves, instead of reaching for less healthy coping mechanisms.

Experiential blindness

Even with all the scientific evidence in the world, it can be very difficult to believe that emotions are internally generated concepts driven by mental simulations. They feel so intense and overwhelming in the moment, like a wave sweeping us away against our will.

The reason emotions feel like reactions to things happening in the outside world has to do with how concepts are used by the brain. Concepts are not just labels for the things we passively observe. They are necessary for us to perceive things in the first place. A concept serves as a lens (or sometimes, a filter) for what we are able to see in the first place.

Imagine you are sitting in a Parisian cafe on vacation, sipping fine wine and eating cheese. You may overhear a French couple at the next table over immersed in conversation. The conversation contains all the information you would need to understand what they’re saying. But if your mind is missing a set of concepts known as “the French language,” it will sound meaningless to you.

This is known as “experiential blindness” – the inability to perceive what you don’t already have a concept for. Remember that we are not experiencing the world directly; we are experiencing our mental simulation of it. And without a concept for something, we can’t incorporate it into our simulation

In her excellent TED talk, Dr. Barrett shares this example:

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As you examine the photo, your neurons are firing like mad trying to perceive something besides black and white blobs. Your brain is sifting through its library of concepts, making thousands of guesses and weighing the probabilities, to find a category to put the picture in.

Now look at the following picture:

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Going back to the first one, you can probably now see a snake:

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But what changed? The image is the same as before, but now you have a new concept in your brain. You’ve gained a “conceptual lens” that allows your brain to fill in the information that is missing. This process is so automatic, that you probably can’t go back to how you saw it before, even if you tried.

Our concepts allow us to perceive things in a world that always provides only incomplete, ambiguous information. They help us recognize things quickly and (usually) accurately, while saving time and energy. But the process of using concepts to perceive things happens so invisibly and automatically, our senses can feel like reflexes rather than constructions. We do not feel any sense of agency for the simulations we are running.

This explains why an emotion like “happiness” can feel like it’s a reaction to external events, rather than generated from within the brain. Even before your brain has finished categorizing a situation as “happiness,” it is also simulating happiness in advance. External perception meets internal construction before you know what’s happening, so it seems like happiness is happening to you when in fact your brain is actively constructing the experience

This can also become a self-fulfilling prediction: the more you expect happiness to arrive, the more preparations you make for its arrival, and the more likely you are to experience it. Even on a neurological level, you create your own reality.

The importance of emotional granularity

One of the most challenging implications of the Theory of Constructed Emotions is that, if someone doesn’t have a concept to describe an emotion, they won’t be able to perceive it. They’ll still feel the bodily sensations, but won’t be able to label them precisely.

In other words, the range of emotions a person can experience is limited by their emotional granularity – the ability to construct and identify more precise emotional experiences.

Imagine an extreme example: someone who only has the ability to distinguish between “good” and “bad” feelings. They exhibit low emotional granularity. Because they have only imprecise information about what is happening inside their bodies, it will be difficult for such a person to handle many of life’s challenges. They will be experientially blind to even their own feelings.

This illustrates the critical importance of high emotional granularity. Making sense of bodily sensations requires energy, and trying to sort a huge amount of sensory data into a broad feeling like “happiness” takes a lot of energy. Now imagine if you had a more precise concept for the feeling of attachment to a close friend, such as the Korean word jeong (정). Your brain would require less effort to construct this more narrow concept. Preciseness leads to efficiency; this is the biological payoff of higher emotional granularity.

When you experience an emotion without knowing the precise cause, you are more likely to treat that emotion as information about the world, rather than your experience of the world. This is known as affective realism. Affective realism causes us to experience supposed “facts” about the world that are in fact created by our feelings. It can leave us trapped in an emotional world of our own making, without realizing that we are the ones who imprisoned ourselves.

Luckily, emotional granularity can be improved. If you can learn to distinguish more precise meanings for “Feeling great” (happy, content, thrilled, relaxed, joyful, hopeful, inspired, prideful, adoring, grateful, blissful . . .) or “Feeling crappy” (angry, aggravated, alarmed, spiteful, grumpy, remorseful, gloomy, mortified, uneasy, dread-ridden, resentful, afraid, envious, woeful, melancholy . . .), your brain will have many more options for predicting, categorizing, and  perceiving emotions.

High emotional granularity gives us a much greater range of tools, allowing more flexible responses to our challenges. It allows us to tailor our actions to the underlying causes of our emotions, rather than their immediate appearance.

Constructing social reality

Although emotions are generated from within, they don’t stop there. We use emotions to construct our social reality.

When you interact with people you know and like – your spouse, friends, lovers, children, teammates, or close companions – you synchronize your heart rates, breathing, and other physical signals, leading to measurable benefits. Something as simple as holding hands with a loved one or keeping their picture on your desk can improve body budgeting and reduce pain. In other words, we also use other people to regulate our body budgets

But this goes far beyond managing our own body budgets. Concepts like “fear,” “anticipation,” and “contempt” are concepts your brain uses to regulate others’ bodies as well. As soon as we construct an emotion concept and label it with a word, we can share it with others, allowing them to see what we see and thus rewiring how their brains work. Once you and I share a concept, I can merely utter a word to start launching predictions in your brain, a kind of linguistic telepathy.

Instead of a limited set of emotions built in from birth, nature provided us with the raw materials to bootstrap a conceptual system, including emotion concepts. With input from the adults who spoke emotion words to us in an intentional and deliberate way, we gained the ability to perceive not just physical objects, but ideas that reside only in the minds of people: goals, intentions, preferences, and their own emotions.

Over time, this intergenerational transfer of emotion knowledge – in the form of stories, traditions, myths, fables, or really anything that we can communicate – allows each generation to shape the brain wiring of the next. This body of knowledge constitutes the essence of our civilization just as much as the books in our libraries.

Modern culture and body budgets

Once you understand body budgets and how they impact our emotions, it becomes apparent how much of modern culture seems engineered to disrupt them.

Much of the food we eat is full of refined sugar that warps our body budgets. School and jobs have us waking early and going to sleep late, leaving over 40 percent of Americans between 13 and 64 regularly sleep-deprived, which leads to chronic misbudgeting. Advertisers play on our insecurities, suggesting we’ll be judged badly by our friends if we don’t look or buy a certain way (and social rejection is toxic for our body budgets). Social media offers even more opportunities for social comparison, while constant mobile device usage means we never truly relax

Remember that the entire experience of emotions relies on our brain’s predictions about what it thinks our body needs. If those predictions become chronically out of sync with our body’s actual needs, it can be hard to bring them back into balance. Your body budgets don’t respond easily to warning signals from your body as it is. Once our predictions have been off-base for long enough, you will feel chronically miserable without knowing why.

What do we do when we feel miserable? We self-medicate. Thirty percent of all medications consumed in the United States are taken to manage some form of distress. We use alcohol, drugs, TV, and sugar to achieve a semblance of budget balance, but at a terrible cost in addiction and obesity. It has become clear in recent decades that the immune system has an impact on far more illnesses and harmful conditions than we imagined, including diabetes, obesity, heart disease, depression, insomnia, cancer, reduced memory, and other cognitive functions related to premature aging and dementia. And the immune system suffers when our body budgets go out of balance

Looking more closely at depression provides a window into how chronically imbalanced body budgets can have compounding negative effects.

Depression can be thought of as a relentless feedback loop of negative thoughts and feelings. Each feeling drives the next thought, and vice versa. The brain dwells on negative past experiences, and thus keeps making withdrawals on an already taxed budget. Alarm signals from the body are turned down or ignored. In effect, the body and mind are locked into a cycle of uncorrected predictions, trapped in an adverse past when metabolic needs were high.

Since the body budget is chronically in debt, the body tries to cut spending. The easiest way to do that is to stop moving around and stop paying attention to the world. If a depressed person then starts avoiding people, others cannot help balance their body budget either. This is the unrelenting fatigue of depression.

This cycle also applies, of course, to people who grow up in adversity, lacking basic necessities like safety, food, and sleep. These conditions change the interoceptive network, reducing the brain’s ability to accurately regulate its budget throughout life. This translates into a higher lifetime risk of heart disease, arthritis, diabetes, cancer, and other diseases.

A new take on personal responsibility

In light of the possibility that we construct our emotions based on concepts, the next question is, are we responsible for our concepts?

Not all of them, certainly. You can’t choose the concepts you learned as a child. But as an adult, you absolutely do have choices about what experiences you expose yourself to, which shapes the concepts that ultimately drive your actions. Responsibility, in this view, is about making deliberate choices to change your concepts

The Theory of Constructed Emotion argues that every aspect of our emotions is malleable and flexible. You are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits buried deep inside some ancient part of your brain. You have more control over your emotions than you think.

You can’t just snap your fingers and instantaneously change what you’re feeling, of course, but here are six practical steps you can take to improve your emotional granularity over time, based on the most recent findings from scientific research.

1. Try on new perspectives

According to the Theory of Constructed Emotion, the concepts we hold directly impact our body budgets, and therefore our experience of emotions. Concepts don’t exist in an abstract, rarified realm separate from biology. Learning or changing concepts (also known as mental models) directly impacts how our body functions minute to minute.

By trying on new perspectives the way we try on new clothes, we can “try out” different body-budgeting regimes. The same way we might allocate more financial resources to one budget category or another, we can do the same with our body budgets.

This can include anything from travel in foreign countries, to spending time with different kinds of people, to reading literature, to trying new experiences. These experiences expose us to different ways of meeting human needs that we may want to borrow for ourselves.

2. Recategorize what you’re feeling

Anytime you’re feeling bad, recognize what is actually happening: you are experiencing unpleasant affect based on interoceptive sensations. With practice, you can learn to deconstruct the emotion into its constituent parts, instead of letting it become a lens through which you view the world.

For example, the broad, ambiguous feeling of “anxiety” can be broken down and recategorized into “tension across the upper back,” “rapidly beating heart,” and “clenched jaw.” This deconstruction robs the sensations of some of their emotional power.

Try labeling what you are feeling more precisely, meditating on different parts of the body, or looking for more immediate, physical causes such as hunger, dehydration, or lack of sleep.

3. Talk about what you’re feeling

One of the most effective ways of questioning the mind’s often overly dramatic interpretations is to talk about them with others. Getting feelings out into the open lends us a degree of objectivity, and allows others to show empathy and understanding.

In studies, men who expressed a lot of emotion that they didn’t label were found to have the highest levels of cytokines, proteins that over the long term cause inflammation. Female breast cancer survivors who explicitly label and express their emotions have better health and fewer medical visits after surgery.

This isn’t fluffy self-help advice: talking about your feelings measurably improves your health and happiness.

4. Move your body

Sometimes the predictive loops between body and mind are so strong that it is difficult to consciously interrupt them. Luckily, we have a backdoor: the body. Whether through walking, yoga, stretching, weight-lifting, or other forms of exercise, we can re-synchronize the signals flowing between our body and mind, putting our body budgets back into balance

All animals use movement to regulate their body budgets. If a dog has too much glucose in its system, it can run around or spin in circles to burn it off. Humans are unique in that we can use purely mental concepts to shift our budgets. But when that fails, a quick run or aerobic routine can correct the runaway feedback loop keeping us down.

5. Improve your vocabulary

This might seem implausible, but there is substantial evidence that emotional granularity is closely linked to linguistic granularity. The more finely grained your vocabulary, the more precisely your brain can identify what’s happening in the body and calibrate its budget accordingly.

In a study, it was found that people who exhibit higher emotional granularity go to the doctor less frequently, use medication less frequently, and spend fewer days hospitalized for illness. In contrast, lower emotional granularity is associated with major depressive disorder, social anxiety disorder, eating disorders, autism spectrum disorders, borderline personality disorder, and general feelings of anxiety and depression.

Whether it is reading sophisticated and nuanced works of literature, watching movies with complex characters, or looking up words you don’t know, expanding your vocabulary can directly impact your body function.

6. Write about your experiences

One of the clear conclusions from How Emotions Are Made is that the world of concepts and the world of biology are not separate. Our brain relies on models of what is happening or likely to happen in the outside world to make budgeting decisions. We are able to consciously influence and enrich these models by what we expose ourselves to.

Writing is one of the most effective ways to directly shape the concepts our brain is constructing. Writing allows us to make our thinking more concrete, outside our heads, where it can be more objectively evaluated, analyzed, and changed. The words we put on the page can be reflected back to us, forming a different predictive loop in which we have much more agency.

A final word

All six of these approaches can turn a negative spiral of suffering into mere physical discomfort. Pain is unavoidable, but it doesn’t have to mean there is something wrong with your life. No technique is guaranteed to work every time, but they open up the possibility of working toward a healthier body, more fulfilling relationships, and a more flexible and potent emotional life.

The promise of constructed emotions is not that we will somehow gain complete control over how we feel. Emotions are inherently uncertain, and that uncertainty is exactly what makes a vibrant emotional life possible. Life can be unexpectedly joyful, unexpectedly meaningful, unexpectedly profound. The promise is not that we can control the emotional waves that sweep over us as we move through life. The promise is that we can learn to surf those waves with skill and with pleasure.

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