How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Modern culture, unfortunately, is engineered to screw up your body budget. Many of the products sold in supermarkets and chain restaurants are pseudo-food loaded with budget-warping refined sugar and bad fats. Schools and jobs require you to wake early and go to sleep late, leaving over 40 percent of Americans between the ages of thirteen and sixty-four regularly sleep-deprived, a condition that can lead to chronic misbudgeting and possibly depression and other mental illnesses. Advertisers play on your insecurities, suggesting you’ll be judged badly by your friends unless you buy the right clothing or car, and social rejection is toxic for your body budget. Social media offers new opportunities for social rejection and adds ambiguity, which is even worse for your body budget. Friends and employers expect you to be surgically attached to your cell phone at all hours, which means you never truly relax, and late-night screen time disrupts your sleeping patterns. Your culture’s expectations for work, rest, and socializing determine how easily you can manage that internal budget. Social reality transmutes into physical reality.2 Your body budget, you may remember, is regulated by predictive circuitry in your interoceptive network. If those predictions become chronically out of sync with your body’s actual needs, it’s hard to bring them back into balance. Your body-budgeting circuitry, the loudmouth of your brain, doesn’t respond quickly to counterevidence (prediction error) fr...