More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brené Brown
Read between
July 27 - August 21, 2025
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” What does it mean if the vastness of human emotion and experience can only be expressed as mad, sad, or happy?
Language is our portal to meaning-making, connection, healing, learning, and self-awareness. Having access to the right words can open up entire universes. When we don’t have the language to talk about what we’re experiencing, our ability to make sense of what’s happening and share it with others is severely limited.
Our ability to accurately recognize and label emotions is often referred to as emotional granularity.
One area that remains under debate is how many human emotions and experiences exist.
overwhelm as the all-too-common feeling “that our lives are somehow unfolding faster than the human nervous system and psyche are able to manage well.”
we don’t process other emotional information accurately when we feel overwhelmed, and this can result in poor decision making.
An intolerance for uncertainty is an important contributing factor to all types of anxiety.
Vulnerability is not oversharing, it’s sharing with people who have earned the right to hear our stories and our experiences.
Comparison is the crush of conformity from one side and competition from the other—it’s trying to simultaneously fit in and stand out.
Am I fearful of losing something I value to another person, or do I want something someone else has?
It’s really important for me not to be perceived as ________________.
Is resentment part of the anger family?” Without hesitation, Marc replied, “No. Resentment is part of envy.”
good friends aren’t afraid of your light. They never blow out your flame and you don’t blow out theirs—even when it’s really bright and it makes you worry about your own flame. When something good happens to you, they celebrate your flame. When something good happens to them, you celebrate their flame.
“Boredom is your imagination calling to you.”
We help each other reality-check our expectations, we ask each other a lot of questions about what we think will happen or what we want to happen,
I can’t wait to share my project presentation with the team tomorrow. They’re going to be blown away and really appreciate how hard I’ve worked. Is there a way to feel validated other than your team’s saying something? It’s dangerous to put your self-worth in other people’s hands. Again, no matter what you do, you can’t control other people’s responses. These are recipes for disappointment and hurt.
“If I have to ask, it’s not worth it.” She tilted her head and said, “If you’re not asking for what’s important to you, maybe it’s because you don’t think you are worth it.”
confusion is good for us and why it’s categorized as an epistemic emotion—an emotion critical to knowledge acquisition and learning.
The same way you feel a muscle ‘burn’ when it’s being strengthened, the brain needs to feel some discomfort when it’s learning. Your mind might hurt for a while—but that’s a good thing.” Comfortable learning environments rarely lead to deep learning.
Nostalgia was considered a medical disease and a psychiatric disorder until the early nineteenth century.
nostalgia is more likely to be triggered by negative moods, like loneliness, and by our struggles to find meaning in our current lives.
Dissonance produces mental discomfort that ranges from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don’t rest easy until they find a way to reduce it. In this example, the most direct way for a smoker to reduce dissonance is by quitting. But if she has tried to quit and failed, now she must reduce dissonance by convincing herself that smoking isn’t really so harmful, that smoking is worth the risk because it helps her relax or prevents her from gaining weight (after all, obesity is a health risk too), and so on.
Sarcasm and irony are reserved for playfulness only. I think that’s the biggest watch-out with irony and sarcasm: Are you dressing something up in humor that actually requires clarity and honesty?
despair as “the belief that tomorrow will be just like today.”
Shame is an egocentric, self-involved emotion. It draws our focus inward. Our only concern with others when we are feeling shame is to wonder how others are judging us.
Shame is the birthplace of perfectionism.
They wanted to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”
perfectionistic traits scale behave in ways that cause perceived and actual exclusion/rejection by others.
Our neural, hormonal, and genetic makeup support interdependence over independence.
living with loneliness? It increases our odds of dying early by 45 percent.
Dr. Murthy confirms the connection between loneliness and our physical health, explaining that loneliness is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and anxiety.
picture memory is a picture I take in my mind when I’m really, really happy. I close my eyes and take a picture, so when I’m feeling sad or scared or lonely, I can look at my picture memories.”
what makes children happy in the moment is not always what leads them to developing deeper joy, grounded confidence, and meaningful connection.
Do I have enough information to freak out? The answer is normally no. Will freaking out help? The answer is always no.
Contentment is about satisfaction, and that, ironically, is an unsatisfying idea for a lot of people. It just doesn’t seem like enough in a world that tells us every minute should be big and life should be OMG-level exciting at all times.
midst of joy, there’s often a quiver, a shudder of vulnerability. Rather than using that as a warning sign to practice imagining the worst-case scenario, the people who lean into joy use the quiver as a reminder to practice gratitude.
Anger is an action emotion—we want to do something when we feel it
A substantial amount of research indicates that our propensity for anger and aggression is partially hereditary, but the specific gene locations have not yet been identified.
Once we dehumanize people, violence and cruelty toward them become easier to perpetrate because the parts of us that are hardwired to not hurt other people turn off—in our minds, we’ve stripped them of their humanity.
Dehumanizing often starts with creating an enemy image. As we take sides, lose trust, and get angrier and angrier, we not only solidify an idea of our enemy, but also start to lose our ability to listen, communicate, and practice even a modicum of empathy.
Dehumanization has fueled innumerable acts of violence, human rights violations, war crimes, and genocides. It makes slavery, torture, and human trafficking possible. Dehumanizing others is the process by which we become accepting of violations against human nature, the human spirit, and, for many of us, violations against the central tenets of our faith.
Too many emotions and experiences present the exact same way. There’s no way to know through observation if your tears come from grief, despair, hopelessness, or resentment, just to name a few. Absolutely no way.
