Your brain is powered by literal emotional energy. An expert explains how to find the right balance

We were designed to feel our feelings. The electrical impulses firing around in that squishy thing inside our skulls are guiding how we experience love, or fear, or panic. Yet we often forget that there's a science to our emotions, that they're not some wild, untamed force operating independent of our minds and bodies. We are made of energy, energy that cannot be created or destroyed — but can be transformed.

"This is not metaphysical," says neuropsychologist Dr. Julia DiGangi. "This is not metaphorical. It's actual neural chemical energy."

In DiGangi's "Energy Rising: The Neuroscience of Leading with Emotional Power," she explores the ways in which our brains can sabotage or support us, while offering practical advice on how to overcome the traps that hold us back. I spoke to DiGangi recently about the science of neuroenergetics, the rewards of "picking a more powerful pain" and why we need to overcome the epidemic of what she calls our "emotional constipation." 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

I think often, especially in our tech and data-driven world, we don't prioritize emotion. 

That's why I wrote the book, to tell the story of emotion in a moment when people are obsessed with this idea of logic, speed, hyperinformation. I feel like this is the work that I was put on this planet to do. 

Let's start by explaining this concept of neuroenergetics, because that is what ties our brains to the rest of the universe. 

Neuroenergetics is a fancy word, but it's quite simple. It's the idea that your brain is running on real emotional energy. This is not metaphysical. This is not metaphorical. It's actual neural chemical energy. And when we understand how the energy of emotion works, we can engineer our lives in more satisfying, connected, confident ways. 

The brain is a pattern detection machine. This is a super useful heuristic to understand this idea of neuroenergetics. Your brain is moving you through your life going, "Apple, apple, apple…" Fill in the blank, it's going to be an apple. A lot of times your brain is making smart predictions. 

But when you are in a chronic problem — you're having the same annoying conversation, you're stuck in the same aggravating situation, you're feeling stressed out still at work — the solution is almost always to do the opposite. The problem is, the pattern detection machine keeps saying, "No, apple again. Try harder. Apple." I do a lot of work in relational systems. I go into large organizations, I go into marriages and I go into families. People will have the same, I'm not kidding you, conversation for seven years.

You say, if you're over one year old, you are familiar with patterns, and you're looking for them. 

You are totally looking for them. So, what is the master pattern? What is the energy supply that it's running on? Our pattern detection machine is the machinery. The energy that's powering that thing is emotional. 

We're talking about the ways we fall into pain in our life, aggravation, stress disconnection. The number one mistake that people make is they focus on the situation. "Bill said this to me… I really don't like the way Mary's talking to me." I get it. We all do it. But there's no power there.

So what do I need to do? I need to start thinking about not just emotion, but the master emotional pattern that is causing my pain. And it's always always going to be something like, "Things never work out for me. Things never work out for me. Things never work out for me." Then watch me get a new job, have an uptick in energy for three weeks, six months. No matter what, the pattern detector will return to baseline unless I'm working with the emotional energy in a new way. 

And one of the ways you do that is picking a more powerful pain. For anyone who has pain in their lives, that is absolutely the scariest concept in the world. Tell me what that looks like. especially for anxious people.

In other words, if someone calls me all kinds of names on social media, or I get fired from my job, and I truly don't have any painful emotions about it, there is no problem. I'm not dissociating. I'm not drunk. But if there's no negative emotional energy, there is no problem. Your problems are actually about not the situation. It's about the emotional energy. 

Most people are familiar with this concept that we kind of have two brains: this very reflexive, primitive brain and then this really gorgeous, thoughtful part of the brain that really drives a lot of evolution in our own life and then across humanity. At this primitive level, the brain is going to respond to all pain the same. If I put my hand on a hot stove, the brain is like, "Let's get out of here." And if I start to have a conversation with somebody that I don't want to have a conversation with, it's like, "Let's get out of here." That is driven by an unconscious belief and unconscious sensation, "I've got a great idea — let's avoid pain." 

If this worked, I would be a huge advocate for it. But trying to find the pain-free option is like, "You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to spend all my life looking for a place to live where there is no gravity. Maybe if I try a little bit harder, I can make things fall up." The consequence of trying to avoid pain creates so much more pain, and it's worse. We know that chronic avoidance, chronic numbing, denying, avoiding, all of this, is just addiction and its various manifestations. It makes us sicker. 

So in a life where there is no pain-free option, let me pick the pain that empowers me the most. If I have to have a very difficult conversation, am I going to feel the zings and zaps of anxiety, stress and fear? Sure. My hands will shake. My heart will start to pound. My thoughts will race. And then you know what? The brain is going to habituate. The nervous system is going to calm down and I am going to reap the reward of deeper confidence, deeper self trust and deeper expression. Whereas if I had taken the avoidance path, it really is this energetic shrinking. This idea of picking a more powerful pain is, let me do the thing that strengthens me. 

We get this so clearly in physical health and physical strength. No one is like, "I want to get strong, so today, I'm going to watch seven episodes of 'Love Is Blind' and I'm going to eat a lot of Flaming Hot Cheetos." Now, there might be days where I'm going to sit on the couch and eat a lot of Flaming Hot Cheetos. But I am not confused why I'm not getting stronger. So even if I can say that today is not the day that I am going to have that conversation, I will be powerful enough to tell myself the truth. I know that in this avoidance, there's no way for me to get stronger. And I know that in this avoidance, my anxiety will actually increase. Even that is a powerful way to meet the truth of your life. 

You talk about mastering the uncertainty, about finding our power and our leadership. Those are tough words for a lot of us to take on, because we feel, "I can't do that. I don't have mastery, I don't have power. What I do have is uncertainty."

Being a trauma provider, I work with a lot of very intense emotions — rage, terror, dejection. I would suggest we miss one of the most hated human emotions. If you think about the one emotion that a pattern detection machine cannot tolerate, it's actually confusion. If it's like, "They hate me, they hate me, they hate me," it feels bad but there's no confusion here. If it's, "They hate me, they hate me, why are they being so nice to me?" Then it's, "Oh my god, they're trying to kill me." The brain has a strong aversion to confusion. Whether you want to call that ambiguity or uncertainty, they're all neurologically the same. The pattern detection machine does not understand what comes next. 

Everyone understands that the brain's number one function is survival. Here comes the problem. In order for me to survive, I need to have clarity. How am I going to get that clarity? I am going to get it through control of the external world. And so I start to overthink. I start to overdo. I think a lot of us start to over function, over appease, It's all about, "How can I behave in such a way that I can control your behavior so that I don't have to feel my feelings?" 

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If you're not really tearing apart or dissecting this idea of neuroenergetics, you're starting to think that the opposite of uncertainty is certainty. It seems logical. People love to say emotions are so confusing. Emotions are not confusing. Emotions can be intense. But there's a physics and a math to our emotions. When I over, over, over all this energy expenditure, the outcome is very predictable. The very reason I'm overdoing it is to feel better. I don't. I feel I feel worse. 

Anxiety is a disturbed relationship with certainty. What is a very counterintuitive thing, and ultimately, a very relieving thing for people to understand is the more that you pathologically demand certainty, the worse you will feel and the more unsafe you will become. 

It raises this really interesting question. Well, what is the opposite of uncertainty? The opposite of uncertainty is self-trust. That whatever happens out there, I'm going to be okay. And okay does not mean, I'm not going to have feelings, I'm not going to have zing zaps of the nervous system. It means I already have what I need. 

I'm not trying to downplay the pain that can be associated with some of these life transitions. But what happens for most of us is we come up with these catastrophic scenarios that don't even happen anyway. And we hemorrhage all this energy of our life, trying to make ourselves safe. But the very mechanisms by which we're trying to make ourselves safe, are what's imperiling ourselves. 

What I see in couples all the time, the session starts with, "You don't really respect me. You don't really love me, you don't really listen to me." So I say, "That's so valid. Before we're going to talk about that, first, tell me how well you love yourself. Tell me what is the state of your self respect?" The expectation is that my partner is going to give me emotional energy. You can think of emotional energy as currencies that I am not set up to receive. It's like trying to go to the ATM and put noodles in it. 

Sometimes you can love yourself enough to realize, this person isn't good for me, this isn't a good situation or a good job. But that comes from being in that place of power and self-love. And it's very difficult to get there when you're seeking it externally. 

That's one of the best examples of picking a more powerful pain. One of the most difficult things to do is to leave relationships [with people] that on some level, we still love. If you think about any form of chronic emotional pain in your life, it's not all bad. In other words, "I love you, but you hurt me. I like this, but I don't like it. I want this, but it's stressful."

We have to understand that if we really want to transform our lives, what we're really talking about isn't just, "How do I end the bad?" It's, "How do I leave the good?" 

Right in the beginning of the book you talk about how energy can't be destroyed. So what do we do with it? Can you explain a little bit of what that looks like in terms of our own brains? 

We can put people in scanners and we see we see this energy force. We do know that energy cannot be destroyed, but it can be transformed. So then the question becomes like, "Let me think about the places that I keep falling into chronic pain in my life." These are the things that are really hurting us are chronic pain cycles. So in order for me to transform it, I have to be willing to feel it. 

Your brain and your body is the most exquisite machine on the planet. It's the most powerful machine you own. The brain and the body know what to do with waste. I eat food, it comes out. I take in oxygen, I put out carbon dioxide. When it comes to emotions, your nervous system is packing 150 million years of evolution. It understands what to do with hard feelings.

But what happens is when the energy starts to rise through us quite literally, not metaphorically, rising into consciousness, we say "No, shut it down. Avoid it. Pretend. Distract." The math behind the chronic avoidance is emotional constipation. I wish there was like a better metaphor, but we're filled with emotional poo, and then things can't move. So what is the process? The process is to move the energy that is stuck inside of you. 

In the race against machines, obviously, they've outpaced us cognitively, in terms of retention capacity, in terms of recall, all the kinds of information processing, memory, speed, things like this. People are kind of freaked out, like, are the machines going to crush us? But what I actually think is going to happen is we're being pushed into a further evolution. What really differentiates us from the machines? It's this idea of our emotional and relational intelligence. I think one of the most pressing questions before humanity is, are we going to come into a deeper appreciation of our unique intelligences, which are emotional and social. But in order to do so, we need to understand our pain.