You’ve heard of cognition. Now, here’s metacognition: the act of thinking about thinking. 

Arthur Brooks, author and public speaker, explains how metacognition helps us reflect on our emotional life, allowing our prefrontal cortex to evaluate signals from the limbic system. For instance, telling children to “use their words” instead of screaming encourages them to engage their prefrontal cortex. The same applies to adults: interrogate your emotions before reacting, and you might just become a more emotionally healthy person. 

According to Brooks, this is a skill that can be developed over time, so if you’re new to the idea of consciously regulating your own emotions, you’re in luck. He stresses that negative emotions – though unenjoyable – are entirely normal and are even representative of a healthy brain. What matters is how we engage with these negative emotions and what lessons we take away from the experiences they give us. 

Metacognition is a skill that requires patience and self-kindness. With enough practice and effort, we all can learn to master this ability and enhance our own happiness, as well as the happiness of those around us.

Arthur Brooks: Emotions proceed from a part of the brain called the limbic system. It's not smart. It just creates these feelings and drives and desires—there's nothing conscious about it at all. If you stop there with your emotions, you'll be managed by them, and that's not what you want. You want to deliver the experience fully to your prefrontal cortex so you can decide what the emotions mean and how you're gonna react. Only your conscious brain can do that—but you need techniques. 

Those techniques are called 'metacognition.' Metacognition is awareness of awareness; it's thinking about thinking. What you're really doing is reflecting on what's going on in your emotional life. You're thinking about your own emotions such that your prefrontal cortex is looking at your limbic system.

So for example, when you have little kids, they tend to be really emotional. And that's great sometimes, but sometimes it's an incredible pain. And so you'll say, "Don't scream, use your words." And what you're actually saying is, "Stop being so limbic." "Use your prefrontal cortex." You want your kids to deliver the signal from their limbic system to their prefrontal cortex and make a decision about how they're gonna react to their own emotions. So take your own advice that you give your kids. First, interrogate your emotions, and then say what you want to say, not what you feel. That requires that we be comfortable with the fact that we have negative emotions in the first place.

And then to have a repertoire of techniques to self-manage. One of the most common ones, the classic that most of us learn from our grandmothers, is when you're feeling angry, don't say anything until you count to ten. Researchers have put this to the test, and they've found that the right number to count to is actually 30. What that's doing is it's giving a chance for your prefrontal cortex to catch up with your limbic system, and it's incredibly good advice. You will self-regulate, you'll also be prouder of yourself than what you wanted to say in the first place.

It's not something that you read about, it makes sense, and suddenly, you can start practicing it perfectly. And you have to be pretty kind to yourself to recognize that you're gonna fail a lot. There's a lot of research that shows that this is a skill to be practiced, and the more you practice, the better at it you get. These are habits and rituals that you'll actually build up. Not only that, but you'll be happier. There's so much research that shows that people who are able to moderate their feelings, manage their feelings—they're dramatically happier than people who are reactive. And, not coincidentally, they make other people happier around them.