Notes from the editor:
The following speech was presented on 6/17/25 at an event hosted by the Department of Growth. Dr. Mehta has reviewed and approved this version of the transcript, but this was originally designed as a small-group live talk.
Dr. Mehta provides a unique perspective that we feel is beneficial for anyone... but especially those who are building businesses and struggling with the challenges of the entrepreneurial environment. Please enjoy his presentation below, and see at the end for his suggested further reading on emotional health in the modern world.
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As a founder, you know that some of the most important decisions that you make in your venture are regarding who is going to be working for you. A good team member provides you with crucial information you need to scaffold your decisions in the complex and fast-moving startup environment. A good team member should alert you to failure modes before they become fires and to valuable opportunities before they slip away. However, good team members should also be flexible – willing to adapt, to learn, and to improve according to the needs of the group.
Well, it just so happens that before you ever made your first hire or connected with your co-founder, you already had team members like this in your court. That is because when understood and leveraged appropriately, your emotions serve all these functions.
What I'm going to offer you in this talk is just a bit about what we learned in academic psychology over the years about how to make your emotions be that good team member and how to make your emotions work for you in your role as a leader.
In particular, I'll be focusing on two tools in the emotional toolkit. First, I’ll talk about how you can benefit from the informational value of emotions with emotion awareness. Second, I’ll talk about changing emotions with emotion regulation.
I'd like to begin by dispelling one of the biggest misconceptions people have about emotions. This is the idea that rational decision making starts by removing emotion. This misconception is very old going back at least as far as ancient Greece, with philosophers like Plato. And it's been repeated consistently in Western culture since that time. But this is a misconception.
In fact, emotion is so deeply embedded into our decision-making machinery, it's both nonsensical and undesirable to seek to remove emotions from your decision-making process. Instead, the key to making good decisions is by understanding your emotions and what they’re telling you, listening to them when they're helpful, and learning to regulate them when they're not helpful.
Some of the most compelling and elegant evidence for the role of emotions in decision-making comes from a neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio. Damasio had a famous case study named Elliott. Elliot had a good job, a family, and a generally normal and healthy life until he eventually developed a large tumor in his brain. This tumor was located in an area of the brain known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or the vmPFC which is located behind the middle of the forehead just above the eyes.
To remove the tumor, doctors had to remove a section of the brain containing his vmPFC. After having his vmPFC removed, the doctors did a variety of tests and were happy to find his cognitive functions appeared wholly intact. His memory was normal. He scored average or above average on IQ tests. His perception was normal. He could speak just fine.
Despite seeming cognitively normal upon first inspection, his life slowly began to unravel. He lost his job and had several divorces – some with partners whom his family could not begin to understand why he had gotten involved with in the first place. He lost all his money in a dubious money-making scheme.
As Elliot’s life continued to deteriorate, Damasio sought to understand what could possibly be wrong that was driving Elliot to make so many terrible decisions. Damasio eventually discovered that at the heart of Elliot’s issues was not a problem with his cognitive capabilities, but instead a deficit of emotion. Elliott’s emotional responses were completely blunted. Elliot was strangely unbothered by the unraveling state of his own life. If you showed him images such as people in catastrophic tragedies or buildings being toppled, he had no emotional response.
Damasio continued to study patients like this with vmPFC damage and this eventually led to the development of his theory known as the somatic marker hypothesis. According to the somatic marker hypothesis, emotions act as embodied signals of value, or what Damasio calls somatic markers. Somatic markers are essentially bodily emotional responses that reflect what we’ve learned from past experiences about the goodness or badness of different choices. These responses can tag different options as being potentially dangerous or potentially rewarding. Somatic markers help us rapidly evaluate and narrow down choices in complex and uncertain situations like those that you all, as startup founders, are faced with on a daily basis. Rather than clouding judgment, emotions and the accompanying somatic markers have the potential to streamline decision making by highlighting what's most important, especially when the facts alone don't clearly point in one direction.
To test his ideas, Damasio and his team developed a psychological study called the Iowa Gambling Task. In this task, participants are presented with multiple card decks and they choose cards from whichever deck they please. Depending on the card that they select, they get either a monetary reward or a monetary penalty. What the participants don't know is that there are two kinds of card decks. Some of the card decks offer large and frequent rewards, but if you keep picking from the deck you will ultimately lose money due to the even larger losses. Other card decks offer more modest rewards, but if you keep picking from that deck, you will ultimately earn more money.
What is fascinating about this task is that healthy individuals begin to favor the good decks before they can even tell you why. However, if you connect their bodies to a bunch of different sensors measuring those emotional physiological systems, you can see that their bodies are having emotional responses to the bad decks before the participants themselves can even tell you that there is a difference in the decks.
Subconsciously, healthy participants respond to these emotional signals, known as somatic markers, by avoiding the bad decks of cards. However, their bodies are generating somatic markers in response to the bad decks before the participants are consciously even aware of the differences between the decks. It turns out that patients with damage to the vmPFC, such as Elliott fail at this task. They don't generate these anticipatory emotional signals and they keep drawing from the risky bad decks despite repeated losses.
OK, so though I'm assuming that no one here today has catastrophic vmPFC damage, this work tells us about the importance of listening to our emotions and listening to our body and understanding what we're feeling and why. Because often long before our conscious mind catches up, our emotional systems are already flagging what's important in our environment and pointing our attention towards threats and opportunities. In the fast-moving and complex high-stakes environment of startups, that kind of built-in signal can provide you with a crucial edge in effective decision making. But how do we leverage this informational signal?
The first step is cultivating mindful attention and acceptance of your emotions. That means noticing when we feel angry or anxious or uneasy, and being willing to sit with those emotions without immediately pushing them away, explaining them away, or trying to fix them. Because when you're receptive to your emotions, that allows you to better understand your emotions.
Emotions are often speaking in the language of the body, so it's important to tune in physically. You might notice your chest tightening, your heart racing, or your stomach getting a sense of heaviness. These can all be early signals that something needs your attention even before you can put it into words. If you're someone who has historically ignored your emotions because you were taught to do so or felt uncomfortable or because it just never seemed useful, know that developing this skill takes time. It's like learning a whole new language without a dictionary or a grammar reader or Google Translate.
At first, everything may feel vague and uncertain. What matters is staying with the practice, continuing to listen and notice, ask questions and reflect until you begin to build this emotional fluency. With that fluency comes the ability to make quicker decisions using the full wisdom of your experience.
In this first part of the talk, we talked about how emotions can serve as powerful sources of information that help us navigate complex decisions. However, it's also crucially important to acknowledge that emotions don't always indicate the correct course of action. As I'm sure we can all attest to, sometimes emotions can reflect old habits or unhelpful beliefs or fears that don't serve your current goals.
For example, you may feel anxiety before giving critical feedback to a team member. This could stem from a long-standing discomfort with conflict rather than a helpful indication that you should avoid the interaction.
In cases like this, we don't want to blindly follow our emotions. We want to work with them. This is where emotion regulation comes into play. Emotion regulation entails the ability to step back and evaluate when to shift your emotional response in a direction that better serves your values and objectives and then having the toolkit to know how to do that.
In the past 30 years, scientists such as the folks from my lab where I did my PhD at Stanford, have been trying to understand the different strategies that people use to change or regulate their emotions and the antecedents and the consequences of using these different kinds of strategies.
Oftentimes, emotion regulation often takes the form of trying to feel better in a negative situation, but it can also involve trying to feel less positively in a situation where it may not be appropriate to express positive emotion or trying to feel more negatively in a situation where negative emotion might facilitate your goals, such as before a protest.
There are many strategies that people use, whether it's avoiding responding to an uncomfortable e-mail, taking deep breaths, playing video games, or drinking alcohol. One strategy, in particular, has really captured the interest of researchers, including myself, is a strategy known as reappraisal.
Reappraisal refers to attempts to change how you are thinking about a situation in order to change your emotional response. It is long known that emotions are determined less by what actually happens in the world, and more by how we interpret and make sense of what's happening in the world. The upshot of this insight is that you can change your emotional response by changing the way that you're thinking about a situation. This is known as reappraisal. For example, if you are denied funding from a potential investor and you're feeling upset, and perhaps you feel like maybe this idea sucks and has no legs… your reappraisal could involve viewing that feedback as important information that's going to help you clarify your value proposition in the future.
The reason this strategy has been of such great interest is because it works very well. Across so many outcomes, we see time and time again that in general reappraisal is very beneficial. People who reappraise more suffer lower rates of psychopathology, such as anxiety and depression, are less lonely, have better relationships, better cardiovascular health and better self-control with things like food craving and academic achievement.
But another great thing about reappraisal is that you can learn to reappraise. We recently ran a study where we gave people a very brief introduction to what reappraisal is, and when I say brief, I mean less in depth than the talk I'm giving to you right now. We then sent them messages every evening for two weeks where we asked them to consider the most negative thing that happened that day and then spend a couple minutes writing a reappraisal. Impressively, we saw significant reductions in anxiety, depression, and stress. But what's even more fascinating is that these reductions in anxiety, depression, and stress persisted for weeks after we stopped reminding them to reappraise. Very powerful stuff!
Now, I want you to know that you can do this yourself. You don't actually need to participate in a study. You can just buy a spiral notepad or make a note on your iPhone and take 5 minutes to check in each evening. Think about what was the most negative thing that happened in your day and spend a few minutes reappraising that situation in a way that's more constructive and perhaps feels less negative.
In general, with this amount of instruction that I've given you, people tend to be able to make pretty good reappraisals. But because you are all in the inner sanctum, I'm going to give you a few extra tips, a few bonus instructions.
The first thing I want to talk about is values. My own dissertation work was on the question of what makes a particular reappraisal best suited for a particular person. It turns out that one of the key ingredients has to do with the match between your own unique values and the reappraisal. Does the perspective of your reappraisal match the broad guiding principles of your life? Everyone has values and you may be more or less in touch with what your values are, but your values are going to determine how you evaluate the situations in your life. And also what kinds of reappraisals will be most effective for regulating your emotions.
For example, imagine your team makes a decision to pursue a particular marketing strategy over another marketing strategy that you yourself preferred. After three months, the response has been underwhelming and you're feeling frustrated because you thought your original preference would have outperformed the other strategy. For someone who authentically values collaboration and teamwork, a reappraisal could involve recognizing that maintaining a culture of collaboration and compromise is more important in the long run than being right on any one single decision.
However, if collaboration is not a value that you hold particularly strongly, that reappraisal will not necessarily be effective for you. Therefore, in order to be effective at reappraising yourself, you need to have a clear sense of what is important to you, what are the values that you care about, and how do you prioritize different values relative to one another.
For that reason it can be helpful to your reappraisal abilities to take the time regularly to really check in with yourself about what your values are. Having that clear picture of your values can give you a starting point for thinking about how you can reappraise challenging situations more effectively. It can also give you a lens through which to understand your emotions and benefit from the information that they are providing you. So that's sort of tip #1 is staying in touch with your values.
The next thing I'd like to talk about is a particular kind of reappraisal known as stress mindset reappraisal. So far we've been talking about reappraisal as changing how you think about a situation in order to change the emotions that arise. However, one interesting thing that humans tend to do – and this might be unique to humans – is that not only do people have emotional responses to situations, they also have emotional responses to their own emotions.
For example, let's say you're giving some type of pitch and you feel your palms getting sweaty and you feel your heart racing and you're thinking: “Why can't I be more confident?! I'm definitely going mess this up now because I'm so nervous.”
What's essentially happening is that you're having negative emotions about negative emotions. Stress mindset reappraisals target this second layer of emotion, changing the way that you think about the stress response itself. Rather than seeing stress as purely harmful or something to eliminate or to avoid, the goal with stress mindset reappraisal is to reframe the stress response as something that can be helpful. Stress is a sign that your body is mobilizing resources and that you're preparing to meet the demands of a challenge. In other words, we're changing the narrative from “stress is threatening” and “stress is harmful”, to “stress is enhancing” and “stress is preparing me to take on this challenge”.
What's fascinating is that how you think about stress, or in other words, your mindset about stress, actually changes how your body and brain respond to the stress. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Believing that stress is an asset actually changes your own bodily response to that stress in a way that makes it more beneficial.
This is observable in scientific studies. Researchers have put people in a lab in a stressful scenario and guided half of them to perceive stress as something that they can benefit from and something that is performance enhancing, and guided the other half to view stress as something that's harmful and that tends to be debilitating. In the group who are guided to think about stress as performance enhancing, researchers actually observed that they have increased cardiac output meaning their heart is pumping greater volumes of blood and they have decreased peripheral resistance meaning their blood is flowing more freely throughout their blood vessels. And sure enough, participants who were taught that stress is enhancing had greater performance than those who were taught that stress is debilitating.
We've talked about two ways to make your emotions work for you – by fostering emotional awareness and by fostering emotion regulation. And it's worth emphasizing that these are not totally separate tools in your toolkit; they are actually interdependent, and together they form a kind of feedback loop that strengthens over time.
When you practice emotional awareness, tuning into your emotions, noticing what they feel like in the body and exploring what they might be trying to tell you, you are building the foundation for more effective emotion regulation. Likewise, when you engage in strategies like reappraisal, especially those grounded in your values, you're not just managing how you feel in that moment but also deepening your own understanding of what matters to you, how your mind makes meaning, and what your emotions tend to respond to. This reflective process feeds back into greater emotion awareness the next time around. Over time, this cycle creates a kind of emotional fluency making you more resilient and more aligned with the kind of leader that you want to be.
So don't think of emotional skills as something you either have or you don't have; think of them as muscles. Muscles that grow with use. The more that you practice emotional awareness, the easier it becomes to regulate. And the more that you regulate in a thoughtful value-aligned way, the clearer these emotional signals become. Together, these practices create a virtuous cycle of insight and resilience – qualities that will lead to greater emotional well-being for yourselves and greater leadership for your company.
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Here are some book recommendations by Dr. Ashish Mehta that dive deeper into building emotional resilience:
Chatter by Ethan Kross
Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett
Open to Emotion by Jenn Veilleux
