Exploring Emotions Through the Lens of a Chef

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Have you ever felt overwhelmed by your emotions or feeling like your emotions were concocted by someone else, leaving you powerless in your own emotional experience?

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Perhaps you look at other people and they seem to have it all together, while you have bursts of emotions that blow like a volcano.

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Or maybe you don't experience much in the way of feelings.

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They've been shut down for so long, it has become a habit to you that you just don't know how to break.

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Or lastly, maybe when someone asks, how do you feel?

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You're just like, I don't know.

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I don't know.

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I don't know how I feel.

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These are all emotional experiences that many face, but what if there was a way to make sense of your feelings through the lens of a chef understanding flavors in a recipe?

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This is Flavors of Emotions, expanding your emotional palette for a tastier life.

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My name is Kim Korte.

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I'm the author of Yucky, Yummy, Savory, Sweet, Understanding the Flavors of Emotions.

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If you have struggled with your emotions and are looking for a new perspective for managing them, then stay tuned for a new way, not only to approach emotions, but to better understand how they are made.

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I felt like my emotions were running my life and there's a good reason.

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It's because they were emotions are hard.

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They were hard for me to face.

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They were uncomfortable and very mysterious.

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Like they came out of nowhere and not a good mysterious.

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I know I'm not alone.

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The relationship with emotions and food is a very natural one.

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Sadness can be bitter.

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Kindness is sweet, passion is very yummy, and love, well, it can feel very rich and full bodied.

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We know flavors when it comes to food, but how do we capture flavors of emotions?

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I learned something that transformed me emotionally and physically, turning my relationships with emotion from a foe to a friend.

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It helped me to Um, go from fearing my feelings to feeling a lot more curious about them.

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We construct our emotions much like a chef constructs a dish using ingredients and a recipe.

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Today, I'm going to provide a high level share as to what makes up our emotional ingredients, where we find the recipes and how we taste our feelings.

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First, I need to tell you where I got the idea for all of What started me down this path was after reading How Emotions Are Made, The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.

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She is also the author of The Theory of Constructed Emotions, which basically says emotions are constructed by the brain using past experiences.

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Obviously, there's a bit more to it, but we have plenty of time in future episodes to give you a better understanding of what that theory is about.

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Though I won't say that what I teach is limited to that, I do find it quite compelling.

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Obviously enough to write a book and create this podcast.

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So let's get into it.

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Let's talk about the ingredients, the recipes, and then tasting the flavors.

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First ingredients.

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Our ingredients are the perceptions that we receive.

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Really our eyes and ears, nose, mouth, all of these sensory organs are just tools, tools for receiving the sensory data from the outside world.

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It's really how we experience the world.

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About a thousand years ago, Hassan Ibn al Haytham, father of modern optics Argued that vision occurs in the brain.

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I'm going to say that again.

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Vision occurs in the brain.

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We think we see with our eyes, but we don't.

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We see with our brain.

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He also pointed out that it's subjective and affected by our personal experience.

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Let's talk about that for a second.

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So this means everything that we see, we hear, we touch, we feel in the way of emotions is coming from the brain.

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Okay.

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We also have another sensory system that a lot of people don't know about.

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It's called interoception.

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And interoception is a complicated way of saying, the interior of your body, this is how it receives the data from the interior of our body.

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The brain rather, I should say.

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The brain receives signals from the interior of our body and then sends signals back so that we have experiences of feeling.

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Now this feeling could be hunger, it could be sadness, it could be the flu, or it could be anger.

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These are all the feelings that we get, are made aware of by our interceptive system.

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Now things are going on inside of us all the time.

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We don't feel our heartbeat until we get nervous or we need to slow down because our heart is beating too fast.

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It's just communication.

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It's telling us something and that's what feelings do.

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They tell us something just like all of the other sensory systems.

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They're telling us what we see, what we hear, and it's all from the brain.

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And I just want to add, because we'll get into this more in the future, a prediction of the brain.

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Then we have Recipes.

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These are our past experiences.

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This is what you've learned, what you believe, your memories.

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It's all the same.

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We know what a rose is because we're taught what a rose is.

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We don't have to think about that we learned it.

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It's so embedded in us now.

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We know what a rose is.

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And if we don't, Someone's going to tell us this is a rose and there are people who can distinguish between different kinds of roses Just like there's different colors and there's different Everything so our past experience what we've learned explains to us what we see in here and experience externally These experiences also tell us what we're feeling.

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I always thought that other people were creating my feelings.

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And when I understood that it's really solely going on inside of me, that was very powerful.

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And I know people have heard this before and it's not fun to hear, but there's a lot of power in knowing that.

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I'm the creator of it.

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And it's almost like we've got a little chef inside of our heads that is taking all the sensory data in and saying, Oh, uh, how have I cooked with this before?

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And, uh, what am I going to do with these ingredients as they come in?

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And that's what it does to produce the dish, uh, the emotions that we experience.

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There's a show it's called Top Chef.

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It's on the Food Network, and it's a great example of how the brain kind of works.

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Of course, the brain is super complicated, and I'm keeping this really, really simple, but I understand there's still a lot of power in this simplicity.

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On this TV show, the Top Chef Food Network channel, there are four chefs.

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They all come to compete against each other.

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They've got three dishes and only one winner, and they get these surprise baskets with ingredients that they have to cook with.

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They have access to all the same foods, they have access to all the same equipment, and yet they all come up with different dishes.

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Each one of them will create a unique dish.

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And why is that?

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Since they have all the same thing, why didn't they all make tacos or whatever it is that the ingredients could likely call for?

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It's because they have different cooking experience, different influences.

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It could be family, their, how their mom or dad cooked.

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It could be cultural, it could be the chef that they trained under.

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These are all things that, that make a difference in how they prepare the food that was given them, even though it's the same.

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And this is true too of us with our perceptive ingredients.

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We are using these recipes.

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We're using our past experience and our experiences are so unique to us and why we can't expect people to have the same reaction or the same feeling given the same situation.

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Next, we're going to talk about tasting the flavors of our emotions.

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So, taste itself is a sensory system.

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You have sweet, sour, salty, bitter, savory, which is also called umami.

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And these are sensations in your mouth.

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Flavor is a combination of sensory data.

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It's what you smell.

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We know from COVID that if you don't smell, you're not going to have a lot of flavor in your food.

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It's what you see can influence it.

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What you're hearing can influence it.

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The texture.

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I mean, there's so much that goes in to your experience of food.

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And as we just learned, this is also true of emotions.

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So we taste them.

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We taste our emotions.

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We get the flavors when we connect to the feelings that's produced by them.

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These interoceptive signals that I talked about earlier.

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Now, great.

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You say, Oh, I taste them.

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I'm, I'm angry.

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I'm always angry.

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Or I always fall in love.

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Like you, you've got like a few go to emotions.

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Well, what if we could expand on that?

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What if you could find distinction in those feelings, being able to notice the different variations of love?

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Maybe it's a crush.

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Maybe it's passion.

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Maybe it's not anger.

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Maybe you're irked.

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Maybe you're irate.

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Being able to taste the ingredients to capture what is in an emotional experience and distinguish it from others instead of just always lopping them into one flavor.

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And I'm going to give you an example to help you visualize it.

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And maybe even you can do this own test at home by three different tubs of vanilla ice cream.

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That's right.

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Vanilla ice cream.

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Pretty simple.

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What do you have in there?

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Some cream, a lot of cream.

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You've got sugar, vanilla, salt, and throw it all in to make a tub of ice cream.

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Now you've got these three tubs in front of you and you take a taste.

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Three different makers.

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It's not the same maker.

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Three different makers and you notice the flavors in there.

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Maybe this first one is very creamy.

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They used a lot of cream and maybe a high quality cream.

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That one was maybe a tad more expensive.

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And then the next one, it's a little more icy.

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It's, it's thinner.

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It's not as creamy as the first one, but it still tastes pretty good, but it's just not that, that deep flavor.

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Then the last one is, whoa, a lot of vanilla in there.

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It's really, really coming out and it's a different vanilla.

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Maybe it's Madagascar vanilla.

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See what I'm talking about?

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It's all ice cream, but the ingredients and how they use them make it different.

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And when we can find this difference in our emotions, then we can react to situations differently.

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We can make better decisions.

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We can discover more of what we like and what we don't like, what we want and what we don't want.

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This becomes how we can define ourselves, how we can define our lives, but it also helps us to identify how we feel, how to communicate it to ourselves and to others.

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There's lots and lots of power in that.

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With all of this, you have a higher level of self awareness and with a higher level of self awareness.

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You are boy able to take on the world practically because you know yourself what you want what you don't want you.

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You are able to make better decisions.

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You're actually better health wise because you don't sit in those feelings as long or you recognize them pretty quickly like oh This isn't what's going on here and you're able to pivot from them it's It's so important to life.

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It's like the difference of having a Table with a few things to eat that are kind of bland, or maybe don't have any real variety, versus a huge table filled with a variety of foods from all different spice levels, all different flavor palettes that you can enjoy.

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We have a chef in our head that is there to Take these ingredients, cook it up just like those Top Chef examples, and then serve it.

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And then we're there to taste it and say, Oh, this isn't right.

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I don't like this.

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I really like this.

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Make this change.

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And then the chef makes the change.

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There's another benefit, though, to going this route by having an emotion chef in your head.

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It's kind of like our dog Finnegan.

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Yes, little Finnegan has taken on the responsibilities of my husband and myself, and I'll explain it to you this way.

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When I leave things around the house, my husband calls it a trail of things.

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He will say, Finnegan left, you know, such and such out.

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Do you think that he's going to pick it up?

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And I'll respond, yeah, he's planning on picking it up.

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Just give him some time.

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Or I'll say, uh, Finnegan did not change the toilet roll again.

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I wonder why he just can't figure out when it's empty to replace it.

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And then my husband will respond, Oh, Finney, Finney, sorry.

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He just isn't thinking half the time about that stuff

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Finney

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is too cute and could never be blamed for any of that, but it's a great tool for depersonalizing this thing.

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This accusation, and when you depersonalize it, what you're doing is that you're allowing yourself to absorb the information and not take it quite as, as critically, right?

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Try it out at home.

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You'll see, I've had friends who've done this too, and it really does work.

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Now, I'll admit there's times when I'm really tired where it might not work as well.

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But.

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It's a great communication tool for us to use by having a chef in our head I just want to talk about this one more time is that the chef works for you, not the other way around.

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And that's how I used to feel like.

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I worked for the chef.

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I worked for my emotions.

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Our emotion recipes change every day.

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With each new experience we have, would it be better to take an active role in how they're created?

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If we view our feelings as cooked up by an emotion chef, then we can play an active role in our kitchen to change the recipes, stop cooking them, or more importantly, create the emotion recipes we want to consume.

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Thank you for listening to Flavors of Emotions.

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I hope you enjoyed the show.

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If you like what you heard and you want to hear more, please click the subscribe button.

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To connect with me or purchase my book, check the links in the show notes.