Marc Brackett, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, recently developed RULER. It’s a framework to handle the highs and lows life hands us daily. More than 5,000 schools are using this tool featured in his new book, ‘Dealing With Feeling: Use Your Emotions to Create the Life You Want.” They are:
Recognize: pause, accept you feel something big enough to notice
Understand: sit with the emotion and be curious about it
Label: put your feelings into as many descriptive words as you can
Express: find a healthy outlet for them. Talk with a friend or pet.
Regulate: find the best strategies to manage these constructively
Source: The New York Times, September 12, 2025. Link. To help you build emotional self-awareness, the team at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence codeveloped a free app called How We Feel, which has 144 different words to describe your feelings (such as “excluded,” “engaged” and “glum”) as well as their definitions. Or you can use the emotion wheel created by the psychologist Robert Plutchik for inspiration.