"Practical Feelings develops a novel theory of emotion, combining the sociology of emotion with social practice theory. Chapter 1 theorizes an emotion practice approach by combining symbolic interactionist and poststructural approaches to emotion using their shared lineage of pragmatism. Within this approach, concepts like emotional capital, habitus, and social location together help us examine emotion as effort, energy, and embodied resource. Chapters 2 through 5 apply an emotion practice approach to the domains of work, leisure, social media, and politics. The empirical chapters move from the intimate sphere of nursing to the sphere of public health threats while refining an emotion practice approach. Audio diaries from nurses capture how they use and conserve emotional resources within hierarchies of social class and race. In examining sports fans, we see how they use and invest in the emotional power of sports symbols, but a hierarchy of racial inequality underlies this economy of emotion that connects communities and corporations. Social media users connect with others during health threats by relying on past engrained digital habits of frivolity and humour. Turning to the political sphere, rhetoric from leaders reinforced a view of emotions as irrational, converting dominant emotional capital into political capital during public health threats (Ebola and COVID-19). The final chapter highlights the relevance of homophily for connecting emotions with social inequality and theorizes mechanisms for social change"--

Tracing emotions across work, leisure, social media, and politics, Practical Feelings counters old myths and shows how emotions are practical resources for tackling individual and collective challenges. We do not usually think of our emotions as practical, yet they often interlace the elements of daily life. In Practical Feelings, Marci D. Cottingham develops a theory of emotion as practical resources. By integrating the sociology of emotion with practice theory, Cottingham covers diverse areas of social life to show the range of an emotion practice approach and trace how emotions are put to use in divergent domains. Spanning work, leisure, digital interactions, and the political sphere, Cottingham portrays nurses, sports fans, social media users, and political actors in more complex, holistic ways. Practical Feelings provides the conceptual tools needed to examine emotions as effort, energy, and embodied resources that calibrate us to the social world.

Your Feelings determine who you are and how you live your life. Like most people, you probably spend a lot of time and money trying to create or avoid certain feelings. In order to liberate the true power of your feelings, you need to understand their real purpose. They are the keys to your emotional potential and intelligence. Learn why feelings like anger, sadness, fear and shame are really the key to your clarity, love, creativity, humility and natural authority - and how you can unlock it!

Employing exercises, self-tests, case studies, and step-by-step instructions, Segal shows readers how to listen to their intuition and their body's messages, make those signals part of their decision-making process, and thus realize the full benefit of their emotional resources. "Unlike so many parenting books full of generalizations, this title includes specific ideas for games, projects, and even computer games. Highly recommended for all parenting collections." - Library Journal

"The only self-help book you'll ever need, from a psychiatrist who will help you put aside your unrealistic wishes, stop trying to change things you can't change, and do the best with what you can control--the first steps to solving all of life's impossible problems"--

One of the world's most respected psychiatrists provides a much-needed new evolutionary framework for making sense of mental illness With his classic book Why We Get Sick, Randolph Nesse established the field of evolutionary medicine. Now he returns with a book that transforms our understanding of mental disorders by exploring a fundamentally new question. Instead of asking why certain people suffer from mental illness, Nesse asks why natural selection has left us with fragile minds at all. Drawing on revealing stories from his own clinical practice and insights from evolutionary biology, Nesse shows how negative emotions are useful in certain situations, yet can become excessive. Anxiety protects us from harm in the face of danger, but false alarms are inevitable. Low mood prevents us from wasting effort in pursuit of unreachable goals, but it often escalates into pathological depression. Other mental disorders, such as addiction and anorexia, result from the mismatch between modern environments and our ancient human past. Taken together, these insights and many more help to explain the pervasiveness of human suffering, and show us new paths for relieving it. Good Reasons for Bad Feelings will fascinate anyone who wonders how our minds can be so powerful, yet so fragile, and how love and goodness came to exist in organisms shaped to maximize Darwinian fitness.

From the duo behind the bestselling book No Hard Feelings and the wildly popular @LizandMollie Instagram, an insightful and approachable illustrated guide to handling our most difficult emotions. We all experience unwieldy feelings. But between our emotion-phobic society and the debilitating uncertainty of modern times, we usually don't know how to talk about what we're going through, much less handle it. Over the past year, Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy’s online community has laughed and cried about productivity guilt, pandemic anxiety, and Zoom fatigue. Now, Big Feelings addresses anyone intimidated by oversized feelings they can't predict or control, offering the tools to understand what's really going on, find comfort, and face the future with a sense of newfound agency. Weaving surprising science with personal stories and original illustrations, each chapter examines one uncomfortable feeling—like envy, burnout, and anxiety—and lays out strategies for turning big emotions into manageable ones. You’ll learn: • How to end the cycle of intrusive thoughts brought on by regret, and instead use this feeling as a compass for making decisions • How to identify what’s behind your anger and communicate it productively, without putting people on the defensive • Why we might be suffering from perfectionism even if we feel far from perfect, and how to detach your self-worth from what you do Big Feelings helps us understand that difficult emotions are not abnormal, and that we can emerge from them with a deeper sense of meaning. We can’t stop emotions from bubbling up, but we can learn how to make peace with them.