Welcome to day 4 of my experiment: Going through the Valley of Despair. Valley of Despair.
This week I watched a video by Dr. Arthur Brooks, a Harvard professor, explaining four emotional profiles:
1. Mad scientists: people who experience both positive and negative emotions with high intensity.
2. Judges: people who feel emotions in a softer and more stable way.
3. Cheerleaders: they feel positive emotions intensely and negative emotions more lightly; they tend to have above-average levels of well-being.
4. Poets: they feel negative emotions intensely and positive emotions more softly; they are the most vulnerable to mental-health difficulties.
These profiles are not fixed. They depend on phases, circumstances, maturity, and context. Even so, there’s an underlying pattern that stays with us — an emotional signature.
I then remembered an interview with the actress Carolina Dieckmann, in which she says she rarely feels sadness, recalling having been truly sad only during her divorce and when her mother passed away.
That stayed with me because — unlike Carolina — my profile is clearly the first one.
In my case, it doesn’t matter whether the emotion is positive or negative: it arrives whole, big, and overwhelming.
Living alongside people from the second profile helps me. They offer me emotional stability — especially when I don’t interpret their responses as judgment. But when I’m surrounded almost exclusively by judges, I notice that I start to lose emotional vitality.
And then, little by little, I internalize the collective belief that feeling intensely is dysregulation and feeling softly is virtue — as if intensity were a character flaw and softness a synonym for self-control.
And when that happens, my reptilian brain ends up flattening all nuance.
Then I need to reclaim my vitality — the very thing that makes my emotional experience as alive as it is exhausting, as rich as it is challenging.
It’s a constant game: balancing depth with stability, intensity with clarity, vitality with regulation — without losing who I am in the process.
Till tomorrow,
