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Name: Atlas of the Heart
Rating: 4.6 (1511 reviews)
Author: Brené Brown

Brené Brown

Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

4.6 (1511 ratings)

27 mins

Brief summary

Atlas Of The Heart by Brené Brown is a guide to understanding emotions, helping readers build meaningful connections and lead more empathetic lives.

Topics

Self-Help Resolving Conflict Emotional Intelligence Skills

Table of Contents

Atlas of the Heart
Summary of 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Learn to navigate your own emotional map.

Imagine you’re stumbling around in the dark, in an unfamiliar city, trying to find your way to a bright light twinkling on a distant hill. You see dark shapes that you think you recognize, but you’re not quite sure what they are. You know you want to get to that light, but the way there involves crossing deep gorges and climbing menacing hills. And there’s no clear path in sight.

You might feel lost like this – without a clear sense of where you really are in your emotional landscape. You might struggle to even name your feelings. Or to understand feelings that come on strongly. Like why is it that that particular person always pushes your buttons? Is there a deeper meaning to the emotions that you’re feeling, or is it just a sign that you need to get some rest?

You want to understand, but the answers to those questions lie just out of reach, in that foggy darkness. And in your search for answers, you’re rocked by emotions, blown off course, left feeling lost and bewildered, and sometimes in despair. You know you want to get to a place where you feel grounded, and content – but it seems elusive, like that bright light on the hill: always around that next bend, never coming closer in view.

Nowadays, it’s becoming more common to talk about emotions. Talk shows now use words like “trauma” regularly, and we can talk about experiences of vulnerability and depression much more openly than we used to. But do we really understand what these words mean? Can we recognize the difference between joy and happiness? What about shame and guilt?

We still have so much to learn about emotions. And that’s where Brené Brown comes in: she’s able to offer clarity on the things that shape our lives.

In these blinks, we’ll gain some orientation of our emotional landscapes with an atlas – the Atlas of the Heart. We’ll learn how to start navigating our feelings with more nuance and more clarity. So, let’s get into it!

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why hopelessness and despair are the most dangerous emotions you can experience;
How understanding your emotions will transform your relationships; and
why happiness and joy are not the same.

A child with magic powers.

Growing up, Brené Brown was sure she had magic powers – that she could predict the future, and make connections no one else around her could.

She remembers how her high-school swim coach had an explosive temper, and that all her classmates were terrified of him. They couldn’t quite figure out why he would suddenly get so angry all the time. But Brené knew. She’d noticed he’d freak out when people weren’t trying hard in practice. It didn’t matter how talented you were – if you weren’t one hundred percent committed to improvement, you’d set him off. On the other hand, if he saw you were taking the practice seriously, he’d never get angry at you, even if you were a mediocre swimmer. And he loved the backstroke.

So, Brené worked on her backstroke. In order to stay under the radar and not piss off her teacher, she gave it her all.

Staying under the radar was the main function of the heightened levels of awareness she'd developed as a kid – what felt like her magic powers. It helped her navigate her home life, with her complicated parents. In public, her parents were sociable, kind, and fun. But, behind closed doors at home, their behavior was unpredictable. Their moods would swing wildly, and they could get pretty angry without much, if any, warning. It was confusing, and it made Brené and her four siblings feel ashamed. After all, their parents only behaved like this when they were at home – so it was only natural that it made Brené and her siblings feel it was their fault that they got so upset. On top of that, Brené was the oldest of the kids, so she felt like it was her job to protect everyone else from their outbursts.

And so she became very observant. She learned to identify people’s soft spots, or what she now calls everyone’s “shame triggers” – like the ill-timed jokes or misjudged requests that might set someone off.

Besides just her parents, she began to notice how other adults around her would channel their anger into everyday moments, like watching sports or road rage. She understood that those situations were often completely unrelated to what was really making them angry.

At the time, Brené didn't know what to do with all this emotional awareness. Nobody at home talked about their feelings, or expressed them much at all. The only acceptable emotion was anger – and just because Brené could predict the outbursts, it wasn't any less painful when she was on the receiving end of them.

Of course, emotional awareness is precisely what Brené Brown is known for today. It's a superpower she's honed over a stellar career, and a skill she passes on in Atlas of the Heart.

You can’t stop walking on eggshells if they’re taped to your feet.

We often say that someone who’s very sensitive to other people’s moods or reactions is walking on eggshells. In her own words, Brené felt like the eggshells were “duct-taped to the soles of her shoes.” She was hypersensitive to the world around her – so attuned to what might go wrong that it felt excruciating.

She tried drowning out those feelings through partying, smoking, and drinking. And while all of that did succeed in numbing her, it also meant the world got blurry. She could no longer observe what was going on inside of people. She was fearful and anxious, and was so scared of feeling pain that she chased experiences that made her feel even more pain. She was, as she says, “taking the edge off” through alcohol. But taking that edge off was also muffling her magic – her superpower.

Expand your emotional vocabulary.

But hang on. Is there a point to all of this? We can’t all be world renowned emotions experts like Brené, so why should the rest of us spend the time learning more about our feelings?

Well, consider this. Imagine you have a sharp, shooting pain in your shoulder. It’s excruciating and won’t go away, and it’s starting to get in the way of your life. So, you rush to the emergency room. A kind, caring doctor comes in and tries to find out what’s wrong. As you start to tell her, something strange happens: you can’t get any words out. You can only point to the general part of your body where the pain is occurring, but you can’t pinpoint the exact location. So she can’t help you. You’re frustrated, and your shoulder continues to hurt.

Places you go when you’re hurting.

We’ve all been there, many times. Something happens that causes us to feel bad, and we usually describe the emotion we have in response as feeling sad. But what does that mean, exactly?

“Sad” is not the same as being depressed. Depression is a chronic condition, while sadness can be a fleeting feeling we experience in response to a particular situation.

Anguish comes for the bones.

Anguish. Anguish feels shocking, unexpected, and often traumatic. And it can hit us on a primal, physical level, too. This happened to Brené one day when she got a call from a childhood friend out of the blue. The friend told her that she’d felt suicidal due to a childhood trauma Brené didn’t know about. When she heard this from her friend, she physically crumpled to the floor.

In Brené’s words, anguish “comes for the bones” – it strikes us at our core. People are resilient, and can heal from this kind of trauma. But they need support. Otherwise, they may go through the motions, while remaining internally numb or “crumpled.” Or they may respond to the pain by becoming rigidly perfectionist, shutting out all vulnerability to try and stay upright. Good support allows you to experience the pain while learning how to rebuild your life. Some of the best support comes from body-centered therapies that address the physical manifestation of trauma in the body.

Hope is a skill, not an emotion.

To combat hopelessness and despair, let’s start with hope. We think of hope as being a warm and fuzzy emotion. But that’s actually not true. In fact, being hopeful is a skill that you can learn. Being hopeful comes from being able to set realistic goals, figure out how to meet the goals and believe in your own abilities. Hope comes from encountering adversity, and discovering that you can be resilient in the face of it. To learn hopefulness, you need to practice setting goals that you can actually meet.

Even more important, you need to become comfortable with failure and be prepared to try new approaches if the first one doesn’t work. The best thing about learning to be hopeful is that it’s infectious. For example, researchers have shown that hopeful parents generally have hopeful children.

Happiness and joy are not the same thing.

On the other side of the spectrum, there’s happiness. We all know what that word means, right? After all, how many love songs have been written about it?

Well, actually, even the most expert happiness researchers – people who spend their whole lives studying the emotion – can’t agree on exactly what it means. Most research to date has been about happiness as a trait, or part of who we are, rather than as a state – something we experience at times.

Become comfortable with paradox.

Over the course of these blinks, we’ve traveled to two emotional places: where we go when we’re hurting, and some places we go when life is treating us well. As you’ve already discovered, there’s nothing simple about this inner exploration. The seemingly neat categories of “sad” and “happy” are bursting with nuance and contradictions.

We’ve gone over how sadness can make us feel good, and that happiness can be less rewarding than joy. We’ve discovered that emotions can lodge themselves in your body, as well as your mind. And that, to a surprising degree, you can influence how you feel by practicing skills like hopefulness.

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What is Atlas of the Heart about?

Atlas of the Heart (2021) is a guide to understanding your emotions and learning how to regulate them. Everyone experiences strong emotions, but most people can’t identify what it is they’re feeling, or work out where the feelings come from. Developing your emotional vocabulary will transform your relationship to yourself, and the people around you.

Atlas of the Heart Review

Atlas Of The Heart (2021) explores the world of emotions and their impact on our lives. Here's why it's a must-read:

The book provides a comprehensive map of human emotions, enhancing self-awareness and empathy.
It offers practical tools to navigate complex feelings and build stronger connections with others.
The author's research-based approach makes the content accessible and applicable to real-life situations.

Unlock the power of empathy and emotional intelligence by reading Atlas Of The Heart.

Who should read Atlas of the Heart?

Curious adventurers interested in exploring their own emotional landscapes
Anyone who feels flooded by painful emotions that they can’t understand or control
Fans of Brené Brown’s work wanting to learn more about her latest insightful theories of emotion

About the Author

Brené Brown is a research professor at The University of Houston and a visiting professor in management at The University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business. She’s spent the past two decades researching emotions like vulnerability and shame, and her TEDx talk on the subject has been viewed more than 50 million times. Her previous New York Times best-selling books include Daring Greatly, Rising Strong, and The Gifts of Imperfection.

Categories with Atlas of the Heart

Mindfulness & Happiness Communication Skills Motivation & Inspiration Personal Development Sex & Relationships Psychology

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