Permission To Feel Book Review | Marc Brackett

Reviewed: October 2024

Quick Take: Permission to Feel introduces the RULER framework – five essential skills for recognising, understanding, labelling, expressing, and regulating emotions. Dr. Marc Brackett, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, demonstrates how we’ve been systematically taught to suppress emotions – and this emotional illiteracy is damaging our health, relationships, and effectiveness. He further reveals how emotional intelligence transforms education, parenting, and professional success.

Emotion regulation is not about not feeling. Neither is it exerting tight control over what we feel. And it’s not about banishing negative emotions and feeling only positive ones. Rather, emotion regulation starts with giving ourselves and others the permission to own our feelings—all of them.

– Marc Brackett

The Emotional Crisis Nobody’s Addressing

Modern society has a profound problem: we’re terrible at dealing with emotions. Studies show over half of people experience negative emotions daily, and two-thirds of young people lack a supportive adult in their lives. We ask ‘How are you?’ without wanting honest answers. We tell children to ‘calm down’ without teaching them how. The cost isn’t just psychological – emotional suppression leads to poorer decisions, damaged relationships, physical illness, and missed opportunities for growth. As Brackett demonstrates, emotions aren’t obstacles to overcome; they’re essential information for navigating life effectively.

The RULER Framework: Five Skills That Transform Lives

The heart of this book is RULER – an evidence-based approach developed at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. Adopted by over 5,000 schools worldwide, RULER has proven results: reduced bullying, improved academic performance, better teacher retention, and enhanced school climate. The acronym stands for five essential skills:

Recognising emotions in ourselves and others – not just in words, but in facial expressions, body language, and vocal tones. Most of us are emotionally illiterate, missing crucial information about ourselves and those around us.
Understanding what triggered these feelings and how they’re influencing our behaviour. This requires becoming detectives of our own emotional lives.
Labelling emotions with nuanced vocabulary – moving beyond ‘fine’ or ‘stressed’ to develop rich emotional language. When we name emotions precisely, we gain power over them. The difference between ‘annoyed’, ‘frustrated’, or ‘enraged’ isn’t semantic – it’s crucial.
Expressing emotions appropriately within social contexts – in ways that inform others and invite empathy. This isn’t venting indiscriminately; it’s communicating feelings effectively to strengthen relationships.
Regulating emotions – not suppressing them, but finding practical strategies for working with what we feel. Regulation means managing emotions so they help rather than hinder us.

What makes RULER revolutionary is its emphasis on adults first. Brackett insists we can’t teach children emotional skills we haven’t mastered ourselves. Schools train teachers and staff before implementing RULER with students – and the transformation is measurable.

The Mood Meter: Your Emotional GPS

One of the book’s most practical tools is the Mood Meter – a simple grid mapping emotions along two dimensions: energy (high to low) and pleasantness (pleasant to unpleasant). This creates four colour-coded quadrants with 100 feeling words. The red quadrant contains high-energy unpleasant emotions like anger and anxiety. Yellow holds high-energy pleasant feelings like excitement and joy. Green represents low-energy pleasant states like calmness and contentment. Blue captures low-energy unpleasant emotions like sadness and loneliness.

Throughout the day, you plot where you are on the meter. Over time, patterns emerge – you notice triggers, identify when you experience certain feelings, and discover which strategies help you move between quadrants effectively. Schools using RULER often start days with Mood Meter check-ins, creating shared emotional language and normalising the full range of human feelings.

My message for everyone is the same: that if we can learn to identify, express, and harness our feelings, even the most challenging ones, we can use those emotions to help us create positive, satisfying lives.

– Marc Brackett

There Are No ‘Bad’ Emotions

Perhaps the book’s most important message: there are no inherently bad emotions. Anger isn’t destructive; sadness isn’t weakness. What matters is how we respond. Brackett dismantles toxic positivity – the pressure to maintain cheerful exteriors regardless of reality. Research shows people who express anger appropriately actually live longer. Suppressing anger triggers chronic stress responses that damage immune systems. Emotions are information – they tell us what we value and need. Ignoring these signals is like covering dashboard warning lights and hoping for the best.

Real-World Impact

The evidence is compelling across contexts. In schools, RULER creates environments where emotions are acknowledged skilfully, leading to improved wellbeing and academic achievement. In workplaces, companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have consulted with Brackett on integrating emotional intelligence into their cultures – resulting in better collaboration, higher engagement, reduced burnout, and improved performance.

Permission to feel book review by marc brackett

My Personal Takeaway

Emotions are not obstacles but essential information that are required to function successfully in every aspect of our lives. What strikes me most is Brackett’s emphasis on permission – many of us don’t feel allowed to experience the full range of human emotion. We’ve internalised that feelings are inconvenient or unprofessional. But emotional suppression doesn’t make us stronger – it makes us sicker and less effective and it’s vital we each figure this out before it’s too late.

I’d also highly recommending downloading the free app ‘How We Feel’; a superb resource to apply the principles discussed in this book, and one I recommend to clients who are struggling to label emotions and recognise the messages their body is sending them.

Who Should Read This Book

Essential reading for parents raising emotionally healthy children, educators creating supportive environments, leaders building emotionally intelligent organisations, and anyone who never learned to properly deal with feelings. If you constantly say ‘I’m fine’ when you’re not, struggle with relationships, or want to break cycles of emotional suppression, this book offers both understanding and practical paths forward.