Why is it that we often forget what someone said but not how that person made us feel? In this Emotional Push-Up, Siri Srinivas, investor at Draper Associates, joins Dr. Emily to explore how we can tap into our emotional memories and control our moods and mindsets for the better. Tune in to learn how to better flex this emotional muscle!

Thank you for listening! Staying emotionally fit takes work and repetition. That's why the Emotionally Fit podcast with psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt delivers short, actionable Emotional Push-Ups every Tuesday and Thursday to help you build a better practice of mental health. Join us to kickstart your emotional fitness. Let's flex those feels and do some reps together!

Follow Dr. Emily on Twitter, and don’t forget to follow, rate, review and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts! #EmotionallyFit 

The Emotionally Fit podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health. Katie Sunku Wood is the show’s producer from StudioPod Media with additional editing and sound design by nodalab, and featuring music by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew!

Emotionally Fit with me, Dr. Emily Anhalt. As a therapist, I know that staying mentally healthy takes work and repetition. That's why I'll share Emotional Push-Ups, short, actionable exercises to help you strengthen your mental fitness. From improving your friendships to managing stress, let's flex those feels and do some reps together! Hey there, Fit fans! I am here today with Siri Srinivas, investor at Draper Associates. Siri, thank you so much for joining me today.

Oh, I'm so happy to be here. I love talking to you, as you know.

Well, the feeling is mutual. And today, Siri, we're going to be talking about emotional memory. So I'm curious, in general, how good is your memory, especially about things from your early life?

That's an interesting question. It goes one of two ways: either I have extremely vivid recollections of moments, or I cannot remember where I put anything. Most of the time, I've always had terrible memory, and it's a family joke at this point. But I do have very vivid images from points of my life that I don't know why I remember. It often has something to do with what I'm feeling at the time. It's a little bit split that way.

Yeah, that makes sense. And I know for me, my emotional memory is much stronger than my logistical memory. So when I think about things from my past, I can viscerally remember how I felt, but I often can't recall any of the details. And I read a paper years ago in grad school about this. So the paper I read was about an experiment that was done to understand emotional memory. And in this study, people with advanced dementia were assigned two caretakers. One of the caretakers would treat them gently and with kindness, and the other caretaker would be unkind and unloving, not abusive, just not pleasant or nice. So then a week later, they were asked if they had ever met either of the two caretakers.

And they all said no. Because of the dementia, they couldn't remember the two people. But when they were asked who they wanted to work with that day, consistently they chose the caretaker who had treated them kindly. But they couldn't explain why. They just felt drawn to that particular caretaker. So the conclusion of the paper was that our emotional memory is encoded and stored differently than our logistical memory. And to me, it shows that we store our experiences and our emotions and our connections in many places, including places we have no conscious access to sometimes. So it's a reminder that in life, people will forget what you said, but they won't forget how you made them feel. Siri, what do you think about all of this?

That's brilliant because like I said, you called it emotional memory and logistical memory, I didn't have those words, those tools to articulate the difference. But especially as a person known for terrible, I guess, logistical memory, I feel this very strongly. In fact, there are times when I'm trying to relate something to someone and I can't remember who I'm talking about. But the first thing that comes to me is how I feel about them, which I've always found really strange. But I feel this way strongly. So it's definitely a thing that I think about quite often. And also places, places and memories and how I felt at that moment, and what the lighting was like, what I was listening to, what I was wearing, interestingly. These are all things that come back to me somehow, but nothing else. No other details. It's more just, yeah, how I was feeling, what I noted in that moment.

Yeah. 100%, I feel similarly. And our Push-Up today is all about exploring this emotional memory. So what we're going to do together today, Siri, is create an emotional memory playlist because I have found that music is an amazing way to tap into our emotional memories. For anyone who's ever listened to a song and instantly just felt a feeling, you know what I'm talking about. So step one of this Push-Up is to decide if today, you want a little help leaning into your happy memories or your sad memories. And I know some people might be thinking, "Why would I pick sad memories? I've got plenty of contact with that."

But actually, in my experience, I don't think we set enough time aside to be intentional about feeling our sadness. And when we do, it can be really cathartic and healing. But that being said, if you need more joy in your life, that's a great choice, too. And really, you can pick any emotion you want to lean more into today. It doesn't just have to be joy or sadness. So for those listening in, go ahead and press pause while you choose which emotion you want to lean into, or keep listening to hear what Siri chooses. So Siri, what emotion did you decide to go with?

I think I would want to choose joy, and I can tell you why.

Sure.

It's because often I think that are enough things around that can make you stressed or angry or sad. But I found often that when my day is going in a certain direction, I'm a fairly emotional person, and a lot of my mental health journey has been about learning to ride that rollercoaster instead of fighting it. So I think it would be very helpful to figure out how to tap into joy in my life, and mostly in my days, when I'm emotionally headed in one direction, but I want to feel something else. It's almost like reaching into your closet and finding or into your bookshelf and finding the emotion that you need right now, or choosing the place you want to be emotionally. And I think that'll be a really useful tool. Yeah, I choose joy, TLDR.

Great. I love it. And I love that metaphor too, of picking a book off the shelf or reaching into the closet. That's just what we're going for. So step two of our Push-Up is to think about songs that elicit this emotion in you. So for people making a sad playlist, it's those songs that make you tear up. Or for those making a happy playlist, it's those songs that you can't help, but dance to, the ones that put you in a good mood. So take some time to put this together. Or you can just create the playlist now and you can add to it over time. So Siri, I'm really excited to hear, what kind of songs are on your joy playlist? What are the songs that make you feel good?

Okay. First of all, this is a fantastic exercise. So I have to say, I have a running playlist on Spotify. And usually, I have about six or seven songs at a time that I'm listening to on loop because they're dancy or they're catchy. It's almost like sucking the juice out of them. I listen to them on loop for a few days, and then I'm done with them. But there are some songs, and I promise you I'm not making this up because this is what we're talking about, but there are songs that for me are universal, also because I associate them with a specific place or time in my life or something that happened. And it serves to remember a really good time in my life. So a song that immediately comes to mind, and I've told so many friends about this, and also told them exactly what was playing at the time, so the music's very relevant to this memory, is Nina Simone's Feeling Good. I don't know if you know this song.

Oh, yeah.

It's literally just... It's such a simple, beautiful song about literally that, about feeling good. And another song that I really like is Picasso Baby by Jay-Z. It's not my genre usually, but this is a song that I absolutely love because every time it comes on, it puts me in a certain hype mode that it's so uncanny how regularly it can do that for me. And I'm Indian, I grew up listening to dancing, to Bollywood music. So it has a lot of nostalgia value for me.

And so I have a whole Bollywood playlist, which somehow my friends found, and now it's become a communal playlist. And those are very personal. They're very... It is, again, I think the specific feeling is often for me, the function is nostalgia. And there's a song called Pehli Baar, which is a song I've listened to many times. But I recently watched the movie it's part of. And ever since I got a little bit obsessed with the song, I don't know if it was the place I was in or the way it made me feel, but that is one other song that I'm really, really into it now.

I love that. Well, those are three great songs and leads perfectly to step three of this Push-Up, which is to set some time aside to listen to this playlist and to feel those feelings, and to reflect on why these songs bring up this feeling for you. Are they associated with a certain person, a certain place, maybe a time in your life? Is it that the lyrics of the song speak to you? Is it the beauty of the music itself? You don't have to have perfect answers. The idea is just to create some time to get in touch with that emotional memory.

So for example, on my sad playlist, I have Nirvana and Sufjan Stevens and Kid Cudi and Smashing Pumpkins, Crosby, Stills & Nash song, all kinds of things on there. The Nirvana song in particular reminds me of being a confused young teenager trying to figure out what the point of it all was. And when I listen to it, I can vividly remember driving in the rain one day, just feeling utterly tortured by the existential angst of it all. So Siri, would you be up for sharing what comes up for you, what emotional memories surface for you when you listen to your playlist?

So I spoke about Feeling Good by Nina Simone, and I remember the exact moment when I feel like it became a part of my life. I remember the day, it was 2015, November. I was on the subway and the song started playing. And it wasn't one I chose, just my phone was on shuffle. And this was a few days before I left New York City for the first time to move to San Francisco. I'd gotten this amazing job in tech, which combined everything I'd done in my life until then. It was a few days before my birthday. I had this amazing community in New York of friends. And I remember this song playing and me looking around, being in this city that I loved and had such a great experience in, having so much to look forward to. And the song goes, "It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me, and I'm feeling good."

And it was that moment when a song articulated something I was feeling. And I remember the exact image in front of my eyes at that point. So I associate it with a lot of new beginnings and feeling really, really good in that moment, which often is really hard for me to do. Yeah. That's what this song represents for me. And with Picasso Baby, so the interesting thing is hip-hop's not... I'm not a big hip-hop person, and I have friends who are absolutely obsessed. So this is a song I listen to on a road trip. And my former colleague, Avishay Kunyar, he introduced me to the song. And it just combines a lot of the things that I really love. It's about art. It's also Jay-Z basically bringing a bunch of contemporary artists and rapping in a museum, which it speaks about how he's an outsider. And what he does is often not considered high art, but he's breaking those rules.

But also, this is a song about ambition. And that's something that I'm always everyday 24/7 ambitious. But sometimes when you're feeling really vulnerable, when you're going after things that you feel a little scared by, or you need a good hype song, and this is one of those songs for me. It's really about of being irreverent and embracing that irreverence in being in spaces which you've constantly been signaled to, that you don't belong in, and saying, "You know what? No, I'm at the top of my field. I'm a woman, an immigrant," whatever your identity is, "I'm in this space and I have power and I have value, and I'm going to embrace it." And even if people tell you to hide your ambition, I'm going to be out there and show it off. So this song is multiple things for me. One, it was introduced to me by someone I'm very fond of, who I became friends with. But it also, I think, just speaks to something I feel very constantly. Whenever I'm a little bit scared or vulnerable, it's a great song to hype me up.

I love that. Well, thank you so much for starting that playlist. I hope that you'll keep adding to it. And eventually, you'll have a whole list of songs you can listen to, to put you in touch with these beautiful feelings. And Siri, I just want to thank you for flexing your feels and breaking an emotional sweat with me today. It's such a pleasure to see you.

This is so much fun. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Siri. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to Emotionally Fit hosted by me, Dr. Emily Anhalt. New Push-Ups drop every Tuesday and Thursday. Did you do today's Push-Up alongside me and my guest? Tweet your experience with the hashtag #EmotionallyFit and follow me at @DrEmilyAnhalt. Please rate, review, follow and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts. This podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health, where you can take live, therapist-led classes online. From group sessions to therapist matchmaking, Coa will help you build your emotional fitness routine. Head to joincoa.com, that's join-c-o-a.com, to learn more. And follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @joinCoa. From StudioPod Media in San Francisco, our producer is Katie Sunku Wood. Music is by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew!