Recently I spent the entire day at Yale University, for the Emotion Revolution summit. It was an event put on by Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and the Born This Way Foundation to launch the results of a nationwide survey on the emotions of teenagers in their learning environments and to advocate for schools and parents to take those emotions into consideration. The study found that among all emotions the teens reported feeling 75% were negative including mainly feelings of fatigue and stress.
I spent the day at the Emotion Revolution summit surrounded by students who are passionate about changing school culture. But there were more than just teens at the event; the NYC schools Chancellor was there, the president of Yale University and other academics. And then there was Lady Gaga, who spoke about the feelings she had when she was in high school, "I felt a tremendous amount of stress, a tremendous amount of anxiety, isolation. I felt lonely, I felt misunderstood. I felt stupid even thought I was smart. These are things that stayed with me and the more I got bullied the worse it got the more I shoved it down. The more it affected me over time until I was older and I started to go through some of the harder things in life."
I could relate to everything Lady Gaga said. In high school, I felt like people underestimated me. No one ever really took me seriously not even my friends. And attending a school where no one was really open about their sexuality made it especially difficult for me. I felt isolated a lot of times, because even my friends never truly understood me or even took me serious.
But on this day teens talked openly about their problems, feelings, school environments and discussed solutions. And perhaps Lady Gaga best summed up the goal of the summit, “When you start to make decisions for yourself that keep you happy by not doing the things you don’t want to do you then begin to curate your own emotional state and that is the place that we want to arrive at. It’s just teaching kids to think that way and strategizing today on the best tools and the best way to market that philosophy to the world.”