Hey everyone, welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the show, thanks for listening today and if you've listened before, welcome back. We explore a lot of different topics on this show, but most of them revolve around the same core question. How can we change in useful ways and get more out of our lives along the way? Now, change is hard, and most of us have gone through a time and life when it felt like we were just running in place.
We were unable to make the progress that we wanted to. It probably wasn't for lack of try, and you read the books, you follow the exercises, maybe you even saw a therapist, but sometimes it seems like no matter what you do, you find yourself back at square one, your stock. Today we're focusing on why this happens, the key factors that stop us from
changing in the ways we want to. So to help me do that, I'm joined as usual by clinical psychologist Dr. Rick Hanson, and we're going to draw on his roughly 50-ish years of working with people to help us answer this. So dad, how are you doing today? What a long, strange trip it's been. I'm doing well, and I love this topic. It's been the one of the top three honors of my life, probably, to be able to work with all the people
I've worked with over the years. And they put up with me, and I learned a lot from them. And I'm looking forward to sharing that today. So I've got seven issues that I just kind of wrote out on a sheet as I was thinking about this topic. I'm sure you'll add a few more. Maybe we'll get up to a convenient round number like 10 if we don't. Hey, you know, the algorithm gods will have to smile on us anyways. And I want to just start this episode with what I think is like an important disclaimer
for everything we're going to talk about today. Some people have significant factors in their life that just limit the amount of change that they have access to. This could include some kind of a major underlying health condition, a mental health condition, lack of resources, all of that. Those things are a huge piece of the puzzle here. And everything is going to be relative to your individual context. And the bottom line is that big challenges
are generally harder to change than smaller challenges. So because it's what we do on this podcast, we are mostly going to be focusing on what I'll call psychological factors. It's the stuff that we can do something about either in our mind or in our lives. For starters, it is more fun for us to focus on those things. And it's also just where we have the greatest agency. So I just wanted to start by saying that to kind of set the stage for what we're
going to be talking about today. That's a great foundation. My own experience with people is that the good news is that with certain things that we're going to be talking about, really can change for the better, including with regard to extremely serious underlying psychological factors and issues. They really can. And sometimes though, you just can't
change. The best you can do is to be able to kind of be with what's there. For example, if there's organic damage to the brain, dementia, delirium, direct injury, that's a really serious thing. Second, sometimes people are just flooded with physical pain. They can barely move without screaming an agony. Or they're flooded with emotional pain during
complete shock. So I want to just call that out. And also obviously call out as was implicit in what you said that in the biopsychosocial framework here, the social extends into systemic forces that can continually bang on a person and keep shoving them back under the waterline even after they, you know, with great effort, heroic effort, crawl out. So I'm really glad
you framed it that way. And then inside that frame, we're going to talk about everything you can do with claiming the power that you do have, tending to causes that you can nurture for your own sake and that of others. All right. So dad, as a long time clinical psychologist, you've worked with a lot of people as we've already alluded to. And I'm just wondering from your experience, what did you see over and over again that tended to get in the way of people improving, rectifying
whatever issues they were dealing with? Or kind of anything else you would like to point out here at the beginning? This topic for us has been really good for me personally to reflect on and I'll probably gain some personal value from it that I'll be applying to some of my own issues. I would think first as a framework, I think of the continuum roughly running from healing to growing to awakening. And so what I'm going to talk about is about
that whole continuum, although we will focus on the healing aspect of that continuum. Second point, it's also useful for me to think about this in a way that does not make a categorical distinction between the outer world and the inner world. In terms of their deep nature, actually, thoughts and things have the same nature. Even if one is intangible and the other is tangible, they are all made of parts that are connected and changing. So it's
dynamic, fluid, interdependent processes. In that context, the same sorts of approaches that work in the outer world also work in the inner world, for example, cooking. So what are the three things that work when you're making a batch of cookies? Or you're doing anything in the outer world? First of all, you need to find out and know what is true. The facts, discernment, clear singing, investigation, respect for reality as it is. Okay. Second, you
need to acquire various skills, competencies, capabilities. And then third, you need to make efforts. So I observe what is true about whether I have all the ingredients I need. I have some basic skills about how I assemble them together and I make the effort to actually do that. I didn't see the cookie theory of personal growth coming through on this podcast episode, but I'm glad that we're here. And I totally agree with the content of what you're
saying here. That's right. Okay. Good. You're exactly right. What's this called? Knowing skillfulness, effort. Now, the same thing is true in the inner world. And what's remarkable to me, routinely, is people get that these three aspects are really useful in the outer world, but they don't apply them to the inner world. It's almost as if the inner world is somehow categorically different, but it's not. So in the inner world, there too, what
is really useful is gradually knowing what is true. And that knowing tends to be particularly emotional and somatic and intimate as well as having some insight. And then second, there are skills and qualities that kind of alongside it. I think of qualities as one of like stable factors like the degree to which a person is is open-minded or has positive mood or has
the general attitude of agency and self-evacacy. And then there are skills in knowing how to actually work with your thoughts and feelings, such as the key skill that I've focused on a lot as you know, of delivered internalization of whatever is good. And then third, making efforts there. Now to make efforts there. So when I think about people progressing or not progressing in therapy or in more informal settings with more of a focus on probably
growing and sometimes even awakening, I look to these areas immediately. What are factors that promote knowing what is true, being skillful, developing skills and using them in that third effort? What promotes it and what inhibits it? So we have promoters and inhibitors. And we can kind of think in that way. And then it becomes very straightforward much of the
time for me kind of like, oh, okay, what's going on in each of these three aspects? Knowing, skillfulness, effort, what's promoting that I can encourage more of what's inhibiting, that we can work on to remove. And then we keep going forward. So the first thing that I thought of when we began kind of brainstorming this exercise together, lands in that first category of knowing, I think, although you might finesse that
a little bit. And that's actually self-acceptance. One of my favorite quotes is from Carl Rogers, curious paradoxes that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change. Beautiful. And I think that's really interesting, right? Because a huge factor here for people when they're going on this adventure of trying to get a little bit better, trying to deal with whatever issue they're trying to deal with is how we define what getting better looks like for a person.
All of this suffering in our lives comes from trying to change these immutable aspects of ourselves. And I think that acceptance in general we can think of is just like the practice of seeing things clearly. Like you were saying, right? Like what's true here? What's true about us? What are we accepting about the way we are right now? And what's true out in the world? Like what's true about our lives right now? And I think you just really have to start with what's true. That's beautifully
said. And of course, recognizing what's true is different from our values or preferences related totally. Yeah. I can accept that, let's say I felt scared and lonely as a kid while wishing that I hadn't. All right. And still it's also unchangeable. That's actually how it was for me when I was a kid for various reasons. I would say with regard to acceptance, when people are caught up in and being at war with themselves or being internally divided, those definitely obstruct the healing
and growing and awakening process. It just gets them the way. And there's a particular kind of acceptance. I want to flag here that's become really focused upon in sometimes called third wave cognitive behavioral therapy or new wave therapies, mindful and spaced therapies, in which it's incredibly important. It's very much of a promoting factor, promoting the good to be able to decouple from what your experience people call that different names, de-center, Steve Hayes,
brilliant, genius, really. A psychotherapy calls it defusion. You're no longer fused with what you're thought. You can step back and think about your thought, for example, and you don't need to believe it. That capacity to be able to disidentify from what we're experiencing and get some breathing room from it, some buffering around it is definitely a very strong promoting factor. And when it's not present, that's very, very much of an obstruction.
We've done, I think, probably three or four episodes on various forms of self-acceptance in the past year. Dad, it's a major topic for us. We talk about it regularly. But pretty quickly here, I'm wondering, let's say that you're working on a topic with a person either in therapy, formally or just kind of generally, you're talking about it with them as a friend. You're able to identify, you think pretty accurately that this is a significant issue for somebody. And they're just
kind of having a hard time coming around to the seeing clearly part of it. Are there things that you might do with them to help them with that process? Yeah, I can think of three hacks. We can might call it off the top. The first is to recognize, and that's the seeing clearly, and then disidentify from that would be skillfulness and making an effort from the inner voices that are not accepting. Typically, the inner perspectives, the views, the voices that are critical,
shaming that come at you with these tirades of sheds. And being able to separate from them, like for example, I trek, is to give them each a little funny personality that enables you to dismiss them a little more. You can kind of see them as a person ranting away at a new, you know, with a party hat on. They look ridiculous, and so it gives you some breathing room from them. So that would be one thing. Second, hack is to know what it is to actually accept something
in a simple way. So start simple, simple. Like you have a glass of water. I accept that this is made of glass. I accept that is helpful. Right. I accept that. And then you can kind of play with broadening it out. Like, oh, I accept that my mouth is a little thirsty right now. Okay. I accept that my throat is a little dry. Okay. You know, and so you know what it feels like to actually accept something. And then third, you can apply this to yourself and there are different versions
of this. You know, one of the more powerful ones warning here is to San in front of a mirror and go through your body and say specifically, I accept that this part of my body, I accept my ears. I accept that my ears look like that. And you can move through the rest of your body because for a lot of people, self-acceptance relates to feeling bad about or even ashamed of their own body. For example, or you could write a little note to yourself, dear forest, you might do it.
Dear forest, I accept that you are. You know, dear Rick, I accept that you are sometimes irritable. Dear Rick, I accept that you can work too hard. Dear Rick, I accept that you have a goofy imagination. You know, you just practice that. Okay. Good. So those three things.
If that's a great quick summary of what we could spend at least several hours and not several days talking about, but it's a really good place to start for people because that acceptance content, I think, is such a crux around so much of this, including how it relates to those things that we really can't change about the condition of our lives and it, you know, accepting those things can often help us identify the things that we really can change and then apply
effort to them. Yeah. Can I add a fourth? I'm just thinking of it. Yeah, go ahead. In important relationships, it can be very powerful to have an intimate conversation with your friend, your partner, your relative, and really essentially explore even as a request from you to them. Do you accept me? Do you accept really all of who I am? It doesn't mean that you're waving your rides. It doesn't mean that you might not have preferences. You know, I welcome your advice and help my friend over time.
You know, I'm perfect as I am and I could use some improvement, etc. Like Suzuki Roshi said, that's very poignant. To move along to what I think is the second major point that came up to me is all of the material that we've explored related to attachment. And this gets maybe a little pedantic here, but definitionally, attachment is what keeps us stuck, right? Most of the time change of any kind requires detaching from one thing in order to attach to and not, right? And this is
one of those small, but I think very important insights. If we look at our behavior, right? Times is zero sum game. We can't add one kind of thing without taking a different kind of thing away because the number of hours that we have in a day are limited. Our behavior is kind of similar that way. If we're choosing one behavior, we're not choosing the different behavior. And if we're choosing
that behavior, well, then we're no longer choosing that other behavior, right? So to get good at at change is to get good at the game of attachment, to get skillful at disidentifying from the behaviors or the people, the places, the things, whatever it is for you that are causing us more
problems and to get better at attaching to the places that we want to go, right? And a huge aspect of this gets to identity and attachment to self because the way that we establish our identity, in many ways, kind of builds the bars of the cage that's around us, establishes the space that we're allowed to play in as a person because we have a particular kind of self-concept.
So if there's a way that you want to change or improve, that is opposed by a self-identity that you have or a form of self-concept that exists inside of you, it's going to be really hard to change in that way. And a lot of this self-concept for people is actually subconscious in nature. We don't really have it at the top of our awareness because not a lot of people go through a process of identifying like, oh, here are my various forms of self-concept that are floating around my brain.
Like that's just not a very common thing that we do, even though it is a very useful exercise here for people. So for starters, Dad, what do you think about that? Classic wine from Ajahn Chau, a great Thai teacher in the Vipassana Buddhist tradition. If you let go a little, you'll have a little piece. If you let go a lot, you'll have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you'll be completely peaceful. So if I were to think about that dimension, I think about different aspects of problematic
attachment, rigidity. Sure. I love that you're highlighting this. Yeah. Yeah. Also, if you think of the five factors of personality structure with the acronym ocean, you know what, obviously, first one, O for openness. So low openness, people who are very low to that. Another aspect, I think, of PHA's models of learning, assimilation or accommodation, assimilation, you suck information into familiar structures, even if it actually contradicts it. A accommodation, you're willing to
actually change your frames of reference. You're not so attached to your frames of reference. You're willing to update your priors. And then you deal with temperament because frankly, some people are just temperamentally more toward the OCD end of the spectrum. OCD in effect is a loss of autonomy. You're talking about increasing autonomy or what Steve Hayes to name check him again here. He talks about flexibility, psychological flexibility, right, as major factors here. So what's
a way to help people with this? Maybe who tan toward rigidity, closed-mindedness, kind of a turtle-like, defendedness. Paradoxically, the first thing I would suggest is to really appreciate how great your defenses are. And I'll say this with people quite often. You can afford to open the aperture a little bit because you're very good at closing it up.
Right. Really appreciate how great your defenses are. Join with the defense initially. And I find that's really useful for people to realize, okay, I can, and then second, I do little experiments where you open up to a new piece of information. You try a new behavior. You enter into a different kind of activity than you normally do. And then knowing that you can always hunker down, you can always go back. But if it goes, well, well, you could push back the bars, you know, as you put it
earlier out of your cage, one millimeter, one inch, even one foot at a time. That's really good. Third, I find it's really helpful to pick an area where you can really afford to be flexible because the stakes are super low. So maybe it has to do with something going back to cooking. Instead of putting all spice in your super duper cookies, try nutmeg instead. Okay. You're being deliberately flexible. So you're deliberately pushing against something that's a habit. We're
getting also at here too, picking up on that last word. What William James pointed to a long time ago about habit. We're talking about the sweet spot on the one hand habits are really efficient. And, you know, being attached to your views and familiar routines, it's really it's cognitively and neurologically efficient. There's a there's a place for it because it frees that processing power
for all kinds of other things. On the other hand, as William James, the great psychologist, Godfather, really, American psychology said that a wise person would pick some habit, some routine, some all expand this to rigidly held view and deliberately push on it each day, push on something
each day. I think that's great, really practical advice. And to turn this toward the self a little bit, I wonder about the aspects of self-concept or how we think about ourselves that we're rigidly attached to, that we have that rigidly around versus the ones that we have a little bit
more space around. And so to return to what I was talking about when I was kind of setting up this attachment idea, I think it can be really helpful for people to go through a deliberate process of taking a look at what are those self-concepts and how might they be bumping into the kind of change that I want to create in my life, right? So like, how do you actually think about yourself? What's your what's your self framework that you're dealing with? Do you think about yourself as
a fundamentally good person? Do you think about yourself as somebody who's capable of learning what you need to learn in order that skill acquisition, like you were talking about that and you're cooking framework for this whole thing? Can you go out and identify and get the ingredients that you need in order to change? All of these are different things that we can look at and it can be really helpful to just go through a deliberate process for some people that might be like journaling around it,
maybe asking like question stems of different kinds, I am a film in the blank. I care about film in the blank. I think that the world is film in the blank. And sometimes just going through that kind of immediate reflective process where you do a sort of free association and you just film the first thing that comes to mind for you into these various blanks can be a really productive exercise. I've definitely gone through versions of that myself and it's been quite helpful.
I do wonder though the extent to which holding on to an identity of, for example, saying, well, I'm depressed. I'm a depressed person or the tendency of language to sort of essentialize things and reify them and thingify them. So to say, you know, I'm bipolar. And you could hear that I'm grappling with this because there could be ways that pattern recognition is useful where you realize, okay, in the aggregate, like I would see about myself,
I'm introverted. All right. I'm a friendly introvert. No, it's kind of hard to describe it. And okay, that's useful. On the other hand, does that perpetuate a person's stagnation, if you will? Or is it a useful kind of acceptance to go back to the first one, right? Yeah. There's clearly some balance between those two things that you're pointing to and highlighting here that I think is really interesting. We're actually planning on doing an episode on how to
break out of a depressive mood cycle. Yeah. That's going to be a conversation that we have pretty soon. And man, I think that this question really relates to that topic, the way that we can see of ourselves, including our mood, our temperament, things like that. And it's tricky because both things are clearly true. Yeah. It's clearly supportive to people, to have a self identity that allows them to access resources, understand themselves better, go find the material
out in the world that could be helpful for them to give a specific example. It was extremely helpful for my partner, Elizabeth, when she got clarity around like complex PTSD, more around ADHD for her because of the latter to access all of these resources that she just didn't realize would help her in a variety of different ways. And then hey, guess what? They helped her, which is a beautiful thing. And at the same time, man, I totally grew with you. To use maybe a
lighter example of this for a long time, I thought of myself as an anxious person. That was like my framework on myself. In part, because I had a lot of people say various versions of that to me. And that was really helpful for me for a while. But what happened is I kept changing. And I became less anxious, but I still had this identity as an anxious person that was kind of anchoring me a little bit. And so I needed to do some work to kind of release that identity a little
in order to capture the gains of the actual change that I had experienced. So there's clearly this push full there. I don't know if you have any thoughts on anything that I've said so far, or any nuance you'd like to add to this as a practice and clinician, but that's just sort of how I think about it. Yeah. Okay. So there's the ways in which we can become trapped in a kind of a view
of ourselves. The ways in which it actually is liberating. Great. Good. Then there's a question of does regarding myself as let's say anxious or I am ADHD, I am bipolar, something like that. Does that itself obstruct progress? A lot, it is my experience at the issue is actually deeper. So they're using their identification with some psychiatric label about themselves as a way to avoid the risks or to avoid making the efforts or to avoid engaging their own mind in skillful
ways. So they use the identity for that purpose, but it's not so much that the identity directly gets in the way. It might be a nuance that's true. It's a difference that doesn't make a difference. I don't know, but I find that useful. That's one of those things that we could totally talk about for
again, at least a full episode. It's one of those conversations that makes me leery because I think that it would be easy for that to come across as invalidating somebody's identity or invalidating somebody's sense of self or questioning whether or not there actually a phone the blank. That's obviously now what we're trying to do here. We're pointing to really a pretty subtle and interesting thing, which is that the self concept that we have does in fact
impact our behavior. What do we take on a self concept? One example of this just in popular culture right now is the softening and loosening of the word autistic and how there's been just a massive rise in the number of people in social media, particularly young people on platforms like TikTok, referring to themselves as being a little bit autistic or having autistic traits or things like that. Two things can be true at the same time. On the one hand, that might totally be true.
On the other hand, man, we are really loosening how that word is used, particularly from a diagnostic standpoint. I think that there are pluses and minuses to both. That's why it's tricky. On the one hand, we get increasing acceptance and increasing access to resources. On the other hand, man, are we cheapening these words in some way? Again, this is something we could just talk about
this forever. I want to be careful about it. Go ahead. I'll just throw this one last little detail and partly also related to those three things I said that are useful, whether you're making cookies in the outer world or making cookies in the inner world, the first of them being clear-saying or knowing. One major factor of good knowing is not knowing its humility, curiosity. Don't know. Beginners mind, child mind. I think with regard to the category of identity and we're still on
attachment here, things that keep us stuck, it can be very useful to go, don't know. Don't know who are you, right? Don't know about this viewpoint or behavior that I'm habitually attached to. Don't know. That can kind of, that's a nice solve it. It dissolves things. Don't know. And most of us could probably benefit from a little bit more. Don't know mine. To your point, her dad. Yeah. I don't know about you, but I'm ready for summer.
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your first month. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've been listening to the show for a while, you've probably heard us talk about how comparison is the thief of joy. It's easy to feel disappointed or even envious when you're comparing the whole of your life to the highlight reel that shows up on somebody else's social media feed. The truth is that everyone's dealing with something and things are rarely as rosy as they seem. Therapy can help you focus on
what you want instead of what others have so you can start living your best life. Whether we're trying to learn emotional or interpersonal skills, get better at communicating or just trying to de-stress, therapy can help. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online designed to be convenient, flexible and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch
therapists at any time for no additional charge. Stop comparing and start focusing with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash being well today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelpHELP.com slash being well. Another major factor that tends to get in the way of change is essentially a lack of motivation. This is where rock bottom comes in as a concept for a lot of people. Because change is really hard.
Systems resist change. Our homeostatic base to use some terminology is pretty calcified for a lot of people. Change usually involves a degree of discomfort. In order to move into the discomfort of change, you need some motivation. Most of the time for people to embrace the little pain of change, sometimes the big pain of change, you need a little bit of pain going on in your current environment. So for a lot of people, they get into this kind of pattern where they think that they should change
something, but they don't really care about it that much. They don't have that much change motivation actually because their life is okay. But the should really hangs out in the back of their mind and that should causes them a lot of pain. They spend a lot of time. I've certainly spent a lot of time beating themselves up about not doing this thing, but they're not actually that motivated to do, which just kind of doubles down on their suffering. They're both not getting the benefits
of changing in the way and they're beating themselves up for not changing. That messy middle, I think, is a really rough place for people. It's certainly a place that I've spent a lot of time. I'm wondering how you think in general, Dad, about the concept of rock bottom as a change motivator for people and whether or not you think that that's kind of necessary to make large changes because there are some people who think that that's really the way that anything meaningful
happens for people. Motivation is really central. How much do you want it? How much does it matter to you? But then it becomes very tricky. What do we mean you? How much do you want it? It implies that the use is a unitary rather than highly compounded, distributed, and dynamic. What do you mean want? It's complicated. I'd just say a few things here. First, there is a truth that sometimes it happens that a person who's typically around drugs and alcohol, there are other things too,
where they find themselves just hitting bottom. At that point, there's a change of heart that's really far reaching, often accompanied by healthy, remorse, guilt, regret or shame. They just don't ever do that thing again, or they turn the corner that really was their last drink.
On the other hand, those traumatic stories leave out the fact that many, many people, including often that same person, so-called hit bottom, and then they just sort of bounced off the bottom and went back to their old ways three days later after all their resolutions to change. So it's not necessarily true that hitting bottom will produce change. Also, I think there are a lot of people who sometimes qualitatively without hitting bottom. They just get it in a quietly
going in a different direction. It also happens that people gradually accumulate, gradual change over time. I want to speak to you some ways to motivate oneself. I think that it is inescapable that we have existential responsibility for our own lives. There's no way around it. It's out of respect for people, not out of shaming them for not wanting it enough, or trying hard enough to date. It's out of respecting people. Really, they are the makers and
the agents of their own life, profoundly so. There's a place for clearing space inside your mind, sometimes related to clearing space outside yourself. For example, you might go for a long walk, or sit by the edge of the ocean, or do a wee-calling meditation retreat. Clearing space to really look hard at something that matters to you, you know, behaviorally. Maybe you really do need to take a big breath and get back into the
dating world again. As a late middle-aged person who still wants to find a relationship, even though the dating world scares the heck out of you. For maybe you realize that at a personal level, you really do need to make a shift psychologically in how you interact with people. Maybe you realize, you know, I'm going to tattoo NMP on the inside of my eyelids, figuratively, not literally, not my problem. Maybe you make that change. There's a place for that.
Second, if one percent of you knows that it would be really good for you to do something, the 99 percent of you opposes. One way to work with that is to bypass the particular issue and work on your overall state of being so that the next time you take a look at the change you're trying to motivate in yourself, the one who is looking at that is bed arrested, well fed,
calmer, a fundamentally different person. It's so much easier to do things that you resist a little bit when you're in a good mood than to do them when you're tired and hungry and in a bad mood and feel really light down by other people. And third, set yourself up to succeed. Set yourself up to win. If you're trying to change what you eat, get the carbs out of the
cupboard. We'll get the beer out of the fridge. I've done both of those things, right? If you're trying to promote exercise, talk to your really quite buffed son about how your forearms are getting a little bigger and not as big as his, and enjoy his encouragement. See, who can I be talking about right now? You know, if you want to, I think you've got great forearms, Dad. You've got nothing to worry about. I got 71-year-old dude, you're killing it. It's a work in progress.
Anyway, exercise. Go with somebody out there in the world. Maybe you want to be more grateful. Do what I know people do. They'll text their buddy. They're gratitude buddy every day with one thing they're grateful for before they go to sleep. They're just committed to that. Some point during the day, they'll text their buddy with one thing and they'll at least do that
with each other. Set yourself up to succeed. It's a lot easier to stay motivated when you're on the downhill with the wind at your back than when you're scratching and clawing uphill, you know, with no support. That's great, Dad. I did want to talk about a particular aspect of lack of change motivation, but we already talked about it a little bit. We were in the identity section, and this is called secondary gains. Would you mind explaining to people what secondary gains are?
Yeah. None of my clients ever wanted to think about this part. I don't want to think about it either. Oof me either. I don't mind using this word payoff. What's the payoff in what you're doing? So I'll give you an example that, as Freud said for sometimes, as regards only as a guard, there really is no secondary gain. I want to also say that sometimes certain habits
take on a life of their own long after there's any gain. Interestingly, I was talking with your mom earlier this morning about people we know, and I'll just kind of disguise things here, but here's the bottom line. This is a person who's dealing with a serious health issue. One of the consequences of that health issue is that it prevents this person from stepping back into the job market, which is scary for the person. They have various reasons for not dealing with
their health issue that on the face are ridiculous. There's some reason why this person is not dealing with their health issue. Well, hypothetically, it's worth inquiring, is there the payoff, the secondary gain, of enabling the avoidance of experiences of anxiety that would occur if this person actually were able to step more into the job market and no longer had a good reason not to.
Because of the health issues, that would be an example. Other examples for people holding on to grievances, wearing their approaches, like a badge of honor, you've done me dirt, especially in relationships, they kind of hold onto the grievance because they want to be able to twist the knife in the person who did them dirt or to maintain a claim on other people. Sometimes people who are dependent upon others are afraid that if they become more self-reliant and more capable,
that others will abandon them. So there's the secondary gain there. I think that's a good list just for now, but these are examples of things. And I find with people, there's kind of a useful structure. It's great. So you basically, you're the person and you say, okay, here's this thing, that you say you want to change, but you're having a hard time changing. So let's sort of slow it down here. Number one, what is the thing? Whatever it might be. Your behavior, what you eat,
what you drink, how you are, what you avoid, fine. Second, what are the gains? What's the do for you? What are the benefits, including the kind of secondary gain less, all right? Okay, those are the benefits, those are the payoffs. Just be in honest about it. Self-acceptance, right? We start there, as you said for us. And then third, what are the costs? It's very straightforward. You have the benefits, you have the costs, you kind of unpack it, you stare at it, and then you basically ask the
person, okay, moment of truth time, what is it you actually value in your life? What do you really care about? And even what's the larger framework of values in which you can contemplate these costs in benefits, short-term, long-term, different categories. All right, net, net, bottom line, what's
best for you and what's most consistent with your values here? Yeah, this is another one of those things that can be a little tricky to talk about because talking about secondary gains or referring to them can make it seem like you're minimizing somebody's suffering or you're questioning whether or not they're actually in as much pain as they say that they're in even just by suggesting the possibility that there could be some other kind of payoff for whatever's going on. That's right.
And again, of course, we don't want to do that. At the same time, if what we're doing is looking at ourselves in this process, right? Like, that's the framework of what we're talking about here. And we're asking ourselves the question, why are we struggling to change right now? It can be really helpful to maybe take a look at what is it that you get from this behavior that you're complaining about or this behavior that you feel like is holding you back.
An example of this that I've shared on the show in the past for myself is that for a long time, I really complained about being, uh, complained mostly internally to be clear. I had like a lot of internalized resentments that I built up over time about being the person in the group who did all of the planning, all of the social planning. I was getting all the people together. I was doing the legwork. I was figuring out where we were going. I was organizing the situation, all of that good
stuff. And I was getting kind of frumpy about the fact that I was doing what I experienced as a disproportionate amount of the effort. And I really went through a process with this one day where I was like, forest, what's the deal with this? Like, you can just stop doing this. You don't have to do this behavior that you're complaining about. You're making it other people's fault that you're doing all of this work. When in truth, you have total control over whether or not you do this work.
So what's the payoff here? There are a bunch of payoffs. For starters, I see the people I want to see more often. Then we do the things that we want to do. And hey, referring to that anxiety earlier, I get to control the situation. We're going where I want to go when I want to go there in the kind of circumstance that I want to have around me. That's a lot of control. And that control helps me avail my own anxiety. So there were all of these secondary gains from this behavior that I was
complaining about. So that's a very simple kind of low level version of a kind of issue a person might have here. But I just wanted to put it into very everyday terms. I think that's great. And sometimes what a person might say in response to another person who says, well, you know, but you're getting so much out of that way of being, they might essentially say what you think I'm doing this on purpose. Yeah. Which becomes extremely interesting. And the short answer is,
yeah, you're doing it on purpose. Now, what do you, what do we mean? You. The you which gets to some of the subcatches stuff that we were talking about during the defenses episode, maybe. Yeah. The you is 20 voices on the committee pulling in different directions, grabbing the mic, playing footsie under the table, and building coalitions with each other and all the rest of that. And so yeah, in that broad sense, who else is doing it besides you,
you as the committee, right? That claiming of choice becomes really important. That's another aspect of it here. Let's say someone is doing something maladaptive. Let's say in your example for us, an intermediate step would be something like, okay, I'm for us. And I'm deliberately taking on more than my share of work. I'm stepping into responsibilities. I'm choosing to do this. I am the one who is doing it, even at some personal cost. Yeah, own it. And then on the basis of
owning it, then you can start to let it go. You can move into disowning it. You have to start by owning it before you can really authentically move into disowning something. Yeah, I think that's a great point and great advice here. And maybe to stretch our concept of secondary gains to the absolute breaking point here, a kind of secondary gain kind of gets to the fifth thing that I wanted to talk about, which is fear of the unknown.
Okay. Maybe one version of a secondary gain is that perpetuating our behavior, perpetuating how we are allows us to avoid uncertainty. It allows us to avoid facing the things that we don't know. And I think there is this kind of fundamental, I'd rather the the enemy I know than the person that I don't, even if the enemy is inside the building. You know, even the if the enemy is this problem out of the version of who we are. We just have an orientation right there because we have
a fundamental survival operation going on in the background of our mind all the time. And the unknown is spooky. Again, brilliant because for one, you're naming that which is routinely left out. Yeah, kind of by this very nature we don't notice people's fear of the unknown because it's unknown. And one thing that really helps is a fundamental kind of is curiosity. So curiosity, you keep turning over stones, you keep looking down different places, you try to take a higher point so you
can get a broader view, curious related to that is not knowing. Don't know. But the unknown might hold. Don't know. Another element I think about attachment theory is the balance of exploration and return to secure base. So you see that in children, the more that they have a secure base, the more they will go out and explore. And so to help people with the fear of the unknown, it really helps to is Baron Von Klausfits said in his rules of warfare, is Prussian general,
secure a base of operations. Whereas Alex Hanold, soldowing this cliff in Morocco, is moving from one stablehold to another. So when you secure your base, then you're much more willing to kind of cast loose other familiar morgues. You're laughing. Well, I mean, I'm just enjoying the scope of our operation here today, dad, between cooking, rock climbing and Prussian generals. We're really checking a lot of our boxes here and I love that for you.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste, right? Hey, I think you're right out here, man. And I also appreciate that I don't know if I have too much to add to what you've already said. And we have done episodes on the past on courage, including emotional courage. And I just think that there is
this fundamental courage aspect to it, but courage is based on evidence, right? Like as we develop a sense of our own capability, self-efficacy, the easier it becomes for us to face uncertain situations because we have greater and greater degrees of self-trust and our ability to deal with different kinds of circumstances. But that gets a little tricky for people sometimes. I've even seen that in my own life because I would describe myself as somebody who's like pretty high up in terms
of self-efficacy. I've got a lot of view of the self as being able to learn, self-problems, all that good stuff. But it's domain-specific. And I think that people sometimes lose that where they have a concept of themselves as having a lot of self-efficacy. But it's uncertain arenas. Maybe it's not emotional self-efficacy. Right. Maybe it's not vulnerability, self-efficacy. Maybe it's not like sharing with my partner some aspect of me that I'm concerned about self-efficacy.
So we can get a little like again and a little trapped in the view of the self. Oh, I thought I have self-efficacy. This is an problem for me at all. Of course, I'm not worried about it. When really in these other domains there are a lot of fears that are operating in the background. With regard to fear of the unknown, I think there's something useful that can happen in people where they just tell the truth that they're getting bored with what's so familiar.
They're getting kind of tired of the daily routine. And it's genuine. It's not some kind of characterological restlessness that can never settle. It's that they're in a red. It's okay. You know, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, TGIF, have fun on the weekend, rinse and repeat. Monday do it all over again. And to listen to that voice that says that we need to shake it up here. Not there's a place for novelty. We want to try new
things. We don't want to stagnate. I think Eric Erickson described the developmental challenge in middle age, especially late middle age, as the challenge of stagnation versus generativity. And I know a lot of people in middle age who frankly would be really served by taking a big breath and looking at generativity in their own life. Doesn't mean you have to figure out quantum mechanics and get a Nobel Prize, something, something. It just means
change your cookie recipe. Try a new route to work. Take a look at some aspect of your creative life. There would be fun for you. Take up watercolor glass online. Do something generativity. So I think that that's a really good way to step into the unknown because to be generative by definition, you're moving into what's unknown. You're listening to that part of you that's just sort of getting tired of the familiar and really is interested in what's on the other side of that heal.
That's bounded your life. I really like how you're highlighting the Board of Mass Fact of this data. I think that's a really clever way into this because it's not the same as attacking fear directly. But it's more about increasing in some ways your felt sense of the discomfort of staying the way you are, which is one way to increase change motivation.
So it's using up and change motivation as a way to deal with this fear of the unknown. I think that's kind of like a clever way to slice through that particular knot that can emerge for people. So I like that as a solution. So as we get toward the end here, I am going to return to some of those circumstantial factors that we talked about at the beginning, including particularly our environmental ones and highlight how our environment can affect us in a way that maybe we can do
something about. And so I'm going to call the sixth one Crab's in a bucket. There's a classic visual bunch of crabs in a bucket as any one crab tries to climb out of the bucket. The other crabs are also trying to climb out of the bucket and they end up inevitably pulling that crab back down into the bucket, right? So none of the crabs end up escaping. And this really highlights
the impact of unsupportive environments on us. And I think that one of the most important levers for change and one of the most unexplored ones for many people is changing their environments and particularly changing their environments in a way that focuses on changing the people who are around them who are limiting their capacity to change. This could be a whole bunch of different things. Chaotic and unsupportive family systems, different kinds of abusive relationships,
even just like friend groups that have tendencies that you've outgrown over time. Friends are often a tricky one because we opt into those relationships at one point in life. And then we all keep on changing. And sometimes we change in ways that just pull us further away from our friends. Think about how your sense of what a supportive friendship looks like today and how that might be different from how you thought about a supportive friendship 10 years ago. And that can really
highlight some of the issues around this for people. And I also want to say that you know, sometimes it's a really noble choice for people to actually stay in the bucket. Maybe they're trying to be the same person in a chaotic system. Maybe they're trying to help a friend also exit the bucket with them, exit the unsupportive environment. But those environments are really a
huge factor for us. My first response here is one that I think is important for people to have whether they're the one who is speaking about the situation or the one who is hearing their friends speak about the situation. And the response in myself right now is one of feeling the weight of what you're talking about. The poignants, the impact, the weight. And you and I focus mainly appropriately on things people can do efforts they can make. Why it's important to motivate yourself
to make the efforts that you can so far so forth. That's side of the truth. The other side of the truth is that many people are doing what you and I are I think I hope, hopefully recommending what they're doing it while walking uphill into a headwind while hauling their loved ones along the way. It's tough. So to me, you're really it's quite tender for us. What you're saying here about honoring what's hard? I think it's also really helpful, especially in the context of self-help,
self-improvement, positive psychology, you know, my turf, certainly. Still, it's really important to have the humility to realize how affected we are by our circumstances. And to avoid the grandiosity of thinking, oh, you know, I need to I should be able to have the power to just step away from or change everything. No, we are entangled in all kinds of situations. We're designed to be affected and inhibited and influenced by all these social factors around us going
deep into our evolution of social primates. Of course, we're affected by all that. And it's important to a recognized how hard it is to change in the face of a lot of environmental resistance, including friends, families, relatives, culture, social systems. And second, how important it is to do what we can to change those external factors, which then can help things change on the inside. And one of the strategies that really worked for me and has continually
worked for me all on the way is I'll realize something about myself. Like, for example, one percent of me realizes that I really need to be more emotionally and spontaneously expressive, going back to my college days. And 99 percent of me was completely incapable of doing that in my current settings. So the 1 percent of me would sign me up for an encounter group. We put ourselves in situations that are better for us. We start looking for people who are better
for us. We realize that we need to reduce contact with things that are bad for us. We need to disengage from certain activities, like playing shooter games six hours a day. That's just training our brain into a kind of a paranoid aggressive, twitchy kind of way of being that we need to self-medicate
with three shots before we go to bed. So I want to really honor the importance of this point that you're bringing up and just say, yeah, it's really important to honor how much it affects us and to take action to the extent we can in the outer world, not just the inner one. So we've moved through my six factors that I think particularly can stop somebody from changing the ways that they want to. But I really want to toss this to you here, Dad, as you've been thinking
about this. So let's say that you're working with somebody who's facing a real issue, but they've just plateaued around it for a while. They haven't had the breakthrough that they've been looking for. I'm wondering if you're working with that person. What would come to mind for you is something you could do with them to create that change or create the kind of growth that they're looking for, or just broadly as we get to the end, if there's anything that you want to highlight as
core issues that tend to end the way of that change. For people in general, not just people specifically in therapy, it's really helpful to think about, okay, what if I tried already to with regard to my thing? Let's say a person is quite anxious, or in my case, let's say, felt sad and lonely underneath it all. What if you tried already and how's that worked? What has been effective for you and what has not been effective for you? And if it hasn't been effective for you, how come? What is
the issue? What have you been aiming for? What have you tried? What has been successful and why? What has been unsuccessful and why? What are the lessons from here? That's a really, really helpful thing. When someone comes in to my office the first time, after establishing a relationship and kind of getting a sense of the issues, I'm really interested in what have you done already? Like, have you done therapy on this already? Have you read some books? Have you tried this or that?
How's that gone? And right there often are many, many clues. Like, oh, the reason it didn't work is that you didn't stick with it past the first day. Oh, maybe that's why it didn't work. Or, oh, you don't have a kind of a mind that that sort of suggestion is very helpful for. For example, you have great cognition already. This part of the problem, you're kind of in your cognitions and they don't really have any traction. You need to work. We need to work at a more
somatic emotional visceral, nonverbal, depth level. Okay, great. So we're learning things. But then let's suppose there's the real case where a person is a really suffering something and really wanting your help with that. And you can see that they are actively preventing the help from landing. That's the tough case, right? That you're kind of getting out of here.
That's really delicate to explore because as I can say, as someone who's fallen into these pits, one of the pitfalls is that when you bring this up as a therapist, it's really easy for the client to feel shamed. As if they're not being a good client. They're insincere. They're not really trying. They've got some hidden agenda. You don't really like them, etc. It's very delicate. Really delicate. It's very understandably delicate. Understandably delicate.
With regard to that, I find what's helpful as therapists generally do to make sure that this is really what's happening and then bounce up to the birds eye view again, where we're just kind of looking at the situation with the client, not in an adversarial way, where we're banging on each other. We're rather we're both looking at it together. Oh, isn't it interesting that? Don't know, mind. Curiosity, isn't it interesting that we've been doing these things and you
say this and that? And yet, really, on any given day, you just don't want to. What's how do you what do you see about this? Right. Literally just sort of no praise, no blank. We're just unpacking it. Not good, not bad. We're just unpacking it. That can often be helpful for a person. And I've had people on the one hand, when we do that, say maybe a little roofily, wow, this is right. I have to take this seriously. And then they really buckle down and over the next
10 weeks, major changes happen. Or, alternately, they look at it all and they go, you know, I honestly, I just don't care. Or I'm just not ready. I am just not ready. Okay. And then we're honest about that. So that's really helpful. The last thing I'll just say about it, in terms of moving forward, what is it earlier? Really is important that one of the most useful things to do when a person is stuck. That's what we started. Like you said, attachment is the literal definition of stuck. You're
attached to something when a person is stuck and level one efforts. So there are two ways here. Level one efforts have not succeeded. We've tried. They've done stuff. I've used all the standard methods. We've been in rapport about it. It hasn't worked. Then you look to level two in two different kinds of ways. One option for level two is you realize I need to bring strengths and resources to bear of a different category. We need to look into medication.
Or this is really a couple's issue. I need to bring a family to bear. Or this person has an addiction problem. They're not dealing with it on their own. We need to bring in other stakeholders. This is more of a family system problem here. You go more to level two. This person really would benefit from a certain kind of experience. I refer them to the Hoffman process for a deep dive into their childhood. For example, or to another therapist who's going to do some pillow pounding with
them and emotional release work. A different level two is to take a look and stop banging on the focal issue. The first kind of level two stays focused on the focal issue. The different kind of level two stops resisting the focal issue and in effect, bypasses it to look to what else could we grow in the mind of this person as a kind of strength or mood, positive mood is the therapist best ally in a lot of ways because in a person,
because then there's the room to become motivated. You don't have that smothering blanket, burying every day after you walk out on the way out of your therapist's office, the return of the smothering blanket, yuck of depressed mood. What could we do over here? Maybe we need to cultivate more mindfulness over here. Maybe we need to cultivate more self-compassion over here. Maybe we need to develop more vitality. This person doesn't need a therapist. They need a trainer.
This person doesn't need anxiety training. They need a yoga class, whatever. Then maybe after that other resource has been developed, we're going to come back to the focal issue. Again, much like how you highlighted boredom as a way to get around an issue with fear. You're highlighting developing these secondary skills that can absolutely support somebody in all these useful ways for dealing with these different kinds of issues. I think that you're right.
Often, when we've plateaued, definitionally, we've gotten stuck in a way of doing or looking. We're trapped here. What helps us break out? Most of the time, it's new inputs. It's new ideas. It's a new way of looking at the world. Sometimes you can get those new inputs in the same old spaces, but it's often a lot easier to change the space, to change the frame. Maybe that's the frame of the counseling work you're doing with somebody else. Maybe that's the frame of the people you're
surrounding yourselves with. Maybe it's the frame of the activities that you're engaging in your life or the kinds of mental processes that you're engaging in, but whatever you're changing, that change is going to help you with whatever the central plateau is as well. It's going to have this secondary positive effect. I love that you're highlighting that here at the end. Yeah, that's great. And then if I could, for us, this has been super useful for me personally too.
Oh, great. I want to end on a, I hear the musician really here. What's a Koda, right? It's sort of the last little bit of, okay, good. I got it right. Okay, Koda, at the very end here. Looking back on all this stuff, three things really stand out as major, major factors for positive development. And if positive development is not happening diagnostically to look at each one of these three and to see if there's something to do with regard to each one. Okay, so first is tell the truth.
I find that if people are stuck, often we need to tell the truth at a deeper level. Tell the truth. Deep down inside, tell the truth yourself. Tell the truth to trust it others. Know that the truth is evolving or discovering it. Get down to the deeper layers, tell the truth in nonverbal ways. You know, no, it's like a knowing and opening to what is actually you. What's it like to be you? What's it like to be you in the deepest, most sensitive,
tenderest, most intimate ways, opening into that. Really, really crucial. Second thing, surrendering to the best within you. Whatever that is, already within you are certain good qualities. Even if you're pretty fractured and pretty traumatized and carrying a lot of burdens, in you are numerous beautiful good things. Be lived by them. Give over to them. Let them be
the wellsprings, the currents that carry you along. Rather than trying to make something new happen or scratch and claw your way up the mountain, give over to the lovingness, the quirkiness, the funnyness, the curiosity, the sweetness, the kindness, the goofiness, the intensity, the fireiness inside you. It's a beautiful positive quality. Surrender to the best within you. I think of will sometimes as a matter of surrendering to the best within you, making the choice
to be lived by it. And then the third thing, keep going. Perseverance, brothers, as it says in the eating, you can honor that you've made efforts today. You can rest when you go to bed. You made efforts. It was a good one today. And then tomorrow, keep going. So those three, those three, know yourself as deeply as you can. Surrender to the best within you and keep going. I had a great time talking with Rick today about all of the things that get in the way of us
changing because we've all had that experience. There's something we want to change. There's something that we want to grow or develop in our lives. There's some habit we have that we just can't seem to kick. And we get trapped in a plateau related to it. Maybe we've made some progress, but we just haven't gone as far as we want to go. There are some things in our lives that are just not that changeable. Our personal history is not that changeable. Our genetics are then not
that changeable. But sometimes accepting the things that aren't so changeable can help us address the things that are. And that was the first factor that we looked at, acceptance. Acceptance is the practice of seeing reality clearly. And it was also a big part of what I would call Rick's cooking model for change here, where he highlighted three key factors. First, telling the truth. Second, getting the ingredients that you need, growing key strengths in your life,
maybe. And then third, applying effort over time because you're not going to make what you want to make without, hey, getting in the kitchen and actually trying to make it. Then the second factor that we talked about was attachment and Rick particularly focused on rigidity as a core issue for people. How flexible are we and how we appraise ourselves or appraise the world around us? And what can we do to deliberately cultivate more psychological flexibility over time?
And we got here into a whole, and I thought pretty interesting conversation, but the ways in which attachment itself concept can limit our ability to change. There are a lot of pluses and minuses to this whole thing. It was a very nuanced conversation because two things can be true at the same time. On the one hand, it can be very helpful for us to have a particular self-identity that might lead to us understanding ourselves better or being able
to access different kinds of resources. And at the same time, sometimes that self-identity can become very calcified and lead to a set of behaviors that are actually not helping us anymore because we've outgrown them. And one aspect of this part of the conversation that I think is safe for most people to lean into is how Rick highlighted don't know mind as a key resource for many people. Where can we find more opportunities to be a little uncertain, to be a little curious about what's
going on inside of us or what's happening inside of other people? Then the third factor we talked about was a lack of change motivation. And alongside that, the question, what increases our motivations? Rick really highlighted taking on your role as the creator of your own destiny, making the commitment to change in your life. A story that he's told in the past is this instance
that he had earlier on in life, a feeling like he hadn't really fully stepped into his life. He hadn't made the deliberate choice to be here, to do what he could, to improve his life and the ways that he could, and to really give a good solid effort throughout that experience. And then second, he talked about listening to the 1% part of personality that really knew that he should make some kind of a change. Sometimes we're in situations where 1% of us want something and 99% of us
wants a different thing, but we really know that the 1% is in the right there. And what can help people sometimes is working on their overall state of being. So when they return to that question in the future, it's a materially different person who's making that choice of which voice to listen to. Then fourth, we talked about a key aspect of lack of motivation, secondary gains. Secondary gains are the benefits that we get from thoughts or feelings or behaviors that we think of as being
painful or problematic or not serving us. I gave one example here of doing a lot of extra planning for my social group where I didn't recognize all of the benefits that I got from this activity that I was complaining about. And one major form of secondary gains is what we talked about a little earlier in the episode, the various ways in which what we do reinforces our self identity. The problematic behaviors that we have places into a certain category or into a certain role in a
group of people from which we derive that identity. And once we have that identity, we really don't want to change it most of the time. Fifth, we talked about fears of the unknown. Fear can really operate quietly in the background and it exerts this hidden influence over our behavior. And Rick highlighted focusing deliberately on boredom. Boredom can actually be a great antidote to fears of the unknown because it highlights the suffering that's present in staying the way
that we are. Whereas fear tries to highlight the suffering that could be present in changing in some way. So you're kind of counteracting that by giving yourself a little bit more change motivation. And then finally, the last factor that we talked about crabs in a bucket. It is very normal for our environments to exert a great deal of influence on how we behave, who we are, and whether we're able to change. And a major aspect of our environments are the people that we
surround ourselves with. Now, there are a lot of reasons to stay in a bucket. If you're making the active choice to do that, maybe you want to help the people who are in the bucket, maybe you're trying to get another crab out of that bucket, whatever it is that you're trying to do. Okay,
lots of good reasons for that. But if we're really trying to change in a meaningful way, and we are constantly surrounding ourselves with people who are incentivized to have us not change, maybe it's a social group that has some kind of communal activity that we no longer want to do, or that we don't think really serves who we are actually. Maybe it's a way of relating to each other in that social group that we just don't think is good for us anymore.
Well, that group's going to put a lot of pressure on you to stay the way that you are. And if you're already dealing with a change plateau, that pressure is going to be very difficult for you to overcome. Then at the end of the episode, Rick offered a number of thoughts on breaking through a plateau. First, you can ask yourself, what have you tried already? How is it gone? And hey, if it hasn't been
so effective, why not? Second, he highlighted the role of shame in keeping people stuck, because once we highlight the true material, the core material that's on the table, the big issue that lies underneath whatever it is that we're processing, a lot of shame tends to come up for people because we have flown a little too close to the sun. We've gotten clear. We've gotten real about what's going on inside of us, which often includes a lot of stuff that we aren't so proud of.
And then third, he talked about how we can bypass the primary issue, the big thing that we're trying to change, and highlight the other stuff that we could potentially grow in our lives. This removes our hyper focus on whatever it is that's wearing us down. For example, maybe we just need more mindfulness or self-compassion or vitality or whatever else in order to actually break
through this plateau. The example that he gave is that maybe they don't need another therapist, maybe they just need a yoga class, because after doing the yoga class for a given period of time, they've worked on their vitality, they've got more energy, and now they just feel like they're in a different place to tackle the problems that they're facing. And a lot of the time up in those resources, up in that overall state of being, can really help us deal with whatever it is that we're
facing. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I had a great time recording this with Rick. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while and you haven't subscribed to it yet, please subscribe down below. We would really appreciate that. If you're listening on Spotify or in iTunes, if you could leave a rating and a positive review, that would really help us out. And if you'd like to support the show in other ways, you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash
being well podcasted. Until next time, thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.