Practical Tools for a Less Anxious Life - Donald Robertson - #1050

Good news! I'm going back on tour with a brand new live show in Australia, New Zealand, and Bali. If you are interested in learning how to overcome imposter syndrome, reach your goals while Not missing your entire life. My perspective on where true confidence comes from, everything I've ever discovered about discipline, plus

brand new insights that I've never spoken about on the podcast, then join me on stage as I explore all of these topics with you. And you can get involved during an extensive QA where we work through the biggest questions that you have.

Right now. Perth and Brisbane are completely sold out, but there are still tickets available for Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Christchurch, Auckland and Bali, and you can get yours right now by going to the link in the description below or heading to Chriswilliamson.live.

What do you wish more people knew about how anxiety works and what causes it from your perspective? Gosh. Well, anxiety used to be my specialism, although now I focus a bit more on anger these days. Um but they're both they're two of my favourite uh emotions. The main thing I think that people should know about anxiety Of emotions uh in a very simplistic way in our society. We have very simplistic language for emotions.

And most people buy into something that psychologists sometimes call the hydraulic model of emotion, which is the idea that emotions are just like a blob of energy that sort of wells up inside you and you can sort of try and push them down or you can sort of vent them or whatever. And that's wrong. It isn't how emotions work, basically. It's massively overly simplistic, unfortunately. That's what we sometimes call the folk psychology or kind of default psychology.

So we get off to a bad start by not having the faintest idea how our emotions work in the first place.

So the main thing I would say is I I think of a an emotion like anxiety more like a recipe for baking a cake. Like it's got milk and sugar and eggs and raisins and whatever else you want to put in. So the thoughts, actions, feelings, mental images, memories, all these things kind of get mixed together and that bakes the cake of whatever type of anxiety that you've got.

And the main thing people should know about treating anxiety, I'll hammer this home because it really is one of the main things. I I like to call this the most robustly established technique in the entire field of psychotherapy research. How would you like to hear about that? Right? And that's no exaggeration.

So there's a thing that we use in C B T that we've known about for Like well over half a century, maybe it's cracking on like seventy years or more now that it's been used in therapy, called exposure therapy, right? And it's probably the most reliable type of therapy that we have, basically. It's used for phobias and other types of anxiety as well. So Chris, what would happen If you take someone that's got a cat phobia, animal phobias are generally considered to be

Pretty much the simplest type of anxiety. It's pretty straightforward. There's other types of anxiety. It comes in flavours like social anxiety, panic attacks, PTSD, stuff like that, right? But we'll start off with a nice easy snake phobia or uh cat phobia. So you get someone with cat phobia, right, and you sling them in a room with a bunch of cats. What's gonna happen to their heart rate? For a start. It's gonna go up a lot.

It's gonna go it's all it's probably gonna almost double Chris, like as if you're sprinting or something like that. And it'll do that in less than five seconds. And that's a pretty robust measure of anxiety, generally speaking, certainly for phobias it is, right? So that's easy. We start off with an easy question to kind of lure you in, buddy. And now we're going to ask you a slightly trickier question. What happens next? Does it stay there?

Uh what, until the cats are removed? Until the cats are removed. Yo, what goes up must come down, right? So we could wait we could wait as long as we like. Like, is it just gonna stay there forever? Like it's probably gonna start to come down eventually. And it'll return probably to almost its starting level if we wait long enough.

Right? And nothing catastrophic happens. Actually the first thing that'll happen is this cat phobic's gonna want to get out of the room desperately. Right? But they can't because we locked the door, so talk. Right. Right. But there'll be an urge. This is why people often don't overcome their fears, right?'Cause there'll be a powerful drive to avoidance, obviously.

Um, so interestingly, w what's one of the main things that would encourage somebody to stay in the room, even though they desperately want to run out the door, would be the presence of another person encouraging them to do it. Now, that might be somebody that's getting paid money for doing it, like a therapist or whatever. You know, good for them. But back in the day when you were just little, Chris, it might have been your mum or dad.

basically, that was encouraging you to do things that were maybe making you feel unnecessarily anxious at first. They're saying, Chris, it's gonna be okay, you don't need to be scared, it'll be fine. You know, you'll get used to, you know, d playing a sport or petting a big dog or whatever it is you're a bit nervous about initially. So the presence of another person can be a game changer in getting people to stay there for longer.

So the heart rate's probably gonna come down, right? How long do you think that might take? Two hours? Might be. If it's a really severe phobia, it could take two hours. It might take usually it'd be less than an hour. It might in some cases it might even just be like ten, fifteen, twenty minutes if it's kinda milder phobia, right?

So let's assume that's what happens, you know,'cause that's generally be that's generally what we will find maybe at least ninety percent of the time, right? Unless there's some kind of complicating factor. So what happens if you can manage to get a hold of this woman and you bring her back and you do the same thing the next day? Heart rate doesn't spike as high and doesn't stay high for as long? Well, you're getting better than that.

Right. So our heart rate will go down and then day three, you bring her in, it won't go up as high again, it'll come down faster. Like I like to call it like a stegosaurus' tail, you know? Like it kinda the smaller spikes and then it kinda fades over time.

There's a very low relapse rate for animal phobias unless there's some ca unless you get attacked by a cat or something like that, it traumatizes you again. But generally speaking, if you overcome an animal phobia, ninety percent of the time it'll stay gone, right?

basic kind of Pavlovian conditioning essentially. So one of the main things, the fo one of the foundational gold standard things in anxiety. Is that this process happens? It goes by various names, it's sometimes just called emotional habituation. Like it's very well established. If you think about it.

Animals would need to experience that for adaptation to occur. Like if you do you remember back in the day when we were all like little furry animals, like and we lived out in the African plains or whatever, right?

So you're going to the place that you usually get your nuts and berries or whatever and a tree falls down or something and it freaks you out, like you run away and you go back again the next day but you're kinda anxious'cause you don't want to get squashed by a tree. But nothing happens.

Right? So then you go back the next day, like and maybe your anxiety's gone down a bit and then you go back the next day and you're still not getting squashed by trees, your anxiety goes down and eventually getting nuts and berries again, right? The point being the anxiety we would hold would wear off naturally, like through repeated prolonged exposure to the triggers, if nothing bad actually happens. Otherwise you'd just be trapped.

Well, by anxiety, it wouldn't be very flexible or very ad adaptive. Um And so all forms of anxiety pretty much respond to exposure. Um with some things it's trickier. My favorite example would be social anxiety. That was my specialism years ago as a a clinician. at a clinic in Harley Street in London and I mainly treated social anxiety for a long time. People with social anxiety don't have a phobia for other people's faces, right? It's not exactly the same as an animal phobia, but it's similar.

Like they have more what you can describe as fear of negative evaluation, is what psychologists call it. So if I have social anxiety, I'm worrying about what you might think of me. And how I come across to you and what you guys might say about me afterwards and things like that. So it's more cognitive, like it's kinda hypothetical. So exposure therapy is a little bit trickier in that case.

Right? Because I'd need to kind of expose myself to maybe embarrassing situations or expose myself to the idea that people are thinking critically of me. So exposure therapy for animal phobia has like a ninety percent success rate within about three hours now when it's done optimally. With social anxiety it takes a bit longer, but the success rate's on average about seventy-five percent ish.

Like a bit lower, but still pretty high. How how's that for a crash cost in anxiety? That's what I want people to know about anxiety. Those are some of the things, anyway.

Unbelievable. Um, a couple of things. Uh first off, when you were talking about somebody in the room with you helping. Uh, one of the first places that my mind went to was soldiers in battle, medieval battle, being next to each other. That's where your mind went.

Well look, I'm I'm used to speaking to you I'm used to speaking to you about fucking ancient history and swords and gladiators and stuff. Forgive me for my Pavlovian condition when speaking to you. So uh that was the first thing that I thought of. Um the habituation thing, um, I then thought, well, what if every time that you went back to this place? a bad thing happened. Um

every time that the owner comes home, the dog is mistreated. Every time that you have a conversation with your partner, you're uh disappointed or made to feel sad or you're abused or neglected or whatever. Th the habituation works in both directions, so it can presumably work to reinforce anxiety as well as to t tune it down.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Like you could that will maintain your anxiety. And it but if you're if something really bad is happening, then you might be justified in experiencing anxiety and being motivated to escape a dangerous situation, right? Um Does that the b the other good question would be what happens if the d anxiety is not really justified, but it doesn't go away?

You know, what are the what might explain that? The funny thing is we now know one of the main things that explains it is what psychologists tend to call experiential avoidance, which is people doing things to try and avoid feeling the anxiety. Like so try to distract myself from it. Social anxiety is a good example. So we again once again, like so we social anxiety, I might kind of avoid eye contact.

'Cause looking at the audience kinda makes me more makes my anxiety spike. So I might avoid eye contact. Uh I might over prepare before a meeting'cause I'm convinced that if I really prepare perfectly then that'll kinda reduce my anxiety when I actually go into the thing. I might be concentrating on my breathing, like to try and control my anxiety and or to distract myself from it.

You know, there's various often it's self help type techniques that people might be using to try and avoid contact or distract themselves. From their anxiety, I control it. We now know that those actually interfere with natural emotional processing.

Like to prevent habituation from happening. So you're sitting there thinking, I'm not I'm gonna avoid eye contact with you, I'll just just stare at my notes here. You'll never really get used to the anxiety, ride it out and allow it to extinguish then. You know, you kinda have to face your fears in order for your brain to process the feeling. But think even things like breathing techniques, sometimes they work, but sometimes they can actually backfire and maintain the problem. Why? Essentially.

Because you need to allow yourself to experience anxiety for your brain to kinda process it, like basically. Also if you're trying to get rid of anxiety too much You create what we now know as a second order pro as if it wasn't bad enough cr that we've got problem we have second order problems and third order problems, right? So social anxiety is a a classic example of a second order problem, uh funnily or not.

It's really serving me well here'cause it's been a convenient example like three times in a row here, right? But I'll throw in another one to the mix in a minute. So so with social anxiety, not only are you anxious about talking to people, you're anxious that they might see that you're anxious.

'Cause you're like, Oh man, I hope people don't see I'm sweating and my hands are shaking and all that I hope they don't notice me blushing or hear me stammering'cause then they're gonna think I'm a big old phony and I shouldn't be here like, you know, it's they're gonna think I'm an idiot or something like that, right? So now I see anxiety itself as dangerous.

because it could people might judge me even more harshly. If I didn't give a monkey Right, whether people see my hands shaking or hear me stammering. then I would re I'd probably remove most of my social anxiety to be honest, right? So second order anxiety, anxiety about anxiety, maintains a

during exposure can prevent it from habituating naturally. And when we are when you're trying to kinda get rid of or distract yourself from anxiety, often that reinforces the underlying attitude that anxiety itself is the problem. It's dangerous. I'm I'm now framing it as a threat and that can that can prevent me from overcoming it. Another uh different example would be panic attack. That's like a different flavour. Got raspberry and vanilla and blackcurrant flavour anxiety, right?

Panic attacks are uh escalate very rapidly and they feel like they're spiraling out of control. They come in a number of varieties, but people sometimes, for example, might fear that they're having a heart attack or a stroke and they're gonna drop dead. So you see them a lot uh in uh accident and emergency, like people go out and they think I'm a heart attack or something and the doctor's like, Just anxious, buddy, like you're having a panic attack, right? But they feel their heart racing.

Uh and some people will interpret that as a sign that they're gonna drop dead. And of course that's scary. So now you become anxious about the symptoms of anxiety. That doesn't sound too good, right? So it's gonna spiral really fast. Your anxiety's feeding off itself basically. And then you're gonna you're gonna freak out. Um so what do you do? You have to learn to tolerate the feelings. accept them, view them uh as harmless.

get used to them. Like which in in some ways is harder than it sounds, in some ways it's easier than it sounds. A big problem is the way we talk about and think about anxiety. Again, a big problem is the fact that we see it as kind of a homogenous blob, rather than kind of seeing it as made of different ingredients. So if you think, uh, what is anxiety? Imagine Chris you've got a big label and you've written the word anxiety on it.

And you've slapped it on your anxiety, right? And now imagine that you're peeling back the label and you're gonna look underneath it and go, What is this thing they call anxiety? If I look underneath it. You know, actually that's one of the best pieces of advice I can give a lot of people. Just literally imagine you're peeling back the label and thinking, What is it we're talking about here in real terms? My heart beating fast.

Maybe my hands shaking like maybe kind of trembling, maybe some thoughts flashing through my mind about bad things happening. My heart goes faster when a jog. It doesn't freak me out. If I drink a lot of coffee my heart beats faster, but that's not scary. Like if I'm really happy and euphoric. Like my heart might beat faster. That's not terrifying. So why should I frame it as scary or dangerous in this context, right? So we interpret pretty banal.

use physical sensations in a threatening way sometimes. And we can get beyond that by questioning the way that we're framing it. So learning to normalize the feelings, view them from different perspectives. uh helps us to take away the catastrophic expectations and to become more accepting of them. That allows us to habituate or to process the feelings more naturally. It's interesting to think about uh how

intervening with the thing that's happening and pushing it away. Uh, I'm gonna do breath work, I'm gonna meditate myself away from this thing. Uh, I'm going to not look at the person I'm gonna expose myself to the situation, but not the specific part of the situation, which is what I'm concerned about. I'm gonna over prepare so that I try and reduce down my error rate moving forwards.

Um that seems to me, at least from a little bit of the research I did this year, like a a big element of acceptance and commitment therapy. And I'm interested in the sort of whether there is something from ACT which is missing from C B T or if uh how you come to think about that when it's uh relating to anxiety.

Well that now we're getting pretty nerdy. Right. So I I like that. Like let's go for like act is a state of the art form of behaviour therapy, basically. But it didn't come out of nowhere, correct? Like it didn't spring fully armed and armoured from the womb, but the goddess Athena Right. It kind of evolved out of stuff that was already happening.

And actually standard C BTE, RT Beck's cognitive therapy, the earlier form of cognitive therapy for anxiety already, I think by the nineteen eighties or whatever, was incorporating some of these kind of acceptance techniques and stuff like that. So were other therapies. So that you could see is the kind of culmination of things that were already happening in the evolving field of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy

Clinical psychology don't stand still. You know, those research studies coming out every day and things are naturally progressing. But the general public often don't really hear about that. They kinda things gen sort of filter down maybe decades later. Um, but I think another way of putting that would be most C B T practitioners now have progressively moved towards a broadly similar set of views about you know, they maybe put slightly different emphasis on things.

act as part of a cluster of different therapies. that are you usually lumped together under the C B T umbrella and we call them the third wave in C B T. So the first wave is early behaviour therapy. The second wave is your classic Beck and Ellis.

kind of cognitive behavioural therapy as most people think of it. And then the third wave is sometimes called the mindfulness and acceptance stuff. And ACT would be one of the leading forms of that, although there's like a bunch of other variations of it. So, I mean it is a a lot of researchers and clinicians were kind of arriving at similar conclusions, maybe putting a slightly different spin on it, but thinking it's like maybe acceptance is a thing

From different perspectives. We know, for example, that people who answer who strongly agree with the statement anxiety is bad and questionnaires, that statement alone correlates with poorer mental health outcomes in the longer term. Like that's pretty revealing, right? But Chris, you'll notice a paradox here. Like people that come to therapy generally do think anxiety is bad. You know, in a way that's almost what they assume the whole thing is about.

and self help, you know, traditionally encouraged it. So in some ways act as You know, in a sense with shaking things up because certainly there's been a tendency

at least, you know, superficially, for people to assume most therapy and self help is about getting rid of these feelings and, you know, figuring out ways to suppress them. I thought you were also maybe gonna say Donald, what you're saying, you're kind of sounds like you're slagging off self help and stuff, you know, maybe some of it backfires. Um but it is there are problems with self help. I'll point to the really I'll start off by pointing out the really obvious one, Chris, right?

When I was a wee boy That was a long time ago. You know, do you remember when everything was made of wood? That was that was when I was a wee boy, right? And I'd go in the bookshops, this is before the internet, right? And you know, they didn't Like we didn't have mu we just did there was nothing in Scotland except sheeps and whiskey. I'd go in the bookshops and there'd be like one or two self help books if you were lucky, right? Now you guys are drinking from a fire hose.

of self improvement bump like twenty four seven if you like, you can do courses, watch videos, you know, listen to podcasts. People consume way more self improvement and self help stuff than they did in the past, at least when I was growing up, right? So you think, well this is awesome, man, everybody must be improved significantly. And you know, the thing is, it wouldn't be too contentious to say they haven't improved though. Like, society consumes all the self improvement and self help stuff.

But rates of depression, anxiety, mental health problems in general are escalating every year. Like, there's no evidence that people are on the whole like culturally are being improved by self-help and self-improvement content. And I think there are probably multiple reasons for that, right? But one of them is that

some of the techniques that people learn are are actually just maladaptive. Although I think that, you know, the the a more annoying point is that you could take almost any good piece of advice and turn it into bad advice, you know. So there are techniques and strategies that potentially can work, but sometimes they need like a little bit of nuance.

And that kinda gets lost a little bit in the messaging and so people will kinda take away maybe what could be an effective technique, but they misapply it and then it ends up backfiring for them if they're not careful. This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. You want to look and feel good when you're in the gym, and Gymshark makes the best men's and girls gym wear on the planet. Let's face it, the more that you like your gym kit,

the more likely you are to train. Their hybrid training shorts for men are the best men's shorts On the planet. Their crest hoodie and light gray mull is what I fly in every single time I'm on a plane. The geo seamless t-shirt is a staple in the gym for me. Basically, everything they make.

It's unbelievably well fitted, high quality, it's cheap, you get thirty days of free returns, global shipping, and a ten percent discount site wide. If you go to the link in the description below or head to gym.sh slash modern wisdom, use the code modern wisdom ten at checkout. That's gym.sh Slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom ten. A checkout. It also could be that the modern world is anxiety inducing and that self-help is an artificial solution to an artificial problem.

That how bad could it be without all of the breathwork and the the the the the the other strategies? Well, I mean I was kinda I was you now you've got me thinking about medieval knights again and I was like, was their world any or less anxiety and just saying I think it'd be pretty sc do you know I think it'd be scary to live before there was a police force?

Like you got to the edge of your village and you like the brigands might come and slip my throat if I wanted to walk to go see my granddad, you know. Well we're often told We're often you get pirates as well. Unless you're well, you just move away from the coast, right? It's the same argument that's made about climate change. Move away from the coast. Um Absolutely. I wondered then why why the chronic anxiety, chronic stress thing

seems to be banded about much more in the modern world. And there's an assumption that at some point in the past, being a caveman and not having reliable, reliable heat to make it through the winter Um, presumably we couldn't have been chronically stressed because we would have it would have just been so maladaptive, it would have been selected again.

Hm. I think it it it's a tricky question. It is a very good question. You know, a lot of people I think intuitively feel there is something a bit wrong with modern society in this regard. Um I feel it's lazy to blame the internet, but I can't help but feel that social media is contributing to some of our psychological problems. I think there's some evidence to substantiate that, although there's still a little bit of debate about how to interpret it.

We do live in a society where I think people increasing increasingly uh think about things without necessarily learning how to cope with them. Right? So in the past You know, people encounter threats and risks at more of a visceral, kind of practical level. Whereas we watch it on the news now and read about it on social media.

And I think this kind of abstract, kind of verbal processing is harder for us to deal with in some ways. We so we talked about flavours of anxiety earlier, right? Phobic anxiety like will tend naturally to reduce over time as long as you actually face your fears. It's a simpler time. It comes from a simpler age, a simpler world when we get a phobia and then you deal with your anxiety, right? But another type of anxiety I didn't mention yet is worrying.

Right. And by worrying we're usually referring much more to a a cognitive process. Dogs don't worry, as far as I know, but they might get phobias, right? Worrying is like a conversation that you're having with yourself. And it you it stereotypically it sounds like this. What if this happens? What if that happens? How am I gonna deal with it? And it goes round and round like that, you know, about hypothetical things, you know, uh catastrophes.

basically. Worrying is a trickier problem when we have a a lower success rate in treating it. Unfortunately, Um, it's a paradoxical thing because people can spend many hours a day worrying about stuff. And you'd think again then that they may figure out solutions or they'd adapt to the stuff that they're worrying about.

But what worrying seems to do is maintain anxiety at a kind of moderate level, chronically, if you're not careful. And I I think social media and the news cycle and stuff like that probably feels worrying.

What are the bad strategies for dealing with anxiety? If those are some of the good ones, what are some of the bad ones? Bad strategies for dealing with anxiety, everybody's favor this is a boring answer in a way, but everybody the number one most popular coping strategy in the world is avoidance, right? So generally speaking, avoidance

is a problem because uh it prevents habituation from happening. It prevents you demonstrating to yourself or discovering that nothing catastrophic happens, assuming it's an irrational or an unfounded fear. So you carry about certain false assumptions or unrealistic assumptions that never get disproved in practice. It prevents you from evaluating your coping ability and maybe refining and improving your coping skills.

basically, which would be another key thing. So you face your feelings enough time you kinda figure out ways of dealing with them. Basically, you don't get a chance to do that. You don't you've got zero practice or time on task if you're avoiding stuff. And it increases uh sensitization to the the cues over time. So anxiety really is the root of all evil from a kind of uh I avoidance, sorry, is the root of all evil. I mean that you'll notice the paradox here.

is that most people assume anxiety is the problem and maybe avoidance is a way of coping with it. But it might be that anxiety in itself isn't actually that bad and that avoidance is the bigger problem. Right. Because avoidance damages your life and relationships, it prevents you from applying for a job.

Like it changes your behaviour in ways that have a wider impact and a longer term effect on your ability to flourish as a human being. You can do a lot of stuff while feeling anxious. Anxiety isn't as bad as people think, right? Once you get used to it you think, So what? My hands are sweating and stuff. Like, you know, my heart's beating a little bit faster. You can even reframe it as excitement. I used to say it's just an adrenaline rush.

It's like it's not a big deal. So you'll see a lot of performers will just ride out their anxiety, especially comedians. Stand up comedians. Like if you go and see them live, like uh I think I used to go and see a lot of shows in London and those guys often maybe w the ones I saw weren't as experienced. just in function rooms above bars and things like that. Well like probably the majority of them looked terrified. Right? But they just kind of incorporated it into their act a lot of times.

So I think you can uh First of all we've got to deal with avoidance, right? Distraction technique.

Um suppression of the feeling, uh using drugs and alcohol to cope. like impulsive behaviors like masturbation. Um but also worrying itself is kind of like a maladaptive coping strategy. Worrying is kinda like failed problem solving or it's kinda overlaps a bit with op over preparation and stuff like that. There's a guy called Tom Bert Borkovek who's uh one basically probably the leading researcher on worry and he forwarded a theory called uh conceptualising worry.

um is a form of avoidance. He calls it the cognitive avoidance model of worry. So people when they worry about stuff, they they kind of trick themselves into thinking they're facing the problem. I've got I've got to think about this problem. Like to kind of I've got to figure out a solution, buddy. Like, oh man, I'm up I woke up at three in the morning for

And I'm like just thinking about a mistake that I made in my taxis or something. I was up all night like worrying about what if this happens, what if that happens, how am I gonna cope with it, try to figure out a solution. And uh but what worrying does is it causes you to kinda jump around in an abstract way. Like so it prevents you from really confronting your problems in a concrete way.

where your anxiety would spike and then you'd get through it. And it so it kinda maintains anxiety at a moderate level. So it's actually more like a kind of weird it's like avoidance in disguise. You think you're facing problems and try to solve them, but you're not really doing it. Like and so the anxiety never really extinguishes. I'll I'll back that up with a weird piece of research, right?

I talked to you earlier about the woman with the cats. With most forms of anxiety, heart rate is a pretty robust measure. Um researchers looking at people who experience severe pathological worrying, they have GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, right? It's something called the worrying disorder. So with those people, you can induce you can get them to practice worrying about stuff, um

in just worry episodes and you know, measure the heart rate and scorvanic skin response, the respiration and stuff like that, the brain imaging and stuff. And what researchers found was these people will say

my level of anxiety is a hundred percent. I'm up to high dough, as we say in Scotland. Like I was freaking out, right? So my anxiety is really high. Like I'm having an anxiety attack, they'll sometimes say. But the heart rate doesn't go up that And the other physiological signs of anxiety don't really appear like the w uh the the woman with a cat phobia, Chris, I'm pretty much guarantee you your heart rate's gonna show up.

Right? Someone with a panic attack can pretty much guarantee you the heart rate's gonna go through the roof. But somebody who's in a worry episode, the heart rate hasn't really got that and it sometimes it even goes down slightly. Which is pretty paradoxical, right? There's one symptom of anxiety that appears consistently. and worry episodes. And that's muscular tension.

So people that are worrying tend to tense up their neck and shoulders and they tense their forehead muscles like other muscles around their body as well for some weird reason. Right.

fuels the idea that maybe they're not really engaging with their fears sufficiently to actually process them emotionally. I tell you what we tend to do with worrying that works pretty well. In the nineteen eighties researchers introduced a protocol Most clinicians call it worry postponement. Um it was originally called the stimulus control method. Right. And it sounds odd at first. It's it's the most effective treatments in the history of psychotherapy tend to be the simplest one.

In all honesty. Not like, you know, Sigmund Freud with his Oedipus complex and interpretation of dreams and all that kind of stuff. The things that actually perform best in clinical trials are usually incredibly simple. you know, and we just kind of figure out this like exposure therapy, right? Worry postponement. You could write the instructions almost on the back of a business card. They gave instructions to college students in the eighties and this has been replicated many times.

We now use this method not only for guard pathological worrying but it's also used in even in treating clinical depression and treating anger, like modified versions of it'cause it's bait found such a robust technique. So the instructions are you need to spot when you're beginning to worry and catch it early. And then you say to yourself, I'm not in the right frame of mind to think about this right now.

I'll come back to it later at a planned worry time that I've set aside, like seven o'clock this evening, when I like to do my worrying, right? So I'll maybe write down on a bit of paper worrying about taxes, worrying about what we're g r wh I'm worrying about running out of things to say to Chris, right? I'll write that down on a bit of paper, I'll stick it in my pocket, come back to that later, right? And then at seven o'clock or your whatever your prescribed worry time is

You sit down if it's still a real problem, you sit down, problem solve it, or like think about it. If it doesn't seem like it's a real thing, then you just kind of forget about it. And that's more or less all there is to the simplest version of the protocol. That reduces the frequency, intensity and duration of worry episodes by roughly fifty percent within two or three weeks.

Right. You think, what the hell's going on there? Right? It doesn't seem like they're really doing all that much. But the trick is that Worrying feels like you're fixing a problem. But you need to understand that your brain goes into different states of functioning. It's like being drunk versus being sober or being drowsy versus being fully awake. So when anxiety is triggered, spite a flight response is triggered or whatever, you think, I'm gonna I need to solve this problem urgently.

But you're not in the ideal problem solving state of mind'cause anxiety biases your thinking. It causes you to exaggerate the severity and probability of of rest. causes you to underestimate your coping ability. You revert back to more simplistic black and white thinking. Because you've basically flipped a switch and turned on the emergency mode. Your amygdala is kinda like starting to hijack your thinking.

So you're now thinking in low bandwidth, rapid terms, in extreme terms. Like you're not your brain isn't in the right mode of functioning to engage in problem solving, especially for like complex interpersonal problems and things like that. So that's partly why you'll go round in circles, right? But if you say I'll come back to this later Seven o'clock tonight. I'm gonna sit down. Uh I'll put on my favourite worry music.

Like I'll slip into my my comfy worry slippers and put on my little uh worrying hat that I like to wear. And I I'll sit and have a good old think about my worries, right? But when you're doing that now, you're using your neocortex, your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that's actually designed for problem solving and looking at the bigger picture and thinking rationally.

So now,'cause you're choosing when you're gonna do it. The the trick is you're using your your brain in a different mode of functioning, basically, and you're probably gonna think things through in a more balanced, nuance. way that's why it tends to work better. Some people think it seems weird to postpone thinking about problems. But if you were drunk, correct.

You just had a bottle of whiskey, right? You wouldn't sit there and think, Well, this is a good time to get in my motorbike or operate heavy machinery or whatever. You think I should probably just wait until it sobered up. And you might think it's not a good time to phone up my sister that I haven't spoken to for years and and have a a a debate with her about our like family uh feuds and things like that, you might think I should wait until it's sobered up, right?

In the same way, we postpone thinking about things uh all the time. Like the best it simplest example would be the middle of the night. So people with pathological worrying. almost always have incipient insomnia as well. They can't get to sleep.

Usually, like'cause they they lie in bed worrying about stuff. Whereas normally what the normal people do, they think, Oh man, maybe I've got something wrong in my tax returns or whatever They'll think, Yeah, but it's like two in the morning, I'll think about this tomorrow. Like, so they they kinda set shelf it and they go come back to it later. But some people find that they can't do that. They don't have the the cognitive skills.

to be able to postpone thinking about things. So they they're worrying spirals out of control.'Cause you're half asleep as well. It's not really an appropriate time. But if you were telling your kids a bedtime story and you suddenly thought, Oh man, like I still haven't figured out what m what questions I'm gonna ask Donald in that interview that I I'm doing tomorrow or whatever, you wouldn't think, hang on kids.

Like, let me just go away and worry about this for a bit and then when I've finished I'll come back and finish a story. You would say to the thought, I'll put a pen in this and I'll come back to it later.'Cause I'm kinda busy right now. Like So it's actually completely natural to postpone responding to intrusive anxious thoughts until a more appropriate time. But a lot of people don't know that. They don't tell kids that at school.

You know, and some people just get in the habit of allowing their anxious thoughts to hijack their thinking. Right. So that simple skill alone can make a a big difference. Um and it shows in a way can be seen as a a problem of of avoidance because

We we're thinking about things and we feel that we're solving a problem, but we're not in the right state of mind to do it and we're doing it in such an abstract way, usually it's not really beneficial. In other news, this episode is brought to you by RP Strength. This

training app has made a huge impact on my gains and enjoyment in the gym over the last two years now. It's designed by Dr. Mike Isratel and comes with over forty five pre made training programs, two hundred and fifty technique videos, takes all of the guesswork out of crafting the ideal lifting routine by literally spoon feeding you a step-by-step plan for every workout. It guides you on the exact sets, reps,

And weight to use, most importantly, how to perfect your form. So every rep is optimized for maximum gains. It adjusts your weight. Each week based on your progress, and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it, train with it for 29 days, and if you do not like it, they will give you your money back.

Right now you can get up to fifty dollars off the RP Hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom.

and modern wisdom. A checkout. You mentioned that some people who have anxiety struggle to be able to deploy that worry time delay strategy. What if someone says, Okay, I realize I'm worrying too much. I have intrusive thoughts. I'm ruminating. I don't get to choose when it happens. And when I say, I'll do this at seven PM tomorrow, my brain goes, Okay and then just goes straight back to worrying about the intrusive thoughts over and over again.

they need to learn certain metacognitive skills or whatever you like like cognitive skills. Um So they you can learn how to do that, right? You they need a lot of that training. Right. This is the other reason self help has some limitations'cause Some of the techniques that you would learn from a therapist, I guess it would be like going to a fitness instructor or something.

There's certain exercises that might benefit people but they probably need to be taught how to do them properly and they maybe need a bit of preparation like before they kind of get fully into to doing them. So they might to do worry postponement effectively, you might need a bit of preparation, a little bit of coaching, a little bit of training to actually get the most out of the techniques. So short answer

They need to probably develop a skill that we call cognitive diffusion. Uh there's different names for it, right? Sometimes it's called cognitive distancing or verbal diffusion. It's a big part of act. acceptance and commitment therapy that you mentioned earlier. There's like half a dozen or more like strategies for doing it that are commonly used in therapy. So

It's an important concept, so I'll explain a little bit about it. Normally when people have thought they kind of look at the world through the lens of the thought. So it's like you're looking through a telescope or something, right? You're not looking at the telescope, you look through the telescope like at things way off in the distance. When you're catastrophizing about the future, you're look kind of looking through catastrophic binoculars.

or a catastrophic telescope, like it, oh man, what if that happens? That'd be awful. How am I gonna cope with it, right? So defusion would be taking a step back and looking at the telescope. It's observing your thoughts. kind of from one side almost. Or sometimes you would say it's like observing your thoughts as a process or an activity that's taking place in the present moment in your mind.

rather than allowing your attention to be funneled or channeled through those thoughts. It's a little bit of a weird concept at first, but in a way it's a simple concept.

You know, some of the things we know about psychology are like kind of simple ideas, but we don't r always have good language to articulate them. And so that again, that's another reason people sometimes need a little bit of coaching to get the knack of it. But defusion is a simple thing. You could the simplest way to do it Would be just to say to yourself, Right now I notice that I'm worrying about paying my tax

Right. And that forces you into metacognitive awareness or like this kind of detached perspective, observing your own thoughts. And then it becomes easier to disengage from them, basically. Or you might say, another trick you can play is you could say, uh, right now I notice that Donald is having the thought, what if this happens, what if that happens? And by that pushes me into a third person perspective. by referring to myself in the third person.

like using my name like or using like third person pronouns or whatever. I can trick myself to into stepping to one side and becoming an observer of my thoughts. Then I might say, uh right now I notice Donald's worrying about his taxes. I don't need to think about that right now. I'll l set it aside, I'm back to it later when I can give it my full attention. So again there's a subtle point here, that someone would easily turn that into an avoidance technique.

But the point is to emphasize that you're gonna come back to it later and give it your full attention. So uh you why sometimes there's a knack to turning what seems like avoidance and into its opposite, into a form of acceptance. I want you think about this properly. So I'm going to come back to it later where can I when I can give it my full attention. So that way you're kind of a fr you're not sending the message to your brain that you're scared of these thoughts.

or that they're dangerous or a problem. They're saying, No, I want to look at them. I'm gonna look at them actually more fully, like in a more committed way. And that takes the that tends to create a sense of confidence and it takes the uh edge off the anxiety as well.

What's the CBT process for someone who says, I know it's irrational, but I still feel it? Right. It's gone below the neck now, it's in the body and I'm feeling it here. Like anxiety. I've just got this kind of visceral feeling of anxiety.

what flavour of cognitive therapy uh or behaviour therapy they're into, right? Some people would say, Okay, well let's just teach you relaxation techniques then to lower nervous arousal if that's what you need. Like someone who's more behaviourally inclined would do that maybe. um or coping skills. Someone like Beck in traditional cognitive therapy might say it may be that you've got automatic thoughts that you're just not fully conscious of.

Right. So you need to kinda like just pay closer attention and catch those very rapid pre conscious thoughts when they're flashing through your mind. Someone like Albert Ellis, who's more philosophically inclined, would say, Well Your beliefs might not be fully conscious, right? Most of our beliefs aren't. They may be implicit in your behavior and in your feelings. How like for example, Chris, how many beliefs do you have, buddy? Millions. Millions. Well, it's too many, probably, right?

Yeah. So you don't count so you don't go around repeating them all in your head all of the time, right? You've probably got loads of beliefs that you haven't even really formulated in words. They're just kind of implicit in your personality and your behaviour and stuff. And that's what Ellis was more focused on. He'd say you've got these underlying beliefs and attitudes.

that we could target. So maybe it kind of feels as if you're demanding that you have to get things right, otherwise it would be a catastrophe. Doesn't mean that you necessarily say that to yourself, but that might be how you're acting and feeling.

And so those beliefs could be disputed even though they're maybe not things that are taken the the the form of conscious sentences that you're repeating to yourself, right? Or you can just, you know, so like I said, some people might just teach you tension release um relaxation uh technique.

I feel inclined to say something about that as well, like you know, just to kinda highlight uh there's another example of an area. The guy that developed the main relaxation techniques that are used in C B T was a professor of physiology called Edmund Jacobson. back in the nineteen uh twenties, one of the pioneers of biofeedback. And Jacobson uh studied muscle relaxation in minute detail and what he discovered was a paradox. He found that most people can relax to a kind of medium level.

But then when they try to relax deeper, they actually tense up. And he said that they're committing right? He said they're committing what he called the effort error. So they're like, I'm trying really hard to relax, god damn it. Yep. Like and then have a kind of rebound. Ancient Uh yeah, philosophy. Wu way. Trying not to try. Yeah. You have to uh reduce the effort somehow. And so Jacobson thought, well, like how can you carry on relaxing but without trying to relax? And so his technique

Which is that you tense your muscles and you study the feelings of tension for like thirty seconds or whatever. Um and then you you let go of the tension. So you focus on tensing up first and then the feeling of letting go of that. And by doing that progressively you should be able to let go more deeply each time. But why is bodily relaxation, why is relaxing of the muscles so important? It tends to lower sympathetic nervous system arousal.

I and so it could be it's one way of potentially damping down the kind of physiological side of anxiety. But again, you know, that can sometimes that can backfire'cause people might use relaxation as a way to try to get rid of their anxiety.

It's another avoidance strategy. It could be an avoidance strategy, right? But you can I believe there's some debate about this. This is where we get into the kind of nerdville of like therapy therapists just in a disagreeing with things and like putting different spins on them. Arguably you can kinda just modify it a little bit and you could say, Well, what if the goal

is to let go of the muscular tension and kind of relax into acceptance of the other symptoms of anxiety. So my heart's beating really fast. What if I kinda let go or what if I just think of myself as not tensing up in response to that and kinda letting go and relaxing into the feeling of my heart beating fast and the other involuntary sensations of anxiety, right? But if I think I'm trying to relax away.

The feelings of anxiety. That might backfire. If I imagine myself as relaxing into them, then it could actually be turned into a form of uh emotional acceptance technique, arguably. Obviously there's a lot of uh I guess Up until maybe about ten years ago, if we were having a conversation about anxiety, a lot of it would have felt very top down. Now I'm seeing increasing amounts of nervous system regulation, dysautonomia, uh vagus nerve stimulation, bottom up.

approaches to this. Um, what's your perspective on w how the blend what what the proportion is of bottom up versus top down for something like worry or anxiety. I still I c I lean more towards the cognitive perspective. Like I mean I I to be truthful in practice, like both approaches can work. Right. But what we lack annoyingly is we've got loads of really good research on psychotherapy, but the one thing that's trickier is longer term follow up research, like a year later, two years later.

Um, so there is an argument that certain types of cognitive change might be more lasting. Like learning to regulate anxiety by relaxation techniques or acceptance techniques and things like that. Like those ta those skills can be powerful and those can change your beliefs because you can prove to yourself that you're capable of coping and enduring the feelings, for example, if you apply those skills in the right kind of way. And you know, they can change your thinking.

But they can also be ways of dealing with a problem temporarily. And then when you maybe encounter a more stressful event in the future, like that overwhelms your coping strategies, you might potentially be back to square one. Um or you might some people might well one problem with coping skills is that people just stop using them after a while. Like, so that's one of the things that we've found potentially but and it sometimes people get lasting benefits.

you know, from managing uh how they feel. So it varies a little bit. But cognitive and kind of behavioural changes overlap quite a lot and interact with each other. So it can be a little bit tricky to tease them apart. But I believe Say for example, your underlying attitude. Albert Ellis was the one that probably went most to the extreme in trying to aim for very general underlying cognitive change. Like so Ellis would say to people You know, not just that maybe you're exaggerating how bad

particular situations are or you're misinterpreting them, which is one way of doing cognitive work. Um but Ellis would say are any situations really intrinsically awful? Like are you making a kind of error by like projecting subjective values onto external situations? Are you causing that by imposing rigid demands? Like that I almost must succeed and I must never make mistakes, for example, that are bound to make you feel anxious about your performance?

So LS thought these kind of rules that people have that shaped the character and the feelings in a very general way needed some attention. And it may be like that that has more general benefits and more lasting benefits than the more kind of coping skills or emotional self regulation kind of approach that that you're talking about. It's not just how you feel, it's how you think. Why is that why is that such an important sentence?

Because emotions aren't just like a blob of energy, like they're they're cognitive, you know, they're intertwined with our thinking. And we have a lot of control over our thoughts and beliefs. We can change them, like we as soon as we realise that our anxiety often like is very closely intertwined with catastrophic thinking, for example. of cognitive therapy technique. that allow us to begin working on that. We can change our perspective. We can challenge our beliefs.

Like we can write different scripts, we can gain verbal diffusion or cognitive distancing. Got a whole we we have a much bigger toolbox of techniques that we could potentially use then for a start. And also it might be that somebody, for example, manages their anxiety, but they could still have other problems, like they might still be exhibiting avoidance. So you get guys that like I don't really I don't really feel any anxiety anymore'cause I drink so much whiskey.

like pretty much anxiety free. Like hey, you go up. But you know, you've got ill you've got other problems now and also you're still kind of avoiding like I don't know, asking girls out on dates or whatever it is. You know, like you've got kind of false courage, it's not you know, it's not really benefiting you in other ways.

Um, so addressing the cognitions can sometimes help us to get more deep and pervasive improvement, especially if we go for these real underlying attitudes. My certain um tendencies that are very, very common. that we all exhibit. Um I'll give you an example. You know, you can work on anger management with people and teach them coping skills like spot when your anger's beginning to arise, catch it really early, nip it in the bud.

three deep breaths to kinda downshift your nervous arousal a bit, to put your prefrontal cortex back in control, buy yourself some time, like so that you can think of a different way to respond. There's a kinda it's kind of coping skills approach, right? But you might still think um if somebody uh insults me, then that just means that they're a total jerk.

Right. If Chris says something I don't like, it means he's an asshole. Right. So I might have a tendency. There's a tendency cognitively in anger. to uh reduce people's personality to a single negative trait. Is that similar to the fundamental attribution error? Yeah, I guess it's you know, maybe it's related in some ways. It's a rejective error. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's a kind of a I I I guess it's related to to attributional style in a sense.

Um it's also related to philosophers have written about it, um many different authors have approached it from different perspectives. So you could describe it as a form of objectification of the other person as well. We don't really perceive them anymore as a living, breathing human being. If somebody's just an asshole. Right, are just an idiot, or just a jerk. They're not really a fully formed human being in our eyes anymore.

So it kinda distorts the nature of our relationship. And you might some people, especially angry people, will tend to think that that's fine, he is a total jerk, right? And y I think the best way to respond to that is It's one of the reasons that when people get angry, their problem solving ability tends to be impaired. So if you can't empathize with people or put yourself in their shoes, you can't really anticipate their actions or understand their motivations.

So it makes it pretty hard to actually deal with them effectively or negotiate with them or problem solve. You're gonna basically be stuck with pretty crude and simplistic solutions like punching the guy in the face or something like that, you know? Ciao! That reductionist way of looking at people um individually also you could argue affects society as a whole. You know. We maybe think of whole other nations and groups of people in a reductionist way sometimes.

So social psychologists um and you know other researchers have talked about this kind of objectifying tendency as being the basis of a a more serious problem which is called dehumanisation. Um throughout history, you know, people have had moral codes. Um, you know, most societies agree that it's wrong to steal from people or to kill them, um, with one exception.

Which is uh if they are if they don't count as fully fleshed human beings, then it's fine. Right? In the ancient world those were barbarians. So the Greek word uh barbaroi, do you know what it means originally? Like uh rodent, non human, vermin? No, it's better than that. It's onomatopoeic, Chris. Right? It means people that go bar.

Sheep? No, it just means it just literally it means people that talk nonsense. Oh, okay. Like it means people that sound like they're going blah blah blah. Hey, look like for forgive me forgive me for thinking that people who go bah blah blah are sheep. Animals who go Yeah, thank you. Animals that go bar bar sheep. Correct. But the Greeks thought that's what barbarians sounded like. Like they'cause they don't it means people that don't speak Greek.

Well do we not see this with the Nazis? They used this sort of disgust language towards Jews, uh that they were rodents, they were vermin. Yeah. Yeah. So they don't count. Moral consideration doesn't extend to them'cause we've dehumanized them, they're less than human and that means anything goes. Like morality. We might have a very sophisticated morality that we can sit and debate till the cows come home. But it doesn't apply to those guys because they're not human.

Also slaves generally throughout history were treated as less than human so rules didn't really apply to them. Um and in some cases maybe children or women in some societies aren't extended moral consideration in the same way. But there's sometimes criminals. They don't count. They don't have any rights or whatever. They're not really human or you know. So you could trace that back arguably to certain features of anger.

Um, so you could say, well, we can teach coping skills to manage anger, but are we then really addressing the tendency to treat individual traits that people have as defining their entire character negatively. It's a very reductionist way of viewing other people. It tends to lead to a lot of problems.

If you think that's a problem dealing with other people, we get angry with ourselves a lot as well. We get angry with other people. But you can get angry with inanimate objects, like your laptop not working, and get angry with yourself as well. People love getting angry with themselves. Mm-hmm. Right? And they do the same thing. So they've got I'm such an idiot. I'm completely useless.

Like and they'll self flagellate, self castigate using these what psychologists sometimes call global negative ratings of value or global negative labels. Right. I'm just useless. I'm an idiot. I'm crap. I'm incompetent. Um I like to refer to that is the world's worst self improvement technique.

It's incredibly popular. Like everybody does it to some extent. But if you had a classroom full of little kids And I don't know, they were studying for a math exam and all the kids kinda got one of the questions wrong. you wouldn't go back the next day and say, Listen kids, I had a look at your answers to that exam and basically the problem is that you're all just a bunch of complete idiots.

Essentially. Why that's where that's where you went wrong here. Why so go away and have a a think about that. You might if you know, but you probably wouldn't be a very good teacher. Constructive feedback tends to encourage people ha for having made an effort. It tends to reinforce the bits that they did right and then it tends to be pretty specific.

about what you did wrong and nudge you in the direction of finding a better solution. That's not rocket science, right? But saying you're all just a bunch of idiots It's kind of like trying to climb on glass then. Like you kinda go, What am I supposed to do? So the solution to that would be get a personality transplant or something like that. You know, it's what am I supposed to do about that? It's paralyzing. If you turn it's highly demotivating, generally speaking.

So we don't usually do that. It's not a technique I say to my clients, this isn't a known self improvement technique. There aren't books that you can buy on the self flagellation method of self help. Like it's not something that I do in coaching unless you would like me to start, you know, I guess we could give it a go. How do you think it would work out? But it's something that people do to themselves. When they're angry with themselves.

And it it tends to backfire in a a number of different ways, but it's essentially making the same error as when we objectify dehumanize other people in anger. And so again the coping skills wouldn't necessarily fix that. They might snap you out of it. But it would be potentially more useful if you addressed that at a cognitive level to make sure you kinda mop up any tendency towards that thinking error.

This episode is brought to you by Woop. I have been wearing Woop for over five years now, way before they were a partner on the show. I've actually tracked over sixteen hundred days of my life with it, according to the app, which is Insane. And it's the only wearable I've ever stuck with because it tracks everything that matters sleep, workouts, recovery, breathing, heart rate, even your step.

And the new five point oh is the best version. You get all the benefits that make Whoop indispensable, seven percent smaller, but now it's also got a fourteen day battery life and has health span to track your habits. how they affect your pace of aging. It's got hormonal insights for ladies. I'm a huge, huge fan of Whoop. That's why it's the only wearable that I've ever stuck with. And best of all, you can join for free. Pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 5.0 strap.

Plus you get your first month for free and there's a thirty day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you do not like it after twenty-nine days, they just give you your money back. Right now, you can get the brand new Whoop five point oh and that thirty-day trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.whoop dot com slash modern wisdom. That's join.whoop.com slash mod.

Modern wisdom. What are the differences between beliefs and feelings? Are they are they an im an important distinction between those two? It's hard to define what's meant by feelings, you know. This and also some of these concepts are really debated to this day by a lot of contemporary uh psychologists. So and also we be partly because in English we use some of these words quite vaguely. And interchangeably.

Yeah, and and we can use them interchangeably. I would say that generally speaking, if we're talking we c we might by feelings we might mean physical sensations. Um, or you might be talking about emotions, for example. Particularly if we're talking about emotions. Generally speaking, I would say there's probably quite a pronounced cognitive element. There'll be a lot of beliefs tied up in them. And throughout history, people have defined

emotions cognitively. The Stoics did. They sat down and wrote almost a kind of dictionary definitions. They say anger's the desire for revenge. Fear is the belief that something bad is about to happen and that you should flee from it. And so they tend to just to interject there, I can see the desire for doing that because When you think about what a feeling is in your body, you have some sort of an emotion. It is this. global, foggy, slippery, ephemeral, fucking morphing and mutating thing.

And you know, I I use this bit in my live show where I actually I don't anymore, but I used to, where I was talking about why You could understand why the ancients would think that mortals were the gods playthings, because rage doesn't just feel like some neurochemical imbalance inside of my brain and body. It feels like I've been possessed. imbued with this, you know, strange

like parasite demon thing that's taken over me or, oh, the deep depression, you know, it's sort of it's weight, the gravity is heavy. It's more than the sensation. And I think that the desire to try and bring into the um easily communicated, transferable. Oh, when you say that

Do you mean the same thing as me? Me and you have never had to have a debate really over whether that football is a ball. Well, you know when you say ball, I that's what I mean when you say ball. Yeah, of course, because you can touch it, feel it, and assess it. But because it's so internal and so uh challenging to uh show objectively to other people, you need a way of being able to exchange and and communicate that.

Yeah. And and arguably that's how we figure out how to use the words is by having some kinda definition that our society agrees on. You sound like an effective neuroscientist, so sometimes they'll say, you know, the the kind of raw affect that emotions are are are built out of.

The some psychologists will say it's like colour words, like red and blue, right? How do I know that what I mean by red is the same as what you mean by red? Maybe what I mean by sadness is different from what you mean by sadness. Except that we can associate it with certain kind of stereotypical patterns of behaviour and things that people say, you know, even then there might be some exceptions. So somebody might be really sad and fake a smile.

Right. So it can be like tricky, but we do we do have these kind of rough templates that we apply in order to apply in to order to know how to use the concept. But it is a to this day, psychologists still argue about this quite a lot. I want to make it you reminded me of a distinction that I think is important though.

That I wanted to to emphasize. Um and it's something I'll talk a little bit about the Stoics,'cause I think the Stoics got a lot of things, right? Did you know what um what do you what do you think is the first ever book on psychotherapy? on psychotherapy. You're gonna tell you're gonna tell me it

fucking Epictetis or someone else. Yeah, it's fucking Epictetus. It goes it goes back even further than that. There's a this is cool but this is kinda nerdy and cool, right? There's a lost book by Chrysopus, the third head of the Stoic school, called the lo the lost therapeutic on.

Right? Like the Necronomicon or something. Okay. Right? And it was probably the in a sense the first ever book on psychotherapy. So Epictetus and Seneca and those guys h had probably read it. It was very well known back in the day. Um And we we know a bit about it'cause there are fragments of it preserved in other authors like Galen, Marcus Aurelius' physician, goes on about it and quotes quite a lot from it.

So the the Stoics got a lot of things right. And one of the things that the Stoics said, I said earlier our big problem is like we start off at a disadvantage'cause we think of emotions in this kind of vague way, right? It's just like kind of blob of energy or whatever. And for a start my emotions are generally speaking much more cognitive.

than that implies and there's probably a mixture of phases to them and different ingredients and stuff. The more knowledge is power, the more we understand about emotions, the more we can kind of control them, do something with them. But another really important distinction would be to say maybe there are kind of involuntary aspects to emotion. We all agree about that. But there are maybe there are more voluntary aspects as well, or bits that could potentially be brought under voluntary control.

I was kind of implying that a bit earlier when I even when I was talking about relaxation, you know, and anxiety. So the muscular tension part of from the the physical side of anxiety is semi voluntary. Like so it's a kind of bracing response. Like you tense those muscles, you're not doing it on purpose. But you can actually let go of some of that tension, if not all of it.

Like so you have some voluntary control over it. If you're like breathing rapidly, to some extent you could potentially slow down your breathing, right? But you don't have complete control over it. You can't directly control your heart rate and some of the other things that are going on. So there's bits of what's happening that you have very little control over. There's bits that are easily under voluntary control.

And then there's other bits that are maybe in this kind of grey zone somewhere in the middle, it's kind of like semi under your control, basically. So that's where it gets a little bit fuzzy. So acceptance strategies you're gonna have to use. For the stuff that you can't control. Right. If I'm anxious and my heart's beating fast.

I don't really have much choice but just to accept the feeling and ride it out, really. You know, distraction techniques and suppression techniques, stuff like that don't really work that well. So probably I'm gonna have to accept it. If I have an automatic thought, oh my god, what if I get hit by a bus tomorrow and die? I can't unthink it. Like it's too late. I've already had the thought.

So to some extent I just need to accept the presence of that thought and kinda detach from it and just not elaborate on it. But like we were saying about worrying, worry is a good example.'Cause often people What people tend to do is they try to take too much control and struggle against the bits of an emotion that are automatic. So that's like banging your head against a

But they neglect to take responsibility for the aspects that are under voluntary control. So choosing to stay in the room with a cat. is largely under your voluntary control. As behaviour therapists sometimes say it's a thing you do with your arm is in leg. Right. You could literally move one foot in front of the other. Right. So it's it's basically that's voluntary. You can control that. Right. Even though it might feel like you can't. But basically there was a voluntary movement.

The worry postponement is largely voluntary. You can choose not to continue having a conversation. The automatic thought might keep coming back, of course. But then each time it does, you can just go, Eh, I'll come back to this later. You don't have to have a conversation about it.

So you mentioned that the stuff that can be written on the back of a business card uh tend to be the most effective strategies. I have to assume that that's because even if there was something more effective, compliance and the ease of the patient to be able to recall what it is that they're supposed to do.

has got to be probably the single biggest determinant about if you don't it doesn't matter how great the technique is if you don't do it, basically. That could be that's a problem in some areas of psych therapy'cause there are techniques that work well in clinical trials.

And then sometimes clients like doing them. And then there's other techniques that people hate doing and have a very high dropout rate. What what is a what are some of the examples of techniques that are very successful but people fucking hate? Exposure and response prevention for O C D. obsessive compulsive disorder. It's like one of the most effective techniques.

For someone who's got bacteriophobia, which is like a form of O C D, you'd get them to kind of put their hand in toilet water and things like that, or you know, like lick the bottom of their shoe or whatever, like expose themselves to things that they think have got bacteria. If they do that repeatedly, Like eventually they'll habituate to it, they'll prove to themselves that nothing catastrophic happens. Like and it sort of has a very high success rate. But it's so aversive that that approach.

like in real world settings often has a very high dropout rate. So we're like, oh man, we know that if you did this, you would get over your anxiety, but it's really hard to kind of drag people kicking and screaming sometimes into Presumably that would be a place for something like a retreat.

or a uh an intensive you know, if you said, Hey, uh, your O C D's stopping your life, come and live at this retreat for four weeks and we will slowly coach you through it because we know that your compliance on your own would be Yeah, it would What a great way to spend the summer. Yeah, big O C D hotel, like something like that. Yeah, I guess. They there are I definitely think there are advantages. Uh I mean sometimes I thought the main way that we could prov improve traditional th psychotherapy

would be just not doing it in a consulting room for an hour like on a weekly basis with the client. Like but I just think breaking out of the consulting room in some ways, you know, rather than just coming up with loads of different variations of things that we can do in a consulting room.

like would potentially open up a lot of opportunities. And I researchers and and clinicians do do that to some extent. And they do group stuff. They take clients out on kind of exercise behavioural exercises out of the I used to take clients who had uh social anxiety into Starbucks or whatever and like I'd spill my coffee or whatever or like I'd get them to practice going up to people on the street and asking them what year it was and

You know, these are kind of typical shame attacking or like behavioural experiments that we get people to do. So you have to go to the consulting room to do that, which is sometimes a little bit tricky to organise. I went into so many shops in Oxford Street um and told them with clients that had IDS, one of their Problems is they have almost a phobia, often of uh but not always, of uh losing control of their bills and whatever, needing to use a bathroom, not being able to do it.

So I used to go round and go into shops and s with the client and say, Listen, I'm I'm really embarrassed. I've kinda had an accident shot myself. Why is there any chance I could possibly use your Washroom, the clients would be like, There's no way I'm doing that you know. But then I say, Well, that's like a red rag to a bull when it comes to exposure therapy'cause then we should probably do it. Like if you could do it though

And it didn't bother you at all, like what difference would that make? And they'd say, Well, yeah, like I wouldn't really have a problem anymore or like deal with a lot of my problems. I figured out M earlier I said with ex social anxiety it can be tricky to get people to expose themselves to the fear of negative evaluation'cause it's more conceptual, hypothetical, like people might criticise me.

But I figured out a way to do it. There's a bunch of ways you can do it. But my favorite way of doing it was that I'd go into like a coffee shop or a restaurant or whatever and I'd walk into the middle of the room and I'd say, excuse me everyone, excuse me. I was in here earlier and I think I might have left my book behind that I was reading.

And I just wondered if anybody's found it lying around. It's called How to Overcome Social Anxiety, Blushing and Shyness. Like, has anybody seen a copy of Overcoming Social anxiety, blushing, and shyness, lying around. And my social anxiety clients would say there's not a cat in hell's chance that you're gonna get me to do that. And I said, Well, I'll do it first.

Right? And you can come and watch me. And then you're like when we get bored doing that, it could be your turn and you can start doing it. You once you don't leave and just three or four times usually it gets the novelty wheels off and you never really care anymore. But when people prove to themselves that they can do that

like in experience the kind of self consciousness but not really be freaked out by it. It's often very liberating. Ellis do you know what Ellis used to do? He'd get people To go to shops and buy a banana. Mm and a bit of string. And there's you can look this up, there's videos of people doing it on YouTube, right? And they tie uh a bit of string around the banana and they they'd walk around the shopping mall like it was a dog is what you call a shame attacking exercise.

So people who are very shy or self conscious feeling, there's no way I'm gonna do that. But by doing it and forcing themselves to get over themselves. That can often have like earth shattering effects on liberating people from When we look at uh some of the solutions from history, the witch's brew of Eye of Newt and Tale of Frog and such, uh string and piece of banana, uh, doesn't sound actually all that all that much more insane, so who knew?

Many of these techniques existed in the ancient Well like so I was gonna say the Stoics have this much more. They start right out the gate with a more philosophical, sophisticated understanding of emotion. First of all they're like emotions are cognitive. Then they're like But there are these there's a proto emotion.

They call it the prophecies. So there's the initial physiological reaction and initial automatic impression that precedes full blown emotions. So you could say there's anger and proto anger. So the Stoics say, Well, proto anger's neither good nor bad. you know, you just need to kinda tolerate it basically. But not get sucked into it and allow it to escalate. And so for example, w one of the big debates about anger is is it good or bad, is it hell could it ever be healthy and stuff like that?

You know, for the Stoics they helped to solve that problem by saying the automatic part of anger at the beginning is like neither good nor bad really. You know, what matters is the use that you make of it, how you you interpret it. Um but then the passion where you buy into the distorted thinking and start to believe it is kind of inherently problematic. Because it's not very like Seneca said, it's temporary madness. You're not you're now handing over your thinking

to a bunch of assumptions that are flawed right right out of the gate, basically. So that that's problematic. But the Stoics had these techniques like you know, the cynics who were the Stoics kind of cousins, the Stoic Stoicism and Cynicism were sort of overlapping traditions. The Cynics used to tie a bit of string around uh the neck of a bottle and walk around the Karamicus. the where all the prostitutes work, uh, in Athens.

Like they had a bunch of they called them shamelessness exercises. Hang on, hang on. Hang on. Tie a piece of string around the neck of a bottle and then walk making it make a noise behind them. No yeah, well I guess like it's walking a dog. Like you know Around prostitutes. A bottle dog around prostitutes. Yeah, it was the graveyard in Athens. The prostitutes used to work in the graveyard, weirdly.

But so it's both you like it's both the graveyard and where the prostitutes would hang out. Ah, yeah. The the end of life and the creation of it as well before reliable contraception. How fantastic. Yeah. So that these are some of the things that I think we can learn from ancient philosophy that we end up kind of reinventing and graveyards, prostitutes, piece of string, bottle. That's Yeah, that's all you need to know basically in terms of coping. Yeah.

Give people bet I like let me give you some more constructive. No, these are these are great these are better. These are I mean look it People listen to lots of podcasts, including this one, and they don't always remember everything. I can promise you they will remember a story about a piece of string and a bottle being dragged through a graveyard filled with prostitutes.

Let me tell you I'll tell you the many ways in which the Stoics highlighted some of the things that are actually important that benefit people who are trying to do. It's why also why self help doesn't always work, right? So number one The clients that I work with? One of the main things that I notice is you can think of therapy and behaviour psychology terms is often about skills acquisition and skills applic application, right?

So you learn how to do relaxation techniques or repeat coping statements or whatever, or you learn how assertive communication, and then you actually use it under stress in difficult, challenging situations repeatedly, right? I think the balance has shifted over time in the clients that I see. And now because they're consuming this kind of fire hose of self help information, uh almost all my clients are male, right? Uh so the guys that I see often have loads of

skills that they've learned. They're all doing journaling. They all do mindfulness meditation. Like they've all got their affirmations and whatnot. But there's often a massive deficit in terms of skills application. Right. So the skills become compartmentalized.

Or as I like to say, they kinda leave it on their yoga mat or whatever, you know, they leave it in their journal. So what benefit does it do someone if they practice journaling for ten minutes every morning and they're kinda working on their thought? But then they go out the door and they stop thinking about that and just revert back to negative thinking all day long for the rest of the day.

And then I certainly know I mean I I I certainly know that I did that for a very long time. So yeah. So I hate to break it to you kids. But if you want to actually improve, I know I like I like these situations. There's so many situations in life where you think, ah you could do this or you could do that. There's one or two situations where I think I know of no other solution.

Right. There's a few times in therapy where I think I in all honesty I can only figure out really one, two things. There's all there's one main thing really that you're gonna have to do here, which is you would have to have some kind of ongoing mindfulness or self observation. throughout most of the day in order to be assured that you're gonna be applying your skills consistently. Otherwise you'll just compartmentalize them.

So you'll be really good at doing your meditation and your journaling and then potentially it just kinda goes out the window when you go to the office and start interacting with people. Um or you might not even notice that you're thinking negatively and practicing like avoidant ways of uh dealing with things, you know, unless you're observing what you're doing. Maybe not all day long, but pretty consistently, right? The Stoics knew that. They called it prosoke.

So they had this idea of watching yourself and paying attention to how your thoughts feelings and actions were interacting to avoid this problem of Epictetus says to his students, You guys are like lions in the school and foxes in the street. Right. You've kinda p you're you're you're talking the big talk about stoicism but then as soon as you go out the door it all goes out of the window.

There's only one solution to that, which is that you'd have to practice continually and be constantly observing yourself. Well the Buddhists do, they practice continual mindfulness throughout the day. The Stoics had exactly the same idea. But the people that I work with today, like most of them they see self improvement as something that's highly compartmentalized and I think that's a Form of avoidance in a way.

And so they don't also practice facing their fears. So y again it's unlikely people will do that unless a therapist or coach or a friend or a parent is encouraging you to do it, unfortunately. Right. And the Stoics knew that as well. So they said, Look, you have to go and endure voluntary hardship and get out of your comfort zone to some extent if you want to do self improvement. But you should also use your imagination, use your noggin, right? And visualise.

anticipating in advance. They call this premeditatio malorum. Like so the premeditation of adversity or bad things. They still say every day you should imagine death, exile, poverty, illness, all of the common problems that can befall people and practice responding to them with a philosophical attitude.

The people are like, Well, I don't really I can't really be bothered doing that, right? But if you don't force yourself in your imagination to face potential catastrophes, then you'll meet them unprepared. Basically, you're you're practicing the skills but you're not really it's like a bo you're doing your boxer training, right, in the gym but you're never getting into the ring. Practice

like sparring or fighting anybody, right? So it's like you need to get in the ring. Like at least in your imagination. Like that's like sparring. And then out in the real world actually pushing out your comfort zone a little bit, facing things. Like otherwise you get what I sometimes call the pen and paper problem. So people are kind of like on paper, good at doing self improvement stuff. like using coping skills, meditation and things like that. But it never really gets applied in practice.

Trust really is everything when it comes to supplements. A lot of brands may say that they are top quality, but very few can actually prove it, which is why I partnered with Momentous. They make the highest quality supplements on the planet, and their whey protein is literally the cleanest on the market. It's fast absorbing isolate sourced from grass fed European cows, which means no hormones.

No antibiotics, no GMOs, plus it's NSF certified, meaning that even Olympians can use it, and unlike most proteins, it's designed for gut health. No fillers, no junk, low in lactose, and it mixes amazingly. It's fantastic. Clean protein usually tastes awful, and this is unbelievable. Best of all, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it completely risk-free, plus they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 35%.

off your first subscription and that thirty day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to live momentus dot com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom a checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout.

It's an interesting challenge because the the compartmentalization I certainly know for me, I relied on a morning routine for fucking ages and that was nine gratitude meditation journals in a row, every like six months worth nine of them and like thousands of sessions of meditation and breath work and reading and note taking and yin yoga and all of this stuff. Um but I was very much treating it like

because it's so detached from the situations that you use it in. Like you think about something that you're grateful for or that you're hopeful for or that your plans for the day or whatever. But then when something to be grateful for or to not be fearful for or a plan for the day appears You're not in the same Location mind space.

Signature. You're not feeling that. So taking it off the cushion, as it's known in meditation, is a that is the skill and that's the same as what we said before. If you can write it on the back of a business card, your compliance and therefore your application are going to go up. You get state specific learning or it gets compartmentalized. There you go. Um

So the most effective treatment, for example, we'll talk a little bit about anger. Um that's I said that's kinda like my hobby at the moment. Are you still doing your are you still doing your book on anger? I'm doing I'm working on it. It's gonna take forever, right? But I'm working on a book about anger. It's gonna be like the greatest book ever written on anger. Basically.

I'm gonna do I'm gonna write a book all about anger. It's my favourite thing. Like I it's quite a exciting emotion. Like it's colourful. Like so there's a lot of interesting things. And we have this whole book by Seneca called On Anger. Which is really good, like about what the Stoics said about anger. And we can compare that to CBT. CBT for anger works pretty well. Like, it's actually here's something about for your self-improvement audience, right?

Anger, uh the success rates in treating anger with CBT are about uh seventy percent mean uh success rate, could have like measures of clinical significant clinic clinically significant improvement. It's about s it's about a seventy percent rate across the board. The largest meta analyses, like these are studies that combine statistically lots of R C Ts, like randomized controlled trials. That's the gold standard for doing clinical research.

fifty in the main ones. I think more recently there are about like seventy individual studies that they pull data from. And from that they have like a a mean success rate of roughly seventy percent. So interesting, bit of trivial for you, right? CBT for anger has a higher success rate than CBT for depression. or PTSD or a bunch of other common problems, right? People with PTC, PTSD and depression often have anger problems, right? So there's a low hanging fruit argument. Which would be

You should treat the thing first that has the highest success rate potentially. Ah, because it's gonna make everything else after that become a little bit easier. It's the blockage that you've managed to get rid of more quickly. Yeah, you'll get some kind of knock on benefit but also you become more skilled at using the techniques and your confidence grows in using the techniques that you're learning, right? So it tends to start a domino effect, right?

So the there's an argument there, like there's there's good reason to argue that in many cases it might be an idea with people that have anger and other problems to target the anger first. The another argument when you're prioritizing things clinically is you might go for low hanging fruit fruit. You might also go for dealing with something that's most urgent. Well, you know, it's anger potentially is an urgent problem because it can lead people to harming themselves. Harming other people.

destroying their relationships. Like so you get potentially more bang for your buck. in therapy terms by fixing that problem. Like the consequences of not fixing it might potentially be worse in many cases. Not always. Like but it's a serious contender for thinking we should probably do something about that first before your wife divorces you. Right? Or what you or you traumatise your kids or get yourself killed in a road rage incident or something like that. So

You might say, well hang on a minute. Uh people guys out there that are drinking from this fire hose of self help stuff online and self improvement, maybe they should be targeting their anger. Like I think of it in some ways as the sort of royal road to self improvement. It's maybe one of the areas where there's the most Room for improvement. It's the forgotten problem, the forgotten emotion. Because for a start, well, why would that be, right? You don't see that much.

self improvement content about anger. Yeah a few anger management books, but it's a drop in the ocean, buddy. Right? People generally ignore it because it's an externalizing emotion. There's something about the very nature of anger that makes people say, If I'm angry, Chris, I'm gonna think you need therapy, not me but

Right? It's'cause it's all your fault that I'm upset, obviously. Right,'cause you're a jerk. Like you didn't send me a Christmas card. Now I'm pissed off. It's your fault. You should be in therapy, not me. So angry people tend not to self prefer for treatment and they tend not to use self help unless their anger reaches a kind of critical point. And then often it's at the behest of someone else. Like their wife says, You need to go and do something about your anger or their What anger?

Well anger or in prisons or in schools, like in institutions people get sent for anger management or a court might mandate it, right? But angry people are often kind of kicking and screaming like they can be reluctant to have it. So they're like soap dodger. in therapy term. They therapy soap dodgers, right, generally speaking. But that means that it's like an untapped vein. Like it's the biggest opportunity. We have a high success rate. and working with it. So it's like low hanging fruit.

But they're avoided doing anything about it. You have to identify that you have anger problems though. I two uh examples come to mind here. So I did um a big retreat. It's probably gonna be the thing. that I remember one of the lessons that I remember most from this year. Um, do this big retreat. It's twelve hours a day, seven days of deep emotional work with a coach who I trust

uh unbelievably deeply who's been on the show a ton called Joe Hudson. I think you'd love him. And um uh small very small group, completely sober. And uh one of the days was anger.

And I'm looking at like the other days. I'm looking at sadness, I'm looking at grief, I'm looking at, you know, some of the other emotions. One of the days was anger. And I was looking at the anger day and thinking, ah no, like i you know, f maybe there's a whatever, whatever. I was the first person to like move from the the initial part to the second part of anger and I was up before anybody and I was like

Maybe I'm more angry than I thought. Maybe I'm more I guess I don't I don't present as an angry person, but Joe then told this story, told this fucking wonderful story. And he said, Um, my daughter was nine and she was crying in the bathtub and she'd done it a couple of times this week. I went in and spoke to her and I said, Why are you crying in the bathtub? Like and she says, Because I'm sad

She's like, You don't sound sad. You sound pissed off and she went, I am said, Oh okay. You know when you're crying in the bathtub, how how often Are you sad and how often are you pissed off? She says, about half the time. She's like, Well, if you're pissed off about half the time, how come you cry a hundred percent of the time? She said, Well When I'm mad and when I'm pissed off and when I'm angry, my sister runs away. But when I'm sad, she comes and gives me a hug.

And it just blew my mind the sort of pro social nature of sadness when you can convert anger into it and the anti social nature of anger. I thought that was so fucking cool. Yeah.

Yeah, it's like it it's it's sneaky, like and it's often hidden. And anger often as well is a way of coping. Like you people use anger as a way of dealing with other feelings. Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, he wrote a book called Prisoners of Hate. It's a really good book about anger. And he said that most of the clients that he asked who had anger problems initially

Yeah. They didn't uh maybe it was like fifty fifty whether they thought their anger was in response to something else. But Beck was really into getting people, as I mentioned earlier, to spot the automatic thoughts and record them very carefully. And he said that when he trained people to observe their feelings very closely, almost all of the clients with anger that he spoke to noticed there was a preceding emotion. that came before it that they were using uh their anger to cope with.

Sometimes anger can be turned into other emotions, but very often it's another emotion like being hurt. Like I said earlier, Chris didn't send me a Christmas card, like and I'm really mad about it. But probably at first, like I I was hurt.

Right. In many cases people are ashamed. They're hurt. They're anxious. And then anger actually takes so we we think of emotions in this kind of homogeneous way. But in many cases anger and other feelings. But anger's a One of the worst contenders for this is used as a sort of coping strategy.

It's a way of dealing and I'll tell you a weird thing about it is one of the ways that anger helps people to cope. When people are anxious, they often activate schemas of helplessness, right? So they momentarily they feel kinda like, Oh, what the fuck am I gonna do? Like helpless. Anger makes you feel powerful.

Right. But it it's kind of an illusion in a way. It's like Dutch courage or whatever. Like you know, you're just it's magical thinking. You're tricking yourself into feeling more in control and more powerful than you are. Nothing has changed about the situation. But you feel like so committed to taking action and fighting back that it gives you this kind of surge I and it conceals or compensates for its overcompensation.

in many cases for feelings of powerlessness and helplessness. I'm gonna take back control of this situation by getting really angry. And it also one of the most dramatic things about it is it shun all of your attention out. Well Why, so it it this is a very simple way of putting it, and you know, I I'd be interested to know, you know, what your uh your audience think of this. In some ways anger very simply functions like a distraction technique.

Like, if I get really angry then I'm not really paying attention to how hard I am anymore'cause I'm just thinking about like how I'm gonna deal with you. Like what a jerk you are and maybe I should I don't need to refresh Yeah, I don't need to I I'm not even feeling my pain anymore. Because all of my attention has literally been diverted away from it, like externalized. Like so it's a big fat distraction technique in many cases. Yeah, I wonder

It seems like anger kind of goes in one of two directions. People get angry when they should be doing something else, and people feel something else when they should be feeling angry. Like some people flee from anger and some people suck it in and use it to avoid feeling other stuff. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

It's often the case. So we have to look very closely at our feelings and try and understand what's going on with them. You know, they cover it they're very often like covering up something else. Very often they're functioning in a kind of defensive way.

I really understand, you know, what's actually going on. I'll tell you well, I was gonna s talk about like very simple techniques. Yeah, and uh what I mentioned earlier, like some of the most effective techniques And maybe this is another reason that people don't get as much benefit from self help is they can't see the wood for the trees probably Right. And the most effective advice is often so banal and so simple.

You know, it's strange. You kinda come back to simple things. You come back to the beginning, but recognize it for the first time. And you think it maybe it really does boil down to something as simple as just doing this. So one of the most effective strategies for anger is just catching it early, noticing the early warning signs of it, but at an earlier stage than you would

typically spot it. Like and then accepting the initial feelings. Like so feel say feelings of being hurt by somebody uh diminishing you or disregarding you or not respecting you or whatever. And accepting those feelings and sitting with them for a bit longer than normal. So that you have time to process them, right? And it may in some cases be like thirty seconds.

You know. But there's nothing that's an incredibly minimal technique. Just pause and notice what the feeling is that's coming before anger. So you'll get like a an urge. to start blaming the other person or yelling at them. Sit with that urge and with the feelings that surround it for just like a bit longer than normal.

And you might go, Man that my feelings are really hard because Chris doesn't send me a a a Christmas card but then that might be long enough for me just naturally to think I didn't send him a Or you know, who gives a shit about Christmas card? Right. And for natural spontaneous

cognitive reappraisal to happen, for instance, or for the feelings to peak and then naturally kinda like wane again, right? But if I launch immediately into anger, I never have an opportunity to process or reappraise those initial feelings. And it it might only it might only take a minute or less, you know, for me just to give myself a chance, you know, to really experience what it is that the anger's covering up and process it.

My so that it's not as much of a problem anymore. Why did you give up on psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapy after so long? That was ages ago. We're going back a ways now. Like, so I started off Doing psycho uh I did a master's degree in psychoanalytic theory and this is like twenty five years ago or something. And I practiced psychodynamic therapy for like a year. The reason that I I there were multiple reasons why I I wonder um some of them maybe I can't

share in public. I got a bit disillusioned with my own personal training analysis and with uh the approach that I was studying and also some of the stuff that I was reading. Um the last But the last journal article that I read I can remember vividly. Uh the last article I read was by a s very like a well known psychoanalytic theorist who wrote an article about uh sublimated anal masturbation. And he believed that golf

Okay. Is a form of sublimated anal masturbation. Okay. Um'cause he'd analyse like one client or whatever and this is what had emerged from it. So he decided he was gonna write like a paper theorising this or whatever. Because you have to put he said and I'm not kidding, I'm repeating his words not mine. He said you have to repeatedly put your fingers in and out of dirty holes.

like when you're going round the golf course taking the like the golf ball out of the out of the hole after you've taken a shot. Okay. And I read that and I thought, I think I'm done with it. Like, I can't I can't really take this seriously anymore. So I mean that's the more extreme end of psychoanalytic interpretation, right? Some of it is m a lot more down to air.

Like definitely in recent since the probably since the nineteen fifties and sixties onwards, and particularly more recently, there are forms of psychodynamic therapy that are much more down to earth. But even when I was training and it we read Lacan We read Klein, we we still were reading Freud and stuff. And so a lot of the literature we were reading was kind of bonkus, really. And based on like zero

evidence as well. Freud, do you know how much clinical research Freud did to develop his theories? Zero? Zero. Nothing. Like he literally wrote the interpretation of dreams after his father died. And he sat and analyzed his own dream. And that was how he basically came up with most of the stuff. So it wasn't based on any client work at all, really. Like it wasn't based on any clinical research whatsoever. Freud was pretty much dead against.

And yet it produced volumes of stuff in this tradition that went on for ages.

So there were some personal reasons why I kind of got a bit disillusioned with it. I thought this is isn't really sitting comfortably with me. Um I'll tell you another little anecdote that I can share with you as well. Like, so when i did my master's degree Uh some of the the lecturers were really into Jacques Lacon, who's a smoke philosophical French post structuralist, uh psychoanalytic theorist who's big in the sixties, like early seventies and stuff, right?

And uh we read this book by a guy called Dylan Evan, uh who it was the Dictionary of Laconian thought and this was the main reference book. Um I and some of the other people, particularly people that were working in psychiatric nursing and therapy and stuff, we'd sit there every week in a little seminar room and the guy that was teaching us would go on about Lacorn or whatever

And we'd sit there scratching our heads, being like, We can't re it for this doesn't make any sense. It doesn't bear any resemblance to what actually happens with our clients and we can't really make head nor tail about what this guy's going on about. And I remember our the the guy teaching us said to us once, he got frustrated and he said, You guys just don't get it, do you? Right?

And we were all thinking, I think like maybe there isn't anything to get, right? But okay, you seem to believe that this is you know, it's not the Emperor's new clothes or quote you know, or anything like that. Like, there's something to get here that we don't understand. So I thought, I give up on this. It's not really panning out for me. You know, cognitive behavioral approach appealed to me a lot more. Years later I was reading a a newspaper and I saw a column by Dylan Evans.

And he was talking about I think he might have mentioned C B T and he was talking about evolutionary psychology and stuff. So I emailed the guy and I was like, Hey, I thought you were into the con and he said, I get this a question asked away all the time And he emailed me back a biographical essay that he'd written. And in it he said he trained as a Laconian therapist. and he was practicing in the NHS doing Laconian analysis and he said that none of his clients were getting any better.

His own personal therapy, after so many years he'd figured out wasn't really doing him any good. He wrote this book to try and sort out in his own head. what Lacon was talking about, but by the end of writing it he'd basically just convinced himself There was nothing there. Like and it didn't make any sense. And so he reached this kind of crisis point and he thought, like me in a way, he threw the towel in on the whole thing and gave it up, right? And I thought I wish I'd known that.

When we were sitting reading this book and studying at a university, and the lecturer was like, You guys just don't get it. Right? Because the guy that wrote the textbook had become completely disillusioned with the whole thing and thought it didn't make sense. And we're sitting there going, Maybe we'll just too thick to understand it, Chris. You know? That is usually the uh default assumption.

Maybe I'm just too thick. I don't understand what this guy's going on about. Right, okay. So the fear of being too thick and the concern of Autoerotic anal masturbation thro from golf. Those were the the two nails in the coffee.

You know, so I I got I started to learn about C B T and it it resonated more with me. I'll tell you another sort like so when I was a kid I was very angry. Right. So I'm a little bit in some ways like a recovering alcoholic in that regard. So I th I was saying the other day, I I thought about it.

And I realised some of the people people ask me occasionally on podcasts will say, Who's your role model? you know, uh, from the perspective of stoic philosophy are the people that you particularly admire and they want me to say Nelson Mandela or something like that, right?

And I think, well, I've never met any of those guys, right? So I don't really know. But the people that impressed me most were guys that you won't have heard of. And if I think about it, like some of them were people that were recovering drug addicts or alcoholics that I've met or in some cases people that were really angry and had maybe got into trouble with the law

But then had turned their life around. And I started to think it may be like that some of the wisest people that I've met and the ones that I think exemplify The best character traits are actually people that were really angry previously. but overcame their anger. And I thought, well, maybe also because that's the kind of journey that I went on. I started off being really angry and then like an alcoholic, you know, I reached a point where I thought this is

I need to do something about this. It's too much. It's kinda getting out of control and it's going on too long. And so then I thought, I have to dig really deep to get myself out of this hole. And in doing that, you know, I guess I changed my whole philosophy of life in some ways. I think uh that that was what got me into the stoics and what got me into uh into practicing C B T basically.

Ultimately the sort of philosophy that's right for you and the worldview that's right for you ends up finding you, I think, given it given a long enough time horizon. And if you're sufficiently flexible to not hold on to shit that you're not supposed to still hold on to. So yeah, if you're doing something that at the time was the incumbent sort of the the cool kid on the block, but it didn't speak to you.

you find the one that you have the most belief in and if you're gonna try and, you know, transform the world and write nine books and and give speak to tens of thousands of people about coaching and courses and all that stuff.

You're gonna believe in the one that transformed your life way more than the one that you're super skeptical about. But dude, Donald, I uh you're so fantastic. Every time we get to speak, I love it. Um How long is it gonna be before we have a book on anger? Tell me. Come on. Ages. Like it'll probably be like another year or a year and a half or something like that. I'm gonna take my time over it'cause I'm gonna try and do a good job of it. But I want to talk about

stoics and how they kind of set the stage for it, how much we can learn from them. But also what C B there's a lot of really good C B T, like I'm saying, with solid research. But we also know lots of from other branches of psychology about anger. Did you know Social psychology, do you know Americans? I think there might be a thing called American anger. Uh-huh. Like I think.

Different countries, different cultures experience anger differently. You know, do you know Americans report according to Gallup poll? getting angry about twenty five percent more often than Canadians and Brita Okay. That wouldn't surprise me. And Americans get angry three times more often than the Japanese. Japanese don't get angry that often, they claim. Okay. Some sort of shame or a culturally mediated anger. Anger's been growing.

Like, for sure there's many different measures that show it's becoming a bigger and a bigger problem. So I think one of the reasons it was it'cause it appealed to me, it was the problem that I did I specialise in anxiety, like I said earlier. And I thought, I want to do something a bit different. I thought I thought I've always wanted to go back and look at anger'cause that was the problem that I dealt with when I was younger. And it's something that really resonates with the story.

But also I'll look out my window and I can see, you know, the world does seem like an angrier place in many ways since I was a kid. I think social media fuels it a little bit. There's a disinhibi disinhibition that happens from the anonymity of being online that allows people to become more verbally aggressive towards each other. And it causes more and more political division. Why and it causes a lot of social problems, I think.

You know, do you remember people used to say a lot of people in America would be going around saying, We think we're on the verge of a civil war or something like that you know? And they meant it really seriously. But for sure you just need to go on Twitter. And see how angry people seem to be about politics. Do you remember when people used to be able to have a conversation with somebody that they disagreed with?

No, that's ancient history. That doesn't exist. I think that's a myth. That's a myth. Yeah, correct. That's correct. That was I of n I of Newton a conversation with someone that you disagree with without shouting. Donald Robertson, ladies and gentlemen, Donald, you're so great. Uh why should people go?

Reads, listen, your things, where where do you want to send them? On Substack. Like I do everything on Substack now. They can just find me on there. I've got lots of articles and things. Beautiful. Mate, until next time. I appreciate you. Awesome. Cheers, Chris. I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories.

And that's why I made a list of one hundred of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life changing reads that I've ever found, and there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them, and it's completely free, and you can get it. Right now by going to chriswillex.com/slash books. That's chriswillex.com/slash books.