Don't Think of the White Bear

what Dostoevsky realized. He warned that when you try not to think of something, you will see that cursed thing come to mind every minute. The Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner was interested in these effects, which he referred to as ironic processes. Cases, were our minds, ironically enough go to the exact place where we don't want them to go. Witner created a version of Dostoevsky's polar bear challenge as an experiment with college students. He asked them to speak

their stream of consciousness for five minutes. Living with my boyfriend right now, so I didn't have to sunburn and I didn't want to be out in the sun really quieted as creaks me out a little bit. Next, he asked them to repeat the task, but explicitly tells them not to think of a white bear. If the bear does pop into their minds while babbling, you have to ring the bell. I asked my students to repeat the experiment.

Here's how they did. Of course, All right, and now, because I was told I'm not thinking of right now, I'm thinking about my class, think about it. Thinking about it. Man, it's checkier than I thought. It's funny to hear so many bells ringing, but everyone does this. On average. People in Wegner's original study ended up ringing the bell about once per minute. Things that we don't want in our heads seem to come up all the time. Just think

of that song you can't stop humming. But sometimes the thoughts we don't want to think about are a lot more serious than a catchy song or a polar bear image. Our dumb minds also spontaneously go to lots of yucky thoughts that fight with our spouse a few weeks back, or that mean comment from a coworker you can't shake. Even really traumatic memories have a knack for popping into our heads when we least want them there, which raises an important question. Why can't we simply get rid of

all these unwanted thoughts? What strategies should we be using not to think of white bears, earworm tunes, and those awful memories that hinder our happiness. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy. The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with

doctor Laurie Santinis. So golfers would never use the word, wouldn't even wouldn't acknowledge it, But there's no question it's well known. You know, some of the greatest players in the history of the game. Get it. Colin Sheen played for the golf team back in the nineties. He's now

the head coach. Colin's a friend of mine, which is the only reason he's willing to talk to me about a topic that's usually for Bowen for golfers to speak of, the yips, the yips is like where you're putting and then your hands just twitch and you're in a position where you no longer in control of the club. It flicks, it twists, you are in control of your of your hands,

and then there you are left broken. The yips happen when golfers totally psyche themselves out, when they think so much about not making a certain type of mistake that they end up making exactly that mistake all the time. And it's not just a one time thing. The yips can return at any moment, and that fear plagues golfers.

The idea of it sort of happening, or that it might happen, has always been a thing for professional golfers, and so you kind of lived in a constant dread of this idea, like is today going to be one of those days? Or we're gonna have a bad yips day? Or is it gonna are we gonna be fairly easy? Or and then you get on the course and it may not even be on the first hole, and then it can come at any moment, and it's it's an unnerving aspect, it's a it's an embarrassing aspect. It's it's

it's humiliating, it's it's dreadful. Think about what happens when you hit a golf ball. Making a put involves not only thinking about where you want the ball to go, but also where you want the ball not to go. This act of thinking of the unwanted action, whatever you do, don't hit it to the left, seems to make that

unwanted action more likely, not less. It's like if you're carrying a glass of wine over someone's new white carpet and you think, whatever I do, I shouldn't spill this, And then, of course, recent research shows how common this

phenomenon is. College students told not to think about a particular person before bed end up dreaming about that person more often, and soccer players told not to shoot a penalty kick to a specific location tend to look at that exact forbidden spot, which is a problem since players tend to aim where they look. Den Wegner, who devised the white Bear experiment, also study these ironic effects on the golf course. He had his student's put a ball

towards a target. Some subjects took the put normally, but others were told, whatever you do, don't overshoot. What happens. People then do exactly what they're told not to. They overshoot the ball by about twenty centimeters. Wegner's experiment had found a way to induce the yips, and it wasn't that hard. Just have golfers tell themselves what not to do, and you have a recipe for disaster. Golf is a lovely game, and it's a cruel game. When it's going poorly,

it can be devastating. But the most devastating thing about the yips is that they tend to stick around. One bad shot follows another, A whole ruined becomes a round ruined, A bad week stretches out into a bad year. Colin explained that this decline without end was famously summed up in a classic article by Henry Longhurst, the great British

golf essayist. It's called once you've had them, you've got them, because there's almost like the ideas there's not a cure, or maybe someday there will be great to take a pill. It was at this point in the interview that Colin suddenly turned a bit quiet. He was wrestling with something. He stammered for a while and began talking about his glory days, I played probably my best golf of my life from the time I was about twenty five to forty.

I had about a decade of my life where I was a plus one handicap as and I loved playing well, and I did it without practicing much. And then in the last five years or so, my game started to struggle, and it went from being just a little bit of a tail off to almost a precipitous decline. I recently told someone, if you wanted to read about my golf game, it's over in the obituary section. One of my Yale students had told me that Colin was an expert on

the yipps. I assumed his expertise came from coaching so many amazing young golfers, But as Colin continued, I realized the truth. Colin knew about the yips because he had him and once you've had him, well, The crazy thing was that Colin was now confessing all this to me in front of alive Mike. You get to a point where you wonder, like, why me, What did I do? I thought it was a good person. What did the golfing gods? Why that? Why did they pick me? And

I didn't grow up Catholic. Everybody out there. It's true. Colin hadn't really spoken about his struggle with the yips to anyone by his wife, and that's common for golfers because when you've got him, you also want to hide him, which makes the yips a form of thought suppression overload. Not only are you trying to suppress your thoughts about what not to do on the golf course, which is bad cognitively, but you're also trying to hide that you

have this shameful condition from everyone around you. You don't want people to learn your dirty secret. Colin even admitted that his wife had pulled him aside before he came to the interview. She asked him if he was sure that he wanted to talk about the awful why word on my podcast, whether he wanted to admit it so publicly. Would his career suffer if everyone knew about it. In the end, Colin decided it was finally time to confess, and maybe there needs to be an opportunity for golfers

to come out about it. I guess I'm doing it right now. Well, it's been part of the stress that I've had is that if we're being honest. I feel like this is a great place to do it. In some ways that should just be like on the first tea, I should just introduce myself and be like, all right, just let me preface this by saying you might see some horrendously bad shots out of me, and maybe that would that would that might help. I can't stress enough how big a sporting taboo Colin has broken by talking

so openly about suffering from the yips. In the golfing world, bringing up the subject, it just isn't done. One way that the yips are perceived is that it's it's because you're mentally weak. Players often think the yips can be overcome by just working harder to suppress them. Just tell yourself more sternly not to lose control of your grip on the club. Mentally, keep telling yourself not to make

a bad shot. Golfers don't take kindly to the suggestion that all this mental pressure won't help them beat the yips, so everyone ends up suffering and keeping it a huge secret, which makes the next story Colin told me all the more unexpected. You see, back when he was a young golfer,

Colin had a chance to meet his hero. I was working for the Golfer magazine just six months in my very first assignment to interview a pro was Bernard Langer, the Rye Hilton, And I'm twenty two years old and there's Bernard Langer, like two time Master's champion, waiting for me in the lobby. And I left an hour early and I was still late, and of course he's on time, and he was gracious to me, and we sat down.

We start the interview and it's going wonderfully, and he's cranking out answers and I'm sliding follow ups and it's going wonderful. That was when Colin made a huge faux paw in front of the greatest player on the planet. I felt like I sort of had a moment where I could ask him about his yips. A typical golfer might have walked out of the interview right there, but Colin's hero wasn't the usual golfer, and he just goes

into this answer. In nineteen seventy nine, I had my first bout of the yips, and then in nineteen eighty two, and he did it. He did it perfectly, and so I realized now in hindsight. There he was doing the opposite of trying to obscure the fact that he had it, and it only paid dividends for him throughout his life. He was forty three at the time, and he just continued a meteoric rise just by disclosing to some twenty two year old kid, it can't hurt, it can't hurt.

He wasn't. He clearly didn't have a problem acknowledging it admitting it. And I think perhaps there's a lesson there, Collins, right, there is a lesson here, one that's really important scientifically. Langer was one of the few golfers who was willing to speak openly about his yips, and that meant that his mind didn't have to harbor a shameful secret. It didn't have to work really hard to keep the dreaded y word hush hush, And that meant that Langer's mind

could relax a bit. His brain didn't have to put so much effort and to keep all those unwanted thoughts concealed. Because his yip's cat was finally out of the golf bag, so to speak. And what was the result. Langer had a lot more mental energy left for doing what professional golfers need to do, namely, play golf. Langer was able to develop new techniques to improve his game because he had finally freed his mind. He had let go of

all those ironic processes, and his golf game skyrocketed. Yet again. Coming up, we'll hear just how powerful that release can be, not just for bad golf games, but for life changing events. Here it was this big secret they've been keeping their whole lives, and here was this opportunity for them to organize the experience and to put it into words in

a way that they've never done before. The Happiness Lab will be right back criminal pace for deeps sixty one Turney General against Adult the son of adult Karl Eichmann, aged fifty four. Historians argue that it took the world nearly twenty years to appreciate the true horror of the Holocaust. First count nature over fence climb against the Jewish people and a fence under section one one of the Nazis

and Nazi collaborators. It's April eleventh, nineteen sixty one, and Adolf Eichmann has just entered his bulletproof doc at a special tribunal in Jerusalem. Over fence. Eichmann was facing fifteen indictments for his role in sending millions of Jews to their deaths. Nazi warker Mills had been publicly tried before, but this time was different. This time, television cameras were beaming the story to every corner of the globe, and this time Jews who had seen and survived the genocide

were ready to take the stand of court. Please, guy in the courtroom, do you speak Hebrew Sir? Yes? Please place the skull cap on your head. Many of the witnesses had never spoken publicly about the horrific cruelty they'd endured. Was my younger sister, and she wanted to live, She prayed with a German police interrogator, Michael Goldman. Gallad had

helped build the case against Aikman. His own parents and sister had been murdered by the Nazis, but like other Holocaust survivors at that time, Michael had never spoken of his ordeal, assuming no one would trust his account. It was impossible to believe, he had said, because it was so horrible. She asked to run naked. She went up to the German with one of her friends. They were embracing each other, and she asked to be spared. Standing there naked, he looked into her eyes and shopped The

two of them. They fell together in their embrace. Michael had bottled up his experiences for twenty years. After listening to hour after hour of awful memories pouring from his fellow survivors, he realized that the trial had become a watershed historical moment. The Aikman trial, he said, opened our mouths again. But unlike those who'd taken a stand against Aikman, many Holocaust survivors still felt they had no acceptable way

to share their stories. You know, it's hard to talk to your neighbor saying, oh, did I tell you all about my holocoust experiences? They learned nobody wanted to hear about it because it was just too threatening. Jamie Pennybaker is a professor of psychology at UT Austin and an expert on the power of expressing our emotions. By the mid nineteen eighties, many Holocaust victims had kept silent about

their experiences for four whole decades. Jamie wondered what told us had taken on them and what benefits they might receive by sharing their stories instead of suppressing them. He joined a project that invited survivors to give videotape testimony of what they had endured at the hands of the Nazis. And here was this opportunity for them to organize the experience and to put it into words in a way

that they'd never done before. And they came in. They were interviewed on camera, and the average interview was about an hour an hour and a half. The films of the interviews Jamie conducted are captain a university archive here at Yale. I arranged to see some of them. It was tougher to hear than even I expect it okay to begin when it? Could you tell us your name, your maiden name, or your friend. My name is Rosalie Chief. I was born in Kako, Poland, and I am a

Holocaust survivor. Jamie asks Rosalie about the appalling things she endured, first in the ghetto and then in the camp. I'm struck time and again by just how determined Rosalie has been to suppress the details. I tried so hard to push the memories away. Do you think you're pretty successful at putting it away? Out of your mind, tending you get true. I'm finding with myself it's not good to start something like this and not to bring it out.

For nearly two hours, Rosalie patiently answers question after question, occasionally wiping away tears. Having suppressed her memories for decades, she finally opens up to recount horrors which seemed almost unimaginable to me. Who were covered with lies, who were beaten. We had to stay in the camp undressed completely like animals, and they should every minute somebody else. It was an

incredibly hard video to watch. Every act of violence perpetrated by the Nazis is more depraved and distressing than the last. At one point, describes watching the SS slaughter and entire orphanage of Jewish children in a frenzied massacre that left the street outside a wash with blood. It was very hot. Talk about done an outstanding job. You've really really, I won't play you the worst parts of rose Lee's testimony.

I had to stop the tape several times and just get up and go for a walk, but Jamie had to listen in real time. It was the most moving experience in my life. I um, it's hard to put into words I had no I'm not a clinical psychologist, and hearing these stories was really hard on me, and it was almost as though it was a traumatic experience for me, and just seeing the depths of the horrors that these people had endured, you know, I had nightmares. I was now, all of a sudden a victim of

my own research. But completing the interviews was only the first part of Jamie's work. Jamie wanted to know if the process of sharing memories would have an impact on the survivors, whose lifelong mental strategy had been to timp down those thoughts and lock them away. What we found

was the experience had this profound effect on them. A lot of them were self reports in terms of kind of a greater sense of well being and happiness, and also we had some health markers that showed improvements as well. Immediately after telling these awful stories, survivors felt better, and survivors who shared the most traumatic memories were the ones who reported feeling the best. They had the lowest heart

rates and the lowest levels of emotional anguish. Talking about the worst possible things they'd ever experienced made survivors feel calmer and happier, but Jamie's results were even more amazing than that. One year after the interviews, Jamie contacted survivors. He asked, how are you feeling and have you been to the doctor recently. He found that survivors who disclosed lots of details in their interviews were healthier. People who evaded talking deeply about their traumas went to the doctor

almost twice as often. It seemed that getting those awful secrets out in the open made survivors less sick even a full twelve months later. It was hard to do a really controlled experiment because we didn't have another group of Holocaust survivors who did not come into the studio. So as a control study it wasn't that impressive, But as a case study, it was a profound Really was

a profound experience. I've become intrigued with this notion that if you have something that's bad and you don't want to talk about it, you probably should think about talking about it, or at least writing about it. After his own tough experience with Holocaust survivors, Jamie set out on paper how upsetting and unsettling he'd found the interviews. He found the writing process so helpful he decided to test the effects of sharing bad memories in a more controlled way.

So I thought, well, we just get random college students who are taking introductory psychology, bring them into the lab. They were either wrote about superficial topics or about traumatic experiences for four consecutive days. And those people who wrote about these traumatic experiences, it was a profound experience. And they wrote about things that anybody would agree was a traumatic experience. They weren't kind of the classic thing. Some

were these huge humiliations, were things that sounded superficial. Death of a person's dog, I remember, and every night I would go and read all of these stories, and they blew me away. Both sets of students, the ones who'd written the stories that had so moved Jamie and the

group who just set down warm, mundane thoughts. Granted permission for their medical records to be tracked for six months, and those in the experimental group, those who wrote about traumas, ended up going to the doctor at about half the

rate as people in the control conditions. When people were asked to write about a deeply troubling traumatic experience or upsetting experience that they hadn't talked to other people about, it was associated with better physical health that people went to the doctor lest their immune system got better, something

that has always stuck with me. I remember in the months afterwards this happened at least a couple of times a student would come up and said, you don't know me, but I was in your experiment on writing and it changed my life. Since Jamie's initial research back in the nineteen eighties, many scientists have seen the same effects of setting traumatic memories down on paper. There are easily one or two thousand studies that have been done since then.

Across these studies, it's been associated with reductions and symptoms of depression and post traumatic stress disorder. It's been associated with people performing better on creative tasks, doing better on a standardized tests like SATs or MCATs. They're mentally healthier, and the biological markers have been quite impressive in terms of changes in terms of improvements and symptoms of arthritis

and immune disorders and cardiovascular changes and so forth. We often tell ourselves not to think about events in our lives that are painful. We think dwelling on that stuff is not good, and so we squash those bad memories down. But the science of ironic processes shows why that's a bad idea. It takes work for us to repress those bad thoughts, and that cognitive work winds up affecting things like sleep and blood pressure and how well we can

concentrate on a standardized test. Letting those bad thoughts out and getting them down on paper finally lets our tired brains relax. It's like opening our little mental pressure cookers to let out some suppressed steam. But there's a second reason that writing down our bad memories makes us happier. Writing stuff down helps us make sense of things. Our brains finally get to process and work through some really bad stuff. I've always been fascinated how people naturally deal

with upsetting experience. You know you're almost in a car wreck. You come home, you tell your spouse, your friend, Oh my god, you were not going to believe what happened. By putting an upsetting experience into words, it forces structure, It forces an organization. There's a beginning, middle, and end. It's not blowing off steam. It's not some kind of venting or the way many people think about catharsis. Instead, you are coming to understand the event and also yourself better.

Writing about your painful emotions can help you organize those experiences. You finally have a chance to make sense of them because they're not bottled up anymore. And once you make sense of upsetting experiences, you finally get enough perspective to from them. And this is something that I find interesting about adversity that very often adversity having the thing that negative certainly sucks, but by the same token, it has the potential to be healing and to make us rethink

ourselves and rethink our lives. Having watched that film of Rosalie Shift breaking her decades long silence about the Holocaust, I found it hard to put her out of my mind. I decided to track her down. It turns out she passed away just a couple of years ago at age ninety one. But as I read her many obituaries, I was struck by something. Rosalie devoted her final years to telling and retelling her terrible story. She even helped to write a book about her experiences. She and her husband

told reporters, quote, we have to talk about it. Rosalie had tapped into an important psychological truth. Putting painful memories into words can give us the perspect if we need to grow from those events, whether those events happened yesterday or even fifty years ago. But what if there was a way to process those painful events while they were actually happening. What if we didn't have to shove the tough stuff into some mental memory bank and marshal the

courage to deal with it all later. What if we could just work through the pain immediately, Just feel all those bad emotions in the moment and accept them. This might sound like some Zen Jedi master stuff, but research shows this radical approach to negative emotions is possible for every one of us. The Dalai Lama simply said to us, if we can all sustain a calm mind, any emotion can arise and fall and not be destructive or hurtful,

the happiness lab will be right back. I'm never going to get rid of emotions, but I think I've gotten better at my recovery. Can I return back to a calm mind a little quicker? I would say yes. Eve Ekman is the director of Training at the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. She's an expert on how people feel their emotions in the moment and can tackle

them head on. I remember very well a friend and colleague of mine in the UK, and her mother said to me, it sounds quite interesting what you do, but why aren't emotions just better if we don't talk about them. I think most people believe that, but would never say it to me, and with that stiff upper lip that we associate with people in the UK, I think there is an assumption that the more we meddle into our emotions,

the more trouble we're making. So can't we just leave them as they are and hopefully they'll just go away on their own. Many people would rather just shut their negative emotions off before they happen, but science suggests that might not be possible. I think the million dollar question that everybody want the answer to is how do I stop right in the middle of my emotion? And to date I have not found anyone who's able to do that,

and has even studied the best emotional regulators around. Even in my work with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, he describes the difficulty of feeling angry and responding to anger, and he is able to have anger come and go, but not to stop it right in the middle. None of us can shut off what we're feeling midstream, not even the Dalai Lama. The problem is most of us don't get that. We don't realize it's impossible, and so we try really hard to shut off any bad feelings

we're having in the moment. And what does all that suppression do? You guessed it? Ironic processes kick in and make all those unpleasant feelings even worse. I think what we know from researches, when we are suppressing our emotions or trying to clamp down on them, they actually have a rebound that's even stronger at a physiological level, meaning it feels more intensely in our body when we're trying to not show what we're experiencing and trying to not

feel what we're experiencing. Let's take a closer look at the science of this rebound effect, an effect that researchers have found clever, though sometimes disturbing ways to induce in laboratory settings. The Stanford neuroscientist James Gross showed his poor test subjects graphic medical footage of a patient's arm being amputated. Some viewers were told to suppress what they were feeling and not show any outward sides of emotion is the

horrific film played. What did Gross find? The individuals that tried to follow this command were less likely to scrunch up their faces in disgust when watching the videos, But Gross also found that they showed much larger internal emotional responses than the ones who just watched the video normally. Their heart rates spiked, they sweated more, and they even showed signs of their blood vessels constricting. The act of trying to shut off our on the outside makes our

internal arousal levels shoot through the roof. Researchers see similar rebound effects when people try to suppress physically painful experiences. In one study, subjects were asked to stick their arms in very, very cold water for as long as they could take, and then rate the experience on a scale from zero no pain at all to ten maximum agony. One group of subjects was told to ignore their pain.

What happened. They pulled their hands out of the freezing water almost a minute before subjects who were just experiencing the pain normally. It'd be one thing if these rebound effects happen only in weird psych studies that involve creepy videos and painful tasks. But researchers have also shown the power of these emotional rebounds in everyday situations like in our family life. Say you have a stressful day at work and you come home to your family still feeling

a little worked up. Our minds often tell us it'd be good to shut those feelings down to make sure you're spouse and your kids don't know what you're feeling. But as researcher Wendy Berry Mendes and her colleagues have found out, that's pretty much the worst thing we can do. Mendes brought moms, dads, and their kids into the lab and had parents simulate a typical stressful work event. They had to pitch an idea to their boss, who immediately

crushes them with some withering criticism. The bruised parents were then asked to play legos with their kids. Half of the parents were told, try to behave in such a way that your child doesn't know that you're feeling stressed. What happened those parents inadvertently took it out on their kids. They were angrier and more upset. They were less responsive to their kids, gave them less guidance, and behaved less warmly. Overall, their bad mood deteriorated even further when they played with

their kids. But what's worse, perhaps not surprisingly, if that Mendes found the parents rebound effect also took a toll on their kids. These kids had less fun and did worse on the task just because their parents were trying to hide what they were feeling. So, at the end of a day in which we've been suppressing the entire day, we feel emotionally exhausted, drained, and depleted. We've been efforting

our way away from these emotions. Eve thinks that if we just felt the emotions rather than trying to suppress them, we might not be as burnt out. After all, emotional responses aren't in themselves bad from the psychological point of view. We would not want to get rid of emotions. That would be a very unsafe world for us to live in. We wouldn't have the signal of fear or feel the

motivation of frustration to change things. Some of our more difficult emotions we'd rather avoid can sometimes, be, of course, our greatest teachers, if we're willing to look at them, and if we have the tools to manage them, and a first step to managing them seems to be to

deal with negative emotions as they arise. So let's say, for example, yesterday I go into the office and I find that my is actually occupied with a meeting, and my first experience is a little bit of frustration, but I try to avoid that feeling, and I instead I'm looking for other places to sit and do my work, but I'm doing so in this kind of pinched, aggravated tight way. And so later on that day when I find that maybe the public transportation on my way home

is late, and I become very upset. I can't believe that this train is late, and what's wrong with the city. And then I question to myself, why am I so upset about this? And maybe I can trace back to not having really been with a low level of frustration

that happened earlier in the day. If I could just accept the fact that it wasn't the way I wanted it, the rest of my day would have felt better, and I could have done the exact same thing, which has find somewhere else to work, but without this kind of heaviness or this out this kind of ongoing residue. The process he's describing here the act of response, rather than

reacting to our emotions. It's one that scholars have been preaching for thousands of years, way before modern neuroscience was around. Take Buddhism, for example, Buddhist teachers have long argued that we're not going to be able to get rid of all the bad stuff in life, the stress, the pain, the occasional negative event. The Buddha himself realized that these are not going away. In fact, the continued existence of pain, or what the Buddhists called duca, is so important that

it's considered the first of the four Noble truths. But Buddhists also realized that our reaction to the pain is something that can go away, that's something we can control. To illustrate this concept, the Buddha told his famous parable of the second arrow. In the story, Buddha explains that when something bad happens in life, say we get stuck in traffic or get yelled at at work, it's like getting hit with an arrow. It sucks. But when we respond to negative events, we also get hit with what

he called a second arrow our reactions. We automatically get really upset, and then we hate what we're feeling, so we try to suppress it, which makes things even worse in life. We can't always control that first arrow, but the pain from the second arrow is totally under our control. Whether we freak out or try to suppress what we're feeling, that second arrow is optional. It's on us. Eve's gotten really good at avoiding second arrows. She even had in

one off before we started our interview. So, actually before this call, I received a pretty confronting email this morning, one that made me feel kind of frustrated and annoyed. And I knew we were going to talk, and I wanted to feel more clear and less kind of triggered emotionally. So I did a short meditation for myself, and in this meditation, I focused on not the story of why I'm right and clearly this person is wrong, but I focused on just the felt sensation of what it was

like to be triggered into feeling frustration and anger. So I think if we can start managing and working with our emotions, the opportunities are boundless. Our mind thinks that the right way to deal with all the unwanted stuff is just to push it out. Just don't do it, don't think it, don't feel it. But science shows us that's just not how minds work. Avoiding our thoughts and emotions causes them to come back with an ironic vengeance.

The most effective way to deal with the pain of life, all those first arrows, is just to let them sting. I decided to meet again with Colin Shean, my friend, the golf coach who confessed earlier that his golf game had gone to pieces. The science says his frank admission about the yips could only have been beneficial. But did Colin's golfing form improve? I wouldn't go so far as to say smashing, but definitely I've improved. I can pretend

to look like a two or three handicap now. By confessing he had yips, by putting it into words and getting it out of his head, Colin was able to golf better than he had in years. Maybe I should get a bumper sticker I had the yipps. Put it catch on. It would help people's game. I think you could have a nice cottage industry of having golfers with the yips come and pay you five hundred dollars to sit down for half an hour. And my little Spiller

Guts podcast recording kouth Golf Confessional. Well, if the podcast doesn't go anywhere, I know have another career. Nice. I'm kind of hoping that I don't have to make a living counseling golfers. But if you've enjoyed the show and found it useful, I'd appreciate you spreading the word. Tell your family and friends and even total strangers. And if you're not keen to share, well, maybe this is one

time we're suppressing. Your thoughts might be okay. So whatever you do, don't think about listening to the next episode of Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie santa The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley. The show is mixed and mastered by Evan Viola and edited by Julia Barton, fact checking by Joseph Fridman, and our original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Miola Belle, Carly mcgliori, Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig,

and Jacob Weisberg. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and Me Doctor Laurie Santos.