Cory Jackson, Welcome mgean pod.
It's still great to be here.
Thanks.
Yes, not that you have been on before for our listeners, but we've had a couple of a couple of goals that this one was a bit of a technical issue with internet, and then the second one was because I didn't bloody well press record. But thankfully we were only sort of five or ten minutes. And you know I once did an entire podcast and didn't press record. Thankfully it was well, thankfully that it was with my wife.
I say thankfully because it was with another guest, but I got in probably more trouble than I would have done if it was it was an independent guest. So mat you were we were talking let's rehash this right, let's go down the PhD pathway.
So the reason that you're.
On the podcast, you'd heard me interviewing Megan Fleemer. We were talking all about mindfulness and she had said something. You thought, Oh, that's kind of right up my street because of your PhD and you, I reckon, are probably three months ahead of me because you have finally submitted all of your stuff.
Uh huh?
Did you?
Did you manage to get it in within four years or did you are you doing here?
Is part time?
Or I had to go part time? Yeah? I had to work yeah yeah, yeah, almost five, I think all up and COVID interrupted because we were running interventions face to face and we couldn't do it. So yeah, yeah, it was a bit of a There was some some obstacles that weren't only me, like I created plenty of my own obstacles, but there were others as well.
You know, PhD is bloody hard enough and there's enough moving parts with our bloody COVID coming in in the middle of it when you're doing face to face intervention. So yeah, I feel Europe and I really do. This is actually my second crack at a PhD. Just an unfortunate incidence. My first PhD was at University of Tasmania. My PhD supervision got Breen cancer and a relationship with them.
Anyway, I ended up going and started a game. But I reckon. I'm three weeks from submitting.
So yeah, good luck.
As Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager used to say, it is squeaky bottom time.
Right Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know exactly what you yep.
So talk to our listeners about your PhD. What were you looking at in that?
We were firstly broadly, we're looking at mechanisms of mindfulness, so like why why is it? Why does mindfulness or sometimes drive down anxiety and depression symptoms? This is what we were interested in. And to do that we used a combination of Buddhist sort of psychological models and some models taken straight out of psychology of course, and the it gets really complicated, So I don't want to get
I want to stay broad brushstrokes here, you know. But essentially what we were there's a really interesting model in this transdiagnostic sort of movement of psychology, of the meta cognitive model. It's technically called the SRIF model. It's the self regulatory executive function model. But what it boils down to is, in fact, maybe if I explain it like this is if you think about symptoms like anxiety and depression,
for examples, my area's symptoms. For a long time in the beginning of psychology, we were throwing things that those symptoms to see what we could do, you know, and
had limited success. Then there's this sort of cognitive behavioral movement, you know, and so cognitive behavioral therapy came out of that, and so a lot of people said, you know what, you can put the symptoms aside and look at some of these cognitions, some of the types of thinking that's driving the symptoms, and they had a lot more success, you know. So there's quite clever, very very impressive, there is, actually and it hasn't got anywhere near the sort of
airplay that I think it should have. And I didn't. I stumbled across this after I didn't go looking for this. I found this sort of along the way of the PhD. There's a thing called this metacognitive model, and what they're kind of saying is as a step further that rather than focus and try to adjust the cognitions and the thinking that's driving these symptoms, it's your beliefs about that thinking.
So it's called metacognitive beliefs. So you target the beliefs and then the rest of the system starts to this pathway that they've discovered from your beliefs about thinking to the thinking itself into the symptomology, that sort of part where it starts to break down when you were just these metacognitive beliefs. And there's a few reviews comparing CBT cognitive behavior therapy and MCT metacognitive therapy, and across the board.
Metacognitive therapy does actually does better, and it's not symptoms specific, so you don't have to have MCT for anxiety and MCT for depression and so on. It's sort of this transdiagnostic approach. So when I found that, that's the model that I used for the mindfulness training.
And I was taught who the hell was that I just interviewed very recently. Oh god, my bloody brilliant is full of PhD stuff, and he was talking about that
transdiagnostic model. Oh it was it was Tom Nemi, tom Nemy who actually just got the podcast just got released, and he said that when he was doing this PhD, the trans diagnostic model kind of came out and it was like, oh my god, this is a severe and because it's kind of like depression and anxiety and all of these dsam issues or are things that they are not independent things like diabetes is independent from obesity and that sort of stuff.
There is there's this cross.
Pollination and it's because the puman brain is bloody complicated, right, Yeah.
Yeah, it's an impressive kind of step. There's some resistance to it, of course, but it is kind of exciting when you look at what's going on, and it comes from the sense if you think about like physical ailments, and this is oversimplification. I'm sure there's people who know more about this listening than I do. But you know, if you have a I don't know, something like AIDS
is a good example. Like back in the eighties, these people were getting sick with these like symptom clusters, you know, and they didn't know what it was like, Oh, so autoimmune deficiency syndrome and you have so you have a syndrome because you don't know the cause. We have clusters of symptoms, you have disorders or syndromes. Once you find the cause, so HIV virus, now you have a disease.
So it flips from being a syndrome to a disease and then you can develop treatments because you know the cause. Right before that, you're addressing symptoms. Well, the DSM, for example, there isn't a single psychological disease right because it isn't a single identified cause for any single not one mental disorder.
So so yeah, so this is why the trains diagnostic thing gets exciting because it's kind of a bit of an acceptance of that and saying, well, maybe there are deeper causes and underlying causes that we should look into. And this metacognitive model, which I was kind of forced to examine through an internal review of my PhD. But I loved it. I can't when I really got it. When he sent it to me, I say, yeah, yeah, actually I need to rework my whole what I'm doing
and check does mindfulness training reduce these metacognitive beliefs? This is sort of the next question, right, and if so, then is one of is that an important mechanism that's reducing anxiety and depression and is it doing it to both? You know, there's lots of questions here and along the way. So there's some issues like, for example, the interventions are used use traditional Buddhist training techniques, which is very unusual in psychology. Almost no research uses the pedagogy as it
existed in tradition, in the contemplative tradition. And we broke down this model. So actually, and this comes to the crux of what we'll get to eventually, we broke the model down. So in this model, we have metacognitive beliefs they lead on too rumination and worry or two. But in fact there's two types of rumination. So when you
start digging into this literature, it gets really interesting. We talk about a brooding type of rumination, which is what we usually mean, and a reflective type, which is more adaptive and so interesting, as I dug around in the beginning, and because I did like four lip reviews, you know, in different topics to figure out what I was going to do, and the it's the true. Same is true
for mind wondering. So when you look into mind wondering, there's what we call a deliberate I don't like these terms so much, but this is what we stuck with, deliberate and spontaneous, and the spontaneous type is more linked with symptoms than the deliberate. So you've got it maps onto the rumination and then you got this further question people are saying, well, is rumination a type of mind wondering? There are all these other questions start when you read
into this, start coming out. So we addressed all of these, where a lot of them as we because they just kept the questions kept coming up, and like you know, we're already doing it, so we can just we can check and see, you know. So it's my work ended up having a lot of moving parts I didn't expect.
But overall, what we're what it's this idea that now, yeah, you know these there's reasons why these traditional pedagogies and definitions of mindfoots and so on actually might work at least as well as the common modern ones we're using, like NBSR and this sort of stuff. There's some important differences.
Yeah, that's super interesting. Let's go back and just talk about that brooding rumination versus reflective rumination. So you're kind of hinting that one is adaptive one is maladaptive.
So would that be, for example, I.
All of a sudden just starts thinking about stuff that's happened in the past, and it's dragging me down a hole.
Or of vortex of negativity.
That's a brooding rumination versus me thinking about stuff that's happening in order for me to do something more effective or better than next time.
Is that kind of what you mean?
In fact, one of the most important differences between the two is the problem solving elements. So you actually kind of hit on it's one of them, you know, and the reflective rumination shouldn't instigate emotional reactions so much too, so you can remember an event but not have the emotional reaction necessarily, which gives you this space to develop some maybe problem solving. What would I do next time? Could I use my experience to help others in a
similar situation. There's all sorts of things you can do with that that you don't have the space for in the brooding rumination because you're just reliving to a degree at the event of the past.
Look, this gets to a crux of my view, which is just been formed over a number of years of different types of psychotherapy. And look, I'm not an expert. I'm not a clinical psychologist. I'm doing a PhD in it.
But I've read enough about this to have an opinion that talk therapies that don't have action associated with them, I think are just can be a waste of time at best and can make things worse because people just continue to talk about their issues and investigate what it's around, and it can create more of that brooding thing, whereas a much bigger fun of stuff like acceptance commitment therapy, where there is an action associated with it.
It's like there's so what are we going to do with this now?
And and I can't kind of think there's there's similarities there with that brooding and that reflexive rumination, because you know, we all do ruminate it, but sometimes it's adaptive, sometimes it's small adaptive, right.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. The question arises, you know what's doing that? Which is so you keep digging you see?
Well, yeah, and that's where maybe if you turn back to two and a half thousand years of sort of peer reviewed Buddhist practice, there's some answers.
Actually, well, at least there's impossibilse to uncover that. You know,
I'm by no means the first to research it. John Dunn and Cliff Saren, there's a few others in the US have done some really awesome work on this, and so that yeah, it's like, yes, there are these times where if you're going to it's not you don't want to sit around and just hope that my ruminations, even all the talk, it's like, I hope by talking, my rumination will be less more adaptive, if you like, you know, less brooding, what would you do?
Well?
Actually, again, contemplative traditions have a lot to say about this, because if you understand, coming back to this idea of mental diseases a little bit, there is if there is a route kind of cause, or if there's a fundamental driver that decides whether it's brooding or not, why wouldn't we focus on that and try to cultivate that, learn that put that into action so that when I have a room and even if I have a brooding rumination happen, I can notice it and flip it over into a
reflective problem solving situation like this. Yeah, and so this is, like I said, this is traditionally, this is around a lot in Asian traditions, probably others. I really only know abou Buddhism.
Yeah, so let's not let's talk about some of the differences between traditional, popularized Western mindfulness and the more traditional contemplative therapies.
And I like the way you use that. I mean, I.
Remember reading a lot and watching some stuff around the I think it's called the Mind and Life Conference.
Oh yeah, that Dalai Lama and I think it was. Richard E.
Davidson was the original neuroscientist who got together looking at those contemplative therapies, particularly Tibetan Buddhism and the links to the neuroscience research, and you know that's been going on for many, many years and as you say, then brought a level of science to to Buddhism and particularly Tibetan Buddhism.
So give our listeners a bit of an overview, and look, we can go deep on this one, right, but just some of the differences between our our Western mindfulness in brackets and those contemplative therapies, because anybody will know that yoga in the West is very different to yoga, traditional yoga that's practiced in India, right, we get a very.
Tailored, sanitized version of that. Yeah.
Absolutely, it's a good example the yoga, the yoga sort of what's happened as it's come to the West. Plenty of benefit, you know, like there's not a lot to not really a lot to criticize, but also you do wonder what's been left behind. And so it's if you like, at some point in the past and you know, some some scientists somehow stumbled across contemplateds, you know, meditators, h and what what what essentially has happened, then they're just getting my opinion here, I can delve into some more
objective facts later. But you know, well, when I look back at the history, I think, well, you know, there's these people. They said, wow, you seem to have your act together. You're really interesting people. What are you doing? And so maybe they say I'm following the sensations of my breath. They're like, well, I can replicate that, you know, in a lab, and I've got measures, and off they went, and they risked their careers to do it, you know,
like it's very impressive. But what didn't necessarily come with them is thousands of years of discoveries of these people, Like they haven't just been sitting there following their breath. They've been investigating how the mind works, what causes suffering, what causes happiness? What what? What's the interaction between me and the rest of the world, what's the interaction with the self itself?
Like what yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a rabbit all right.
Yeah, that's right. And that whole massive body of work didn't come right across to the scientific They're like getting people to follow their breath because that's what they saw these people doing, so which is still like I say, I don't want to come across the bidder because it's impressive, and they risked their careers again and again because nobody wanted them researching this stuff. John cabot Zin people like this. Yes, yeah,
so got to start there. But then, you know, I think now we're doubling, we're circling back now because there's what's been missing, is some of this this knowledge and what has been lacking. So a few times, I'm sure you've thought about it. When I consider it sort of just throwing the PhD in and doing something else. You know, I've come across some really heavyweight scholars in this mind and life field, and others like we'll like be Alan Wallace for examples.
I'm like, oh, yes, yes, yes, I remember listening to him.
She's thirty years ago.
Yeah, well he's still going strong in the field, you know. So I mean Alan Wallace, Robert Thurman, John Dunn, these sorts of people saying, you know, we need contemplatively contemplative trained people getting involved in science.
You know, I'm actually sorry, can I just jump in, Corey anybody who really wants to dig into contemplative therapy?
So I think any books by Alan Wallace.
You know, he really addresses this whenever I was reading his stuff like like nobody had at the time, right, I'm sure there no, But because he was a proper contemplative practitioner, wasn't.
He months and months and months alone in in like up in the Humalayas in little Cabins, meditating with expert advice from other yogis and this sort of stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah, plus a science background. He is all this work in physics and stuff at at university and yeah, yeah, so definitely. I mean it's, like I say, one of my teach main teachers and absolutely inspiration in the field. The Yeah. So this idea then that you bring, you can bring there's some knowledge here that we could bring over. But it's not just the knowledge in bringing the pedagogies itself. So the training methods themselves, they've been changed, you know, like unequivocally.
And diluted for us, Right.
I don't kind of but I don't. I don't like to call it diluted necessarily. So for the games are absolutely but you know, if like you think about John cabots In, he's got stressed out people, executives and so on, he's got people with pain management. He got started with this mindfulness training he's got people in front of him and he thinks he's got a way to help them, and he delivered it in a way that he thought they'd accepted. And it's genius, you know, like it's brilliant.
But in doing so, there are some things that got changed that aren't necessarily in certainly not the Indo Tibetan tradition. And so this is going to shock some people who have background in mindfulness. But traditionally in this in this tradition, non judgmental is not in the definition of mindfulness. There never has been. This is a new you think that entered in the West because in actual fact, and if you go back to some classic uh, there's a there's
a really classic text called The Suture King. Melinda by Nagasena is this Indian scholar, and he says, you know, the dull point of mindful and it's actually it's a paraphrase him. He says, it's exercising good judgment. It's like having impulse arise and knowing not to engage with it or to engage with it. This is what it is for. It's about exercising good judgment. The whole thing.
She such that you know, what The parallels with stoicism are believable, right, yeah, there are. That is the fundamental approach of stoicism, is it. It's not what happens, but it's about our judgments that matters, and it's really about analyzing your judgments and changing your judgments of situations.
Yeah, well this is sort of that's right. It's like, well, this is a good thing to do, and that relies on some some other things, you know, like what goals? Are you after?
What?
There's also of other things going on here, you know, are you and are you trying to be a better I don't know, husband, father, wife, sister? Are you trying to be a better executive or a boss or whatever, or are you, you know, trying to achieve enlightenment or liberation? Like this makes a big difference, but the practices are the same. It's like, whatever that goal is, you know what if you trace it backwards, well, what are the decisions I need to make as I go through? And
how many? Of course, you can talk about it either way. You can flip to a site sort of perspective and say how much of my automated responses, you know, so emotional responses for example, Yes, but how much of my automated responses actually serve this long term goal and how many of them actually get in the way and serve a short term goal that popped up because I was emotional, and you know, I leave you to decide for yourselves. You know, I could say you from my perspective is a lot.
And so it's being able to put these long make decisions even when you're under stress, that are in the service of these longer term goals that gets important. So the in actual fats and you can look, there's a great paper by George Drefus, who's like a brilliant Buddhist scholar, you know, and it's and he sort of says, it's not the evaluative aspect of cognition isn't the issue. It never has been. It's your reaction to it. And so of course in the West, when you say reactivity, people
think physical reactivity or maybe verbal reactivity. But in Buddhism we have three types. Right, there's cognitive reactivity, and so physical reactivity is the easiest to restrain or inhibit. Verbal activity is a bit harder, you know, like I could be angry and I could not throw something at someone, but I could probably still say something mean, you know, it's a bit harder, right, And then of course there's the mental is now I noticed that I'm angry. Can
I transform? That is way harder. And that's what they're all included when you're trying to dial down reactivity from this contemplative perspective. Yeah, you can do the physical. It's helpful and you should do it. Yeah, the verbal definitely really important, but the mentals where it comes from in the first place.
So magic is right, And so to come back about just the judgments thing, and and I just wanted to ask because in Stoicism and one of the key things are the key virtue of the story step four cardinal virtues and and and their their primal one was about wisdom, which was about knowing how to act in a given situation, right,
because you can have other virtues. So for instance, you know that there's the topic I think it was Donald Robertson talked about a suicide bomber, right, who is basically for his God, whatever God that might be, whether it's Christian or Muslim or or whatever. Hate that person actually thinks they're doing good, right, I think they're doing a good thing.
For their religion, for.
Their God, and the Stoics would say, what they don't have is they don't have wisdom.
They didn't know who to listen to.
So what does that actually come into it when you're looking at judgments and good judgments because you mentioned earlier on about good judgments or is it more goal orientated around is this judgment helping me towards a.
Particular goal of being a particular person.
So it can be both. So yeah, there's a big in especially in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, which is the Indo Tibetan tradition. There's a lot of talk of compassion for example, you know, but there's and in terms of and if you accept your longer term goals as being liberation and enlightenment, these Buddhist goals, then you know that you need to develop high levels of compassion and what we call wisdom or understanding, and you need them both.
Because there's Lama Yeshi, who's one of the original Lamas who Tibetans who came to the West and set up a lot of these Buddhist centers all over Australia and the world. Used to call it idiot compassion sort of what you're talking about. It's like, you know, it's like I'm trying to help people, but really dumb about it, you know. So there's some virtue there probably you know it's okay, but no, it's you need these two wings of a bird sort of an analogy, you know, to
get to where you're going. So there's this kind of both. There is very much buddhism't surprisingly goal oriented.
You know.
Interesting, Yeah, you don't know that as you get involved, right, it's like, no, no, look, you're trying to achieve this and there are little way stations, you know, along the path, but that's what you're pushing for. And the reason there's it's not about the journey, none of this. Oh, it's all about the no, no, no no. The reason there's a path is to get you there as fast as possible. So they want you to understand where if, and you have to accept and decide whether or not you believe
that destination is possible. And so this is where it comes back again. Well, if you're going to bring these practices to the West from Buddhism, you don't necessarily need to change the practices, right, you just change change what they're aimed at and see where you go from there. But that's not what happened. They came to the West and people, oh, I need to secularize it, which.
Means change that. Yeah.
Yeah, there was that whole thing of because particularly when it first came into the West, there was a lot of resistance from Christians who said, this is a different religion.
Yeah, and they.
Tried to address that, as you said, bi secularizing it, which then you lose lose a chunk of it, right, yeah, you.
Do, and you change, you even change the methodology. Now we have people John cabots In who who came up with this that the modern definition of mindfulness that most psychology, most people will hear about in the West will be something like non judgmental moment to moment awareness. This is what it'll be, something like this, which he considered an operational definition. He never meant it to be definitive. And I also had him on record cited in my thesis.
And you know that it's not even non judgmental awareness probably isn't possible, right, but it's what's happened, is it has taken in the West, is.
Yeah, it's worthwhile pausing on that, right, because something happens, something bad happens, to have a non.
Judgment about it, like no judgment whatsoever.
Freaking hard to do because you're going to have an emotional response, right, we have these automatic, non conscious emotional responses which then drive thoughts and feelings in the brain. And to not have a judgment about it.
Is really frigging hard.
I mean again, this is the thing that I really struggle with with stoicism, is that just the judgments in changing your judgments or you know, it can be frigging hard when you're faced with a shit storm, right.
Of course, of course. Yeah, And well that's sort of what if you look at a lot of the Buddhist approach in general. The a better way to think about meditation, certainly in the Indo Tibetan tradition maybe in the modern world to think about it is types of technology.
Right.
So it's like the first and mindfulness is a part of the technology, but it's by no means the end. There's in Buddhism, it's not the be all and end, or you don't just mindful is a tool that you use. Actually, and so then a good analogy is it's a microscope or a telescope is maybe easier, like if you have if you're on a look and observe your own mind, it's very hard. The second I look at my mind and there's a memory, then I'm carried off into brooding,
rumination or worry, you know. So you need to be able to develop a level of objectivity to be able to examine what's going on in there. And that's what mindfulness is for. It's like a telescope, you know, to try to get through this atmospheric distortion, you know, to actually try to be able to see through it and then more clearly see things without all this distortion that
you get. And so from there that's where you develop this idea of wisdom, is this sense of now I get it actually why I'm reacting like this, and you want to undo the healthy ones and cultivate the healthy ones. This is sort of in a nutshell how it works.
Interesting.
So it's kind of like that exercise from acceptance commitment therapy of leaves on a stream that you kind of you observe your thoughts, but they're just leaves on a stream that are passing, or they're like clouds that are passing, and you don't get hooked by those thoughts, right, that's that I think there's with the judgment part comes in,
or maybe with the non judgmental stuff. Is there that and actually talk about getting hooked and getting unhooked from thoughts that when they hook you, then you're in emotion having a judgment about it, and then you get into that whole brooding thing. So it's that observing going oh, there's that thought again, isn't that interesting?
And then just kind of letting it go. Yes, how is that? How is that.
Different to the traditional Tibetan Buddhist view.
This just happened yesterday. I met a friend for coffee who's also PhD in a different feel and he was giving the same example. You know, he leaves in a stream. So yeah, in this approach, and there's different Buddhist approach. There's lots of different Buddhist approach, but in this approach, and I haven't quite fleshed this analogy out because we
just had a strong coffee and we're talking. You know, but rather than sitting on the bank watching the leaves go by in the stream, it's more like you're Moses in the middle of the stream, parting the whole thing, like in the midst of the whole thing, and unaffected by it. And this is a lot more powerful. And it comes back again to well, what's the mechanism Why if I delve into my own thoughts and minds, what's the mechanism by which sometimes I'm just pulled away like
non lucidly. I don't understand. I don't even know what's happening, or why might I be able to just sit here and observe them all unaffected coming at me? Is there is there a fundamental mechanism that drives this? This is the question in Buddhism, you know, we always go to sources, so well, is there something driving this? And can I do anything about it? So yes, that leaves on the streams a classic traditional lot of you know, I trained in this when I first got into Buddhism, of course too,
and it's totally worthwhile. It gives you the objectivity and distance, but there is you can keep going from here, you know, you can really dive into this, and there's no reason we shouldn't be examining this in psychology, and in fact, slowly, slowly we are.
M I want to talk about attention and attentional control because the more I kind of dig into that, I'm my wife as well, who she has a background in Japanese psychology and acceptance and commitment therapy and counseling, and so we have lots of conversations around attention. And as part of my PhD, I was involved in a Delphi study around cognitive fitness. Were my PhD supervisor. He basically put this study together and got a whole host of
world experts around sports psychology, military psychology, business psychology. I kind of squeezed in there because I was his PhD student, as did It made a man Craig Harper, who was a PSD student of a colleague. But what we had to do was really interesting is that they had identified through neuroscience a number of trainable cognitive primaries in the
brain that are important for performance under pressure. Right, so this is you know, it's the whole military figued about how do we have sustained performance under extreme pressure?
And we had to read these cognitive.
Such as performance monitoring, risal control, attentional control, and across all domains business, sport, military, and the number one thing voted on by everybody was.
Attention and attention control.
And then in Japanese psychology, I'm sure there's a similar line of thinking in Buddhism. Is they say that your life is based on your attention and ares a neuroscientist, I love that because whatever you pay attention to your briand commits sales to it. Right, the particular activating system in the Brian is off and you are committing sales to whatever that is.
So how how's prevalent or strong is attention in Tibetan Buddhism?
And is it is it called by attention or is it awareness or you know, does it does it even play a role at all?
Yeah, it plays It plays a fundamental role. And even in eighteen ninety, you know William James sort of father, one of the fathers of psychology.
You know, I could say, by the way, like some of his ship is just amazing. Does everybody should William James? That guy was just light years ahead of his time.
And it's and it's like poetry, you know, yes, it's just well, well he said in eighteen ninety he said, oh, there's he's a little preamble, but he says, for the moment, what we attend to is reality. So if you don't attend to something, it doesn't exist for you, right, yeah, yeah, and so and then unfortunately the behaviors came along and just buggered psychology up for decades. But that's true, you know, Skinner and all these crazies. Yes, we've still got the
poison in the veins from that stuff, you know. But you know, it's such a shame because you know, over one hundred and like thirty something years ago we were this, this was picking up, you know. So yeah, it's not like a crazy it's not a crazy idea in the there's more to it's not just the only sort of bone I pick with that is, it's not just what you pay attention to.
But how ah yeah, yeah, good cop.
And so this is again, you know, Buddhism. In the Tibetan system, there's a thing called well sem jung is the is the it's a study sort of unit, and it's called mind and mental factors, you know, and and
it runs through this like how your awareness works. And it's not so important perhaps for our for our purposes, but yeah, it's it's when you are if I am, for example, I give you maybe a sort of if I have a person who's regularly kind of angry, and you know, and I deal with them a lot, I think, you know, because yeah, I meet someone I know this is how emotions work. Is part of my research too, you know. Angry people are an anger trigger. So I so I meet an angry person, how I get angry to?
You know, I'm in the grip of an anger episode too. So what can I do about this? Well, I can try to suppress the anger. It won't work, It'll make it worse. We know this, you know. I can be and try to be in control and what I say and do. Yeah, yeah, okay. But can I cognitively mentally reframe it? And you can? So you have to think what it is the person in front of me. Do they look like they're enjoying themselves, you know, or do they look like maybe they're in some kind of distress
so they're angry? Are they happy? And so will rather than so I'm sure I'm presented with it with this person, and I interpret them as an angry person. But what if I just reinterpret them as a distressed person. It's totally it's not delusional. It's actually probably better. And then what that does now is it brings forth all the way I attend to this person changes.
Now because I'm starting to have compassion exactly, rather than being pissed off.
You'll at least have empathy maybe a bit of compassion. But the compassion can be trained. So that's right, And then you start and it might you might turn out that the most compassionate thing you can do is just shut up for a bit, you know, so out of actual presented with an angry person, just completely motivated by compassion, I can just stay quiet for a bit, you know, and then come in and try to say something smart, skillful as we go. But yeah, so there's these things
start to play. And if you pull this apart, and that's what I was talking about before, the mindfulness training will give you the it'll dial down the reactivity. As I mentioned, you know, is paper from that's the reactivity
is the issue. So if I can do the mindfulness training that dials down the reactivity, then when I'm presented with these difficult situations, I can sidestep the automated responses, right, and then I can pull up these other ones that I think are more helpful, and over time, the more my percentage goes up the constructive responses become the automated
responses because it only happens through repetition anyway. And so I can do that in real life, and I can support it by practice, I do, you know, on the cushion or something too, like gym work, you know, to make sure I can bring that out into the rest of my life.
Interestingly, anger thing.
I wanted to talk about a kind of a meta cognitive approach to it from the Stoics and and and again it was I think it was a podcast I was doing with Donald Robertson and he said the Stoic philosophers their approach to anger. I think I can't remember whether it was Seneca or a dictators or who it was, but but called it temporary insanity. Yeah, and that really clicked with me. And there was there was an incident.
I just think it was maybe a year ago. So I have an eighteen year old daughter and we are very very similar, right, So we clash for we have this love and it's not a here, but we have
a love clash relationship, always have done. It does my wife's heading, but she's very skilled at pushing my buttons when she wants to be right and there was fun day we were in the kitchen and she was pushing my buttons and I just I felt the red mist descending and I was just about to have a verbal outburst at her, and this little voice in my head just come up and went, you're about to go temporarily and seeing, And it.
Actually made me stop and think.
And I actually said to her, because we talked about it, I'm about to go temporarily and seeing.
And it made us both laugh and disfuse the situation.
Right, But there had to be that that metacognitive or that self awareness of the emotion, and then the judgment of the emotion came from that little oh, it's actually temporary insanity, which which kind of changed the emotional response that I was actually having.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you like Paul Ekman, who's so a lot.
Of ah, Paul, Yeah, brilliant, so great.
So I run an intervention. In fact, the intervention we used use some of his work. He's got an intervention called Cultivating Emotional Balance that he designed with Alan Wallace as a result of the Mind and Life Project, so that I'm quite heavily involved in that, and it's we used part of that from my research too, and so he's he really objects to the idea of negative and positive emotions. He says, there's no such thing. I really
like this. There's no negative emotions, right. There is negative affect, of course, there's unpleasant you know, negative sensation, but the emotion itself isn't negative. So if it were like if the if anger was negative, then we should get rid of the emotion, right, Like, there's no argument to this. If it's negative, you get rid of it. So then, you know, how do you end social injustice? How do you fix the climate prices? How do you get women the vote or end slavery? People got to get angry,
but they have to do something smart. The same with fear. You know, fear will save your life again and again every time.
There's a reason for these emotions, right, that's right.
Sorry.
Ekman was the first to show that emotions are cross cultural.
Right. He did all this research.
He went to I think it was Pappi in New Guinea and went into the tribes and Pappi New Guinea who had never seen white people, and they were having this They had the same emotions that we have.
Yeah, he took photos of their faces and took them back to San Francisco and had his students identify six emotions. Anyway, there are more, you know, he's not saying there aren't more emotions, but there was six or seven you could consistently recognize. And so yeah, oh it's fascinating research. There's no one's not. Everyone's on board with all of it. Of course, because we're our really individualistic society. We all like to think, No, I'm special in my emotion different.
But I don't really like this. I think it's pretty solid. There's a lot of evidence for what for that position. But I like this idea of what he says, that the function of emotions is to let you know that something you think important is happening. It's a sign post, right, and so like yeah, yeah or not right. So like in this case, it's like, oh, something important is happening, and I want to do this, but you have the wherewithal of go. But it's better that I don't do that,
I do nothing or or something else, you know. And so that's this idea. If he rather than get caught up in your negative emotions because or positive emotions for that matter, if there's no negative emotions, there's no positive emotions.
Either what you've got is sign posts telling you that something you think important is happening, and then you can have a whole series of like questioning and checking in to see is it important, and all these sorts of things that you can train to do within like you know, half a second, you know, to check on how you
going to react or reframe or something like this. So your example is a good one because it's like, yeah, there's all this stuff going on and you're like wait, you know, it's sort of like am is this beneficial? Is just further in collaboration, we sometimes say in emotions research, is it or not? You know, and when it's not, then you can diffuse it, and if you have tools
to defusing it, then that's really good. One that I know one of the people I worked with for a while, couple having arguments and they decided that they when they argued, they would argue in the bathroom and so completely completely agree anyway, so they told me that. So it's all blowing up and they're about to go in like off right,
and they go into the bathroom. They look at each other and start of laughing, you know, because that's go isn't brilliant, and it's just like completely derailed the whole thing because you get set up all these we're just so amazing as human beings. It's not only it's the person who's in front of me, and so what they're saying, and it's how I'm responding. It's all so the location is happening in if you argue in the same place, we know this, how you get set up to argue
this all. There's so much going on beyond our conscious awareness, right that psychology. This is why I love this combination of psychology and Buddhism, because psychologists got a lot to say and a lot to help Buddhists with their everyday life if there was look up for a moment. But actually there's all these deeper wisdom too that maybe psychology
should pay some attention to. And there's a lot of scopia for overlap that could push us a long way to discovering maybe causes, but certainly fundamental drivers of mental illness and this kind of and happiness for that matter.
You know, I just was thinking as you were talking there, just about emotions, and you know that we know that there are non conscious I did some stuff with Evan Gordon from the Brillant Resources Institute a guide doctor Royce Sugarman, and they had this integrate model in the briand and said that emotions arise in response to significant situations around you within so already to fifty million seconds in the
brain way before thinking and feeling. And it just kind of struck me that maybe emotions are nature's way of grabbing your attention because there's something important around that's happening.
So let's have a look because one of the and so I'll have one of the things you can be almost certain of if you're in an emotional If I'm in an emotional episode, we say, you know, if I'm in the grip of an emotion, almost certainly my attention has been captured. So, if you want to break it down,
is that oversimplification, but it works for our purposes. Two types of attention controlled and captured, right, so we know, and they're different neurological systems, exogenous and endogenous systems in
the brain, you know. And so even flipping from an endogenous controlled attention to captured, whether it's in the auditory domain or the visual because there's different sensory input, you know that it really sets up these HPA access so you get cause al adrenaline released, you know, just from the attention switch, right, which makes sense. If you're a hunter gatherer and you're doing your thing and there's a rustle in the grass, you know, I mean apologies and
he rustles listening. But if there's a sort of a rustle in the grass and your attentions pulled away, this arousal happens, and it's a saber tooth tiger or it's the wind, you know, and either way you're prepared. There's no there's no net loss really, so that that attentional.
And that's a captured attention.
Can you just see it go into a little bit of detail or I think I get what you're saying, but just explore for us the controlled and captured attention.
So is controlled attention thevo litional stuff.
Where it's captured is you've been grabbed by your emotion and your articular activating system is just diverted.
Yeah, exactly, And so and that's the key of a of an emotional reaction is your attention is captured and you want what under attentional capture tends to be. You know, we talk about these as if they're they're more like ends of the spectrum, right, They're not like it's easy to talk about them as a WILB. But the the captured attention is non lucid. It's it's easy to have your attention pulled away for extended periods of time and
not know that it's happened. And if you've ever tried to meditate your.
Boom scrolling, doom scrolling, doom.
Frolling, of course, I mean that's and that's really up against it because people with post grad degrees have designed that to make sure your attention.
Yeah.
Absolutely, But if ever you've tried just meditating, you know, just spend two minutes and try to sort of follow the sensations of your breath NonStop, see what happens. You know, probably find at some point you can start writing a shopping list or you know, planning a revenge on your neighbor or something without really knowing, you know, and so so the it's quite a long time before you know.
And so the parallels here are really critical because if you think about a mindfulness training session, certainly you know in the system that I use and TEA that's essentially in the beginning is what you're doing. You're sitting, you're resting, You pick a focal object, let's say it's sensations in the body. You know, you pick that and you try to attend to it, and at some point you've got
to notice that you're distracted. And when you notice, so, actually, what you're really doing is getting a sense of the difference between the experience, that this qualitative difference between captured and controlled the tension.
Oh yeah, gotcha, okay.
And over time you'll find with experienced meditator, like at the moment they all overlap and you sort of don't keep getting pulled away and you don't know, but experienced meditators know. They're really obvious and so that and part of that is to do with the lucidity of your own thinking. So I'm there and I'm aware of the thoughts and things that are going on, and so whereas once the tensions captured, are not necessarily so aware. This
is a direct transition straight up into an emotion. If you think the anatomy of a distraction I often call it is the same as the anatomy of an emotion, is that your attention's pulled away. You'll losecidity decreases, your automaticity increases. Right, And just as you can sit here and sort of in a meditation session be thinking of all these things and not know it, now you can be saying and doing things and you don't really know because the emotions are it's a very coarse version of
a distraction. So you can start to see. Now if you train, and if you use a training pedagogy that's designed to interrupt this, which is what the buddhistuff is for, then you do this on the cushion fifteen twenty minutes a day, even it doesn't have to be radical. You'll get these interruptions of emotional reactions for free. And this is where you start to come back. You're saying this project cultivating emotional balance. You know that that's what we're
trying to do. You first get your attention under your control, like notice, when it's captured, so you can bring it back.
Then we can do the psycho education component where we teach how emotions work and what they're for, and different types of emotions and all these things the physiology, so you recognize them sooner and you can start to get people in these feedback loops where even emotional reactions happen and you get pulled away, and because of the meditation training, you notice and you relax and you bring it back. That emotionality actually helps you with your attention, like you
can if you leave it alone. It's a feedback, it's a downward spiral. My attention keeps getting pulled away and captured. It actually makes me more emotionally reactive, which degrades my attention capacity and so on. If but the reverse is true, if you keep interrupting the attentional capture and interrupting the emotionality, you get less emotional reactivity, more controlled attention, which dials down your reactivity which increases, and you can set up
a feedback. Your attention increases as the emotional reactivity decreases. And this is when you're in a sweet spot now, because you really in control of what you say and do when you're emotional, which is sort of the to me when I work with people, it's like, this is the first step we're look working on. Imagine being in control of everything you say and do, no matter how emotional you are. And this is only the first step.
This isn't even this isn't even advanced you know, and that only requires attention and some what we call emotional skills, which is what my research was. We only taught. We
only gave emotion skills training and mindfulness training. We didn't do any of the compassion training or insight all this other stuff, just straight up and in doing so, then we're trying to dig down and see what happens, you know, in terms of what sort of mechanisms are at play when people are becoming emotional and when those emotions turn into symptomology, which is basically what happens. You know, what mechanisms are driving it, and why does mindfulness training seem
to dampen it? This is sort of our real our area.
Bloody interesting, any specific brillant changes or differences.
So I know that generally.
Meditators have reduced activity in the paraet's a lobe.
They tend to have a more suppressed or less active.
Normal sort of what's the what's the word that I'm looking for?
The Oh Jesus, it's just slipped out of my brilliant editor.
When when the neuroscientist told the diala lama about it, he said, ah, you mean monkey mind yabah yaha, yaba, the default mode network, right, which is the resting brillin state, which is higher in anxious people. Any specific that either in your research or looking at research differences in brillant activity patterns between experienced meditators and non experienced people.
So there are it's not my feel, you know, like the neurosciences, I'm so going to the subjective responses, but of course I come across it. You know, the most interesting one is probably the thicker grade matter and connectivity between prefrontal cortex and the amiga.
You know, yes, and that is all about their emotional regulation.
Yeah, that's right, because that sets off the limbic system, which is sort of the emotional kind of driver. I really want neuroscience to keep going full speed ahead, but I'm also not sure it's not. I don't know always the benefit for somebody trying to get their anger under control, telling them you can't tell them dial down. You're amigndal. It means nothing, you know, and you only know that it's active. You can infer that it might be active
based on your subjective experience. So I'm still I'm interested in people's subjective experience a bit more. I don't want to get in the way of the neuroscientists because they're going to hit gold at some point. But in the meantime, knowing that that's happening isn't having a really big effect on treatment so much as yet.
Yeah, yeah, it's not.
Really my field. One field person to look into is anihi Jar, who's also done work with military post deployment in terms of stress and brilliant research.
What's what's what's your name?
Amishi A M I S H I J J h A.
Okay, this has been bloody fascinating. What can people go to find more about you? And what sort of things do you do for people?
Right?
Haven't done a pH d in this area? I'm sure you just haven't left it and off you go. So what sort of things do you do? Do you work one on ones with people, to work on groups?
Tell us more people can find out more.
Yeah, sure I I At the moment, I run an online community space this is and so we meet once a week and meditate together. And I have an online course in there a few online courses, so that's kind of the primary place to connect with me at the moment. Yes, I do work one on one I'm building that more and more now that the PhD is over and I have several things coming up in person, this Cultivating Emotional Balance project that I'm so excited about with a full course here in Brisbane starting in May.
Oh cool.
But yeah, the best place is just to get in touch and see if maybe there's I have some content online that helped you, or we can talk and and so on. I've like, I've only really just looked up for my PhD to think about what to do next.
Yeah, no, I get you, I get you and people. Is it your website Corey Jackson dot com, dot you.
Yeah, that's yeah, it's so old, I haven't updated it, but that's the that's the place to go and get the contact that you can get to me through Facebook Linkedins as well, you know.
And what are we signed here? Where we find your online programs?
They're in this space, so that is I'll put the link, I'll send the link through. But it's it's members dot Corey Jackson dot com, dot you and that yeah cool has free and paid stuff so you can have a.
Little all right, brilliant man, excellent.
What a freakin fascinating conversation from a random email from saying that somebody randomly said on the podcast, I love this stuff and I love the the organic nature of the of the conversation.
Right, it was just like, let's just see what happens when we started talking. Pretty cool stuff, mate.
I'll tell you about that cultivating emotional balance. You need to create a version of that for schools. The gear that shut up.
The initial study that was a really comprehensive study with Paul Ekman and Alan Wallace and these other Richard Davidson and so on did it all together, you know, and they did it on school teachers, which was interesting. And the next the next generation of mindfulness research needs to do this third person stuff, So let's train teachers and measure the effect on their students or trained parents and this sort of stuff. So, yeah, this is really in
our radar. We didn't touch on it, but the next I have post traumatic stress some projects coming out that we're looking into that because again, this idea of what makes your thoughts sticky and drive emotional reactions is at the core of have so much mental health. So I got some other projects on the go.
Yeah, yeah, go.
Once you get into the emotional space, it's a it's wow, it's a Pandora's box. Eh yeah yeah, yeah great, This has been awesome. Thanks for your time and and and your insights for people, and so take yourself off to Cody Jackson dot com. DODA you sign up to some online courses and let's get better emotional balance because.
Who doesn't need that ship? Yeah absolutely, thanks, thanks for thanks