So a big part of the model is learning to unhook from those you know harsh self judgments and instead bring in some self compassion. What are kind things we can say to ourselves? Kind things we can do for ourselves.
Today? It's great to have Russ Harris on the podcast. Russ is one of Australia's foremost practitioners of acceptance and Commitment therapy, a mindfulness based psychological therapy that aims to help you reduce stress, overcome fear, and find fulfillment. In this wide ranging episode on mental health, we discuss Russ's happiness trap cards, which include ideas such as your mind is not your enemy, when emotional storms blow up, drop anchor,
and urges are like waves. We also cover our self esteem, the experience of being human, and how to set yourself up for success in life. I'm a longtime admirer of Russ Harris and I'm so glad I was finally able to chat with him on my podcast. So without further ado you, Russ Harris, Ross Harris, how are you?
And great?
Thank you thanks for inviting me. I just had my fifty eighth birthday yesterday, so I'm I'm recovering too. Much cake and sugar and happy birthday.
Thank you to the legend himself. You've really made quite a name for yourself and really help a lot of people kind of reclaim their mind in a lot of ways. I feel like everyone feels like they're losing their minds. Thank you.
Yes, I think we all feel that way at times.
Definitely, because your background is in ACT.
Is that right, Yeah, Like the official association is ACT.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right.
If you if you cool it ACT within ear shot of Professor Stephen Hayes, the guy.
Yeah actually comes, he comes, he pops out and like the candy man. Yeah, you know it that way.
But the ACT is a good abbreviation for the model acceptance and commitment therapy because at the core of it, it's about taking action, you know, it's about doing things that are meaningful and important in life to make your life better.
Yeah, and so that's your training and specialty. But it really this approach really encompasses so much of human life. And this book, you know, you obviously wrote the best seller of The Happiness Trap, but this most recent book, The Happiness Trap Cards, although I mean it's not a book, ahould say this collection of cards. The Happiness Trap Cards
is is really all encompassing. I mean, as I'm reading it, I'm like, wow, he's covering from self esteem to to thinking thinking traps, to to living a life of gratitude. I mean, it's really it's all of mental life.
Yeah.
Look, it was much harder creating the cards than it was writing the book, because when you write a book, you can go into stuff in depth, in detail. You can, you know, spend a chatter exploring a concept such as
mindfulness or self compassion. But when you've got a deck of cards, you really got to just distill that down to two or three paragraphs, you know, or I think the limit was two hundred words per card on one side, distill a concept, and then put a exercise or skill or technique on to the other side.
And boy was it hard. I mean, talk about losing your mind. I really did lose my mind writing that.
Oh huh. It sounds like it's like a tweet. Everything's a tweet.
Yeah, yeah, I've never been onto the Twitter space.
Well, I tell a lie. I was on it for about a month and then I gave up.
It's just too stressful. Ah, just is like an entry away into act. Can you just tell people a little bit like what are the core can put like, what's the core concept of unhooking? You know what does that mean? And because you kind of start off the book with that.
Yeah, well, so basically, difficult thoughts and feelings show up for all of us throughout the day every day. You know, life is stressful. We all have challenges, and the human minds often interpret things in a way that makes things even more stressful than they need to be. So when I use the term hooked, what I mean is your thoughts and feelings are having a huge impact on you.
They're jerking you around that they may pull your attention away from what's important, what's meaningful, so you're no longer focused on what you're doing, or no longer engaged in what you're doing, or they may hook you in other ways, pull you into patterns of behavior that are self defeating
that make life worse rather than better. You know, drugs or alcohol or you know, shouting at people that you love or procrastinating on important stuff, all of those self defeating patterns of behavior that we all do to one extent or another. So basically means your thoughts and feelings just having this huge impact on your actions or on your attention and just kind of pulling you away from what's important or pulling you into self defeating patterns.
One of this approach is obviously very similar as well to Susan David's idea of emotional agility.
Right. Yeah, absolutely, Susan David uses acceptance and commitment therapy. She acknowledges it at the back of the book, but she doesn't really mention it throughout the book. But yes, her book is absolutely based on the same approach. And we've had her at a as the guest speaker at the World APT Conference, and she said she didn't kind of reference it throughout the book because she didn't want her book to be filled up with sort of tech,
you know, scientific references. But it's exactly the same approach actually, And so unhooking skills are a set of skills that you use to take the power and impact out of those difficult thoughts and feelings. It's not about getting rid of them or suppressing them.
It's about just.
Kind of having a new way of interacting with them. So they just lose their power. They'd become like water off a duck's back. They can't jerk you around.
Why did you get so interested in this approach?
Well, it was started from a personal journey.
I mean, I graduated as a junior doctor in my twenties and I was, you know, miserable. I was depressed, I was anxious, and I couldn't understand why. I mean, you know, being a doctor. Everyone said that was going to make your life brilliant. You know, it's prestige status, it's a meaningful job, it's good money.
But I was miserable.
So I started, you know, exploring why am I so depressed and miserable when I've got everything that you know, society tells us makes you happy. And basically what happened was through my own personal therapy and through reading lots of self help books and doing lots of self development, I started to become very interested in the psychological aspects of medicine and lose much interest in the physical side.
And so I was working as a GP family doctor in Melbourne, Australia, and I found that as a GP, my consultations with my patients were getting longer and longer and longer, and we were talking more and more about the psychological sides of health and less and less about the physical side, and I started to realize that I
was in the wrong profession. Gradually I started retraining as a therapist, and it was my income went down and down and down, because as a therapist you earned much less money as her doctor, but my satisfaction went up and up and up. I found this is what I was really interested in, and this is what fulfilled me, helping people, you know, deal with their psychological health issues and build richer lives. So I've you know, it's a
cut a long story short. I arrived at ACT through a long journey of trial and error and blind Alley's training in many different models of therapy, and each model I found some things that I liked and some things that I didn't like, and some things that worked and other things that didn't work.
They were all good things in every model.
But eventually, when I discovered ACT acceptance some commitments there therapy, it just seemed to have everything that I was looking for all in one package, and it was just love at first sight. I read the first textbook on that was out at the time, it was like, this is amazing, this is incredible, this is just what I've been trying to do, and it's been a love affair that's lasted for over twenty years now, so it just keeps getting richer and deeper all the time.
I really like it too. How would you describe the difference between ACT and cognitive behavioral therapy, particularly the new crop of it, the mindful of cognitivi or therapy that my friend south Gilhann is kind of spearheading.
Yeah, well, you know.
I think it's a hard question to answer because cognitive behavior therapy is evolving all the time, and ACT has massively influenced it, so a lot of stuff from ACT has actually crept into CBT. Traditionally, probably the biggest difference with CBT encouraged you to get into a battle with your thoughts. You'd start analyzing them, whether they're true or false, and challenging and disputing them and trying to get rid of the negative thoughts and replace them with positive thoughts.
Whereas ACT doesn't do that. ACT kind of you acknowledge your thoughts. You recognize that even the most difficult negative thoughts are at some level your your mind actually be trying to help you. You know, like when you're worrying a lot, your mind's trying to help you in you know, point out things that are dangerous, point out things that
you need to take action on. And so I often describe the mind as like an overly helpful friend, you know, Scott, have you ever had one of those hopefully helpful friends.
Yeah, I call I called intrusive helping.
In trues, that's I love it. Brilliant, Yeah, trying so hard to help become a real nuisance. And that's usually what our mind is doing. So we don't want to get into a battle or a fight with it. We want to kind of acknowledge it's trying to help, but kind of take the power and impact out of those thoughts, learn how to see that they're nothing more or less than words and pictures popping up in our heads. We don't have to fight with them. We can just learn to let.
Them flow through us. And and so that's probably the biggest difference.
Instead of fighting, good disputing and we kind of just let the thoughts, you know, float on by like water off adopts back really.
Right, right right, And it's not entirely about your your cognitive distortions. There's also a great sense of like acting in the world and getting out of your mind, like like not get not overthinking it.
Yeah, there's there's a you know, a lot of emphasis on mindfulness skills, on kind of bringing your attention to what's important, focusing on what's important, engaging in what you're doing, and savoring the potentially enjoyable, pleasurable aspects of what you're doing. But it ACT is a bit different to other models in that it doesn't emphasize meditation. Meditation is, let's be honest, for a lot of people, it's very boring and very difficult.
So ACT kind of teaches mindfulness through lots of simple, easy to implement strategies that you can build into everyday life, you know, without meditating.
Yeah, yeah, good point. What is your mind not your enemy?
Why is it not your enemy?
Yes?
Yeah, well because it's always basically, you know, fundamentally, your mind is like a problem solving machine. It's always trying to do one of two things inside of trying to help you get things that you want or help you avoid things that you don't want. So if you think about when your mind starts beating you up, judging you, that does your mind judge and criticize You've got yes, of course, So you know, could you give us an
example if it's not too asking too much? You know, what's a mean, nast thing that your mind says when it's judging you.
Wow, you're a silly goose.
Okay, And so it's not just saying that. You know, I must say your mind's quite polite.
My mind's a bit ruder to me than that.
But you know, when your mind kind of judges you that way, what's it trying to do? What's it trying to It's basically trying to say, if you keep doing this, something bad's going to happen. If you keep saying these things or doing these things, you're going to upset people, or you're going to get rejected, or you're going to screw up. You know, if your mind saying you're you're a bad mother, it's trying to help you shape up
and become a good mother. If your mind saying you're you know, you're you're stupid, it's trying to tell you, well, look, there's an important area that you need to skill up on or do differently, or you need to kind of you know, handle these things better and more effectively. So it's not deliberately trying to make you miserable, it's actually trying to help you. Unfortunately, that strategy is not a particularly full strategy.
You know, judging and.
Beating ourselves up does sometimes motivators, but at other times it has the opposite effect. Like Scott, you've got a you've got a pet donkey, right that carries your load to market every Saturday.
I sure do.
Yeah. And you know there's two ways to motivate your donkey, right, carrot and stick, that's right, And so you know you can motivate your donkey with a stick and whack it and it'll kind of carry the load.
But over time you end.
Up with a miserable, you know, bruised, battered donkey. And that's really what self judgment is. It's our minds using the big stick to motivators. But luckily, in act we've got something that's much better than a carrot. You know, you can motivate your carrots, it'll carry the load. You end up with a happy, healthy donkey with really good night vision. Right, But we've we've got something much more motivating than carrots.
We've got something called values.
And values are sort of your heart steepest desires for how you want to behave as a human being, how you want to treat yourself, how you want to treat others. And once we are clear on our values, we can use them as a compass, as an inspiration, as a guide to help us do the things that we really want to do in life.
Yeah, you have a really gentle way of being. It's very compassionate and gentle on the oneself, I could imagine enjoying being your patient.
Well, yeah, I hope so, you know, I mean, self compassion is such an important part of the you know, our default setting for most of this is we just judge and criticize ourselves. And you know, again, just like sometimes that will motivate a donkey to carry the load, it will motivate us at times. But it's a life training form of motivation. So a big part of the model is learning to unhook from those you know, harsh
self judgments and instead bring in some self compassion. What are kind things we can say to ourselves, kind things we can do for ourselves. I often will ask my clients, you know, if somebody else were you know, had just screwed up like you've screwed up, or have just made this mistake, or is going through something painful, like what you're going through, you know, and if you love this person and you want it to be a source of care and support and kindness to this person, what would
you say to them? Yeah, And usually it's so different to what they're actually saying to themselves. Instead of this harsh criticism, this really kind, supportive language comes out. And so you know, in ACT we encourage people to have hooked from the harsh self criticism and kind of find kind ways of talking to themselves and more importantly, kind things that they can do for themselves. Like very often when we're in pain, we we go for the drugs or the alcohol, or the junk food or you know,
the unhealthy distractions. We do all sorts of things to try to escape and have albit those painful feelings. Oh yeah, but a big part of ACT is learning how to open up and make room for those painful feelings and be kind to ourselves and take the power out of those painful emotions and let them sort of flow through us without sweeping this away.
It's beautiful, it's beautiful. What is the idea of dropping the anchor when your emotional storms? While how can we anyone do that at any time in their life. Yeah, well, so it's called dropping anchor because, yeah.
You know, your boat sailing into the harbor. You hear on the radio there's a big storm blowing up. What's the first thing you need to do when you get into the harbor.
It's a bad question. You need to drop anchor, right, you know.
And I need to have some stability, some stability in my life exactly.
And if you don't drop anchor and that storm blows up, your boat's eve are going to get smashed against the other boats or swept out to the sea. And so it's the same with emotional storms, for it, you know, for our when the going gets tough, we have emotional storms. For some people, it's anxiety storms. For some people, those are sort of depressing storms. For some people those anger storms.
But basically we get jerked around by these painful emotions and they sweep us away and they so dropping anchor is sort of learning to do the same thing with our own emotional storms. We learn how to keep ourselves steady so that the emotional storm doesn't pull us away from our life or sweep us off into self destructive or problematic behaviors and I like this meanciful because you know, anchors don't control storms. You know, when you drop an anchor,
it doesn't make the storm magically go away. It just holds the boat steady. So at the same time we drop anchor with our own emotional storms, it's a way of holding ourselves steady. And and all emotional storms will you know, they'll rise and they'll peak and then they'll fall again. So let's hold us the steady till the storm passes.
Yeah, it's a it's very in line with my cell boat model of self actualization that we need. The security needs have to be met in the boat itself before we can open up the sail and grow.
I like that, Thank you, thank you.
It's it's it's a it's a reimagining of Maslow's hierarchy. That's not a pyramid but a sailboat. So so yeah, very very much in line. I resonated with so much of your book, and I just pulled out various things that I was nodding vigorously when I got to them.
For instance, this one. I love this quote. To help break bad habits or to disrupt self defeating behaviors, ask yourself the workability question is what I'm doing workable will work in the long term to help me to build the sort of life I want, will work in the long term to help me become the sort of person I want to be. Yeah, that's very active, you you know, moving in the direction of your values is is. Yeah, it's wonderful. Can you elaborate a little bit more on the workable?
So workability is one of the key themes in act. You know, the question is is what you're doing working to build the life you want to be, the sort of person you want to be, doing the things you want to do.
And this is the problem.
If we go back to the idea of the mind as a problem solving machine, the default setting of the mind is it doesn't really consider, you know, the long term big picture is just what do I need to avoid right now? What do I need to get right now?
So if we can start to add in, you know, this kind of reflective way of considering, you know, is what I'm doing really working in the long term in the big picture to give me what I want that can help us help us kind of you know, well, actually, you know, no, it's not really it's meeting my needs in some way, or it's getting me what I want in the short term, but it's not really giving me what I want in the long term, and that insight is often the first step in changing a problematic or
self defeating pattern of behavior.
Absolutely, you say that life is a stage show. I would have said life is a shit show. But you know, but you're so such as, you're so polite. So okay, why why is life like a stage show?
Well, there is some ship on a life stage show, but there's more than a shit there.
You know, that's true, that's true.
Yeah, the amount of shit on the stage varies from moment to moments.
So yeah, I like this metaphor, the idea that life is like a stage show that's changing all the time from moment to moment, and on that stage, on that stage, there's all your thoughts, all your feelings, everything that you can see and hear and touch and taste and smell, and it's continually changing. And there's this part of you that can step back and watch the show and kind of zoom in and take in the details, or zoom
out and take in the big picture. And this part of you in actually often call it the noticing self. It's the part of you that can notice your thoughts, notice your feelings, notice the world around you. And this, this part of you plays a big role in mindfulness and engaging in life. There's there's not really a good word for this part of you in everyday language. You know, sometimes people call it the silent self or the silent
witness or the observer self. When people meditate, they sort of build up this this sense of this observing part that it's able to notice and observe. As I said earlier in that we don't really kind of get into meditation that much, but there are other ways of building
up this kind of observer part, which is useful. Again if we come back to this idea of unhooking, if you can kind of step back and observe the thoughts that are showing up on life stage show, or observe the difficult feelings, but without getting swept away by them. And you'll see that from moment to moment, they change, they come, and they go. We don't have to get into a battle with them, we don't have to run
away from them. So sometimes there's awful stuff from that stage show, and sometimes there's beautiful stuff, you know, sometimes there's ship and sometimes there's sapphires, sapphires. I was trying to think of something that started with an S. I could have said silver. Sometimes there's ships and sometimes there's silver there.
No, I like sapphires. No, No, I like that.
You parsed it like like sapphires, like you know they I know where I usually say it was one word no, but I I that's the British.
How do you how do you say it sapphires like one word? Oh?
I see right, Okay.
My accent is such a hybrid because I grew up in England but lived in Australia for more than half my life now, so also you think I sound English, but when I go back to England, they think I sound Australian.
I love it. I love the way you talk. It's actually really calming for something. It's oddly poetic. Oh wow, like your your cadences are very poetic.
Yeah.
I was thinking that as you were talking. So just to continue this, uh cell bot metaphor and see metaphor. How are urges like waves?
Oh?
Yeah, well so you know, and it's just like a wave in the sense that you know, if you watch your wave, it rises it reaches a peak or a crest, and then it falls again into a trough, and then it rises and peaks and falls. And our emotions are like that. Our urges are like this, even the most intense emotions, they will actually rise and reach a peak and then for even when you're really angry, you know, it doesn't last forever, crests and peaks and then it
falls again, you know. So one of the skills that can really help us to unhook from difficult urges and emotions is that is something that's called urge surfing or emotions surfing. Yes you know, have you ever been surfing?
Or yes, yes, I've been thrown around by the waves before. And you know that's what you mean by surfing it too.
And you know you don't want to resist a wave, right, because what happens if you try to resist a wave? No, no, you know, if you resist it, you get slammed. And so surfing a wave means you kind of ride it. And it's the same with our own urges, cravings, intense emotions.
We can learn how to surf them rather than you know, in everyday language, particularly with urges, we talk about resisting urges, but resisting urges is much like resisting a wave, you know, where whereas if we can learn how to surf the urge, let it rise up and I just observe it and notice it's there without acting on it. And instead of struggling with resisting the urge, what we do is we
focus on our values. We put our attention into meaningful you know, values based behavior, behaving like the person we want to be, and we kind of take that urge with us. We let it kind of play out inside us without acting on it, and we focus our attention on what we're doing, and we engage and what we're doing, and that urge will rise and peek and then fall without sweeping us away.
See that was poetic, the way you said that really was. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely absolutely, and you really can you can really see that. Dare I say? If you meditate over a long period of time, you really start to get intimate with your own patterns of thoughts and you start to realize as well, it all has a certain cadence to it, you know, are.
Yeah, well, you're right there, and it's important this thing about meditation, because you know, I'm not knocking it for a lot of people do you like you never find it useful, but it most of just being realistic. A lot of people find it really hard to do. And one of the nice things about ACT I think one of the things that I fell in love with is that it gives us short, simple ways to learn these skills without having to meditate. So you can kind of
think of meditators. You know, you can get very fit by lifting lightweights in the gym. You don't have to go for the heavyweights. There are benefits of going for the heavyweights, but they're not essential to get fitness, and so you can think of meditation as like lifting the
really heavy weights. It does add benefits, but there's so much that we can do without meditation, and this is one of the reasons why act is kind of become popular, because it helps people to develop these mindful of skills.
And you know.
Particularly if you've got something like ADHD, for example, you know, it's very hard for adhds to sit still and focus with their eyes closed, you know, on their breathing for a long period of time. But we can give them other ways of retraining their attention that they're much more doable.
Definitely, definitely, and a lot of your exercises or or whatever we want to call them. Cards really help with overwhelm, right, help with this feeling of the world as too much. I'm feeling too much, I'm thinking too much.
Yeah, well, you know, in a sense, that was one of the main motivators for actually creating the card deck, because you know, when you're really you know, when you're really overwhelmed, it's hard to read a book. A book just seems too much. But if you just you know, each card has got one little point that it makes and one little practice that you can do, So when you're overwhelmed, you can pull out one and that one
little thing can make a difference. You know. One of the problems with overwhelmed is you know, your mind's just going to everything that's going on in your life, and so one of the most useful things you can do is marror your focus. Just focus in on one thing, one little thing you can do, no matter how small that might be, one little positive thing. Yeah.
Yeah, it's gotten me through a lot of a lot of panic attacks. That advice.
Yeah great.
So why why do you bring chess into this?
Why? Why?
Why? Why should you be like a chess board?
There are a lot of great metaphors in act. You know, the danger is of metaphor abuse. You know, you kind of give somebody so many metaphors they're just.
Completely overwhelmed by metaphors.
But you know, the chessboard metaphor is a nice one because it basically goes this way. You know, you're the one side of the board. The pieces are all your sort of negative foots and feelings. On the other side of the boarder all your positive foots and feelings, and we go through life caught up in this battle. We're trying to get the positive feelings to dominate the board and wipe out all the negative pieces. But there's two
problems with going through your life this way. One is there's an infinite number of positive and negative feelings, so you know this is a battle that can never be won. Now, the other problem is that positive pieces actually attract negative pieces. You know, you move forward the positive piece I'm a good friend, it attracts the negative piece.
Well, no, you're not.
What about the time you said this, What about the time you did that. You know, you move forward the positive piece I am lovable, it attracts the negative piece.
Well, no, you're not. What about your big.
Fat and girt, what about your stretch marks, what about your balding head. You know, it's kind of so what act teaches us to do is step out of that battle instead of learn how to be like the chessboard. So the chessboard holds the pieces, it's in contact with the pieces, but it's not fighting. It's just making the space those pieces can move. So again, it's another way of just looking at this idea of unhooking from our thoughts and feelings another words, Yeah.
It's really good, it's really good. Why is there no delete button in the brain.
Wouldn't it be great if there was? You know, it would be great if we could just kind of delete all those unwanted thoughts and all those difficult memories. But the brain doesn't work that way. I'm sure most of your listeners have heard of neuroplasticity, this idea that the brain is plastic and that it changes throughout your life.
And that's true.
Your brain does, but it doesn't change by pulling out old neural pathways. The way it changes is by laying down new neural pathways on top of the old ones. So you know, if for thirty or forty years, your mind has been saying.
Yeah, I'm a loser. I'm a loser.
You're not going to magically be able to delete that neural pathway. What you can do is lay down a new one that kind of goes, oh, there's the loser story. Ah, okay, thanks mind. I know you're trying to help. Ah, there you are. You're kind of beating me up a bit, hoping to motivate me. But hey, it's okay. I'm dealing with it.
Ah.
You know, I know this one.
So that new neural powerway helps us to canasy. This is just a bit of old programming. It's a bunch of words popping up. It's my mind trying to help, like pulling out the big stick to beat up that donkey, you know, and a very popular you know, if I say to you, I say to you, Mary had what pops up a big dog? But before you said big dog? What pops up in your head?
Little land?
A little lab? You know?
And so you know, anyway programming, and suppose you can't get rid of that. Right if you grew up in North America, Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, then you learned the rhyme Mary had a little lamb at a very young age. You can't just delete that. Any point in your life someone comes up to you and says, Mary had You know, the first thing that pops into your head is little lab. You may then say, oh, a big black dog, but the first thing that pops
off this little lamb. I had some old programming. You can't delete it, but you can add new stuff on top that helped you to see here's my old programming.
Yeah, it's like, you know, don't don't think of a white bear, and it can't help, but think of white bears. Yeah, that never helps, but yeah, we can definitely forge new pathways for sure. Yeah.
I mean, you know, all the self help approaches and even old CBT approaches actually deduced to encourage that sort of something called thought stuff being so an unwanted thought would show up and you'd silently say stop, or you'd imagine a stop sign and you push it away. But hopefully no modern approach encourages that, because the research is so clear that you can push those thoughts away for a short space of time, but in the long term there's a rebound effect. They come back with greater and
greater frequency and intensity. So yeah, as she said, if you're trying not to think about white bears, you might be able to push those thoughts away for a short space of time, but in the long term it's going to be Yeah, it's going to be full of white bears everywhere going crazy.
Yeah, and that's not fun when that happened.
What is the If you've got a phobia of white bears, then it's really not fun.
Yes, yes, they could help you with the exposure of therapy. Perhaps that's true.
I don't think about being eaten by white bears very slowly.
Yeah, who knows. The brain is a funny thing. You never know how a person's going to react. What is you know, what is the self esteem trap? Why a trap?
Oh gosh, well, you know, self esteem It didn't really exist until about the nineteen sixties. It kind of one of one of the USA's exports to the rest of the world.
That's funny.
Yeah, this idea that you have to think positively about yourself and have a high self image and reflect on all your strengths and your positives and everything that's great about you. And you know, this has just become part of the culture now. But you know, before nineteen sixties, that would have been a very alien concept. And parents tell this to their children, you have to have high self esteem, and teachers tell it to the kids, and coaches tell it to their coaches.
You know.
And the problem is that, you know, I mean, there's no doubt that low self esteem is problematic, but high self esteem has a dark side too. I mean, what's the danger of going around thinking you're the greatest, You're wonderful? You know?
Is that the same thing as narcissism? Though, because I've seen high self esteem is distinguished from narcissism.
Well, I think it overlaps, so you know, high self esteem easily overlaps with narcissism, over confidence, arrogance, egotism, inflated self confidence. So that's the dark side of high self esteem, you know, if you can hold these stories lightly. I mean, act is more focused on self acceptance and self compassion.
So self esteem is kind of about focusing on all my positives, all my strengths, everything that's right on good about me, where self acceptance is accepting myself with my pluses and my mind is acknowledging my strengths and my you know, positive size, but also acknowledging my weaknesses and my failures and accepting myself with all of that. Self compassion is being kind to myself when I'm suffering and I'm in pain. So in that we kind of emphasize
the self acceptance of self compassion. We're not saying that self esteem is bad. It's just not part of a model, and there is a downside to it, certainly as it's popularly taught in a lot of self help programs, there is a lot of emphasis I'm trying to really build up that positive thinking, and that can have you know, it's just like the chessboard metaphor we were talking about.
Actually, there's actually some good research that.
People with low self esteem that practice positive self affirmations often get worse, not better, because they get caught up in that battle. They're saying, you know, I'm lovable, I'm worthwhile, and then mind comes back with well, no, you're not about this, and what about that? They end up worse off.
Well, narcissists don't think like that. It's need to write a book for narcissists to be a little bit harsher on yourself.
Well, what happens with narcissists is they're kind of deeply afraid, deep inside that they're not good enough, that they're worthless, and so they're just desperately clinging to this story I'm wonderful, I'm the greatest, and no one else is good enough, and that's their strategy from escaping a deep seated sense of self worth, of low self worth.
Sorry, somebody is jealous of narcissists. No, I'm jocking. I'm going that's a lot labor justification there for No.
You see this in therapy, you know, occasionally, like you know, most really narcissistic clients are not great therapy clients because they won't go there, they won't acknowl the difficult stuff. But sometimes they will, and what you find is just this deep sense of worthlessness, emptiness and just clinging to this story that I'm a great person to try to escape that. So it's very difficult to work with in therapy.
Yeah, yeah, that's true. My friend Keith Campbell says the only narcissists who end up on the counts are either vulnerable narcissists or grandiose narcissists who've been forced to go there by their girlfriends. And he's a world expert on narcissism Keith Campbell.
Yeah, well, you know, it depends on the type of therapy you go to. If you go to the sort of therapist who just lets you trying to you know, talk or about you know. I don't know if it's the same term in USA, but in Australia we could call it supportive counseling where the therapist doesn't really do very much. They just kind of listen and on their
head and valid days how difficult life is. And you know, so a nice sister would probably take very well to that kind of therapy because it doesn't challenge.
That's a good point. We're talking about. Disciplinary therapy is what we're talking about. That they don't like it now, I don't know if that's that's not a thing, folks. I was joking, it's not the thing.
It is disciplinary therapy, but you could start.
It, Scott, I'm sure that that would be people.
Basically, disciplinary therapy is where narcissts go where you tell them you're a loser. You you basically do the exact opposite of like, you know, you're the point of your whole book. It turns it all around. I think that'd be a good stand up comedy bit. I'm actually adding this to my list for my next stand up act. You know, the exact opposite. You get it, You get what I'm you, you get what I'm.
Saying I do.
Yeah, let's talk about my favorite one in your whole book. Well, okay, one of my topmostly top three, top three favorite noticing your direction. This is something that you can even course correct yourself at any point, right, like you can if you Sometimes we get an autopilot and we could be like just noticing that we're not really moving the direction we want to be moving, right Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. I mean that's a really just useful thing to do.
Is just a quick check in through the day, what directions am I going in? And it really is never too late to change course. It's in normal everyday life,
it's like, okay, let's try something different. That's when it's good to drop a hangkut and just kind of start, you know, have a stretch, take a breath, notice what you're thinking, notice what you're feeling, notice what you're doing, and then consider, you know, how can I course correct What's a little thing that I can do, tiny thing to start moving in the direction I want to move
just it's a hopeful. It's so hopeful to feel like you can course correct, like my friend Sharon Salisburg says, you know, like you can return your breath anytime you want. I mean, it's you can start over, she says, any moment, you can just start over by returning to your breath.
Yeah, Sharon Salzburg work, Yeah, Yeah, she's.
Great legend like you. She's a legend.
She's got a very calming voice, doesn't she.
She's a very calming voice.
Yeah.
I love hanging out with her. I feel very calm. So the dance of love and pain and this is not an eighties rock song, right it could be, couldn't It could be a good song or something. It could be. It could be.
Yeah, I mean basically love and pain. You know, they are intimate dance partners. They often go hand in hand, you know, not all the time, but when you're in a loving relationship with someone, boy, oh boy, there's going to be pain. And that's not what you want or what you expect or what you hope for. That you you can't have a loving, committed relationship with anybody, with your partner, or your children or your friends, or your family without pain showing up, you know, because you have
different wants, different needs, different expectations. But also when you love someone and something bad happens to them, that's intensely painful for you too. But our culture doesn't really prepare us very well to deal with the pain. And certainly popular movies and books and TV shows, it's all about the wonderful feelings of being in love. And you know, particularly when it comes to romance and romantic movies, you know, it's love, love, love, love, love, and you're a little
bit a little bit of pain in that movie. But it's mostly about love and feeling wonderful. And you know, in real life it's not like that. There's a lot more pain that we are one form or another. Oh so we need to learn how to open up and make room for the pain in order to have the love and have the connection and do the thing things necessary to build those rich relationships with others.
Yeah, you really say so beautiful, You say things that matter also hurt. That really hit. That hit when I want to learn. Also, you said it, you said it, and and it's it's just it's a really profound truth of human existence. It's like you can't, you can't ignore it.
Steve Hayes, the guy who created it, sets on some commitment of therapy. He's got a nice way of saying it. He says, we we hurt where we care. We hurt where we care, you know. And that's true, isn't it.
Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, there's definitely a potential for for hurt. And that's what you're opening yourself up to with the price of admission.
Yes, yeah, absolutely, yeah, it's you know, I often say vulnerability. He is the price of admission to intimacy. You know, if we if we want to have intimate relationships with with other people, we need to let them know what we're feeling and what we're thinking and what's going on for us and what we care about.
And we're vulnerable when we do that, you know, vuln vulnerable.
Vulnerability comes from the Latin word vulness.
Which means wound. You know.
So normally we've got our arm around, we've got our defenses up, and we take off our armor. We can be wounded, we can be her. And this intimacy is so often scary and difficult, and why we often avoid it.
Why Tinder exists exactly cure for all our intimacy.
Problems for people, for people who don't want intimacy, are scared of it.
What what? Why?
Why should you you told people to stop seeking the magic potion? Why why would you do that to people? Tell them this, start seeking it.
Yeah, well, so you're talking about the magic potion of confidence or willpower or discipline or motivation. People have got a number of magic potions and many magic potions, and you know that people are looking for this magic potion because they say things like I'll do it when I'm more confident, or I'll do it when I've got the willpower, or I can't do it because I don't have the willpower, or I can't do it because I don't have the motivation.
So it's kind of it's.
A language trap. It creates the idea that there's this magic pill or magic potion that's called motivation or willpower or discipline, and when I've got that, then I'm going to start doing the things that are important, and it doesn't work that way. Basically, what happens as we start doing the things that are important and making room for all the difficult thoughts and feelings that are guaranteed to show up.
Along the way.
Then if we do that over and over again, keep doing the important, meaningful stuff even though difficult thoughts and feelings are showing up, then other people will say, oh, you've got discipline, Oh you've got motivation, you've got willpower, And other people will think we found the magic potion that there really never was one in the first place.
It's about acting on your values, doing what's important, over and over and over again, and making room for all the psychological and emotional barriers that show up as you keep doing that.
Yeah, it's very true. In a lot of ways, taking the route of putting their hard work in creates the meaning, which creates hurt. So where can matter portion again?
Now, Hank, I'm I'm joking. Sell it through my website. We've got a special offer just for twenty four hours.
No, I mean, good point, good point, good point. I mean you talk about how precious life is. And I mean again, I want to re read a point I made at the very beginning of this episode, which is like this book, this notes what can I call a book?
Yeah?
Yeah, yeah, this book is like all encompassing, you know, like it's not just change your thoughts, you know, change your life. No, it's like jump into your life, jump into the stream of experience full and live fully. You know, you have this whole section on the preciousness of life. Can you just talk a little bit about that. I love that's that's top three top three favorite ones.
Oh wow, yeah, well, just coming back to jumping into it. Yeah, jump in if you're willing and ready to kind of jump in. But if you're not, also just dip a toe in, you know. You know, there might be times where you jump in, times where you dive in, but there might be times where you just dip a toe in. You might just put a foot in.
You know.
It's kind of as long as you're engaging in life, that's the key thing. The it's a given that throughout the day, they'll throughout the week, and throughout the month, there'll be times that we're more able or more willing to kind of engage and do what happens. But even a little bit makes a difference. So it's okay if you just want to stiff it down. But yeah, life is precious. I mean we know this that you know, we never know how long we've got, we never know
how long our loved ones have got. We're always shot when when bad things, you know, if people die or get sick or injured. And so it's about making the most of the very short time that we have and throughout the day, I mean, most of us waste large amounts of the day just going through the motions on
automatic pilot. And if we can just start to come back and just appreciate this little moment of life right now and the next one and the next one, well, you know, it makes a difference just to appreciating the cup of coffee that you're drinking, or appreciating the meal that you're eating, or appreciating the smile on the face of somebody you love, or just appreciating you know, like in everyday language, we have that phrase stop and smell the roses, right, yea back in North America. But yeah,
you know, so we've got these sayings there. People have recognized the importance of this for a long long time. Or count your blessings, you know, but most of us forget to do it.
Yeah, I mean you you say, find a find the treasure, right, That's that's a great reframe like that. You wake up the morning being like, hey, I'm going to find the treasure of this human existence. That's a.
Well, there is stuff that you can treasure even in the midst of great pain and suffering.
You know.
It's like, I agree.
I think funerals are a very dramatic example of this. You know, funerals are full of pain and sadness, they're also full of love and compassion and people reaching out to each other. And you know, there's a you can You're not trying to escape the pain, the sadness, the grief, but you can at the same time appreciate the love and the support and the connection and the compassion that is there, you know.
And that's what I mean by treasure.
It's not ignoring all the painful stuff, but it's also treasuring that the beautiful stuff that goes with it.
Yeah, so true. How can you like not set yourself up to fail? Because I like, I think a lot of people do it in all all sorts of ways. They don't realize they are actually setting themselves up.
I mean, I think it's inevitable that we will.
At times set ourselves up to fail. But but we can get better at at not doing that by and by just being more realistic with our goals. And you know, so many of us kind of yeah, I'm going to do it, especially if you've just listened to it. You know, an American motivational speaker.
You can do anything. Just your man and you can transform the universe. That's good.
That was good. Good impression of me. Good impression of me.
Well, you know, like it's got a motivational speaker has to have an American accent like it just it doesn't, you know, it doesn't work with an English accent.
You know, it just used your mind sensible the universe, you.
Know, especially a Texas accent, which is which is the way you used.
People do often set themselves unrealistic goals and and then course that piles up the pressure and you know, so it's all useful just to ask yourself, you know, on a scale of zero to ten, how realistic is this?
Ten is? This is completely realistic. I'm definitely going to do it.
Even if there's a zombie holocaust, I'm going to do it. It means there's no way I'm going to do it. I'm saying the words now, but it's not going to happen. I ask people to make sure it's at least a seven. If you can't score it a seven. Then change it, make it smaller, make it simpler, make it easier, or do something different. There's no point setting yourself up to fail.
Yeah, excellent point. What is the happiness trap? Not on me that I never asked you that question, but I want to. I want you to.
Can you?
Can you tie everything up in a bowl that we talked about today and just answer what happiness trap is?
Could do? You could also recut the interview.
I think this is funny. I think this is funny.
Yeah, no, I think this is good. This is good role modeling on your path of how kind of change direction?
New point and answer.
It'll be a good It'll be a summary, do you know. I mean, it's like a summary of everything we just talked about.
Yeah, okay.
So the happiness strap both the book and the deck of cards.
I mean. The name comes from.
The idea that popular ideas about happiness are misleading and inaccurate, and they'll actually make it miserable if you base your life on those ideas. And the most common of these is the idea that happiness means feeling good. If you look in most dictionaries, happiness is defined as a state of pleasure or contentment. So if that's your notion of happiness, then there can be no such thing as lasting happiness. I mean, how long can a state of pleasure or contentment?
Possibly you asked and so, But people hold onto this idea, and a link to that idea is the idea that if happiness is feeling good, that means I need to get rid of all the unpleasant feelings or the negative thoughts or the painful emotions. That's how I get to be happy. And both of those ideas will just make your life miserable, because if you are going to live a full human life, living your values, behaving like the person you want to be, doing what's important, then you're
going to feel the full range of human emotions. You're going to feel the pleasant emotions of love and joy, and you're going to feel the painful emotions of fear and sadness and anger and guilt and so forth. You don't get one without the other. So I if you asked me to define happiness, I would define it as living a rich, full and meaningful life in which you feel the full range of emotions, both the pleasant and painful ones. But that's not what most people mean by happiness.
Yeah, I think there's a no summary I mean of a lot of the themes we talked about today. You know, I've known about you for quite some time. I'm glad we find a guid a chance to talk. Quite a few colleagues of mine in the field of positive psychology have told me they think your book, The Happiness Trap is the best book written on happiness. Oh wow, So I'm glad, you know. I multiple people have told me that. Wow.
Your name has been in my consciousness for for a good number of years now, so it was nice to kind of get a refresh on you and to read these notes and uh, or these these cards, I should say, to read these cards and and to talk to you. So thank you so much for being on my podcast.
Oh, thank you, thank you so well.
You just made my day with that feedback.
That's lovely, to be sure, thank thank you, and it's a lovely if it's lovely to uh. I've really enjoyed the interview. It's been great. And if you next time you see Sharon Teller, I'm a huge fan and I will Okay, thank you