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

Good news, I'm going back on tour with a brand new live show in Australia, New Zealand and Bali. If you are interested in learning how to overcome imposter syndrome, reach your goals while not missing your entire life, my perspective on where true confidence comes from, everything I've ever discovered about discipline, plus brand new insight that I've never spoken about on the podcast, then join me on stage as I explore all of these topics with you and you can get involved during an extensive Q&A where we work through the biggest questions that you have. Right now, Perth and Brisbane are completely sold out, but there are still tickets available for Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Christchurch, Auckland and Bali and you can get yours right now by going to the link in the description below or heading to Chris Williamson.live. What do you wish more people knew about how anxiety works and what causes it from your perspective? Gosh. Well, anxiety used to be my specialism, although now I focus a bit more on anger these days, but they're two of my favourite emotions. The main thing I think that people should know about anxiety is we tend to think of emotions in a very simplistic way in our society. We have very simplistic language for emotions and most people buy into something that psychologists sometimes call the hydraulic model of emotion, which is the idea that emotions are just like a blob of energy that sort of wells up inside you, and you can sort of try and push them down or you can sort of vent them or whatever. And that's wrong. It isn't how emotions work, basically, it's massively overly simplistic unfortunately. That's what we sometimes call the folk psychology or kind of default psychology. So we get off to a bad start by not having the faintest idea of how our emotions work in the first place. So the main thing I would say is I think about an emotion like anxiety, more like a recipe for baking a cake, like it's got milk and sugar and eggs and raisins and whatever else you want to put in. So the thoughts, actions, feelings, mental images, memories, all these things kind of get mixed together, and that bakes the cake of whatever type of anxiety that you've got. And the main thing people should know about treating anxiety or hammer this home because it really is one of the main things. I like to call this the most robustly established technique in the entire field of psychotherapy research. How would you like to hear about that, right? And that's no exaggeration. So there's a thing that we use in CBT that we've known about for like well over half a century and maybe it's cracking on like 70 years or more now that it's been used in therapy called exposure therapy, right? And it's probably the most reliable type of therapy that we have, basically, it's used for four years and all our types of anxieties. So the Chris, what would happen if you take someone that's got a cat phobia, animal phobia is generally considered to be pretty much the simplest type of anxiety, it's pretty straight forward. There's other types of anxiety. It comes in labels like social anxiety, panic attacks, PTSD, stuff like that, right? But it will start off with a nice easy snake phobia or cat phobia. So you get someone with a cat phobia, right, and you sling them in a room with a bunch of cats. What's going to happen to their heart rate for a star? It's going to go up a lot. It's going to go up. It's probably going to almost double crests like as if you're sprinting or something like that, and it'll do that in less than five seconds. And that's a pretty robust measure of anxiety, generally speaking, certainly for phobias that is right. So that's easy. We start off with an easy question to kind of lure you in, buddy. Now we're going to ask you a slightly trickier question, what happens next? Does it stay there? Forever. Well, until the cats are removed. Till the cats are removed. Your focus up must come down, right? So we could wait as long as we like. Like, is he just going to stay there forever? Like, it's probably going to start to come down eventually, right? And it will return probably to almost starting level if we wait long enough, right? And nothing catastrophic happens. Actually, the first thing that will happen is this cat phobia is going to want to get out of the room desperately, right? But the cat, because we'll lock the door so tough, try it, but there'll be an urge. This is why people often don't overcome their fears, right? Because there'll be a powerful drive to avoidance, obviously. So interestingly, what's one of the main things that would encourage somebody to stay in the room, even though they desperately want to run out of the door, would be the presence of another person encouraging them to do that. Now that might be somebody that's getting paid money for doing it, like a therapist or whatever, you know, good for them. But back in the day, when you were just little Chris, it might have been your mum or dad, basically, that was encouraging you to do things that were maybe making you feel unnecessarily anxious that fast. They were saying, Chris, it's going to be okay. You don't need to be skilled. It'll be fine. You know, you'll get used to, you know, playing a sport or playing a big dog or whatever is a bit nervous about initially. So the presence of another person can be a game changer and getting people to stay there for longer. So the heart rate's probably going to come down, right? How long do you think that might take? Two hours? Maybe. If it's a really severe phobia, it could take two hours, it might take, usually I'd be less than an hour. In some cases, it might even just be like 10, 15, 20 minutes if it's going to milder phobia, right? So let's assume that's what happens, you know, because generally we'll find maybe at least 90% of time, right? Unless there's some kind of complicating factor. So what happens if you manage to get hold of this woman and you bring her back and you do the same thing the next day? Heart rate doesn't spike as high and doesn't stay high for as long. What? You're again? Better than this. You're back and you're well and fast, right? So our heart rate will go down and then day three, you bring her in, it won't go up as high again, it'll come down faster. Like I like to call it like a stegosaurus, it's tail, you know, like it kind of the smallest spikes and then it kind of fades over time. There's a very low relapsor rate for animal phobias, unless there's some kind, unless you get attacked by a cat or something like that, it traumatises you again, but generally speaking, if you overcome an animal phobia, 90% of the time it will stay gone, right? Basic kind of Pavlovian conditioning, essentially. So one of the main things, one of the foundational gold standard things in anxiety is that this process happens. It goes by various names, it's sometimes just called emotional habituation, like it's very well established. If you think about it, animals would need to experience that for adaptation to occur. Like if you, do you remember back in the day when we were all like little furry animals, like we lived out in the African plains or whatever, right? So you're going to the place that you usually get your nuts and berries or whatever, my tree falls down or something and it freaks you out, like you run away and you go back again the next day, but you're kind of anxious because you don't want to get squashed by a tree, but nothing happens, right? So then you go back the next day, like and maybe your anxiety is going down a bit and then you go back next day and you still not get squashed by trees, your anxiety goes down and eventually get nuts and berries again, right? So the point being that anxiety we would hold would wear off naturally, like through repeated prolonged exposure to the triggers, if nothing bad actually happens, otherwise you'd just be trapped. By anxiety, it wouldn't be very flexible or very adaptive. And so all forms of anxiety pretty much respond to exposure with some things that's trickier. My favourite example would be social anxiety, that was my specialism years ago as a clinician at a clinic in Harley Street in London and a mainly treated social anxiety for a long time. People with social anxiety don't have a phobia for other people's faces, right? It's not exactly the same as an animal phobia, but it's similar, like they have more what you can describe as fear of negative evaluation to what psychologists call it. So if I have social anxiety, I'm worrying about what you might think of me and how I come across to you and what you guys might say about me afterwards and things like that. So it's more cognitive, like it's kind of hypothetical. So exposure therapy is a little bit trickier in that case, right? Because I'd need to kind of expose myself to maybe embarrassing situations or expose myself to the idea that people are thinking critically of me. So exposure therapy for animal phobia has like a 90% success rate within about three hours now and it's done optimally. With social anxiety, it takes a bit longer, but it's success rates on average about 75% as a bit lower, but still pretty high. How's that for a crash course in things? That's why I want people to know about anxiety. Those are some other things, do you know what I mean? Unbelievable. A couple of things, first off, when you were talking about somebody in the room with you helping one of the first places that my mind went to was soldiers in battle, medieval battle being next to each other. That's where you're mind went. Well look, I'm used to speaking to you about fucking ancient history and swords and gladiators and stuff. Forgive me for my Pavlovian condition when speaking to you. So that was the first thing that I thought of. The habituation thing, I then thought, well, what if every time that you went back to this place, a bad thing happened, every time that the owner comes home, the dog is mistreated, every time that you have a conversation with your partner, you're disappointed or made to feel sad or you're abused or neglected or whatever, the habituation works in both directions, so it can presumably work to reinforce anxiety as well as to tune it down. Yeah, yeah, for sure. That will maintain your anxiety. If something really bad is happening, then you might be justified in experiencing anxiety and being motivated to escape a dangerous situation. The other good question would be, what happens if the anxiety is not really justified but it doesn't go away, what might explain that? The funny thing is, we now know one of the main things it explains is what psychologists tend to call experiential avoidance, which is people doing things to try and avoid feeling the anxiety. So try to distract myself from it. Social anxiety is a good example. So again, once again, social anxiety on my kind of avoidive contact is looking at the audience, makes my anxiety spike, so I might avoid eye contact, I might over prepare before a meeting because I've convinced that if I really prepare perfectly, then that will reduce my anxiety when I actually go into the thing. I might be concentrating on my breathing to try and control my anxiety or to distract myself from it. You know, there's various, often itself help type techniques that people might be using to try and avoid contact for distract themselves from the anxiety, control it. We now know that those actually interfere with natural emotional processing, like the prevent habitation happening. So you're sitting there thinking, I'm going to avoid eye contact, they're just going to stare at my notes here. You'll never really get used to the anxiety, write that out and allow it to extinguish then. You know, you kind of have to face your fears in order for your brain to process the feeling. The thing, even things like breathing techniques, sometimes they work, but sometimes they can actually backfire and maintain the problem. Why? It's an issue. Because you need to allow yourself to experience anxiety for your brain to kind of process it, like basically. Also if you're trying to get rid of anxiety too much, you create what we now know as a second order process. If it wasn't bad enough, Chris, that we've got problem, we have second order problems and third order problems, right? So social anxiety is a classic example of a second order problem funnily enough. It's really serving me well here because it's been a conveniently example of three times in a row here, right? But I'll throw in another one to the next in a minute. So with social anxiety, not only are you anxious a bit talking to people, you're anxious that they might see that you're anxious because you're like, oh man, I hope people don't see I'm sweating and my hands are shaking and all that. I hope they don't notice me blushing out here and my stammering because then they're thinking I'm a big old foany and I shouldn't be here like, you know, I'm looking to think of an idiot or something like that, right? So now I see anxiety itself is dangerous because people may judge me even more harshly. If I didn't give a monkey's, right, well the people see my hands shaking or hear me stammering, then I would, I'd probably remove most of my social anxiety to be honest, right? So second or other anxiety, anxiety about anxiety maintains it during exposure, it can prevent it from habituating naturally. And when you're trying to get rid of or distract yourself from anxiety, often that reinforces the underlying attitude that anxiety itself is a problem, it's dangerous, I'm now framing it as a threat and that can prevent me from overcoming it. Another different example would be panic attacks. Just like a different flavor, you get raspberry and vanilla and black flavorings, right? Panic attacks are escalated very rapidly and they feel like they're spiraling out of control. They come in a number of varieties, but people sometimes, for example, might fear that they're having a heart attack or a stroke and they're going to drop dead. So you see them a lot in the accident and emergency, like people go in and they think they're under a heart attack or something, an adult or something, just anxious, but they're having a panic attack, right? But they feel their heart racing and some people will interpret that as a sign that they're going to drop dead. And of course that's scary. So now you become anxious about the symptoms of anxiety, that doesn't sound too good, right? So it's going to spiral really fast, your anxiety is feeding off itself, basically, and then you're going to, you're going to freak out. So what do you do? You have to learn to tolerate the feelings, accept them, view them as harmless, get used to them, like, which in some ways is harder than it sounds, in some ways it's easier than it sounds. A big problem is the way we talk about and think about anxiety. Again, a big problem is the fact that we see it as kind of a homogenous blob, rather in kind of seeing it as made of different ingredients. So if you think, what is anxiety, imagine Chris, you've got a big label and you've written the word anxiety on it and you've slapped it on your anxiety, right? And now imagine that you're peeling back the label and you're going to look underneath it and go, what is this thing they call anxiety if I look underneath it? You know, actually that's one of the best pieces of advice I can give a lot of people. Just literally imagine you're peeling back the label and think, what is it we're talking about here in real terms? My heart beating faster, maybe my hands shaking, like, maybe kind of trembling, maybe some thoughts flashing through my mind about bad things happening. My heart goes faster when I jog, and it doesn't freak me out. If I drink a lot of coffee, my heart beats faster, well that's not scary, like, if I'm really happy and you for it, like, my heart might beat faster, that's not terrifying. So why should I frame it, it's scary or dangerous in this context, right? So we interpret, free banal, use, physical sensations and a threatening way sometimes, and we can get beyond that by questioning the way that we're framing it. The learning to normalise the feelings, view them from different perspectives, it helps us to take away the catastrophic expectations and to become more accepting of them. That allows us to have a chance to process the feelings more naturally. And interesting to think about how intervening with the thing that's happening and pushing it away, I'm going to do breath work, I'm going to meditate myself away from this thing, I'm going to not look at the person, I'm going to expose myself to the situation, but not the specific part of the situation, which is what I'm concerned about, going to over prepare so that I try and reduce down my error rate moving forward. That seems to me at least from a little bit of the research I did this year, like a big element of acceptance and commitment therapy, and I'm interested in the sort of, whether there is something from ACT, which is missing from CBT or how you come to think about that when it's relating to anxiety. Well, now we're getting pretty meldy, right? So I like that, let's go for, ACT is a state of the art form of behaviour therapy, basically. But it didn't come out of nowhere, Chris, like it didn't spring fully armed and armoured from the womb, but the goddess Athena, right? It kind of evolved out of stuff that was already happening, naturally stand on CBT, R&T Bex, cognitive therapy, the earlier form of cognitive therapy, anxiety already, I think by the 1980s or whatever, was incorporating some of these kind of acceptance techniques and stuff like that, so were other therapies. So, like you could see is the kind of culmination of things that were already happening in the evolving field of psychotherapy, psychotherapy, clinical psychology, don't stand still. You know, those research studies coming out every day and things are naturally progressing, but the general public often don't really hear about that. They kind of, things kind of sort of fell down maybe decades later, but I think another way of picking that would be most CBT practitioners now have progressively moved towards a broadly similar set of views about, you know, they maybe put slightly different emphasis on things. I think it's part of a cluster of different therapies that are usually lumped together under the CBT umbrella and we call them the third wave in CBT, so the first wave is early behavior therapy. The second wave is your classic back and Ellis kind of cognitive behavioral therapies, most people think of it, and then the third wave is sometimes called the mindfulness and acceptance. Stuff and act would be one of the leading forms of that, although there's a bunch of other variations of it. So, I mean, a lot of research, as in clinicians, were kind of arriving at similar conclusions, maybe putting a slightly different spin on it, but thinking it looks like maybe acceptance is a thing from different perspectives. We know, for example, that people who strongly agree with the statement anxiety is bad and questioning us, that statement alone correlates with poor or mental health outcomes and longer terms. Well, that's pretty revealing, right? But Chris, you'll notice a paradox here, like people that come to therapy generally do think anxiety is bad, you know, in a way that's almost what they assume the whole thing is about, and self-help, traditionally encouraged it. In some ways, act is, in a sense, with shaking things up, because certainly there's been a tendency, at least superficially for people to assume most therapy in self-help is about getting rid of these feelings and figuring out ways to suppress them. I thought you were also maybe going to say, Donald, what you're saying, you're kind of saying that you're slagging off self-help and stuff, maybe some of it backfiles, but there are problems with self-help. I'll point to the real, I'll start off by pointing out the obvious one, Chris, right? When I was a wee boy, that was a long time ago, you know, do you remember when everything was made up wood? That was when I was a wee boy, right? And I'd go in the book shops, this is before the ends on that, right? We just said, there was nothing that's gone except sheep's and whiskey. I'd go in the book shops, and there'd be like one or two self-help books if you were lucky, right? Now you guys are drinking from a firehose of self-improvement, like 24/7. If you like, you can do courses, watch videos, listen to podcasts, people consume way more self-improvement and self-help stuff than they did in the past, at least when I was growing up, right? Do you think, well this is awesome, man, everybody must be improved significantly. And you know, the thing is, it wouldn't be too contentious to say they haven't improved though, like society consumes all the self-improvement and self-help stuff, but rates of depression, anxiety, mental health problems in general are escalating every year. Like, there's no evidence that people are on the whole, like culturally, are being improved by self-help and self-improvement content. And I think there are probably multiple reasons for that, right? But one of them is that some of the techniques that people learn are actually just maladapt of, although I think that, you know, that a more annoying point is that you could take almost any good piece of advice and turn that into bad advice, you know? So there are techniques and strategies that potentially can work, but sometimes they need like a little bit of nuance, and that kind of gets lost a little bit in the messaging, and so people will kind of take away maybe what could be an effect of technique that they misapply at, and then it ends up back firing for them if they're not careful. This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. You want to look and feel good when you're in the gym, Gymshark makes the best men's and girls gymwear on the planet. Let's face it, the more that you like your gym kit, the more likely you are to train. Their hybrid training shorts for men are the best men's shorts on the planet. Their crest hoodie and the light gray mile is what I fly in every single time I want to play in. The Geo seamless t-shirt is a staple in the gym for me. Basically everything they make is unbelievably well-fitted, high quality, it's cheap. You get 30 days of free returns, global shipping, and a 10 cent discount site wide. If you go to the link in the description below or head to gym.sh/modernwisdom, use the code modernwisdom10, a checkout that's gym.sh/modernwisdom, and modernwisdom10. A checkout. It also could be that the modern world is anxiety-inducing and that self-help is an artificial solution to an artificial problem, that how bad could it be without all of the breath work and the other strategies? I mean, I was kind of, you know you've got me thinking about medieval nights again and I was like, was there what old anyhow, less anxiety and just saying, I think it'd be pretty, do you not think it'd be scary to live before there was a police force? Like, you got to the edge of your village and you like the brigands might come and slap my throat. You want to see what is going to see my grandad, you know, well, we're often told that we're often to get pirates as well. Unless you're just move away from the coast, right, it's the same argument that's made about climate change, move away from the coast. Absolutely, I wondered then why the chronic anxiety, chronic stress thing seems to be banded about much more in the modern world and there's an assumption that at some point in the past being a caveman and not having reliable, reliable heat to make it through the winter, presumably we couldn't have been chronically stressed because we would have just been so maladaptive, it would have been selected against. I think there's a tricky question, it is a very good question, you know, a lot of people are thinking intuitively feel that there's something a bit wrong with modern society in this regard. I feel it's lazy to blame the internet, but I can't help but feel that social media is contributing to some of our psychological problems. I think there's some evidence to substantiate that, although there's still a lot of debate about how to interpret it. We do live in a society where I think people increasingly think about things without necessarily learning how to cope with them, right, so I'm in the past, you know, people encountered threats and risks at more of a visceral kind of practical level, whereas we watch it on the news, now read about it on social media, and I think this kind of abstract, kind of verbal processing is harder for us to deal with in some ways. We talked a bit of flavours of anxiety earlier, right, phobic anxiety, like we tend naturally to reduce over time as long as you actually face, if it's a simple type, comes from a simpler age, a simpler world when we get phobia, and then you deal with your anxiety, right? So another type of anxiety I didn't mention yet is worrying, right? And by worrying, we're usually referring much more to a cognitive process. Dogs don't worry, as far as I know, but they might get phobias, right? Worrying is like a conversation that you're having with yourself, and stereotypically, it sounds like this, "What if this happens, what if that happens? How am I going to deal with it?" And it goes round and round, like that, about hypothetical things, catastrophes, basically. Worrying is a trickier problem when we have a worse accessory and treating it, unfortunately, it's a paradoxical thing, because people can spend many hours a day worrying about stuff. And you'd think again, then they would figure out solutions, or they'd adapt to the stuff that they're worrying about. But what worrying seems to do is maintain anxiety, kind of moderate level chronically, if you're not careful. And I think social media and the news cycle and stuff like that probably fuels worrying. What are the bad strategies for dealing with anxiety? If those are some of the good ones, what are some of the bad ones? Bad strategies for dealing with anxiety, this is a boring answer in a way, but the number one most popular coping strategy in the world is avoidance, right? For generally speaking, avoidance is a problem, because it prevents habituation from happening. It prevents you demonstrating to yourself a discovering that nothing catastrophic happens, claiming it's an irrational or an unfounded fear, so you carry about certain false assumptions or unrealistic assumptions that never get disproved in practice. It prevents you from evaluating your coping ability and maybe refining and improving your coping skills, basically, which would be another key thing. So you face your fears enough time, you figure out ways of dealing with them. Basically, you don't get a chance to do that, you look at zero practice or time on task if you're avoiding stuff. And it increases sensitization to the cues over time. So anxiety really is the root of all evil from a kind of avoidance, sorry, is the root of all evil. I mean, you'll notice the paradox here is that most people assume anxiety is the problem and maybe avoidance is a way of coping with it, but it might be that anxiety in itself isn't actually that bad and that avoidance is the bigger problem, right? This avoidance damages your life and relationships, it prevents you from applying for jobs, it changes your behaviour and ways that have a wider impact than a longer term effect on your ability to flourish as a human being. You can do a lot of stuff while feeling anxious, anxiety isn't as bad as people think, right? Once you get used to it, you think, so what? My hands are sweating and stuff, my heart's beating a little bit faster, you can even re-frame it as excitement, it's just adrenaline rush, but it's not a big deal. So you'll see a lot of performers will just write out their anxiety, especially comedians, stand up comedians. If you go and see them live, I think I used to go and see a lot of shows in London and those guys often maybe weren't as well experienced, just in function rooms, above bars and things like that. Well, probably majority of them look terrified, right, but they just kind of incorporated into their act a lot of times. So I think you can, first of all, we've got to deal with avoidance, right? Distraction techniques, suppression of the feeling, using drugs and alcohol to call, like impulsive behaviours like masturbation, but also worrying itself is kind of like a maladaptive coping strategy, worrying is kind of like field problem solving or it's kind of overlaps a bit with over preparation and stuff like that. There's a guy called Tombert, Borkavek, who's basically probably the leading researcher on worry, and he forwards the theory called conceptualising worry as a form of avoidance. He calls it the cognitive avoidance model of worry. So people, when they worry about stuff, they kind of trick themselves into thinking they're facing the problem. I've got, I've got to think about this problem, like to kind of, I've got a figure out a solution by the like, oh man, I'm up, I woke up at three in the morning, Chris, and I'm like just thinking about a mistake that I made in my taxis or something, I was up all night like worrying about what this happens, what's that happens, how am I going to cope with it, type of figure out a solution, and what worrying does is it causes you to kind of jump around in an abstract way, like, so it prevents you from really confronting your problems in a concrete way where your anxiety would spike and then you'd get through it, and it, so it kind of maintains anxiety at a moderate level. So it's actually more like a kind of weird, it's like avoidance in disguise, you think you're facing problems and try to solve them, but you're not really doing it, like, and so the anxiety never really extinguishes. Well, I'll back that up with a weird piece of research, right? I talked to you earlier a bit, the women with the cats, when most forms of anxiety, heart rate is a pretty robust measure. Researchers looking at people who experience severe pathological worrying, have dad generalized anxiety disorder, right, it's something called the worrying disorder. So with those people, you can ingest, you can get them to practice worrying about stuff in just worry episodes, and, you know, measure the heart rate, and gov and skin response, the respiration and stuff like that, the brain imaging and stuff. And what researchers found was these people will say, my level of anxiety is 100% I'm up to high goal, as we say in Scotland, like, that was freaking out, right? So my anxiety is really high, like, I'm having an anxiety attack or sometimes say, but the heart rate doesn't go up that much. And the other physiological signs of anxiety don't really appear, like, the women with the cat for beacuse, I'm pretty much guarantee you your heart rate is going to show up, right? Someone with a panic attack, I'm pretty much guarantee you the heart rate is going to go through the roof. There's somebody who's in a worry episode, the heart rate doesn't really go up that, and sometimes it even goes down slightly, which is pretty paradoxical, right? There's one symptom of anxiety that appears consistently in worry episodes, and that's muscular tension. So people are worrying tend to tense up their neck and shoulders, and they tend to forehead muscles, like other muscles around their body as well, for some weird reason, right? So they're kind of, that's fuels the idea that maybe they're not really engaging with their feels sufficiently, that actually process them emotionally. I tell you, what we tend to do, we're worrying, that works pretty well. In the 1980s, researchers introduced a protocol, most clinicians call it worry postponement. It was originally called the stimulus control method, right? And it sounds odd at first, it's the most effective treatments in the history of psychotherapy tend to be the simplest ones, in all honesty. Not like, you know, segment Freud with either this complex and interpretation of dreams and all that kind of stuff. The things that actually perform best in clinical trials are usually incredibly simple, you know, and we just kind of figure out this, like, exposure therapy, right? worry postponement, you could write the instructions almost in the back of a business card. They gave instructions to college students in the 80s, and this has been replicated many times. We now use this method, not only for a guide, or pathological worrying, but it's also used in even in treating clinical depression, and treating anger, like modified versions of it, because it's been such a robust technique. So the instructions are, you need to support when you're beginning to worry and catch it early, and then you say to yourself, I'm not in the right frame of mind to think about this right now. I'll come back to it later, at a planned worry time that I've said, I'd like seven o'clock this evening when I like to do my worry, right? So I'll really write down about people worrying about taxes, worrying about what I'm worrying a bit running out of things to see it crash, right? I'll write that down about people, stick it in my pocket, back to that later, right? And then at seven o'clock, wherever you're prescribed worry timers, you sit down. If it's still a real problem, you sit down in problems over, like, think about it. If it doesn't seem like it's a real thing, then you just kind of forget about it. And that's more or less all there is to the simplest version of the protocol. That raises the frequency, intensity, and duration of worry episodes by roughly 50% within two or three weeks, right? And you think, what the hell is going on there? Right? It doesn't seem like they're really doing all that much. But the trick is that worrying feels like you're fixing a problem, but you need to understand that your brain goes into different states of functioning. It's like being drunk versus being sober or being drowsy versus being fully awake. So when anxiety is triggered, by a flight response is triggered or whatever, you think, I'm going to, I need to solve this problem urgently, but you're not in the ideal problem solving state of mind because anxiety biases your thinking, it causes you to exaggerate the severity and probability of risks, causes you to underestimate your coping ability. You revert back to more simplistic black and white thinking because you've basically flipped a switch and turned on the emergency mode, your amygdala is kind of like, started to hijack your thinking. So you're now thinking in low bandwidth, rapid terms, in extreme terms, your brain isn't in the right mode of functioning to engage in problem solving, especially for like complex interpersonal problems and things like that. So that's partly why you'll go around in circles, right? But if you say, I'll come back to this later, seven o'clock tonight, I'm going to sit down, I'll put on my favourite worry music, like I'll slip into my comfy worry slippers and put on my little worrying hat that I like to wear, and I'll sit and have a good old think about my worries, right? But when you're doing that now, you're using your neocortex, your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that's actually designed for problem solving and looking at the bigger picture and thinking rationally, to now, because you're choosing when you're going to do that, the trick is you're using your brain in a different mode of functioning, basically, and you're probably going to think things through in a more balanced, nuanced way, and that's why it tends to work better. Some people think it seems weird to postpone thinking about problems, but if you were drunk Chris, you just had a bottle of whiskey, right? You wouldn't sit there and think, well, this is a good time to get in my motorbike or operate heavy machinery or whatever you think, I should probably just wait until it's over, but and you may think it's not a good time to phone up my sister that I haven't spoken to for years and have a debate with her about, like, family, feud and things like that, you may think, I should wait until it's over, right? In the same way, we postpone thinking about things all the time, like, the best, it's simplest example would be the middle of the night, so people with pathological worrying almost always have insomnia as well, they can't get to sleep usually, like, because they lie in bed worrying about stuff, but it's normally what the normal people do, they think, oh man, maybe I've got something wrong in my tax returns or whatever, they'll think, yeah, but it's like two in the morning, I'll think about this tomorrow, like, so they kind of sit shelf it, they'll go come back to it later, there's some people find it, they can't do that, they don't have the cognitive skills to be able to postpone thinking about things, so they're worrying spirals out of control, because you're half asleep as well, it's not really an appropriate time, but if you are telling your kids a bedtime story and you suddenly thought, oh man, like, I still haven't figured out what questions I'm going to ask Donald, and if you, I'm doing tomorrow or whatever, you wouldn't think, hang on kids, like, let me just go away and worry about this for a bit, and then when I finish, I'll come back and finish up story, you would say to the thought, I'll put pen in, that's not come back to it later, there's some kind of busy right now, like, so it's actually completely natural to postpone responding to intrusive anxious thoughts until a more appropriate time, but a lot of people don't know that, they don't tell kids that at school, you know, and some people just get in the habit of allowing their anxious thoughts to hijack their thinking, right, so that simple skill alone can make a big difference, and it shows, you know, worrying in a way can be seen as a problem of avoidance, because we're thinking about things, we feel that we're solving a problem, but we're not in the right state of mind to do it, and we're doing it in such an abstract way, usually it's not really beneficial. In other news, this episode is brought to you by RP Strength. This training app has made a huge impact on my gains and enjoyment in the gym over the last two years now. It's designed by Dr Mike Israel and comes with over 45 pre-made training programs, 250 technique videos, takes all of the guesswork out of crafting the ideal lifting routine by literally spoon-feeding you a step-by-step plan for every workout. It guides you on the exact sets, reps, and weight to use, most importantly how to perfect your form, so every rep is optimized for maximum gains. It adjusts your weights each week based on your progress, and there's a 30-day money back guarantee, so you can buy it, train with it for 29 days, and if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Right now, you can get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below, by heading to rpstrength.com/modernwisdom, and using the code "modernwisdom" a checkout. That's rpstrength.com/modernwisdom, and modernwisdom, a checkout. You mentioned that some people who have anxiety struggle to be able to deploy that worry-time delay strategy. What if someone says, "Okay, I realize I'm worrying too much, I have intrusive thoughts, I'm ruminating, I don't get to choose when it happens, and when I say, I'll do this at 7 p.m. tomorrow, my brain goes, okay, and then just goes straight back to worrying about the intrusive thoughts over and over again." Well, they need to learn certain meta-cognitive skills, or whatever you like, cognitive skills, so that you can learn how to do that, right? They need a lot of that training, right? This is the other reason self-help has some limitations, because some of the techniques that you would learn from a therapist, I guess it would go like going to a fitness instructor or something. There's certain exercises that might benefit people, but they probably need to be taught how to do them properly, and they maybe need a better preparation, like before they get fully into doing them. So, they might, to do worry-porsponement effectively, you might need a better preparation, a better coaching, a little better training to actually get the most out of the techniques. So, sure answer. They need to probably develop a skill that we call cognitive diffusion. There's different names for it, right? Some of them are called cognitive distancing, or verbal diffusion. It's a big part of act, acceptance and commitment therapy that you mentioned earlier. There's like half a dozen or more like strategies for doing it that are commonly used in therapy. So, it's an important concept, so explain a little bit about it. Normally, when people have thoughts, they kind of look at the world through the lens of the thought. It's like you're looking through a telescope or something, right? You're not looking at the telescope. You look through the telescope, like at things way off in the distance. When you're catastrophizing a bit, the future, you're kind of looking through catastrophic binoculars or a catastrophic telescope, like, "Oh man, what if that happens out to be awful?" And we're going to cope with it, right? So, diffusion would be taking a step back and looking at the telescope. It's observing your thoughts, kind of from one side almost, or sometimes you would say it's like observing your thoughts as a process or an activity that's taking place in the present moment in your mind rather than allowing your attention to be funneled or channeled through those thoughts. It's a lot of a weird concept at first, but in a way, it's a simple concept. You know, some of the things we know about psychology are like kind of simple ideas, but we don't always have good language to articulate them. And so, again, that's another reason people sometimes did a lot about coaching to get the knack of it. But diffusion is a simple thing. You could, the simplest way to do it would be just to say to yourself, "Right now I noticed that I'm worrying about paying my taxes." Right? And that forces you into metacognitive awareness or, like, this kind of detached perspective observing your own thoughts. And then it becomes easier to disengage from them, basically. Or you might say, "Another trick you can play is you could say, right now I notice that Donald is having the thought what if this happens, what if that happens." And that pushes me into a third person perspective by referring to myself in the third person, like using my name or using, like, third person pronouns or whatever. I can take myself into stepping to one side and becoming an observer of my thoughts. And then I might say, "Right now I notice Donald's worrying about his taxes. I need to think about that right now. I'll set it aside and back to it later when I can give it my full attention." So, again, there's a subtle point here. That's someone would easily turn that into an avoidance technique. But the point is to emphasise that you're going to come back to it later and give it your full attention. So, sometimes there's a knack to turning what seems like avoidance and into its opposite, into a form of acceptance. I want you to think about this properly. So, I'm going to come back to it later when I can give it my full attention. So, that way, you're not sending the message to your brain that you're scaled of these thoughts or that they're dangerous at a problem. They're saying, "No, I want to look at them. I'm going to look at them actually more fully in a more committed way." And that tends to create a sense of confidence and it takes the edge of the anxiety as well. What's the CBT process for someone who says, "I know it's irrational, but I still feel it." It's gone below the neck now. It's in the body and I'm feeling it here. Look, anxiety. I've just got this kind of vissarole feeling of anxiety. Well, the CBT practitioners will maybe say different things about that, depending what flavour of cognitive therapy or behavioural therapy they're into. Some people would say, "Okay, well let's just teach you relaxation techniques then to lower nervous at rousal." If that's what you need, someone who's more behaviourally inclined would do that maybe or coping skills. Someone like Beck and traditional cognitive therapy might say, "Maybe that you've got automatic thoughts that you're just not fully conscious of." So, you need to just pay closer attention and catch those very rapid, pre-conscious thoughts when the flashing through your mind. Someone like Albert Ellis who's more philosophically inclined would say, "Well, your beliefs might not be fully conscious, right? Most of our beliefs aren't. They may be implicit in your behaviour and in your feelings. Like, for example, Chris, how many beliefs do you have of body? Millions. Millions. Wolves. Do many probably, right? Yeah. So, you don't go around repeating them all in your head all over the time, right? You've probably got loads of beliefs that you haven't even really formulated in words. They're just kind of implicit in your personality and your behaviour and stuff. And that's what Ellis is more focused on. He'd say, "You've got these underlying beliefs and attitudes that we could target." So, maybe it kind of feels as if you're demanding that you have to get things right otherwise it would be a catastrophe. But I mean that you necessarily say that to yourself. But that might be how you're acting and feeling. And so, those beliefs could be disputed even though they're maybe not things that are taking the form of conscious sentences that you're repeating to yourself, right? Or you can just, you know, like I said, some people might just teach you tension-released relaxation techniques. I feel inclined to say something about that as well. Like, you know, just to kind of highlight, there's another example of an area. The guy that developed the main relaxation techniques that I used in CBT was a professor of Physiological Edmund Jacobson back in the 1920s. One of the pioneers of biofeedback. And Jacobson studied muscle relaxation in minute detail. And what he discovered was a paradox. He found that most people can relax to a kind of medium level. But then when they try to relax deeper, they actually tense up. And he said, you know, come at him, right? He said they're committing what he called the effort error. So they're like, I'm trying really hard to relax. God damn it. Yeah. Like, and then ancient, yeah, philosophy. We're trying not to try. We're there. Yeah. You have to register effort somehow. And so Jacobson thought, well, how can you carry on relaxing, but without trying to relax? And so his technique, he figured out a way around that, which is that you tense your muscles and you studied the feelings of tension for like, very seconds or whatever. And then you you'll let go of the tension. So you focus on tensing up first. And then the feeling of letting go of that. And by doing that progressively, you should be able to let go more deeply each time. But why is bodily relaxation? Why is relaxing of the muscles so important? It tends to lure sympathetic nervous system arousal. And so it could be, it's one way of potentially dumping down the kind of physiological side of anxiety. But again, you know, sometimes that can backfire because people might use relaxation as a way to get rid of the anxiety. That's another way to actually keep an avoidance strategy, right? But you can, I believe there's something to be about this. This is where we get in and they kind of narrowed the whole therapy. Therapist isn't disagreeing with things or putting different spins on them. Arguably, you can kind of just modify it a little bit. And you could say, well, what if the goal is to let go of the muscular tension and kind of relax into acceptance of the other symptoms of anxiety? So my heart's speaking really fast. What if I kind of let go or well, if I just think of myself as not tensing up and response to that and kind of letting go and relaxing into the feeling of my heart beating fast and the other involuntary sensations of anxiety, right? But if I think I'm trying to relax away the feelings of anxiety I might backfire. If I measure myself as relaxing into them, then it could actually be turned into a form of emotional acceptance technique. Arguably. Obviously, there's a lot of, I guess, up until maybe about 10 years ago, if we were having a conversation about anxiety, a lot of it would have felt very top down. Now, I'm seeing increasing amounts of nervous system regulation, disautonomia, vagus nerve stimulation, bottom-up approaches to this. What's your perspective on how the blend, what the proportion is of bottom-up versus top-down for something like worry or anxiety? Still, I lean more towards the cognitive perspective. I mean, to be truthful in practice, like both approaches can work, right? But what we lack annoyingly is we've got loads of really good reception psychotherapy, but the one thing that's trickier is longer term follow-up, research like a year later, two years later. So there is an argument that certain types of cognitive change might be more lasting, like learning to regulate anxiety by relaxation techniques or acceptance techniques and things like that. Those skills can be powerful and those can change your beliefs because you could prove to yourself that you're capable of coping and enduring the feelings, for example, if you apply those skills in the right kind of way, they can change your thinking. But they can also be ways of dealing with a problem temporarily, and then when you maybe encounter a more stressful event in the future, like the overwhelms your coping strategies, you might potentially be back to square one, or you might, some people might, one problem with coping skills is that people just stop using them after a while, right? So that's one of the things that we've found potentially. But sometimes people get lasting benefits, you know, from managing how they feel. So it varies a little bit, but cognitive and kind of behavioral changes overlap quite a lot and interact with each other. So it can be a little bit tricky to tease them apart, but I believe, say for example, your underlying attitude, Albert Ellis was the one that probably went most to the extreme and trying to aim for very general underlying cognitive change. Like, so Ellis would say to people, you know, not just that maybe you're exaggerating how bad particular situations are, or you're misinterpreting them, which is when we're doing cognitive work. But Ellis would say, are any situations really intrinsically awful? Like, are you making a kind of error by like projecting subjective values onto external situations? Are you causing that by imposing rigid demands, like that I almost must succeed and I must never make mistakes, for example, that are bound to make you feel anxious about your performance? But Ellis thought these kind of rules that people have, like shape the character and their feelings in a very general way needed some attention. And it may be like that that has more general benefits and more lasting benefits than the more kind of coping skills or emotional self-regulation kind of approach that you're talking about. It's not just how you feel, it's how you think. Why is that such an important sentence? Because emotions aren't just like a blob of energy, like they're they're cognitive, you know, they're intertwined with our thinking. And we have a lot of control over our thoughts and beliefs. We can change them like we, as soon as we realize that our anxiety often, like, is very closely intertwined with catastrophic thinking, for example, we open up a whole toolbox of cognitive therapy techniques that allow us to begin working on that. We can change our perspective, we can challenge our beliefs like we can write different scripts, we can gain variable defusion or cognitive distancing. We have a much better toolbox of techniques that we could potentially use then for a start. And also it might be that somebody, for example, manages their anxiety, but they could still have other problems like they might still be exhibiting avoidance. So you get guys like, I don't really feel any anxiety anymore because it drinks so much whiskey, like, I'm pretty much anxiety free. You go, but you know, you've got other problems now and also you're still kind of avoiding, like, I don't know, asking girls out on dates or whatever it is, you know, like, you've got kind of false courage. It's not, you know, it's not really benefiting you in other ways. So addressing the cognition can sometimes help us to get more deep and pervasive improvement, especially if we go for these real underlying attitudes, my certain tendencies are very, very common that we all exhibit. I'll give you an example. You know, you could work on anger management with people and teach them coping skills, like, spot when your anger's beginning to arise, catch it really early, nip it in the bud, take three deep breaths to kind of don't shift your nervous arose a little bit to put your prefrontal cortex back in control by yourself some time, so that you can think of a different way to respond. It's kind of coping skills approach, right? But you might still think, if somebody insults me, then that just means that there are a total jerk, right? If press says something I don't like, it means he's an asshole, right? So I might have a tendency to attend and seek cognitively in anger to reduce people's personality to a single negative trait. Is that similar to the fundamental attribution error? Yeah, I guess it's, you know, maybe it's related in some ways. It feels like a ridiculous error. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of a, I guess it's related to attributional style in a sense. It's also related to philosophers have written about it. Many different authors have approached it from different perspectives, so you could describe it as a form of objectification of the other person as well. We don't really perceive them anymore as a living, breathing human being if somebody's just an asshole, right? Just an idea, just a jerk. They're not really a fully formed human being in our eyes anymore. So the kind of distorts the nature of our relationship. And you might, some people, especially angry, people will tend to think that that's fine. He has a total jerk, right? And I think the best way to respond to that is, it's one of the reasons that when people get angry, the problem-solving ability tends to be impaired. So if you can't empathize with people who are put yourself in their shoes, you can't really anticipate their actions or understand their motivations. So it makes it pretty hard to actually deal with them effectively on negotiate with them or problem-solve. You're going to basically be stuck with pretty crude and simplistic solutions, like punching the guy in the face or something like that, you know? So that reductionist way of looking at people individually, also you could argue, affect society as a whole, you know? We maybe think of whole other nations and groups of people in a reductionist way sometimes. So social psychologists and other researchers have talked about this kind of objectifying tendency as being the basis of a more serious problem, which is called dehumanization. Throughout history, you know, people have had moral codes, you know, most societies agree that it's wrong to steal from people or to kill them with one exception, which is if they don't count as fully-fledged human beings, then it's fine. So in the ancient world, those were barbarians. So the Greek were barbarally? Do you know what it means originally? Rodent non-human vermin? No, it's onomatopoeic, Chris, right? It means people that go "bar-bar-bar" sheep? No, it just literally means people that talk nonsense. It means people that sound like they're going "bar-bar-bar" or "bar-bar-bar-bar" sheep. Animals that go "bar-bar-bar-bar-bar-bar-bar" are sheep. Correct. But the Greek thought that's what barbarians sounded like. Because it means people that don't speak Greek. Do we not see this with the Nazis? They used the sort of disgust language towards Jews, that they were "roads" and they were vermin, yeah. So they don't count. Moral consideration doesn't extend to them because we've dehumanized them, they're less than human. And that means anything goes. Morality, we may have a very sophisticated morality that we can set in debate until the cows come home, but it doesn't apply to those guys because they're not humans. Also slaves generally throughout history were treated as less than humans, so the rules don't really apply to them. And in some cases, maybe children or women in some societies aren't extended moral consideration in the same way, but there's sometimes criminals, they don't count, they don't have any rights or whatever, they're not really human or you know. So you could trace that back arguably to certain features of anger. So you could say well we can teach coping skills to manage anger, but are we then really addressing the tendency to treat individual traits that people have is defining their entire character negatively. It's a very reductionist way of viewing other people, it tends to lead to a lot of problems. If you think that's a problem dealing with other people, we get angry with ourselves a lot as well. We get angry with other people, but you can get angry with inanimate objects, like you're laptop not working, you get angry with yourself as well. People love getting angry with themselves, right? And they do the same thing. So they've got such an idea, I'm completely useless, and they're self-wide jelly, self-castigate using these, what's they called as sometimes called global negative ratings of value or global negative labels, right? I'm just useless, I'm an idea, crap, I'm incompetent. I like to refer to that as the world's worst self-improvement technique, it's incredibly popular, everybody does it to some extent. But if you had a classroom full of little kids, and I don't know, they were studying for a math exam, and all the kids kind of got one of the questions wrong, you wouldn't go back the next day and say, listen kids, I had to look at your answers to that exam, and basically the problem is that you're all just a bunch of complete ideas, essentially. That's where you went wrong here, so go away and have a think about that. You may, but you probably will be a very good teacher, constructive feedback, tends to encourage people for having made an effort, it tends to reinforce the bits that they did right, and then it tends to be pretty specific about what you did wrong, and not doing the direction of finding a better solution. There's not rocket science, right? But saying you're all just a bunch of idiots, it's kind of like trying to climb on glass, then you can go, what am I supposed to do? So the solution to that would be get a personality transplant, or something like that, what am I supposed to do about that? It's paralyzing, if you turn it's highly demotivating, generally speaking. So we don't usually do that, it's not a technique, I say to my clients, this isn't a known self-improvement technique, there aren't books that you can buy, and the self-flagulation method of self-help. It's not something that I do in coaching, unless you would like me to start, I guess we could give it a go, do how do you think it would work out? But it's something that people do to themselves, when they're angry with themselves, and it tends to backfire in a number of different ways, but it's essentially making the same error as when we objectify, dehumanise all the people in anger, and so again, the corpink skulls wouldn't necessarily fix that, they might snap you over, but it would be potentially more useful if you address that at a cognitive level, to make sure you can unblock any tendency towards that thinking error. This episode is brought to you by Woop. I have been wearing Woop for over five years now, way before they were a partner on the show, I've actually tracked over 1600 days of my life with it, according to the app, which is insane, and it's the only wearable I've ever stuck with because it tracks everything that matters, sleep, workouts, recovery, breathing, heart rate, even your steps, and the new 5.0 is the best version. You get all the benefits, the make-whip indispensable, 7 cents smaller, but now it's also got a 14-day battery life, and has health span to track your habits, how they affect your pace of aging, it's got hormonal insights for ladies, I'm a huge, huge fan of Woop, that's why it's the only wearable I've ever stuck with, and best of all, you can join for free, pay nothing for the brand new Woop 5.0 strap, plus you get your first month for free, and there's a 30-day money back guarantee, so you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you do not like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now, you can get the brand new Woop 5.0 and that 30-day trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.woop.com/modernwisdom, that's join.woop.com/modernwisdom. What are the differences between beliefs and feelings? Are they an important distinction between those two? It's hard to define what's meant by feelings, you know. Also, some of these concepts are really debated to this day by a lot of contemporary psychologists, and also partly because in English, we use some of these words quite vaguely. And interchangeably. And we can use them interchangeably. I would say that generally speaking, by feelings we might mean physical sensations, or you might be talking about emotions, for example, particularly if we're talking about emotions. Generally speaking, I would say there's probably quite a pronounced cognitive element, there'll be a lot of beliefs tied up in them. And throughout history, people have defied emotions cognitively. The Stoics, they sat down and wrote almost like kind of dictionary definitions. They say anger's the desire for revenge. VR is the belief that something bad is about to happen, and that you should flee from it. And so they just do interject there. I can see the desire for doing that because when you think about what a feeling is in your body, you have some sort of an emotion. It is this global foggy slippery, ephemeral fucking morphing and mutating thing. And I use this bit in my live show where I actually don't anymore, but I use to, where I was talking about why you could understand why the ancients would think that mortals were the gods play things. Because rage doesn't just feel like some neurochemical imbalance inside of my brain and body. It feels like I've been possessed, imbued with this strange parasite demon thing that's taken over me or the deep depression, you know, it's sort of, it's weight, the gravity is heavy, it's more than a sensation. And I think that the desire to try and bring into the easily communicated, transferable. Oh, when you say that, do you mean the same thing as me? Me and you have never had to have a debate really over whether that football is a ball. We know when you say ball, that's what I mean when you say, but yeah, of course, because you can touch it, feel it and assess it. But because it's so internal and so challenging to show objectively to other people, you need a way of being able to exchange and communicate this. Yeah. And arguably that's how we figure out how to use the words is by having some kind of definition that our society agrees on. You sound like an effective neuroscientist. So sometimes they'll say, you know, the kind of raw effect that emotions are built out of. The some psychologists will say, it's like colour works, like red and blue, right? How do I know that what I mean by red is the same as what you mean by red? Maybe what I mean by sadness is different from what you mean by sadness, except that we can associate it with certain kind of stereotypical patterns of behaviour and things that people say. You know, even then there might be some exceptions. So somebody might be really sad and fake a smile. Right? So it can be like tricky, but we do, we do have these kind of rough templates that we apply in order to apply it in order to know how to use the concept. But it is, to this day, psychologists still argue about this quite a lot. I want to make it, you reminded me of a distinction that I think is important though that I wanted to to emphasise. And it's something, I'll talk a little bit about the stories, because I think the stories got a lot of things, right? Did you know, what do you think is the first of our book on psychotherapy? On psychotherapy. You're going to tell, you're going to tell me it's fucking epic thesis or someone else. Yeah, it's fucking epic thesis. You try to catch me. It goes back even further than that. There's a, I know. This is cool. This is saying I'm nerdy and cool, right? There's a lost book by Crisipus, the third head of the Stoic School, called The Lost Therapeuticon, like the Necronomicalon or something. Okay. And it was probably the NSN's, the first of our book on psychotherapy. So epic thesis, NSN, I can those guys, I'd probably read it. It was very well known back in the day. And we know a bit about it. Yes, there are fragments of it, preserved another author, like Gaelin, Marcus Aurelase's physician, goes on about it and quotes quite a lot from it. So the, the Stoics got a lot of things, right? And one of the things that the Stoics said, I said earlier, our big problem is like we start off at this advantage because we think of emotions in this kind of vague way, right? It's just like a blob of energy or whatever. And for a start of emotions are generally speaking much more cognitive than that implies. And there's probably a mixture of phases to them and different ingredients and stuff. The more knowledge is power, the more we understand about emotions, the more we can kind of control them. Do something with them. But another really important distinction would be to say, maybe there are kind of involuntary aspects to emotion. We all agree about that. But there maybe there are more voluntary aspects as well, or bits that could potentially be brought under voluntary control. I was kind of implying that a bit earlier when I even when I was talking about relaxation, you know, in anxiety. So the muscular tension part of from the physical side of anxiety is semi-voluntary. Like so it's a kind of bracing response, like you tense those muscles, you're not doing it on purpose. But you can actually let go of some of that tension if not all of it. Like so you have some voluntary control over it. If you're like breathing rapidly, to some extent you could potentially slow down your breathing, right? But you don't have complete control over it. You can't directly control your heart rate and some of the other things that are going on. So there's bits of what's happening that you have very little control over. There's bits that are easily under voluntary control. And then there's other bits that are maybe in this kind of grey zone somewhere in the middle that's kind of like semi under your control. Basically that's where it gets a little bit fuzzy. So except in strategies, you're going to have to use for the stuff that you can't control. Right? If I'm anxious and my heart's beating fast, I don't really have much choice but just to accept the feeling and right out really, you know, distraction techniques and suppression techniques stuff that don't really work that well. So probably I'm going to have to accept it. If I have an automatic thought, oh my god, what if I get a hit by bus tomorrow and die? I can't unthink it. Like it's too late. I've already had the thought. So to some extent I just need to accept the presence of that thought and can I detach from it and just not elaborate on it. But like we all say about worrying, worrying is a good example because often people what people tend to do is they try to take too much control and struggle against the bits of an emotion that are automatic. So that's like banging your head against a wall. But they neglect to take responsibility for the aspects that are under voluntary control. So choosing to stay in the room with a cat is largely under your voluntary control. It's behavior therapists sometimes say, it's the thing you do with your arms and legs. Right? You can literally move one foot in front of the other. Right? So it's basically that's voluntary. You can control that. Right? Even though it might feel like you can. But basically those are voluntary movements. The worry of postponement is largely voluntary. You can choose not to continue having a conversation. The automatic thought might keep coming back, of course. But then each time it does, you can just go, meh, I'll come back to this later. You don't have to have a conversation about it. You mentioned that the stuff that can be written on the back of a business card tend to be the most effective strategies. I have to assume that that's because even if there was something more effective, compliance and the ease of the patient to be able to recall what it is that they're supposed to do has got to be probably the single biggest determinant. But if you don't, it doesn't matter how great the technique is if you don't do it, basically. That could be it. That's a problem in some areas of psych therapy because there are techniques that work well in clinical trials. And there's sometimes clients like doing them. And then there's other techniques that people hate doing. And that's a very high dropout rate. What is some of the examples of techniques that are very successful, but people fucking hate? Exposure and response prevention for OCD. Obsessive, compulsive disorder. It's like one of the most effective techniques. For someone who's got bacteria, phobia, which is like a form of OCD, you'd get them to kind of put their hand in toilet water and things like that or, you know, like let the bottom of the show or whatever. They can expose themselves to things that they think have got back to you. If they do that repeatedly, like eventually they'll habituate to it. They'll prove to themselves that nothing catastrophic happens. And it sort of has very high success rate. But it's so eversive that that approach like in real world settings often has a very high dropout rate. So we're like, oh man, we know that if you did this, you would get over your anxiety, but it's really hard to kind of drag people kicking and screaming things into it. Presumably that would be a place for something like a retreat or an intensive, you know, if you said, hey, your OCD's stopping your life come and live at this retreat for four weeks and we will slowly coach you through it because we know that your compliance on your own would be. Yeah, it would be a great way to spend the summer. Yeah, the OCD hotel, like, something went up. Yeah, that'd be fun. Yeah, there are, I definitely think there are advantages. I mean, sometimes I thought the main way that we could improve traditional psychotherapy would be just not doing it in a consulting room for an hour, way on a weekly basis would be quite like, but I think breaking out of the consulting room in some ways, you know, rather than just coming up with loads of different variations of things that we can do in a consulting room, like we'd potentially open up a lot of opportunities. And researchers and clinicians do do that to some extent. They do group stuff. They take clients out and kind of excess behavioral exercises out of the. I used to take clients who had social anxiety into Starbucks or whatever and like I'd spill my coffee or whatever or like I'd get them to practice going up to people on the street and asking them what year it was and, you know, these are kind of typical shame attacking or like behavioral experiments that we get people to do. But you have to go at the consulting room to do that, which is sometimes a lot of it tricky to organize. I went into so many shops in Oxford Street and told them with clients that had IDS. One of their problems is they have almost a phobia, often of a bit not always of losing control of their bills, whatever I'm needing to use a bathroom, not being able to do that. So I used to go round and go into shops and with the client and say, "Listen, I'm really embarrassed. I've kind of had an accident that myself. Like, is there any chance I could possibly use your washroom, the clients, but let there's no way I'm doing that." But then I'd say, "Well, that's like a red rag to a bill when it comes to exposure thing, because then we should probably do that. Like if you could do it though." And they didn't bother you at all. Like, what difference would that make? And they'd say, "Well, yeah, I can't really have problem anymore. Like, deal with a lot of my problem." I figured that out. Earlier, I said with social anxiety, it can be tricky to get people to expose themselves to the fear of negative evaluation, because it's more conceptual, hypothetical. Like, people might criticize me, but I figured out a way to do that. There's a bunch of ways you can do it. But my favorite way of doing it was that I'd go into like a coffee shop or a restaurant or whatever, and I'd walk into the middle of the room and I'd say, "Excuse me, everyone, excuse me." I was in here earlier, and I think I met a left in my book behind that I was reading, and I just wondered if anybody's found that lying around. It's called, "How to overcome social anxiety, blushing and shyness." Like, has anybody seen a copy of overcoming social anxiety, blushing and shyness lying around? And my social anxiety clients would say, "There's not a cat at hell's chance that you're going to get me to do that." And I said, "Well, I'll do it first." Right? And you can come and watch me, and then when we get bored doing that, it can be your turn and you can start doing it. And once you're done, it leaves in just three or four times. Usually, it gets the novelty wears off and I don't really care anymore. But when people prove to themselves that they can do that, like an experience that kind of self-consciousness, but not really be freaked out by it, it's often very liberating. You know what Ellis used to do? He gets people to go to the shops and buy a banana and a bit of string. And you can look at those videos of people doing it on YouTube, right? And they tie a bit of string around the banana and they walk around the shopping mall, like it was a dog. It's what you call a shame-attacking exercise. So people who are very shy or self-conscious, but there's no way I'm going to do that. But by doing it and forcing themselves to get over themselves, that can often have the earth-shattering effect on liberating people. You know, when we look at some of the solutions from history, the witch's brew of I of Newton, tale of frog and such, string and piece of banana, it doesn't sound actually all that much more insane. So who knew? Many of these techniques existed in the ancient world. So I was going to say the Stoics have this much more. They start right out the gate with a more philosophical, sophisticated understanding of emotion. First of all, they're like emotions are cognitive. Then they're like, but there are these, there's a proto-emotion, they call it the propa-thea. So there's the initial physiological reaction and initial automatic impression that precedes full-blown emotion. So you can say there's anger and proto-angre. So the Stoics say, well, proto-angre is neither good nor bad. You just need to kind of tolerate it basically, but not get sucked into it and allow it to escalate. So for example, one of the big debates about anger is good or bad. Could it ever be healthy and stuff like that? For the Stoics, they help to solve that problem by saying the automatic part of anger at the beginning is like, neither good nor bad, really. What matters is the use that you make of it, how you interpret it. But then the passion where you buy into the distorted thinking and start to believe it is kind of inherently problematic because it's not very, like Seneca said, it's temporary madness. You're now handing over your thinking to a bunch of assumptions that are flawed right out of the gate, basically, so that that's problematic. But the Stoics had these techniques, like the cynics who were the Stoics kind of cousins, the stoicism and cynicism were sort of overlapping traditions. The cynics used to tie a bit of string around the neck of a bottle and walk around the caramacus where all the prostitutes were in Athens. They had a bunch of, they called them shamelessness exercises. Hang on, hang on, hang on, tie a piece of string around the neck of a bottle and then walk, making it, making noise behind them. Yeah, well, I guess it's walking a dog way, you know, around prostitutes, a bottle dog around prostitutes. Yeah, it was the graveyard in Athens. The prostitutes used to work in the graveyard, weirdly, but so it's both the graveyard and where the prostitutes were tying out. The end of life and the creation of it as well, before reliable contraception, have fantastic. Yeah, so these are some of the things that I think we can learn from ancient philosophy that we end up kind of reinventing. Graveyard prostitutes, piece of string bottle. That's, yeah, that's all you need to know basically. You know, I should give people, but like, let me give you some work instructions. No, these are great. These are better. I mean, look, people listen to lots of podcasts, including this one, and they don't always remember everything. I can promise you, they will remember a story about a piece of string in a bottle being dragged through a graveyard filled with prostitutes. Let me tell you the many ways in which the Stoics highlighted some of the things that are actually important, the benefit people who are trying to do it. Also, why self-help doesn't always work, right? So number one, the clients that I work with, one of the main things that I notice is you can think of therapy and behavior, psychology terms, is often about skills acquisition and skills application, right? So you learn how to do relaxation techniques, or repeat coping statements, or whatever, or you learn how to set up communication, and then you actually use it under stress and difficult challenging situations repeatedly, right? I think the balance has shifted over time and the clients that I see, and now because they're consuming this kind of firehose of self-help information, almost all my clients are male, right? So the guys that I see often have loads of skills that they've learned, they're all doing journaling, they all do mindfulness meditation, like they've all got their affirmations and whatnot, but there's often a massive deficit in terms of skills application, right? So the skills become compartmentalized, or as I like to say they can leave it on their yoga mat or whatever, you know, they'll leave it in the journal. So what benefit does it do someone if they practice journaling for 10 minutes every morning, and they're kind of working on their thoughts, but then they go out the door and they stop thinking about that and just revert back to negative thinking all day long for the rest of the day. I certainly know, I mean, I certainly know that I did that for a very long time, so yeah. So I hate to break it to you kids, but if you want to actually improve, I like these situations, there's so many situations in life where you could do this or you could do that, there's one or two situations where I think I know of no other solution, right? There's a few times in therapy where I think, and honestly I can only figure out really one, two things as well, there's one main thing really that you're going to have to do here, which is you would have to have some kind of ongoing mindfulness or self observation throughout most of the day, in order to be assured that you're going to be applying your skills consistently. Otherwise, you'll just compartmentalize them. So you'll be really good at doing your meditation and your journaling, and then potentially it just kind of goes out the window when you go to the office and start interacting with people, or you might not even notice that you're thinking negatively and practicing like avoidant ways of dealing with things, you know, unless you're observing what you're doing, maybe not all day long, but pretty consistently, right? The story's new that, they call it cross-okay, so they had this idea of watching yourself and paying attention to how your thoughts, feelings, and actions were interacting to avoid this problem of epically to says to his students, "You guys are like lions in the school and foxes in the streets," right? You've kind of, you're talking the big talk about stoicism, then as soon as you go out the door, it all goes out of the window. There's only one solution to that, which is that you'd have to practice continually and be constantly observing yourself, well the Buddhists do, they practice continual mindfulness throughout the day, the stoics had exactly the same idea, but the people that I work with today, like most of them they see self-improvement as something that's highly compartmentalized, and I think that's a form of avoidance in a way, and so they don't also practice facing their fears, or again, it's unlikely people will do that, unless a therapist or coach or a friend or a parent is encouraging you to do it unfortunately, right? And the stoics knew that as well, so they said, "Look, you have to go in and do your voluntary hardship and get out your comfort zone to some extent if you're at this self-improvement, but you should also use your imagination, use your noggin, and visualize anticipating in advance, they call us premeditatio malorum, so the premeditation of adversity or bad things." The stoics say "Every day, you should imagine death, exile, poverty, illness, all of the common problems that can before people, and practice responding to them with a philosophical attitude." The people are like, "Well, I don't really like everything bother doing that," right? But if you don't force yourself in your imagination to face potential catastrophes, then you'll meet them unprepared. Basically, you're practicing the skills, but you're not really, it's like you're doing your box of training, right? And the gym, but you're never getting into the ring, practice like sparring or fighting anybody, right? So you need to get into the ring, like at least in your imagination, like that's like sparring, and then out in the real world, actually pushing out your comfort zone a little bit, facing things. Otherwise, you get what I sometimes call the pen and paper problem, so people are kind of like on paper, good at doing self-improvement stuff, like using coping skills, meditation, and things like that, but it never really gets applied in practice. Trust really is everything when it comes to supplements. A lot of brands may say that they are top quality, but very few can actually prove it, which is why I partnered with Momentus. They make the highest quality supplements on the planet, and their way protein is literally the cleanest on the market. It's fast-absorbing isolate, sourced from grass-fed European cows, which means no hormones, no antibiotics, no GMOs, plus it's NSF certified, meaning that even Olympians can use it, and unlike most proteins, it's designed for gut health, no fillers, no junk, low in lactose, and it mixes amazingly. This is fantastic. Clean protein usually stays awful, and this is unbelievable. Best of all, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it completely risk-free, plus they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription, and that 30-day money-back guarantee, by going to the link in the description below, or heading to livemomentus.com/modernwistim using the code "modernwistim" or "checkout". That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S. ".com/modernwistim" or "modernwistim" or "checkout". It's an interesting challenge, because the compartmentalization, I certainly know for me, I relied on a morning routine for fucking ages, and that was nine gratitude meditation journals in a row, every like six months, worth nine of them, and like thousands of sessions of meditation, and breathwork, and reading, and note-taking, and yin yoga, and all of this stuff. But I was very much treating it like, because it's so detached from the situation that you use it in, like you think about something that you're grateful for, or that you're hopeful for, or that you're plans for the day, or whatever. But then when something to be grateful for, or to not be fearful for, or a plan for the day appears, you're not in the same location, mind space, regulation, signature. You're not feeling that, so taking it off the cushion, as it's known in meditation, is the skill, and that's the same as what we said before. If you can write it on the back of a business card, your compliance, and therefore your application are going to go up. You get state-specific learning, or it gets compartmentalized, much better way to go. So the most effective featment, for example, we'll talk to a little bit about anger, and that's, I said, that's kind of like my hobby at the moment. Is he still doing your book on anger? I'm doing it. I'm working on it. It's going to take forever, right? But I'm working on a book about anger. It's going to be like the greatest book ever written on anger, basically, because if anyone's going to do it, I back you to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to write a book about anger. It's my favourite thing. It's quite an exciting emotion. It's colourful. So there's a lot of interesting things, and we have this whole book by Seneca called On Anger, which is really good, like what the Stoic said about anger, and we can compare that to CBT. CBT for anger works pretty well. It's actually, he has something about your self-improvement audience, right? anger, the success rates in treating anger with CBT are about 70% mean success rate. It contains, like, measures a clinical, significant, clinically significant improvement. It's about 70% rate across the board. The largest meta-analyses, like these are studies that combine statistically lots of RCTs, like randomised controlled trials. It's a gold standard for doing clinical research. There are about 50 in the main ones. I think more recently, there are about like 70 individual studies that they pull data from, and from that they have, like, a mean success rate of roughly 70%. So interesting, but a trivia for you, right? CBT for anger has a higher success rate than CBT for depression, or PTSD, or a bunch of other common problems, right? People with PTSD and depression often have anger problems, right? So there's a law hanging through argument, which would be, you should treat the thing first that has the highest success rate attention. Ah, because it's going to make everything else after that become a little bit easier. It's a blockage that you've managed to get rid of more quickly. Yeah, you'll get some kind of knock on benefit, but also you become more skilled at using the techniques and your confidence grows and using the techniques that you're learning, right? So it tends to start a domino effect, right? So there's an argument, there's good reason to argue that in many cases it might be an idea with people that have anger and other problems to target the anger first. But another argument when you're prioritizing things clinically is you might go for low hanging through it. You might also go for dealing with something that's most urgent. Well, you know, anger potentially is an urgent problem because it can lead people to harming themselves, harming other people, destroying their relationships. Like, so you get potentially more bang for your butt in therapy terms by fixing that problem. Like, because the consequences of not fixing it might potentially be worse in many cases, not always. Like, but it's a serious contender. But I think we should probably do something about that first before your wife divorces you, right? Or you traumatise your kids or get yourself killed than a road rage incident or something like that. So you might say, well, hang on a minute. People, guys out there that are drinking from this fire hose of self-help, stuff online and self-improvement, maybe they should be targeting the anger. Well, I think of it in some ways as the sort of royal road to self-improvement. It's maybe one of the areas where there's the most room for improvement. It's the forgotten problem, the forgotten emotion, because for a star, on why would that be, right? You don't see that much self-improvement content about anger. Yeah, if you anger management books, but it's a drop in the ocean buddy, right? People generally ignore it because it's an externalising emotion. There's something about the very nature of anger that makes people say, if I'm angry press, I'm going to think, you need therapy, not me buddy, right? Because it's all your fault that I'm upset, obviously, right? Because you're a jerk. Well, you didn't send me a Christmas card. Now I'm pissed off, it's your fault. You should be in therapy, not me. So angry people tend not to self-refer, for treatment and they tend not to use self-help unless their anger reaches a critical point. And then often it's at the behest of someone else, like their wife says, you need to go and do something about your anger. What anger? Well, I anger, or in prison, or in schools, like in institutions, people get sent for anger management, or a court might mandate it, right? But angry people are often kind of kicking and screaming like they can be reluctant to have it. So they're like soap dodgers and therapy, the therapy soap dodgers, right? Generally speaking. But that means that it's like an untapped lady. It's the biggest opportunity. We have a high success rate and working with it. So it's like, low hanging fruit, but there's only doing anything about it. You have to identify that you have anger problems, though. Two examples come to mind here. So I did a big retreat. In fact, I keep telling this story because it blew my mind. It's probably going to be it's probably going to be the thing that I remember. One of the lessons that I remember most from this year. Do this big retreat. It's 12 hours a day, seven days of deep emotional work with a coach who I trust unbelievably deeply who's been on the show a ton called Joe Hudson. I think you'd love it. A very small group, completely sober. One of the days was anger. I'm looking at the other days. I'm looking at sadness. I'm looking at grief. I'm looking at some of the other emotions. I was looking at the anger day and thinking, no, like, you know, maybe there's whatever, whatever. I was the first person to like move from the initial part to the second part of anger and I was up before anybody. And I was like, maybe I'm more angry than I thought. Maybe I'm more, because I don't, I don't present as an angry person. But Joe then told this story, told this fucking wonderful story. And he said, my daughter was nine and she was crying in the bathtub. And she'd done it a couple of times this week. I went in and spoke to her and I said, why are you crying in the bathtub? Like she says, because I'm sad. She's like, you don't sound sad. You sound pissed off. And she went, I am said, okay, you know, when you're crying in the bathtub, how often are you sad and how often you pissed off? She says about half the time. She said, well, if you pissed off about half the time, how can you cry 100% at the time? She said, well, when I'm mad and when I'm pissed off, when I'm angry, my sister runs away. But when I'm sad, she comes and gives me a hug. And it just blew my mind, this sort of pro-social nature of sadness when you can convert anger into it and the anti-social nature of anger. I thought that was so fucking cool. Yeah. Yeah. It's sneaky. And it's often hidden. And anger often, as well, is a way of coping. Like, people use anger as a way of dealing with other feelings. Aaron Beck, the founder, a cognitive therapy, he wrote a book called "Presenters of Hate" is a really good book about anger. And he said that most of the clients that he asked to had anger problems. Initially, maybe it was like 50/50 whether they thought their anger was in response to something else. But Beck was really into getting people, as I mentioned earlier, to spot the automatic thoughts and record them very carefully. And he said that when he trained people to observe their feelings very closely, almost all of the clients with anger that he spoke to noticed there was a preceding emotion that came before it that they were using their anger to cope with. Sometimes anger can be tundered into other emotions, but very often it's another emotion like being heart. Like I said earlier, a priest didn't send me a Christmas card. And I'm really mad about it, but probably at first I was heart. In many cases, people are ashamed. Their heart, they're anxious. And then anger actually takes, so we think of emotions in this kind of homogenous way. But in many cases, anger and other feelings, but anger's one of the worst contenders for this is used as a sort of coping strategy. It's a way of dealing, and I'll tell you a weird thing about it is one of the ways that anger helps people to cope. When people are anxious, they often activate skin as a helplessness, right? So they momentarily they feel, "Can I know what the fuck am I going to do?" Like, helpless, anger makes you feel powerful. It's kind of an illusion in a way. It's like Dutch courage or whatever. You're just it's magical thinking you're ticking yourself into feeling more in control and more powerful than you are. Nothing has changed a bit of the situation, but you feel like so committed to taking action and fighting back that it gives you this kind of surge. And it conceals a compensates for its overcompensation in many cases for feelings of perilousness and helplessness. I'm going to take back and control this situation, but get really angry. And it also, one of the most dramatic things about it is it shunts all of your attention out. Well, so this is a very simple way of putting it, and you know, I'll be interested in what your audience thinks of this. In some ways, anger very simply functions like a distraction technique. If I get really angry, then I'm not really paying attention to how hard I'm anymore, because I'm just thinking about how I'm going to deal with you, what a jerk you are, and maybe I shouldn't. I don't need to reflect. Yeah, I don't need to. I'm not even feeling my pain anymore, because all of my attention has literally been diverted away from it, like externalized. So it's a big fact distraction technique in many cases. Yeah, I wonder, it seems like anger kind of goes in one of two directions. People get angry when they should be doing something else, and people feel something else when they should be feeling angry, like some people flee from anger and some people suck it in and use it to avoid feeling other stuff. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's often the case. So we have to look very closely at our feelings and try and understand what's going on with them. You know, they cover it. They're very often like covering up something else, very often the functioning in a defensive way. I really understand, you know, what's actually going on. I'll tell you, well, I was going to talk about like very simple techniques, and what I mentioned earlier, some of the most effective techniques, and maybe this is another reason that people don't get as much benefit from self-help, is they can't see the wood for the trees problem, right? And the most effective advice is often so banal and so simple, you know, it's strange. You kind of come back to simple things. You come back to the beginning, but recognize it for the first time. And you think, maybe it really does boil down to something as simple as just doing this. So one of the most effective strategies for anger is just catching it early, noticing the early warning signs of it, but an earlier stage than you would typically spot it, like, and then accepting the initial feelings, like, so say, feelings of being hurt by somebody diminishing you, or disregarding you, or not respecting you, or whatever, and accepting those feelings and sitting with them for about longer than normal. Still, you have time to process them, right? I don't know, in some cases, be like 30 seconds, you know? But there's nothing that's an incredibly minimal technique. Just pause and notice what the feeling is that's coming before anger, so you'll get like an urge to start blaming the other person or yelling at them, sit with that urge and with the feelings that surround it, but just look a bit longer than normal. And you might go, "My, my feelings are really hurt," because Chris doesn't send me a Christmas card, but then that might be long enough for me just naturally to think, "I didn't send him a Christmas card," or, you know, who gives a shit about Christmas cards, right? And for natural spontaneous cognitive reappraisal to happen, for instance, or for the feelings to peak and then naturally, you know, like, wane again, right? But if I launch immediately into anger, I never have an opportunity to process or reappraise those initial feelings. And it may only, it may only take a minute or less, you know, from me just to give myself a chance, you know, to really experience what it is that the anger's covering up and process it so that it's not as much of a problem anymore. Why did you give up on psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapy after solar? That was ages ago, we're going back, always now. Like, so I started off doing psycho, I did a master's degree in psychoanalytic theory, and this is like 25 years ago or something, and I practiced psychodynamic therapy for like a year. The reason I, there were multiple reasons why I, where I wonder, some of them, maybe I can't share in public. I got a bit disillusioned with my own personal training analysis, and with the approach that I was studying, and also some of the stuff that I was reading. The last book, the last journal article that I read, I can remember vividly. The last article I read was by a very, like, a well-known psychoanalytic theorist who wrote an article about a sublimated anal masturbation. He believed that golf is a form of sublimated anal masturbation, because he analysed, like, wooden client, or whatever, and this is what I had the mail from it, so it decided he was going to write, like, a paper, theorizing that, so whatever. Because you have to, he said, and I'm not kidding, his words not mine, he said, you have to repeatedly put your fingers in and out of dirty holes, like, when you're going around the golf course, taking the, like, the golf ball out of the hole after he's taken a shot. And I read that, and I thought, I think I'm done with this, like, I can't really take this seriously anymore. So, I mean, that's the more extreme end of psychoanalytic interpretation, right? Some of it is a lot more down to earth, like, definitely in recent, since the, probably since the 1950s and '60s onwards, and particularly more recently, there are forms of psychodynamic therapy that are much more down to earth. But even when I was training and that we read La Cohn, we read Klein, we still were reading Freud and stuff, and so a lot of the literature we're reading was kind of bonkers, really, and based on like zero evidence as well, Freud, do you know how much clinical research Freud did to develop his theories? Zero? Zero. Nothing. Like, he literally wrote the interpretation of dreams after his father died, and he saw and analyzed his own dreams. And that was how he basically came up with most of the stuff. So, it wasn't based on any client work at all, really. Well, it wasn't based on any clinical research whatsoever. Freud just pregnant dead against that. And yet, it produced volumes of stuff in this tradition that went on for ages. So, there were some personal reasons why I kind of got a bit disillusioned with it. I thought, this isn't really sitting comfortably with me. I'll tell you another little anecdote that I can share with you as well. Like, so, when I did my master's degree, some of the lecturers were really into Jacqueline, who's a philosophical, fringe, post-structuralist, psychoanalytic theorist, who's big in the 60s, the early 70s and stuff, right. And we read this book by a guy called Dylan Evans, who it was a dictionary of Lacanian thought, and this is the main reference book. And I and some of the other people, particularly people that were working in psychiatric nursing and therapy and stuff, we'd sit there every week in a little seminar room, and the guy who was teaching us would go on about Lacan or whatever, and we'd sit there scratching our heads, be like, we can't really, for this doesn't make any sense. It doesn't bear any resemblance to what actually happens with our clients and we can't really make headnotty all about what this guy's going on about. And I remember the guy teaching us said to us once, he got frustrated, and he said, you guys just don't get it, do you, right. And we were all thinking, I don't like, maybe there isn't anything to get, right. But okay, you seem to believe that this is, you know, it's not them for us new clothes, you know, or anything like that. Like, there's something to get here that we don't understand. So I thought, I give up on this, it's not really panning out for me, you know, cognitive behavioral approach, it feels a lot more years later, I was reading a newspaper and I saw a column by Dylan Evans, and he was talking about, I think you might have mentioned CBT, and he was talking about evolutionary psychology and stuff. So I emailed the guy, and I was like, hey, I thought you were in Lacan, and he said, I get this question asked away all the time, and he emailed me back a biographical essay that he'd read. And in it, he said, he trained as a Lacanian therapist, and he was practicing in the NHS, doing Lacanian analysis. And he said that none of his fights were getting any better. His own personal therapy after so many years, he figured out wasn't really doing him any good. He wrote this book to try and sort out in his own head, what Lacan was talking about. But by the end of writing it, he'd basically just convinced himself there was nothing there, and it didn't make any sense. And so he reached this kind of crisis point and he thought, like me in a way, he threw the towel in and the whole thing and gave it up, right? And I thought, I wish I'd known that. When we were sitting reading this book and studying at a university, and the lecturer was like, you guys just don't get it, right? Because the guy that wrote the textbook had become completely disillusioned with the whole thing, and thought it didn't make sense. And we were sitting there going, maybe we'll just defect to understand that stress, you know? That is usually the default assumption. Maybe I'm just too thick, I don't understand what this guy's going on about. Right, okay. So the fear of being too thick, and the concern of auto-erotic anal masturbation from golf, those were the two nails and stuff. I know, so I got, I started to learn a little bit CBT and it resonated more with me. I'll tell you another story, like, so when I was a kid, I was very angry, right? So I'm a little bit and somebody's like a recovering alcoholic in that regard. So I'll say another day, I thought about it, and I realized some of the people, people ask me occasionally, I'm podcasting, I'll say, who's your role model, you know, from the perspective of Stuart philosophy or the people that you particularly admire. And they want me to say Nelson Mandel or something like that, right? And I think, well, I've never met any of those guys, right? So I don't really know. But the people that impressed me most were guys that you weren't of her, and if I think about it, like, some of them were people that were recovering drug addicts or alcoholics that I've met, or in some cases, people that were really angry and had maybe gotten to trouble with the law, but then had turned their life around. And I started to think it may be, like, that some of the wisest people that I've met and the ones that I think exemplify the best character traits are actually people that were really angry previously. But overcame the ranger. And I thought, well, maybe also because that's the kind of journey that I went on, I started off being really angry. And then like an alcoholic, you know, I reached a point where I thought, this is, I need to do something about this. It's too much. It's kind of getting out of control and it's going on too long. And so then I thought, I have to dig really deep to get myself out of this hole. And in doing that, you know, I guess I changed my whole philosophy of life in some ways. Well, I think that was what got me into the Stoics and what got me into practicing CBT basically. Ultimately, the sort of philosophy that's right for you and the world view that's right for you ends up finding you, I think, given it given a long enough time horizon. And if you're sufficiently flexible to not hold on to shit that you're not supposed to still hold on to. So yeah, if you're doing something that at the time was the incumbent sort of the cool kid on the block, but it didn't speak to you, you find the one that you have the most belief in. And if you're going to try and, you know, transform the world and write nine books and you can speak to tens of thousands of people about coaching and courses and all that stuff, you're going to believe in the one that transformed your life way more than the one that you're super skeptical about. But, dude, Donald, I, you're so fantastic. Every time we get to speak, I love it. How long is it going to be superficial? We have a book on anger. Tell me. Come on. It'll probably be like another year or a year and a half or something. I'm going to take my time over it because I'm going to try and do a good job of it. But I want to talk about Stoics and how they kind of set the stage for it, how much we can learn from it. But also what CB, there's a lot of really good CBT, like a same with solid research, but we also know lots of from other branches of psychology about anger. Did you know social psychology? Do you know Americans? I think there might be a thing called American anger. I think different countries, different cultures experience anger differently. Do you know what Americans report, according to Gallup polls, getting angry about 25% more often than Canadians and breads? Okay. That wouldn't surprise me. And Americans get angry three times more often than the Japanese. Japanese don't get angry. That often they claim some sort of game or a culturally mediated anger. Angers being growing, like for sure, there's many different measures that show it's becoming a bigger and a bigger problem. So I think one of the reasons it was, because it appealed to me, it was the problem that I did. I especially had an anxiety, like I said, out there. And I thought, I want you to do something a bit different. I thought I thought I've always wanted to go back and look at anger because that was the problem that I dealt with when I was younger. And it's something that really resonates with the Stoics. But also, I'll look out my window and I can see, you know, the world does seem like an angry place in many ways since I was a kid. I think social media fuels it a little bit. There's a disinhibition that happens from the anonymity of being online that allows people to become more verbally aggressive towards each other and it causes more and more political division. And it causes a lot of social problems, I think. You know, do you remember people you say a lot of people in America would be going around saying, we think we're on the verge of a civil war or something like that. And they meant it really seriously. But for sure, you just need to go on Twitter and see how angry people seem to be about politics. Do you remember when people used to be able to have a conversation with somebody that they disagreed with? No, that's ancient history. That doesn't exist. I think that's a myth. Back in medieval time. That's a myth. Yeah, correct. That's correct. I have new in a conversation with someone that can disagree with without shouting. Donald Robertson, ladies and gentlemen, Donald, you're so great. Where should people go? To watch, read, listen, your things, where do you want to send them? Unsubstack. Like, I do everything on substack. No, they can just frame me on me. I've got lots of articles and things. Beautiful. Mate, until next time. I appreciate you. Awesome. Cheers, Chris.