Self-Help, Solved

If you're listening to this podcast right now, chances are you have listened to multiple self-improvement podcasts, and if you've listened to multiple self-improvement podcasts, you have probably been told like 28 different things to do to improve your life. In fact, there's so much different advice coming at you from every direction that sometimes it feels impossible to know what is actually credible, what actually works, and what doesn't. And so here at the Solve podcast, what we do is we over-research everything. I've been in this space for almost 20 years, drew my co-host and lead researcher here has been with me for over a decade, and in that time, we have dug deep into the science on so many different techniques, tactics, tropes, cliches, conventional wisdoms that we decided to actually sit down and rank them. We took 19 of the most conventional, cliché pieces of self-help advice, things that you've heard a million times in a million different places, and we decided to go into the science and find a way to rank them from worst to best. Which self-improvement techniques you may be asking, here is the full list in alphabetical order. We looked at affirmations, cold water therapy, crystal healing, eat that frog, which is, do the hardest thing first, energy healing, fake it till you make it, gratitude journals, intuitive decision-making, learning styles, meditation, microdosing psychedelics, morning routines, positive thinking, power posing, self-help books, in general, speed reading, venting emotions, visualizations, and of course, willpower. Now, in the process of putting this episode together, I definitely was surprised by a few of these. I don't know about you, Drew. There's a few shackers in there, yeah. Yeah, there were some things that showed up way higher on the list than I expected, and a few that were actually much worse than I expected, so it was a little bit illuminating. Obviously, there's a bunch of nuance and context for each of these things. Some of it is determined by how you actually define some of these practices or some of these pieces of advice. So, we will talk about all of the different specifics and angles and caveats, what not, when we get to the rankings themselves. But, I actually want to ask you a question. I aggregated all of the research that we had on all of these techniques. A lot of this is left over from previous episodes that we've done, a lot of this is new, a lot of this was compiled by the research team, and of course, a lot of this was scooped up by AI. How many studies do you think in total were at least looked at for this episode? I never looked, I guess it didn't see. I couldn't even. I don't know. A thousand. I don't know. 2,600. Oh my God. Really? 2,603. 2,603. Okay. Obviously, not every single one of those was red, but a lot of them were, and I would say at least the abstract was red of probably at least half of them. We did some quality vetting too, like really shitty studies, which didn't even bother with necessarily, but it was taken into consideration, sure. Which brings me to the question of how we actually went about ranking these. So, we looked at three different factors. One is just the quantity and quality of the research. How many studies have been done on this particular piece of advice, and how good was that research? Was it actually respectable? Was it done at a very credible institution? Was it a very large sample size? Was it done cross-culturally? Was it replicated? All that stuff? Controls, all that. Yeah. The second thing we looked at is what percentage of the studies came out in support of the practice? You know, say there are 100 studies that we found on it. 50 of them say it works, 50 say it doesn't. There are other ones that, out of 100 studies, 98 say that it works, and 2 say it doesn't. So, obviously, the one that had 98 that says it works is going to be ranked higher than the one that says 50. And then finally, we looked at a fixed size. So, a fixed size is essentially just how much does it work? Does it work a tiny bit, or does it work really, really well? Like, if you take 100 people and you have them gratitude journal every single morning for a month and then you have take another 100 people and they do nothing, not only do you look at whether the people who gratitude journal are happier, but how much happier are they? What is the degree of difference in the practice? And what we find is that there are some things that work very consistently, but only a tiny bit. And then there are other things that can work a lot, but they work very inconsistently. So, out of these 19 practices, we're going to go through them starting at the worst and working our way up to the first, and we have four categories that we're going to work through. So, at the top of the pyramid, we have stuff that legitimately works and is good advice and should probably be adopted by most of us. The second category we have is the maybe depends category, which is, this can work, but it kind of depends on your situation, who you are, the way you do it, why you're doing it, and so on. The third category is the probably nothing category. It's, you know, it's not hurting anybody, but it's probably not doing anything either. And then finally, the fourth category, which is our bullshit category, is it actually might be hurting you, and you should probably stop doing it. There's, like I said, there's some shockers in here, a few things that surprise me even too. We go way too deep. We over-research everything. We over-complicate everything, Drew, why do we do it? Why do we do this to ourselves? Why can't we just interview fucking Instagram influencers like everybody else? God, damn it, Drew. Because we're trying to solve actual problems. That's why. All right. So, here we go. We are going to start with the bullshit category. We're going to start with number 19. The worst of all of the practices that we examined is suppressing negative thoughts. Yes, suppressing negative thoughts and emotions. You could call this, if you want to be uncharitable. You could call this the hardcore version of positive thinking, which positive thinking often does get interpreted in this way is that people hear that, "Hey, I should think positive," and they immediately assume like, "Oh, if I have a negative thought or emotion, I should just push it away and pretend like it's not there." So take us through why is suppressing negative emotions, a bad thing, Drew? The biggest piece of evidence we have against suppressing thoughts and emotions is what they call the ironic process, which is, basically, if I tell you not to think about something, you're going to think more about it, right? So if you have some negative or traumatic event or something like that in your life and I tell you, "Okay, here's all these ways we can go about not thinking about this." Then when that thing pops up, you start thinking, "How do I not think about this?" And it just amplifies it in your mind, right? It just makes you focus on it more and it pushes out all the other good or neutral things that are going on in your world or in your life at that time. So people think that it reduces intrusive thoughts and images. Not really true. There's not a whole lot of evidence for that. Improves your mood, decreases anxiety, depression, again, not much in the way of that. For people who have, let's say, traumatic stress disorders, PTSD or something like that, in certain very limited structured situations where they need to avoid that triggering event or that thought, under very close careful supervision, that can maybe work sometimes. But it's not just for your average person walking around, like, "Oh, my girlfriend left me or I lost my job and I don't want to think about it." It's not helpful at all to go about just shoving that all down, right? Right. And this is, I feel like at this point in 2026, we kind of know this. This is a bit of our parents and grandparents generation of life, just like just bury it. Yeah. Just push it down here, have a drink, push it down further. I think our generation and Jinzie have grown up with the knowledge and understanding that, like, this is a bad long-term strategy. So there are a number of recent meta-analyses on this. And one of the ones that I found actually quite interesting is that it found that for some people, suppressing negative thoughts and emotions can be beneficial in the short term. So if you're in, like, a high pressure, high cognitive load situation, and it's just, like, I can't deal with this right now, it can be short term effective for that very moment. Like, get you through that one little moment. What they found though is that it made things worse over the long term. That rebound effect was even worse. Right. Right. So the rebound effect comes back harder. You are even more upset, more angry, more stressed out, more anxious in the long term. But the funny thing I found too, and I'm just going to translate this very crudely, the researchers found that the people who did this best, who actually, like, let's call it a successful suppression, the people who did it best or who benefited the most in the short term, were people who had high levels of working memory and high fluid intelligence. So it's basically, like, very smart people can do it, whereas if you're not a super smart person, it's probably just going to backfire super hard on you in the immediate term. But it was interesting because it's my stereotype of a very smart person is that they're actually very good at repressing their own emotions. Yeah, true. True. No, that's a good point. Yeah. But I think you're right though. It is kind of like a tracheotomy, right? You absolutely have to, if you can't breathe, sure, and you need to just get through some rough situation, I get that, but just no, that's going to probably bounce back harder. The interesting thing, and I'm going to foreshadow a little bit, is that because it is so popularly and widely known now that you're not supposed to suppress your negative emotions, a lot of people kind of assume the opposite must be true, which is you should express every negative emotion. And we're actually going to get to that in a minute. That did not score super well either. So there's probably a happy medium here that we're going to investigate. But that's number 19, suppressing negative thoughts and emotions, the effect size was relatively modest, but it was, it was negative. It is not helpful. It's a pretty consistent finding. You're not doing yourself any favors. Don't pretend like the shit doesn't stink. Don't pretend like there's nothing wrong if there's something wrong. - Turn and face the pain. (laughing) - Just take it on the nose. - There's something to be said about dealing with it, right? - Just deal with it and now don't just brush it aside. - Number 18, this one's gonna be spicy. I can already see a bunch of angry commenters coming at us. Microdosing psychedelics. - I'm bummed by this one. - I'm happy. (laughing) I live in California, I can't tell you how many fucking people walk around here, microdosing a bunch of crap, telling me that they're more creative. They're getting in touch with the universe and their spiritual, like bunch of bullshit. And sure enough, the research on this shows pretty consistently that not only is there not really any measurable benefit with any consistency, but there is a decline in cognitive functioning and executive reasoning. The only benefit that was found in the meta-analysis was improvement of mood. So it's like, dude, you're getting high. Like, this is what you're doing. You're getting high and you're telling yourself that it's a productivity hack or you're getting in touch with your creativity or whatever. And technically, that's not even a microdose. If you can feel something, it's technically supposed to be subperceptual. - Yes, right. - So, the complicating factor of this is that there are reams and reams and reams of anecdotal case studies. There are plenty of case studies of people who claim that they suffered from lifelong depression, that they had anxiety disorders, that they had all sorts of crippling conditions, that they struggled to get over and then microdosing changed their lives and saved them. There's also plenty of case studies of people who microdose for extended periods of time and fucked up their own mental health. So it is all over the map. There is no consistent benefit. It is, in my opinion, just getting high. And it's the 2020s version of smoking a little weed before you go into work in the morning to ease the stress. I knew people in college and some of my early jobs who that made them a little bit more effective. They were very high, strong, anxious, stressed out people. And it's like taking a little hit of weed helped smooth the rough edges before they went in for the day. If that's what you're doing, that's fine. It's just like don't kid yourself. You're not getting in touch with some deeper creativity. You're not accessing better decision-making. It's not happening. There's no evidence of it. It's mixed at best. And it is just non-existent at worst. Yeah, there are a lot of people too with ADHD. There's a randomized control trial that came out. There was no improvement over placebo effect. A lot of it is either probably a placebo effect. Again, if you're taking a subperceptual dose of anything, is it really doing anything anyway, other than a placebo? When they do really careful studies on these, they find nothing. Or a decline in cognitive function. Cognitive functions, yeah. It's just not reasoning, decision-making, yeah. The evidence isn't out there. I said I was bummed because I was, I was in the 2015, 2016 era when everything was ramping up with psychedelics. I was really excited. I was like, oh, here's kind of a safer way we can explore with these, and then nothing came over. All of the promising research is around the macrodosing. And it is, but the macrodosing is like, that's a lot. It's like, now you're entering. You can't not feel something like macrodosing, right? Yeah, and it's also like, you really need to be careful about how you approach a macrodose, which we did not evaluate in this ranking. But it's funny because I remember when a number of friends of mine started macrodosing, probably around the same time, 2016, 2017, and they kept telling me how it made a more productive, and they made them do this, and they're more creative at work, and all this stuff. And I remember I microdose once, and around that time. And it was like, it sucked, it sucked. I just felt like, I just felt giggly, and I couldn't really think straight. And I was like, I feel like this is bullshit. And I remember looking at some of the early research at the time, and it was basically turning up that there was nothing there. And it's nice to see that now that there are some meta-analyses that follow through on that. - So that placebo effect, though, that's gonna be important through all of this as well. Again, if you're one of those people who are already typing in the comments, like, well, it works for me, it was like, okay, compared to what? - Right, okay. If I gave you something, and I said it was psychedelics, you would probably still experience many of the same effects. - Yes. - Or nothing at all, so yeah. - Yeah, that's the tricky thing with self-help advice, personal development advice, is-- - Compared to what? - Right, they will put in placebo effects are powerful. - Yeah, they are. Like, if people believe that something works, it can really work for them. And you could argue that a lot of this industry is kind of just a fancy way of inducing placebo effects in people. My issue with the microdosing is that actually, that they have seen in like long-term microdoses that there are some adverse health. Physical health effects. - You're taking a lot of active compound, long-term, even at low doses, that can have detrimental effects. - Yes. And so that's why this is in the bullshit category, the stop doing a category rather than the, probably nothing category. - So if we haven't pissed off all of the California hippies yet, with that one, we're definitely gonna piss them off with this one. How many times drew have you heard that you should trust your intuition, trust your guts, that you should listen to your deep inner voice, that your inner wisdom knows best for you? How many times? - I hear that all the time. In some form or another, and sometimes it's dressed up in ways that kind of hide it, but yeah, you hear it a lot. - I don't know, I might push back a little bit on this one. - Okay. - We might argue a little bit on this one. - Let's butt heads on it. This one, there are caveats too. There are caveats too, which we will get into. Speaking generally, general life decision making. You've got a choice in your life. You can have dinner here or go there. You can call this person back or you can decide to be single. Any of these sorts of life decisions, following your gut, following your intuition, it does not make for a better choice. It often makes you feel better about your choice, which is a very different thing, which is a very different thing, but it doesn't make a better choice. And I think that's the distinction. I think most people who really subscribe to trusting their gut, listening to their intuition, listening to their inner wisdom, all that stuff, really what they're optimizing for is just feeling good about their choices, and minimizing doubt or regret or insecurity, which is fine, but you're not making better decisions. Your gut doesn't know better. Like all of the evidence suggests that your gut does not know better except, and I feel like this is what you're gonna bring up, in very specific cases of expertise. So if you are a domain expert, so if somebody has been a brain surgeon for 40 years and they are brought into a surgery room and they are shown a patient and they see something, their gut instinct is actually going to be accurate a lot of the time, right? And you see this consistently around people who have lots of experience, and that's because like Danny Kahneman talks about this and those famous book thinking fast and slow, system one, system two, like really what your gut reaction to things is, is it's pattern matching based on experience. So if you have tons and tons of experience in a certain area, you're probably gonna pattern match extremely well, but most of us are not experts at the vast majority of things we do. Therefore, I would be very, very careful relying on your gut or intuition, okay. What say you, sir? - Well, yeah, okay, definitely agree with that. If you're a surgeon, you're in the middle surgery, something goes wrong. - You don't have time to sit there and, you know, do a cosmet of these. - With pros and cons, yeah. - Trust your gut in that situation or fight or pilot or something like that, even a commercial pilot. It's something goes wrong. Trust your gut, sure. I get that. Actually, what you said at first makes a lot of sense when it's like you might feel better about the situation 'cause I was gonna bring up my own situation where I left academia and came to work for Mark Manson, right? And so that was, a lot of that was around kind of a gut like minimizing regret, which again, what you say is fine. I still think it was the right decision. That might be the key point. You actually might have like taken care of my skepticism with this sort of with that. Like if you might feel better about that decision, but I mean, there are certain situations of tours, just like there's not really a right or wrong outcome. It's just a values thing. - Yeah, or an emotions thing. - Like with a job, like a long-term fulfillment. Like if I knew in academia, there was this narrow path and there were a narrow set of outcomes. - Yeah. - And I was like, well, I'm gonna go take the more variable path and you're with more variable outcomes and see what happens. And it worked out and there's some survivorship bias there. I get that. - Totally. - But like a lot of that was a gut decision for me, yeah. - I will grant you that I think when it comes to primarily emotionally-laden decisions or value-based decisions, then your gut probably has actually better access to that than your mind or your slow thinking system. - Right. - And I do think there is something to that. Like trusting your intuition to know what's best for you or to know when you're gonna be happiest. But it's like if my agent comes to me tomorrow and she's like, look, we've got three different publishers offering you three different book deals with different terms. What do you wanna go with? I'm gonna be like, okay, obviously I'm gonna have a gut reaction. It's probably useful to acknowledge that and like recognize it. But it's also like you should sit and argue against it and think in other terms. I would also argue in situations of immediate potential immediate danger. Like if you come, if you meet somebody and you're like something that's just off, I'm going to trust my gut and not interact with them. I'm okay with that. Yeah. Like I'm okay with that. You might err on the side like of being a little. Right, you might have some false positives. Right, right. Yeah, that intuitive decision-making, I would say this is probably only harming you if it is chronic. And like I definitely know some. Okay, yeah. Some very, very woo-woo people who it's like everything. Everything is like, oh, I'm trusting my intuition. Right. Oh, the universe is telling me to do that. Actually, yeah, I have a friend who is that way. And telling me to eat three pieces of cake today and you know, sleep with the next person I see. No, it's funny. Actually, no, I have a friend who they got very much into kind of the Joe to spend the world, like trust the energy, like the universe is telling you and trust your, like you're tuned to the energy of the universe. And so you just trust your gut. My wife and I, we've basically watched them turn into the most self-serving, selfish, self-indulgent, completely detached from reality human. And it's like, it's fucking up a lot of their friendships. It's fucking up a lot of their relationships. It's a problem. It's a problem. And so I do think you have to be careful with your intuition because ultimately your intuition is self-serving. And that's fine in a lot of context, like making a career decision. That's a self-serving decision. So you need to like, it's important to listen to yourself. But if you're thinking about in terms of like what party to invite people to or like what to do with your Saturday night or who to call when like if somebody a friend's going through a hard time, like how to respond to that, like your guts probably, it's probably not going to be the best judge of all those things. When the situation warrants a measured response. Yes. Okay. All right. This was also Kahneman's point too, right? It's like ultimately system one and system two, you need both. Yeah. And they balance and counterbalance each other in various ways. So last of the bullshit section, I think this one, this one might surprise some people. It surprised me a little. Yeah. It's funny. I had researched this before. So it did not surprise me. But I think this is definitely another holdover of probably our parents' generation. So the conventional wisdom, especially back in the 70s and 80s, they actually used to have therapeutic methods in the 70s around this of like scream into a pillow and like write all of your angry feelings onto a piece of paper and then flush it down the toilet. Like we'll call it catharsis theory. Yeah. I've also seen it described as like the hydraulic pressure theory of emotion, right? It's like, oh, there's anger pent up and you need to let it out. Right. Otherwise, boil over. Yeah. Otherwise, you're going to explode and all this stuff. This is bullshit. Most evidence shows no effect, like screaming into a pillow or punching a wall or whatever. And what little effect size there is is actually on the negative side. So it shows that the more you scream into the pillow, the angrier you're going to be and the more angry you're going to be more often. And so it's this ventine practice or the catharsis effect actually backfires. And it just, and it which makes sense because you're kind of training yourself to indulge in an emotion, which might be I guess marginally beneficial if that if it's an emotion that you've like traditionally suppressed within yourself. But indulging an emotion is probably just going to lead to more like a greater tendency to indulge that emotion. Now, you still need to process the emotion, which is what the research finds is that actually finding better ways to actually calmly process, analyze it, be more introspective about it, be more self-aware around it. That's a much better way to deal with things like anger and frustration, any kind of angst that you have, rather than just like, yeah, acting it out. There was was one small study I did find though that it was violent criminal offenders, right, in a very controlled setting where they did some forms of catharsis with them. It seemed to help a little bit. But again, it was a highly controlled setting. And the times that do find either nothing or small positive effects that they do find, there's usually a lot of processing afterwards about the anger that they let out. So sometimes I think what it is is those people who are just so disconnected from their emotions to begin with, use that anger to maybe get them connected with it and then you really process it afterwards. But it's got to be highly, highly structured with somebody who really knows what they're doing. Most of the time though, in the kind of colloquial way, we use it. Yeah, it's harmful actually. What I just noticed too is everything in our bullshit category is it's basically unbridled. It's like letting your emotions loose without any check from the rational side of your brain. So whether it's just suppressing negative thoughts and deluding yourself in the positivity, microdosing psychedelics, which suppresses your executive function, intuitive decision-making, or catharsis venting, you're in each and every case, you're kind of letting your emotion, your feeling brain off the leash. Very indulgent. Yeah. Yeah. And it makes things worse. No, I think that captures that category very well actually. So moving on, that was number 16. We're moving up our ranking, up the charts. We're now moving into things that aren't harmful, but they're probably not helping either. This is our probably nothing category. Starting with number 15, this one was very upsetting, Drew, very upsetting, crystal healing. Okay. I had such high hopes. You know, you don't know this, but every podcast I sit with my crystals, yes, behind the table. And I rub them. Or did you get these? They're my crystals. They're my, they heal my podcast chakra. I really don't like how you're touching those. Sorry, sorry. All right, we're before we get canceled. Okay. So no, no effects of these. Yeah, nothing. And in very little research too, I kind of threw this in just for the lulls. But I mean, there are a lot of people who are really into the crystal thing. I mean, I know a certain somebody who's girlfriend is. It was so funny by him crystals recently. I was getting pictures like this one. You like this one right before we started recording. Yeah. What was the meme that you were talking about at lunch today? It's the single. Yeah, single guys. The single guy dilemma, which is what? Every single guy has a dilemma of making fun of like astrology and spirit crystals or getting laid. These are for decorations. That's what I'm looking at. Okay. Okay. They're decorative. Quote decorative. Okay. It's true, though. There really is no evidence. Do we, do we have anything to say about crystal healing and aligning our chakras to the vibrations of the crystal wisdom of the universe? They're rocks. They're expensive. They're very expensive. That was one thing I noticed. Make you send me pictures. The price tag on it. Maybe we should drop this into the bullshit category simply because if anything, it's just going to harm your bank account. This one show is the placebo effect like on steroids. Okay. If you believe that crystals will have some healing power over you, whether that's like some mild pain or anxiety or whatever, whatever problem in your life and you engage in some ceremony, then yeah, you're probably going to see a little bit of something. If you don't, it's not going to. That's just that is the placebo effect. That's a definition of the placebo. Yep. So there's a lot of ways you can go about doing that and spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars on rocks is probably not the best one. It's pretty harmless. Yeah. This next one, though, might, might actually not be harmless. Number 14, will power. In the literature, this is known as ego depletion. It's actually a very controversial concept within the psychological literature. A lot of psychologists strongly argue that it's just not even a thing. A lot of psychologists argue that it actually is very much a thing and it's very important. I guess the, how would we categorize this? It would probably be like the, would you call it like the will power as a muscle theory of effort, right? It's like this idea that will power is finite. It's something that you need to work and improve and practice and you can overexert yourself or some people just are born with a weak will and some people are born with a lot of willpower and like how would you characterize this? Yeah. I think that's, I mean, you know, the whole ego depletion theory is basically, you have a tank of willpower or whatever it is. If you work on something or you're focusing on something or you're spending a lot of time and energy on something, then your tank is drained over time and then afterwards you're not going to be able to apply any of that time and energy to anything else very effectively. You know, this, there was some early evidence for those kinds of things, even like the whole the lemonade study. Yeah. And if you remember that one, like, yeah, with the sugar, if you don't have enough, if you're blood glucose is low, you won't have enough willpower. So you should have a little bit of sugar before that turns out to be, you know, there's more careful studies done. Not true. Willpower though, it's treated like a resource. I mean, yes, you have energy levels and just metabolic energy levels on your brain or whatever it is, but like, the actual, is there a willpower center? No, probably not. The harmful thing is when you start to think that, oh, I only have so much, I have this little bit of willpower that I need to piecemeal out throughout my day or whatever it is. Otherwise, I'm just going to be exhausted in the middle of the day and I won't be able to do anything done. I think that's where they're more harmful. - What's interesting to me is that what you just said is probably super ineffective. If you really believe that you only have so much energy in the day and that you have to be very careful of how you expend it, yeah, you're probably really gonna underperform your potential. What's interesting though is that observationally, you see the opposite as well. Like you see, there's so much stuff out there that it's just like, dude, you gotta grind, you gotta hustle, you gotta push yourself, you gotta do all this. And we consistently see that that advice also doesn't work. So it's like the people who are telling you, hey, willpower is kind of this fragile thing that you need to manage, that's not showing up in the research. But just from my experience in this industry too, it's like all the people who are like, dude, you just gotta fuckin' grind, bro, you gotta push yourself. You gotta, like all the new year's resolutions, like none of that works. - Right. - None of it works. None of it is like, oh, I'm gonna lose 40 pounds and work 12 hours a day and run a marathon next month and start getting up at 4 a.m. Like, it doesn't work. No matter how hard you go, how hard you push yourself, it's just, to me, it just seems like such a faulty framing of how things get done, of like what motivation is, or like what effort is. - The better version of the advice out there that you sometimes hear if you hear it at all is, it, you know, set up the discipline systems. - Right. - So even when you don't feel like it, even when you have no will power, - Right. - It's quote unquote will power, you set yourself up where it's more likely that you're going to do what you need to do. - Yeah. - Whether you want to or not. - Right. - That's not will power though. That's just a form of discipline. - This harkens back to our procrastination episode last year, where really the big conclusion we arrived at in that episode is that really productivity problems are emotional problems, this guy's this productivity problems, it's either you are, it does, the work doesn't feel meaningful or it doesn't, it's not fun, it's not interesting, it's not connecting you to others, it's not fulfilling some deeper value or purpose. And I feel like this is kind of, like motivation and nut shell is kind of the same thing. - Yes. - Like will power as a concept is just, is the idea of trying the force yourself to do something you actually deep down don't want to do or don't see the value in doing, which by definition means it's self-defeating in a lot of ways, right? - Yeah, like you go to a job you hate all day, yeah, that's gonna take a lot of will power, quote unquote. And then, but then you get home and you're like, I don't know, you won't play video games, you're gonna go out with your friends or like all of a sudden you have all this energy and motivation to do things, it's not because you don't have any will power, like your will power hasn't been drained. - The iron motivation has been directed in the wrongs. - Yeah, the irony is that if you're living very aligned, you don't experience anything just will power. - Yes, yeah, right, it's just, you're just doing things. - Just doing it, yeah, you can just do things. - Yeah. - All right, that's number 14. Number 13, power posing. I remember when this was a thing for a hot minute, there was a big TED talk, I think in 2013. - Yeah, I never saw any of this stuff, so this was all new to me. - You know, it's funny, this was a big thing, it was funny seeing this blow up because this was a big thing in the pickup artist community of kind of 2000s, so the pickup artist, like a big part of the pickup artist scene, for people listening who don't even know what this is, first of all, I'm sorry. Second of all, what it was is a bunch of nerds in the mid 2000s got on line together and started scientifically studying what attracted women and calling themselves pickup artists. It went about as well as it sounds like it went, but one of the things that they got really into, I remember at the time, is they got really into body language research and they developed a lot of the old pickup artists were like, "No, put your shoulders back, stand up straight," because it's not just that it exudes confidence, it trains you to feel confident. - Right, right. - And so I remember when all the power posing stuff came out, Amy Cuddy, I think, was the big researcher behind it. She did a TED talk in 2013, it went super viral. She framed it much more in a professional setting, right? So it's like, if you've got to give a presentation at work and you're really unsure of yourself, it's like, put the shoulders back, stand up straight, create a power pose for yourself and then you'll suddenly feel confident. And there's all this kind of evolutionary backwards rationalization, explaining it, I think even Jordan Peterson has gotten into it. I remember in 12 rules for life, he talks about how shoulders back is like a status symbol and it trains your reptilian brain to see yourself as higher status and all this stuff. Anyway, I can keep going, basically nothing there. Long story short, there's nothing there. - There's some of the nuance here, okay? - You can have very short term, like little boosts in your mood or just energy, I guess, levels. Very short term, very transient. There were some early studies too that purported to find some hormonal changes like increases in testosterone, that sort of thing. That's been debunked since then, though, too. So you can maybe get a tiny little boost out of it in some situations, but it's very transient and it's not really clear if that even translates to anything tangible anyway. So, yeah. - Yeah, I wonder if it's just, again, speaking of placebo, right? Like, I wonder how much of it is just being aware of your posture in the moment, right? Like, I can sit here, I'm kind of slouched over over the mic right now, right? Like, let's say I'm sitting here and I'm like, you know what, I'm gonna scoot up. I'm gonna stand up straight, shoulders up. This is my power pose, Drew. You fucking ready for my power pose. Stop the crush, this fucking podcast. It gives you an end to create a narrative in your brain. You've activated some self-awareness there. - Yes, yeah. - And then there's like a little embedded mini narrative there of like, okay, I'm sitting up with my shoulders back. I'm gonna crush this podcast now, which then, you know, a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy of like, you tell yourself that narrative, it generates the emotion that you're thinking about. Whatever you think about is just gonna, it's just gonna multiply. Okay, power posing, number 13, kind of a nothing burger. This one was interesting. This was a bit of a surprise and it was funny 'cause this actually got roped in, you know, when I was doing the initial kind of sending the AI out to like go grab early research on a bunch of different topics, it just kind of lumped this topic in and I was like, wow, I never thought about that topic. I don't know about you, but I remember when I was a kid, there was a whole thing about like, are you a visual learner, an auditory learner, a kinesthetic learner? And, you know, if you're a visual learner, means that you need like diagrams and videos and pie charts to understand a topic, whereas if you're an auditory learner, like you need to like listen to a lecture and kinesthetic learners need to like touch and feel the thing and all this stuff. Anyway, not really a thing, not a whole lot there. I still hear that today, like you still hear about learning styles today, yeah. So, this one shocked me. Yeah, crazy thing. I saw when we were researching this, I saw that over 90% of teachers in the United States believe this is a thing and they're actually trained on it. Like, there's still training that goes on on VAK learning styles, on grade school teachers and there's actually like the research consistently shows that there's not really anything there. People who take this seriously have done more careful studies. They've kind of concluded what it is is more that you're giving the person a choice or agency in the matter, not necessarily their learning style. It's not that you're just sitting down and saying, this is how we're doing, you're giving them some choice in the matter, whatever that is. Which is, which they're probably gonna, whatever they choose, they're just gonna like more. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, it's more of a liking effect than anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, number, that was number 12, number 11 affirmations. As you know, I've been shooting on affirmations for, this has been paying my bills for a long time. That's right. A long time. That's right. Affirmations, I mean, kind of similar to power posing. There's a little bit, little, like for certain people in certain situations, what I found interesting is that the most evidence that they see of this is around people who are around like minorities underprivileged people, people who feel like, who have been like oppressed against or like discriminated against in some way. That, those people are some of the only people that you actually do see a legitimate effect size. The rest of the population, it seems to be a bit of a nothing right. I think you've said this before, though, too, just like if you're going from no self-worth whatsoever and completely just fixate it on a negative, a huge negativity bias, then going to some form of positive thinking, then yeah, that's gonna help, right? Like in some, in most situations, most people, though you're going to get a little no effect whatsoever. - I think that the thing that's interesting about the marginalized groups is that if you take people who have actually seen evidence of the world treating them worse, then I think it makes sense to tell yourself like, no, no, I am smart, I am able, I am lovable, I am, people do like me. Like I can see why that would have power, whereas if you're just like a random person living their life, it's what you see is that it actually affirmations often backfire for people, right? It's like secretly, it's like you know, they're like, oh, I have to sit here and like tell myself, I'm smart and like, well, it must be that I'm not very smart and likable. And so what you see is that affirmations are kind of, I consider them like a win-more strategy and there's actually, there's a few things in here that I would consider what I'll call win-more strategy. So like anybody who's played strategy games, Oftentimes what we're talking about. what will happen is that you'll find a strategy that seems on the surface like a really good strategy, but actually it only works if you're already winning. So it takes somebody who's winning and it just helps you win a little bit more. Whereas if you're not winning, it's actually not gonna help you win at all. Affirmations is totally the same way. So what the research finds is that people who already feel good about themselves, if they give themselves affirmations, yeah, they feel a little bit better, but they already feel good about themselves. So they don't really need it. Whereas the people who feel bad about themselves, when they use affirmations, it actually makes them feel worse. Because what happens is that they stand there in their bathroom and they're like, wow, I'm the kind of person who has to fucking look in the mirror and tell myself that I'm beautiful and that I'm smart and that I'm lucky. - You like that gap, right? - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, like what a loser I am. I can't believe I have to do this. - Yeah. - So it is, in a way, it's like polarizing the mental health outcome. - It really, what it does is it highlights whatever the underlying belief actually is. - Mm-hmm. - Or either positive or negative, right? - That's a good way to look at it. - If you're already there, if you are like that star athlete and you're on the free throw line one second left, and you tell yourself you've got this, you're the man. - Yeah. - Probably going to help you a little bit. - Right. - But yeah, if you have just been taken loss after loss in your life and you're down and out and you tell yourself, no, I'm an amazing, good looking, hardworking, rich, whatever, you know, that's just going to highlight how you're not all of those things. - Yes. - So yeah, yeah. And that's what they found in the research as well, is people with lower self-esteem actually don't benefit from this very well. - Yeah. It's a mixed bag. It's definitely a mixed bag. And even when it works, it doesn't work much, right? It's a very, very small effect size. Last one in this category. And the probably nothing category. This one's a little spicy. I feel like we're gonna get a lot of the Huberman, Tim Ferriss, biohacker people in our comments for this one. Morning routines. - Yeah. - Morning routines, number 10. - You've been shit, not me for a while too. - Two, yeah. - Who cares? - Do you not have like any morning routine? You know what my morning routine is? - What is your morning routine? - I wake up, no alarm. I wake up, I go to my desk, and I work. - And you get to work. - Yeah, that's pretty much what I do too. - I don't fucking do anything. - Nothing, I don't need to, like, come on, come on guys. Like, just do the thing. - Okay, so what's so wrong about morning routines? - There's nothing, okay. First of all, I do think this is a very personality based thing. - I would agree with that, yeah. - And this is also this, it bears on the researches that it is a very personal thing. Some people love their morning routines and they swear by it. Other people, like me, could not give two fox. So, my guess is that it probably maps very, very strongly to conscientiousness and probably a little bit to neuroticism as well. I think it's one of those things that because it's very tangible and measurable, like, we all want an answer that feels very explicable, right? Like, if I look at some super successful admirable person that I really admire and I want to be like them, like, the thing that actually makes them successful is that they have like this very rare combination of personality traits and background in history and various social influences and connections and relationships in their life. Like, that's so messy and intangible and indefinable that it's hard to get motivated and feel good about myself learning about that. Whereas if you tell me what they eat for breakfast and how long they meditate in the morning, I'm like, I can do that. Let me do that. - It gives you a sense of control. - Exactly, it's like, well, let me just do what, I don't know, Steve Jobs does. And then maybe I'll be a little bit more like Steve Jobs. So it scratches that underlying emotional itch, but it is, the evidence is mixed at best. - Yes, it is very mixed. - It's useful for some people, not useful for a lot of people, and it is all over the map. - So, yeah, some of those situations in which it's not helpful. Okay, again, it's mixed, it can't be helpful, but some of those situations where it's not matching your chronotype, right? So if you're not a morning person and you try to be a morning person with a morning routine, there's genetic phenotypes of early risers versus night owls, all of that, right? That can change over time. You're an example of that. You used to be a night owl now. You're an early bird, pretty much, right? - Yep, yep. - The point though is that if you're mismatching those things and trying to shoe horn in this morning routine and you're just not a morning person, yeah, don't force that, right? People who are very rigid around this, they're probably those highly conscientious, highly neurotic people you're talking about. You almost get attached to that morning routine as like, oh, it's almost a superstition, right? Like, I have to start my day like this, otherwise-- - It's another plushie. - The whole day is ruined, right? Like, I missed my, whatever, my workout because something popped up with work or the kids or whatever it is. Now my whole day is ruined and I can't get anything done. There's some evidence to that. They found like a subset of people who are like that, which is like, can't function without it. Well, that's not a healthy coping mechanism at all. That's just a crutch you're trying to leave at that point. Again, probably for some sense of control as you're seeking. It's really like a placebo is probably inspired by some credible story of like, okay, this, it makes sense why this would work. There needs to be some sense of meaning behind like whatever it is, right? So it's like the people who believe in the crystal stuff. Like, there's some sort of metaphysical spiritual explanation that makes them believe it. And because they believe it, they actually get some benefit out of it. I kind of, same thing with the power poses. Like, I feel like morning routines is probably in the same boat, right? It's, there's something about knowing like, well, the science says that it's optimal to work out at this hour and eat this macronutrient at this hour of the day. And it's, and these really successful people wake up at this time and they do these things first. If that gets you into a good emotional state first thing in the morning, if like, that's what it takes to get you fucking fired up by 7.30 a.m., 8.00 a.m., and like, ready for your day, then great. Like, that's wonderful. There's nothing wrong with that. But again, it's like, let's not pretend it's the root, there's anything magical about the routine itself. It's the confluence of understanding your own biology, psychology, and your environment. And then just finding the repeatable pattern that reduces friction as much as possible. For me, it's just like, I wake up excited to work. By the way, I've tried all this shit. I've tried literally everything. I've done all of, working up at every time. I've done like morning stretches, yoga, meditations, workouts, ice baths, smooth, like every smoothies supplement fasting, like everything. None of its stuck. Eventually, by the time I was in like my late 30s, I was like, you know, I just kind of wake up wanting to work. Why don't I just work? And so I start working at like six. Like, within two minutes of opening my eyes, I'm working. And then I actually, this is the ironic part. I have a little bit of a morning routine like two or three hours later. So when I go have like my breakfast, I've got a whole routine around my breakfast, which is like, that's when I do my household chores. That's when I listen to the podcast I like. That's when I, you know, I eat any sort of like, hygiene stuff I do then. Yeah, this isn't, but it's an argument against good habits. Yeah, but it's not, yeah, but it's not, that's not making me better. Right. That's, it's just I like it. If you are in like some sort of rut or something like that and like you change to a no morning routine or whatever, the, again, it's a placebo effect, probably, but it's just like, oh, now you're seeing the world in a different way, slightly different way, and that could change something. But there's a lot of different ways you can do that. It's not necessarily the morning routine that's responsible for that. Yeah, yeah. We are halfway through true. We just wrapped up, we started with the bullshit section, the stuff that not only doesn't work, but may actually be harming you. We noticed that that was mostly emotionally indulgent behaviors, things like intuitive decision making or catharsis. We just went through the section that was, we agreed was probably mostly placebo, like kind of nothing, probably nothing there, but it's not really gonna hurt you. That includes everything from power posing to positive affirmations to morning routines. Now we're getting into the stuff that works. And by works, I put like, for this next section, I put an asterisk next to works, which is that it technically works, but there are real questions around how much does it work, when does it work, for who does it work? Basically, the mechanisms, yeah. This next section, it's all about stuff that kind of works some of the time a little bit for some people. For some people. (laughing) Starting with number nine, everybody's favorite. This is a classic visualization. Yeah. Visualizing the future outcome that you want, visualizing the success, being confident. Oh, look at you drew on that mic. Just fucking own in this podcast. Seeing myself killing it, crushing it, but millions of people out there in their cars, taking out their trash, being like that drew Bernie, man. He's got it figured out. How's that visualization working out for you? That's my routine, every time I record. (laughing) Oh, that explains the success. Yeah, that's why we're doing so well, got it. All right. Visualization, I will admit that the affirmations, I could always kind of understand why some people did them. why it worked. And I will say this too, on the margin. Like I've definitely used affirmations on the margins. I'll, for example, like if I'm about to go on stage in front of like 2000 people and I'm like, fucking nervous is shit. I'll be like, bro, you're gonna kill this. Your talk is awesome. You're gonna nail it. Like I'll give myself that little pet talk beforehand, but other than that, I've never really used affirmations. Visualization, I've never really been able to bring myself to do. We're not the same. I don't totally know why, but I do know some people who swear by it, and especially these days with manifestation coming back with the vengeance. Like it is, there's stuff all over TikTok and Instagram of telling people to visualize their future, visualize their success, and then it will make it happen. Tell us true, is it that simple? - No. (laughing) This one did, it surprised me a little bit in some ways, but then when you dig into it, you're like, oh, this makes a whole lot of sense. - Yeah. 'Cause because what they find, especially for athletes, or really any physical activity that you're doing, and you have some level of competence around it, positive visualization works fairly well. They've done a lot of studies, especially with athletes, especially like elite athletes. So as the competence level goes up, I think this works a little bit better too. - To me, that makes sense. That kind of stuff makes sense too. - Anything physical, if I'm like a basketball player, and I need to, if I need to think about how I'm going to play against the guy who's gonna play defense against me, it makes sense to me that visualizing that process, imagining him in front of me, imagining me going around him, shooting over him, or whatever. I can see why that sort of mental rehearsal works. What I don't understand is, I don't know, you're sitting in your bedroom, playing, you know, I don't know. - You're a slob on the couch and you're like, you're playing Grand Theft Auto and you're just like imagining yourself surrounded by dozens of beautiful women cheering for you for existing. - Well, you said the word already, there's a finer point we have to put on this. When you're talking about the athlete, and you know, if you're a basketball player, something like that, and you are visualizing the process, you said, of how do I beat this opponent? How do I make this shot? How do I, whatever it is, right? How do I make this awesome pass? You're visualizing the process of that happening. - Not the result. - Not the result, okay? And that's what they found in the research, is that if you, the positive visualization around the process of getting to where you want, is actually what's the most important part. So yes, you're a slob sitting on the couch playing video games, nothing going on. Just imagining that tomorrow is gonna be different, is not gonna do anything for you. Now, imagining getting off the couch and going to the gym, and you know, like actually trying at your job or whatever it is, and all of the actual things that will get you somewhere, positively visualizing around those things, that's what's most important. - This maps to, from what I saw with some of the men and analyses, the largest moderator by far on whether visualization works or not is whether it is accompanied with planning. - Yes, exactly the process. - Yeah, like if you, if the whole manifestation, ju-ju, like it can work if it's accompanied with an actual action plan of like, okay, these are the five steps I have to go through. And okay, now I'm gonna visualize what success looks like at the end of those five steps. Whereas if you're just visualizing the success and have no idea how you're gonna get there, then it doesn't really do anything. - Yeah, no, exactly. There's one study in particular that I found around health behaviors, actually. So as people who were unhealthy or felt they were unhealthy and wanted to change something about their lifestyles, right? And so they had, it was a control study that they used and they had some people visualize around the health behaviors that they wanted to do engage in with the commensurate plan. That went along with it. Those people stuck to those health behaviors much more than the control group who didn't have the planning or the visualization around it. So yeah, the plan and the process is actually the most important part around the visualization. That makes total sense to me. - Right, which makes me wonder if you just take that away and how much benefit is actually left. - Take away the planning. - Oh, the planning. Oh yeah, probably not much of any. - Right, yeah. - It's maybe a little bit of a mood boost. And then like you said, if it's like a physical activity, the mental rehearsal of that activity, like there's probably a marginal benefit to it. - Yeah, there was another study too around just motivation and energization towards your goals. And they just had people purely focus on results on the outcome base, what they call outcome-based imagery around this. And it decreased motivation for those people. - Interesting. - Yeah, if you just positively visualize that, you're immediately less likely to be motivated to go do those things. Whereas when you focus on the process and the planning, then you actually create some momentum. - So like with affirmations, there's a bit of a backfire effect here as potentially as well. - Yeah, it could be a rebound effect there, yeah. - Yeah, okay. - So somebody wanted to put up a vision board, let's say, right? - I have never been into those for sure, but usually those are very much outcome-based and just, you know, I'm here, this is where I want to go, nothing in between. - So I actually looked at a couple of studies right, vision boards. And yeah, just boost your mood a little bit. - Yeah, right, you could do a short-term move. - Yeah, you could have a rebound effect though too. - So I think it comes back to the point that we made in like some of the entries at the bottom of this list, right? Because one thing we noted is that all the things that the bottom of the list are just purely emotional indulgence with no sort of mental planning or logic component to it. I think this is another example of like, if there's no planning component, if there's no logic component, married, like the visualization is probably an emotional boost, like it gives you a little bit of a jolt of motivation or excitement of indulgence a little bit even to you. - Right, which is great, like, and it's definitely, I will say this, like whenever I've had big goals, like I definitely fantasize about what it's like to have that goal, but I've never considered that like a success strategy. It's more just been like, man, it's gonna be so awesome once I achieve this goal, and imagining what my life is gonna be like once I do achieve that goal. Like I definitely do that, but I have no illusions that that is actually what's helping me achieve the goal. I think it's just, that's just a being excited about my goal. - Right, right, right. - It's actually the planning and the strategizing and the action that achieves it. - Well, let's move on to the next one, 'cause this next one is a little bit spicy, a little bit of a surprise, I never would have guessed it would come out this high, energy healing. - Oh, Mark, it should play to crow, maybe. - This is the revenge of the Wu-Wu. - I do, okay. - All of our Wu-Wu stuff, or most of the Wu-Wu stuff was at the very bottom of this list. This one somehow made it to the top half. - Right, right. I might question our methodology. (laughs) But we'll see, we'll see what you have to say about this. - There are different types of energy healing. - Yeah, this is a very big, like, catch all groups of us, bucket that we made here. - I do have a hypothesis around this. - Okay. - Which is that, and I was very curious about this. So, as you probably know, there's a concept, sometimes referred to as touch therapy, which is just that having human touch is in and of itself that are putic, it helps people calm down, it helps people regulate their emotions. So things like, things as simple as just hugging somebody, touching somebody, holding somebody, having somebody put their arm around you, like there are real emotional psychological benefits of human touch. It's like very much an innate part of our nature. There is actually plenty of research on, quote unquote, touch therapy. And sure enough, the effect sizes of that research come out to be very similar to what a lot of the energy healing effect sizes look like, especially when it comes to managing pain. - Okay, okay, yeah. - So my hypothesis here is that the 99% of the benefits of energy healing actually come from the fact that another human is just focusing on you, touching you, and doing it in a sympathetic and carrying way. - I would probably agree with that. I think, you know, the one study I found, it was actually a placebo controlled study, as best as you could with this anyway. So Raky, there's this old Japanese, ancient Japanese tradition called Raky. And it's kind of like it's either light touch or no touch, actually just kind of a practitioner, an experienced practitioner, a hovering over you while you're laying down, you know, eyes closed, very relaxed environment. In the study, they use that versus a sham control. They called fakey, which I thought was really funny. Which is like just an inexperienced, nobody who's, they're not a practitioner, they just go in and outweigh their hands around, yeah, basically what it was. And they did actually find, so they compared that to a meditation group as well. - Okay. - And then they had just a weightless control, no intervention whatsoever, okay. So they did find that Raky, meditation, and the fakey group actually immediately improves a pain. It was, these were people with knee pain. - Okay. - So they did immediately, all three of those immediately improved it. - Yeah. - If I thought was very interesting. So, you know, and about to the same degree as well. So meditation, Raky, and the fakey. The interesting part with this study though, so that would suggest that Raky and fakey, like there's just a placebo effect going on, right? The interesting thing though, was a couple of months later they followed up with them. And my guess is what happened, you know, after the study, they take these measurements, how's your pain doing, they tell them, and then they tell them, okay, actually you were in the fakey group, you were in the Raky group, you were obviously in the meditation group, right? Two months later when they followed up with them though, the only ones that still had improved pain were the meditation and the Raky group. The fakey group had went back to their old pain, which was interesting. - So there could still be an expectancy effect. - Well, I was gonna say that could just be the placebo. It's just like that Raky is a strong placebo, basically, right? - So I want-- - Okay, keep going. - I'm just saying, it's like technically it worked, right? - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, technically it worked yeah. I have two personal experiences around this. - Okay. - One is that I dated a girl at one point who had taken a bunch of Raky courses and was supposedly certified in Raky. And she did it to me once. And I remember it was because I was having lower back pain. And she was like, "Oh, I can fix that for you." And I was like, "Really?" And she was like, "Yeah, lay down." And she like did her whole thing. Didn't fix it for me, didn't feel a thing. I was like, "Made fun of her." - Yeah. - I was like, "What the fuck?" - Yeah. - And paid for this? - Yeah. - I was kind of an asshole back then. Second experience. So I had a really good friend back when I lived in Boston, an older guy who was really into energy healing. And he was an interesting guy because he was definitely woo-woo, but he was much more scientifically minded than. And often I would talk to him about things and he would even tell me he's like, "I don't know why this works, but it does." And I was like, "Okay, that's fair." So anyway, he was an energy healer. He had trained under some guru for multiple years and he kept saying he's like, "No, it's really good. It's very powerful." And I was like, "Sure, whatever." I broke up with a girlfriend. I just got out of a relationship. It was really depressed, really down. And I was staying with him one weekend. And he was like, he's like, "You know, man, let me just do a session with you." Like, it can't make it worse, right? And I was like, "Sure, fuck it." Why not? - Yeah, I'm like, "All right, man, whatever." Sure. So I laid down, he had this little, it was kind of like a massage table. So I laid down on a massage table and he started doing all this stuff. He started putting his hands on all these places. And it was very, at the time, I was like, "This is very meditative." It was very relaxing, but from what I could tell consciously, I couldn't tell if anything was happening or not. - Okay. - And then afterwards, he was like, that was a very intense session. You definitely want to take it easy for the next day or two. I don't know what it was. I slept like 10 hours at night, 12 hours at night. I was absolutely exhausted the next day. I had crazy fucking dreams. And I felt better a couple of days later. Like, it wasn't completely over the relationship. I wasn't open to break up. I wasn't that I wasn't depressed anymore. But I noticeably felt better a day or two later. And there was a weird exhaustion, mental, emotional exhaustion that happened. And then there was definitely like a, to this day, I don't know what the fuck he did. And he used to always just kind of laugh and be like, you know if I explained it to you, you wouldn't even believe me. And I was like, okay. So he could have been a placebo. I have no clue what happened. But there's a lot of people with the Raky that report the whole sleep thing. They're like, yeah, I slept great after a session. And it gave me the relaxation part. The self-awareness part, I'm sure, is factors into that. But yeah, I don't know. - So I still work for some people. You know, one of the things that's not on here that we could have done is hypnosis. - Yeah, so part of me, 'cause this friend of mine, he also had a background in hypnosis. And so part of me wonders if there was like some aspect of like physical hypnosis that went along with it. I don't know, TBD, one of the mysteries of Mark's life. - Yeah, again, it works for some people. I think there is a huge expectancy effect. It works better if you think it's gonna work better. - Yes. - That said, like, okay, that whole study I explained about the knee pain and all of that. I mean, meditation worked just as good as Ricky. So you don't necessarily have to go and pay somebody, you know, probably a couple hundred bucks to wave their hands over you necessarily. But if you're into it, I don't know. - There is a cool little ceremony around it. There's a social aspect, like you said. - Yes. - And like that, okay, sure. Maybe there's different mechanisms between meditation and this. But in just the speak briefly to the power of placebo effect or the expectation effect, I don't think people realize like how absolutely powerful a placebo effect can be. And like all the things you just said about there being a ritual around it, a social expectation around it, being in a context or a mental state where you're open to it, which actually if you look in the hypnosis, the biggest thing about hypnosis is that it's, you have to be open to being hypnotized. Like you need to be suggestible. It was what Hypnotists call it. There's crazy, crazy stories of placebo effects in medicine around there are things called sham surgeries where it's like they put people to sleep and they don't give them the surgery. - They make an incision and that's it. - And then when they wake up, they're told that they had the surgery and they're like, "Oh great, my knee feels great, doc, thank you." And they don't have knee pain anymore. - Right, yeah, especially around the pain stuff. It's not to say that like pain's in your head or anything like that. But there is a very, very much like a connection between the mind body in there is very real. And pain is very much modulated by the way you perceive it. - Big, a big-ass question mark next to that one, but hey, energy healing made it to number eight. The thing that's interesting, I mean looking at so like the way we measured this, right? So most of these, it's actually an interesting juxtaposition between visualization and energy healing. So visualization, average effect size of the best metanalysis we found was 0.29, which is a pretty small effect size. Like that's pretty small. That is in the neighborhood of a placebo. But 95% of studies found a positive effect from it. Energy healing, the effect size that we found, the best effect size that we found was 0.53, which is a medium effect size, but only 56% of the studies that we looked at found any reportable effect whatsoever. So it's one of those like, it works half the time and when it works, it works really well. Whereas something like visualization, it works almost all the time, but it's very negligible, very marginal. Yeah, all right, let's move to the next one, which is a little bit more modern. Cold water immersion. Well, yes, well, it's modern, but it's actually very ancient at the same time. So excuse me, Dr. Bernie. There's a modern version of it, right? But people have been, people have been dipping in cold water for thousands of years. Yeah, that is true. My biohacker, broscience bias is kicking in, where you've got a cold bath, don't you? I do have a cold plunge. It is the most unreasonable, impractical thing to own. Don't get me wrong. I love cold plunges, but it is such a pain in the ass to maintain and keep up. I mean, who would have thought Drew that keeping a running body of water outside of your house takes a lot of fucking maintenance? Yeah, they don't tell you that when they, when you click on the Instagram ad. You're going to be cleaning this thing twice a week for the rest of your life. I live in Colorado, so in the winter, you can just get out, go to lake, you're going to jump in. It's funny because I remember there was a cold shower craze about 10 or 15 years ago. There's a bunch of TED talks about it. A bunch of YouTubers made videos about cold showers. I remember doing the cold shower thing and being like, well, this is cool. Like, it puts me in a good mood, but it definitely, I don't feel like it's changing my life or anything. Yes, yeah. Interestingly, cold water immersion has positive mental health benefits. And this is found fairly consistently. It's not uniform across the board, but it is like, at this point, it is consistent enough that it does seem to be a real thing. And with that said, there's a lot of caveats and nuances here. I would put cold water immersion in the wind more category from what I saw from the research. It's the sort of thing that if you're already kind of healthy and already in a good mental health space, it makes you feel better. Yes. But if you are not healthy and you have serious mental health issues, it could potentially make things worse. Just because it is getting into a body of very cold water is physically and mentally stressful. Like, it is a jolt to the system. And so if your system is already fragile for various reasons, that jolt can actually make things worse. Whereas if you're already pretty robust and resilient, then it can make you feel even more robust and resilient. There's also just a consistency aspect to it too. During it once, like you said, you might get some short term, hey, I feel better for the rest of the day or a couple hours. Doing it every day, probably not either too. There's a little bit of a u-curve here, like a sweet spot you got to hit. But consistency over time, when you're already healthy, like you said, you have all those other things taken care of. Yeah, sure. It probably helps in the margins, yeah. I do around things like stress and anxiety, especially. Right. It's interesting. I do it pretty consistently in the summers. I'm too much of a pussy to do it when it's cold outside. Oh, yeah. Those freezing LA ventures, you know, out here. It gets cold, man. I had to wear a jacket a few days ago. Oh my gosh. It was really nice. It's tough. Winter LA is tough, Drew. You have no idea. I mean, sometimes you go to a restaurant, and they see you outside, and it's windy, and it's-- And bring you a blanket. It's very uncomfortable. Yeah, bring your blanket with a heater. It's a problem. It's a big problem out here. I know. Anything else we want to say about cold water? I feel like all the bro science people are probably angry that we're not lauding the benefits as the number one. Yeah. I have a little bit of a theory around this one, actually. And like I said, people have been doing this for a long time. It's an ancient practice using cold water immersion for health purposes. It goes way, way back, thousands of years, as far as we know. My theory, you know, kind of a modern rendition of it, though, too. A lot of people point to like the Scandinavian countries that do this, right? talk about, you know. hole in the ice in the middle of the winter and they're all jumping in it, there's a huge social aspect around that too. And I think this is what a lot of people miss is the real benefits come from you getting together with a bunch of people going out and doing something kind of weird and streaming together and a little bit like it's out of the norm, shocks your system a little bit, but you're all doing it together. I think that's actually would probably give you more benefit or especially around stress reduction at any kind of anxiety you have depression, whatever it is. Just steam theory. Yeah, there's actually a huge social component to it. And so when they market you and ice bath to put in your backyard and go do it by yourself, you might still get some of that that benefit, but I think it's going to be smaller than if you would go out to some frozen lake. And I buy that. Yeah, I buy that. Although I imagine they probably control for that and a lot of the research. Yes, but I do agree with that. And it's funny too because I did such an LA thing, but a bunch of my friends and I we get together to do cool blushes. It's like a thing to do. Another interesting caveat that is is actually really important to point out two things actually that both both surprised me. One is that colder water isn't necessarily better, at least for mental health benefits. There might be certain recovery benefits or whatever that that colder water is more beneficial, but you don't get any added effect by making it ice cold versus just really cool. And then the second thing is that you need to work up to those colder temperatures. If people just jump into freezing ice water point blank with no work up to it or no experience, then again, you can set yourself up for a certain level of system shock and have worse outcomes than if you gently push yourself up to it. One thing I've noticed is I really enjoy a cold plunge down to maybe 50 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 10 degrees Celsius. Anything below that in my opinion hurts. Okay. And I'm like, why? Why would anybody do this? So I was happy to see that. Okay. I only looked at the psychological outcomes for this. Have you looked into more of the physiological stuff? I've heard before, if you, the cold plunge will help you burn off internal fat reserves that you have or the brown fat around your organs and stuff. There's a lot of stuff around. My understanding is that it's actually sauna that's heat therapy instead. Well, heat therapy, I believe, is much better for your cardiovascular system. Okay. And then the cold therapy, I believe, is is better for like body composition recovery. Okay. And recovery. I've used it for recovery primarily. It's funny. I don't notice a huge difference in my recovery when I use it. I notice a big mood boost. Like I get out and I'm like glowing for the next hour and a half. Like I just feel I'm in a great mood. I feel like I have tons of energy. I think it's the combination of adrenaline and dopamine. Like it does release just a massive amount of dopamine into your, into your system. I just like how it makes me feel. I personally can't attest to any sort of physical benefits or mental health benefits either. I mean, sure, maybe it marginally makes me a little bit happier. But yeah, I mean, hey, if you need shocked out of like some funk, try and give it a try. Yeah, sure. All right, let's move to the next one, which is a very interesting one, which I also have a lot of experience with speed reading. This actually really tracked my expectation. Like if you would ask me before we research this, where I thought it was going to come out, I would have said kind of middle of the pack, it works, but with a lot of asterisk and copious. And I think I would have said exactly what we're going to say here, which is that you can train, train yourself to read faster. You cannot train yourself to read that much faster. It's like marginal improvements in speed. So important to note here, the average person I believe reads around 200 words per minute, a lot of the advertising around speed reading promises that they can get you up to 1000 words per minute, which is a 5x increase. What the research shows is that really what's realistic for most people is that you can go from 200 to 300 or 200 to 400. So like a speed descent. It's significant. Imagine cutting every book you read, it takes 30% less time. That is actually very significant. And that's my experience as well. I think now I read at 3,500 words per minute or something like that. Two interesting caveats around this is that the research on reading speed basically finds that it's mostly genetic. It has to do with, I forget what the actual word for it is, but it's your eyes ability to see peripherally. So if I'm focusing on your face, how aware is my vision of the stuff that's in the peripheral, parts of my vision. So some people apparently have a wider aperture of visual information that they can take in simultaneously. And some people have an extremely narrow aperture of the visual information that they can take in. And so what they find is that people who are just genetically have a wider aperture, they can take in more word simultaneously. And so the core technique of speed reading that they teach you, like any speed reading course you take, the first thing they teach you is about your kind of internal monologue as you read. And they give you techniques to help shut that off. Because once you shut that off, you can actually start ingesting multiple words simultaneously. Because the argument is that it's that internal monologue is your speed ceiling. Because you have to wait for your brain to read every word to you. But if you can train your brain to stop saying every word out loud, you can ingest words much quicker. And you can ingest chunks of words, phrases and stuff. So it's just how you just absorb the concept of the words. I've never tried speed reading it. So I don't know. And I'm a slow reader. And it's very much like every single word in my head. The answer is yes. But that brings us to the next caveat is that they find that speed reading techniques decrease retention. Okay. Of course. So you are there's a tradeoff. Yes. So there's a tradeoff. You recall things worse. You remember things worse. You remember details worse. And that is probably a direct result of eliminating that internal monologue, right? Because when you construct that internal monologue, it's kind of like writing stuff down. There's a cliche that people say there's a magic to writing things down. And it's like, I don't think there's a magic. I think it just forces your brain to slow down and focus enough. Get very clear. Yeah. That it makes a larger imprint on your memory. And I think the same is true with read. There's probably just an inherent tradeoff with speed of informational ingestion and retention. Okay. And as you speed up, that retention goes down. And as you slow down, that retention probably goes up. Right. Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. There's been studies to where just metacognitive training, like just making you aware of those sorts of processes in your in your mind. Like speed reading courses versus just generic metacognitive skills. No difference there too. So which makes sense. Yeah. And because speed reading is teaching you a metacognitive skill. Yes. If you just have metacognitive skills in general here, you can do just as well. So yeah. So Tyler Cowan is who I believe we both follow. Yeah. Right. The blogmar marginal revolution. He is, he is a person I believe that are known as like hyper, hyper readers. Like he literally reads I think three, four, five books a day on average. And it doesn't surprise me. Yeah. And it's funny because I listened to an interview where he was asked about this. And he said he was like, I did research on it. It seems to be primarily genetic. It's like a very rare thing. He said, I've always been a fast reader my entire life. And I've only gotten faster the more I've read. And he actually made that point. He said, it's like anything else. The more you read the faster you get at it. And so the the faster and the faster you get, the more you can read. So it becomes kind of a virtuous cycle. But he actually made a very interesting point, which I agree with as well as he said, the more you read, the more stuff you already know. And so when you pick up a new book, you could skip a whole bunch of it. Yeah, which is, which is I've experienced this within certain topics and domains. So like if I pick up a pop psychology book, generally speaking, it's like I open chapter one and it's like, oh, it's the marshmallow test. I've read that for 100 times. So I skip it. I'm like, okay, I already know the point he's making. And I skip to the next section. And then I read for say two or three pages. And then it's like, then it's the Milgram experiment. It's like, I know the Milgram experiment. All right. So the skip the next three or four pages. And it's like, okay, now what now what point is he making? So now I technically just quote unquote read 10 pages in like a minute, whereas somebody who's not familiar with those things is like, probably still on page two. Okay. Yeah. Reading as a skill in general, that's a very good example of, oh, if you're reading a book and you come to something that you know, a skip to the next chapter, you're going to be a faster reader, a bit more effective reader, just in general. So yeah, which is it blows my mind that people don't think about that. Like I've said this like we've made content around it. Like I've made content around this and people are just like, oh my god, I never thought I'm like, and I, some of it I think is that way before I heard you. I just like, some of it I think is the education system. Yes. You know, because it's in school, you have to read the assignment. You have to read every fucking paragraph. And you're going to be tested. You don't know what you're going to be tested on. So you have to read the whole thing. Whereas it's like in real life, if the only thing you care about his chapter 8. Just reach out. Chapter eight. - Right. - There's not an exam at the end of this. Nobody's putting a gun to your head. Shreed chapter eight and put the book down, go pick up another one. - You know one of the realizations I had around this too was when I was in high school and my cousin, he was like a year older than me and he had to do a book report. And he just read the first page in the last page of the book and he got like an A minus. And there's something like that. And I was like, "Oh, shit, you can do that." - Oh. - So yeah. - Talk about 80-20. - I know. - I know. (upbeat music) - All right, we are back and we're in the final five, the five self-help techniques that actually work counting down. Number five is actually something. I have never done in my life. - Oh. - That might surprise you. - Okay. - Gratitude journaling. - Okay. - You all right. - You've never, have you seen stunts? - Have you ever just like. - Did you get grateful for things? - You're right. I'm like consciously like, okay. - I'm gonna be like, okay. - So I've done like gratitude meditations. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - I've actually never gratitude journaled. I'm what I call a crisis journaler. - Yeah, yeah. - So I like, I journal when shit's hitting the fan and I wanna jump off a bridge. That's when I journaled. - Okay. - I've never like journaled being like, "I'm so grateful for Drew, he's such a good co-host." - But you've practiced gratitude in some way or, like you said, I'm meditation. - Gratitude's awesome, okay. - I looked a little bit more into like, just gratitude interventions in general. We can talk about the journaling aspect of it too, but gratitude interventions in general, it doesn't have to be journaling. Which is, I think, maybe a relief for some people because I just always found it oaky too, just a little bit like, write these three things down and you end up just kind of making it another chore. - Yeah, it's probably useful differentiating those. By the way, journaling works by and large and gratitude practices work. So you can combine them, you can do them separately, but why don't we just focus on gratitude practices? - Yeah. - First of all, like you can do, like I said, you can do the journaling, you can do the meditations, you can just take a moment and do it. I think really what I've found though too, and this checks out kind of anecdotally, is like, if you're not a grateful person, this is probably something you need to do. You're gonna have the most, there's like a kind of a floor effect here. You can't go any lower, you may as well try it, and it's gonna help you in some way or another. I just find myself to be a pretty naturally grateful person. I think I've just been fortunate in my life and like I can look around and be like, oh, I'm very grateful that I have these opportunities or whatever it is. The other thing though that I found about, in the research, which was very interesting, it works, gratitude works, it helps reduce stress, it helps with depression, it helps with things I do some extent. The thing is, again, we go back to that question, compared to what? - If you're doing nothing and you start a gratitude practice, that's gonna help you. - Yes. - If you're doing nothing and you start a meditation practice, we're gonna talk about that a little bit, or you start some sort of positive intervention of any kind, like actively positive, trying to like change things. It's about the same as gratitude, as well. So I don't know if there's anything necessarily special about gratitude. I think being gracious and being grateful is a good thing, like just in general, and it has other effects. We can talk about too. Gratitude works and it's very accessible. It's a very easy thing for a lot of people. I just don't think there's necessarily anything special about it, you know what I mean? - In terms of just the aggregate data, this had a very small effect size of the top eight. It had the smallest effect size, but very consistent. - Extremely consistent. It was the most consistent out of everything that we analyzed, out of 166 studies, 98% of them found a positive effect of gratitude practices. So it is consistent, but small. - Right. - I find gratitude very easily. I'm often like one of my first reactions, anytime anything goes wrong, one of my first reactions is always to think of like, why I'm lucky to have this problem. And it's just kind of a default that my brain goes to. So I could see why four seniors, but if you're somebody who tends to dwell on problems and always think very negatively, then I could see why this would be a very useful practice to train in yourself. - And especially this is another one where consistency matters a lot. If you again are going from a not very grateful disposition to try to instill more gratitude in your life, being consistent with it matters a lot more than just like doing it haphazardly, right? There's just a little bit of a compliance issue sometimes with people like you know, if you're trying to like not be depressed or anxious or something like that, like you're probably going to be better off with medication and therapy than you are just like a straight gratitude practice. It can help on the margins. Again, the effects are usually small, but they're consistent. There was a study too. An interesting study I found too where they called it a menu-based gratitude practice. So you could choose from a number of different of these practices. There was journaling, there was meditation, there was just like thinking about it, those sorts of things. People were way more compliant when they had a menu of options to choose from. So they can mix it up a little bit and they stuck with it longer doing that. - Isn't it funny how you see that show up and so many different- - So many different surprises, yeah. - The study, like experiment constructions, like it just when you give people choice, they're more likely to adhere to it. - Right, right. Even if the choice is kind of fake, you can make up. - It really is. - It's a bit arbitrary. - Yeah, for sure. - Okay. Anything else you want to say about gratitude, or are you just grateful for this section? - I am so grateful for this podcast, too. - Oh, this is so lucky. - The one study that I found that really focused on this question is like gratitude versus what? If it's just measurement only versus doing nothing, the effect size is pretty, like it's moderate, I would say. If it's compared to alternate activities, like just listening out to the things you did during that day, good nor bad, whatever, writing about just neutral events that happened, you get a little bit of a smaller effect, and then if you compare it to positive interventions, like I said, things like encouraging people to engage in acts of kindness, or they have this best possible selves exercise where you write about like, this is my best self, when I'm my best, this is how I am. - Yeah. - The effect kind of starts to pretty much go away. - Go away, interesting. - So it's more, again, I don't think there's like a specific gratitude mechanism necessarily. It's just being more self-aware around just the positive events in your life, I think, in general. It's probably just helpful. - Yeah, all right. Number four, meditation. - Okay. - A big favorite, a big crowd favorite. Comes in at number four on this list. I would expect it near the top. There are, I would say the things above this are a little surprising. But I'm not surprised that it is in this cat. It definitely works at this point, we know that. There are caveats, we covered that in our meditation episode last month. But by and large, for the vast majority of the population, it is a good thing, and your mileage is gonna vary, but generally speaking, it's probably gonna help something. - There's been tons of study on meditation as we covered in the meditation episode. But like the meta-analyses around this just show that yeah, you can, especially for stress and anxiety. So they have this, there's a thing called mindfulness-based stress reduction, which is a meditation, a modified meditation kind of program. It's like an eight-week program they've used, that goes all the way back to the 70s or 80s, I think. And they've consistently used this in work settings, and personal settings, and organizational settings, whatever, to decrease feelings of stress, anxiety, even some depression, to some degree, and it's effective, and it works. This is another thing to, another study I found as well, though, was a comparison to like an SSRI medication. Like, you basically equivalent. If you do like a consistent mindfulness-based activity that you can do, has about the same effect as a lot of SSRIs for depression. - Oh, yeah. - Yeah. Again though, just like with gratitude, there is a little bit of an issue around the active control problem. So compared to nothing, meditation is great. - Yeah. - Compared to other positive interventions. For instance, there was a pretty well done study around active health education versus meditation. So just teaching people about healthy behaviors in their lives versus a meditation group, they did it about the same as well. - Interesting. - So, in the meditation episode, we talked about the different types of people who probably would benefit from meditation more than others. You're just somebody who's just like, "I just can't meditate." - You don't have to meditate. - Yeah. - It's like, you don't have to journal. All of these things. - Right, but finding ways to be mindful and more intentional in your life is obviously going to help quite a lot. - I would say we have definitely not hit. There's maybe one thing on this list. I think number one is might be the only thing that I would say people have to do. I would have the confidence to say that people have to do. You have to learn how to do it. - That's a good point. I think everything else on this list is optional. And your mileage is going to vary and pretty much everything past number 10 or 11 is like, probably you're fine not doing it. - Yes, now all of that said, I would still encourage people to meditate because not for these reasons, though, of like stress reduction even or better sleep or all of this. This is the point I made in the meditation episode. The reason you should meditate is so you can know your mind better. - Yes. - And you can control yourself better. - You know yourself better. - Right. - That might have all of these secondary effects, all these secondary benefits, but the primary goal of meditation is just to know your mind and yourself better. - I 100% agree. It's funny too if you talk to any serious meditation practitioner, they always say they're like stress reduction is like you're an inch deep in a 20 foot pool, right? You barely even crack the surface of what meditation can do. - Sure. - It can lower stress and anxiety. But that is honestly the very first sliver of the benefit. - It's the hook that allows you to do it. like a lot of marketers kind of, you know, get better sleep or stress and anxiety and depression and all of that. The real benefit comes much deeper. Yes. All right. Number three, this was a surprise for me. But then once I started reading through the research and the summaries, I was like, oh, okay, that actually makes sense. So there was a very famous self-help book from the 1980s. It's called Eat That Frog. It's one of those classic self-help books that probably should have been an article. It was written by Brian Tracy, but the concept of Eat That Frog, it's you take the most important task of your day and you do it first. That's the whole book. More or less. I mean, there is a system of prioritization that he has within the book. And then you take, there's like kind of a process that he walks you through to figure out what that most, what your frog is. But then the advice is just, that's what you should do first thing every single day. So that's all fine and dandy. And I think we briefly mentioned this in the procrastination episode. And we actually, I think you and I, we were a little bit ambivalent about it. I was surprised to see it land this high. It turns out 95% of the benefit of Eat That Frog is figuring out what the most important thing is. And then 5% of the benefit is the fact that you did it first thing in the morning. - Yeah. - So it's almost like a Trojan horse that just gets you thinking about your priorities and what matters to you. That in and of itself, like drastically changes outcomes for people. Whether you do it first or second or at 11 a.m. or 2 p.m. is probably like secondary. - Right, yeah. You don't practice the opposite of this, don't you? - Yeah, I eat cake first and then eat my frog. - Okay. - So yeah. - And it seems to work for you. - Yeah, yeah. Like you said, you kind of like have a warm up a little bit in the morning and then you get to the stuff you need to do. - But it is, I am very often thinking about what is the most important thing that I could be doing with my time? What is the thing I should be working on? What is the thing I should be thinking about? Like those are questions I think about constantly. And there's so much value in that. So much value in that. And I do agree that like, I think a lot of people go through life never considering those things. - Well, think about the clarity you achieve when you do that. That's, I think that's what a lot of people want when they're thinking about, the constant question they're asking is, what should I be doing next? - Right. - If you have the most important thing in front of you, well, there's no question. - Right. - What you should be doing next. There's no anxiety around what you should be doing next. You just do it. - Yeah. - Interestingly though, too, on top of that effect, I think there's another effect that this has, which is they found in several different studies that if you like starting with the hardest task first, ending your day on the easier tasks, that actually has increases self-efficacy. So it increases kind of like your confidence that, oh, that was a good productive day, rather than doing it the other way around. - Makes sense. - So it might be a little mind trick here that you're playing on yourself. But still, like people just feel better. Like I got all this stuff done. I ended my day on a high note too, 'cause it was an easy task. Like I think it's just the momentum you create from it. You're not necessarily anymore productive. - Is it a thing. - So even if you switch those around, you do the easiest things first and you do the hard things later, you just still get the same amount of work done. - Right. - But you feel better about it. - You feel better about it. - It means you're more likely to continue doing it that way. - Yeah. - In the long run. So I think that's a huge benefit as well. - It kind of reminds me of what we talked about with intuitive decision making, which is that listening to your gut doesn't make better decisions. - Right, yeah. - But you feel better about those decisions. - Right, right. - Which gives you the perception that you made better decisions. - That's right. - So yeah, there is some value. Give you some peace of mind, sure. - Yeah. - And I can absolutely see the self-efficacy argument of like just knowing you did the hardest, most important thing first in your day. And it's like nine, 30 in the morning and you're like, I already accomplished something very, very valuable. I can see how that could give you a high that you can kind of ride through the rest of the day. So I would have guessed that eat that frog would have been kind of in the middle of the pack. You know, it would have been one of those maybe depends on the context, the person, what you're doing. - Right. - I'm a little bit of a convert here. The prioritization thing really hit close to home when I saw that. Obviously, it's like that's basically what the subtle are and not giving a fuck is about is prioritizing. I definitely understand the power and the clarity that comes from that. I guess I just never thought of it in those terms. Like I never, a lot of these things are like that. - Yeah. It's not eating the frog that is the benefit. It's the process that leads to eating the frog that is the benefit, very much similar to like the visualizations that we talked about. - It's not universally beneficial across all tasks. They've found, you know, just in some realistic settings that they're doing more naturalistic observations and stuff, it's not always clear that this works the best. Also too, there's, let's go back to the ego depletion and the willpower thing. Like some people think, oh, I need to do this thing first in order to have, and maximize my willpower, yeah. - That's not really how it works either. So because again, you can do the easy task first and the hard ones later and you still get the same amount of work done. If you're just trying to like get up in the morning and eat that frog but you're a night owl, that's not really gonna help you a whole lot either. So, yeah, I mean, there's some borders to it for sure. Overall, I was very surprised by it too. - I was also surprised by the next one. And this is, people are gonna listen to this and they're gonna think that I totally planted, I put a gun, I put a gun to you and our research team's head and it was like, put this number two mother fuckers. (laughing) You better find those studies. - Right, right. - Right. Number two is reading self-help books. - Yeah, Bibliotherapy. - Bibliotherapy, reading self-help books. - So I had done some research on this before. So I knew reading self-help books did something. Like I knew that there was a consistently positive effect size. I did not expect it to be this big. We looked at 188 studies. 93% of them came out in support. Average effect size of 0.56, which is decent. Like that's note, like you're approaching kind of effect size levels of some modalities of therapy at that point. And so yeah, I shocked, a little shocked, especially as somebody who's (laughing) I know it sounds weird coming from a self-help author. But like, I don't think super highly of this genre. I don't, I definitely, and I think a lot of self-help books are pretty trashy. I was, yeah, I was surprised. - Well, okay, I mean, they did find that the quality of-- - Quality of the book matters. - Quality of the book matters a lot. Bibliotherapy itself has this defined like in therapy and in psychology, there's some structure to it as well. It's like, they find it's most helpful. Like if you're in therapy for a specific problem or you have an issue and the therapist assigns you some books and walk you through it. The more structure it is, the better you get out of it. That said, there's still some just like unstructured evidence as well, or evidence around unstructured reading that also shows a lot of benefit too. I don't know, I don't know if I was as surprised by this. And maybe that's just because I over-intellectualize things. But like some of the biggest like a-ha moments I've had have definitely been reading books of all kinds and even self-help books. Sure. I've changed behaviors based on them. I mean, there is definitely a point where you go too far with this obviously where you procrastinate, changing anything because you want to read more. But just in terms of like changing your mind, I don't think there's a better way for me anyway than like reading a book that really lands, you know what I mean? - I think maybe the thing that makes me wrestle with it is the unevenness of the quality. - For example, if I think about all of the self-help, self-improvement, health books, pop psychology books that I've read, it is definitely a power law distribution, right? There's probably two or three that were very impactful on my life that I would call like quote unquote life changing. There's probably another 10 that I would say were influential, were definitely a positive influence. And then there's probably like a hundred that I was like, okay, well, that was a thing or I just didn't finish them or I was like, wow, that's six hours of my life. I'll never get back. So it's an extremely uneven experience. And I could see why in the context of a therapist recommending a book, you do get a much higher hit rate because the therapist is probably speaking to the patient. They're probably noticing they're like, oh, you're struggling with this one thing, you have this type of personality. You know what book you'll love? You should go read this book. It's right up your alley. It's definitely, it's what you need right now. I think you'll relate to the author, go check it out. I could see why that has a much higher hit rate than say just wandering into the self-help section at your local bookstore and grabbing something off the shelf or random. So perhaps it's skewed to the positive a little bit in that regard. And that there's a little bit of filtering that's happening in these studies. - Yes, yes, that makes total sense to me. - So maybe this is, we cross this out and replace it with good self-help. - Good, you're obviously, well, yeah, yeah. That is a big qualifier we have to point out, but that's true. I think you've done some YouTube videos on this. What is like a self-help book that you think really changed or that had such an impact on you that you could still even today be like, yeah, that. - I mean, honestly, reading Tim Ferriss's for our work week completely changed my life. - Yeah, completely changed the trajectory of my life. - Okay, so this is the thing about self-help though too is like, when you read it, the reason you read it, it's very personal, right? Like, it's kind of hard to recommend a book to somebody because usually what happens is I found this book at the right time when I was going through a particular problem and it helped me a lot there too. Yeah, would I say the four hour work week is one of the best self-help books of all time? I don't know, but I know a lot of people have. - Right. - Like, changed their ways. - Well, and because of it. - Yes, that is a timing is a huge component of this. And I've experienced that going in both, like multiple directions, right? So like, I remember when I was just came out of college, I read "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill and I was like, oh my God, I'm gonna do all this. I'm gonna, I need to start doing this today, right? And it seemed very powerful and profound at the time. Looking back, it was a bunch and nothing. Like, it was, I don't think it really had any effect on my life whatsoever. And I remember, it's funny because we just, we did a YouTube video about Napoleon Hill. So I went back and I read parts of "Think and Grow Rich" and like, the whole time I'm reading it up. - Yeah. - Just like, what the fuck? - Yeah. - How did I ever read this? How did I ever get through this? But I've seen that going the other direction as well. For example, like, when I was a teenager, I read Scott Peck's "The Roadless Travel" and I, 'cause it was my dad's favorite self-help book. And I remember at the time being, like, God, this guy is such a downer. Like, this is so, like, the stodgy and boring and it's all about love and how hard everything is. And I was just like, fuck off. And I remember, I didn't even finish it. I went back and read it in my late 20s and I was like, this might be the best self-help book. I've ever read. - Yeah. - Like, it was excellent. - I haven't read that one. - It's very good. - So, yeah, a lot of it is timing where you are in your life at the time, what you're struggling with. You kind of have to be receptive to the message at the moment, I think, where at the land. But, yeah, I mean, the right book at the right time can be absolutely life-changing. - I do remember several years ago, I was dating a girl and she came over and she said, so, my brother, he just broke up with his girlfriend and I was like, oh, no, what happened and he goes, well, he read a book and I said, oh, yeah, what was that? You wanna guess what book it was? - A subtle article. - Yeah, yeah. He didn't even know I worked for you or anything like that. So, I mean, obviously, there's been, I don't know, tens of thousands of people have told you at this point, that your book changed their life. And I think more than anything, it just, like I said, if you're open to the message, you then enter like this, a new kind of like mind space around how you approach things. Like, yeah, a book can do that. A book can definitely do that. It's almost like hopping on a cognitive plane and visiting somebody else's brain for hours at a time. So, you essentially get to live inside somebody else's mind temporarily. And if that person has perspectives and experiences and ideas that are extremely profound for where you are in that moment, then it makes sense. Like, I see why it happens. Maybe I'm a negative Nancy. I did not expect it to be this high. It didn't expect it to be this consistent, although the way you talked about the, how the experiments were constructed, like that kind of explained some of it. There's definitely some filtering that's going on here. I think if you, if you just raw dog a random self-help book, it would not be, be this high on the list. But for sure, the right self-help book at the right time can be very powerful. - I'll give my recommendation too. - Okay. - Just one that, most recently anyway, I guess it's been a few years, not only read a whole lot of self-help anymore, but Oliver Berkman's 4,000 weeks. That's a fantastic book. It masquerades as a productivity book, and it's not. It's all about your relationship with time. And it like changes a lot of how you see just how you live your life. - He sent me the manuscript of that about six months before it came out. And I started reading it. I remember I got through the first chapter, and I became angry that he wrote it and I did it. It's like very rare that I have that, just like very intense envy. And I actually, Oliver's an old friend. So I emailed him and I told him that. I was like, "This is so good that I'm like pissed." That you got to write it, and I didn't. - Writing the content of thinking around it. He puts ideas from so many different traditions, and it's very, very good. - Should we get to number one? - We actually initially started researching the concept of fake it 'til you make it. Which is, as we researched it, we realized was kind of nebulous. - Yes. - Like what does that mean? Does that mean that you pretend you're a clown at the circus, and then before you actually become a clown at the circus, or do you pretend like you know how to code and JavaScript before you code and jump? Like what does that mean? - Yeah, right, right. - And eventually we kind of just settled on this idea known as behavioral activation, which is actually more akin to what I call the do something principle in my work, which is just do the thing. Even if you don't know what you're doing, even if you don't know what you should be doing, just do something. And if it's intimidating and scary, or you don't feel motivated, reduce the scope of what you do, until you feel like you can do it. And it almost doesn't even matter what you do. Like it just fucking go do something, right? To do the thing, there was a great essay that went viral a couple of years ago called do the thing. It's this whole thing it's like talking about doing the thing, it's not doing the thing, planning how you're gonna do the thing, it's not doing the thing, fantasizing about doing the thing, it's not doing the thing, promising yourself that you're gonna do the thing, it's not doing the thing. Just like go through all the typical ways that we avoid doing the thing. So I think what you could call number one, behavioral activation. And behavioral activation is, it's actually, it's like a very old therapeutic practice comes from clinical studies of, basically taking depressed people and just making them do something. (laughing) - Right, because when you're depressed, you don't wanna do anything. - You don't wanna do anything. - I mean, like it can be as bad as that. I don't wanna take a shower, right? Like it can get down to that point. So yeah. - And sure enough, what they found is that doing the thing, even when you don't wanna do the thing, has incredible positive effects, doing anything when you don't wanna do the thing, also has robust positive effects. And if you are too intimidated or too scared to do the full thing, breaking it down and only doing part of the thing has highly replicable, repeatable positive effects. To the point that it's actually more effective than a number of therapeutic modalities, it's on par with CBT, which is considered the most effective therapy. It doesn't cost you a fucking thing. You can do it tomorrow. You can do it right now during this podcast. It is the single most robust thing that we found in our research. I love that it basically boils down to take action. The best thing you can do is just fucking do it. - Just act, right. - Just do the thing. - So are we really saying number one is, you just do it. - Just do it, just do it. Just do it. It's the shield, we should just put the shield above me and me and me here. Just do it, fucking do it. This, though, to me over this last holiday season, I was traveling a whole bunch. So it's getting very shitty sleep. I mean, consistency for sleep, but I was bouncing all over the place coming out here, going back to my parents, being home. My diet was garbage. I wasn't getting my workouts in. I started to feel pretty depressed. I was slipping into that where I was like, oh, I haven't felt this way in a very long time, but I remember it, like what's going on here. And then after a weekend of literally just sitting around the Netflix, it wasn't Netflix and chill, it was Netflix and the, like that, you know? That's what I did for an entire weekend. And it had been, my house was a disaster. I hadn't cleaned it. I usually cleaned it once a week. I hadn't, like all the things I enjoyed doing, I hadn't been out in my wood shop. I hadn't gotten, I hadn't exercised. All of these things, I was just, and I was just like, I don't wanna do any of this. And I just, after that weekend of Netflix and the, I made myself clean my house. That's what I did. And cleaning my house, I'm finally gonna do that. Yeah. Felt okay. Like I really did not wanna do it, but it felt okay and did that. I was like, okay, fine. Then I got back into the gym one day and it was shitty, shitty workout. I probably put 10% effort into it. But it felt a little bit better. Cooked some meals that were nice and healthy. Like started doing the things that I knew before, kind of kept me sane. Don't you hate me? Magically here, I am again, right? I'm feeling okay. Don't you kind of hate that it's successful? Yes, yes, don't you wish it was, don't you wish there was some complex theoretical framework that we could just apply to everything and that there was a secret, you know, the secret morning routine that the billionaires don't want you to know or the powerful affirmations that come from the ancient Vedic texts that no one has translated before. Like, no, it just goes secret. Do the thing. It's good. You just have to do it. Just go do the fucking thing. Learn how to do it when you don't wanna do it. Yeah, pretty much especially. This is from research from an episode last year. But I remember there was, so there was a meta-analysis last year that came out around interventions for depression. Oh, yeah. And it looked at everything across the board. And I remember it went viral because the number one thing that they found, they did kind of a ranking similar to what we did here. And the number one thing that they found was exercise. So obviously that got a lot of attention. But it was interesting because a few weeks later, one of the psychologists that I follow on Twitter, he got curious and he went and looked at the source studies that fed into that meta-analysis to see what exercise. And the funny thing was it didn't fucking matter. It was like literally just walking in the park was 98% as effective as the most intense gym routine. Dancing was super effective, lifting any weights, like doing anything, swimming, and basic kegels workout. He's like fucking anything, just doing a thing, just doing a fucking thing. it's it's absolutely maddening, you know, there There is a classic self-help book called Feel the Fear and Do it anyway by Susan Jeffries. She has probably been vindicated on this. I would like to break it down a little bit more minutely because it's easy to sit here and just tell people over and over to just do it. Just do it, bro. So I talk about, in subtle art, I talk about this. I've got you two, I've been talking about this for years, but I call it to do something principle, which is the biggest misconception that I think people have around this is that when they're in that sloth-like state that you were in, they have this mistaken belief that inspiration or motivation has to strike, that it's like, well, I'll get off the couch when I feel like doing it. Yeah, I feel like doing it. When it's the other way around, it's the way to feel better is by getting off the couch. Motivation is not the cause of action, it is the effect of action. And so when you are in a situation like that, where you're like, my God, I'm disgusting. I'm like a puddle on my couch. I haven't done anything useful in three days. I need to get up and do something. And you start imagining all the things that you wish you were doing and you're not doing and that overwhelms you, it feels like a lot. You're like, oh my God, I can't even imagine. Like, the amount of willpower that's gonna take. Again, if you're thinking in terms of willpower, you're already losing, we covered that. What works is you just take all those things you wanna do and you just find the smallest viable thing that feels doable in that moment. So in your case, it was just like cleaning up the house a little bit, right? It's like, I'm gonna go take out the garbage or let me go make the bed. Like that's another huge self-help book, right? Just make your bed. Again, I think probably the large percentage of the value of that book is simply that it's getting people who are prone to not doing things to do something. Do it first thing in the morning, build a habit out of it and that way it creates momentum for the rest of your day. And so when we were developing purpose our AI coaching app, I did a lot of market research into like various mental health apps, you know, different things that are people use. There's one that's been blowing up the last couple of years. It's called Finch. It's almost comically simple. Like you get this little baby bird and you have to like take care of it and the way you take care of it is by completing actions throughout your day. And the actions are hilariously simple. It's like brush your teeth, gives you five points. Take a shower, it gives you five points. Go for a walk, gives you like 10 points. Eat a meal, gives you five points. And I remember sitting there like hitting the, I'm like, yes, I ate a meal today. Yes, I took a shower today. And I'm just like accumulating all these points and my baby bird is growing. And I'm like, this is so ridiculous. (laughing) But then there's a certain logic to it that first of all, it gets a little bit addictive and you keep like wanting to find, like cause obviously once you get past taking a shower and eating food, it actually starts giving you kind of more meaningful things to do with your day. And I was like, okay, so I actually see the logic behind this. And it turns out like if you read the user reviews online and you go look at their community and they're like, people rave about it. They're like, I couldn't get out of bed for months. This app got me out of bed. Now I'm actually doing things with my life. We want to imagine it's complicated that it's hard to understand that we have to listen to multiple five hour long podcasts to know how to do a thing. When really it's like the most effective intervention you can do, it's just do the thing. It's like do something. - Question, does your baby bird die if you don't do the things? How does that go? (laughing) Yeah, or you don't know. You never let it get to that. - Yeah, maybe we should go back and look. Try to resuscitate my dead baby bird. - You know how we almost in previous episodes we've almost always opened in some way with Aristotle, right? - Oh boy. You had to go find one. - I'm not, no, I'm not shoehorn in this and there's actual, there's an actual, it actually kind of marries this whole do something principle with the fake until you make it even too. Aristotle, I think we've mentioned this before. He actually said the way that you become virtuous is through your actions. - Through action, yes. - If you want to be brave and courageous, you must behave bravely and courageously. If you want to be an honest person, known as an honest person, you have to engage in honest interactions with people. This goes all the way back to that even too. And kind of it's kind of like the fake until you make it, but it's also very much just that you have to act. - Yes. - Like your virtue, your life, who you are is only developed through your actions. - Yes, I think identity follows action, right? Like you are, I believe it originates with Aristotle where he says like you are what you do repeatedly. - Right, right. - Therefore, excellence is a habit, not a practice. And this is why fake until you make it works. It's not comfortable, it's not easy. It doesn't necessarily feel good. Sometimes you feel like you're lying or you're an imposter, but it's why it works. It's if you do an action repeatedly, you eventually become that sort of person. - Yeah, you talk about it in terms of building evidence a lot. - Yes. - That's what I've heard you say. - You have to build the evidence around this. If you want to take on a new identity, you have to have evidence for identity. It's if you want to be a fit person, it's not about your body fat percentage or how you look in the mirror. It is somebody who is regularly working out and developing fitness. And there's an interesting chain here of identity follows action and I think emotions tend to follow identity in terms of like we talked about on the ego episode, how whatever our identity is, we will psychologically defend it, right? So it's if something challenges that identity, we will become angry or scared or envious or whatever. So it's like the actions lead to the identity, the identity leads to the emotions and then obviously the emotions lead to your subjective wellbeing. (upbeat music) - One thing I sought to and I kind of pointed this out earlier was just kind of the arc of how we think about these things. Positive psychology was kind of all the rage back in the 90s and into the 2000s. There was all these studies coming out about it, that you had these huge effect sizes and then the real kind of science had to come in behind it and be like, well, okay, here's some boundaries on it. The effects aren't necessarily as big. So it was really good to get caught up like on all of this research that's going on for the last decade or so that I knew a lot of these older studies and this was good to see. Science works, it's just slow. - It is, it is. - You know, we went through the replication crisis. It feels like we're kind of coming out of that a little bit and we're starting to get a better, more nuanced picture of all of these things. - Seven of the top 10 originated in the ancient world which I think is very interesting. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Most of the new stuff is pretty close to the bottom of this list. (laughing) If you look at the bottom five, it's pretty much all stuff that's from the last 50 years. - Yeah, a lot of comments. - Except for, yeah, except for maybe intuitive decision making. The other thing that I noticed, we've already mentioned a couple times that the bottom of this list is pretty much just indulging your emotions is that hurt too. I would say the middle of this list is it's very cognitively focused or physically focused, right? So you're either trying to alter your body or you're trying to adopt the right framework or mindset in your mind. Pretty much all the stuff that like either is placebo or only works in very specific contexts is cognitively driven or biologically driven. Everything at the top of this list is action-based. It actually involves you doing a thing. (laughing) - Yeah. - Whether you're meditating or you're eating the frog or you're reading a book or you're practicing gratitude, like you are actively doing something. Whereas everything in the middle of the list, it's like, oh, I figured out your learning style. Practice your power poses, recite your affirmation. Like these are all very cognitively driven things. All if not the majority of the value is driven from the perception that they're doing something much more than what they're actually doing. - One of my real big takeaways from this was just how like individual and personal all of this can be. So like if we chat on one of your favorite little methods or whatever, like don't take it too personally. It's just like this is what the research says so far. - Yes. - And then not only that, if it works for you great. - Yeah. - Like even the crystal healing, if that's working for you. - Sure. - Hey man. - Just don't go around claiming it's, you know. - So I can bring like crystals to the next episode. - You can't just run. - So when you're just saying that? - They're rubbing, just don't rub them. - They're rubbing, you were like, that's the best part. - Oh, it was uncomfortable. - That's the best part. - It was uncomfortable. - That's actually most of the therapy of value. (laughing) - That's where you get that therapy. - Rubbing my crystals as if they're large boost. - If it works for you fine. And this is why like I think too, it's like I try not to just tell people, oh you have to do this or that. I think you're right in saying that the only one we think you really should do is go do something. - That's mandatory. - Yeah. It's really the do something principle. I would say is the one mandatory thing. Even if you want to call it fake it's leave. Like I do think it's mandatory. Like at some point in your life, you're going to be in a situation where you, there is something you need to do that you don't feel like doing. And so you have to get good at that. That is, like if I had a child and I was raising them and I was looking at this list of like okay, what do I want to teach my kid? I would probably cross off everything in the bottom 10. The next five, I would kind of keep dry. Yeah, I would like see like how his or her personality would develop what they're into or whatever, maybe introduce them to a couple of things. But it's like really the, I'd say the top three or four, I would be like. to me would be mandatory, right? So behavioral activation and do something principal, read books, eat the frog, so task prioritization, and then I would have them at least try meditation. - Yeah, I think it was James Clear who said in his book, he's like, "Do the things you have to do "so you can do the things you wanna do." - Yeah. - I think that's a good way to put it as well, like there's some behavioral activation, some eat the frog in there too. Again, I think though too, it's just like, I really like that a lot of this is, you can personally experiment with a lot of this stuff. And that's what I think the big takeaway is, is like personal experimentation around this stuff, find what works for you. And if it works for you great, and you don't have to proselytize it or anything like that, you don't have to, it's not a religion. - And it's also very likely it will work for a while, and then it will stop working. - That's the other thing I think I realized definitely too, is that like, especially when you get into something new, like it's gonna work right away. There's probably some publicity will affect with all of these things. - Yes. - And another big takeaway was just doing anything, just doing anything that was somehow positively related to you doing getting closer to what you want or what you, who you want to be. - Yeah. - Any of it. That's great. That's just a good starting point. - I think I might give eating the frog another shot. - Yeah. - I might try that in the next couple months. It's like, maybe take a week and just try to really do the most important thing first thing in the morning. That's not solely based on this episode. I'd noticed that I've been fucing around a little bit more than usual in the mornings and being kind of slow to ramp up into useful valuable stuff. So I might give that a shot. - All right. You can tell us how that goes. - I will. I will. You're gonna have to listen to it. You will have to, the these people, they can turn us off, but you're gonna have to sit there and listen to it. Be sure to check out the Purpose Coaching app. It is at purpose.app. We have free seven day trial. It is kind of crazy. How quickly it can spot your weaknesses and inconsistencies. So if you want your bullshit called, check that out and be sure to follow, leave a review. Like and subscribe. Smash that like button, bro. - Smash it. - Smash it. And we will see you next time. - Bye.