In this episode, Spencer Greenberg discusses the 12 levers that actually help you change your life and explains why lasting personal growth isn’t about finding a single breakthrough technique—it’s about knowing which tool fits the challenge you’re facing. Drawing from his new book, The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit for Improving Your Life, Spencer shares how nearly 500 self-improvement methods can be organized into 12 core psychological strategies. He also explore habit change, values, fear, acceptance, and thinking more clearly, while showing why understanding the root cause of a problem is often the key to creating meaningful, lasting change.
Free Guide: Outsmart the Hidden Saboteurs of Self-Control. What’s been holding you back lately? In this free guide, Eric shares the six common saboteurs that quietly derail our best intentions—like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, and emotional escapism—and offers practical strategies to help you regain control and move forward. Download your free copy at oneyoufeed.net/ebook.
Key Takeaways:
- Why self-improvement techniques can be organized into 12 core psychological levers
- How understanding the root cause of a problem leads to more effective change
- The ABC method for uncovering the thoughts and beliefs behind difficult emotions
- Why analyzing your past successes is one of the most effective ways to build new habits
- How identifying your values, priorities, and guiding principles leads to better decisions
- Why gradually facing fear is more effective than avoiding it
- The difference between accepting reality and approving of it
- How resistance often creates more suffering than the problem itself
- Practical ways to recognize and challenge distorted thinking
- Why personal growth works best as a toolbox—not a search for a single solution
Spencer is an entrepreneur and mathematician with a focus on improving human well-being through social science. He’s the founder of ClearerThinking.org, which provides more than 70 free tools and training programs related to topics like decision-making and cognitive biases, used by hundreds of thousands of people. He’s also the founder of Spark Wave, a startup foundry that creates novel software products from scratch designed to solve problems in the world. Spencer has a Ph.D. in applied math from New York University, with a specialty in machine learning, and a Bachelor of Science degree from Columbia University. Spencer’s work has been featured by numerous major media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, the Independent, the New York Times, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Fast Company, and the Financial Times.
Connect with Spencer Greenberg: Website | Twitter | Clearer Thinking Podcast | The Intrinsic Values Test
If you enjoyed this conversation with Spencer, check out these other episodes:
Tiny Habits for Behavior Change with BJ Fogg
Behavior Change with Dr. John Norcross
How to Integrate Behavior Change with Your Values with Spencer Greenberg
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Episode Transcript:
Spencer Greenberg 00:00 If your friend asks you for feedback on their play and you know that they want to be told, oh, it was great, it was fantastic. But that’s not how you honestly feel. Well, there’s a fundamental trade off. You have to decide how much does it matter to you to prioritize them feeling good about what you say versus being honest?
Chris Forbes 00:00:07 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer: 00:00:49 Spencer Greenberg tested 20 habit change techniques on hundreds of people tracking who stuck with their habits and who didn’t? 15 of the 20. Strategies failed outright, including one with years of research behind it. So what worked? Spencer tells the story in this conversation, and the answer might be simpler than you would expect. It fits the way that he thinks. No silver bullets, just a toolbox and the skill of knowing which tool fits which moment. His new book, The 12 Levers, sorts nearly 500 self-help methods into 12 strategies, and we spend the hour walking through them. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hello, Spencer. Welcome back.
Spencer Greenberg 00:01:37 Thanks for having me, Eric.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:39 Yeah. You were a guest. I don’t know how long ago. I’m terrible with time, but it’s probably been for four years by now.
Spencer Greenberg 00:01:45 Something like that.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:46 Yeah. Yeah, but I’m happy to have you on because we’re going to be discussing your latest book, which is called The 12 Levers The Complete Psychological Toolkit for improving your life. And one of the things that I love about your work in general is that you’re really, really good at synthesizing a lot of different information, finding patterns, and laying it out in a really useful way. And this book is yet another example of that, and we’ll get into it in a moment. But we’ll start, like we always do, with the parable. And in the parable there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two roles inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Spencer Greenberg 00:02:54 Since I know that you always ask about that. I was reflecting on it this morning and thinking, well, what does this mean to me? And it actually got me thinking in a different direction than I ever thought about it before. So I appreciated that prompt. And I started thinking, what makes the bad wolf bad? And my thinking was, okay.
Spencer Greenberg 00:03:11 The bad wolf has fear, the bad wolf has greed, the bad wolf has hatred. But what are those things? Well, greed is desire that’s excessive. And desire itself is not bad, right? And hatred is anger that’s gotten excessive a lot of times. And anger isn’t necessarily bad. It can be bad, but it could be righteous anger that’s actually justified. That helps motivate useful actions. And so I started thinking, maybe the bad wolf is bad because it’s been fed too much. Maybe it’s not just the dichotomy of oh, don’t feed the bad wolf. It’s like you’ve overfed the bad wolf, and that’s what’s made it bad.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:44 I love that I don’t think anybody has said exactly that thing, and I couldn’t agree more. I mean, the more I think about life, the more convinced I become that most any trait, its best expression is, you know, somewhere in between too much of it and it’s a problem, too little of it. And it’s a problem. And I think you’re exactly right.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:04 Like desire is natural, normal, and actually part of the positive energy that moves us. And too much of it is greed. That’s a really great take. Okay, let’s move into the book because I want to just read what you say here. You say the premise of the book is that from a bird’s eye view, all self-help techniques collapse into just 12 broad strategies. We call these the 12 levers. If you know the 12 levers, understand how to apply them and put them into action, you can meaningfully improve your life. So talk to me about the difference first between a technique and a strategy, or what you’re calling a lever.
Spencer Greenberg 00:04:52 Yeah, a lot of times self-improvement books, they talk about stories about the person’s life, and that’s understandable. It provides motivation, and it can also make you connect with the reader and so on. And sometimes it talks about theory. But in my view, a lot of times the most useful aspects are actually the techniques which are the concrete, specific things that you can do, because that’s actually what you have control over, right? You can do the technique, you can’t do the story, you can’t do the theory, you can do the technique.
Spencer Greenberg 00:05:19 And the way this book began is my colleague Jeremy Stevenson and I, we had this intuition that we kept seeing similar patterns throughout self-improvement. We’re both self-improvement fanatics. We love trying to improve ourselves and learning about different methods. And we were like, but what’s the sort of high level meta on it all? What’s sort of the underpinning patterns? So we set out to write this book by first reviewing over 100 different self-improvement books and taking every single method that they give you and everything they say to do and extracting it. And from this we generated this database of almost 500 different methods. We also include therapies like cognitive behavioral Therapy Act and so on as well. So we have this giant database of all the different techniques. And then we start asking ourselves okay what’s the pattern here. And as we start categorizing them carefully that’s where we came up. The 12 levers, these 12 psychological strategies. And each of them is very broad and each encompassing dozens or sometimes even hundreds of different techniques. But that kind of gives you the meta pattern. And then for each of the levers we can talk about, well, how do you apply that in the most useful way?
Eric Zimmer 00:06:22 And I’m assuming that the best self-help book written in the last 50 years, namely mine, did not make it in time for the analysis.
Spencer Greenberg 00:06:31 Unfortunately not. It was a little. It took us too long to write our book.
Eric Zimmer 00:06:34 kidding! Okay, I love this and because I like to do pattern matching too. And I’ve, you know, had so many of these interviews and interviewed so many different people. But what I love is that I think you have a very rigorous mind for this. So I really appreciated the way you went about this. And I think the thing for us to do is just cover as many of the different levers as we can in our next period of time. So I’m going to start with the first one, because I think it is the most foundational one to to any of the rest of them making sense. And the first lever is called unravel the causes, understand the problem. Talk to me about this.
Spencer Greenberg 00:07:16 Yeah. So a lot of times when people are struggling with something, they think they understand what the thing is that they’re struggling with, but actually there’s a deeper level of understanding that they haven’t fully unlocked. And that deeper level of understanding can be game changing. To give a silly example, suppose your clock is not working and you just try changing things at random like you replace the batteries. It still doesn’t work. You try moving the wheel, you know, you move it around quickly and it doesn’t work. You bang on it, it doesn’t work. But it turns out that one of the gears is missing. Well, until you figure out that gear is missing, it’s hopeless. You’re never going to fix that clock. But as soon as you recognize. Oh, it’s that gear that’s missing. Well, now you can solve it. And I think many of life’s challenges are like that, where we kind of have a vague understanding. The clock’s not working, but if we dive deeper, it actually can give us a causal story that lets us take strategic actions that actually work.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:05 So let’s apply this to what a lot of people go to self-help for, which is I don’t feel good inside. Right? I might be able to categorize it as sadness or depression or anxiety, but those are still very broad problems. How would someone do you think maybe start going about applying this lever to that vague of a feeling, which is like, I want to change because I don’t like how I feel?
Spencer Greenberg 00:08:34 Yeah. So in the 12 levers book, we give a number of specific strategies you can walk through to help you unravel these causes. But I’ll walk you through one now, which is the ABC Technique, which is a really powerful one. And you start with the A, the activating events. And the question is when do you feel that thing? Let’s suppose we’re dealing with sadness. When do you feel sadness? Try to get really specific because presumably you don’t feel sad every second of every day. So there’s a moment when you start feeling sad throughout the day, even if you feel sad a lot. What preceded that moment? You know, did you just miss a call from a friend? Do you just have a conversation with your partner? Did you just go to your job? And for different people, that’s going to be very different things. And noticing what the activating event is. The clue, it’s a hint. Why are you feeling sad? And this brings us to the B, which are beliefs which can also include thoughts. Because often after the activating event, there’s something happening internally. There’s some thought you’re having next. It may not always be an explicit thought. You know, you hear a voice in your mind, but there’s some kind of implicit thought. A lot of times. And so the question is what is that thought? So for example, let’s suppose you find that you tend to feel sad at work, but not when you’re at home. Okay. That’s interesting. Well, what is that thought when you’re about to go to work? That’s about your work. When the sadness starts coming on, is it? Oh, man, I’m never going to have the career I want.
Spencer Greenberg 00:09:53 Or is it? Oh, geez. Like, I’m so sad that I didn’t get that promotion or, you know, it could be so many different things for different people. But noticing what that belief is that actually the second kind of critical step to unlocking the causal story. And then the final piece is the see in the ABC method, which is consequences. So how are you behaving based on this and what are the emotional consequences? You know, what’s actually happening to you as a result. And applying this is the simple technique, but applying it can help you figure out what’s really going on. And that can help you make better strategies to solve it.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:28 Yeah, I think that’s really valuable advice because getting specific allows us to at least approach part of the problem. We may need to do ABCs in four different ways before we fully puzzle it out, but it’s the nonspecific nature of things that often make it so challenging. Later in the book, you talk about choice points, which I talk about in my book, and one of the benefit of a choice point, which is kind of when you’re on the horns of making a decision, is that you can narrow into that moment.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:58 It gives you a slice of time to examine what’s going on inside you. That that makes it not this general I was thinking about. For me, I have this one, and I’m just giving an example kind of to give listeners over one from my own life. And I’ve shared it before, but I have this thought that will pop into my head from time to time. It’s a sequence of words that shows up, and they are some version of basically, I wish I was dead and I was like, what on earth is that? And when I when I traced it back, I realized it’s when I don’t know the answer to something.
Spencer Greenberg 00:11:39 Oh. Interesting.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:40 Right. And then, you know, the consequence of that is. Then I’m kind of walking around with that mood. When I saw it, I was like, oh, I see what it is. And now I mostly can laugh at it because it’s oftentimes something like, I can’t decide whether it’s a day to shampoo my hair, and my brain is like, I wish I was dead. And I’m like, settle down. But getting specific.
Spencer Greenberg 00:12:02 So interesting about it. There’s that connection there for you, right? Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:12:05 Or the other way that triggers is if I know I have to disappoint someone. So for whatever reason and I could go back and unpack childhood reasons, all that is true, which could be valuable. But also just knowing that like, oh, this is exactly what it is when that comes up. And I’ve just learned how I talk to myself in those moments that mostly now I just kind of notice the thought. I’m like, that’s odd, and I glide by it. But for a long time I didn’t understand that mechanism.
Spencer Greenberg 00:12:35 Yeah, that’s such a good example. And there might even be deeper causes to unlock, saying, well, why is it that when you don’t know what to do, you have those specific thoughts rather than someone else could just feel frustration or annoyance or whatever, but you’re having that specific thought. So there might be something interesting and you may well have unpacked it already, but there could be further to explore to figure out the deeper cause.
Eric Zimmer 00:12:55 Yeah, exactly. What I noticed was when I got sober the second time, the thought was, I need a drink. That’s what that caused. And when that thought kind of got washed out with the, you know, basically I don’t drink anymore. And I have it for a while, that thought kind of died down. And then this other one, which actually sounds worse. You’re like, wish you were dead. That’s serious, came in its place. But that actually, I think is probably closer to what the original thoughts were for me way back before I ever drank. Yeah.
Spencer Greenberg 00:13:28 That’s interesting.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:29 Okay, I also want to do the bright spot analysis aspect of this of unravel the causes, understand the problem because I think this is a different frame but can also be really useful.
Spencer Greenberg 00:13:44 Yeah. So a lot of times when people have recurring problems, they think, oh, I’m always this way or, you know, I’m always unhappy or, you know, I never feel good anymore. And then the question is always, are you sure? It’s always because what if is that always? And let’s pay attention to that.
Spencer Greenberg 00:13:59 Are there times when you actually do feel happy, even if it’s not that often or not that happy? And those can be really interesting to zoom in on. So this is the bright spot analysis. It’s looking for the times when there are positive exceptions and saying what can we learn from that? When you did last feel happy even if you don’t usually ever feel happy, what was going on? Who were you with? What were you doing? And this might actually unlock something about why you’re struggling to feel happy.
Eric Zimmer 00:14:24 Yeah, I love that. You know, a lot of what I end up talking with people about is like behaviors, you know, how do we change our behaviors and when one way of looking at a challenge around solving a behavior is to look at the times that it didn’t work. You know, why didn’t I do it? What happened? But it is equally instructive to look back and go, what was happening like when I was consistent with that thing for three weeks? What was happening? How was that working? Because there’s a lot to learn from both. You know, obviously the times that were not successful, but the times we are really valuable.
Spencer Greenberg 00:15:01 We have some really interesting data on this actually.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:03 So please.
Spencer Greenberg 00:15:03 We ran a giant study on habit formation asking the question, what really helps people stick to their habits over the next 4 to 8 weeks? And we tried many different things. We actually tested 20 different techniques in this giant study on hundreds of people tracking them and how well they stuck to their habits. And fascinatingly, most of the techniques failed. About 15 out of the 20 totally bombed. They didn’t help people at all, but the single most promising technique that came out of our research is one that we call habit reflection. And it’s actually based on this idea that you’re talking about. You think about a habit you succeeded at in the past, and then you say to yourself, what did I do that helped me succeed at that habit? Was it that I told a friend about it? Was it that I wrote a note on my mirror? Whatever it was, then you write down and I really would recommend writing it down.
Spencer Greenberg 00:15:51 Not just saying in your head, how can I apply what I learned from that habit to this new habit I’m trying to form? And when we had people do that, they actually stuck with the habit more reliably and were more satisfied with their habit by the end. And it’s such a simple technique, you can do it in five minutes. It seems to work really quite well.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:08 I’m glad to hear that that is what worked. What are some of the ones that just bombed?
Spencer Greenberg 00:16:13 Oh man. Well, one of the ones that we thought was going to work because there’s a lot of evidence for it in the research literature, is we thought that the whoop technique would work. Well. You think about what you’re trying to achieve, you think about an obstacle, it stands in your way. Then you make a specific kind of effect and plan of like when that obstacle comes up. I’m going to do this to solve it. And there’s a lot of evidence that can work for different things. But in our study, it totally bombed. It didn’t work. And I don’t know why. I don’t know whether it’s just in this particular application for habit formation, it doesn’t work as well, or if the research is going to overstate its effectiveness or it was just an unlucky fluke. So I don’t want to say it doesn’t work in general, but.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:51 Well, my thought and the way I approach that sort of if then planning, like here’s what I’m going to do, is that it’s only part of the thing. It alone as a technique isn’t sufficient, right? It’s a tool that helps bolster lots of other strategies that actually do work. But I wouldn’t say as a strategy on its own, it would necessarily be effective. I think that’s the thing that gets so tricky about so many of these things, right, is it’s like, well, if you’ve got 20 interventions, does 18 work good? If it’s paired with four and three, which is why all the data is so valuable. And then what works for me? Because we’re different.
Spencer Greenberg 00:17:33 Absolutely. And I think this is something that’s honestly a huge misconception in the self-improvement world in general. I don’t think you make you have this misconception, but I think a lot of people do that. There’s going to be a silver bullet. And, you know, there are a lot of people out there being like, I did this one thing and it changed my life and everyone needs to do it. And they’re like, okay, hold on. Even if it’s a really good technique, even if it’s really effective, it’s still not going to work for everyone, guaranteed. It’s not going to work for everyone. You’re going to need to try different things. And some people, they’re going to try it, okay, it’s gonna be amazing. And then a bunch of people who try it, it doesn’t work for that.
Eric Zimmer 00:18:26 Yeah. One of my favorite sort of anecdotes or stories about this is Jack Kornfield. The The Meditation teacher tells a story about one of his teachers named Ajahn Chah. It is a Thai forest monastery. And one of the students went to Ajahn Chah and said, like, what’s going on? I ask you a question. You tell me this, but he asks you a question, you tell him something different. And Ajahn Chah says, look, if I see somebody walking down the road and they’re way off to the left and they’re going to fall in the ditch to the left, I say, go right, go right. If I see somebody else who’s walking along the far right and is about to fall into the ditch that way, I said, go left, go left. And I love that story because it just shows that what we need just depends on where we are, who we are, what the circumstances are, and I. But I don’t think that means that work isn’t valuable, like the kind of work that you’re doing or hopefully the work that I’m doing, because it does give you ideas and thoughts. But ultimately what works for you is the the indicator. And it’s part of what I love about your work is I do think there’s not always nearly enough nuance in this field. And I love the nuance and thought that you bring to what you do.
Spencer Greenberg 00:19:36 Oh thank you. Thank you, I appreciate that. And I think that kind of thinking also motivates the toolbox approach, which is really what I prefer. Not all techniques are equally good. I don’t think all techniques should be taught, but I do think that there’s a powerful toolbox of techniques that, yes, almost everyone should know about. And because you don’t know which of them are going to work for you or in which situation, but having the full set of tools is really good. And that’s what we really try to do. In the 12 levers in the book. We try to teach you the toolbox.
Eric Zimmer 00:20:03 Yeah, it is a very systematic guide to the tools to pull out. Let’s go in order for a second lever, too, because I think it’s a pretty big one. Right?
Spencer Greenberg 00:20:11 I think it’s a you lever also.
Eric Zimmer 00:20:13 Yeah, yeah. Uncover your guiding foundations. Clarify what matters most. Talk to me about this one.
Spencer Greenberg 00:20:20 Yeah. So this is an interesting one where me and my co-author have a little bit of a different perspective, and then we kind of bring them together because I think they’re complementary. I’m a really big values person. And in particular, I like to think about intrinsic values, which are the things that you value most fundamentally. You value them for your own sake. You’d want them even if they got you nothing else. So examples would be maybe people value their own pleasure, but they also value like love and connection. They value freedom. They value longevity. I think humans tend to have lots of values, but they’re different for different people. And some people will have, you know, a strong value of freedom. Some people that won’t be so important, but they’ll really value love and connection and so on. And so I really emphasize trying to figure out not just what you value, but what you intrinsically value. Because most of what we value, we don’t value it fundamentally. We value because it gets us other things.
Spencer Greenberg 00:21:06 So for example, you know, someone values having a car. Well, why do they want a car? Do they intrinsically value a car? No. They value because it gives them the freedom to go do things, evaluate because they think it’s going to give them social status because it’s a cool car or whatever it is. So I really have an emphasis on trying to understand your intrinsic values. And in fact, we have a free intrinsic values test on our website, Clearer Thinking org, which you can check out if you’re curious. It helps you figure out your intrinsic values. But my co-author, he really likes to approach this a little bit differently by thinking in terms of priorities like what is your life priority right now? Do you want to focus on fitness and health? You know, do you want to focus on developing your interpersonal relationships? And so we kind of hybridize that together and call it your guiding foundations. Your guiding foundations has really three parts to it has your intrinsic values. It has your priorities. But then also there’s another part which is your principles, which are basically rules of thumb about how you want to make decisions that help you support your values and priorities, such as you might have a principle of like always try to tell the truth or principle of family comes first, and that’s trying to put your values and your priorities into action in your daily decisions.
Eric Zimmer 00:22:09 So is it safe to say that the guiding principle is what you said? It’s sort of a way of combining those two into a simple statement.
Spencer Greenberg 00:22:19 Yeah, it’s sort of where the rubber meets the road because. Okay, okay. You’ve got these values and these priorities, but like how do you put them into action in your life. And your principles are basically saying you’re going to pre decide how you’re going to use them so that you do so effectively. So for example, if one of your strongest intrinsic values is truth or honesty, then you might have a principle around always try to tell the truth. And then when you have a decision to make about what do I do in this situation. Well, you just pull your principle, oh, I’m going to tell the truth. Like that’s my principle, right? And so it actually makes it easier than having to go back to your values every single time.
Eric Zimmer 00:22:53 I have like a guiding principle, which is to try and leave any person place thing situation better than it was when I got there. I’m not saying in any way, shape or form, I do it all the time. It’s just a very simple question to ask myself and give me like an opportunity to do something. And I think having some of those is really good. I love that you’re bringing these two things together, because I do think that people often get these mixed up, you know, a value being I value kindness, a priority being my family.
Spencer Greenberg 00:23:27 Exactly.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:28 And I haven’t heard it articulated that way. But to me I’ve got kind of both those things happening inside me at any given time. As you know, from having read my book and interviewed me, I’ve got a whole section on kind of finding these values and I’ve got exercises in the book, but I love your intrinsic values. Talk to me about the values wheel because I think this is important.
Spencer Greenberg 00:23:50 Yeah. So we actually did research on trying to figure out what are all the things that people intrinsically value. And remember, these are the deepest values. So they’re the ultimate goal of why you value other things. Right. And you might think, well, maybe there’s like a million different things that people intrinsically value. Or you might think, oh, there’s only one true thing. At the end of the day that everyone dies. But we found something in between. We found that there in our research, where we got people to submit what they thought they intrinsically valued. After going through a little training module to teach them about what intrinsic values are. We found about 3000, but then we realized most of them were duplicates or very similar to each other. So we did duplicate it and we analyzed it all, and we were able to boil them down to 22 different categories. And in each category there can be multiple specific ones.
Spencer Greenberg 00:24:32 But that’s kind of a way of grouping it and saying, okay, there’s quite a few different intrinsic values people have, and most people value each of these things at least a little bit. But people differ a lot, basically, on how strong each of their intrinsic values are. Some people have much stronger ones in one area than another. So for example, some people have really strong spiritual values and some people have like no spiritual values. Some people have really strong nature related values and people have no nature related values.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:55 Now I’ve seen another value wheels I think, which sort of talks about how values that are on opposite sides of the wheel often conflict with each other. Is yours have that or is yours is just more of a general categorization?
Spencer Greenberg 00:25:10 Well, most of the ways that people categorize values don’t distinguish intrinsic versus just values in general. So I think that’s what makes ours really distinctive, because we’re really only going to the deepest, the deepest part of values. Yeah. But I would argue that every intrinsic value can conflict with every other intrinsic value.
Spencer Greenberg 00:25:27 It’s not always equally likely to conflict, but I think they really can. And the reason is because you can always be in a situation where you have to choose between two of them. Do you go spend time out in nature, or do you go working hard to try to make money? Right? Well, the first could support a nature value and the second could support an achievement type value.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:44 Yeah, I talk about this like two of my fundamental values that sit very opposite each other. One is I have a value for I call it adventure. You could call it novelty, I don’t know, I mean, we could call it different things. And I also have a value of like being able to appreciate any moment I’m in exactly as it is. And these two pull on each other, you know, in your own life. How do you think about okay I’m facing a values to values conflict. How do you think about choosing you know, do you have any method in your mind?
Spencer Greenberg 00:26:20 Well, the first thing I like to try to do is really clarify what values are at stake. And often this actually makes the decision a lot easier, because the way we think about it naturally may not be in that form. A funny thing happened with a friend a number of years ago, where she was feeling really unhappy, and she came to me and asked to talk about it, and she knew it had something to do with her boyfriend, but she was very vague on like what exactly it was. And so I said to her, okay, so you think it’s related to your boyfriend? Let’s write down the ways that your boyfriend is like a really good person, right? What is the what are the values that that he reflects? And she wrote them down and I said, okay, I want you to write down your values now. And she wrote those down. And there was essentially no overlap in the lists. And then I said, okay, write down your parents values. And she wrote them down. It was like almost a perfect match to her boyfriend. I was like, okay, I think I maybe have identified the problem here.
Spencer Greenberg 00:27:09 You’re dating the person your parents would have chosen for you, rather than the person who reflects your deeper values. And just that was enough to really, I think, give her a lot of like, oh, we’ll have clarity on it, because once she’d framed it in terms of values, yes, there was a values conflict, but it made it so much easier. Right.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:25 Yeah. Those are fundamental challenges. My last marriage, I think, was one where we just had truly different values, which meant no amount of surface fixes that we would apply to the marriage, which we tried, would actually work because we just simply disagreed on what was important. I’m not going to say that having that disagreement is impossible to solve. In my case, it was right. They were so different from each other that it was the core problem, not me or her. Just like, okay, this match isn’t going well.
Spencer Greenberg 00:27:59 I think just to kind of add to that. So in your case, you found out, you know, you have this fundamental values conflict, right? Okay. In a lot of decisions we make, there will be fundamental values, conflicts. Like literally by promoting one value, you’re weakening another value. And I think there one thing that can be clarifying is to just recognize there isn’t a right answer. The answer is just on how much you value each of those things fundamentally. Right. There’s no correct objective answer for all people across all time. Of how much honesty is worth. How much harm? Right. If your friend asks you for feedback on their play and you know that they want to be told, oh, it was great, it was fantastic. But that’s not how you honestly feel. Well, there’s a fundamental trade off. You have to decide how much does it matter to you to prioritize them feeling good about what you say versus being honest?
Eric Zimmer 00:28:47 Yeah. And I think that basic statement is part of what makes life a challenge, right. Is that, like, these things don’t resolve themselves. They don’t just disappear. But I agree with you.
Eric Zimmer 00:28:59 I think being able to name them and know what values are at stake, it at least clarifies. And then for me, knowing there isn’t a resolution and like you said, there isn’t a right answer helps me just to relax a little bit around it and go, okay, no, no value gets honored perfectly all the time. There’s a there’s just a trade off between things.
Spencer Greenberg 00:29:21 Exactly. And I find just for my own values that if I neglect one it starts pulling harder. Right. Like, let’s say I’m not spending too much time with my, you know, my personal relationships. And they’re weakening a little bit. But I’m seeing a lot of time of achievement. Then I start feeling like actually, human connection is more valuable to me. I think that’s just something about our natures as humans that if we neglect values, that they tend to become more important.
Eric Zimmer 00:29:48 Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You’re not alone in this, and I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self-control things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here’s the good news you can outsmart them. And I’ve put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at oneyoufeed.net/ebook and take the first step towards getting back on track.
All right. I’m going to move us forward a little bit. And I’d like to talk about lever five. Approach the monster gradually confront your fears.
Spencer Greenberg 00:30:46 Yeah. So it’s really incredible the extent to which people are prevented from living by their values, by negative emotions and fear being the the most common one. But it could be other ones as well. It could be, you know, feelings of awkwardness or all kinds of negative emotions. And there’s this spiral that happens. It’s really common.
Spencer Greenberg 00:31:04 And I can talk about how it’s happened to me as well, where because you fear something, you avoid it, and when you avoid it, you get an immediate relief. And then that reinforces the behavior. Just like any kind of, you know, reinforcement. And then you avoid even more in the future and your kind of life gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Yeah. When I was young, I had really bad social anxiety, and it would get triggered in specific circumstances. For instance, if I was like at an event and I thought about talking to a stranger there, my heart would start pounding in my chest to the point where, like, I thought I was going to die. You know, it was like it was so intense at times. It would be so bad. It almost felt debilitating. And when I was finally in my early 20s, I said, I got to do something about this. This is ridiculous. Like, I’ve been dealing with this since childhood. And I went to a therapist and the therapist said, okay, I can help you, no problem.
Spencer Greenberg 00:31:52 But you’re not necessarily going to like the solution. I said, well, what’s the solution? He said, I’m going to give you homework. You’re going to go to bars every weekend. You’re not going to drink alcohol, you’re just going to go sober. You’re going to introduce yourself to five different strangers. And I thought, oh my God, that sounds impossible. And we started small gradually, right? We didn’t jump right in. The first thing was, okay, go up to people and ask what time it is, right? Really simple. What time is it? And then it was like a little harder. Go up to them and say, hey, what are you drinking? That looks good. And then at the end, the culmination has got harder and harder. The culmination was I would go up to men and say, hey, I know this is a weird question, but can I give you a hug? And my brain predicted like I was, you know, I was going to die, like they were going to kill me or whatever.
Spencer Greenberg 00:32:37 And the worst reaction I got was like a laugh, you know? Like, you know, nobody ever slugged me in the face. And it was remarkably effective. Like, really, ever since then, my anxiety has just been shockingly less around these kinds of scenarios. Now, I’m not going to say I have no social anxiety, but it’s kind of hilarious sometimes to be in a situation involving social things. And I’ll be like, I actually think less stress than the average person here was just kind of amazing.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:26 I had a moment yesterday. I was at a conference, and normally you put me in a room at a conference with a bunch of people you don’t know. Is about the only time that I think to myself, boy, a drink would actually help this situation. But I just had a moment where I realized I walked up to someone who I identified, and it was somebody I wanted to talk to. I walked up, I introduced myself, I started talking, I interacted in a fairly fluid way. I cracked a joke, and as I was walking away, I was like, wow, that’s a lot of progress. Like, I still don’t quote unquote like it. But I’m so far beyond where I was. And again, I think the way that I have gotten there is by just doing it a lot. You talk about when it comes to this, there are two contrasting forms of this exposure therapy. One is called flooding. The other, it sounds like the one that you did is gradual exposure. Is there any evidence that flooding is a good idea?
Spencer Greenberg 00:34:26 So flooding will you just, you know, jump right in right into the deep end can actually work remarkably well for some people. But it does have some really big drawbacks, which are that people are much more likely to just abandon ship in the middle, and that can actually reinforce their fears more. So generally, it’s usually not advisable. The other thing is it just can be so difficult. A lot of people aren’t willing to do it.
Spencer Greenberg 00:34:47 There’s a funny example I like to give here, which is imagine you’re scared of snakes and there are some non deadly but very scary looking snakes and you accidentally trip and fall into the pit of snakes. So the snakes all around you. But they’re not harmful. Now you’re going to be absolutely freaking out. But what do you think’s going to happen by hour 19 in the pit? Like, let’s assume that, you know.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:08 Assuming you don’t have a full psychic break.
Spencer Greenberg 00:35:10 Yeah. Like you’re actually going to be bored at some point. You’re just gonna be sitting in the pit like, oh, you wait till morning until they come and get me, you know? Now, you might be worried about other things like, you know, people finding you or whatever, but like, weirdly, your brain is just gonna burn out on the fear. You just cannot be afraid for that long. And there’s a pretty good chance at the end of that, as long as you really, genuinely get to the point where you’re truly bored by the snakes after enough hours, you might actually not be afraid of snakes anymore.
Spencer Greenberg 00:35:33 You might be afraid of pits. That’s another thing.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:35 Well, what happens though when you have an encounter like that? Like, let’s say you were thrown in the pit with the snakes and pulled out 20 minutes later.
Spencer Greenberg 00:35:45 See, there, you’ll probably be more afraid.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:46 You’re going to.
Spencer Greenberg 00:35:46 Be more.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:47 Irony.
Spencer Greenberg 00:35:47 Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:49 It’s funny, I have been thinking about this in relation to spiders. I don’t like spiders. I mean, it’s not like I see a tiny spider and I lose my shit, but a spider of a decent size deeply disconcerts me, and I started to think, maybe I should do spider exposure therapy, because I just simply don’t want to be bothered by it. Again, it’s not a problem I run into that often, but it’s also the sort of thing that makes me think, like, I’m not going to go hiking in the Australian outback, for Christ’s sake, because there’s going to be some big spiders out there. And I would love to. You know, I just don’t like anything that I feel like limits me. So I’ve contemplated spider exposure therapy.
Spencer Greenberg 00:36:27 It’s very effective. It’s very likely that you could learn to really not fear spiders or just tremendously reduce your fear fairly quickly in, you know, maybe eight sessions, something like that. And you kind of make a gradual exposure plan. And, you know, we go through all the details in the 12 levers, but you basically can make a plan where you start with like level one, what gives you a kind of a bit of discomfort around spiders? Like, I don’t know, maybe it would be like the word picture or the word. Okay. There you go. There you go. The word. Okay. So no, literally the word. That’s fine. So you literally would expose yourself to the word of spiders, and you kind of sit with that fear. And the idea is that you specifically don’t leave. Right. You got to sit with that fear until it starts coming down, and then you do it again. Okay. Look at the word again.
Spencer Greenberg 00:37:07 So with the fear until it goes down, etc., that might be level one. What would be level two for you? Like a little bit more stressful probably.
Eric Zimmer 00:37:12 Pictures.
Spencer Greenberg 00:37:13 Yeah. Okay a picture. Yeah. A picture maybe of a not horrendously ugly spider or something like that. And then you’re going to a level two. You’re going to practice just looking at the picture. Sit with the fear, you know. Don’t look away. Like look. Sit with it. Wait for the fear to start to fade. And then do it again. Maybe the next day. And you kind of build up and eventually, you know, you might get to. Maybe you’re going to go to a store that sells scary spiders, and you’re going to get right up to the cave to them. And maybe eventually, if you really want to get all the way and really cure, eventually you’re going to take a non deadly spider. It has to be non non non.
Eric Zimmer 00:37:43 Deadly non deadly.
Spencer Greenberg 00:37:44 And you’re going to put on your hand and you’re going to sit with it until you’re not afraid anymore.
Eric Zimmer 00:37:48 Yeah, I know the gradual nature of change enough to believe that would occur. And I’m like, yeah, right up to that last one. I’m like, all right, no, no. But well.
Spencer Greenberg 00:37:58 Okay. Part of the benefit of that hierarchy is also that at every step it doesn’t feel like that.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:02 Exactly.
Spencer Greenberg 00:38:03 The word doesn’t feel that scary, right? A picture isn’t that scary. But by the time you get to the highest step, which right now might feel horrendous, you’ve already gone to the level below, so it no longer feels like a giant step. Just you’re just walking up.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:16 Yep, there’s a lot more stuff in this chapter that’s really good about treating exposures and experiment, dropping safety behaviors, the stretch zone. But we’re going to move on because I think we’ve covered this well enough for now. And amazingly, time is just slipping bias. Do you have a favorite? Which one do you want to talk about? I’m picking, but what do you got? What happens to you right now?
Spencer Greenberg 00:38:37 One thing I picked this in part because it’s really important to me, but I think it’s so important to do is acceptance. And this comes up in our lever 11 choose your attitude. And it’s really about the idea that you can do all these things to try to improve your life. But sometimes the only thing left to do is to change the way that you look at things, and that it can be monumentally powerful to change the way you look at things and be like, wait for now. For this moment. I’m not going to try to change the world at all. I’m just going to try to change the way I look at the world so that it’s more healthy and helpful to me. And under that, the idea of cultivating acceptance, I think, is just really powerful.
Eric Zimmer 00:39:15 Just so people know, like you’ve got one on optimism, acceptance, stoic resilience, appreciation and kindness. But let’s talk about acceptance. My experience in the courses that I’ve taught over the years, one of the pillars is, you know, this ability to accept, and it is the one that people most say they have the hardest time with. It’s even higher than self-compassion as a thing like it is a real struggle. What are some techniques that can get me moving in that direction.
Spencer Greenberg 00:39:47 I think one of the first things people struggle with is they think, well, to accept something that would mean you want the thing to be that way, and you can understand why people think that, but that’s actually not true. You can accept horrendous things, like, for example, you can accept the fact that you’re going to die without wanting to die, or without being okay, or without wanting to die or without thinking. It’s like a good thing that you die, right? And so I think that’s the first thing is acceptance is distinct from desiring something, right?
Eric Zimmer 00:40:13 Or approving even.
Spencer Greenberg 00:40:15 Or approving or approving. Like you can accept that there’s evil in the world and you can still work to combat it even though you accept it. Right.
Eric Zimmer 00:40:22 Okay. So that’s part of it. You talk about a two step process. You say identify resistance in all its forms, then release it by doing the opposite. And and you list rumination, distraction, avoidance and fantasy as some of those resistance. So how do I use this. Identify my resistance and then do the opposite of it. Give me an example.
Spencer Greenberg 00:40:46 Right. Right. So what’s something in your life that you might. Maybe now or in the past you’ve struggled to accept?
Eric Zimmer 00:40:53 The reason this question gets tricky for me is that I actually, the more I look at this question, the more I realize that I’m both accepting and changing. Oftentimes the same thing. The thing that came to my mind was, for whatever reason, I’ve been on a streak of about a week of higher than average pain in anywhere in my posterior chain. Right. My hip. My, my.
Spencer Greenberg 00:41:15 That’s a good one. Pain. It is really hard to accept, but I think it’s actually a really good example. And I also right now I’m dealing with pretty significant daily pain. And so it’s I literally think about this using this technique on a daily basis for my pain. So maybe we should talk about its application to pain.
Eric Zimmer 00:41:30 Let’s do it.
Spencer Greenberg 00:41:31 Yeah. So here’s a very bizarre thing that you may have noticed, but many people will not have noticed unless they’ve paid really close attention, which is that if you try to say, well, what does pain actually feel like? And you really zoom down. These are the words zoom a lot in this conversation, but you really zoom down on the exact sensations of it. You can start to notice that there’s sort of two aspects to what you’re experiencing. There’s the literal sensation like what exactly it feels like, and then there’s sort of cognition around it. Like, this is bad, this sucks. Maybe it might not be verbalized for everyone, and it could just be like a sense of wanting to get away from it or to push it away, trying to make it stop. Those two layers, they could come together. So we often just think of them as one thing. Well, that’s what pain is. But if you start separating those layers, you realize that one of those layers is actually the resistance layer.
Spencer Greenberg 00:42:21 It’s the I want to get rid of this. And for example, if you have the thought, oh man, this sucks so much, am I? You know, my back hurts or whatever. That’s the resistance layer. And then you can start to notice that you’re having that thought. And then you can work from there towards acceptance, which is well what is the opposite. Well there can be different ways of approaching it. But one way to approach is to say, well, what would I say to myself instead? That cultivates an attitude of acceptance instead of oh, this sucks. Let’s say, for example, that you feel like you can live with the pain. You can say, I can live with this pain. I can heal this pain. I can still have a valuable life even when I have this pain. But it’s different for different people. There’s not like a one size fits all solution. But you have to think about what is the resistance you’re doing, which could differ for different people, and then what is the opposite of that? And that’s the acceptance frame.
Eric Zimmer 00:43:06 I quote sometimes the meditation teacher, Shenzhen Young, you probably have are aware of the equation of like he says, suffering equals pain. Times resistance and suffering is just like the total amount of yuck around something is kind of the way I think of it. Pain is the like you said, the actual sensations and then the resistance is like everything I’m doing around that. Like you’re saying, all the cognition, whether it’s I don’t want it, whether it’s like constantly massaging my shoulder, it’s just it’s attempt to make it go away. And the reason that equation is so valuable is that if you could turn the resistance down, the total amount of yuck goes way down, and you don’t have to change the underlying pain. And that’s good news because often we can’t.
Spencer Greenberg 00:43:50 Yeah, that’s the shocking thing is it sounds really hypothetical, but you can actually try this. And if you’re able to turn down the resistance, you’re like, wow, this is just not as bad. It’s not as bad as it was a second ago and I can live with it better.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:03 Yeah. I often look at like how I’m describing the pain to myself. You know, an example I use in my book and often is when my back hurts and I’m not consciously attending to it. My brain says some version of my back is killing. That’s what it says. Now, that is not the truth, you know. Or I’ll find my brain saying something like, I just can’t stand. And I’m like, well, that’s not true either. By adjusting the language a little bit, I, I turned down recently, my mother passed and she was in chronic pain for the last decade of her life.
Spencer Greenberg 00:44:37 And sorry.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:38 Looking back on it all now and again, I didn’t know this at the time. So this is not like I’m being really hard on myself, but I would have gotten her involved in the different forms of working with her pain mentally. We spent so much time trying to make it go away and we never could. And I believe that sometimes chronic pain becomes a hardwired signal.
Eric Zimmer 00:45:02 I think that had happened to her. I mean, I tried I’d exposed her to podcasts and I would give her books and but I think I would have really leaned in on one instead of thinking we were going to get it to go away. And then by the time I really was like, well, that’s what we have to do. Her cognitive abilities just weren’t where they needed to be to be able to take on that kind of work. And so I think about that now, kind of just having ended that episode and I think about it a lot, also like why I try and focus on like meditation and the spiritual practices I do is because I’m like, pain is a common right? Like it’s not getting better from here. You know, I’m not saying like it’s going to be all pain all the time. But the general tendency is the older you get, the more things don’t work right. I just really need to keep preparing for those moments like that. My mind is capable of being resilient and flexible enough to at least minimize the suffering that I do.
Spencer Greenberg 00:45:59 Yeah, and with these kind of tools, there’s less to fear. Sometimes people talk about the second arrow, right? The first arrow is, you know, the actual pain. The second arrow is all this resistance actually makes it so much worse. Yeah. It’s like you don’t need the second arrow. You can just deal with the first arrow.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:13 Which is enough, right? I mean, there’s lots of first arrows that suck. Okay. I want to go back for a second to lever seven, because lever seven is steward your thoughts, cultivate helpful thinking, and this is another one where you divide it. You know, you go 7.17.2, because there’s a lot of material in here, and I just love to talk through the the three different parts of this briefly. The first you call cognitive restructuring, right.
Spencer Greenberg 00:46:43 So one of the things that you start to notice, if you pay a lot of attention to your thoughts, is that your thoughts are not always helpful and your thoughts are not always true. But the weird thing is that when we’re having a thought, we often get stuck in it as soon as we call it fusion, like you’re in the thought.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:59 And yet you don’t know who you are. It’s that weird state.
Spencer Greenberg 00:47:02 Exactly like you. You know, you get cut off in traffic, you think, what an asshole. And then you’re just like, living in the thought of that person being an asshole. And that is the truth. That is the truth. You know, like, maybe it turns out you actually were violating the traffic laws, and that person didn’t really cut you off. But you’re in that moment. That is the reality and that is the truth. And it’s really interesting to take a step back from your thoughts and actually have a little story about this. This is part of how I became fascinated in psychology, which became my life’s work is. I first heard about this idea in cognitive behavioral therapy, which says that when you’re having intense emotions, your thoughts tend to get distorted.
Spencer Greenberg 00:47:37 And I thought that I don’t know if I buy that. That seems a bit of a crazy claim. And so one day when I was feeling really negative emotions, I just wrote down my thoughts. And then the next day I came back to them and reread them and I was like, Holy shit! They were right. My thoughts are worded really distorted by my emotion. I had never realized in my whole life.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:56 That’s a really powerful point, though, because the way that approach is often talked about is that your thoughts cause your emotions, but you’re describing that it also works the other way around, that your emotions can cause or distort your thoughts. And I think understanding the two way nature of that street is really valuable.
Spencer Greenberg 00:48:15 Yeah, it really is a two way street. If you have a thought like, let’s take an example, an event in the world, right. Suppose you do badly on a test in school, right? And you have a thought. Oh man, I’m a failure, right? Well, that thought’s going to obviously make you feel really bad.
Spencer Greenberg 00:48:29 You can put you in a bad mood or make you feel depressed. And then when you’re depressive, that tends to produce more depressive thoughts. And so now you might have a thought like, oh, the world would just be better without me. And what’s that thought going to do? It’s gonna make you feel even worse as you get this downward spiral. Things can just get worse and worse and worse.
Eric Zimmer 00:48:47 Yeah, I noticed this years ago. I was like, okay, I get the cognitive restructuring, which is enormously valuable as a tool. But I was like, there are times I just feel crappy and I haven’t even had time to think anything yet. Like I noticed it like waking up. I was like, I just kind of wake up and it seems like there’s a weather system there. And then whatever that weather system is, is what all my thoughts look like. It’s like when I’m sick. As an example, my thoughts turn really dark when I’m sick. I can’t turn them off when I’m sick, but I at least now go, okay.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:24 This physical state of being run down physically is going to cause me to think that life has no point. And again, it’s that going both ways. Let me ask you a question. How do you go about working with this? So let’s say you notice this thing because sometimes it seems cognitive restructuring helps. Other times it seems like the emotion is ramped up too high for cognitive restructuring to work. So talk to me about when you think it’s useful and when maybe there’s a different tool you want to bring to the table. And by cognitive restructure. And I just want to use in the technical term, which basically means you examine your thoughts and you try and make them more accurate with what reality is.
Spencer Greenberg 00:50:06 Right? Yeah. I like to think of it as you want to think about replacing that thought with a thought that’s at least as accurate and more helpful, right? You don’t want to delude yourself. And this is a problem with some self-improvement literature. It’s trying to get you to delude yourself. And it’s like, that’s good.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:21 For a certain class of people. That simply does not work. And I know listeners of this podcast are those people. They’re like, I can’t believe something I don’t believe.
Spencer Greenberg 00:50:30 Absolutely. And trying to believe something that is not true also, or is exaggerated, can cause friction with the world, because that’s not the way the world works, because there’s all kinds of problems. So the idea is not to delude yourself. It’s to say another thought. It’s at least as accurate, but more helpful for this one. And there almost always is a thought like that you can generate if you take a moment to think about it. And there’s different ways to get to that thought, you know. So one technique is some people find it useful to consider the evidence for and against, and that can help them get to a more balanced thought. Other people they like to look for kind of common distortion. So there’s kind of a common list of the ways they get distorted. And you can kind of go through and see which of these distortions do I have.
Spencer Greenberg 00:51:07 But to your point, this technique tends to work when we have kind of a moderate level of emotion. As emotion gets higher and higher, it’s actually becomes difficult to engage cognitively, at least in an effective way. One way to think about it is that your emotions so intense it’s distorting your thoughts to such a high degree that it may be hard to even think in this way.
Eric Zimmer 00:51:27 Yeah. What do you recommend? Or what do you do yourself when you find yourself in that state? The way I often notice that I’m in that state is that I will try and restructure a thought, and it just my brain won’t have it right. It’s just it’s some form of like, no, it won’t engage or it just or it comes right back or I’m in an argument with myself. I’m trying to convince my brain one thing, and it’s convinced of something entirely different. And we’re not coming to terms.
Spencer Greenberg 00:51:55 Yeah. So in those really intense states, two things that tend to be effective for people are one, grounding based techniques.
Spencer Greenberg 00:52:02 They’re bringing you out of your head and into the physical reality, which could be as simple as, okay, sit. Notice three things that you can see around you. Just observe each of them. Notice three things you can hear. Observe each of them. And just grounding in the physical reality gets you out of your head and can start to settle down your system. And then the other kind of class of techniques that tends to be helpful. There are ones that use intense stimulation. That’s enough to sort of like move your attention away. And so an example of that take a cold shower can just zap you out of it. And you’re just like, now you’re focused on the coldness of the water rather than the tumult in your mind.
Eric Zimmer 00:52:39 Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that’s exactly why I created The Six Saboteurs of Self-control. It’s a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you’re ready to take back control and start making lasting changes. Download your copy now at oneyoufeed.net/ebook. Let’s make those shifts happen starting today when you book.
If we were doing levers in order, we would have covered leaver six, which comes before leaver seven that we’re talking about, which is shift your body to shift your mind, which is all these things that you’re talking about right now, like you can use your body to, to shift your mind. For me, I’m always kind of like which it’s sort of I’m trying to determine what’s the most useful place to intervene. It’s kind of back to your toolkit idea. It’s like knowing, okay, sometimes the thing for me to do is to just allow myself to experience the emotion, feel it, then ground myself in my body, calm my nervous system, and then take the cognitive approach. Other times, the cognitive approach is like cutting something off at the root.
Eric Zimmer 00:54:04 I just look at it and I go, well, that’s not true. And the whole thing vanishes, you know? And so knowing which of those to do when is what makes this an art to a certain degree.
Spencer Greenberg 00:54:15 Absolutely. And it could differ for different people. For me, I often start with the cognitive and then I’m not making progress. I’ll switch to other techniques like moving to grounding or body awareness and that kind of thing.
Eric Zimmer 00:54:26 Yeah, I found for me that I go back and forth. Sometimes I try and on the feeling, the emotion state, because I often that’s what gets cut short in me. I’m very good at cognitively like moving myself out of a difficult space, which is in general a very good skill unless I use it as a way to constantly avoid real emotion. And so balancing those are always kind of my two things.
Spencer Greenberg 00:54:55 There’s a really interesting point here, which is that sometimes people will suppress totally valid emotions, like they’ll try to talk them down or get rid of them.
Spencer Greenberg 00:55:04 For example, let’s say you lose something that you really care about. Let’s say, let’s say your dog dies, right? And people will feel sad about that, and then they’ll be trying to talk themselves out of feeling sad or, you know, trying to use cognitive techniques on the thoughts that are sort of making them feel less bad about it. And maybe actually what they need to do is say, my dog was important to me. When you lose something that’s important, you feel sad. That is the natural emotion. And I just need to sit with that emotion and maybe remember why I care about my dog, etc. at the same time, sometimes we really have inappropriate, excessive emotions in response to things, right? Like if your dog died three years ago and you find it every single day, you’re feeling sad today as a result, then almost certainly there’s something going on and some distortion thing that’s preventing you from healing.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:51 So to kind of wrap all this up, right, we’ve got these 12 levers and your book really lays them out and it’s got the techniques underneath them.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:59 How would you suggest somebody sort of take this and start using it or some part of it. Where would somebody walk in here and start?
Spencer Greenberg 00:56:12 Yeah. It’s interesting because you might think that, oh, you should always start at the beginning, right? You know, unraveling the causes and then, you know, then work on uncovering your foundations, etc. but actually, for many people, they will have already unlocked certain parts of this, and therefore they might actually need to jump forward into a particular lever. Right. So let’s suppose you’re someone who has your life has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller because you’ve been avoiding uncomfortable emotions such as things you fear. Then I would jump right in to say, approach the monster like that’s what you need to do. You may already know what you value, but you’re not pursuing it because fear is holding you back. or suppose you’re someone who, you know, you feel bad a lot and you just feel like life sucks, but you can’t really put your finger on what sucks about it.
Spencer Greenberg 00:56:54 And it’s like, no, maybe you need to start at the beginning. Maybe you really need to look into the causes of your feelings and really get a deep causal understanding. or maybe you’re someone who is in a situation that is just unchangeable. It’s bad, it sucks, and you cannot do anything. You’ve tried everything that can be done well, then you’re going to have to work on your on shifting your attitude because that’s all that’s left. And that can actually go a long way. So then I would recommend love for 11. She’s your attitude. And that’s going back to this idea of a toolbox right. It’s so useful to have a toolbox that you can use to almost any kind of life situation. But which tool is appropriate? Well, it’s not always a hammer and it’s not always a sore. Right?
Eric Zimmer 00:57:31 Yeah. You can’t always say pull out the screwdriver, then the saw, then the hammer. Right. And so yeah. And this book is really designed very well to do that.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:39 You can open it up and like you said, look it like what resonates, you know, what feels valuable to you in that moment. Well, Spencer, you and I are going to discuss some other levers in the post-show conversation. Listeners, you will have to tune in to know what lever it is. It’s the magic lever that we haven’t talked about so far.
Spencer Greenberg 00:57:58 The one lever solve all your problems.
Eric Zimmer 00:58:00 Exactly. Know there’s no such thing. But we are going to continue to discuss a lever in the post-show conversation if you’d like access to that ad free episodes. And if you would like to help support a show that you care about. You can go to one you feed net. Spencer, thank you so much.
Spencer Greenberg 00:58:19 Yeah, thank you so much for having me. And if anyone’s interested in the book, I would love it if you check it out. 12 lovers The Complete Psychological Toolkit for Improving Your Life. And I also have a podcast called Clear Thinking. You can come listen to me interview Eric on it, as well as a lot of other fascinating thinkers.
Eric Zimmer 00:58:34 Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.
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