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Episode Transcript:

Paul Millard 00:00:00  The really hard to understand reality for many people is that a job container is probably not the right path for you, but if you are going to opt into that, you need to be fully aware of the trade offs you’re making and understand what are the principles that really matter to you and how do you prioritize those principles given the path you’re on or what you’re choosing to enter into?

Chris Forbes 00:00:30  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.

Erich Zimmer 00:01:14  Paul Millard has a quiet, uncomfortable equation in his book. For most people, he says a known discomfort, plus some way of coping with it, beats the unknown discomfort of blowing up your life and starting over. So you stay. You build the coping around the ache and call it fine. The question underneath this whole conversation is one that we all face eventually is the problem, the situation I’m in or the way I’m relating to it. Sometimes it’s best for us to change how we live inside a particular life. Sometimes we need to choose a different life. Paul walked away from consulting and wrote The Pathless Path about what came after. I’m Erich Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Paul. Welcome to the show.

Paul Millard 00:02:01  Hey, Eric. Excited to be here.

Erich Zimmer 00:02:03  Yeah, I’m excited to have you on. We’re going to be discussing your book, The Pathless Path Imagining a New Story for Work and Life. I came across you on Twitter, I think, and your good friends with Jonny Miller, who was a guest on the show.

Erich Zimmer 00:02:16  And I just kind of kept seeing your stuff for a little while, and I was like, I really want to talk to this guy. So I read the book. I’m really glad I did. So we’re going to be talking about it. But let’s start like we always do with the parable and the parable. There’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves 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. Think about it for a second and look up at their grandparent and 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 and your life and in the work that you do.

Paul Millard 00:02:59  Yeah, I was reflecting on it before this call, and I’ve listened to a number of your interviews, and I love this framing.

Paul Millard 00:03:05  It’s such a good jumping off point for a conversation. I think early in my life I didn’t feed either of them. And I guess you could say I fed fear a little in the form of sort of just fitting in and going along with things, but I just didn’t have the role models to be sort of an emotionally connected man in the world. And I think when I entered young adulthood, I sort of just drifted along, and I don’t think I was hyper aware of what was driving me. I just kept making impulsive decisions, jumping from company to company, chasing the next impressive accomplishment. But I didn’t have much self-awareness of why I was doing that or what really mattered to me. And it wasn’t until my mid 20s in which I started to actually get more in touch with those and then eventually leaving the corporate world. I think my journey has been a journey of really figuring out how to have a relationship with fear, love, bravery, courage, creativity, all those things. And I think to me, that’s really what life’s all about.

Erich Zimmer 00:04:13  That’s a really interesting framing to say that you don’t know that you were feeding either wolf, right? Or you weren’t conscious of which wolf you were feeding. You were kind of just feeding the wolf that was laid out in front of you as the next thing to do. You were accepting cultures, values. And I don’t mean culture broadly, although perhaps, but I also mean the culture that you were in, you know, which said, here’s the next thing you do, right? In the book, you refer to it a lot as the default path, right? It’s just you kind of follow what’s laid out in front of you. Let’s talk for a minute about the title of the book, which is called The Pathless Path. What drove that? And what does that mean to you?

Paul Millard 00:04:56  Yeah. So I discovered the phrase in a David White book. Have you read any of David White?

Erich Zimmer 00:05:02  I have, yep, I’ve read him and he’s been a guest on the show, and he’s a remarkable man.

Paul Millard 00:05:07  I didn’t know you interviewed him. I’m definitely listening to that right after this. Yeah, yeah. So he’s written about work, and I think his language helped me transcend an understanding I had of the world, which is like prior to reading David White and after reading David White, prior to reading David White, I just thought work was part of life, right? After reading David White, I had this whole new interpretation, which is like, okay, there is like work to fit in and do what other people are doing. And then there’s work. There’s work that is deeply connected to who you are, what matters in the world, and something that can give you sustainable energy throughout life. And he talks about his own journey and he talks about this phrase, The Pathless Path. And I remember it. The book actually came to me via a gift from another person you mentioned earlier, Johnny Miller. He handed me the book. He’s like, you need this. This is a year after I quit my job.

Paul Millard 00:06:01  He’s like, read this book. I was like, okay, read the book over the next couple of weeks, and this phrase, The Pathless Path, just jumps off the page and just like, sort of took over my life. And he said something like, when you first discover the phrase the pathless path, you’re not meant to know what it means. But for me, I had the opposite reaction, and that’s what he said. But to me it was like, oh, this was such a release. It’s like I’m not supposed to know what I’m doing. I spent my whole life always trying to orchestrate the next step, and it was that orchestration of life that sucked the joy out of life. Right? And it was really that that guided me over the next several years of contemplating, what if I just released the tiller? What if I don’t orchestrate and I just try to lean away from any active planning in life, which a lot of people at first glance, like, you can’t just do that.

Paul Millard 00:06:58  Well, it turns out you can. You will still do things. You will react to things. You’re going to react if you’re in danger and need all these things. And what I discovered is that I got to know myself. I started feeding my good wolf, and I think I started feeding the bad wolf at the same time, which was I started to get in touch with like, oh, I have passion for life, I care about things. And also I have these fears. I’m scared of going broke. What’s that about? I’m scared of people not loving me. What’s that about? And learning to kind of coexist with all that. And over the next few years, I didn’t really think about writing a book. And then eventually a bunch of people just kept asking me and I was like, okay, I think we’re going to write a book. And that name was just so obvious to me. It had to be called The Pathless Path.

Erich Zimmer 00:07:54  Yeah, it’s such a Daoist Zen phrase and Zen.

Erich Zimmer 00:07:58  We talk about the gate less gate, you know, which is there’s a gate you pass through, but it doesn’t exist. I mean, there’s no thing that’s blocking the gate the same as you. When I heard that phrase, I was like, that’s such a great phrase. So you were kind of on what you would consider The Pathless Path now. But before that, let’s talk about your life on what was kind of the default path. You know, give us a couple minute version of kind of what you did and where you were.

Paul Millard 00:08:25  Yeah. So for context, I grew up, my parents didn’t go to college. They were very much on the default path. And I write in my book. I think in previous generations there just weren’t alternatives as there are now. Right. And so they did well on the default path. And their goal was to make sure their kids have everything they need. we went to public schools. We didn’t have a fancy upbringing, but we had enough and we had love, and they just wanted us to go to college.

Paul Millard 00:08:56  And I think also part of that was, I think, the expectation that the goal in the US is just to make a lot of money. I didn’t realize there was that implicit expectation, but I followed that path. I was always good at school, so if you’re good at school, the opportunities just eventually show up. You’re good at school, you do good in tests. You get into the honors program at college, I went on a full scholarship to undergrad, which was the only college I considered because I just did not want to go into debt. I went to University of Connecticut surrounded by all these high achievers. They’re like, I’m going to go to Harvard Law School. I’m going to get into med school. I want to work for these impressive companies. And suddenly you start to figure out, oh, there’s like a ranking, right? I’m in the business school and I’m realizing GE is the best company to work for everyone who gets hired there. People pay attention to those people. Oh, wow.

Paul Millard 00:09:47  That person got this offer right. So you just start competing. It was not that hard for me to be good at these things. I just had to, like, figure out the steps and then execute. But by doing that for so long, I think I was short circuiting my own curiosity, my curiosity for life and all these other things. And at the same time, I would get in these companies and I wouldn’t fully absorb the identity of like, a high achiever. I’d always be slightly skeptical. I eventually broke into strategy consulting, one of the top firms in the world, McKinsey and company, and I would work less than other people. I’d be like, why are you guys working so much? They said we could go home at 5 or 6, so why not? And everyone would stay till 8 or 9. And what I realized eventually is a lot of people in these worlds, like their whole identity is work, right? And by work, it’s they identify with a career narrative about their life, which is their life and the whole point is to get to the next steps and keep going and build wealth and sort of live out what the previous generations did.

Paul Millard 00:10:53  I didn’t really have that example though, growing up, so I was always a bit lost. I never fully understood, like the elite codes of talking and what people were angling about, how people had all these political opinions. I was always so confused, sort of an outsider in these worlds. And eventually, like, you just can’t last in these worlds if you’re not, like of that source material. And I think my questions just eventually got to me. It’s like, well, we’re making enough and everyone around me thinks we’re broke. I don’t understand what we’re doing here.

Erich Zimmer 00:11:28  Yeah, well, I mean, so your default path was a very successful path in the traditional sense in that you went to a really good school, you got a full scholarship, you were able to go work for some of the top companies in the world. Your career was off to a really strong and good start. You know, I think it’s interesting you talk about prestige in the book and you just referenced it a little bit here, which is you start to realize there’s a ranking.

Erich Zimmer 00:11:52  Oh, going to Harvard Business School is better than going to Ohio State’s business school. You know, going to McKinsey is better than going to I don’t know what’s a lower tier consulting company, right. So that there’s all these rankings and that this prestige is you use a quote in the book, a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. And I love that idea because what you’re talking about is mimetic desire, right? We had a guy on the show, Luke Burgess, who writes about this, which is.

Paul Millard 00:12:23  Yeah, I love Luke’s book.

Erich Zimmer 00:12:24  Yeah. You start to want what the people around you want. And it’s a really interesting idea that we all do, which speaks to thinking about who you’re around and what they want and whether you have these values. So you started to, as you said, question whether this was really the right fit for you because you weren’t all in in the same way that everybody else was. And you were sort of a, as you call it in the book, a hoop jumper.

Erich Zimmer 00:12:53  And yet there’s something else going on inside of you. Tell me a little bit about the process of going from, I’m on this path and I’m just jumping through hoops to going, Maybe this isn’t the right place for me.

Paul Millard 00:13:07  Yeah. So I always had those doubts. In my first internship. I read about this in the book. I’m looking around and seeing all these men not really doing anything, and I’m like, why are people doing this? I remember talking to one of my aunts and uncles, and I was like, nobody seems to be really doing anything. He’s like, oh, you’ll learn. Once you’re in the real world, you’ll figure out, like, you gotta, you gotta just work. That’s what you do. So I always had these questions, but it’s more confusing for other people that I left than me. Like, it makes so much sense that I left. It’s just that I was good at the game that the vast majority of people think is the point of life, but I was good at a life that wasn’t mine.

Paul Millard 00:13:48  Yeah, and the only thing that kept me in it was my stunted self-awareness. And I think the first thing that really opened me up was the loss of my grandfather. This was about a month before I started business school, and it really just broke me open. Like I started crying a lot more. I don’t even know the last time I cried before that, but like I would just became a lot more in touch with what I was actually feeling in life. And I started to introspect a little more. But at the same time, I was still at a top business school. You can’t just introspect fully there, like you got to get a job, you’re going into debt. I was like 70 grand in debt at 27 years old. So like I needed a job to pay that off. But over the next five years, there were all these tiny little moments of starting to write a little more, getting interested in coaching on the side, going on a personal development retreat, going on a solo travel trip up the California coast, and the spaciousness and wonder of life started to creep in.

Paul Millard 00:14:58  And once that happens slowly, it became very easy for me to walk away like people ask me, was it hard to walk away? Not really. I didn’t feel like I had any move left, like I felt hopeless for the future. I was surrounded by people that were cynically going through the motions. I struggled to find role models, and wandering around without a plan seemed way better than that.

Erich Zimmer 00:15:25  Yeah, yeah, I think it’s really interesting. I’d love to ask you a question about life now, because right now, and this is a hypothetical, you may not even be able to put yourself in the mindset that this question would even make sense. But your son to a ten week old baby. And you know a lot of people who don’t walk away from the default path, even when it feels like it’s not the right place to be. And I did this for for years, is because of what feel like responsibilities around children and family and things like that. Do you think it would have been harder for you today, as a parent, to walk away and make that decision than it was for you in a relatively sort of independent place in your life?

Paul Millard 00:16:11  Yeah.

Paul Millard 00:16:11  Of course. But I probably would have married the wrong person and been in the wrong life, so it would have been way more disastrous. Yeah, yeah. Like I wouldn’t have met and married my wife. She wouldn’t be with me unless I was actually chasing what was true to me. Yeah, it’s hard to answer. Right? And part of what drove me is I did have a sense that I wanted kids in the future, and I wanted to build the kind of life so I could be present and have time flexibility. And I’m so rich right now because I have that time. I don’t have a return to work plan. I’m like fitting work in. I have two hours of stuff I’m doing today, and the rest of the day I’m hanging with my daughter. It’s awesome. I love it, and this is like the whole point. This is why I tried to get more time instead of more money.

Erich Zimmer 00:17:02  Yeah, it’s certainly a useful reframe, right? Like I was telling you before the call about my son, who’s 24, and I raised him largely at sort of the peak of trying to succeed in my career.

Erich Zimmer 00:17:14  Right. My path is different than yours. Instead of sort of blindly following the default path, I just blindly drove my life off a cliff, you know? And by the time I was 24, I was homeless and had a drug addiction, so things were not going well. So then I was sort of frantically trying to climb on some sort of path that felt like it was going, you know, somewhere. And I think I overcorrected. I went like, oh God, I’ve been way over here. Time to buy into all these ideals around career and responsibility and and all that. And then it took me years to sort of find my way. What, for me, felt like a middle ground of actually my own path. And so when my son was little, I was right in that thick of, you know, trying to make up for lost time. You talked in the book about your father, who always felt like you had to work harder because he didn’t have a college degree. Like, that was me.

Erich Zimmer 00:18:04  I was in these worlds where everybody had degrees and MBAs and all this other stuff, and and I had nothing. And so I was always like, I can outwork these people. But I missed time with him that I tried to have back today.

Paul Millard 00:18:17  Yeah, it’s hard. And I write something also in the book, the longer you’re on the wrong path, the longer it takes to find the one that is the right path, right? Yes. And it’s taken me a really long time to find my footing on this path. This will be my sixth year in like two weeks, and only in the last year or two. I feel like I have like my footing, but it’s constantly going to shift. My first few years I think I overcorrected in terms of like going full wandering vagabond, avoiding employment, not trying to make money. I was living on like 500 to $1000 a month in Asia, really, just like I was sacrificing. Like I wouldn’t even, like eat food out. I it was crazy.

Paul Millard 00:19:06  And I sort of stifled my own imagination for possibilities and creativity. But then you come back and you’re like, okay, do I lean more into ambition than you try to find the middle ground and you’re always searching for the right path? Yeah, I think the mistake with a lot of legible paths, paths that we can see, oh, I’m going to become a data scientist, then a manager, then a VP is that it tricks you into that is the path that is right for you. And the really hard to understand reality for many people is that a job container is probably not the right path for you, but if you are going to opt into that, you need to be fully aware of the trade offs you’re making and understand what are the principles that really matter to you and how do you prioritize those principles given the path you’re on or what you’re choosing to enter into?

Erich Zimmer 00:20:01  Right. I sort of avoid binaries in general, and so I think there is a way to be on something that resembles a default path that is valuable and meaningful.

Erich Zimmer 00:20:12  I mean, the first years in my career, I was in software startup companies, and I loved that work. I was ambitious, and there was a certain, you know, path there. But it was also very exciting, and I loved it. And I was challenged and, you know, through my whole career, Even as I moved into consulting for big organizations, I always felt like I had a job that I liked. You know, in that, like, I was like, I’m intellectually challenged and I’m around people. As I got older, I got more and more into meaning. And I think you can make meaning in any role. Right. We read books about, you know, janitors at hospitals who their meaning is making a beautiful and clean place for the patients, and they make meaning out of it. So I think we can make it anywhere. But it’s, at least for me, easier to find it in certain places.

Paul Millard 00:21:00  Yeah. And it all comes down to self-awareness.

Paul Millard 00:21:03  Right. Yeah. Understanding those two wolves, as you say it. And you could have said I am a software salesperson, right. And then defined yourself as that. But I imagine that was not it. It was probably something around curiosity for people and connecting things, making things happen. And without knowing yourself, like if you defined yourself as a software salesperson, you wouldn’t be hosting a podcast.

Erich Zimmer 00:21:29  Right.

Paul Millard 00:21:29  Right. And you probably kept going deeper with the curiosity. And then you get to this raw, just curiosity for the world. No one starts a podcast to make money.

Erich Zimmer 00:21:42  Not if you have an IQ above 40. No you don’t.

Paul Millard 00:21:45  And so you figure out, oh, there’s these things worth doing in the world, right. And then as you’re hosting a podcast, you’re paying a cost. Monetary cost. Right. Because you could be doing other things with your time. You could be selling software. Right. But eventually you realize there’s certain upsides to life. And in today’s world, many people are blind to those upsides.

Paul Millard 00:22:10  So you have to pay the tax of other people not understanding what you’re doing. And as long as you’re okay with that, you can find a path in which you can thrive, I think.

Erich Zimmer 00:22:39  My path to where I’m at today was certainly it was a middle way path between staying in what was secure and made a lot of money. I mean, secure as much as anything is today. I mean, that’s an illusion, right? But more secure or doing the podcast where, I mean, I did the podcast for four and a half years while I worked in a career, and after a couple of years I started going, okay, I know where I want to be now, how do I get there? Right? How do I get from this job to to doing this podcast and the and the work I do with people full time. And, you know, I kind of made my way there, but there was a point where I had to go, okay, like when you get to be my age is successful as you were at your age, right? This idea of golden handcuffs is a real thing.

Erich Zimmer 00:23:23  You know, like I had to make a decision at some point. Like I’m walking away from a substantial amount of money in both the short term and the long term. In order to do this now again. Who knows, maybe next week I’ll be Joe Rogan, right? I think it’s unlikely, but like you, I made a decision of meaning and purpose and loving what I do over money.

Paul Millard 00:23:46  Yeah, I left right as my peak earning years were about to begin. Yeah, I did not cash in. I am not somebody that got to financial independence and walked away. I stupidly lit probably millions of dollars on fire like the economy went crazy too. For the consulting world and strategy work like starting in 2017, salaries just started going up like 2,030% a year. It was crazy. I didn’t get any of that. I lowered my salary down to like 25, 32, 40 grand for the next three years. But they were the best years of my life. Yeah. And the challenge is, I think people think that you can escape the base reality.

Paul Millard 00:24:31  Right? Especially if you’re in the US. If you want to live in the US, you can’t escape the fact that most people see money as one of the most important things in the world. If you are going to make a decision to say money isn’t the most important thing in our world. You need to figure out how you’re going to manage that tension. Yes, and feeling bad about that? Being insulted by other people. Many people have said, don’t you think you’re wasting your degrees? It’s a really interesting way of framing it, right? Wasting your degrees, aka the whole point of life, is to get credentials to trade in for money. Right? I disagree, I think the point of life is not to maximize financial income, and the point of life for me is something I can’t fully explain to you. I tried to explain it in writing a book, but it’s a felt sense. It’s a deeply felt sense. Yeah, I’m a little crazy for believing it at my age, and I’m just gonna follow that feeling.

Paul Millard 00:25:34  And I ended up meeting a wife who sort of values the same things. And it’s going to be harder for us to build a life because we don’t have the payoffs that, like all my former peers and coworkers, have. They’re all in million dollar houses living in fancy neighborhoods with good schools and, like, putting their kids solidly in like, private schools cannot afford that. We don’t own a home. We rent. We don’t own a car. We do this by design because we live, like in a walkable area. We bike a lot of places and we’re comfortable using like Ubers and lifts and stuff like that. But yeah, it’s totally worth it because we’re thriving. I get to write most days. I get to talk to people like you who inspire me. My wife spends a lot of days painting and creating, and we both get to spend Bountiful time with our daughter, which is like, that’s it. That is like the point for me.

Erich Zimmer 00:26:33  Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about the fear and uncomfortableness that comes with choosing this different path, because it’s real, right.

Erich Zimmer 00:26:45  And what can happen. And I’ve watched this sort of manifest in myself and had to sort of work on it. Right, which is that you step off the default path to do this other thing, but the fear of, holy crap, how am I going to make a living? How am I going to make money? What am I going to do? My son’s in college. I got to pay for his college. I mean, all this stuff can drive me to turn my pathless path into. I don’t know what the word is. A hugely ambitious and stressful, pathless path right where I boxed myself into a new corner by letting that anxiety drive me to do more and more and more and more and more and more. And that’s something I’ve had to kind of work on going, all right. And I’ve gotten better at it. Like you, it takes it took me a few years to kind of get my foot in, I think where I was like, okay, relax. You’re going to be okay.

Erich Zimmer 00:27:39  Relax a little.

Paul Millard 00:27:40  Yeah, a lot of people leave their jobs because they don’t like their managers, but then they instantly hire a manager in their head to control their behavior.

Erich Zimmer 00:27:50  Yes. Who’s the tyrant?

Paul Millard 00:27:52  And one good thing about feeling like you’re going to run out of money and not making money, especially if you’re raised in the US, you’ll just start freaking out and try to make money. Yeah, and a lot of people have not felt this. This is probably one of the most useful things to happen to me. I quit my job in New York. I think I should have thought more deeply about this, but I was spending about 6000 a month and I had like 50,000 in savings and like month one, month two, I’m like, oh crap. Like I’m gonna run out of money. Yeah. And I just started getting really aggressive. I’m like calling everyone, emailing everyone I know, applying for all these contract jobs, putting my thing on all these talent platforms to hire for consulting gigs.

Paul Millard 00:28:39  One of my first gigs was walking around New York City for this investment firm. They needed this last minute freelancer to do surveys of people wearing Allbirds. So I just walked around New York City and tried to spot people wearing Allbirds. First day, I couldn’t really find that many people. The second day, I’m like, all right, I need to figure out how to do this better. So I held up a sign in Union Square Park and said, does anyone own Allbirds? Right? And then I think I got 40 people to answer my four questions survey. And I was like, I don’t know if I could find 100. They’re like, yeah, 40 is good. But it was my first experience of, oh, you just made yourself feel more uncomfortable than you did in the entire ten years of your safe knowledge work job, right? You look like a fool holding a sign you’re desperate for money and you only made like $1,000 doing this over a week and then analyzing the data and all this.

Paul Millard 00:29:33  And yeah, it made me realize there’s so many ways to make money. It’s just that for knowledge workers, what they’re really afraid of is, can I make what I used to make? And I didn’t really set out to replace my income. Yeah. Replacing your income. I have no advice on how to do that. It took me until my fifth year to actually make a comparable amount to my last year of working. Yeah, and I don’t know if I’ll match it again. It could go down.

Erich Zimmer 00:30:05  Yeah, I think that’s a really good point about matching your income is a hard thing to do. You know, I think like you did, it’s a matter of looking at everything is trade offs in life, right? I mean, I think you said that earlier. I mean, everything has its trade offs, and we just have to find the ones that we’re willing to live with. You talk in the book about this idea of many people on the default path will live with certain discomfort and then layer coping mechanisms on it, rather than face uncertain discomfort.

Erich Zimmer 00:30:37  Talk to me a little bit about that. You know, knowing that you are uncomfortable and then finding ways to cope with it so that you can stay where you are.

Paul Millard 00:30:46  Yeah. You probably have more knowledge about this than me. I think with the addiction, if everyone around you is slightly uncomfortable and anxious, it becomes normal to feel slightly uncomfortable and anxious. Right. And then if everyone’s coping in similar ways, namely drinking a lot on weekends, like me and all my friends, 100% of my friends did, then that’s just life. Right? But now, looking back, I don’t drink anymore. And it’s really weird to look back because I didn’t have trouble drinking. I don’t think I was addicted, but it sort of fell out of my life in a weird way, in which I look back and say, oh, I did have a drinking problem. And when you say that, it triggers a lot of people because a lot of people get defensive. Drinking in the US especially, is one of these things that’s just part of life for people.

Paul Millard 00:31:40  And to bring this up makes people feel really uncomfortable. But I think for a lot of young people, especially living in cities, binge drinking on the weekends, is the bomb for the discomfort of the workweek, right? And as long as everyone’s doing it and it seems fun, you don’t notice that it’s a problem. But I wasted so many days being hungover and recovering from drinking, and probably stifling my curiosity and actual passion for life.

Erich Zimmer 00:32:11  Yeah, I think this is a really interesting point, which is, I mean, a lot of the work that I do, I would say is about people increasing their healthy coping strategies. Right. So I think we could probably all go, you know what? If you’ve got a life that’s bad and you escape it by drinking or doing drugs or whatever your thing is, your addiction, that’s very problematic. We would all go, well, you know what? There are much better ways to cope with that, right? And I think part of what we do here is help teach people those mechanisms.

Erich Zimmer 00:32:45  Part of what I occasionally am uncomfortable with, and that I wonder about, is the point that you’re making, that even a healthy coping mechanism oftentimes is keeping you in a place that may not be the right place for you. And that’s a fundamental question that I think a lot of people who are later in their career, who’ve been on the default path for a while, who are going, I’m not really comfortable here, or I’m not happy or I’m not fulfilled. And their question that they spend a lot of time on is, do I just accept that this part of my life is this way and build everything else around it in a really meaningful and purposeful way? Or do I sort of blow the whole thing up? I don’t think there’s easy answers, and I think depending on the person and the situation and all that, those are both reasonable approaches. But it does get to there are other ways of coping with situations that maybe we shouldn’t be coping with, even if we’re doing it in a healthy way.

Paul Millard 00:33:50  So to connect this to the previous point, I think the equation I put in the book is certain discomfort from plus coping mechanism is better for many people than uncertain discomfort of blowing up your life and taking that new path. Yeah, the thing that tips the scales over and over, and you can identify this in the way people talk about the future is the sense of wonder and possibility. They say, okay, I might blow up my life, but there might be something interesting worth finding. And Johnny Miller has been a huge influence on me. I’ve lived with him in three different countries, and he’s helped me think about this in terms of like nervous system regulation and connecting with your body. And I think the thing to ask is, how do I experience different states of being right? You’re coping because you’re in an uncomfortable state of being. But if you talk to enough people, you read history, you read poetry, you read literature, you start to discover there are states of being where people feel at peace.

Paul Millard 00:34:54  And given that knowledge, we should all sort of be freaking out, figuring out how to try to get there. And there are many ways to get there, I think. Sabbatical taking one month disconnected from work can be very powerful for people. Breathwork can be very powerful for people. I know a lot of people are experimenting with psychedelics. I haven’t used those. Yoga, Tai chi, qigong, all these practices. There are different practices which let you participate in the world in a different way. And John Vivek is really good around this. He talks about it in terms of participatory knowing, right? How do we experience the world in a different state of being, such that we can sort of come to a different state of knowing, right? And in the West and in knowledge, work, jobs, hardcore career jobs were not at the participatory level. We’re at the propositional level of like concepts, abstract ideas and all these things. So we’re existing up here, but we’re not down here. We’re not in the heart, we’re not in the body.

Paul Millard 00:36:06  We’re not in a state of flow. We’re not experiencing the magic of deep leisure of this connected contemplative state. Because if you’ve never experienced that, you’re going to just keep going and what you’re doing. But the thing I love about podcasts is you have people in your ears telling you different things are possible. So if you’re listening to this like different states or possible, go see if you can find them and you can find them in a weekend. You can find them after work. All you need is enough of a window to say, ooh, I want to follow that and see where it leads.

Erich Zimmer 00:36:38  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.

Erich Zimmer 00:37:08  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 one Eufy Net and take the first step towards getting back on track. The question underlying this is sort of this fundamental one that I think we all wrestle with in lots of different aspects of life, which goes back to the classic Serenity prayer. Right? Like what situations do I need to accept and make the best of? And that the way that I’m responding is an internal problem? The problem is in here, right? And what situations is legitimately the problem out there? And there are many situations where in certain cases that’s very clear, right? If you’re in an abusive marriage, for example, it may not feel clear to you in the moment, but deeper knowing will lead to a clarity that says I’m clearly in the wrong spot. The answer is not to learn to tolerate my abuse better. The answer is to get out of here, right? So there are examples where we can go, well, that’s a little bit more obvious, but for most of us in life, this figuring that out is really sort of the challenge of, you know, what does this situation call on for me? Do I need a whole new career and everything to be different, or are there ways of relating to the life that I have very differently that will cause me to be in a much greater state of peace and calm? And that’s sort of the fundamental question that’s underlying some of this.

Paul Millard 00:38:46  That’s why I like being on my current path. My current path is not a path, and you probably experience this as well. Every week is different. Every month is different. Every year has been different. So I’ve had all these mini lives in these last six years, whereas I look at the previous ten years, it was very predictable. I did the same kind of work on the same times of most days of the week for ten years, around the same kind of people thinking in the same way, showing up in the same way, coping in the same way. Now my life is just weird. Yeah. And there’s more possibility for people to tap into this. Like I’ve challenged a lot of people. Do a freelance year, do one year where you just go try to make money on your own. It’s going to be scary. It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be uncomfortable. But you might discover that you have more courage than you thought. You might discover there’s more people out there willing to help you than you thought, and you might discover you’re curious about things you forgot about.

Paul Millard 00:39:52  Right. Yeah. And that’s been the magic of this path is. We touched on this before, but I still have fear. Like, I’m really leaning into being a parent right now, and I’m dropping the ball on a lot. And I’m just wondering, like, if I keep leaning into this, am I going to not make money? Am I going to not plant the seeds of the next thing that might take off? I’ve had 4 or 5 different things that have gone like up and down and dissipated, and I don’t know, but I’ve been on this path long enough to say, okay, I’m going to have a mini existential crisis every few weeks, but it’s just there. It’s always going to be there. The fear doesn’t leave, right? And maybe this is the point of the parable is like you’re always feeding the bad wolf, right? But you learn to just accept it. It’s part of life. Fear is part of life, totally. But is existing with that fear in a more relational way.

Paul Millard 00:40:58  More comfortable, way. More like. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you’re afraid for the future. But the other side of that fear is love, right? You’re afraid for that future because you love the people in your life. You desire to show up with your full self. And it’s all related.

Erich Zimmer 00:41:31  I think depending on our makeup, we all live with different degrees of fear. You can be in the default path and be terrified, right? I mean, so fear can come from anywhere, but there is when you’re on sort of this pathless path, there is more opportunity because uncertainty is not a state that we naturally do well in. And I agree with you, what I think I’ve gotten better at doing is just going, okay, there’s the twinge of fear going on over there. I can’t make it go away, but I’m also not going to react to it. I’m going to respond to it and hopefully a wise way, but I’m not going to allow it to sort of jerk my chain.

Erich Zimmer 00:42:07  And it’s just funny over. I don’t know, maybe it’s been 4 or 5 years now that, you know, since I left my software world, I mean, the first year, I mean, I remember it as clear as day. I don’t know, I was maybe nine months into it and all of a sudden the coaching work that I’ve been relying on just hit a dry patch and I was like, well, that’s it, I’m doomed. You know, everybody who wants to work with me has already done it. You know, they’ve heard the podcast. They don’t want to do it anymore. And, you know, now when any part of the business sort of quote unquote, dries up a little bit, I’m like, that happens. Let’s move this way. I don’t freak out in the same way. I’ve just gotten better at handling the uncertainty.

Paul Millard 00:42:47  Yeah, uncertainty is not a problem to be solved. And I think the great delusion of the modern world is that we can solve uncertainty.

Paul Millard 00:42:58  Paycheck life sort of promises you that a steady paycheck solves uncertainty, but all it does is enter you into a vast conspiracy with all the other people with a paycheck to not mention it right, and then working on your own. It just punches you in the face and eventually you’re like, oh, we’re dancing with uncertainty, right? This whole path is just about dancing with uncertainty, and it’s just an ongoing dance. You can’t leave the dance and it just keeps going. But eventually you start to see, oh, there’s some fun in it.

Erich Zimmer 00:43:32  Totally. I mean, the last ten years of my sort of software career, I was doing consulting work for very large organizations on really big, complex software development projects. And the whole time my mother and my father, to some degree, but not to the same extent, just kept saying, well, why don’t you get a job there, right. Like, it’s so uncertain being a consultant. Like, just get a job. And I was like, mom, I don’t think you quite understand.

Erich Zimmer 00:44:01  Like, getting a W-2 from them does not mean they’re going to keep paying me forever.

Paul Millard 00:44:05  Their generation, it does 100%.

Erich Zimmer 00:44:08  And, you know, for me, I just was like, you know what? The fact that this is like a six month consulting gig at a time that just sort of keeps going on some level for me was like, okay, I have to sort of keep my skills sharp, right? I have to stay connected in this world. And to me, that was the better hedge against uncertainty was my own ability, my own confidence in myself to say, okay, if this thing doesn’t work, there are other things that will, you know. And so I just think that that certainty question is different for everybody. I interviewed a guy recently. Have you seen a recent book by a guy named Bruce Feiler called The Search?

Paul Millard 00:44:52  I haven’t seen search, but I read life is in the transitions right here.

Erich Zimmer 00:44:56  Okay, well, he’s got a new book that you would be fascinated by because it’s sort of life is in the transitions for work specifically.

Erich Zimmer 00:45:06  Oh, wow.

Paul Millard 00:45:07  It’s my wheelhouse.

Erich Zimmer 00:45:08  It’s totally your wheelhouse. He basically goes through and he comes to a lot of the conclusions that you do. I mean, one of them is this fundamental idea that you think there’s a path, but you’re not on a path. Like life isn’t certain enough. The world isn’t certain enough that your path is assured. You know, there are some that are better trod than others, right? That we can sort of see. But if you really understand the nature of the world, you realize that your path is unfolding as you go, and there’s going to be things in that path that you just don’t expect.

Paul Millard 00:45:41  Yeah, I love this so much, and it ties to what you’re doing, right? One of the features of being a consultant, it’s hard for people to understand is that you can’t delude yourself about what you’re doing because you need to opt in and take responsibility for your path. Right? Right. If you’re in a job, it’s such a subtle shift, but people just start talking themselves into like, well, this is what I do.

Paul Millard 00:46:09  Right. And there’s a motivation question. If you’re working as a contractor, they can’t tell you to do anything. Technically, of course they can. But when you’re working for a job, there’s just stuff you have to do. So you can do stuff you’re like, actually two out of ten motivated by if you’re working for yourself. Suddenly if you try to get me to do stuff, I’m actually two out of ten excited by, it will never get done.

Erich Zimmer 00:46:37  Yeah.

Paul Millard 00:46:38  So it sharpens your focus to say, okay, I need to search for stuff that’s at least eight out of ten excited by. And that’s why it was very easy for me to write a book, because that was like a ten out of ten. I was like, pumped. Powering through that. And that’s beautiful, right? And it ties back to what Bruce Feiler writes about is life is just disruptions one after another. Life is in the transitions is such a good book because it brings alive so many stories. It’s like this person thought they had a path and like, boom, disruption, disruption, disruption, disruption.

Paul Millard 00:47:13  It’s basically constant in everyone’s life. And I looked at my life and it’s like, oh, I wasn’t on a steady path. I had a health crisis. I lost my grandfather, I moved cities, I moved companies five times. Just constant disruptions.

Erich Zimmer 00:47:29  Yep. Yeah. You should check out his new book. You’ll absolutely love it if you like. Life is in the transitions. And I know, given your love of exploring this different way of thinking about work, having read these two books in somewhat close proximity, right? What Bruce does is interview hundreds and hundreds of people and sort of compile that data and put it together, and after doing so, he arrives at the same place that 80% of your book is at. Also, like, it’s just a different way into what are very similar conclusions about the way things are in today’s reality.

Paul Millard 00:48:01  Yeah, it’s just I think with my book, I just don’t like those books where they interview a lot of people. I just want to hear like people’s personal stories.

Paul Millard 00:48:10  So I just trusted my intuition. And mine’s fueled by I had probably 400 conversations with random strangers on the internet. Yeah, I’ve injected a lot of the lessons from them. And it it was very an emergent book from those conversations which spiked during Covid. Suddenly everyone was like, oh, wait, what are we doing?

Erich Zimmer 00:48:33  Yeah. When did your book come out?

Paul Millard 00:48:34  2020 2nd January.

Erich Zimmer 00:48:37  Okay. I thought it was a little bit earlier than that. So let’s talk about a couple other ideas here. Talk to me about the idea of the ought to self versus the ideal self.

Paul Millard 00:48:49  Yeah. This was Davidovich, the psychologist at Cornell. I think it’s this idea, like we think leaving the default path, for example, leaving your job is just going to destroy your life. That is how our brain works. We imagine all terrible things because we’re scared. That’s our fear talking, right? But they argue that our ought to self is so powerful that we’re still going to take care of our responsibilities and obligations.

Paul Millard 00:49:19  Like, I’m scared of leaving my job because what about taking care of my family? Well, in that statement, I’m scared of taking care of my family. You’re actually going to take care of your family. Like you will figure it out because it matters to you, right? And we don’t pay attention or trust this or to self enough, and we sort of neglect our ideal self. And this is for many people, the whole point of life becoming the person you want to be, right? That drives a large percentage of people. And if you neglect that pursuit, the aspiration to become your ideal self really just growth. There doesn’t even have to be anything to aim at just growing, evolving as a person. If we neglect that, we’re going to have regrets. So the takeaway is trust your art to self. And this is why I don’t really stress with having kids. It actually, I think will make it easier because there’s no way in hell I’m going to drop the ball and taking care of my daughter’s needs, right? Maybe I’ll skimp on some of my needs, like I’ll drop the ball on my needs, not buy new clothes or whatever to keep my path going and protect my creative work.

Paul Millard 00:50:34  But I won’t do that with my daughter. Right. And just trusting that I’ll pay attention to that.

Erich Zimmer 00:50:40  Yep. That ought to. An ideal self is a really interesting idea because on one hand, you know, we hear this idea ought to self and we think that’s a bad thing, right. Like that whole phrase like, you know, if you’re saying the word should, you know, don’t should on yourself as if the word should is always a bad thing. I mean, sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s taking on values and ideas from other people that aren’t your own. But sometimes it’s just a simple shorthand for what matters to me. Right. And ought to is the same thing. Like it could be bad. It could be mean, neglecting and only taking on the values of others. But it could be my inner self saying, here is what you ought to do to be the person you want to be. So it’s not all bad. And also that ideal self, it’s having both of those things being in some sort of balance.

Paul Millard 00:51:29  Also, it’s all about self-awareness, right? If you think something matters to you and you’re living in concordance with that, if somebody gave you advice or more information about how to do that better, you would never get offended. He would just figure out how to integrate it into your life, right? Instead of we have these ideas sometimes of what we should be doing. I should be writing more. I never say such things. It’s like I’m either writing more. I’m not like there’s probably a reason for one of those or the other. Typically, we’re doing as much as we can.

Erich Zimmer 00:52:02  Let me dig into that a little bit further, though, right. Because at least in my case, I find situations where in order to be the person I want to be, I’m having to push myself sometimes to do things that I’m like, well, I don’t really feel like doing that. So the word should comes into it again. It may not be the right word, but I’m wondering how you think about that if you’re writing or not.

Erich Zimmer 00:52:28  Writing. But part of you is like, I really, I want to finish this book. I mean, how do you think about that question, you know, to be the person you really want to be? Are there situations where you’re having to sort of push yourself in directions that you don’t feel like at the moment.

Paul Millard 00:52:45  Yeah, I think this is something I need to think about more. I don’t know if I have the best answer to it now. People come to me for advice on how to create stuff online, and I think what I’m talking about is a narrow case of somebody has been saying, oh, I should write more for like a year after a year. If you’re not writing, like, your sense of what you should be doing is not the problem. It’s a problem of something else, your environment or how you’re designing your life. Right? Yeah, and that really just gets to thinking differently about, okay, what are the pieces in the environment I need to change to actually get what I want? Right.

Paul Millard 00:53:27  And Tim Ferriss fear exercise has been great for me, which is what are the risks in taking this action. How could you mitigate those risks? And then flipping it and saying, what are the risks of inaction. Yeah, right. So what are the risks that you’re pricing into your day to day existence? And then I don’t know, this is like a really interesting question because I think this is something I wrote about in my book, which is I can’t really pinpoint like a moment. You know how everyone asks, when’s the moment you knew? I don’t know if there was a moment rather than like, I was just on an emergent path, right? Yeah. And it’s really a felt sense, right? So then the question is, how do you just know when you’re not on the right path? And that, I think, might be everything, which is just figure out when you’re on the wrong path and just keep shaking things up. The answer might literally just be do random stuff on your drive home.

Paul Millard 00:54:26  Take a different route. Go take a walk without a destination. Go play an instrument. If you’ve never played an instrument, I don’t know. Just do random stuff that might shake things up for you. And this is the hard thing because a lot of people want playbooks. They want how to. But the truth is, there are no how to’s to find your own true path.

Erich Zimmer 00:54:46  Amen to that. That is a very, very true statement. I think that we can listen to podcasts, we can read great books, we can get great ideas. And those are all very useful things. And learning from others and having teachers and all that and mentors has been incredibly important for me. And at the end of the day, I had to find my path because I am not someone else. I am me in my own set of causes and conditions that make up who I am. My path is going to be a little bit different, and that’s why this sort of ten easy steps for X, I’m always like, well, okay, that’s probably not like I don’t think anything is easy.

Erich Zimmer 00:55:27  And we all might need prompting in different directions depending on who you are. That’s the other piece of like one size fits all advice is it’s like well maybe for some people that’s the right thing, but for other people, the exact opposite might be the right thing.

Paul Millard 00:55:42  Yeah, it’s so hard in today’s world. I think I have a certain psychology which was not able to thrive on the default path, and that’s meant I had to leave that and it’s made life harder. Like, the truth is my current path is harder. It takes more reflection. It takes more introspection. It’s frustrating sometimes, but it’s also, I know in terms of just the day to day wonder, the joy I have for life, the sense of creativity, the contentedness. It’s a lot better for me and it’s going to continue to be hard. Kids don’t make it easier. They make it harder. But also the payoffs are much bigger, too, to finding the right path in which not only can I thrive, can my wife thrive and my child thrive.

Paul Millard 00:56:31  But that’s the lifelong question, and I love trying to figure it out, and I’ve just found over and over again that thinking about this and trying to find the right path is worth it.

Erich Zimmer 00:56:44  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 once. Let’s make those shifts happen starting today. Once you feed Net Book, you’ve come back to the phrase. You’ve used it multiple times in this conversation, which is self-awareness, right? And I think the important thing, at least for me, is in the willingness to continue to ask the questions.

Erich Zimmer 00:57:41  Now, like you, I feel like I have a psychology makeup and a life conditioning makeup that makes it almost impossible for me not to. You know, if I could just shut it off and be like, forget it. I’m just gonna coast here for a while. I think I would do more of it. Maybe, I don’t know, I just am not wired up that way. But I do think that a meaningful life comes from asking a lot. What is a meaningful life to me? And am I doing it like not every ten years on some, you know, retreat, but regularly again and again and again. You know what matters. Am I living that way? That, to me, is how a meaningful life is created. And I think that’s a big part of what your book says to me at the end of it is, you know, ask these questions and be willing to look at the hard answers.

Paul Millard 00:58:33  Yeah, it’s all about noticing for me and paying deep attention to how I’m living my life week to week, month to month, year to year.

Paul Millard 00:58:42  Yeah, this conversation right now, me talking with you, is somebody that takes these questions seriously. It tells me, oh, I’m in the right place. Yeah. Ten years ago, I was surrounded by people who mocked me for asking deeper questions. Oh, that’s that’s ridiculous. You have to work. That’s a stupid question. Deep cynicism. And I was surrounded by that. And it’s scary looking back, because I almost convinced myself that cynicism was the right orientation toward life. Hey, what are you gonna do? You got to just struggle through life and suffer and do these stupid things. Because money is important and employment is important. I’m glad I just kept asking questions.

Erich Zimmer 00:59:28  Yeah, I’m glad you did, too. And I think that is a perfect place for us to wrap up. Paul, thank you so much for coming on the show. We’ll have links in the show notes to your website where people can get your book and all the ways to find you.

Paul Millard 00:59:42  Yeah, and I’m always happy to gift the book to people.

Paul Millard 00:59:45  It’s such a joy to connect with people who are asking these questions like you. So I appreciate what you’re doing. And this was a beautiful conversation. So thank you.

Erich Zimmer 00:59:54  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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Episode Transcript:

Simone Stolzoff 00:00:00  In order to build this uncertainty tolerance, we have to tell ourselves a different story, which is that uncertainty does not necessarily mean danger.

Chris Forbes 00:00:18  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 00:01:02  Simone Stolz, off was finishing a book on the value of uncertainty when he and his wife learned they were expecting. At a checkup around three months, the doctor couldn’t find a heartbeat and asked them to come back a week later. So they waited. He’d just been writing about how the waiting is often the hardest part. Now he was living it. They ended up losing the baby. What stayed with him wasn’t only the grief, it was how present that week made both of them. And that’s what we get into. How to stay close to your life when you can’t know how it turns out. His book is How to Not Know: the Value of uncertainty in a World that Demands answers. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Simo. Welcome to the show.

Simone Stolzoff 00:01:49  Thanks so much for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:51  I’m really excited to talk to you about your latest book, which is called How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World That Demands Answers. And this is a topic near and dear to my heart in many ways, but we’ll get into it after we start the way we always do, which is with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who is talking with her grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves 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 if 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.

Simone Stolzoff 00:02:44  First and foremost, I love this parable because I find it to be so true. As a naturally doubting and uncertain and ruminating person, I chose to dig into this topic of uncertainty precisely for the theme of the parable, which is we can choose to see uncertainty as a threat, as a source of fear, to catastrophes, to think of everything that will go wrong when we’re in an uncertain situation. Or we can feed that other wolf. We can choose to see uncertainty as the birthplace of possibility, as the precursor to learning and growth.

Simone Stolzoff 00:03:25  And I often think about it in the context of this piece of advice that you sometimes give to people who are learning how to ski or snowboard, which is look where you want to go. And often if we spend too much time looking that uncertainty as a threat, as a source of fear or anxiety or worry, that’s where we go. And yet, if we’re able to flip our frame, to change our mindset and to see uncertainty As the place from which learning and growth and development and possibility and opportunity is all born. We can start to move in that direction as well.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:06  Yeah, as a wannabe surfer, I’m learning. Don’t look at your board. Don’t you have to look where you want to go on the beach? I am told consistently I only get to do it about twice a year. So I never actually get better, though. But the point is a good one. And what I like about your book is that it’s part of a philosophy of why uncertainty is really valuable, and all these things we talk about, and we’ll get into that.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:31  But it does a really important thing also, which is it’s lovely to know that uncertainty is good for us. It’s a whole nother thing to learn to tolerate it long enough that it can do good for us or to even tolerate it in general. And I think your book does a really nice job of of doing all those things.

Simone Stolzoff 00:04:53  Thanks for saying so. yeah, I think that idea of tolerating it for long enough is a really important learning that I had through the reporting and research for the book. There’s this comedian, John Cleese, who you might be familiar with from the Monty Python, and he was asked to speak at a big company one day, and they asked him, basically, how are you able to be so creative? How are you able to continue to produce such original work? And I loved his answer. He said, I’m willing to stick with the problem for long enough. And he has another friend colleague in his office that is smart and has good intentions, but never seems to produce truly original work.

Simone Stolzoff 00:05:33  And Cleese basically says, the difference, I think, between me and him is that he always goes with the first solution that comes to his mind, whereas I am more willing to stick with the problem. And I think that is exactly what you were saying about the value of building uncertainty tolerance is that you can stick with the issue, stick with the problem, Stick with your life for long enough to have that breakthrough, for the possibilities to emerge, as opposed to just going for the safe route or the quickest way away from uncertainty.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:05  This feels particularly relevant in our current moment, where AI has the ability to shepherd us right past all the sticking with the problem long enough to come up with new ideas.

Simone Stolzoff 00:06:18  Yeah, very much so. You know, in some ways, AI is a certainty machine. You know, it gives you the probabilistic expectation of what you hope to receive based on the question that you ask. And especially speaking with young people. I see this all the time where they think that because they can answer some of their questions with a chat query or the right prompt, that all of life’s questions should be able to provide such immediate gratification or uncertainty.

Simone Stolzoff 00:06:49  But I also see it in myself, you know, whereas ten years ago I might have been okay not knowing the name of a given actor. Now I feel almost involuntary need to reach into my phone. And so I think all of our tolerances for uncertainty by nature of being in this hyper connected digital age are at risk of deteriorating.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:08  Right? So uncertainty is naturally uncomfortable and is kind of built into us. And we’re going to get into some of the biology neuro neuro of of all that. But I think you’re making a point, which is that we’ve gotten worse at it because we don’t have to endure it as much.

Simone Stolzoff 00:07:25  Yeah, well, there’s two things going on. One is the world is getting more uncertain. So there’s this economist from Stanford named Nicholas Bloom, who’s been tracking global uncertainty since the early 80s. And he’s found that the five highest measurements since he began studying the phenomenon have all occurred in the last five years. So if you think about the pandemic and shifting tariff policies, AI and these wars overseas, so the world is more uncertain.

Simone Stolzoff 00:07:51  The trend that is less often talked about is what we were just talking about, which is the decrease of our tolerance for uncertainty. And primarily this is correlated with the rise of the internet and particularly the rise of mobile phones. I think phones do two things. One is they bring all of the world’s uncertainties to our pockets. So now we can track the real time updates of a war overseas, or what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz. And we can also track the real time locations of our children and all of this information that hasn’t necessarily made us any wiser and often just fuels our anxiety. The other thing that phones do is they rob us of the practice of sitting with what we don’t know. And I know that as an practitioner, you know, a lot of what I’ve gleaned from my meditation practice is the value of feeling that discomfort, feeling that pain, feeling that uncertainty, and not rushing to solve it right away. And so the world is more uncertain. Our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline. And that’s why I argue so many people feel anxious and unmoored.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:54  So when I read the title of your book, the first thing that popped into my mind is a Zen koan that talks about this, that I was like, I’ll bring that Zen koan to the conversation. And then about three pages into the book, I was like, he’s already got it, so why don’t you share that with us?

Simone Stolzoff 00:09:10  Yeah. Another sort of, you know, teacher and student moment. There’s these two monks that meet in the forest, and the older monk, the more experienced monk asks the student, what are you doing here? And the student says, oh, I’m on a pilgrimage. And the monk says, what are you on a pilgrimage for? And the student says, I’m not sure yet. And the monk says, not knowing is the most intimate. And I remember being in, like a sangha in a meditation circle, and the teacher telling us this koan, and I was like, not knowing is the most intimate.

Simone Stolzoff 00:09:43  What the heck does that mean? You know, the thing that I feel most intimate when I don’t know something is Google, you know, but it’s really changed my perception of uncertainty. And I think what intimacy in my interpretation, what that means here is more proximate to reality as it actually is when we are certain, when we think we know exactly when the market is going to crash, or when the relationship is going to end, or what the future of AI is going to bring. It has a sort of narrowing effect that closes our mind. But if we’re able to maintain that not knowing mind, maintain that uncertainty without rushing for easy answers, then we can see the world as it actually appears, as it as it emerges. And so by not knowing sort of the purpose of this pilgrimage, the student is more open to what the pilgrimage might teach him.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:34  Yeah. And I think it’s proximate to reality. And I think it’s also an attention mechanism. Right. When you think you know something, you stop paying attention to it. Whereas when you focus and give it more attention. And in that case, it actually becomes more intimate, because I think a lot of intimacy for me is about the things that I’m paying attention to. I am more intimate with.

Simone Stolzoff 00:10:59  Yeah. It’s beautiful. I think about that’s when I’m traveling all the time. I’ll be in a foreign city that maybe I’ve never been to before, and I’ll see an old man reading a newspaper outside of a cafe on the corner and say, oh my God, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. And yet, when I’m in San Francisco walking around, there’s probably plenty of old men reading newspapers that I just don’t notice because I have this assumption that I know where I am. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:21  Okay, so let’s start with talking about why is uncertainty so uncomfortable. We can talk about it being something that’s ultimately good for us. And yet it is one of the hardest states to be in. Why is that?

Simone Stolzoff 00:11:39  It’s biological. So you can think about it from an evolutionary standpoint.  If one of your ancestors is in the jungle and there’s a rustling in the bushes, and they don’t know the source of that noise. That uncertainty could be lethal. It could be a saber toothed tiger. I feel like it’s always a saber toothed tiger. And these sorts of examples.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:57  I know, I’m wondering like, what did the mastodon have a bad public relations person? I mean, it’s always the saber tooth tiger.

Simone Stolzoff 00:12:04  Exactly. But, you know, I mean, I think the point stands, which is when we don’t know, we can’t plan, we can’t necessarily guarantee our survival. And that is our primary function. It’s our desire to stay safe and secure. And so from a feeling standpoint, when we are certain, it makes us feel like we can plan and by extension, that we are safe. It’s why we like music that’s based on repeating patterns when you can anticipate what’s to come. Uncertainty, on the other hand, makes us feel incredibly uncomfortable because if you don’t know the source of that noise, maybe it is the tiger.

Simone Stolzoff 00:12:42  The problem is that our brains are also wired to see a lot of false positives. We often perceive uncertainty as a threat, when it might just be a discomfort of being in a new place that we’ve never been, or the precursor to learning, or a feeling that is necessary to go through to discover the possibilities that might be sitting on the other side of our discomfort. So in order to build this uncertainty tolerance, we have to tell ourselves a different story, which is that uncertainty does not necessarily mean danger. Uncertainty can potentially be the cause of fear, can be hard to deal with, but it can also be something that shows us something about ourselves or the world that we didn’t previously know.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:36  So you talk about three psychological or behavioral traps. I may be paraphrasing you there comfort, hubris and control. And then you turn around and say, you know, each of those has a sort of a corresponding virtue that would go with it openness, humility, acceptance. Talk to me first about the three comfort. Hubris in control. Because that’s really how you orient the book.

Simone Stolzoff 00:14:01  Yeah, it’s every nonfiction book needs its framework. And this is my framework. I originally wanted to call them the The Three Horsemen of Delusion, but my editor thought that was a little too highfalutin. And so we settled on the certainty traps.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:14  I like it, yeah, I get it.

Simone Stolzoff 00:14:16  In many ways. You know, they’re just these psychological tendencies that we have that keep us stuck without accepting uncertainty. So for comfort, for example, we all have a status quo bias. We probably all know a friend who’s in a job or in a relationship that they know isn’t quite working for them, but they’d rather the devil they know. They’d rather stay with the situation that is known and comfortable, as opposed to exposing themselves to the uncertainty of what happens if they walk away. For hubris, this is our tendency to be excessively proud. Our tendency to think that we know best. And I think this shows up all the time in the business world, where people claim to know exactly how many entry level jobs will be wiped out by AI, or how the market is going to behave over the course of the next 12 months.

Simone Stolzoff 00:15:05  The last is maybe the most pervasive, which is control, which is our desire to plan for all future outcomes, to need to know exactly how our career will progress, to need to know exactly what the future of the climate or our own death day will be. And all. Though all of these psychological needs are borne out of a place of wantonness to stay safe and secure and survive. They also come with costs, with comfort, with. We are not willing to expose ourselves to uncertainty. We will never learn. Not just our own preferences, but what we are capable of. With hubris, it can be indicative of blind spots where you can’t see ways in which you may be erring or not seeing an accurate picture of reality. And with control. Our desire for control, particularly about things that we can’t control, like macroeconomic conditions or climate change, or these things in our life that are outside of our realm of influence, can suck so much of our energy and attention and take us away from the realm which we actually can control, which is our realm of influence.

Simone Stolzoff 00:16:22  And so that’s sort of the flip side of each of these traps. So on the other side of comfort is the growth and learning that comes from being outside of our comfort zone. On the other side of hubris is the humility that comes from admitting what we don’t or can’t now. And on the other side, if control is the acceptance that comes from being able to separate what is in and outside of our power.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:02  I think that’s an important point to note, because I often think, sometimes we think that we need to get to a place where we’re not uncomfortable for things to be valuable. I mean, it’s sort of the opposite of the comfort question, but there’s a line you have from a researcher and I love it. She says uncertainty is annoying, difficult and stressful for a reason because if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t pay attention to it and take action.

Simone Stolzoff 00:17:26  Yeah, I love that too, you know? Uncertainty is what incentivizes us to say, put on a seatbelt before we enter a car, because we’re not sure whether the car is going to crash or to maybe think twice before we reach for that berry that we’re not sure is poisonous. And so in many ways, like many of the sort of emotions in the negative register. They can be great teachers. They can be instructive and tell us what we might need to pay attention to, even in the context of something personal, like a relationship. If you’re uncertain about something, maybe that is a flag that shows that you need to have a conversation with your partner about it. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to abandon ship or leave right away, but uncertainty is that teacher. It is that sort of internal alarm system that’s saying, pay attention to this. This might not be in your favor.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:15  I want to talk about decisions. And you frame up this making decisions through three different people’s perspectives. Ira Bledsoe, Esther Perel and Ruth Chang share about those.

Simone Stolzoff 00:18:29  So the broader context is that the book is narrative based. So each chapter of the book has its own sort of mini case study. And one of the chapters I profile a couple and they have been together for 17 years, married for ten, and they’re out having a drink at a bar in New York City, and they decide to do something that other people thought was insane.

Simone Stolzoff 00:18:50  They decided to go their separate ways for a year, and then come back to the bar to decide whether they want to stay together. 12 months later, they called it the Year of Living Dangerously. And I remember first hearing this story and I was like, well, I have to write about this. This is a stranger than fiction, and I won’t ruin that. And you’ll have to read the book to find out what happens. But in the context of reporting this story, I reached out to all of these experts. So Esther Perel is this famed couples therapist. Ira Bradshaw is this ethicist who was at Emory University, and then Ruth Ching as a philosopher. So it’s sort of three different perspectives on this question of what do you do when you’re uncertain about a relationship? But it can also be extrapolated to other facets of life, and they each have their own perspective. One of the lines from Esther Perel that I really loved was that trust is an active engagement with the unknown. So, so many people come to Esther and they say, how do I know whether I found the one? Or how do I know whether I am in the relationship? Or I should go on another date? And the truth is, you can’t know, especially not at the outset.

Simone Stolzoff 00:19:57  You can’t know whether this person is the right person or be your one and only love, or is worth exploring until you’ve actually transacted, until you’ve actually been able to take some of those leaps and find out whether they continue to show up. And so I love that idea of trust being an active engagement with the unknown. Bradshaw is an ethicist, and so he works both at hospital and with college students, helping them figure out their career. And whenever someone comes to him with an uncertain predicament, he always asks them the same three questions. And I love them all. The first is what do you want? Pretty straightforward, but the idea here is to get out of your head and into a more embodied sense of desire. The second is, do you want to want that which is little heady, but it’s what ethicists talk about as your second order desires. So sort of your your desires, of your desires. So do I want to smoke a cigarette? Sure. Do I want to want to smoke a cigarette? Maybe not.

Simone Stolzoff 00:20:55  You’re sort of more reflective self. The third question, which is the one that I like the most, is what does this choice say about who you are and why I like it is because when we’re making a decision, when you’re at that crossroads and you can go left or go right, you can’t necessarily know the outcome of your decision. And so that question, what does this choice say about who you are or who you want to be? Taps into this aspirational version of ourselves. It helps align your choices with your values. And if you make a choice that’s aligned, hopefully you can stand by your decision even if you don’t get the outcome that you desire. And the third is this woman, Ruth Chang, who’s a philosopher. And she says that what makes a hard decision hard is not that one option is clearly better than another, and you’re just too stupid to work it out. What makes a hard decision hard is that one option is likely better for some reasons. Another option is likely better for others, and neither is better overall.

Simone Stolzoff 00:22:00  So rather than agonizing over trying to make the right decision or trying to find the perfect fit, she says, make a decision by whatever means you can, and then spend your energy telling yourself a story of why that decision is right. Sort of retroactively weaving a narrative about all of the reasons why you made that choice. And I love that, you know, the example that she gives is imagine you’re deciding what to eat for breakfast, and you’re deciding between a bowl of fruit and a doughnut. The fruit is healthier. The donut is more delicious, but neither is better overall. And so you go back and forth and back and forth, and you make pro con lists and you talk to your yoga teacher about it and yada yada. She says, make your choice and then tell yourself the story. Today I am going for the doughnut because doughnuts are delicious and I want to start my day with joy. And I think we can make lots of life’s crossroad decisions from a similar vantage point.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:58  Yeah, I think the danger there, of course, is the narratives that we can very easily tell ourselves about consistently making the donut choice, right? If we’re not, if we’re not careful.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:09  But I flip a coin for a lot of things. It drives my partner nuts. She’s like, you can’t just decide by flipping a coin. And I’m like, yes, I can because I’ve spent five minutes and I can’t tell the difference. And so it doesn’t matter. I also love the Ruth Chang one because it also says something I think is really important, which is that we’re too stupid to know which. Hard choices are hard, not because of our ignorance. And I’ve been in situations where I’ve had to make very difficult decisions. The biggest, most wrenching one for me was my last marriage, right. And it just went on a long time. Lots of many decisions. But one of the worst parts was that I just kept feeling like I should be able to figure this out. And it was a little bit of a relief to me, a little turning down of my psychological distress to go. You can’t figure it out because this is a really difficult decision. And like you said, I’ve got two choices.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:08  Neither of these is particularly the one I want. You know, or they’re both good and bad in very different ways. And I and I think so for me, for the trivial things, just making the decision is really valuable. And those more important things. I do think knowing that it’s natural for this to be really difficult, it’s helpful.

Simone Stolzoff 00:24:29  Yeah. There’s a line from a psychologist that I quote in the book that I really like, this guy named Rollo May, and he says that commitment is healthiest, not in the absence of doubt, but in spite of doubt. And what I love about that is it is not making an assumption that you should be able to rid or banish doubt or uncertainty from your mind, but it’s by making choices in spite of not knowing exactly how they’ll turn out. That refines our character, that makes us into who we are. I remember in my own life this this maybe lower stakes, but equally as distressing decision between choosing to take a job as a journalist or to work at this design firm in San Francisco.

Simone Stolzoff 00:25:17  The journalism job was on the East Coast. And, you know, on one hand, it’s like world’s smallest violin. You know, the agony of deciding between two attractive job offers. But on the other hand, it really sent me for an existential loop. And maybe some of our listeners have been at a similar sort of crossroads where they can see two very distinct paths. There were sort of Simone, the designer on one path, simony, the journalist on the other, and I was insufferable. I could not make up my mind for the life of me, and I talked about it with everyone I knew, and depending on the side of the bed, I woke up and I would change my mind. And what I realized in retrospect is exactly what you just said. What made the decision hard is not that there was a clear right path. It was one path was better for some reasons. Another path was better for other reasons, and neither it was better overall. And so what I had to do is be able to make a choice to commit in spite of my doubt, in spite of my uncertainty.

Simone Stolzoff 00:26:14  And in many ways, this book is just sort of a balm for the 28 year old. I was trying to make that choice in my life. You know, we write the books that we need to read.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:22  Yeah, well, that idea of the Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer talks about not making the right choice, making the choice right. And it’s the same thing that once you do, it’s really very beneficial, as was suggested, to start the narrative about how this is the right choice and to live fully into that choice. You know, I remember the more recently for me, my son trying to figure out college was a similar thing. I just was like, there’s no right answer here. There are variables. We can’t even begin to predict that. We just can’t know. Who’s your roommate? Do you have a good roommate? Do you have a bad roommate? Who are your professor? I mean, there’s so many factors that we just don’t know. Like, let’s make an informed choice, but then ultimately just realize, like, once the choice is made, now we go live it.

Simone Stolzoff 00:27:14  Yeah. That’s my. My Russian friend used to tell me, you make a choice and then you murder the alternatives. Which I kind of like thinking of that, especially in the context of something like a college. You know, there’s this, decision strategists that I talked to for the book. This former professional poker player named Annie Duke. And she gave me this tool that I think is very helpful, called the only option test, which is imagine you’re deciding between going on vacation to two equally as attractive places. Maybe one is Rome and the other is Paris. And, you know, it’s a high stakes decision because it’s expensive. You might not be able to take many trips like this in your lifetime. And so you agonize. You make pro con bliss. You flip the coin, you flip the coin again. What she says is, imagine someone had a gun to your head and said, your only option is to go to Rome. Would you be happy? And then imagine if that same person had a gun to your head and said, your only option is to go to Paris? Would you be happy? And if the answer is yes to both, maybe the decision matters less than you think.

Simone Stolzoff 00:28:18  You think. And so for your son, for example, maybe he’s choosing between two schools. What makes the decision hired is the opportunity cost is knowing that choosing one school means foreclosing on its options of choosing other schools. But if you only had one choice to make and he would be happy, maybe that’s a decision that he could make relatively quickly.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:38  Yeah, it’s the other thing that the coin toss does for me is that it? I almost immediately discover that I had a preference. After all, when the coin comes up like it’s just I have, I can feel it. I’m like, no or yet, right? If I still can’t discern, then I’m like, okay, truly, either one is a perfectly good choice. 

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Simone Stolzoff 00:30:00  Yeah. So the story here is the story of a young fellow named Max, and he is a software engineer. In college, he actually studied software engineering in art, fine art, which I think is a little bit illustrative of the way that his career and his life developed. But he’s a software engineer. He gets a job at Google, a sort of dream job. He moves out to the Bay area and after a few years of working, he has this uncanny feeling that his life is just sort of acting out this expected script.

Simone Stolzoff 00:30:29  But each day just feels like rinse and repeat. And he goes to the coffee shop that’s highly rated on Yelp, and he takes the optimal route to work on his bike, and he goes to the exact bar that you would think a 24 year old living in San Francisco would go to. And so he decides to shake things up a little bit, and perhaps in an extreme way, which is he starts designing algorithms to make decisions on his behalf. In many ways, they’re sort of like the souped up coin flips that Eric uses. And the first one he does is it taps into the Uber API and calls an Uber to his house and brings him to a location in this city known only to the driver. So it’s sort of like a roulette Uber roulette. And so he, you know, gets to see all these different neighborhoods, these different places that he wouldn’t have otherwise seen. Then he decides to dial it up a notch. And at the time, Facebook had this feature where you could see all of the public events in your area around you.

Simone Stolzoff 00:31:26  And so he created his Facebook random event generator that would just tell him a random event to go to in the city, and then he would go. And at its most extreme, he quit his job and he created an algorithm to choose where he lives around the world. So each month he would roll the dice and they would say, Cortina, Slovenia. And he would pick up his bag and he would go to Slovenia. And he lived there for a year or a month, and then at the end of the month, he would roll the dice again and says, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. And he sort of lived his whole life this way for over two years. And what I like about it is, in the short term, you might think this man is like an uncertainty expert. This is like our our sensei. We can learn so much about him from his tolerance of uncertainty, his willingness to expose himself into new situations. But I interviewed this psychologist named Mikhail Dukat, who really helped change my mind.

Simone Stolzoff 00:32:22  And Duga was one of the first people to link intolerance of uncertainty with a lot of anxiety disorders that he sees in his patients. And he says that when people are particularly intolerant of uncertainty, he tends to see one of two different behaviors. The first is people become obsessive information gatherers. You know, we probably all have a friend who needs to read like 300 reviews on Amazon before they buy a plastic water bottle, or we become extremely impulsive. And he says neither is really an adaptive behavior. Like, imagine you’re trying to buy a jeans. The information gatherer will have to try on every pair of jeans in the store. The impulsive person will have to buy the pair of jeans in the window, but both are sort of avoidance strategies to try to get away from the uncertainty that is inherent in making any choice in your life. And so on the surface, where you might see Max as someone who is really tolerant of uncertainty by outsourcing the responsibility or the decision to the algorithm, he’s in fact avoiding uncertainty.

Simone Stolzoff 00:33:28  He’s finding certainty and is not needing to choose himself. And so it was a fascinating chapter to report, and I think it taught me a lot about this balance between exploring and exploiting, this balance between wanting to learn about the world and novelty and new possibilities, while also committing and having stuff that compounds that we can continue to return to and find meaning.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:08  When I was reading that chapter, I was thinking about a story about the musician John Cage that I read recently and as his career went on, he was a Zen practitioner to a certain degree. So his idea was that the ideal music is the music in which the composer’s ego is completely absent, absent from. And so he would be doing things like just using the I Ching to pick chords. He was he was taking it like to such an extreme that when I first start reading about it, I’m like, wow, that is really cool. And then I listened to some of John Cage’s music and I’m like, hold on a second. Like, you know, there is a role for the composer to be making choices.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:52  Again, I think he was proving points often with his music, but to me it was that like, you know, how do we find the middle ground of I obsess over every last detail of everything I compose to the nth degree, or I absolutely to your point, outsource all the decisions to some random generator. And I think the conclusion I came to after I read that, and that you’re sort of coming to you right now, is like, we got to find that middle place that works for us. And the other thing that I think is interesting about that explore, exploit dilemma. Right. The explore is you just keep doing different things. The exploit is maybe you try something that compounds or you just keep like, you know, you’ve got a good restaurant, you just keep going to the good restaurant. And what I found interesting about that dilemma is I think we can be on different parts of that spectrum for different parts of our lives. Like food wise, I’m kind of an exploiter like, meaning that my uncertainty tolerance on food is less, you know, or my window of of comfort is less.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:59  But other things, it’s a lot more wide. Yeah, but I think the prison of our preferences is just such a I just love it because I see how more and more, particularly as I age more of my choices get made by comfort. That’s the one that is driving the engine, and it is not the one that I want driving the engine, I don’t want to banish it to the outskirts. I think that prison of our preferences is a lot because, you know, if we look at Buddhism in general, there is a certain degree of, hey, you are suffering because you are very attached to this going one way or the other.

Simone Stolzoff 00:36:39  Yeah, yeah. At the very least, if you’re to attached to one way of life or one dish from a restaurant or one job title, you become fragile because that thing might get taken away from you, or you might not be able to go to that restaurant, or you might get laid off or furloughed. And so that’s one case for diversifying your preferences.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:02  Or North Star, don’t even say that North Star could go away. I don’t know, don’t even suggest it.

Simone Stolzoff 00:37:09  But I think there’s there’s trade-offs on both ends of the spectrum. So if you do too much exploration, too much novelty seeking your life doesn’t necessarily move in a particular direction. And this is what Max ultimately found. You know, he spent all this time traveling and seeing the world, but it had diminishing returns. Whereas if you do too much exploitation, too much leaning into what you already know and you like, that has a few costs as well. One is you might miss out on a preference that you didn’t know you had. You know the restaurant around the corner that you might like a little bit better or like better certain days of the week, or the dish on the menu that you didn’t know that you wanted to order. And so in addition to it being person dependent and dependent on maybe different facets of your life, I also think it changes a lot as we age, and people who are older might need a little bit less exploration as they become a little bit more calcified in their ways.

Simone Stolzoff 00:38:13  Whereas if you’re younger, you might need a little bit more exploration as you’re trying to determine your tastes and figure out who you are. But the most important takeaway in my mind is that we all need both. We need to have some certainty and some uncertainty to live a fulfilling life.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:30  Yeah. I mean, I think when it comes to that aging piece, you raise a point that I think about a lot is that I notice tendencies of aging in myself that I don’t generally like, and resisting the things that come with aging is not exactly a graceful way to go about it, but nor is giving in to the tendencies that come with it. So, you know, figuring that out is always sort of a nuanced path.

Simone Stolzoff 00:38:59  Yeah, very much so.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:01  All right. Let’s move on from here. And I want to talk about doubt. Talk to me about the role of doubt as a positive force in our lives, or the cost of not doubting. Whichever way you’d like to go.

Simone Stolzoff 00:39:22  Yeah, I mean, they go hand in hand, right? If you’re too overly confident, if you don’t introduce any sort of doubt or uncertainty into your thought process, you’re prone to have large blind spots.

Simone Stolzoff 00:39:35  And we see this all the time. There is a benefit to having expertise and experience, but the cost is that we are these pattern matching brains. And if you always expect something to go a certain way, you might miss out on something that’s outside of your purview. The classic image, which I really like a lot, is you can become a drunk man looking for his keys under the streetlight, because that’s the only place that’s illuminated. And so one of the things that introducing doubt or maybe in an organizational context, descent or in your personal life. Some uncertainty is. It makes you think twice. It makes you pay attention to what you might be missing. It makes you find evidence to support your claims, as opposed to making assumptions that you know are right. The problem is that introducing too much doubt or too much uncertainty can be paralyzing. It can keep you from making a choice at all. There’s this one study that I talk about in this middle section about hubris that I really like a lot, and it was conducted at a university, and they broke students up into small groups to solve a murder mystery.

Simone Stolzoff 00:40:50  And a majority of these students were in Greek life. So fraternities or sororities and in certain groups, they were homogenous. So they were all people from the same frat or sorority house. And in other groups there, they were more heterogeneous. They had people from different houses, and then they worked on the murder mystery and then came up with their results and then rated how effective they thought their group was. And the findings were fascinating. Groups that had diversity in them, people from different houses were correct at a much higher rate. They were better decision makers. And yet the process of coming to a decision they rated as less effective, whereas people that were part of the in-group, this homogenous group of people that were all in the same sorority, for example, had an easier time coming to consensus. They thought that they worked better together, but they were less effective. And I think you can take this finding and think about so many aspects of your life or your organization that probably falls in line, which is to say that when we are surrounded by people who always think like us, it feels good.

Simone Stolzoff 00:42:03  There’s less tension, there’s less friction, but often you’re prone to blind spots and mistakes and you’re thinking, whereas when there is a diversity of perspectives or ages or people of different teams or people that have different life circumstances, there is friction. And maybe that’s by a design that friction is what leads to more comprehensive decision making. And even though it doesn’t feel as good, often that ultimate outcome is more accurate. And so that’s sort of a tension that we’re all having to navigate in the context of our businesses or our lives or families or relationships. Maybe there’s no better source of a frictionless decision than one that you only have to make with yourself. And yet, when we surround ourselves with other people, there is always going to be a little bit of a rub, which is maybe by design.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:52  Yeah, that was one of my favorite studies in the book, too. I found it absolutely fascinating that you would objectively be worse at solving the problem, but think you were better at it because it made you comfortable.  It made me think of a couple things. My career before I did this was in software. And so a lot of times, you know, we would get brought a problem as a leader. And there’s like one person that knows the answer. Yeah. And intuitively it makes sense to me. I’m like, yeah, that’s that. Of course that’s probably exactly what’s happening. And sometimes that was the case. And rushing down that path would get us to an answer far faster. But there were plenty of times that I rushed us to decision, because the people that I most liked agreed with me, you know? Now, I couldn’t see that at the time. Yeah. You know, the other story that it made me think of is I did this, like Outward Bound expedition several years ago, and it’s an organization that takes people out into the wilderness and trains them to do well out there. And so we were out on a nine day thing, and in the beginning, our guides sort of told us where to go, but as the week went on, we had to make more and more of the decisions with a map and a compass.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:11  The whole process was always uncomfortable because you broke into like, you know, four groups, and in each group you’re debating what’s the right answer. Then you have to all come together and all agree on the right answer and collectively. So the whole process was fraught with that uncomfortableness. But I remember one time all of us except one woman thought we knew the right way to go. And this woman was by nature a very retiring, shy, not comfortable confronting people. But she just sort of stuck to her guns. And you can see where this is going. She was, of course, was the right one. Yeah. And I just loved that story as another example of like sometimes that, you know, that dissenting opinion, as annoying as it is. Right. Because I’m just like, can we just wrap this up? I’ve got, like, a £40 pack on my back. Here we go. You know? But she saved us hours. You know, she saved us ours by being willing to be the one that disagreed.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:16  And and I think in a beautiful personal empowerment way, I think it was a huge lesson to her that, like, I can, you know, like I can have an opinion. It’s valuable and it’s right. It was just a it was kind of a beautiful thing.

Simone Stolzoff 00:45:27  That is beautiful. And I think the fact that she is by nature shy gives her more credibility because often, like, especially in a business team context, you’re often listening to the loudest voice in the room or the person that gets paid the most opinion, and it shows. You know, this is classic groupthink, right? If everyone starts thinking one way, you just want to get on the bandwagon. But if you’re willing to stick to your guns and back it up with evidence and share your thinking, that actually will ultimately lead to to better group decision making.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:57  Yeah, the thing that I found difficult in that work context also is that sometimes there’s just the person that disagrees because that’s what they do, right? And you’re like, I don’t really want to pay that guy a ton of attention.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:11  But sometimes he actually is right, you know? And so there’s a tendency to be like, all right, you’re just slowing this whole process down, you know? Anyway, no short answers to any of that, but it certainly made me think about that as we looked at that chapter.

Simone Stolzoff 00:46:26  There’s a framework that I like when it comes to making these types of decisions in a business context, which is rather than thinking just about consensus as what we’re looking for. Like everyone’s saying yes or everyone’s saying no, there’s a middle ground which is safe enough to try. And so rather than it just being we need 100% in or 100% out being willing to run the experiment, being willing to try something, let’s say let’s go for this direction in five minutes and then reassess is often a better way of trying to balance that tension between wanting to, you know, disagree and commit versus wanting to talk it over one more time.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:07  That’s beautiful. Going back to the prison of your preferences also. Like, is this safe enough to try? It’s a great question.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:14  Like, oh, I’m really not losing that much by, you know, moving outside of what I would normally do here. I love the Voltaire quote. Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

Simone Stolzoff 00:47:27  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:28  Now, one of the things that I notice in the world, and I’m not alone in noticing this, is that certainty is very rewarded in a lot of places. You know, even if I look at the world that you and I are sort of in, which is, I don’t know, I want to call it personal development, business advice, self-help, whatever you want to call it. Right. The people who are really certain that they have the answers tend to do well in a lot of ways. Is this just back to the uncomfortable of what uncertainty is. And just as a people will just be like, I’d rather not. I’d rather not wrestle with that question. I’d rather not have all the nuance.

Simone Stolzoff 00:48:08  Yeah, I mean, we all want to hitch our wagon to the leader that has a very clear idea of exactly what the future will look like. Or, you know, the most extreme, maybe a cult leader who tells you exactly what the world is going to do, or exactly the steps you need to take to get to heaven. The problem is, these hubristic leaders are attractive and not always correct. And so it’s easy to sort of outsource your worldview or to say, okay, I’m just going to follow this politician or this CEO or this, you know, self-help guru into the dark. And yet, especially with anything that hasn’t happened yet, the idea that we can be certain is a fallacy. Yeah. And particularly in these moments, like the one that we’re living through right now where there is so much precarity and uncertainty. The peddling of certainty just increases. You know, you turn on the TV and there’s someone that’s going to tell you exactly who’s going to win the election. You open your app on your phone and someone tells you the food that you need to eat. If you want to live to 100 and it’s attractive. You get it. It sort of taps into this, you know, person in the jungle that’s like, oh, when I’m certain, then I feel safe, then I can plan and I feel secure. The problem is, it’s often wrong, or at least not the whole story.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:30  Yeah, yeah, I notice it in myself. And I think, like, my entire worldview is sort of nuance and questioning. And yet I feel the same pull. I’m like, maybe they really have figured out how to do 200 hours of therapy in 20 minutes, right? Maybe, maybe this person really has cracked the code.

Simone Stolzoff 00:49:51  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, we all have that tendency in ourselves to look for the path of least resistance, or the easier answer, and to say that it’s nuanced or it’s not black and white. Or maybe you’re wrong. It is not as attractive. And I think it’s true. You know, for example, thinking about a CEO. No one wants a leader that just says, I don’t know what’s going to happen.

Simone Stolzoff 00:50:13  And yet the leaders that say, this is exactly what’s going to happen. You know, they are often wrong. And so I think we need a little bit of both. We need the types of leaders who are confident about what they know, are humble enough to admit what they don’t know, and who are willing to design a plan for learning and figuring things out.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:31  Yeah, I faced this when I was writing my book because I’m a big believer there’s not like one size fits all solutions, right? Everybody’s life is different. There’s so many varying circumstances. So my natural tendency, if I’m not careful, is to hedge everything and caveat everything and create 8000 pages worth of end notes. But at a certain point, then I’m just not saying anything right to write. It’s complicated and hand it back to my editor is not exactly a good book.

Simone Stolzoff 00:51:00  Yeah, I love that quote. All models are wrong, but some are useful. Yeah, and, you know, I think it’s true. You can’t take a picture of the whole world.

Simone Stolzoff 00:51:08  You need to put up a frame. You need to have constraints. And of course, you know, lots of pieces of advice are one size fits all are overly prescriptive, but sometimes they sort of function like the coin flip, where they give you something to react to and you don’t have to necessarily accept it whole hog. But it’s nice to have people who are willing to put a stake in the ground.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:31  So one of the things that I really liked in the book was sort of a two by two decision matrix. Can you share that with me?

Simone Stolzoff 00:51:41  Yeah. Basically the two axes are is this a decision that is of high consequence or the stakes high, or is the decision of low consequence with lower stakes? And is it a decision that is in my realm of influence, or is it a decision that’s outside of my realm of influence? And we spend a lot of time focused on decisions that we have no control over, or decisions that are of low consequence. And what we should actually be spending on our time is, is only that one quadrant of high stakes decisions that we have control over.

Simone Stolzoff 00:52:18  And another way to think about this is through what you might know as the Serenity Prayer, which is very popular in any sort of addiction or 12 step program. God grant me the serenity to to accept the things I can’t control, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I think the majority of the decisions in our day to day lives are in that low consequence quadrant. They are about what to eat or what to wear, what to watch on the TV. And not to say that those decisions don’t matter at all, but you can often make those decisions quickly because the cost of making a wrong decision is relatively low. They are what are sometimes referred to as two way door decisions, where if you make the decision, you walk out the door, you realize you made the wrong decision. You can walk back through that door.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:09  It’s my friend. Chris gets hung up though, because he can’t decide what clothes to wear. He often ends up just going out in public with nothing on.

Simone Stolzoff 00:53:17  Poor Chris. Or maybe a blessing to everyone around him for the past year.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:22  Well, I’m not going to comment on that second part. All right.

Simone Stolzoff 00:53:26  The other types of decisions that are in our controller. Obviously, you know, the decisions that are more like one way, two decisions, questions like, you know, should I marry this person? Should I buy this house? And those are decisions that warrant a more analytical decision making process. The problem is, when we take our frameworks from one day, one way to our decisions and apply them to two way door decisions. And I’m sure we all have a friend that will go back and forth and back and forth, and whether they want to get the pizza or the pasta, and then they put in their order and then they changed their order. We could afford to be making some of those two way door decisions a lot quicker.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:00  Yeah, I love that idea of there’s one quadrant that’s worth paying attention to. I think the tricky part, because I’ve thought a lot about this.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:09  I’ve lived with a serenity prayer for 30 years now since I came into recovery the first time is that so many things don’t fit cleanly into either column, and I think that makes things trickier. I was talking with somebody who’d had a chronic disease for a long time. Right. And we were talking about how, you know, there’s part of that process which is learning to accept that your life is kind of the way it is, but also recognizing there’s things you can change. Or I think about, like, you know, we could say like, well, you’re not in control of your, you know, what happens with your finances, which ultimately is true. The stock market could implode tomorrow. There’s nothing there. But there’s a lot that I can influence in that. And that’s why I love you using the word influence more than the word control, you know? Because I do think a lot of these things are matters of influence. Even, like, you know, I may not be able to control when I die, but I certainly can influence how likely that is to happen in, you know, next week.

Simone Stolzoff 00:55:12  Yeah, I really like that distinction a lot. And, and makes me think that we can make decisions that plan for that uncertainty. You know, in the same way that like an investor benefits from diversifying the stocks in their portfolio as a tactic that helps them hedge against a future market that they don’t know. We can do that in our personal life, too. You know, my first book was called The Good Enough Job, and it was about the value of diversifying our identities beyond just what we do for work. And one of the main arguments is that when you’re able to see yourself as more than just a software engineer or an accountant or a lawyer, It allows you to have a more broad foundation so that even if you were to lose one pillar of your identity, the house can remain standing. And I think that’s a lot of our work in this current moment where we don’t know what the future holds. We don’t know whether AI is going to undermine these industries or whether the president is going to lead us to a world war or what have you.

Simone Stolzoff 00:56:12  But you can do things in your life that are both commitments. In spite of that uncertainty and things that plan for an uncertain future like hedging.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:23  I was thinking of going to the story of you and your wife, the pregnancy, and part of what I really like about that is that even as someone who knows all this about uncertainty, how living in it is actually still challenging.

Simone Stolzoff 00:56:38  Yeah. So while I was reporting the book, my wife and I were trying to get pregnant for the first time, and we did. And we were so excited and we started planning future. We got the app that says, you know, how big is your baby? Based on what week you’re at. And we started calling this unborn kid Poppy. And about three months and we were at the doctor’s office and she said, at this stage in the pregnancy, we’d expect to see a heartbeat. And I’m not picking one up on the ultrasound right now. And, you know, of course, our minds go, oh, shit, you know what’s happening? And she said, why don’t you come back in a week and then we can do some more tests and see where we’re at.

Simone Stolzoff 00:57:18  So not only did we have to deal with the prospect of miscarriage, but we also had to deal with the waiting. And I just been writing about these studies about how, you know, a study at the University of College London where participants were given either a 50% chance of receiving a painful electric shock or an 100% chance of receiving a painful electric shock. And those with the 50% chance were far more stressed and anxious than those with 100% chance, or a study of breast cancer patients where they found that the period between getting a biopsy and getting a diagnosis is often the hardest part of the entire breast cancer journey. It’s the waiting. It’s the uncertainty. And here I am writing about the stuff, and then I have to deal with it in my own life. And I remember that week very clearly. You know, it was tough. There is no no two ways around that. But there were also some, some beautiful moments. My wife and I would maybe make eye contact in a crowded room or hug for a little bit longer.

Simone Stolzoff 00:58:14  It sort of had a slowing down of time. We were very present in our experience and sure enough, we come back to the doctor a week later and it was what was called a pregnancy demise. You know, we lost the baby. And what that story taught me is that uncertainty is tricky by design. You know, in the last chapter of the book, I talk about grief and death, and there’s this one line that I keep coming back to, which is the fact that we live in the death denying culture robs us of the ability to appreciate how we want to live. And, you know, the loss was really hard. And now this is a few years later. We were able to conceive again. And I think we appreciate that baby just a little bit more because we went through that negative experience. But all of the wisdom of the book, you know, this idea of finding your anchors, of finding the things in your life that you are certain about, this idea of trusting in your future self, this idea of being willing to transact in spite of not knowing.

Simone Stolzoff 00:59:28  I got to live it in my own life. And every time I look at my son now, I think a little bit about that loss and how it helped me become more appreciative of the life that I do have.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:41  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 once. Let’s make those shifts happen starting today. Oneyoufeed.net/ebook. 

Well, that is a great place for us to end. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us. You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation, where I’d actually like to take those four lessons of living with uncertainty that you gave us in 15 seconds and explore them a little bit more.

Eric Zimmer 01:00:43  Some, you know, even more practical tools for living with uncertainty. So listeners, if you would like access to that and not have to live with the knowing uncertainty of what brilliant thing did Simo say, as well as add free episodes and really importantly, supporting something that you know with no uncertainty you love? Go to one. You bet. Thank you so much, Simo.

Simone Stolzoff 01:01:07  Thanks for having me on the show.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:08  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.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:40  Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.

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Episode Transcript:

Julie Holland 00:00:00  How can we get into parasympathetic? What can you do to get out of fight or flight and get into parasympathetic? And you know, for some people it’s put your phone down, your phone is making you sick.

Chris Forbes 00:00:18  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 00:01:02  There’s a saying in addiction medicine that Julie Holland and I both love. You can never get enough of something that almost works. We moved on and started talking about phones, and she put it in a way that stuck with me. A text is like a vitamin A conversation. Face to face is the food. You can live on supplements for a while, but it’s never the nutrition of the real meal, which is why it never quite fills you and you keep reaching for more. Julie wrote good chemistry about the science of connection. Her case is simple. Stop trying to live on vitamins. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Julie, welcome to the show.

Julie Holland 00:01:43  Thanks for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:44  I’m excited to have you on. We’re going to be primarily discussing your book called Good Chemistry The Science of Connection From Soul to Psychedelics. But before we get into that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. 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.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:15  And the grandchild stops. 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.

Julie Holland 00:02:29  Well, I guess the first thing it means to me is just where you place your attention, where you place your energy and what you’re trying to accomplish. You know, one of the metaphors I use is like, first you have to decide what a garden is to cordon it off and get rid of the rocks and change the dirt around and add the plants. Like the first thing you have to do is say, this is going to be a garden. So some of the energy that I think I put toward things is figuring out what to build, where to build it, what it’s going to look like so that you can kind of defend your space with other people. But from a personal perspective, my two wolves are sort of like the yin and yang energies that I am constantly trying to balance.

Julie Holland 00:03:08  I am very naturally sort of yang testosterone heavy. I have things to do. I’ve got a vector. I have places to go. Get out of my way. Whereas the yin energy is more receptive and and hanging back and seeing what people say and taking it all in before you make a decision. So it’s very easy for me to be sort of all in and aggressive and barreling forward, and where I really need to put my energy is to having more of a balance of yin receptivity, openness. That’s my own sort of personal battle. I think I have issues with like impulse control, for instance, which I feel like is a very yang thing to just kind of shoot first, ask questions later, you know? Yeah, shoot from the hip. So luckily, I’m married to someone who’s very introspective and receptive and takes a lot of time before making a decision and is like sort of what I call a slow metabolism. I’m a very fast metabolism. I’m like, if this has changed, then we have to accommodate the new thing and pivot, you know? Whereas the person that I am emotionally yoked with is like, well, let’s let’s think about this and see where it’s all going.

Julie Holland 00:04:09  So that’s my real battle is to put the brakes on, not be all gas, to have some impulse control, to stop and listen and take things in. Which is why I should stop talking now. Right. Eric.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:20  Well, I’m not going to touch that. It’s interesting, though, as you were talking about your partner that you’re yoked to. It made me think about a section in the book where you are talking about when we fall in love, there’s there’s this Limerick’s period. There’s sort of a high or not sort of there actually is a high that comes from that. And then we settle into the harder work of building a relationship, and you have a line there where you say the optimal outcome, the way out of the dead end, the dead end being the tendency to just kind of like, keep looking for something else. You accept and embrace all the disowned traits in your partner, and that helps you accept them in yourself. And I was thinking about how it sounds like you found the way to do that.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:05  You found the way to appreciate the way in which your partner is different than you, and how that is helpful. I’m not saying all the time you feel that way, but that in general you do. And how did you get to a place where you were able to see that as different, but a positive compliment to you versus this person is wrong about the way they see things or do things.

Julie Holland 00:05:28  Yeah, I would say it’s constantly in flux. Those things, like Jeremy, through basically sheer will and brute strength, has, you know, consistently reminded me that my way is not always the best way and that he is not the enemy, you know. So and the truth is, you know, it’s funny because, like, if we play opposite each other like a game of Scrabble, it would be a very close game. And he would drive me crazy because he took forever. But if we’re on the same Scrabble team and we’re playing against our friends, we are unstoppable, you know? And so I just I kind of remember that, like, we work better as a team and it’s sort of like buckshot, you know, if I’m all white and he’s all black and you put us together, we’re covering a lot more ground.

Julie Holland 00:06:08  But because of the way I was raised to be self-reliant and trust no one and take care of myself and also, you know, those sort of very young and I would say even maybe kind of misogynist sort of traits, like, I think I had internalized misogyny growing up. I was the youngest of three girls. My parents both wanted boys. They told us they wanted boys. I heard so many times growing up. Julie, you were our last chance for a boy. So there was some way where I was operating of, like, how tomboyish can I be? Can I be a bully? Can I be a brute and a bruiser? And those traits honestly served me really like being a premed, being a med student, being a psych resident. You know, I kicked ass because I did it all myself and I didn’t trust anybody to do it. But when you’re a wife and a mother and you know, like a parent and a spouse, like you can’t act like a surgeon, you know.

Julie Holland 00:07:01  Right. Like, it just it doesn’t work. So when I was at Bellevue, you know, I spent nine years running the psychiatric emergency room at Bellevue Hospital, and I was a cowboy. You know, I was a tough guy. And that’s how I survived in, like, a very challenging environment. I lasted longer than any psychiatrist at that psychiatry had. I had the same job for nine years, and I didn’t get burnt out, mostly because I worked weekends and I had all week off to recover. But over those nine years, I got pregnant twice. I nursed babies twice. By the end of it, there was so much oxytocin like drowning out the testosterone. I couldn’t really work there anymore. I, you know, I got too soft, I became a softie. And maybe you can be a soft either, but I couldn’t, you know, I had to really be a tough guy to make it through. And I got punched in the face, you know, because I was kind of being a bitch.

Julie Holland 00:07:49  Pardon me? To a patient. And when I look back at my notes from Bellevue, I wrote a memoir about my nine years in the psyche. But when I looked back at my notes, all my notes stopped after I got punched in the face. Like it really did something to me and how I went about my job there. But I ended up writing about this sort of transformation from, you know, a butch, tomboy, manly woman to somebody who had gone through having two kids and I couldn’t be a cowboy in there anymore.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:16  What does being a tough guy mean in that sort of circumstance or that sort of situation, you know, at Bellevue? Yeah. Yeah.

Julie Holland 00:08:26  Now, looking back, I would say tough guy at Bellevue means that I was like kind of an asshole. Like nothing got to me. I didn’t care how sad the story was. I’d heard it all before. It didn’t matter. You know, I would say things like, all of it is sad, so none of it is sad.

Julie Holland 00:08:39  Like, I had a threshold that I got very hardened. And I wrote about this in my book, Weekends at Bellevue. I really wrote a lot about how hard I was when I came in and how softened up I was by the end, and that because I was soft, I couldn’t really do the job because there’s a lot of sad stories and, you know, there’s terrible things that happen to people and the people who end up with significant psychiatric issues and addiction issues. Almost inevitably, they have had horrible childhoods. They’ve been sexually abused. They’ve been physically and emotionally abused. They’ve had childhoods where they’ve had to be in fight or flight the whole time, and they end up as psychiatric patients and addicted to all sorts of drugs. So, you know, in a perfect world, you would have people coming in and you would do intense psychotherapy. God, what happened to you in your childhood? Let’s process it. But like the reality is you don’t have time for intensive psychotherapy in a psychiatric. And every single patient would require that or a childhood transplant.

Julie Holland 00:09:35  So we end up using humor a lot as a defense and as a shield, you know, in the E.R. to sort of deal with the atrocities that we’re seeing and sort of laughing it off. Maybe it’s not what the patients want, but it was a way for the staff to stay connected, to enjoy being at work and to get the job done. So, you know, a little bit of a callousness and a humor and a sort of gallows humor, maybe where it’s not appropriate. But that’s what it took to, you know, show up every week and work, you know, these 16 hour shifts.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:05  Yeah. Do you find that you’re able, as you’ve become softer to use your words, or less hardened? I might say more compassionate, maybe won’t agree with that phrase, but I’ll use it.

Julie Holland 00:10:18  You know, I feel like even when I was a hard ass, I was compassionate with the people who really deserved it. The thing about Bellevue is there’s a certain percentage of people who are gaming the system, who are pretending to be mentally ill, to get off the streets.

Julie Holland 00:10:31  They’re hiding out from somebody, or they just don’t have any money. They’ve run out of money. They come in, they say they’re hearing voices to kill themselves and others, and they think that that will be enough to get them admitted to the hospital so that they can have, you know, three warm beds and a place to sleep for a week or two. And, you know, I appreciate that they’re looking for respite. But one of my main jobs was to basically keep the sharks out. You know, people who are chronically, persistently, mentally ill are really vulnerable. And if you’ve got any social people who aren’t really sick but they’re pretending to be sick, the real patients are at risk and are vulnerable. So it’s my job to keep the sharks out. On the other hand, as I grew more compassionate and I was always giving lectures at the psyche, about psychosis or about malingering people faking what to look out for. But the way I would start my malingering lecture after a while was like, look, even if they’re faking symptoms, they are coming to the hospital for help and we’re here to help them.

Julie Holland 00:11:25  And we got to figure out. Look, you don’t really look like you’re hallucinating to me, but you do look like you’re having a hard time, and you run out of money and you’re homeless. And let’s figure out why that’s happening. And, you know, might it be because of this, that and the other thing, and not that you’re actually psychotic, but at least you’re still saying, I know you’re coming to us for help. Let’s figure out how we can really help you, instead of just give you this bandaid of a week off the streets, right?

Eric Zimmer 00:11:49  And it speaks to the fact that somebody is in some degree of dire straits, that they think a psych ward is an improvement over.

Julie Holland 00:11:57  Right. So let’s, you know, start with the reality and sort of present them with the reality. Like, why is your life so chaotic that a week at Bellevue Hospital is a vacation, right? Like, what’s going on to get you to this point? But, you know, it was a bit of a revolving door of Bellevue people coming in and out.

Julie Holland 00:12:12  And sometimes the staff gets very frustrated that, you know, the same people aren’t getting better and the same things that we’re trying aren’t working. It’s because, you know, they need a new childhood. They need a childhood transplant. We need to be focusing on early education and headstart programs and things like that to prevent addiction and violence and things like that from taking root in childhood.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:33  You’re very interested in involved in psychedelics as mental health treatments. True. Was that driven by a frustration with the fact that the system that you were embedded into. You didn’t seem to be working?

Julie Holland 00:12:48  No, because it came before Bellevue. I got frustrated with the system by the time I get to Bellevue. But my interest in MDMA as an adjunct to psychotherapy, for instance. I mean, some people may know MDMA better as Molly or ecstasy, but this idea that there was a substance that could help psychotherapy go deeper and act as a catalyst to therapy, where you’re really getting to the stuff that matters quicker. I mean, I guess that’s a very yang way of talking about it, right? But like, more efficacious, you know, more effective, faster, deeper, better.

Julie Holland 00:13:21  So that appealed to me. Even before I went to medical school, I got very interested in MDMA in the context of psychotherapy when I was an undergrad. You know, this is like the mid 80s. I’m a pre-med at Penn. The summer of 85, I was actually living in a castle. There’s a castle on campus that was like a for fraternity house. So I was living in a castle. All of a sudden I started hearing about this drug that they were calling Adam, that they were using in therapy, that, you know, therapists were giving to their patients. And I got very interested. First of all, it was a new drug, and I was an undergrad studying psycho pharm. So the fact that there was a new drug, I was all, I didn’t even care if it was in therapy or not. Just the fact there was a new drug, like I knew all about all the other ones so far, and I tried most of them and this was a new one.

Julie Holland 00:14:03  So that was exciting. But the fact that it was actually being used as a catalyst during therapy, it’s one of the reasons that I ended up really committing to psychiatry and not neurosurgery. When I went to medical school, I knew I was going to do something with the brain. I was always very interested in the brain and drugs, but the reality of what neurosurgery is and what neurology is, versus the reality of what life as a psychiatrist was, it was really no contest for me. I got very interested in psychosis, you know, schizophrenia and bipolar. And, I mean, it’s all so fascinating, you know, the things that go wrong and right with the brain. So I got interested in psychedelics as a treatment modality before I even went to med school. And honestly, it was one of the things that kind of fed me and kept me going when med school was impossible and ridiculous was, you know, the sort of carrot. But I wrote a little haiku or something once, and it was like, it takes a mighty lure to nurse the hardships we endure.

Julie Holland 00:14:54  Like, med school is hard and you’re not treated very nicely. And residency is sometimes more the same, and it’s a real slog, you know? And you, you got to have a reason to go through all of this. And for some people, it’s like my dad’s a doctor, I’m going to be a doctor is very familial. I didn’t have that, but I did have this idea of MDMA assisted therapy sort of pushing me to go to med school, get my residency, be a psychiatrist. You know, it’s an exciting time to be a psychiatrist because we’ve got a few more tools at our disposal, and we need every tool you can imagine.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:28  I would assume then that the recent and I don’t know the exact time frame, but I believe in the last six months ruling by advisers to the FDA that MDMA treatment posed more risks than benefits was a bitter pill.

Julie Holland 00:15:43  So I would love to break this down. And I was really tempted to do the wolf thing and talk about this, but I decided it wasn’t appropriate.

Julie Holland 00:15:50  So the way to get FDA approved is that you do phase one, phase two, phase three clinical trials. And there were multiple centers that did this kind of work. It wasn’t just one place. There were a lot of different groups that were running people through an MDMA assisted therapy protocol during phase two, which is not the data that FDA needs to approve. They really look at phase three data. But during the phase two multicenter trials, there was one cell, one center that ran four subjects. One of those subjects, there were egregious boundary violations and grossly inappropriate things that happened between a researcher and a research subject at this one cell that ran four subjects during phase two. There were no other improprieties. Phase three there’s no problem with the data. Phase three, but people got very fixated on this terrible, egregious boundary violation. But I would argue that one terrible thing that happened from one cell of a site that ran four people should not discount the hundreds of other people who were run through the studies, who had a benefit and who did well and who didn’t have egregious boundary violations.

Julie Holland 00:16:57  And this is really a situation of like one bad apple should not spoil the whole bunch, and particularly the data should not be impugned by one boundary violation. The data is powerful and strong, and the bottom line is that a lot of people who had PTSD once they made it through the MDMA assisted therapy protocol. They did not meet criteria for PTSD anymore. They did not have their symptoms. So, you know, we don’t say cured in psychiatry, but you could at least say that the end of the study, those people wouldn’t have made it into the beginning of the study because they weren’t appropriate, because they didn’t have the symptoms needed for the study. As many as two thirds of people responded robustly. And you don’t see those numbers in any other treatment. So we’ve got more and more people with PTSD. We have more and more veterans committing suicide, and we have a medicine that, if used appropriately in the context of ongoing therapy, will markedly decrease PTSD symptoms and the desire to be dead. So I’m still very committed to FDA approval.

Julie Holland 00:17:57  You know, I listened to the talks that whole day, June 4th, from 830 to 6 p.m. and FDA spoke first. And I was very heartened by everything that FDA had to say. They seemed to really understand the situation, and the fact that it is nearly impossible or purely impossible to have a blinded study, because everybody knows pretty much who took MDMA and who didn’t. You know. Right. So that’s called functional, unblinded. But still the study was blinded and the data is powerful. And, you know, we’re going to have to see what FDA decides, because the advisory committee does not know as much as FDA about this. And there’s a handful of about 5 or 6 people who are really committed to supporting the victim from the phase three trial and, well, they should be supporting this victim. But to stop MDMA from getting approved means that you’re enabling the PTSD to continue in millions and millions of people because you are protecting one person who had a terrible experience. And I don’t agree with that calculus at all.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:57  Right, right. It seems that the committee was extrapolating from there to the fact that MDMA itself was the reason that people acted inappropriately, which I think is an extrapolation.

Julie Holland 00:19:10  Yeah, it’s really easy to sort of name names and call names. And I’m tempted to, you know, out the boundary violator and say how terrible he is. I don’t fully understand the situation. I mean, this was a married couple who was doing this work as far as they know, they stayed married after this boundary violation and everything that happened with this third person. I don’t pretend to understand, you know, what happens with couples and taking in somebody to live with them or another lover or you know how that works. I understand it’s very fraught. I will also say that, you know, in the underground scene, we had situations where married couples, one or both members of the party ended up, you know, being involved in boundary violations also. So, you know, we all sort of had this idea that like a male female therapist couple would keep everybody safe and it turns out not always right.

Julie Holland 00:20:00  And whether in research or underground or in regular psychotherapy or with a dentist, there are often boundary violations and weird shit happens, you know, in regular therapy without the meds. But yes, MDMA is going to make you more vulnerable, more trusting, more open. And that’s why what’s been proposed to FDA is that it’s in the context of ongoing therapy, that it is not just a one off with somebody that you don’t know and don’t have any therapeutic alliance with.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:29  Right, right. Let’s move on from psychedelics, at least for now. We may find our way back there, but I’d like to focus on the heart of your book, Good Chemistry, which is about the science of connection. You say our species is categorized and I love this is obligatory. Gregarious. What does that mean?

Julie Holland 00:20:50  Yeah, I like saying obligatory. Gregarious, too. It feels good in my mouth.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:53  I was afraid I was going to stumble over it, but it came out okay. So you.

Julie Holland 00:20:57  Did greater. Yeah.

Julie Holland 00:20:58  So the idea is that we are obligated. It is part of our biological imperative that we are gregarious, which means friendly. So Homo sapiens sapiens, if we are not social, we do not survive, right? And if you think back to our time on the savanna, we lived in multigenerational homes. We were a part of a clan. There would be several families that would be part of a clan together. And within the clan there was cooperation in building a shelter, hunting, sharing food, sharing resources, making sure everybody got a mate and was mating. And so within that clan, if you were ostracized, if the clan decided that, you know, you’re not on our team and you’re not with us and they ostracized you, you would die. Ostracism back on the savannah meant very likely death because no one would help you build a shelter. No one would feed. You wouldn’t share the kill with you. You would not, mate, if you didn’t die. At least your your genetics aren’t getting spread.

Julie Holland 00:21:54  Which is part of our imperative is to clone ourselves, basically reproduce. So we still process ostracism and not being in the group and being in the in-crowd as an existential threat that puts us into fight or flight. So when we are disconnected from our community, from our friends, from our family, and then I would also argue, disconnected from ourselves and our own bodies, which happens every time we open up our phone or disconnected from the planet and the Earth, which happens every time we open up our phone. All of this severance and disconnection puts us in fight or flight. It puts us in the sympathetic nervous system, which is not where your body wants to be. Your body wants to be on the other side, which is called parasympathetic. That’s where we can rest, digest and repair, and not just repair our bodily functions, you know? The only time the body does any major repairs is when you are not in fight or flight, when you are in parasympathetic rest. I just repair, not just bodily repair, social repair.

Julie Holland 00:22:52  Right. You get into a fight with somebody, you say something stupid because you’re in fight or flight. Then you feel calm and you’re in parasympathetic, and then you can repair the social disconnect that happened. Your social skills suck when you’re in fight or flight, right? You know you’re more likely to break and, you know, disconnect than you are to connect. So when you are in fight or flight, the main sort of juice that runs your sympathetic nervous system are things like cortisol and adrenaline. And adrenaline in the brain is known as epinephrine. But cortisol and adrenaline are sort of the main chemicals that enable you to be in fight or flight. And the longer you’re in fight or flight and the more you’re exposed to cortisol, the worse your body is. You get fat, you can’t sleep. Your immune system is a mess. Your blood sugar is a mess, and your body can’t repair itself. When you are in parasympathetic, which is rest, digest, repair. That is primarily not adrenaline in cortisol, but rather oxytocin and something called acetylcholine, which is involved in memory.

Julie Holland 00:23:52  But the oxytocin is the hormone and neurotransmitter that allows you to open up trust connect. Oxytocin is very much involved in parent infant bonding with a nursing baby, or just any baby who’s dependent on you. It’s also involved in like a post orgasmic bonding state, which is why I said in Moody Bitches that you should be careful you think you’re having casual sex with somebody, but if you have an orgasm, you’re going to be in this post orgasmic state, which is a high oxytocin state, and you may find yourself emotionally bonding even though you didn’t mean to. So oxytocin is involved in wound healing, body repair, social repair, and it’s involved in all the sort of trusting and bonding that happens between parents, between lovers, between teammates, even. You know, that little like pat on the butt, the football or the pat on the shoulder or the hug, all those things. Eye contact, hand-holding, spooning, they all enable the release of oxytocin, and oxytocin feels good.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:21  Let me ask a question.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:22  I’ve never thought of this question before. Even though we’ve had plenty of guests who talk about the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems. That makes it sound like you just switch into one or the other. Is there a clean line between them? Is there a way that, like you could say, Eric, you are in parasympathetic or Eric, you are in sympathetic or is it more like many things? There’s a gradation in there.

Julie Holland 00:25:48  I think it’s okay to say it’s a spectrum. And the truth is, there’s one specific situation where there’s actually a couple situations where they both come into play, where you’re in both okay, but if you think of it on a spectrum, I’ll get on my phone and I’ll scroll and I’ll scroll and I’ll start to notice that my heart rate’s going up a little bit and my hands are getting a little sweaty and they’re getting a little clenching and oh, maybe I’m punching my jaw and like, sure enough, you know, whatever I’m reading and responding to or not responding to is putting me in fight or flight.

Julie Holland 00:26:16  I can feel it in my body. So I would argue that even if it is a spectrum, you reach a point where you say, I’m over the line. You know, I’ve gone from ash grey to charcoal gray. And it’s not good for your body, you know. And the longer you’re in fight or flight, the worse it is for your body. So one of the things that I talk about in good chemistry is how can we get into parasympathetic? What can you do to get out of fight or flight and get into parasympathetic? And you know, for some people it’s put your phone down. Your phone is making you sick. Your phone is making you miserable. I mean, I have a private practice in psychiatry. I talk to my patients and it comes up quite a bit that they feel like their phones are making them depressed. Their phone is making them anxious, they feel like they’re addicted to their phones. And we talk about sort of having a media diet or a social media diet or a media fast.

Julie Holland 00:27:05  You know, sometimes you have to stop, you know, you’re soaking in all this terrible news and it’s terrible news about things that are happening all over the world that you can’t do anything about. You know, the way we make a laboratory animal depressed or anxious so we can study it is we put them in a situation where they feel bad and they can’t do anything to stop it. You know, you shock them and you shock them, and they don’t know where the shock is coming from. And they can’t stop it. And they get depressed and they get anxious. And it’s like, I feel like this is what’s happening with people on their phones, is that they’re getting into this learned helplessness situation where, oh my God, it’s so terrible what’s happening in Ukraine. It’s so terrible what’s happening? Gaza, you know, the world is a mess. America is a mess. Even the psychedelic community now we’re fighting in, it’s a mess. And like, you know, where do you turn for peace? And so soaking in all that unrest and unease is going to put you in a sympathetic place.

Julie Holland 00:27:55  It’s not good for your body. So sometimes, just like you have to watch what you eat, and maybe flour and sugar is not that great for you. And so you learn to limit or cut out flour and sugar. And I would argue that TikTok and Instagram and all these things and Twitter, Facebook, whatever you’re doing, pay attention to how your body feels. You know, they don’t call it doom scrolling for nothing. And it’s not just that you start thinking bad thoughts, but your body, on some very basic level, does not know the difference between reading about a woman whose kid has just died in an earthquake and being the woman whose kid has just died in earthquake. You see that picture of a woman holding a dead baby in front of a pile of rubble? I don’t know about you, Eric, but like, I feel it in my chest. In my torso. I see something like that, and I’m like, as if this terrible, sad thing is also happening to me.

Julie Holland 00:28:45  And that’s like, I have a lot of empathy. I have a lot of compassion, and that’s good. Unless I’m scrolling past image and image and, you know, there’s famine, there’s genocide, there’s war. And what can you do about any of it? So it’s really not good for your physical and mental health. Sorry to be a downer.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:01  Well, I agree with you, and I think that any thinking person in today’s world is wrestling with these questions of to what extent do I remain informed? As if informed is a virtue on its own, which I’m not entirely sure it is. But to what extent do I remain informed versus do I go too far into it? Yeah. I think everybody wrestles with these things.

Julie Holland 00:29:26  I have a few ideas. Malcolm McLuhan, I think, is the one who said that when you act as if your nervous system is on the outside of your body, you’re going to be in a very unnatural situation. And the media is making us have eyes and ears all over the world, right? So we’re experiencing trauma, like, okay, a thousand years ago, you might experience trauma once or twice.

Julie Holland 00:29:45  Maybe there’s an earthquake in your town, maybe there’s a fire in your town. But not every single day, whenever you want. Can you see that there are earthquakes and fires happening and you’re experiencing them to to some degree, obviously not as if you’re burning, but your brain is still having that panic response. What I would argue is that what’s better for you and your community is that you focus on what is actually around you, that you can’t fix the Middle East, right? But you could volunteer at your community resource center in your town and drive somebody to their doctor’s appointment, you’re going to feel good giving back to your community and you are actually doing something that makes a difference. Instead of scrolling and not being able to make a difference with all these terrible things that are happening somewhere. So. The other thing I want to say is, you know, the hunter gatherer brain that we’ve inherited, we don’t need to hunt for food anymore because God knows the food is everywhere and there’s calories available everywhere.

Julie Holland 00:30:43  As soon as you open your hand and there’s cheap, plentiful calories everywhere. So now that we don’t forage for food, we forage for information. We think that the more information we have, the safer we’re going to be. And that may be true, but mostly what’s happening is that we’re getting terribly depressed and feeling hopeless and demoralized and helpless. We can’t do anything to change it. So good chemistry was all about like, close your laptops and go outside. Go be in nature, you know, sit next to a tree. The tree will help to calm you. You know, you can go on earth time instead of social media time and, you know, have a very different experience of what’s really going on around you? What’s really going on in the environment that actually will have an impact on you and get involved locally?

Eric Zimmer 00:31:26  Greek philosophers were talking about this doctrine of control, what you can control versus what you can’t. And I think Stephen Covey, in his book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, gave to me the best example of this.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:39  And he talked about imagine two circles, right? There’s a big circle. And within it there’s a small circle. And the big circle is your circle of concern. Everything that you possibly are concerned about or care about, the small circle is your circle of influence. And the idea is you would want to spend more time in your circle of influence. Obvious, right? But the thing that he said that really opened this for me was he said, the more time you spend in your circle of concern, but not your circle of influence, your circle of influence shrinks. Right? And the more time that you spend in your circle of influence, the more it grows. And that to me, really put all this into really clear state that like this concerning myself with all the problems of the world wears me out and I don’t do anything right. Whereas if I’m taking clear, targeted, positive actions.

Julie Holland 00:32:27  It feeds you.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:28  And I’m going to be more effective. If my true concern is less suffering in the world.

Julie Holland 00:32:33  You will have an impact locally, and it will give you the energy to continue to have an impact. And maybe it scales up. Who knows? But you can’t you can’t start with fixing the world. So I think what happens is people get kind of paralyzed by how terrible everything is and they do nothing. And the other thing, I’ll tell you, my patients do this all the time. You know, they’ll talk like I know I should exercise and I know I should do this, but I’m not motivated. And as soon as I figure out how to get motivated, I’ll do it. And I’m always like, it just doesn’t work that way. If you start a thing, anything, just start it. Then you’ll get motivated to continue it, and that’s about the best you’re going to get. But waiting around to feel motivated to go exercise that may never happen. Put your sneakers on, go out the door and start walking. You’ll be motivated to continue.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:13  Yeah, it’s such common sense, but not common practice.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:16  You know, when I was in recovery, we used a phrase and listeners of the show were probably tired of it by this point, but it illustrates exactly what you said, which is sometimes you can’t think your way into right action. You have to act your way into right thinking.

Julie Holland 00:33:28  Yeah. And also that sort of act as if and your body will follow. You know, if your body starts, your mind will follow. But yeah, I agree that right action can proceed. Right thinking. Absolutely. You know, it’s funny because chemistry was written before Covid, right? So a lot of the suggestions in there are a little timed out, unfortunately. Like, you know, there was this whole idea of like, not only do you like, put your phone down, put your laptops down, but go be with people face to face, skin to skin, hug, kiss, have sex. You know, like just just connect, go connect. And then like Covid came and it was really pardon me for saying, but it was just like a huge kind of cock blocker, you know, that people couldn’t do these things that would really help them feel better.

Julie Holland 00:34:08  Right. I mean, I literally had a patient who was trying to get pregnant during Covid and she’s like, what am I going to have, like sperm mailed to me? Like, you know, Covid really was a cock blocker for her. A lot of the advice in good chemistry temporarily could not be acted upon. And now it can be.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:22  Yeah. Yeah. You talk about this idea of staying glued to our phones and it feeling good and us maybe getting a little bit of connection from it.

Julie Holland 00:34:32  Synthetic.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:32  Right. And you say there’s a great saying in addiction medicine, which is you can never get enough of something that almost works. And I mean, I think that’s so true.

Julie Holland 00:34:43  I love that quote. Maybe that it was Gabor mate that said it, but I’m not sure. But that is one of my favorite quotes that I use a lot. And it is really true. You know, if you’re scratching around the itch, you’re never really going to get any relief. Yeah. You know, we see this sometimes with like, even like a food situation, right? We’re like, I really have a craving for pasta, but I shouldn’t have pasta.

Julie Holland 00:35:00  So I will go eat this instead. And that didn’t really work. So then I’ll also eat this other thing. And like, by the time I’m done eating around the craving, if I had just had a couple fork fulls of the pasta I wanted, I would have been done with it. I’ve actually ingested, you know, 600 more calories than if I had just eaten the thing. So I think that that’s true with our sort of hunger for connection also, is that we do other things to sort of plug the hole. And, you know, social media friendships are not going to give you what a real friend is going to give you. You know, and texting is great, but it’s not going to give you the same thing that like eye contact and hugging or hand-holding is going to give you. Like, you know, we we are designed for physical connection and we are trying to fill that hole with technological, synthetic virtual connection. And it’s not ever going to really scratch the edge.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:51  Yeah, I was thinking about texting recently because my general sense was like, well, you know, texting is not as good as a phone call, which is not as good as seeing a person in person.

Julie Holland 00:36:01  It’s better than nothing.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:02  And I believe that to be true. What I realized, though, is with certain people, I’m actually, like, in far more regular contact with them than I would be if it was a phone call or having to see them. Right. And so I don’t think it’s that it doesn’t have a place, but it’s not it shouldn’t be a replacement for. It’s I think it can be a nice addition to.

Julie Holland 00:36:22  Yeah. To me it’s almost like vitamins versus food. You’re always going to have better nutrition if you eat colorful foods than if you take a supplement. Yeah. Look, I get a lot of pleasure. We all do it. Yeah, I get a lot of pleasure from texting my kids. My kids don’t want to talk on the phone. They want to text. So we text and it’s great. You know, I end up because I’m like Gen X, I’m, like, dictating long texts, you know? And then I get back like, okay.

Julie Holland 00:36:43  But I still enjoy feeling in touch with them. There’s no question. I mean, my daughter’s in London, you know, I’m actually I’m going to go see her next week. And it’s this is the longest we’ve been separated. I feel it in my body that I’ve been, like, physically separated from this person who came out of my body, like, the longest ever. And like, yeah, we texted and it’s great, but I can’t wait to, like, have a real hug, you know? Yeah, it’s long overdue. So, yeah, it’s better than nothing, but it’s definitely not as good as a real thing. And but I would also argue again, the brain doesn’t Completely fully differentiate you like synthetic texting from talking or whatever. Like, I don’t know. I just know it’s like good, better, best and the best is rolling around naked with somebody that you really love. That’s a high oxytocin state and that’s what’s best for your body.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:29  Hey, friend, before we dive back in, I want you to take a second and think about what you’ve been listening to.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:35  What’s one thing that really landed and what’s one tiny action you could take today to live it out? Those little moments of reflection. That’s exactly why I started good wolf reminders. Short, free text messages that land in your phone once or twice a week. Nearly 5000 people already get them and say the quick bursts of insight help them shift out of autopilot and stay intentional in their lives. If that sounds like your kind of thing, head to one. You feed, SMS and sign up. It’s free. No spam, and easy to opt out of any time. Again, that’s one you feel. Net tiny nudges, real change. All right. Back to the show. As a member of Gen X, you not only are dictating a long text message to your daughter, you’re making sure it’s grammatically correct. And it has all the right punctuation. Me? To me, too. And then.

Julie Holland 00:38:31  You’re right. The comma.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:33  Yeah, yeah, I totally.

Julie Holland 00:38:34  Maybe not an Oxford comma, but plenty of comma.

Julie Holland 00:38:36  Yeah, I do, I’m guilty.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:38  I keep asking myself. I’m like, I know this doesn’t matter and yet I can’t stop doing it.

Julie Holland 00:38:43  Yeah, because it’s for me. It’s such a sign of intelligence that I know how to spell your and your apropos of nothing, Gen X, but I just saw a picture of Vice President Kamala Harris from back in the late 80s, early 90s, when all of us were wearing our hair a particular way and wearing makeup a certain way, and I was just like, oh my God. She is like, absolutely my demographic, 100%. Like, that’s how my hair looked that year. Yeah. You know, it was just kind of really funny to see, like, you know, we all had this kind of, like, short on the sides and curly on the top thing for a while, and so did she.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:17  We’ve talked about oxytocin, and I think many people have probably heard of oxytocin as sort of the bonding chemical. You brought up a chemical that I haven’t heard about in years.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:28  I remember hearing about it and being fascinated by it. It’s a brain chemical vasopressin.

Julie Holland 00:39:33  Yeah. So the first thing I will say about vasopressin is it’s really complicated. And my publishers didn’t want it included because it muddies up everything. As straightforward as oxytocin is, I feel like vasopressin is much less straightforward. It’s more complicated. One thing for sure is that it’s more active in men than in women and women. Oxytocin is more active than men. Like oxytocin works very well in an estrogen rich environment. Oxytocin is a little bit embattled in a testosterone rich environment. Vasopressin does not have those same sort of constraints on it, but it does a lot of the same things. But there was one thing we didn’t mention, which is like if you’re in or out of the in-group. You know, everybody thinks like oxytocin and vasopressin is all this kind of touchy feely granola. Kumbaya. You’re, you know, bonding and trusting and openness. And it sounds lovely and like, you know, flowery. But the truth is that oxytocin and vasopressin are also involved in discerning who is on your team and who’s not on your team, who is friend or foe, basically.

Julie Holland 00:40:33  Are they in your clan or are they in the opposing clan? And so both oxytocin and vasopressin are involved in that sort of discernment. You know, nothing makes a group more cohesive, I think, than if they have an enemy. You know, I don’t want to talk too much about politics, but it’s one of the things that really drives politics is that you come together in your distaste for the other group, and that is a heavily, I would argue, vasopressin and oxytocin fueled state to be in. But it feels good, right? Because you’re all on one team and you feel the cohesion of being on a team and, you know, everybody wants to be on the winning team, and the more cohesion the team has, the better they are at winning. So xenophobia, for example, right, is sort of about are you on my team or are you on the other team? You know, looking at looking at immigrants as other and as them. There’s a great Ted talk called them as a four letter word.

Julie Holland 00:41:25  You know, this idea that you don’t have compassion, that you’ve othered them into something different from yourself. And this actually gets back to what you were talking about with partners and being yoked and them having sort of disowned things about you that you project onto them. And people do this in groups too, in a dyad or a partnership of marriage or something. Let’s say, for example, that I mean, these are real examples, but I feel like in my childhood, if I was sad or if I was scared, I was sort of rejected. You know, I had to be tough and happy. And so don’t be sad and scared of bad things. I go out in the world and I fall in love with and marry somebody who, on some level, at least to me, presented as a sad, scared person. And because I embraced him and sort of, you know, engulfed him and we became one entity. I was able to get those things that were rejected out of me and I had put away, and I was able to sort of accept them and accept the sad and scared parts of myself, blah, blah, blah.

Julie Holland 00:42:23  Same thing in groups. You know, there’s a group cohesion and we’re good and they’re bad. And, you know, you project all the things that you don’t want to own. For instance, as an example, let’s say that a Republican actually really likes having sex with men, but they feel like that’s not part of the Republican image. And so they’re going to say that they’re all about family values and that being gay is wrong. And they’re going to kind of double down. And so they’re rejecting this part of themselves. They put it on the other, and they say those people that have those feelings about wanting to have sex with men, they’re bad. And I’m against them when really it’s self-hatred, it’s projected self-hatred to taking that part of themselves they can’t accept. They’re putting it on the other people, and they’re saying they have that thing, and now I’m allowed to hate them because I was told that those things were bad and I shouldn’t be those things. So, you know, the basic things that vasopressin does has nothing to do with what we’re talking about.

Julie Holland 00:43:16  I mean, primarily it is an antidiuretic hormone that helps to control the balance of water and electrolytes so that you don’t get to over hydrated. That’s primarily what it does. It’s also like a vasoconstrictor, which means it increases blood pressure. If you lose blood volume, it comes around so that it keeps your blood pressure up. Those are sort of the the main things it does. But then also in males it reinforces pair bonding, keeping you mated but also reinforces a aggression of like sort of territorial aggression, like what I sometimes refer to as territorial piercings. This is my territory. You can’t cross over into this line. If you do, I’m going to attack you. That’s very much a vasopressin thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:24  So let’s talk a little bit about psychedelics and addiction. And I think it is a nuanced and complicated area. I am a recovering alcoholic heroin addict. I usually don’t state this, but in addition to those two, I was a prodigious marijuana user. So I have watched this psychedelic unfurling over the last decade where it’s really started to get traction in both mental health and spiritual circles, very interestingly and also very Cautiously given my history and given I’ve had some really tremendously bad trips in my past.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:09  And so let’s talk about first, just that link between psychedelics and addiction. Whether psychedelics are actually addictive. And then furthermore, what do we see that are some of the possibilities that psychedelics might give for healing addiction?

Julie Holland 00:45:29  Yeah. So I mean, you could tell by the length of your question how complicated is, right? Like, psychedelics can potentially help people who are addicted, and psychedelics could potentially make things worse if you’re addicted. And some of it depends on which medicine we’re talking about. So there is one way of talking about psychedelics, which is a very broad umbrella. You know, anything that helps you see the way your mind works could be considered a psychedelic. And if you use that broad term, then things like ketamine and cannabis fall under the psychedelic umbrella and MDMA, if you’re using a more narrow term where you’re like, okay, let’s just say the classical psychedelics are like LSD and mushrooms and mescaline. Those three, the classical psychedelics. There really isn’t any addiction in terms of tolerance, dependence, withdrawal, sort of the classic things physiologically that you would see in addiction.

Julie Holland 00:46:17  So I’m going to start with sort of the broad statement that in general, what has not been reported is tolerance, dependence, withdrawal with the classical psychedelics LSD, mushrooms, mescaline. So put those aside because I do think they may be helpful in treating addiction. So we’ll come back to them where we get into trouble with psychedelics and addiction. Ketamine, which is really not officially a psychedelic. It’s definitely not a classical psychedelic. Ketamine is actually a dissociative anesthetic, and ketamine is the most addictive of the psychedelics. Full stop. If you are the kind of person who has addictive tendencies, you tend to get addicted to things. I do not recommend that you do any sort of self-administration of ketamine, you very well may end up in trouble. MDMA rarely causes problems with addiction. It’s not something that you can really take chronically. It feels worse and worse every time you take it. Basically, if it turns out that really you’ve got sort of something you think is MDMA, but it’s not and it’s methamphetamine, obviously you’re going to get into trouble.

Julie Holland 00:47:19  Methamphetamine is much more addictive than MDMA, which is methylene dioxide methamphetamine. I’ve never seen a case of MDMA addiction, but I have heard about people who, you know, go clubbing and take ecstasy and or Molly, as the kids call it today. And, you know, maybe they’re taking it multiple nights in a row or multiple weekends in a row. Like, we know that’s not good for you. Yeah. No one is saying that’s good for you. Cannabis has an addictive potential. 100%. We all know people who’ve gotten addicted to cannabis. The percentage is, you know, they put it at roughly 9%. It might be higher now with a higher THC percentages. It’s still not nearly as addictive as I mean, I don’t know that it matters to like put things in order. But I would argue that cigarettes, heroin, cocaine, alcohol, cannabis kind of in that order from top down of how addictive things are, how hard it is to quit. It’s harder to quit smoking cigarettes than it is to quit heroin.

Julie Holland 00:48:13  It may be harder to quit heroin than it is to quit cocaine. It’s harder to quit cocaine than it is to quit cannabis. Then the other thing I’ll just have to say, it’s sort of a cop out sounding, but you can get addicted to anything. Obviously we know people who get addicted to masturbation, to shopping, to gambling, blah blah blah blah blah. So we have to cop to the fact that there’s also something called a process addiction, where you can get addicted to any behavior. Right?

Eric Zimmer 00:48:37  Right. And some of these things that we might think of as less addictive, like cannabis is going to, I think.

Julie Holland 00:48:43  A process addiction.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:44  I think it ends up co-opting a little from both. Right.

Julie Holland 00:48:47  Yeah, I agree, and the same with food. Right. Like you, you can have a process addiction around eating. You know, what’s a drag about food addictions is that you have to eat or you’ll die, right? You don’t have to drink or have to smoke pot.

Julie Holland 00:48:58  So it’s, you know, it’s really, really tough when food is your drug of choice. As a psychiatrist who works with addiction quite a bit, as a friend and colleague of Gabor Mate and also Elias Dacher just wrote an amazing book about addiction, you may want to talk to him. I will say that a lot of people who work in this field feel like part of addiction is sort of like a spiritual illness, where there is a lack of meaning and a demoralization and a sort of just trying to numb and existential angst. And so in those situations, cannabis or other psychedelics, classical psychedelics, that may give you sort of a meaning making experience or fill you with some sort of hope or plans for the future that can be helpful in treating an addiction more directly. I really want to let people know that there’s a plant called ibogaine that is from a shrub of the iboga Tabanus plant. I’m probably saying tavern name wrong anyway. Ibogaine, which you will be hearing more about seems to specifically really help with opiate addiction, seems to sort of reset the receptors so that you get rid of the whole tolerance withdrawal issue and also gives people a very intense psychedelic experience where they do a bit of a life review and sort of come to the conclusion that the opioids have not been helpful and it becomes easier to quit physiologically and psychologically after ibogaine experiences.

Julie Holland 00:50:24  So I think you’re going to be hearing more about ibogaine for drug addiction. And I really I think there’s a lot there. The problem is that ibogaine is potentially toxic to the heart, cardio toxic. And there are a few ways to get around this. You can do an EKG and an echo to make sure your heart’s okay before ibogaine, or you can potentially take magnesium during the ibogaine to lessen the cardiac effects. But that is one clear example of a psychedelic treating addiction with really impressive results. I would also argue I have patients who have quit being addicted to pain meds by using mushrooms. I have had patients quit being addicted to pain meds by using ayahuasca. I do think that there is value in a guided psychedelic experience in tackling childhood trauma and just maybe kind of unraveling where things went wrong, where things went south. You know, you weren’t an addict when you were eight. You weren’t an addict when you were ten. What happened when you were 12? Because from 13 onward there was an issue.

Julie Holland 00:51:22  You know, it’s like you can kind of look back and see the narrative, figure out where things went wrong. I think in the context of like, supportive psychotherapy, the classical psychedelics, ayahuasca, ibogaine could be very helpful in treating addiction. And then there’s cannabis, which is complicated because, you know, it’s sort of like the people’s psychedelic. Cannabis is a psychedelic. If you use that big umbrella term where it’s mind manifesting and it shows you how you think, and there are people who are using cannabis in high doses as a psychedelic, the same way that you would use psychedelic assisted therapy, whether they’re treating addiction or not. I could not say.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:57  Yeah, and obviously I feel like I always hear other podcasters do this, so I suppose I should do it. None of this is medical advice.

Julie Holland 00:52:03  No, I’m not your psychiatrist. I’m not your doctor. I’m speaking in generalities.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:09  Yeah. We’re not encouraging or condoning. We’re just discussing.

Julie Holland 00:52:12  Yeah. And there are a lot of risks.

Julie Holland 00:52:14  And it’s important to talk about the risks. You know, unfortunately, with our nation’s drug policy, the number one risk is that you don’t get the drug you thought you were buying. And it’s more dangerous than what you were hoping to get. And, you know, I often tell the story. When I was a teenager, I’d heard a lot about mescaline. I was very interested. Mescaline. I wanted to try it. I inadvertently ended up trying PCP. it wasn’t what I wanted. And I got a very intense, psychotic experience, which was not, you know, the the unifying, you know, peak mystical experience I was hoping for. But it got me very interested in psychosis and psychiatry, and it got me really interested in, in harm reduction and counterfeit drugs. And drug substitution is one of the things that makes drug taking so dangerous. And as long as we have the drug policy in America, we do. That’s the number one risk. The number two risk is just not getting good information.

Julie Holland 00:53:02  You know, it’s hard to get reliable drug information. Our government isn’t great at giving us all the information. And then it’s hard to figure out, you know, whether you should trust whoever’s giving you this information. So that’s also a real casualty of the drug war is, you know, the truth.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:17  Right. I think that’s a really good point, is it is really difficult to get good information on what are considered illegal substances. Right? Because you’re right, the governing bodies are just interested in demonizing them, by and large. And then you get the people who are unabashed advocates of it. Right. And that’s not what you want either. No. And I’m not saying it’s perfect, but you want something a little bit closer to what we get with FDA approved drugs, where you have some sense of the truth being disseminated to some degree about the pros and the cons, the side effects, the benefits.

Julie Holland 00:53:58  The other risk, besides drug substitution or misinformation is that when you are altered on a psychedelic, you are in an exquisitely vulnerable, plastic, impressionable state.

Julie Holland 00:54:11  It is a nonspecific amplifier. Everything comes in more. And so it’s really important that you are in a safe space, that you are around people who make you feel safe, that you’re in a good headspace when you start the experience. I mean, that’s all set and setting and that you are not around bad actors and it’s, you know, it’s hard to tell. You know, I jokingly refer to something as like, shamans behaving badly. You know, there there are there are people out there who say there are shamans.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:37  Shamans gone.

Julie Holland 00:54:38  Shamans. Yeah. But like, you know, it’s not funny. I mean, it’s, you know, sadly, you know, the the phrase is funny, but the reality is really sad and terrifying that there’s always going to be people who are going to take advantage of other people. You know, there’s there are bad actors in the world. There are people who are going to take advantage of somebody who’s trusting in in an open state. And so you really have to do sort of the homework ahead of time that you are at a good retreat, that you’re with a good guide, that you are actually taking the medicine you think you want.

Julie Holland 00:55:07  And, you know, like there are so many variables that need to be accounted for. And there’s no question that in a medical model, it’s safer because there’s no counterfeit drug substitution. You’re not over hydrating or overheating or doing any of the crazy things that could get you into trouble with MDMA or, you know, you’re like dancing for hours on end. You’re not taking breaks if you’re sitting in the in your therapist’s office talking about childhood trauma, you’re not over hydrating or overheating, and you haven’t taken a counterfeit drugs. So already, like three major risks are mitigated in the medical model. The reality is that most people don’t take psychedelics under a medical model. They use a recreational model. And sadly, the recreational model in our country is going to be less safe. Unfortunately, you know, you have to do more work to make sure you’re going to be safe. The government, unfortunately, in this situation, is not going to. At least for now, is not going to be guaranteeing your safety.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:00  Yeah. As we wrap up, take one thing from today and ask yourself, how will I practice this before the end of the day? For another gentle nudge, join good Wolf Reminders text list. It’s a short message or two each week, packed with guest wisdom and a soft push towards action. Nearly 5000 listeners are already loving it. Sign up free at one. You feed us. No noise, no spam, just steady encouragement to feed your good wolf. Well, that is a wonderful place for. Well, it’s actually not a great place to wrap up because there’s about a hundred other things we could discuss about it. However, what it is is time to wrap up. I segue into my usual habitual. That’s a great place for us to stop. It’s not a great place, but. But that’s where we are. You and I are going to continue to discuss these issues and a little bit more in the post-show conversation, which listeners, we would love to have you join our community, where you get post-show conversations, ad free episodes, and all sorts of other wonderful things by going to one ufi.net join.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:07  Thank you so much, Julie, for coming on.

Julie Holland 00:57:10  Absolutely. My pleasure.

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Episode Transcript:

Michelle Segar 00:00:00  I really think we’re misguiding people when we ask them to form automatic habits. Instead, I think we should be teaching them on what you and I have been talking about this whole time. Because you know what? This is another word for everything we’ve been talking about is resilience.

Chris Forbes 00:00:22  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 00:01:07  Michelle Seeger just ran one of the first studies on all or nothing thinking and exercise, and the results surprised her. A lot of people, it turned out, didn’t actually want to do the exercise they planned in the first place. So when life got in the way, choosing nothing wasn’t a defeat. It was a quiet escape from something they dreaded. The fix isn’t more willpower; it’s to find movement that feels better to you and to follow a phrase I’ve used for years. A little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing. Michelle also wrote the Joy Choice about sustainable change. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Michelle. Welcome back.

Michelle Segar 00:01:50  Thanks for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:52  I believe this is time number three, if I am correct. And I’ve loved your research and your books over the years. I was saying to you before we started, you’re actually in my book very directly. I quote you on something called the Self-care hierarchy from a previous conversation, and your ideas are also sprinkled throughout. So I’m really excited to have this conversation with you. We’ll get into all that in a moment, but before we do, we’ll start like we always do, which is with the parable.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:21  And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves 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, it 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 and your life. And in the work that you do.

Michelle Segar 00:02:56  It’s every time you ask me that question, I’m overwhelmed with feeling because it’s so meaningful to me. It means that what we put our attention on, what we think about, influences the parts of ourselves that we experience and manifest and the energy we put into the world.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:19  Yeah. That’s beautiful. I like that energy idea, the energy and where we focus. And a lot of your focus is you can correct me if I say this wrong, but you are very focused. Your I would call you a behavior change researcher, but I would say that you’re focused primarily on the behavior change of exercising.

Michelle Segar 00:03:42  So the only tweak I would make to that is really since the beginning of my career, I instead of behavior change, I’ve been focusing on sustainable change. And I think you you need different inputs to achieve the latter. Then you do the former because one is about forever and one is about change and what we need to do at the beginning. In many regards, for many people, is going to be very different than what you need to sustain. In most of my work, in both academic research and coaching has been focused on physical activity. More recently, I’ve started doing research into eating.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:25  Yes, I think that’s a good way to say it. You’re focused on the sort of changes that you don’t do for a season that you ideally do for a life, you know, lasting and sustainable change.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:36  And you’re right, there there are slightly different skill sets that are needed to begin something and also to keep it going. And oftentimes, the energy that we bring to the beginning actually can sabotage us in the keeping it going. So the reason that you and I are talking beyond the fact that we like to talk is that you’ve published some new research, and I’d like to go into it, because in my book there’s a whole section called The Middle Way, and it explores the middle way from a lot of different angles. But one of the angles that it explores it through is this idea of all or nothing thinking. And you recently have done research, I believe maybe some of the first research to examine what all or nothing thinking does to our abilities to sustain and exercise habit.

Michelle Segar 00:05:27  Yes, yes. You know, I went into this new research that actually was inspired by writing the Joy choice and seeing how little research on exercise there was about this, quite a bit on eating, but nothing on exercise for the most part. Who are the most important people to help learn how to sustain physically active lives? It’s those who have not succeeded at doing it, who start and stop and start and stop but don’t sustain. So we targeted people in the community and also two different groups, student groups and, you know, people who work, living their lives having families. And we advertised to get people who identified with the idea that they had tried to exercise but just couldn’t stick with it because those were the people. Those are the people, the majority of the population that we want to help. So we wanted to talk to them and find out, gosh, do these people talk about physical activity and exercise using language and concepts that might reflect all or nothing thinking? And if they do, in what ways do they manifest all or nothing thinking at exercise choice points right? When when a challenge bumps up against a plan or an intention, what do they say to themselves? What do they choose to do? And that those are the people that we wanted to do this research with.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:54  Excellent. Let’s talk about choice point for a second, because I think it’s a really important idea. How do you describe choice point?

Michelle Segar 00:07:01  Yes. So when I first started using this concept, I called it Decision Point with my clients. It just kind of came to me one day when I was coaching and it was like, well, at this decision point, when your plan bumps up against something, but then choice point is a nicer term. And then I found out that actually choice point is used largely in other places, which shows what a great concept it is. So to me a choice point represents when someone has and it doesn’t matter what behavior, someone has a plan or intention to do something, but whether it’s a competing goal, whether it’s low motivation, whether it’s an unexpected call from the school to pick up your kids, any kind of conflict that occurs to an intention or plan becomes a choice point that you have to navigate.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:58  Yeah, I often think of it as the moment when it’s you and the choice that you kind of have to make. There’s so much stuff we can do structurally. I call it upstream, right? Knowing what I’m doing when I’m doing it, how I’m doing it, planning for what happens if I don’t do it well, having support for doing it. But there comes a moment where it’s like me and the choice and those moments are so critical because we can examine what happens within them specifically. Right? That’s been my experience, is I don’t have to solve all the questions in my life to look at what’s happening in that moment. If I go the direction that my best self didn’t want to go.

Michelle Segar 00:08:42  Absolutely. And and if you think about it in a certain way, it’s an opportunity for creativity and innovation because, you know, all or nothing essentially is I’m at a choice point by definition. If you’re at a choice point, unless it’s motivational, you’re not going to do the all. So the only the only alternative in that binary is nothing. But if we take a big step back and instead of looking at it in a black and white way, we look at it with gray and nuance. There’s so many options in a choice point, if we give ourselves permission to play with the possibilities.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:26  Yeah, I think that this idea of I will either do it perfectly or I won’t do it at all is kind of what your research is, is getting to. And I got a text from somebody who read the book, and this is a personal trainer. So someone who does personal training has worked on their own training and other people’s training for a long, long time and is really good at what they do, but they recognized that they were doing all or nothing thinking when it came to their own working out. Either they were in a position to just go for it and do a great workout, or they would just do nothing. And so I think that this runs deep through so many of us.

Michelle Segar 00:10:07  It absolutely does. The fact that my field has not researched this topic suggests that my field in general has all or nothing thinking that if people don’t exercise in the way they are planning to exercise, that meet the guidelines, that the the alternatives are are not valuable. And that’s a shame because something is always better than nothing.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:33  Yeah, my little phrase that I used with coaching clients for years was a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing. Yes. Right. Yeah. So let’s talk about what did your research find. So we talked about who you studied. What did you find?

Michelle Segar 00:10:47  So what we found, we did qualitative analysis. And what that means is, is that we let the data speak to us. We didn’t come in with a bunch of codes and say, oh, do they have that? Do they have that? No. Now with all research, whether it’s quantitative or qualitative, the caveat, and I think this is really important for scientists to say all of our research is biased. So what we see in qualitative research is, is informed by what those of us coding it know. And in quantitative research, what we measure and study is also coming out of our biases. So I just like to say that so what did we find.

Michelle Segar 00:11:29  Well, we found that indeed people did speak about exercising and choice points with all or nothing thinking, but it manifested differently than we thought. We kind of came in that myself and Jennifer Tabor. So Jennifer Tabor and I were the leads on the study. A John Up de Graaf was also a primary player, and Alexis, who was a postdoc of Jennifer’s, was also part of the study. I should have said that up front, but they are my really important co-investigator on this. And so Doctor Tabor and I coded the data, and what we found was that people didn’t have the same criteria. We thought people were going to come in with like the same criteria, like, I have to go to the gym for 60 minutes and kill myself on the StairMaster. People did not say the same things. They all had their unique take on what their all was, what their criterion, what their idealized criterion was. And so that was interesting because it went against what we assumed was going to happen regardless.

Michelle Segar 00:12:42  Most people did have some type of standard that if they couldn’t achieve it, they wouldn’t do anything. So, you know, lo and behold, there’s all or nothing thinking. But part of the task of qualitative coders, through the quotes and the conversations is to try to see if we can figure out how do the different themes fit together. And so what we, you know, identified was that people had idealized, rigid criteria for exercising. So I’m just going to make this up for you, Eric. It could be, running outside for 45 minutes Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And for me, it could be doing my NordicTrack for ten minutes, seven days a week. Yeah. And so whatever that criteria was, if I couldn’t meet it on any given day, I didn’t do anything. But what we you know, this is tentative because this is the very first focused study on this topic. But what we identified was that these rigid, idealized criteria functioned through two other pathways. So it wasn’t just, oh, I can’t do it all, so I’m not going to do nothing.

Michelle Segar 00:13:54  It wasn’t this direct. Nothing. What actually we found was that people didn’t want to do the idealized criteria. They were seeking excuses from doing what they thought they should do. So we called this like a motivational pathway. And, you know, as someone who’s research has dominated, has been dominated by motivation. I was at first very disappointed because I thought, I thought I was ready to leave this topic and here it is in the data. So it turns out that people, many people, if their idealized criteria in a way are, well, they’re idealized, not necessarily realistic, not necessarily things people want to do, and a lot of people don’t actually want to do it. So part of the force of all or nothing. Thinking is that if you’ve got these criteria and you don’t want to do them, so you’re motivated to not do them. The other pathway, which is a little it’s got kind of two pieces, is that people talked about exercise is basically being the sacrificial lamb. You know, they would say things like, you know, if I don’t exercise.

Michelle Segar 00:15:07  Nothing concrete really happens. I don’t really have any kind of negative immediate consequence from not exercising. But if I don’t do my homework, if I don’t cook a meal, if I don’t pick up my kids from school. Stuff happens. And so on the one hand, they had other theme related to people who had these idealized criteria. They actually didn’t find exercise to be as high of a priority as there are other things. But the other thing that we saw a little bit of which I think is really, really important, is that if your standards and criteria for what is worthy exercise are rigid and can’t change, and life throws a curve ball and you have 15 minutes less than the 45 you have planned for, but your criteria are rigid. They have 45 is the bullseye, and if you can’t hit the bullseye, don’t even bother. So this rigidity prevents bringing a natural flexibility to what we do. And you know, and this is true in eating too. If you can’t follow your eating plan to a tee, you throw everything out instead of trying to do a part of it.

Michelle Segar 00:16:17  And that happens with eating too. So, you know, when we have rigid criteria, which I think people have learned to have in society, we don’t want to do it. And when we need to flex what we’re planning to do, it can’t flex because it’s rigid. And so that leads to all or nothing thinking. And kind of the final theme, which was fascinating, is that People. When they were reflecting, they would say things like, gosh, you know, I used to feel good when I did that, or I had fun with my colleagues when I worked out at lunch. You know, I’m an educated person. I’m baffled why I’m not exercising. So the other piece of it that I absolutely think is true, and links to all of my other work, is that this is an unconscious process. People don’t know, oh, I have rigid criteria that I’m not motivated to do and can’t flex in the realities of daily life. They don’t know that.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:34  There is a lot in there that I think might be worth separating out. The first is that people don’t really want to do whatever the thing is. Now, it may not be that they don’t want to exercise. It may be that they don’t want to be on the StairMaster for 45 minutes. And so when they come up with a situation where it’s either all or nothing, they happily choose nothing as an escape route from something they didn’t want to do.

Michelle Segar 00:18:02  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:03  So in that case, then motivation or going back to even before that and evaluating like, well, what am I doing and why and how am I doing it? And does that make sense? Is the answer for that. The second one is more what I would think of as standard all or nothing thinking. I’ll just use it for now. We’ll go. Yeah, which is that I do want to do this thing. It’s just that I am confronted with a situation that doesn’t allow me to do that thing in the way I had imagined, and since I can’t do it in the way I had imagined. I just jettison it.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:41  And I assume there’s crossover and bleeding between all of these different things. So we’ve established these two sort of things that are happening in here. There’s the motivation and then there’s the rigidity. Let’s talk about each of those in turn. So if motivation is the issue, it’s that I really don’t want to do this thing. How do we start on working on and fixing that?

Michelle Segar 00:19:05  Well people’s motivation originates from their reason or why for trying to adapt a behavior. And so the first place to start when you’re trying to enhance your motivation for something is, you know, am I trying to do this because I feel bad about myself because my doctor is admonishing me, because society tells me this is a good thing to do, which feels like a should or a chore and leads to non-optimal, low-quality motivation. But the other piece of the motivation, which more directly ties into the rigid standards we’re talking about, is what physical activities feel good to do. Am I choosing physical activities that feel good or bad to do in ways that feel good or bad? So if I think I’m supposed to be running for 50 minutes, that’s the right way to exercise then.

Michelle Segar 00:20:10  But I don’t like it. But it feels punishing or I’m not. You know, my physiology is not yet in shape where I can handle that type of activity and get positivity from it. That’s, you know, that’s the motivation component. And that ties directly into the standards people have. I mean, this is something that is so underappreciated in society and in, in my field is that socialization, education, something that is underappreciated by society and by my field, is that the ways people have been socialized or educated to approach being physically active. It’s about rules. You do it this way. This level of intensity makes sure your heart rate’s this. Make sure you’re sweating. Make sure you’re breathing hard. And the problem with that is it has turned physical activity into. It’s been prescribed to people as if there’s a one size fits all, or there’s a right size that we should be aiming for. But movement is an embodied process. I mean, I don’t want to go too far down this path, but people have learned to have rigid criteria.

Michelle Segar 00:21:23  And because movement is embodied, just like sex is an embodied activity. People don’t want to do things that don’t feel good with movement, people don’t want to do things that don’t feel good, but we’ve been taught that there is a right way to do it, and that kind of leads people to have rigid standards, and when they can’t achieve them, they don’t feel that it’s worth doing.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:47  Hey friend, before we dive back in, I want you to take a second and think about what you’ve been listening to. What’s one thing that really landed, and what’s one tiny action you could take today to live it out? Those little moments of reflection. That’s exactly why I started good wolf reminders. Short, free text messages that land in your phone once or twice a week. Nearly 5000 people already get them and say the quick bursts of insight help them shift out of autopilot and stay intentional in their lives. If that sounds like your kind of thing, head to oneyoufeed.net/sms and sign up. It’s free. No spam, and easy to opt out of any time. Again, that’s oneyoufeed.net/SMS, tiny nudges, real change. All right, back to the show. 

Okay, so I think there’s two things within that that I kind of want to pull apart. The first is the should. So I go to my doctor and my doctor says, look, your blood sugar is so high. You’re, you know, you’re likely on your way to diabetes. And oh, by the way, your cholesterol is really high. I recommend that you exercise. So there’s a should there. How do I convert that should into a want to I don’t want I want to leave out what the exercise is right now. But how do I get to a want to around the thing as a whole.

Michelle Segar 00:23:15  Right. Well the first thing you have to do is acknowledge like, oh my gosh, this is a should. You know, I have a scale in No Sweat where I ask people from a wanted your to a five a gift.

Michelle Segar 00:23:27  When you think about exercising at a gut level, where do you sit on that continuum and you know the people who I work with anyway. Most people would say a 1 or 2. It’s a chore. And so awareness, as you know and write about, is everything. And so the first thing people have to do to convert a should to a want is you just have to acknowledge it’s like, which one are you going to feed. Do you want to keep feeding the should or do you want to start feeding the want? If you can basically give yourself permission to leave the should, which are often determined by other people in society. Then the question is, well, what can I tell people? How can I help people go from, yeah, I want to leave the should to, I want to go over to the want. And there’s a couple of relevant concepts here. First of all, most people haven’t been taught or socialized or educated to think about movement as an incredible wellbeing enhancing activity because it’s a health promoting weight loss.

Michelle Segar 00:24:32  Supporting it. You know, that’s what people think. So we have to help people understand often through experimentation. If I tell you, Eric, if you hate exercising, so shouldn’t I say to you, it can actually promote your well-being? You are not going to believe me because you haven’t necessarily experienced that positivity. We want people to understand there’s this potential for it to feel good, but there might be a bit of a learning process where you say, well, I really love to be outside, but I’ve never really thought about walking outside as a way to reduce my stress in my job in the middle of the day, or as a way to transition from work to family life. And once we can plant these new seeds of meaning, if you will, and give people an opportunity not to get it right, but to experiment and say, hey, how did that make you feel? Were you glad you do it? Did it feel good? Would you do it again through that process? We can help people go from a should to a what does that make sense?

Eric Zimmer 00:25:40  It does. I mean, I think there’s two things in there for me. And these are the things that have made exercise easier to do. I’m not going to say easy because we can talk about habits later. And how complex behaviors are rarely habitual is exactly those two things. First, I recognize like I’m going to feel better quickly from this. It’s not that it’s for my health 50 years from now. It’s because I’m going to feel better quickly. I mean, that’s one big thing that I did. And then the other was to actually really after I was exercising and I felt good was to spend time really trying to notice that and bring it on board, like, okay, I did that. It felt good. Now the thing that remains semi mysterious to me. And you could probably talk to this a little bit. Is that you would think after having done this 5000 times or whatever it is, where every single time I’m like, I’m glad I did that, I would expect that I would just want to do it like I would run to do it.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:47  But of course, that is not the case, right? I still face resistance, but changing those two things has made a really big difference.

Michelle Segar 00:26:57  From the way you’re talking. I’m going to guess that you exercise pretty intensely.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:05  It depends, yes. Some of my some of my exercise is intense. It’s more than walking. Although I do really embody a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing. Because ultimately I will just default to if I’m really struggling, just move in some way, right? The plan yes does have some degree of what would be considered strenuous. Okay, not miserable. I’m not like every single time I’m like, I’m going to do the hardest hit work out there is. That is, I’m not there. But it does involve, yes, some degree of strain.

Michelle Segar 00:27:37  Well, you know, this really taps into, you know, what we know about if people were prediction like, we predict how are we going to feel now? How are we going to feel now? How are we going to feel when we do that? And if we feel that this is going to be effortful or, you know, something can feel good and effortful, but maybe we’re low energy at that time, right? And so our brains basically give us messages that we approach things we want and we avoid things we don’t want.

Michelle Segar 00:28:09  So I do think putting out effort like that, it’s challenging and that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it. You know, I’ve been playing with this too, with my NordicTrack, which now that I can’t run, I’m a walker and I used to love to run outside. Now I love to walk outside, but I can only get positive experiences on the NordicTrack. If I listen to dance music, I can transfer that dancing experience. But that doesn’t mean even though while I’m doing it, I can actually enjoy it, even for only 5 or 10 minutes. I’m not talking about 30 or 40 minutes, but I still don’t look forward to it.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:04  I think that energy thing is a really big one for me. I write this in the book and I’m kind of joking, but I’m like, I think my brain is doing a calculation kind of like this. And it’s like, okay, it is time to get up and go do a 60 minute ride on the peloton. And my brain sort of checks in and goes like, well, that takes like 30 units of energy.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:23  And then it’s like, well, what do I actually have? And I’m like, well, I’ve got two. I’m laying on the couch and it goes, well, in that case, this isn’t going to work. Whereas for me, and this is the little by little. Right? I just when I shrink it and I’m like, you know what? Just go get up, put on your bike shorts, put on your bike shoes. My brain is like, okay, well, that takes two units of energy. Oh, and you know what? We’ve got almost two. Maybe we can do this, right. I feel like that is such a big one for me, is that there’s some calculation going on or some prediction, to use your point, it knows what it’s going to take to do that, and it measures it against what I currently have. Now, for me, once I get on and I start pedaling a little bit, my actual energy starts to go up and then, you know, but again, I still it’s why like one day at a time or one step at a time, I’m like, you know, if all I’m looking at is like, I’ve got 45 minutes to go, that’s usually problematic. I would just be like, well, the next minute, the next two minutes, the next five minutes. But I do think that energy is really, really a big one in my case.

Michelle Segar 00:30:28  Absolutely. And I think I have fallen prey to this too. But here’s my, you know, but but then I’ve talked myself out of it. I live. I used to belong to the Y, and it was on my daily route, and I was at a point where I was doing some weightlifting and I was exhausted, and I didn’t want to go in and do my weights. And I said to myself, you know what, Michelle? Instead of doing three sets of of everything with £5, why don’t you go in and do one set with £2 and be done? And it was such a win. Like, you know, you shrink it down and most people don’t give themselves permission to do. And I’m in a point in my career with this topic that I honestly believe, because people don’t give themselves permission to shrink and do less or different, that, that if it’s not the biggest reason people drop out of of of their regular exercise.

Michelle Segar 00:31:26  It’s going to be the second biggest reason I’ve just seen it. And as we’re talking about it, can’t you see the psychology of how powerful I can’t do the all? I don’t want to do the all, so I’m just not. The easy thing is to do nothing. But people don’t think there’s an option. That’s the problem.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:43  Well, you just said that might be the second thing. Now I have to ask, what’s the first thing? And if you don’t have that answer immediately.

Michelle Segar 00:31:49  So all or nothing thinking there’s a permission piece that if I can or don’t want to do the all, it’s not there’s nothing valuable. So if that is the that’s a value calculation about the worthiness of doing less. And I, I interviewed a lot of other scientists for the all or nothing discussion because I wanted to understand all these different perspectives. And I spoke to some people in cognitive psychology who really helped me see just plain and clear, this is a value calculation that people it’s not valuable to do less.

Michelle Segar 00:32:25  And so that’s that’s the that part of the all or nothing. But the other piece is the should I mean, and the should ties directly to the criteria. But it’s as you’ve already said, it’s bigger than that. It’s my you know, my my doctor is telling me this, I have to do this. You know, the influencers are saying that. Yeah. And they’re very much related, but they’re two very different things. And there’s a couple of other issues too. But I don’t want to take us too far off track.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:55  Yeah, I do think the messaging that we get is really, really important around this because the messaging that we do tend to get is 150 minutes of semi-hard cardio a week. That is a lot. And then you can go to any number of different influencers who who will take it up. Even beyond that, it’s it’s this really it’s a high level of intensity. It’s a high level of consistency. We’re told to aim for streaks. You do it 90 days in a row and if you mess up, you go back and you start over.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:27  And I’m not saying that those things are not valuable for some people, because in some ways I think those things can be valuable. For some people, we are all different, but most people, my experience is they do need permission to do less. I think it was BJ Fogg that I got this from, and I think it’s a very good analogy because he’s talking about this idea and he’s like, well, you know, let’s say your thing is to do strength training, you know, three days a week and you go on vacation and you’re not really going to be able to do it. But what you decide to do instead is that you’ll just do two sets of push ups and crunches on those days instead. And the analogy he makes is he’s like, it’s kind of like a houseplant. He’s like, when you’re home, you can really give the plant all the attention at once. But in these other moments, what you’re doing is you’re keeping the plant alive. And I think that’s really valuable because oftentimes people will be like, well, what? Who cares? Two sets of push ups and crunches.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:26  That’s not going to shape my future outcome very much. And you’re right, it won’t. But what it will potentially do is enable you to continue with the behavior over time. And that’s the value sometimes for me of a little bit of something being better than a lot of nothing. It’s not that the thing I do, the smaller thing that I do is beneficial in and of itself. Although it is.

Michelle Segar 00:34:54  It is.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:54  Right. It’s also part of a bigger picture. And that bigger picture is that I’m flexible enough that I keep doing something to the best of my ability versus what feels like start stop, start stop, start stop. Yes, it’s much more gradual, but it keeps the momentum going.

Michelle Segar 00:35:14  So yes, you know, I had this statement in no sweat where I said consistency over quantity. That’s that’s the momentum. But I want to say two additional things about this topic because in addition to keeping the momentum, and I think, you know, I don’t have data to say this, but in my mind and work, I think this might even be more potent is when we do those other things which we know don’t elevate to near the same level as what we might be doing at home.

Michelle Segar 00:35:48  What we’re doing is we’re just showing ourselves how important it is. Yes, that we it’s part of our identity. It’s something we truly value. And again, there’s that value calculation again, that it it doesn’t matter what it is. I’m showing myself that it is meaningful to me to just dip my toe in the water. I mean, it could be dipping my toe in the water, right. And that’s it. The and the other. But there is another side to this that I think is really important to acknowledge that. Again, I don’t think my field has been ready to hear. And and this is hard because, you know, when we get out of the swing of things, we truly get out of the swing of things. But on the flip side of, you know, consistency over quantity and doing something is always better than nothing. Sometimes we’re on vacation and we just want to let go.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:39  I agree.

Michelle Segar 00:36:39  So yeah, where does that sit in our mindset such that we go, I’m giving myself permission over this next week.

Michelle Segar 00:36:48  If I feel like taking a walk, I’ll take a walk if I don’t feel like it because it’s vacation. But taking a walk is so valuable to my quality of life that I know as soon as I get home, I’m going to go back to it. Guilt free should free. And this gets that kind of this bigger picture flexing where it’s got to be, right, even on vacation or even something on vacation, when you know there’s different phases of life, right?

Eric Zimmer 00:37:16  I would always tell clients of mine who were going on vacation, I was like, well, what are you going to do on vacation? And they’ll be like, well, I’m just going to keep doing the thing exactly right. And I’m like, okay, well, you can choose that. You can also choose to simply say, I’m not going to do it during this window. What I think is that the more important piece is that we are making a conscious decision. And I’m like, I would much rather have you say, you know what, I’m just going to let it go this week than try and do something that you’re not going to be successful at doing, and you end up feeling bad about the whole time.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:50  Like, there’s no point in that. Just say, I’m not going to do it. And if you do any. Wonderful. Yeah. And then here’s the other like lived experience thing I see is that transition back in is so important. Right. That is where I see a lot of like consistency become inconsistent. Is that when anything changes vacation, whatever the thing is. Right. And this maybe we can talk about move into habits a little bit here, right? Because the idea is that we will do these things and they will become so automatic, we will always do them. Talk about what habit means in a more strict sense.

Michelle Segar 00:38:26  In the behavior change literature, a lot of people are interested in forming habits, forming automatic. So that’s thew big difference. One is, is it a routine? Do you tend to do it on these days at this time or is it an automatic habit? And you know what’s going on in the literature. And it makes sense that people want to help the population form automatic habits.

Michelle Segar 00:38:51  We live a lot of our lives unconsciously, so why not harness that resource, if you will, that we’re already doing. The problem is, is that automatic habits sit on top of assumptions, assumptions of in variability. So in order for that cue response to form and become an automatic habit that literally there’s no consciousness around. When you do the cue, the response has to happen. And typically there’s some type of reward. And if we take a huge step back and think about complex behaviors like physical activity, I mean, you were talking about putting on your shoes and putting on your shorts, setting your alarm, leaving your email. I mean, there are so many steps involved, and that’s just physical activity. Think about eating, grocery shopping, menu planning, trying new recipes. I mean, the list goes on and on of the number of steps. Well, that doesn’t meet the assumptions that are required. And so, you know, that has been my biggest concern about the notion that we should be helping people develop automatic habits for complex lifestyle behaviors like eating and exercise.

Michelle Segar 00:40:00  In addition, there is not research support that you can form automatic habits long term, and even research looking at flossing did not produce long term effects. So and in the exercise literature per se, the most recent reports on whether, you know habits can help people follow through with their intentions to behavior is very mixed. So I really think we’re misguiding people when we ask them to form automatic habits. Instead, I think we should be teaching them on what you and I have been talking about this whole time. Because you know what? This is another word for everything we’ve been talking about is resilience. We need to teach people behavioral resilience. And that’s not doing the same activity on the same days. That’s about bending when the wind blows and standing back up and bending again when the next wind blows. Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:55  Yep. I see why we are seduced by the idea of habits. I even used that word in programs that I taught for a while, because what we want is something to become automatic so that it’s not difficult to do ever again.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:11  And we just do it. I mean, of course, who doesn’t want that? Right. And to your point, as I’ve learned, and some of your research is part of that and in other ways, is that another way of saying what you just said is that a habit has to rely on what we would call a stable context, meaning it’s the same all the time. It’s why, like putting on your seatbelt can become fairly automatic because you get in the car in the same way the car is exactly there, the seat belts in exactly the same place. There’s not much to it now. I suspect if I was forced to crawl in through the trunk of the car, I might not have a habit anymore because. And so when we’re trying to build a habit, our context is constantly shifting. And I love what you said about resilience, because that’s part of what I talk about in the book and in a method I have. And what I would do is when I would form a plan with a client, the very first thing I would say once we were done, we go.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:05  Planning is really important. What are we doing? When are we doing it? Let’s try and at least to start with, drive ambiguity out. And then we say what’s going to go wrong? Because of course it is like, if your plan is like, I’ll work on writing my Substack, I’ll do it after the kids get on the bus to go to school. The question we have to ask is what happens when the kids don’t get on the bus? Because that is surely coming. You can’t plan for everything, but you can plan for some of it. And then the resilience also, like you said, is recognizing like, oh yeah, of course I got off track for a couple days. So that’s what happens. How do I get back on track? Like it’s inevitable. So don’t make a big deal out of it.

Michelle Segar 00:42:48  That’s why the value is the foundation and the goals create the context of the value. If it’s valuable to you, you’ll do it. Unless you’re so rigid that you feel like a failure and then you, you know, then you don’t do it.

Michelle Segar 00:43:01  So here’s the thing. I’ve been thinking a lot about planning and intentions as part of the new work that my colleagues and I are doing. We’re actually developing a measure of rigid versus flexible regulation. So we can actually we’ll look at quantitative data to look at to see our people who are more flexible. Do they do more physical activity. You know, we’re going to actually be able to answer that question quantitatively.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:25  But how will you measure flexibility. Like how will you determine who’s flexible?

Michelle Segar 00:43:29  Let me tell you, we’ve spent the past year and a half. I’m not kidding.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:35  On that question.

Michelle Segar 00:43:36  We looked at like 20 other measures from other fields. I believe it, you know, we had comments in the focus groups for the all or nothing study. I have comments, you know, clients have said things that I remember. I asked personal trainers examples. So and so we haven’t done the first like hugest stat biggest step which is actually doing factor analysis where we where the stats tell us are these are these two factors.

Michelle Segar 00:44:05  Are they in a continuum. Are they different? And I will let you know. It’s. This is it’s been so intensive. But we want to do it right. So a question could be, you know, when my plan bumps, how true is the following for you? Or how often do you do this? I mean for that question we have both a belief subscale and a decision scale. But I’ll do the decision scale, which would be how often do you do this? When my planned physical activity becomes unworkable, I’ll find another way to be active that day. So that would be an item that’s probably very similar to one of our items that, if people affirmed, would reflect flexibility. And if people said not often that okay, so but that’s an example. I mean, ideally we could do stuff in the moment, but we’re just not there yet.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:56  As we wrap up, take one thing from today and ask yourself, how will I practice this before the end of the day? For another gentle nudge, join good Wolf Reminders text list. It’s a short message or two each week, packed with guest wisdom and a soft push towards action. Nearly 5000 listeners are already loving it. Sign up free at oneyoufeed.net/sms. No noise, no spam, just steady encouragement to feed your good wolf. 

Flexibility is such an interesting idea. One of the schools of thought that is informed the way I see the world a lot, or I should say, I discovered it and realized that it saw the world similarly to me is acceptance and commitment therapy. And they have an idea there that what ultimately the thing that they’re trying to develop is psychological flexibility, right? It’s the ability to bend and move and shape and shift and, you know, hold on to certain things and let go of other things. And I think that idea of flexibility is so, so important. It’s a strange thing. I’ve often said that like if you want to do a behavior long term, you need like this weird mix of like stubbornness and also extreme flexibility. The stubbornness is like, I’m going to keep doing this. This is important. I’m going to figure it out. And then the extreme flexibility speaks for itself, right? I have to adapt what I’m doing on a regular basis.

Michelle Segar 00:46:32  Absolutely. And that reminded me of what we were talking about before, which is I think planning is hugely important. And I think earlier in my career I was really into coping planning, which is a or if then planning implementation intentions as kind of the holy grail. What to do you like? You help people create a plan, but in a way that secondary plan is still a plan. And so what I feel like we’re not doing.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:02  It is.

Michelle Segar 00:47:03  What I feel like we need to do that we haven’t been doing yet is I think we need to help people learn how to be more dynamic in the moment, but I think they need to have an understanding of what I would call a movement menu. For example, you know, if you only have five minutes and very little energy versus five minutes and a lot of energy, like if you have 25 minutes.

Michelle Segar 00:47:28  So I think if people if we can help people build this knowledge and this this would be called metacognition or meta knowledge, you know, then when they come to the choice points, which I didn’t know until someone told me in an interview for the Joy choice that Acceptance and Commitment therapy uses that same term, which is really cool.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:49  It does.

Michelle Segar 00:47:50  Then it’s not as threatening because we have this resource at hand, and we know that just like an A menu in a restaurant, we don’t feel like we have to choose the, you know, get it right every time. It’s like, well, what do I feel like today? Right. And so I think if we helped people come at it with a wider variety of options, from almost nothing to a lot more than I actually want to do, they will be more prepared. You know, I agree.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:22  I think that is a really good and important point about developing menus and choices, and I think some of what happens over time, at least with me and movement, that being the primary thing, is that I’ve improvised so many times now, and I have a life that resists any kind of context.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:41  I feel like I’m always somewhere else, somewhere different, like there’s just a lot of that. And and, I mean, I’m choosing that the way I choose to live my life is one in which there’s not a lot of time to be really steady in the same place, doing the same thing. I mean, some of that was for years, Ginny and I going back and forth from Atlanta to take care of her mom to Columbus, to take care of my mom every two weeks. We were somewhere different. What that has caused me to do is to be flexible enough times that I kind of have my own little menu, now that I know. And another thing I was thinking about as we were talking, I was thinking a little bit about like planning, and I was thinking about planning work. And and what I’ve realized over time is that when I’m in a good place, I don’t need to spend a lot. And by good, I mean sort of emotionally regulated, steady place. I don’t need to spend a ton of time planning out exactly what I’m going to do.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:37  I mean, I’m not saying I don’t have any planning, but I’m not like time boxing to the hour. I’m in a good enough spot that I can look and go, okay, that’s important, and that needs to be done. I can kind of manage it, but when things start to get really wobbly for me, I sometimes need to go back to more rigidity and structure. I need to go back to like, okay, I actually do need to sit down and go, okay, what meetings do you have today and what are the spaces in between, and what are you going to do in those spaces in between? Because I’m not in as good a place. And so I think about that sometimes too. Also with exercise, I was thinking about this recently, like with my strength training, it’s gotten a little bit wobbly. And so I’m like, you know what? I think what I’m going to do is rejoin this gym that I go to, and they have strength training classes three days a week, and I’m going to go to those for a little while because I’m off right now and I need the rigidity.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:30  And over time I will probably migrate away from that again and kind of be more on my own. And this just goes back and forth, this waxing and waning of structure.

Michelle Segar 00:50:40  Absolutely. And you know, what you just kind of demonstrated is it’s a journey, right? And it ebbs and flows and people with exercise especially, they just they have the wrong impression. I don’t want to say wrong because that’s judgmental. and some people do. My husband’s exercise is the same. Day in, day out when we travel day. You know, I mean, he is just one of these people who’s going to do it the same way. But I don’t think most of us have either the disciplined or the or the wherewithal or the desire or the value to do that. And and so I mean, everything in life changes. Yet because of the way people have been socialized to think about exercising, they haven’t been taught to change it. Like you said earlier, 30 minutes, five days a week at moderate intensity forever.

Michelle Segar 00:51:39  But that is not a recipe for resilience for most people. And so that’s what I think we need to do, is I think we need to give people permission to be flexible and to be resilient with physical activity, just like they are as parents, as professionals, as daughters and sons and siblings, right? I mean, we don’t expect these other life areas not to change.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:03  Exactly. Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Resilience and flexibility. Michelle, thank you so much. I always enjoy talking to you. And like I said, so much of the way I see things you have been a big influence on. So I love talking with you.

Michelle Segar 00:52:19  Thank you. I love talking with you too. Eric, thank you so much.

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Episode Transcript:

Rick Hanson 00:00:00  Where are we repeatedly dwell, for better or worse, becomes what dwells within us, because neurons that fire together wire together, especially negatively because the brain’s negatively biased, as you know, it’s like Velcro for bad experiences, but Teflon for good ones.

Chris Forbes 00:00:24  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 00:01:09  There’s a phrase Rick Hansen uses in this episode that I love. If you routinely choose harmony over truth in relationship, you often end up with neither.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:19  And that names exactly the trap that I have fallen into in the past. I’m staying quiet to keep the peace, telling myself I’ll bring it up later and then never doing it. What looks like keeping the peace is actually just driving the conflict inward. Rick’s new book is Making Great Relationships, and it’s full of this kind of precise, unsentimental wisdom about what actually works in relationships and what we only think is working. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Rick, welcome to the show, Eric.

Rick Hanson 00:01:53  Again, I’m really glad to be here. We were yakking it up before we started officially and that was great. I want to keep going.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:01  Yeah, we should have captured some of that. However. Yeah. I don’t know how many times you’ve been on now. You know, we’ve had you on with Forrest and it’s always a pleasure. And we’re going to have a chance today to discuss your new book called Making Great Relationships Simple Practices for Solving Conflicts, Building Connection, and Fostering Love.

Rick Hanson 00:02:19  There you are. Ta da!

Eric Zimmer 00:02:21  But before we do that, let’s start like we always do with the parable and the parable. There’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there’s two wolves 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 and they think about it for a second. 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 does that parable mean to you in your life and in the work that you do?

Rick Hanson 00:02:56  Oh, it’s it’s central for me as well. And we have the two wolves. And much of life is about feeding the qualities inside the wolf of love, of mindfulness, of resilience, of determination, commitment to social justice, all of those things.

Rick Hanson 00:03:13  The wolf of positive emotions. Emotionally positive experiences are one of the best medicines of all for both mind and body authentic ones. So we want to cultivate one, and we want to increasingly disengage from the other. If we hate it, we feed it, but we can withdraw food from it and fuel for it. And for me, there’s a resonance of this that relates to my own background in the Buddhist contemplative tradition that has to do with where you dwell becomes increasingly what dwells within you. And also this resonates for me very much in terms of my background in neuropsychology and what’s called positive neuroplasticity, in that it’s really important to rest in what calls your heart to rest. Your mind almost calls your heart for a breath, or longer to help the mental neural pattern of the time that underlies that experience. To help that. Leave residues that last behind in physical changes in your brain in terms of altered neural structure and function. Because without that actual physical change in your nervous system, you may have momentarily fed the wolf, right? But there’s no lasting learning.

Rick Hanson 00:04:28  There’s no development, no cultivation. The wolf has not gotten any bigger. Bigger. The good wolves get bigger when we take in the good, and we turn positive states into positive traits by resting in them for a breath or longer. And I’ve written a ton about that and hardwiring Happiness and other books. As you know, you are right up my alley. You know I am right up your alley with the one you feed.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:51  Yep. So say that about the dwelling piece again. What was that quote that you just said?

Rick Hanson 00:04:56  Basically, if you just think about it, think of it as dwelling. There’s a technical word in the language of early Buddhism a Brahma vihara. A vihara is a dwelling place, a Brahma being a really positive dwelling place. So vihara, where do we dwell? And I find for me that this is a very emotionally rich and embodied sense, like dwell. It’s like a dwelling place. Where do you abide? What’s home for you? We long to come home. It’s sometimes said that all sickness at bottom is homesickness.

Rick Hanson 00:05:28  Do you understand that? In different layers of meaning. So where do we want to dwell? And where we repeatedly dwell, for better or worse, becomes what dwells within us? Because neurons that fire together wire together, especially negatively, because the brain’s negatively biased, as you know, it’s like Velcro for bad experiences, but Teflon for good ones. So it’s really important to rest in beneficial experiences, particularly the ones that you hope to. Grow in stabilize inside yourself so that you rest in them either because they’re already happening. Usually, like right now, it feels really good with you, Eric. It’s good. I’m resting in this. It’s camaraderie. It’s companionable ness. Yeah. You know, we’re spiritual friends as well as worldly friends. It’s good. Like so there, on the other hand, you can create a beneficial experience deliberately by mobilizing compassion for somebody or mobilizing gratitude for something or anything else. Okay, once you’re having that experience, don’t waste it on your brain. Slow it down so that as you dwell in it, stay with it.

Rick Hanson 00:06:35  Not out of attachment to it or clinging to it. More like a gentle openness to it and an establishing of yourself in it, a protecting of it, often for a breath or longer. Right? It doesn’t take a lot of time to change the brain for the better. We just need to give it some time initially, especially with positive experiences, and then do this repetitively. So as you dwell increasingly in what causes your heart, that becomes increasingly what dwells within you in a sense of growing, stable traits that operate in the background. Or you can call upon them quickly as needed. Traits again, like the trait of mindfulness, the trait of compassion, the trait of resilience, the trade of being determined, the trait of emotional intelligence right. Becoming more skillful in relationships. The trait of patience. The trait of fundamentally positive mood. Inner peace. Yeah, the more we dwell on experiences of these things, the more we dwell in experiences of them. As strengths, we grow those durable strengths within ourselves.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:36  Yeah, that idea of just these brief moments underlies a lot of what I’ve really focused on in the Spiritual Habits program, where, you know, the core mantra there is little by little, a little becomes a lot. Right. Which is beautiful. These little moments. Right? Yeah. I think it’s a Tanzanian proverb. I didn’t make it up, but kind of what you’re saying. Most of us don’t have big chunks of time to devote to spiritual practice. Our lives are busy, but we can little by little, make a lot of progress. And that’s what you’ve talked so eloquently about for so many years.

Rick Hanson 00:08:08  Yeah. Well, I love that proverb. I’m going to remember it a little by little. A little becomes a lot. Yeah. The thing I see a lot is a psychologist, therapist and, you know, a long time husband, a long time father, long time business person as well, is that we tend to just race on, we don’t value enough, and we don’t have the humility to stay with he beneficial experiences.

Rick Hanson 00:08:31  We race on to the next one before internalizing the current one, which leaves us endlessly hungry for more. And so it’s really important to value key beneficial experiences. And because you value them, internalize them, rest in them. And we also have a culture that kind of Pooh Pooh this whole idea, you know, culture that basically says, you know, what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger. You know, you learn through pain. Actually, most pain has no gain. Think of it. And most pain actually tears us down. Stress, anxiety, depressed mood, anger. Chronic anger is terrible for cardiovascular health. Shame. Feeling inadequate. Feeling less than others. Feeling endlessly driven to impress others. And you know when their approval again and again. You know, whatever their approval was yesterday, you need to ruin it today to fill that hungry hole in your heart. That’s deeply problematic. And I find so many people, when they first start to slow down to taking the good, they start to realize that it’s hard initially.

Rick Hanson 00:09:34  It’s just not their habit.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:35  It is hard.

Rick Hanson 00:09:36  But it’s wonderful. You know, it’s the good news. Just like, why not stay with the experience for like, well, we want to race on to the next thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:44  Yeah. I mean, I’ve been hearing that.

Rick Hanson 00:09:46  Feed the Wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:47  Yeah, I’ve been hearing that teaching from you for. I mean, how many years now? Six. Eight. Right. And it’s still it’s not natural to me to dwell and stay and savor.

Rick Hanson 00:09:59  Yeah. And let it sink in. And sometimes what we rest in, what we dwell in, you know, what we stay with is not technically something you could actually savor. Like, for example, the feeling of healthy remorse or disenchantment, like, hey, it’s fun to get buzzed, but, you know, it’s fun for 20 minutes, and then after that it’s all just contraction and wanting more. And then the next day feeling, you know, foggy and your partner looks at you and goes, oh, your breath smells and there you are.

Rick Hanson 00:10:30  Well, realizing that may not be an experience you savor per se. And yet it’s an important to let it land not out of beating yourself up, but by letting the resolution and the disenchantment sink into you. So the next time you walk a higher road, one that’s kinder to your future self, right? Who’s going to be paying the price for that pleasurable 20 minutes? And also to the other people around you? sometimes ideas are really also useful to internalize. So I’m just kind of building on what you said there about savoring, not against it, just adding what else people can be aware of. You know, like the idea that you’re not responsible for your partner’s alcoholism, right? Or the idea that your contribution to a rocky relationship with an adult child perhaps was real and worth remorse, regret and correction. And that contribution that has your name tag on it, you know, was one of many significant factors in whatever has turned out. Yep. That idea, that understanding is also something to to really let it land so you can form conviction around it.

Rick Hanson 00:11:39  Anyway, we feed many wolves in many ways, and little by little, a little becomes a lot, just like you said.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:44  Yeah. Yeah. I love that idea, though, about staying with things a little bit more purposefully and consciously, both what we would consider positive things and things that we might consider negative in the sense that they don’t feel good. Yeah, necessarily. But to me, that is sort of the point of a lot of the negative emotions. Right? Used correctly. Yeah. Is that there’s something to be learned there. Yeah. If we can, you know. Not all the time, not in every case, but in a lot of them there is. But our desire to not feel them means that we also won’t learn from them.

Rick Hanson 00:12:23  Exactly. Give you a little example. So last night I have a regular Wednesday meditation program online. People can check it out. It’s free, no big deal. And it’s very open and inviting Wednesday night. So last night, the first one of the year, I gave a talk on what matters and what doesn’t, because that’s really central.

Rick Hanson 00:12:42  And in effect, we want to help ourselves disengage from what truly doesn’t matter. Those wolves, metaphorically speaking, we want to disengage from what truly doesn’t matter. And we want to rest increasingly in and feed and cultivate and practice what truly does matter to us. Okay, so I gave that talk, and then my wife and I have a little kind of time together. She goes to bed a little earlier than I do. So we hang out and we also do a little brief meditation on the way to bed. It’s like I’m putting her to bed. It’s kind of it’s sweet. And we were talking and I’ll spare you the exact detail, but she made a little passing comment about a situation that I could just kind of deal with and put up with. In effect, that wasn’t that great for me. And right there I was at a crossroad. What matters most? Which wolf am I going to feed? Am I going to get a little irritated and a little snarky and push back on this thing that she thought I could just put up with that would be uncomfortable for me? Or do I just sort of let it go by and know that actually I’m not going to do that thing, but I don’t need to make a deal out of it right now.

Rick Hanson 00:13:50  What matters more now? Which Wolf, do I want to feed? I want to feed a pleasant way of ending our day together. I don’t feel the need to get into an argument just before bad. You know, I’m trying to manage my tendency to drop in exasperated input. No input is one thing, but adding exasperation. Maybe the input matters. But does the exasperation truly need to matter to you? Do you want to really feed the wolf of exasperation? So that was a little moment, and basically I could just feel myself initially wanting to chase the irritable, kind of exasperated reply and to feed that wolf and to make that wolf matter in the moment. And I just slowed it down to kind of disengage from that reactive cascade and Rest. Marina. Hey. I’m okay. Still, I don’t need to chase this one. I don’t need to go to war over this one. We’re all right. And, you know, slide into making that matter instead. That’s the wolf I fed, and I’m.

Rick Hanson 00:14:51  I’m really happy now, 12 hours later, being able to talk about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:55  Yeah, I actually want to come back to that story in a minute, because I think it’s central to a lot of things in the book. But I think we first have to start with the elephant in the room, which is you writing a book about relationships is ironic given you’ve been married five times.

Rick Hanson 00:15:10  What? You’re joking are I’ve been married 40 years to the same person.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:15  Oh, no. I’m confusing you with the professional wrestler Ric Flair. I’m sorry.

Rick Hanson 00:15:20  I don’t worry about it. There’s also Ric Hansen, who’s the police chief of Calgary, Canada. And then there’s another Ric Hansen who, you know, yeah. Disabled athlete went across the country. Well, yeah. Good luck. That was it was a good.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:34  It was a stupid joke. Ric Flair. I couldn’t resist. I do, right here.

Rick Hanson 00:15:39  Right here. What are we going to chase? And which is one of the central themes in the book, Making Great Relationships right here.

Rick Hanson 00:15:45  Am I going to get snarky about that? Am I going to take it personally, or am I going to know that you’re a good guy? Right? and if I actually had been married five times, it would be ironic to write a book about making great relationships right there, right there. We have that choice hundreds of times each day in all kinds of relationships. All sorts. And which one do you tilt? Which choice do you make? And that’s what that book is so much about. What do you do with your thoughts and your basically your your thoughts, words and deeds, what you say and what you do. Yeah. Well, you, you know, with your mind in your mouth, essentially. I don’t mean that sexually. again and again and again. And the consequence is that those little things, as you just said, yeah, build something that’s a lot over time.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:31  Yeah, yeah. No, that was a pre-planned dumb joke. I know you’ve been married a long time.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:38  I’m just thinking of you and Ric Flair in the same breath. It just was too good to resist for me. Let’s go back to that story about your wife there, though, because there’s something interesting in that. And as I was reading your book, I sort of kept seeing both of these things reflected. And what they are is I feel like it’s a real tension that I have certainly faced in relationship. I think everybody does to some degree. Right. And it’s this tension of, on one hand, we want to pause, slow down, rein in our tongue, think about what’s important. Choose what do I want to feed right now when we’re presented with something in a relationship? Yeah. That tendency, though taken too far, becomes a tendency where we don’t talk about the things that we’re unhappy about. We don’t talk about what we need. We don’t talk about what we want. So my rationale is a little bit like the one you just did, which is like, I want to feed this peaceful moment.

Rick Hanson 00:17:34  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:34  So I’m not going to bring up this thing. Yeah. And then I say to myself, this isn’t the right time, which may be very wise in a lot of cases it is. I’ll bring it up later, which then I never do. Yeah. I thought we could talk about that essential tension of thinking through. When do I say something about what’s going on? When do I not? How do I determine what the right time is? I just love to kind of explore that because I think that’s a big deal.

Rick Hanson 00:18:03  I think it is a big deal. And I think that’s an example of a really big deal, which is the whole thing of what do I do when, what do I say when? And, you know, besides being married for 40 years, I’ve been doing counseling for roughly the same amount of time. That’s a lot of experience, including a lot of couples and families and other kinds of relationships, including business, relationships, partners or, you know, the manager person they manage or the work team.

Rick Hanson 00:18:30  A lot of experience there, and there are thousands of books on relationships. I wanted to write a book that no one has written, really, which is 50 Simple Practices for Solving Conflicts, Building cooperation, and Fostering Love practices specific to do’s, 50 to do’s that answer the question what do I do when right? So in this particular case, I think you’re right. People can on either side. They can on the side of coming in too hot or too cool. They can on the side of, you know, saying too much or saying too little. Which way do we go? And there’s kind of a saying, I put it in my book, resilient, my saying, which is very often we’re choosing harmony or truth in our relationships. Yeah. And there’s a place for choosing harmony. There’s a sequel to my story about my wife last night, actually, I’ll tell it to you, but at first I chose harmony over truth. Yeah, right. But there’s a problem that if we routinely choose harmony over truth over time, we often end up with neither.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:31  Exactly. That was an insight I had, which was like I was thinking I was keeping the peace. What I realized I was doing was driving all the conflict inside. Yeah, it wasn’t peace. There was external peace, but there was not peace. It’s just that I, for that time, was taking all of it, you know, which turns out to be a losing game for me and the relationship.

Rick Hanson 00:19:53  Yeah. Yeah. So. Exactly. Right. So again, long term therapist. It’s like learning a skill, you know, if you want to learn to ski, which I’m bad at, you know. But when I was trying to learn it, there’s the foundational things you learn along the way. Right. So in the book, it starts with befriending yourself. Yeah. Because if we don’t have that fundamental quality of being on our own side and not against others, but for ourselves and kind to ourselves and recognizing good in ourselves and having compassion for ourselves and supporting ourselves like a good coach or a good guide.

Rick Hanson 00:20:25  Not a critic, but a good coach or guide and a cheerleader as well. That’s foundational. And then certainly their general capabilities around warming the heart toward others. You know, the cultivation of compassion, the the skills of empathy. I’ve seen the good in others, seeing good intentions in others, even though they are expressing them in ways that are problematic. You know, it’s on that foundation, definitely that. Then you get to okay, all right, something happened. We’re going to interact about it. How do we do that? And there’s a lot in the book about the actual how of moving through a conflict effectively or negotiating wants. You want X, they want Y or you felt kind of hurt or you felt let down, you felt really wounded. What do you do? And even ultimately, how do you resize the relationship in key ways? maybe, if only in your mind. Like, I don’t know about you if you want to go public with this, you know, I. But I can go public too.

Rick Hanson 00:21:24  There are certain areas where I’ve just sort of given up on the hassle about something like I like it sort of neat and orderly. Partly because I’m dealing with a million things and that’s how I manage a million things. My wife grew up in a family where it was just chaos everywhere, and it was not a problem. It was a happy family. So we’re different that way. So I’ve given up about vast areas of our home, you know? But my closet is organized, my office clear and neat. That’s a formal resizing. Other people, you just resize and you realize, you know, I’m not going to talk to them after they’ve been drinking or, you know, yeah, we’re going to have lunch maybe once or twice a year. And we’re not going to talk about Donald Trump. We’re just going to let that one go right by. Yeah. And that will be enough with that kind of old friend from college, for example. So yeah, and we could talk more about it.

Rick Hanson 00:22:14  Thanks for letting me kind of give you an overview of the book, and I’m happy to give marital advice if you wanted. And happy to receive it from you as well.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:24  Yes, yes. Well, I’m teasing you about being married multiple times. I have been married and divorced twice. So I may have more war stories than you. But you’ve met Jenny. She’s interviewed you. She’s enormously happy now. Yeah. The thing that was coming up for me is you were kind of talking through this, and we were thinking about it as a little bit of this sense, and I think we do this in many aspects of life. Right. Which is discernment around, like you said earlier, your core talk last night or earlier this week, which was, you know, what matters and what doesn’t.

Rick Hanson 00:22:55  Yep.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:56  Because that’s what we’re really talking about. Figuring out here is what really matters. What things can I let go of that don’t compromise me in any meaningful way. Right. They may cause me to have to do some adjustment.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:10  They may cause me to have to relax a little bit, but they don’t compromise me in a fundamental way. But there are other things that might. And I think we do this in all relationships and even in things like work. Right? Like work is a compromise for most people. In some way it’s like, well, there’s all these really good things, but then there’s these three bad things and which outweighs which. And so there’s this, this sort of discernment process that feels challenging. And I think that’s part of why, as I was reading your book, the early parts are very much as you said, about internal steadiness, focus, work, etc. because I do think that steadiness is needed to make these difficult discernment because we don’t make them well when we are out of whack.

Rick Hanson 00:23:53  Yeah, yeah. You know, it might be helpful since you’ve been so kind, actually, to talk about the book. Yeah, I’ll just kind of name some of the simple practices. Then. The chapters in this book are really short, you know, usually 3 to 5 pages each.

Rick Hanson 00:24:07  So their each one of them is a specific thing. So I’ll just kind of just start naming chapter titles starting in part four. Stand up for yourself. So let go of needless fear. Use anger. Don’t let it use you. Tell the truth and play fair. Don’t be bullied. For example, these are really foundational, you know. Or pass that in terms of the section on speak wisely. That’s the longest part of the book. Yeah, six parts total. Speak from the heart, ask questions, express appreciation, try a softer tone, admit fault and move on. Yes, that’s been one of the best for me. Stay right when you’re wronged. That goes to practicing unilateral virtue, not out of being a doormat, but in part because it puts you in the strongest possible position. Yeah. Say what you want. Come to agreement. Forgive them. Forgive yourself too. Yeah. Anyway, you can just see the kaboom of those things and they really are kaboom. The longer I’ve done therapy with people, I think I’ve become kinder.

Rick Hanson 00:25:16  I’ve also become blunter. Yeah, yeah. And that bluntness, that kind bluntness definitely runs throughout the entire book. Like, this is what we’ll do. This is what’s in your power. There’s so much that’s not in our power, right? Other people going to do what they do. Many people disappoint. That’s reality. Okay. What’s in your power with what you think and what you say and what you do? And that’s what the book is really about. In that way, you can make a great relationship, even if the other person’s problematic for you, even if you want to disengage from them. For you, it’s a great relationship because you’ve practiced with it in various ways.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:13  You pulled out some chapter titles, and maybe we could go deeper into a few of them, because I’ve picked a few out myself that I wanted to kind of touch on, and one of them is this admit fault and move on. You say, remember, it’s in your own best interest to admit fault and move on.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:29  Admitting fault might seem weak, or that you’re giving others a free pass for their faults, but actually it takes a strong person to admit fault and it puts you in a stronger position with others, you know. You also then go on to talk about try not to make the fault bigger than it actually is. Be specific about what it is. Talk a little bit more about this ability to admit fault and do it in a wise way.

Rick Hanson 00:26:54  Well, you know, there’s a saying in medicine, I’m thinking about your two marriages so far. Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. So you’ve had a lot of experience. I’ve had a lot of experience to it that has come from my own bad judgment. So in the moment we do stuff, you know, a tone slips in or we drop the ball. You know, we’re supposed to remember to get the milk on the way home or something, right? Or we’ve just kind of more globally been tuning out our partner because we’re preoccupied with work or we’re thinking about TV we want to watch later tonight, whatever it might be.

Rick Hanson 00:27:28  You know, a lot of faults are morally innocent. It just slipped our mind. Yeah, right about something and. Okay. And it’s about acknowledging that and being committed to correction in the future rather than arguing about the past. Yeah. And so it’s in that context just two examples. One is how we say it has much more impact than what we say generally. Much research on that tone and communications about the nature of the relationship, who’s on top, who’s on the bottom, who’s the dominant person in the relationship in the moment. So, you know, maybe we said something that we stand behind. Maybe we just said to our partner, you keep leaving your shoes in the middle of the doorway. All right. That’s a fact statement. But the tone around it could be really problematic way beyond just a reasonable exasperation after the fifth time your roommate does that, or your teenage child does that. Okay. And then the other person winces, or they get on your case about it like, oh, you’re so mean.

Rick Hanson 00:28:29  Or you said that you’re so mad all the time. And okay, so you might say, okay, you’re right, you’re right. I don’t want to use that tone. I never want to use harsh tone. One of the earlier chapters is called Watch Your Words. I use the guidelines in early Buddhism about what constitutes wise speech or right speech, and one of the kind of five key characteristics is not harsh tone. So what is harsh depends on culture and setting and so forth. But you could go, you know, okay. Yeah, I was cranky. My tone wasn’t good. You admit that fault? It clears the decks. Now the person has to deal with the actual content that they can’t believe in their shoes in the doorway, and they can no longer evade dealing with that content, that actual truth, that fact, because they’re, you know, critiquing your tone, right? For example. Yeah. All right. Another one is where, you know, you did something that really warrants some remorse.

Rick Hanson 00:29:24  You know, it’s not just about putting correction in, but it’s about, wow, I’m really sorry. And I just find if there’s going to be a healing in relationships, it’s important to feel that the other person gets it. This book, in a lot of ways, is about being that person that other people really want to be with over time. Because that person you are is someone who’s prepared and is big enough and strong enough to experience and express genuine guilt and remorse. That’s in proportion to what happened. You know, like, for example, let’s suppose you know, you’re routinely late, you know, for something and your partner’s calling you on it like, hey, you’re always ten minutes late, or you’d say you’d be home at a certain time, or you know you’ll be ready for a certain time, and you always keep me waiting. And maybe you realize, you know, the truth is, I just have not made timeliness as important to me as things that my job were. I’m always on time.

Rick Hanson 00:30:27  What’s with that? Why am I making my partner, or my kid, or my dear friend, or my aging parent less important to me than some Gibney down the hall at work? That, of course, show up on your bony jawbone.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:43  I don’t know what that means.

Rick Hanson 00:30:44  I just made that. That’s a California slang term from somewhere in my youth. Junior high. I have no idea. Sorry. I mean, I don’t I it’s just a made up. Anyway, point is what? And then you start to, you start to really feel it like wow. And you start to feel how much you care about your partner. You start to become aware of your impact on your partner. It wasn’t your intent to be cruel and yet the impact caused harm, caused suffering, and you start to feel a little like a wince and you go, no, sorry, sorry, sorry honey or sorry friend or sorry mom, I got it, I got it, and it’s that healthy remorse that will motivate you to not do that again, and to be that person who won’t do that again.

Rick Hanson 00:31:29  And when other people see that about you. Just to finish here, here’s the moving on part, where when you’ve acknowledged it, you can move on. Now, they may not be ready quite yet to move on because they don’t trust you. And what’s useful about admitting fault and moving on is to say, I get it, but I’m not going to try to prove this to you. I’m just going to demonstrate it. Yeah. It landed, I got it. I’m not admitting fault. Just to brush you off and make you go away. I really get it. And it’s it’s the admission of fault, including sometimes with proportionate remorse that enables me to say, hey, I’ve done my part here. You know, I’ve acknowledged it. Confessed? I’ve pled guilty. However you want to say it, I’m not trying to minimize how it landed on you. I’m not trying to get into some big, long, defensive explanation. You know, internally, I’m reserving my right to judge for myself how big a fault it is.

Rick Hanson 00:32:27  Yeah. And if the other person thinks, oh, on a on the 0 to 10 scale of faults, it was at least an eight. And you’re thinking, hey, I just added a little exasperation in my tone about your shoes in the middle of the doorway for the fifth time today, but okay. You know, for you it’s maybe a one or a two, but whatever it is, you acknowledge it and then you move on from it and it’s great. You know, you’re just moving on. They can think what they think. You’re walking the high road. You know, you’re practicing unilateral virtue on your own. And that gives you a real feeling of worth in yourself. Plus, over time, it removes reasons for others to find fault with you, you know, and less and less to find fault with. Even if they go looking and some people will. Unfortunately. And you’re just. You’re impeccable. You can enjoy what’s called the bliss of blameless ness. Yes, deep in your bones.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:19  In 12 step recovery, we talked all the time about keeping our side of the street clean. Right.

Rick Hanson 00:33:24  Like, beautiful.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:25  And what comes from that is a degree of peace.

Rick Hanson 00:33:28  Yeah. That’s right. And the foundation of that is like a phrase that you’ll relate to, of course. Fearless in searching inventory. Yeah, yeah. Of yourself. Which means. Because you’re willing to do that. Fearless in searching inventory, you can stand strong in what you’re not going to take on. Yep. You know, you’re not going to say that you’re responsible for that or be guilt tripped into feeling inferior to others because they’re lambasting you about something that you’re like, no, honestly, I don’t think it was that bad. Yeah. And I have authority to say I don’t think it was that bad inside my own heart, because I’m fully prepared to say what is bad based on a sincere and searching inventory.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:07  Yeah. I want to make sure we hit unilateral virtue because I love that idea. But I want to stay here for a second and talk a little bit about a couple of words that you used in there that, that are part of a cultural conversation to some degree these days, which is around impact versus intent.

Rick Hanson 00:34:24  Yeah, exactly.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:25  There are differing schools of thought. And and I tend to think people land on one extreme or the other on this. Right, versus a middle ground, which is there’s one idea which says if what you did impacted me negatively, it doesn’t matter what your intent was, you are wrong. There’s another school that tends to say, but I didn’t mean it that way. So it didn’t hurt you, right? Or it shouldn’t hurt you. It shouldn’t hurt you because I didn’t mean it that way. That wasn’t my intent. And I think in relationship this becomes very difficult at times because we go, well, my intent was and you took it X way and you know, so there is this searching and fearless moral inventory where we go. Well, you know, to me, that’s a to. But to my partner, it was an eight. Now, how much of that do I need to take on or not take on? Because we know that people respond to things from a variety of factors.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:20  Right. The tone about the shoes in the doorway might be a two on its own. Yeah, but if you’ve talked with that tone for five years, it might be an eight now. Totally. Right. Or if your partner had a dad who was slightly angry when you use a very mildly angry tone, they might reacted in eight. So impact and intent can very often be mismatched. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, just I just love to hear you sort of elaborate on that or kind of, you know, talk through that.

Rick Hanson 00:35:50  Yeah. Or just add another thing. Let’s suppose that you are a white person and a person you’re saying that to is a person of color, let’s say. And so there’s another element in the mix in which someone who belongs to much more. The dominant side and advantaged privileged side in the culture, including historically, is then criticizing and in effect, commanding another person to do something. So you’re right. Multiple layers to that. For me, having worked through this territory a lot, including in terms of kind of classic diversity trainings and considerations about it, let’s see.

Rick Hanson 00:36:28  One of the keys for me that’s been helpful has been to internally cut to the chase about, okay, what’s my correction from now on? That kind of is independent from the emotional charge and sometimes the accusations that are flying or in disagreements about what something means, let alone disagreements about what happened. Yeah, right. And also, how can I put it disengagement from the understandable backlog that a person who’s been shoved down and had the boot on their neck and their parents and their grandparents and their ancestors and all the rest of that to kind of, in effect, acknowledge that while zeroing in on, okay, what am I going to do next time?

Eric Zimmer 00:37:10  Yeah. Well, you’ve got a line that says you don’t have to fight about the past to agree about what you’ll do from now on. And that line just jumped off the page. It means yeah. That’s right. Because how powerful is that idea? Like, okay, your fault. My fault. We’re rehashing what may have happened. My memory, your memory of what happened.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:27  It’s all muddled ground, right? Right. What we can do is say, let’s talk about what we do now. Moving on. And let’s create. You talk about agreements in the book. Let’s create an agreement about what’s going to happen. You can’t reset the emotional clock entirely. I’m not saying that, but you are resetting it in a sense. And you can then from that agreement, then have conversations about, you know, how are we doing with our new agreement about how this will happen.

Rick Hanson 00:37:52  That’s right. A second key distinction for me is to kind of tease apart what the experience of the other person is from. Maybe there are accusations around it, right? I don’t have to necessarily buy into the accusations. You know that I was an egregious asshole or promulgating a bunch of micro-aggressions from my privilege or something. I don’t have to necessarily agree with those accusations, while being really interested in and sincere about understanding the experience of the other person, and in a context of a kind of unconditional grounding in goodwill and kindness and compassion.

Rick Hanson 00:38:35  Not from a pity place, not from a superiority place, but just from a naturally open heart. That distinction between what’s the experience of the other person and being interested in it sincerely and trying to learn from it, distinguishing that from whether or not their accusations are founded or whether they’re over the top, or whether I need to feel guilty about it, you know, separating that out I find super helpful too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll give you an example of that. I grew up in a home in which my parents had a monopoly on the expression of anger. And so I entered adulthood super uptight, really pinched, and I saw myself. Also, I was very young, going through school, this nerdy young kid. And I did not have any sense, really, of my personal power, didn’t get it. And then it was really in my marriage, including the early years of our children, now 35 or so years ago for our oldest. My wife started pointing out to me that actually I had an intensity that I was totally unaware of.

Rick Hanson 00:39:36  And I also grew up in a home where my parents let fly a fair amount of emotional intensity. It was not a big deal to me, and I had to realize that the experience of other people was that they were shaken. I wasn’t abusive, but I was just intense, and I didn’t realize the impact of that intensity. And so I learned over time to stop being so defensive about the fact that I had every right in the world to say that, because it’s really true. You left your shoes in the damn doorway again, right? Yep, yep. I had to separate out the validity, whatever it was, let’s say, which usually there is some validity in what we say, even if it comes out in a sort of messy, turbocharged way and then focus on and learn from. Oh, wow, that’s how it landed on you. That’s how it landed on you. You know, that was really helpful and more broadly helpful to realize that, man, we’re so affected by each other.

Rick Hanson 00:40:34  We’re vulnerable. We’re social primates who are evolved to be, in effect, the most affected by other species on the planet, by design. Of course we’re affected. Of course you are affected. It’s not because you’re weak or a whiner or needy. Of course you are affected by what they do. Yeah, and flip the other way. they are really affected by what you do. The micro expressions across your face of, you know, contempt, divisiveness. You know, disdain. Like a little exasperation, you know, not really being present. Your eyes start wandering away. You’re not showing up for them. They get affected by that, let alone if you start adding significant anger into the mix. Yeah. And anyway, it’s just been helpful for me to have that feeling of almost the tenderness of other people while also finding ways to be strong and be clear. Yeah, and to say what needs to be said.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:35  There’s such an art to that. That ability to say what you need to say.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:40  Yeah. And do it in a way that has the most likelihood of being received. It is a real skill. It is a real skill to learn. But I do think it really can be learned, and I think it’s one of the most valuable things you can learn to do is, you know, how do you have difficult conversations in a effective and productive way? There is a book that’s been out a long time called Crucial Conversations. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that one, but so many great pieces in there too, about, you know, how do you approach this? You know, there’s some parallels to what you’re talking about in your book and in their book, because, you know, they do say you got to start internally.

Rick Hanson 00:42:19  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:20  You know, you got to start internally getting clear on getting to a settled place, to a strong place. You’ve got to get clear on what do you actually want, what matters here, what’s important. So there’s a lot of work ideally that is done now.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:36  It can be done very I’m not saying you got to set aside hours to do it necessarily, but I do think it needs to be done. It can be done fairly quickly. Sometimes it needs to be done over a longer period of time where there’s some real thought about like, this is an important thing to me. Yeah. And how I’m about to communicate. This actually matters because I want it to be both kind, but I also want it to be effective.

Rick Hanson 00:42:58  Right? Oh it’s good. So I’ll just tell you from a lot of couples counseling and different kinds of couples, including parents and teenagers and family members, and also in work environments. So first, classic setup A and B walk into the office. Right. A says I want you to change. B says, I want you to change. Yep. And then B says, yeah, I’ll change you first. Boom. Deadlock. That’s where unilateral virtue comes in where you practice. I think of it as the 8020 rule put 20% of your attention on what you want from them.

Rick Hanson 00:43:31  Meanwhile, put 80% of your attention on how you could be a better partner or friend or worker or boss or sibling and so forth, because that is unilateral virtue, and you’ll feel so much better by doing that. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:44  Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight? Breath shallow. Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday, I send weekly bites of wisdom, a short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show. Things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose into bite size practices you can use the same day it’s free. It takes about a minute to read and thousands already swear by it. If you’d like extra fuel for the weekend, you also get a weekend podcast playlist. Join us at one You feed. That’s one you feed newsletter and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right, back to the show. That’s so good. 8020. Actually, I read that in the book too, and I loved it because you hear people say it’s 5050, or then you’ll hear other people say, no, no, no, no, it’s 100% you, 0% the other person.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:46  And neither of those to me is right. So I think 8020 Feels about right. Like 80% of my effort really should be on me and what I’m doing, and. But you know what? I’m a human being. I’m not like a robot. And I’m not going to respond and pay attention to 20% of it.

Rick Hanson 00:45:00  For me, it reframed everything to realize that the strongest, most badass kind of way to be is to zero out the other person’s complaints to the maximum, reasonable extent you can. Yeah. Going forward. Right. Whatever happened in the past? Focus on the future from now on, rather than arguing about the past. That was the best thing you can do for yourself and think about what is it like to be with someone who sincerely wants to sort out? What is the maximum reasonable correction to put in going forward without necessarily beating themselves up with a lot of guilt? Just okay, how can I prevent that next time? Or what can we do going forward? When you’re with that kind of person, you want to give them everything in the world, you know, because they’re chill and cool and reasonable to work with or live with or sleep with.

Rick Hanson 00:45:50  Okay, so that’s one. Here’s another one that I’ve just seen a lot. People don’t make requests. They tend to make demands. You need to get your shoes out of the door rather than hey, I request that from now on, you make an effort to keep your shoes out of the doorway. Okay? Can we have an agreement about that? And is there anything I could do, maybe even that could help you keep that agreement? Like not rushing you so much in the morning.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:15  Pick up my damn shoes.

Rick Hanson 00:46:16  Yeah, I’d like not buy you any more shoes, kid. No, no, I’m just kidding. But you see what I mean? But focus on requests. Requests? Not demands. Now, the other. If the other person doesn’t meet your requests, there could be consequences. And those consequences are not a threat. They’re just reality, right? If you have a roommate who keeps leaving their shoes in the doorway or the equivalent times ten, after a while you’re going to either get, you know, kick them out of the apartment that you have the lease on or, you know, find somewhere else to live or something like that.

Rick Hanson 00:46:46  There could be consequences that people don’t meet your requests. Here’s the third one. If I slip it in really fast, I’ve just seen it a million times. Yeah. People routinely do not actually speak from their heart. They don’t share their experience. They say things like, you’re wrong or, you know, you made me something. You made me mad. You hurt me, or you’re bad. In some ways, you did something wrong. They find fault rather than what is much more effective. Even though it’s harder and more courageous, is to just slow it down and go with dignity and appropriately say more like what your actual experience is, how you feel. So in those structures, you all know of nonviolent communication. It’s called nonviolent communication. It’s really helpful here. The structure basically when X happened or happens, I feel y because I need z, in other words. And X is described objectively. So when you know, you roll your eyes at me when I’m talking or when you interrupt me, which is factual, I feel frozen, I feel startled, I feel kind of flooded, like I was with my kind of scary stepfather coming at me.

Rick Hanson 00:47:59  I feel like I don’t matter enough for you to slow down and actually give me an extra 10s to finish my sentences. You know, I feel this inside. I feel kind of scared of you. It feels scary a little. I feel mad, honestly, as well. I feel like I just want to back away. I don’t want to be with you. I don’t want to have anything to do with you. I’m not saying that’s what I’m going to do, but I feel that because deep down, like you, like everybody, common humanity, I need to feel like I exist in the minds of others who matter to me, that I matter to people who matter to me. You know, I need to feel that I have standing, that I’m not voiceless and pushed around like I was when I was young. As a young girl in my family, these are things I need. So from now on, I request that you let me finish my sentences before you interrupt me. You know, I’m happy to make as much time for each of us in conversation.

Rick Hanson 00:48:54  I’m not trying to claim more time. I’m just trying to have as much time back and forth as you. Can we do that? Going forward, that’s a very powerful framework with a lot of dignity and gravity in it and self-respect, and it’s very effective.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:32  You’ve got another line in the book that says, if the results in our relationships are not so good, it’s our process that needs improving. And I think all this that we’re talking about to some degree is process, right? It’s about how do we interact with each other, how do we talk to each other, how do we express needs not being met, etc.? And my experience has been also that when a relationship, people can be oriented almost as if there’s this third thing that’s out there, which is our dynamic, and if you and I can unite on we’re on one side are problematic. Dynamic is on the other side. Yeah. Not I’m on one side. You’re on. So by talking about process, it moves it out into this thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:16  My fault. Your fault and becomes this other thing that is a different thing that we’ve co-created of course. Yeah. But that we can co resolve. There’s something about that shift that I think is really powerful. And so I just think that line in the book about, you know, it’s a process issue can be really powerful and healing.

Rick Hanson 00:50:34  Oh that’s right. Good process creates good product. So if you have good product, you know, you have good process. You have if you have bad results, bad outcomes, bad product. Take a look at your process with each other, how you interact. Yeah, relationships are built from interactions, and interactions are built from kind of turn taking. All right. You said this then they did that okay. Now what do you do. Right. And there’s kind of like a range. How can you be maximally skillful back and forth like tennis or ping pong or something to volley back and forth given, you know, what they’ve offered to you. And if you look at people who are really effective in the world historically, like Gandhi or today, the Dalai Lama, Michelle Obama, these are people who again and again say what they need to say, but they do it clearly from a place of dignity, gravity and self-respect without adding all the topspin that enables other people to avoid the actual crux of their message.

Rick Hanson 00:51:40  That’s really effective. Yeah. Take a quick story. A long time ago. 25, 30 years ago. I got to meet the Dalai Lama, and I was on a board at a meditation center, Sierra Rock Meditation Center. And we had a meeting where. Dalai Lama came in to a room with maybe 150 teachers of various kinds. And I was a small frog in that big pond, obviously. And the Dalai Lama came in with his translator and a third man. I didn’t pay much attention to. And after a while, though, I started to notice the third man who looked kind of athletic. He was wearing a suit. He looked like a middle linebacker in a small college football team, and he just stood there in the front of the room, radiating loving kindness. And his eyes never stopped moving. And he was the Dalai Lama’s ninja. He was there to take a bullet for him if need be, and you could feel there was no sense of menace. It wasn’t like he was scowling.

Rick Hanson 00:52:35  He was just there with this grounded presence. And you knew he was like a black belt in seven things or something like that. You know, he could do anything, but he just radiated kindness and goodwill while his eyes kept scanning the room. Right. And I think about people who have that quality of strength of character, who are fully prepared. They mean business, and they are fully prepared to do what’s needed to serve the greater good and to, you know, be protective and supportive and, and provide as well. That’s how we can kind of live into. Right. That’s the wolf we feed. What does it feel like? You know, you just feel immediately I’m sitting up a little straighter. I’m channeling the Dalai Lama’s ninja a little bit here, you know, and you’re rested in that way of being. And as we dwell there, increasingly, that becomes the habit of our heart. That becomes more and more where we dwell ourselves.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:33  Yep, yep. That’s beautiful. I want to hit just a couple other lines that came out in the book before we wrap up.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:39  One of them is you say large issues are often resolved through a series of small agreements. Say more about that.

Rick Hanson 00:53:47  Oh that’s great. So let’s say that you’re in a work setting, right? And you know, you’re part of a team and the team’s discombobulated and other people’s not getting the job done. Lands on your desk somehow or makes it harder for you. You know, it’s a big mess, right? Maybe that has to do with the culture of the company. So you just start with small agreements. Like when do you have meetings? Is an agreement to come on time, to end on time? Do the meetings conclude with a statement of who’s going to do what? By when. So you start building in a structure of accountability and personal accountability that’s results oriented. It’s about producing tangible results that are identifiable. And you do it step by step by step. That would be an example there or in your home life, let’s suppose kind of classically after you have children. My first book was about taking good care of mothers over the long haul.

Rick Hanson 00:54:42  If your kids come along, which means taking care of the partner, if there’s a partner involved, and more broadly, the village it should take to raise a child, the village it does take and should be present, and often is more like a ghost town in the developed countries of the world these days. In any case, very often in a couple, let’s say a heterosexual couple, there’s a kind of, you know, movement over time that maybe is a lack of erotic interest on the part of one person and on the part of another person, a kind of disengagement and a lack of interest and emotional connection. And so you start to realize, oh, if we start making little agreements about emotional connection, spending more time at least every day where we’re just hanging out with each other for at least ten minutes in a row, even though the kids are pulling on us and life’s crazy and we both have jobs, but we’re going to set aside that time or we’re going to give each other listening.

Rick Hanson 00:55:34  We’re going to practice a deeper kind of listening where we’re we’re really attentive for five minutes in a row. It’s not forever. And, you know, we’re going to connect more. We’re going to touch each other affectionately, not as a prelude to a request for sex. We’re going to connect physically, like we’re going to make that important to us. We’re going to do things that we’re both interested in. Maybe my wife and I were interested now in Jack Ryan, so we’re like going through the Jack Ryan TV stuff, whatever. Like, blows my mind. My wife’s interested in an action film, but okay, we are shared interest. Maybe it’s you play cards, maybe you go for walks. Maybe you have a cat or dog you care about together. Okay, fine. And then on the basis of those small agreements, then suddenly the erotic dimension of your life has more of a foundation for it, and you can start coming to mutual understandings. They’re not like you’re trying to mandate some sort of forced thing, but you start having understandings like, okay, at a certain frequency, we’re going to connect in that way.

Rick Hanson 00:56:33  Once a week, once a month, twice a week. You know, we’re going to connect in that way. then, you know, bit by bit, you start making those little understandings. It creates more of a sort of a field of mutuality with another person that’s really hopeful. Instead of feeling like, you know, the proverbial elephant has to be swallowed in one bite. you don’t need to eat. Elephants should not eat elephants, obviously. Big pile of tofu. Let’s say, just bit by bit. Spoonful by spoonful. Right. And as you put it, I love that proverb. Wow. Little by little, a little becomes a lot.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:08  Yeah. Certainly ties back to that. You say that in your experience as a therapist. Poor empathy is the core problem in most troubled relationships. Let’s not talk about how the couple got there, but let’s talk about the path forward. If empathy turns out to be the core problem, how do you start building that back?

Rick Hanson 00:57:26  That’s great. And that goes to your topic earlier about impact distinct from intent.

Rick Hanson 00:57:30  You know, for example, just about that when you start to imagine, you know, what’s it like to be you, you over there, the you that you’re living with, sleeping with maybe, or the you that you’re now in the middle of this kind of awkward conversation where maybe you’re a person who has a lot of advantage in the culture and you’re suddenly like, I didn’t mean any harm. Like what? You know? And what’s it like to be that other person? What’s it like to have grown up in the ways that they’ve grown up? What’s it like to know that their parents and grandparents, if not great grandparents, were enslaved, were property, you know, and had their children taken away, sold themselves, their own children, sold into slavery, for example. It’s really staggering to enter into the world of others. And you start to understand, of course, they’ve had it up to here with all that. And it’s not that you personally are doing a bad thing, it’s just that you’re interacting with someone who’s had so many bad things happen to them and to their parents and grandparents and great grandparents, of course.

Rick Hanson 00:58:37  Understandably, they feel that way. And so empathy is really important entering into the world, the mind of another person, technically. So now the how to I’ll do the quick how to hear empathy basically boils down to three circuits in your brain. That’s a real how to write. So we have empathy for actions. We have empathy for emotion. So we have empathy for thoughts. To simplify a lot of stuff. Three major neural substrates are involved in those things. So one thing you can start doing is tracking the body language and the micro expressions of the other person, imagining what would you be feeling if your body was moving or sitting or being contracted in that way? If your shoulders were coming forward, hunching over yourself like theirs are, and their head is kind of ducking a little, how might you be feeling? Like you might be feeling beleaguered and less than are not powerful and kind of like you’re trying to appease. But underneath that is a growing, seething rage and having to freakin appease yet again.

Rick Hanson 00:59:35  How might you feel? Or looking at the expressions right around their eyes or on the corners of their mouth, the main areas of micro expression. A great TV show. Speaking of is lie to me, especially the first season where they really go into Paul Eichmann’s work about micro expressions and really tracking what’s going on in another person in expressions that last half a second or a couple seconds at most. But you can really learn a lot. So right there, empathy for actions. Mirror neurons mirror like networks. Get involved in that. Empathy for feelings like what are their feelings? Especially beneath the surface. They’re coming at you all hot and heavy, angry, angry. What’s underneath that? Are they frustrated? Are they anxious? Do they feel hurt? Have they just had it up to here with you being the next person in a long line of folks who’ve been disrespectful, who haven’t slowed down to really listen. What might they be feeling underneath it all? And with training and practice, you become more comfortable with that kind of empathy and less empathy for thoughts.

Rick Hanson 01:00:38  That is called theory of mind, where basically you kind of imagine what might they be thinking given what they’re saying or how they’re acting or given their personality. And you could think of personality in lots of ways like the Enneagram point or the Myers-Briggs, or that this is or that they’re their horoscope. Who knows? You know what I mean? Their upbringing, given how they were brought up, given their situation in life right now, given the fact that they’ve got chronic pain, let’s say physical pain, given the fact that their previous partner cheated on them massively. You know, given that fact, what are their hot buttons? Understandably, what are the questions running in their mind? You know, the thought balloon over their head like in a cartoon, right? The thought balloon over their head. What could be cooking in that thought balloon? You’re forming hypotheses, you’re speculating a little bit about what could be happening. These are things we can all do. It doesn’t mean you’re trying to do mind reading.

Rick Hanson 01:01:32  You’re not being a therapist. And actually what promotes empathy is boundaries. Because if you feel more rooted like a tree, deeply rooted, you can be more open to the storms blowing at you from other people or happening inside their minds, the hurricane in their head, right? You can be more open empathically to it if you feel deeply rooted. And you’re also clear. That’s their mind. It’s not necessarily my mind. And just because they’re upset doesn’t necessarily mean it was my fault. Just because they want something, because you can tune in to the wants of others, doesn’t necessarily mean I have to give it to them. Just because they think things, things have a certain meaning for them, doesn’t necessarily mean they have to have the same meaning for me. You know, it’s the establishing of that. Differentiation is the technical term that boundary fences make for good neighbors. The old proverb. Right. Yeah. And I find this so exciting. I’m a longtime rock climber. It’s about the courage to venture past your point of protection, to enter into the world of the other person, and to feel the nobility in that a little bit the moxie, you know, the badassery a little bit in being brave enough and strong enough and caring enough, really kind enough to really enter into the world of the other person.

Rick Hanson 01:02:50  These are ways to help yourself enter into that world and train so that increasingly, you’re just much more rapidly empathic. You feed the wolf of empathy, and you can become more empathic over time. And then when people feel Dan Siegel is a great phrase, when we feel felt. Feeling felt right. When you give others the experience of feeling felt by you, they tend to cool their jets because very often that’s what people really want, you know? Yeah, they want you to give them what they want, but really, they want you to understand what they want and recognize why they want what they want through empathy. And then also empathy gives you a lot of useful information. You start realizing that the real issue here is not about the shoes in the doorway. It’s not about that at all. It’s about the fact that you’re physically big and they’re physically smaller. It’s the fact that they’ve been bullied when they were young. It’s the fact that all kinds of haughty white people have been telling them what to do their whole life, one way or another, without even recognizing the fact that they were doing that.

Rick Hanson 01:03:51  And they’ve had it up to here and you suddenly realize, oh, okay, that’s useful information. You know, I can take it into account going forward.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:59  Yeah, yeah. Empathy can be so helpful. Let’s end with one last idea here.

Rick Hanson 01:04:06  Sure.

Eric Zimmer 01:04:07  You start with this very early in the book, and this goes back to being with ourselves and handling ourselves. And you said everything I’ve learned about practicing with the mind fits into three categories. Being with what you’re experiencing, reducing what’s harmful and painful, and increasing what’s helpful and enjoyable. And so I love these three basic things. Can you run us through those three real quick?

Rick Hanson 01:04:28  Oh, sure. That’s really foundational. And by the way, it’s a very astute conversation, Eric. No surprise. And you know, I appreciate it a lot. Yeah, a good metaphor is imagine your mind and the brain mind go together as like a garden. Well, we can witness what’s happening in the garden with mindfulness, kindness. Hopefully, we’re not trying to do anything to the garden.

Rick Hanson 01:04:52  We’re just simply being with it. Second, we can pull weeds, right? We can pull weeds or prevent them from landing in the garden in the first place. Third, we can grow flowers, right? So right there, in terms of the two wolves metaphor, we can be with the two wolves without recoiling doesn’t mean we’re agreeing with them. We can see what’s there. We can be with what’s there. Yeah. We can also withdraw food. We can stop feeding certain wolves. And third, we can start encouraging and even breeding. If I dare say that other wolves, the flowers and fruit that we hope to grow in the rest of our mind. So those three are really helpful to recognize. And in fact, the second and third are about working with your mind. The first is about being with your mind. Being with your mind is primary, but it’s not enough. Many people in the mindfulness new age self-help world overvalue just witnessing. Yes, you know, you can witness your mind forever and it isn’t going to change because the structures in it are baked into your brain.

Rick Hanson 01:05:56  They’re physical, especially the negative ones, which are designed to really sink in deep roots. The brain is very fertile for weeds by design, because that’s what kept our ancestors alive back in the Jurassic Park and the Stone age, essentially. So it’s important to work with your mind actively, not just be with it. Second, very often there’s a natural flow. Something has bothered you. So your partner, let’s say you left the shoes in the doorway. Yep. Okay. So your partner, boom, did you know read you the right act about the shoes yet again. And, what you could do first is slow it down in your own mind. By yourself. 10s by yourself. Five seconds by yourself. Five minutes to kind of go whoa! And be aware of, man, you’re getting so pissed off. So many reactions are arising. You’re having a flashback to your childhood where you’re angry. Parent kept constantly criticizing you and you became rebellious about it. So now it’s like, screw the world.

Rick Hanson 01:06:52  I’m going to leave my freaking shoes wherever I want, let’s say. So you become aware of these things in you. You’re not acting them out. You’re not trying to change them. You’re being with them. That’s where you start. And then at a certain point, often after a few breaths, maybe a few minutes, you start moving into releasing. You start letting go of that angry reactivity. You start disengaging from that turbocharger from your childhood, you know, even traumatic history and childhood. You start disengaging from these thoughts you have about your partner, that they’re a total asshole, and you’ve had it up to here and you’re not going to tell me what to do anymore. You know, you just let it go, let it go, let it go, disengage. And then after you’ve kind of released that for a while, after a few breaths or maybe a few minutes, you start to let in. You start to replace what you’ve released with something beneficial, like, okay, the feeling that you can stand up for yourself reasonably without being a jerk about it, that there’s a middle way between being a jerk or a doormat.

Rick Hanson 01:07:52  Okay, I’m going to let that in. I’m going to know what that feels like to to be there. You can also let in that. Yeah. In the scale of wrongdoing, this is like a one. I left my shoes in the doorway, but the fact that I keep doing it maybe makes it a 2 or 3. I’m going to let that land and I’m going to correct. I’m going to commit to not doing that in the future. You could let that in, right? You could let in more empathy for the other person, like given their history and their background, the fact that they’re juggling a million balls, maybe they’re the primary homemaker and caregiver for the children. The last thing the world they need is your shoes in the doorway, on top of everything else they’re dealing with. Okay, you let that in and then, you know, you come to some kind of resolution. So in effect, three steps. Let be let go let in. It’s a wonderful structure. And it really makes sure you let in.

Rick Hanson 01:08:48  A lot of people focus on letting be and letting go, but they don’t grow the flowers. And as any gardener knows, if you don’t replace your weeds with flowers, the weeds come back. So it’s very important in the space that’s left after you release to focus on what is the wolf your metaphor again that you want to feed, to grow and fill in in that space? Yeah, yeah.

Eric Zimmer 01:09:10  Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, how will I practice this before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly Bites of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection and links to former guests who can guide you even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose and habit change. Feed your good wolf at one you feed. Net newsletter. Again one you feed. Net newsletter. I love those three things and I love that garden analogy. I think it’s a really powerful way to think about how to work with the mind. And I agree with you. I think mindfulness taken too far that it’s only about seeing, is incomplete.

Eric Zimmer 01:09:55  I think it gets such an emphasis because what most of us do is we don’t do that first step, and we start either wildly pulling at weeds or throwing seeds all around trying to plant something positive.

Rick Hanson 01:10:07  Fix it, fix it.

Eric Zimmer 01:10:08  Yeah, instead of actually spending enough time to go, okay, this is what is the feelings that come with it. I may not like them, but I can be with them from there. And this is the sort of to recap your book, right, is from that place now of strength, of groundedness, of consideration. I can now think about what is the best strategy in my relationship. Is it to go plant some flowers? Is it to go talk about a difficult issue? You know, but I’m doing that from a place of wisdom and strength.

Rick Hanson 01:10:38  Yeah. That’s great. And I know we’re finishing. I’ll just maybe finish with a with a plug here, please. Not so much for my book, although I invite people to check it out. Actually, it’s the result of 40 years of work, and it’s my first book that’s entirely focused on relationships, and I just kind of packed into it everything I’d want someone to know.

Rick Hanson 01:10:56  And I wished I had known, you know, my own good judgment that’s embedded in the book has come from my own experiences of bad judgment. Anyway, it’s that I think we can get caught up also in fighting with the weeds. And the truth is, the mind is inherently imperfective. It just unfolds. It keeps unfolding. And biologically, you know, we have tendencies of various kinds. We do the best we can with them. But where the great opportunity is really is to deepen in our capacities, to be with our minds not identified with it first and second, to grow more flowers there, to really tend to the garden, and to focus on beneficial experiences in which we can dwell right and then increasingly become what dwell within us as we turn beneficial states to traits. And I would really encourage that for people because it’s so hopeful, you know, we can be pulling weeds forever in the garden of our mind, and certain weeds will never leave, you know, the impact of certain traumatic experiences.

Rick Hanson 01:12:01  It will always hurt to think about what happened, let’s say. But what we can do is grow the good alongside all that is else there, and then we have more of the good inside ourselves to offer to others too.

Eric Zimmer 01:12:13  Beautiful. Well, Rick, thank you so much. It is always such a pleasure to have you on.

Rick Hanson 01:12:18  Oh same here.

Eric Zimmer 01:12:19  We’ll have links in the show notes to your book, to your website, to all your stuff. But again, thank you so much and such a pleasure.

Rick Hanson 01:12:25  Very much myself. And you’re growing and feeding a lot, a lot of good wolves in this world.

Eric Zimmer 01:12:31  Eric, 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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Episode Transcript:

Alex Olshonksy 00:00:00  I think in particular, our world is getting so fast paced. You know, there’s global wars. You know, we’ve now had almost two and a half decades of the smartphone era. There’s now the AI intelligence craze. And I think people are just like, this is a lot. And there’s got to be something else.

Chris Forbes 00:00:23  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 00:01:07  Alex Olshansky was building Twitter during the day and sneaking a few blocks into the tenderloin to score dope between meetings. That’s the double life he was living, and he describes it as a literal split in the psyche. Two wolves, one with a corporate badge and the other a junkie. He’s now been sober for ten and a half years, and the thing he’s most focused on isn’t substances. It’s something subtler, the addictive pull of compulsive thinking itself. His idea is simple: that overthinking is almost always under feeling. We spin up stories to avoid making contact with whatever is actually there. Alex writes the wonderful Deep Fix newsletter on Substack, and he’s a somatic teacher and coach. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Alex. Welcome to the show.

Alex Olshonksy 00:02:00  Eric. So good to be here.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:01  I’m really excited to have you on. I have been following your Substack for a while now, and I think you’re an amazing writer, and I think our interests cross over a great deal. And so I’m really kind of looking forward to doing this, but we’ll start in the way that we always do, which is with the parable.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:18  And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two rules 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 and 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.

Alex Olshonksy 00:02:54  Well, first, Thanks. It’s great to be with you. I feel like you’re an addiction OG and it’s such a good parable. It really rings true. And I’ll talk about it one how it applies to my life personally, and then how it applies to my work today. And on a personal level, it is just painfully accurate because I spent the first half of my life really feeding that bad wolf.

Alex Olshonksy 00:03:18  And I think one thing that feels really salient about this is just how deceptive that can be. Like, you can really think that you’re feeding the good wolf, when in fact you’re just totally in self-deception. And so in my case, like as a child and teenager, I was always fascinated by fantasy and Jedi’s and magic and Harry Potter and Tolkien and this idea that, like a human, can have these magical abilities that sort of transcends the typical. And when I discovered drugs, it was like, there’s my gateway, there’s my magic. Yeah, there’s the magic. It literally, like, opened this portal to another world and. And so at the time, like, it didn’t seem like I was feeding the bad wolf. It was actually just. This is just enhancing my life. And then as things progressed, it became more about, like, performance enhancement and doing my best work and biohacking, like, I thought I was like a Hunter S Thompson and Silicon Valley and really, really like justifying and feeling like this made me a better person and unlocked like capabilities that I didn’t have without it.

Alex Olshonksy 00:04:24  And then, of course, when I finally hit my bottom and and entered recovery, I started to realize just how deluded I had been and how really it had been that that bad wolf. And I don’t love the term bad, but that one had been driving the show, and it was really just like I was living with just immense shame and insecurity and lack of worth in recovery. Like just sort of outside of my control. Just the good wolf took over and like, I just couldn’t help but become fascinated by healing and meditation and spirituality and awakening and all these different esoteric sort of practices and recovery itself. And that just became the thing that I was absolutely feeding it, but it started really feeding itself. And so the parable was like it could not be more accurate for me. And and then the other part is like how it applies to, to my work today. I think what comes up is now, like I wouldn’t describe it feeling as resonant around things, just being a binary within ourselves, like just a good and bad part, especially just with some of my training and background and the work.

Alex Olshonksy 00:05:32  What I do, I do with folks is helping them understand the many different sort of identities and sub personalities that dwell within, within the psyche. And all that said, I still find that the binary is accurate in a lot of the work that I’m doing today, which is really around helping people break free from overthinking, being lost in rumination, or simply just being distracted from the present moment. And when it comes to to that work. The most simple first step is cultivating what I call attentional agency. And it’s really it is binary. Like your attention, you’re either aware or you’re unaware. And when you’re unaware, it’s unconscious. You don’t know what you’re doing. And modern life has really just rigged the deck for us to be constantly distracted and numbing and avoiding. And in this, you know, a place where we actually don’t know what’s happening with our attention. And so the move towards shifting into presence the moment, whether that’s the senses or something like just love or the field of experience like that, that move itself, I feel like is is a binary move.

Alex Olshonksy 00:06:39  And the more that one does that, the more that one rests and trains their attention to rest on what’s here, and then eventually even sort of Inquiring and resting and like the source of attention itself, like that’s when you start entering kind of what traditions have called spiritual awakening. And it can really reorganize your life. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:00  Yeah, there’s a lot in what you said. I want to spend a couple minutes on your addiction and your story there a little bit, and then I want to really go deeper on this attentional agency idea, or the idea of being addicted to our thinking. I will say that you are an enormously functional drug addict. You got through Dartmouth, right? You you you had jobs in the tech field. I mean, you did well in that as a highly dysfunctional drug addict, I’m semi amazed by the length of time you managed to keep things together. But we end up in a very, very similar, similar place. And you know, our stories are similar and we both have opiates in our background is the stone that ultimately broke the camel’s back.

Alex Olshonksy 00:07:51  Yeah, yeah, look at that. Actually, that’s a great segue. Well, Eric, that’s something I actually reflect on quite a bit, was just like how functional I was and the madness that was involved in that, like literally the, the sort of the double life that I was living where on the one hand, I was building these at the time, you know, paradigm shifting companies like Twitter. And then on the other hand, like sneaking out a few blocks away into the tenderloin to score in between meetings and then living, you know, doing the same at night. And this sort of literally like there was a almost like, talk about the two wolves, like a legitimate split in the psyche. Yeah. And you know, the term like high functioning is interesting too, because like, really what that is signaling is like I was able to still fit into the machine and produce great capitalistic output. You know, like I was really able to do that well, when in fact, like the, the reality, I think of the body and the pain that I was living inside was just it was utter like shame and terror and madness and, that’s something that it took me a long time in recovery to really sort of like, grapple with is just what was driving me to still pursue both things simultaneously.

Alex Olshonksy 00:09:13  And I think just given my background and and upbringing and trying to like this, this real striver identity of like wanting to prove myself and in like become a random just boy from the suburbs who wanted to just make his claim and, and the the sort of insanity of propelling that towards immense like harm and ultimately ruin, you know. And so, it was it was dark.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:39  Yeah. I took the route of just, pretending to be, burgeoning rock star where all that just seemed like it was part of the path. The whole thing was a crazy dream, but it was a way of just sort of saying like, well, yeah, I mean, what I’m doing makes sense. You know, it was just all kind of out there in a totally different way. You have so many great lines about writing, but one of the things that cracked me up is I think you called the handicap stall, the drug addicts office. Yeah.

Alex Olshonksy 00:10:10  Yeah, the junkies office. I think it’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:11  You know, the junkies.

Alex Olshonksy 00:10:13  We’re not, you know, we’re in the addiction space. You’re not supposed to use that term. But when I’m describing myself, you’re right.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:17  So you can use it for yourself. Yes. Yeah. I mean, that is just so true. I, I by the end, for me, it was it was all intravenous drug use. But it was, it was the same thing as, like as a handicapped stall open. Great. Why is he in the bathroom so often? You know what? What’s the matter? Does he have a digestive issue of some sort that we need to talk about? Yeah.

Alex Olshonksy 00:10:36  Yeah. Why? He’s always rubbing his nose. And why was eyes look funny? It’s like you got. Oh, you’re you’re sinus infection that never goes away, Right. Yes. It’s like bad sinuses. That’s actually true in my case. But also, there was a lot of just. I was doing whatever I could to try to, you know, make it like I was not just a total, poly substance drug addict.

Alex Olshonksy 00:10:58  Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:59  Let’s talk a little bit about your your healing journey in brief, just so people can kind of see all the aspects of it. So I don’t want to dwell too much on what the bottom was like. And I mean, these stories are they’re all unique and interesting and all sort of the same at the same time. Right, right. Which is you just some part of you just is completely beaten, defeated, exhausted. And basically I refer to as like, I just had my ass handed to me. That’s where we end. Talk to me about sort of the arc of your healing journey. You wrote the essay I was reading when you were ten years. Where are you now?

Alex Olshonksy 00:11:35  Yeah, just about ten and a half. Oh, that was only six months or so ago. Six months ago.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:39  Okay.

Alex Olshonksy 00:11:40  Yeah, right. Yeah. And I. And I love what you. You said there I was just so thoroughly broken and humbled. And I think humbled is the key word for me that I had just been so embarrassed that I was just like, okay, I give I literally give up and had a quintessential moment.

Alex Olshonksy 00:11:54  And at that point, I was actually already in outpatient treatment because I was on opiates, amphetamines, benzos. So I had to have a medically supervised detox for a year. And so I basically recommitted to that treatment, which I had done in secret, because I was so petrified of the more moral failing of being a drug addict amidst having this career. And so I had failed out of that several times and never actually stuck. And I never actually stopped everything because I was always like, well, it’s really only the opiates and amphetamines. And so, you know, I’m gonna still smoke weed and drink, obviously. Right. Like, and at that point, being so broken, I just, I dove straight into that treatment and that’s when I also dove into AA and in particular the men’s groups. The Stags meetings was was really a tremendous force. And that led me then to I when I sort of felt like and I loved the 12 steps in that community. But like a lot of people felt like I had hit a, a cap at a certain point.

Alex Olshonksy 00:12:55  And that’s when I started diving really deep into Buddhist space recovery. And then when I was a year sober, I was doing really well, and I just made it through my my grueling year long taper off Suboxone. And I was now at the point where I was at a real crossroads, feeling like, what am I going to do next? And that’s when I decided to do ayahuasca for the first time, because I was also at that point considering drinking and smoking again, thinking like, okay, the the hard things are behind me. But yeah, yeah, that weekend was the back to back ceremonies altered the course of my life, and that then propelled me down a path of plant medicine study trips to the Amazon to study with the capybara and then other Colombian lineages more locally in California, and study the healing arts and yoga. And my meditation throughout had just been continued to blossom. And, you know, there’s a lot I could list, a lot of different modalities in there, but I really like the the spiritual path took over my life.

Alex Olshonksy 00:13:58  The dharma became the most important thing. And that was was also the most beautiful things. Even though it comes with its, its, you know, downsides. When you really let something like that, when something like that just takes over. So then I would say, you know, like meditation, dharma yoga and, somatic psychology in particular, really doing a long in-depth study with me. Somatic psychotherapy was tremendously healing for me to, like, really get into the places of my body and relive some of those memories in the tenderloin and other sort of crime ridden, trauma related escapades that I just wasn’t able to access in any other of my talk therapy or even 12 step work. And so it’s been it’s been a lot of work in a, in a long, long journey. Couldn’t have gone any other way. And I’m just so grateful for it. especially leading to me, I think, to where it most recently in the last like four years, led me more into the non-dual traditions of like, Tibetan Buddhism and Vita Vedanta.

Alex Olshonksy 00:15:02  And that’s been just tremendously life changing.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:06  So what has been the role of entheogens in your ongoing recovery?

Alex Olshonksy 00:15:12  In my ongoing recovery lately? It’s non-existent. And that’s something that I didn’t expect to happen because I had such a profound experience with ayahuasca. And at that time, as you know, it was quite controversial. Like, things have changed so much in the recovery scene. But when I, you know, I remember, You know, like people in AA were like, that’s a relapse. And, you know, that’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:38  What I would say. Yes.

Alex Olshonksy 00:15:39  Yeah. I had a lot of shame around it and had to keep it really secretive. And it was so impactful. And then I started doing like really dedicated work around intentional work. That part of my mission really became about helping people in recovery. Understand that, yes, you can intentionally, consciously engage with these sacraments from the Earth, particularly the entheogens, which which come from the Earth itself and have a lineage behind them, and even ended up co-founding Natura Cara, which is an addiction and entheogenic nonprofit that weaves contemplative practice, nature immersion and retreats.

Alex Olshonksy 00:16:15  And so it was a really central part of my work. But as time went on, the personal use diminished. and especially then when I had a major shift in meditation where there was sort of a before and after I no longer had the desire to to take psychedelics, because my experience was so psychedelic that I didn’t need anything else. And so it’s like I got sort of the ultimate recovery where it felt like I had. And not to say that there’s still a, you know, I still love that work. And occasionally, you know, I could see myself personally coming back to it, but in recent times I haven’t felt that call or need.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:13  It’s a wild thing that we are using drugs that can be taken recreationally as healings for addiction. I mean, I certainly experimented plenty with psychedelics in my active use phase. You know, I will say there was a flavor of transcendence to it. But we were partying, right? Yeah, yeah. It was a very different animal. And so as this whole thing is sort of really blown up over the last decade, you know, seeing the entheogens really come into, I mean, frankly, just the mainstream at this point, but be behind a lot of healing work I found myself.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:57  I don’t know how long ago it’s been now seven years, maybe six years, thinking, you know what, I want to see if a psychedelic treatment would help with my sort of semi trenchant, depression slash, low mood slash anhedonia. There’s plenty of studies that seem to show it’s helpful for that. So I did do a psychedelic experience. I did, I did psilocybin, and I remember I was so focused on making sure that, like, this is in a healing context, right? I would be lying if I said there wasn’t a little part of the inner. I like being high that woke up with the idea. It was like, Right. You know, like you’re going to get a faster way out of your head for a while. Okay, I’ll take that. You know, I noticed it wake up. And I just ended up doing it with, like, a therapist in a certain setting. I did it flanked by days and meditating. You know, all day Zen sitting like, I just, you know, nestled it as deeply in healing as I could.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:07  For me, it turned out to be sort of a not a big thing. But I have had a couple of. It sounds like you describe some awakening experiences that fundamentally shifted who I was. And, you know, I had done a lot of Zen practice. You know, me working through a hundred miscellaneous koans with teachers, and I just sort of saw kind of what I already knew, but in a darker light. I was getting the slightly scarier version of impermanence on this trip. You know, interesting. I know impermanence to be the nature of things. So I’m just sort of revealing my history with all that in service of, of the conversation as a whole. But I’m always curious about it since I’ve only played on the outside of it. I do see some people that seem to be like, I’m judging without knowing enough to judge, but I see a certain culture of concern, a very, very frequent use of these substances that looks to me more than the sacred healing ceremony. Totally.

Alex Olshonksy 00:20:16  Right. And that’s where I mean, it is the Wild West. And I think for those of us in recovery, we have to be really careful and honest with ourselves. We actually have to practice the principles of recovery as like, am I escaping here? Am I bypassing? Or is this something that actually is serving my evolution? And, you know, I’ll say for me, many people who kind of go through the sort of psychedelics to meditation, awakening pipeline, I don’t think I would have got there with without that, that experience like it really, it really altered the course of my life. And for me also doing like being exposed to in particular ayahuasca and these, these lineages that are really nature and reverence, reverence towards the natural world. Like I became a vegan and a Yogi and like fortunately, I self corrected on the vegan front, no offense to any any vegans out there.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:07  I was a vegan for a while. Yeah, I’ve been there.

Alex Olshonksy 00:21:09  Yeah yeah yeah. And like but it just really like I think it opened up a care for the natural world.

Alex Olshonksy 00:21:15  And for me this, this has been called the eco delic insight in this is particular to like the entheogens that come from the earth where it’s like you can have a sense of real connection to the natural world and Mother Nature. That I think for a guy who had my background, like, I didn’t really have that previously. And so it did a lot on that end for me. And, you know, working with Nature Care and the programs and the retreats that we do, you know, we’re seeing some some veterans who just are really in need of assistance. Sometimes people have been through, you know, every treatment possible and rehab, and they need, you know, another option. And then there’s other people like you who have maybe a decade or a few years of recovery under their belt, and it’s sort of like, what’s next? And so I think for certain people at the right time in recovery, it can really be a rocket, like something that sort of helps in ignite a second stage recovery.

Alex Olshonksy 00:22:10  Yeah. To your point, like, and in the culture we’re living, it requires discernment. And I think mentorship and accountability to ensure that you’re not feeding that bad wolf. Deceiving yourself? Yep.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:23  Which we as addicts are enormously good at. Right. So I want to turn a little bit towards some writing you’ve done more recently on what you call an addiction to thinking. And so I’m just going to read a couple of things that you wrote, and then let us kind of go into it from there. So instead, if there’s been a through line in my work over the last decade, it’s an addiction gets subtler the further you follow it. First, I had to get sober from the obvious bad stuff, the narcotic chemicals. It nearly killed me. Then I had to reckon with the legal drugs like Twitter, Instagram, Pornhub, and yes, the New York Times politics section, which I used to read cover to cover as if it were oxygen. After that came other socially sanctioned drugs I had long mistaken for purely virtuous achievement, ideology, productivity, optimization, and having a sharp take on everything.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:19  So I love that idea that addiction gets subtler the further you. You go. And I think I’d like to circle back around and talk about whether calling these things addictions is useful or not. We’ll get to that in a moment, but I want to follow the thread here, because ultimately, for you, this all boils down to, I think you would say an addiction to thinking. Is that the way you would sort of say, if you follow this thread all the way down, that’s where it ends.

Alex Olshonksy 00:23:47  Yeah. That’s right. And, you know, it surprised me because it really first started with the external. And then it got more subtle and it didn’t really click for me until I had also had some meditative breakthroughs, which really and having studied numerous spiritual traditions from, you know, yoga to Hindu tantra to hatha yoga and then various flavors of Buddhism, like, you really see that this is what they’re pointing at. They’re pointing at that. We compulsively think. We believe our thoughts. We believe the voice inside our heads to be us.

Alex Olshonksy 00:24:22  We fundamentally mistake our identity to be that small self, that narrative self, and instead miss that we’re just something much vaster, more spacious, wild and free. And so once I was able to sort of connect the dots there, it really started to land that. Yeah, if we were to look at this kind of squarely in the face, I think I personally, in the way that I would replay conversations, try to win arguments in my head, obsess about something, you know, plot my career domination like it was functioning in a lot of ways, just like an addiction. And I think especially if we look at like the most simple understanding of, of addiction, which is that addiction has some impulsivity and consequences, negative consequences. And for me, both of those things were happening in when it comes to overthinking. And is that a provocative take? Sure. Absolutely. And let’s let’s have that conversation because I want to. But then, you know, also like some of my, my favorite, you know, spiritual teachers like Addie Ashanti, I also later came across talking about how like, we’re addicted to thinking, we’re addicted to the me and creating this self.

Alex Olshonksy 00:25:33  And that’s ultimately where the where the road led for me, and especially then weaving in sort of the third element of somatic psychology, which is that fundamentally we reach to overthink when we’re feeling discomfort in the body. And so overthinking is always under feeling. And when you look at it like that, and that also really tracks to many flavors of Buddhism and contemplative practice, which is that, you know, we have direct sensation and then there’s either craving or aversion to get away from that sensation, and then the mind spins ups its stories to do so. And so when I saw this, it just seemed pretty clear to me that like, oh, there’s a, there’s a through line throughout all these traditions and all the stuff that I’m interested in.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:15  Yeah. And I think what you just said there, and you say it in your article as you get further on, is at its root, it’s, you say, an addiction to wanting things to be different than they are. Right. And that’s the that’s the Buddhist idea of aversion, the root poisons, greed, hatred or aversion and grasping.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:33  But it is ultimately. All right. I don’t like this, whatever this is. So I’m going to I’m going to change it somehow. And I’ve said for years that it feels to me if I had to look back at addiction and I had to go, what was the fundamental skill I had to learn to get over it? Like to truly get on. And again, I don’t want to say I’m on the other side. As if relapse isn’t possible. That’s not what I’m saying at all. But it was that I could recognize I can have any experience, and I’m capable of handling it without having to immediately fix it. That was when I went, oh, I think I can really do this as long as I there was this like, well, but I can’t handle that or I couldn’t handle that or I couldn’t take that. And look, there is more suffering to come. I never want to be like, I never want to tempt suffering with being like, oh, bring it on.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:34  That is not what I what I’m saying at all. I’m just saying that that was a fundamental thing to go, okay, I don’t have to necessarily immediately fix this moment.

Alex Olshonksy 00:27:46  And there are so many ways that we can fix the moment. Yes. A term that I’ve tried to coin, as is modern addiction, which is that like addiction, it’s not just the people huddled up on the street or in church basement or guys like us, like today, with digital technology in particular, not to mention gambling and everything else and porn, etc. our news cycle like we’re all subject to this. And I think that, you know, what you talk about, like having something in life that we’re feeling that is uncomfortable or hard and wanting just some way to get relief from it. It’s the most natural thing in the world. And, you know, now I think it’s like pretty commonly accepted that, you know, if you scroll TikTok like that’s going to distract you from whatever you’re feeling, right? If you’re going to binge Twitter and go down a Twitter rabbit hole, it’s gonna numb that grief that maybe you’ve been avoiding.

Alex Olshonksy 00:28:42  So it’s like that is pretty well understood. Now, even though we have, in my opinion, we’re still massively under reacting and not actually doing much around it. And so really, I’m just taking sort of the next step, which is that you have that let’s say that like, well, of grief that hasn’t really been contacted. And, you know, instead of actually giving you a chance to feel it, you will go into the rumination or like you send a text to a friend and like you feel you feel something after doing it, and instead of actually just feeling that feeling of vulnerability, it’s like, well, like they don’t. They’re never going to respond. And oh, I should have rewarded it differently. And, you know, like, oh, I don’t even like them anyways. And all these things that we do that actually are one move away from just being with the, the feeling itself, the other side here, Eric, is that like when we actually really deepen that capacity, that fundamental skill that you and I both had to learn in early recovery of, like just being with life on life’s terms, that’s when things get really good, right? Because you’re not fighting so much with the way things are, and it’s more of like a flow and surrender and opening and then like these other great qualities of sort of like ease and carefree and lightness and humor come through.

Alex Olshonksy 00:29:55  And so I know it’s a provocative thesis and angle, but the point and I think part of why it’s been so resonant for people is that there’s something else that’s possible. There’s another way to live. And I think in particular, our world is getting so fast paced. You know, there’s global wars. You know, we’ve now had almost two and a half decades of the smartphone era. There’s now the AI intelligence craze. And I think people are just like, this is a lot. And there’s got to be something else.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:22  Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight, breath shallow? Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday, I send weekly bytes of wisdom. A short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show. Things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose into bite size practices you can use the same day it’s free. It takes about a minute to read and thousands already swear by it. If you’d like extra fuel for the weekend.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:57  You also get a weekend podcast playlist. Join us at one you feed. That’s one you get. newsletter and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right, back to the show. With the idea of addiction, I mean, the other way I often think of addiction is just to to make it super simple as I just think of it as lack of control, right? I mean, that was the main problem, right? I could say I am not going to do X, Y, and Z, and then I would promptly do it over and over and over and over again. Right. I couldn’t make and keep any sort of promise to myself. And if, you know, thinking, if we say that we have no control over it, you could on one hand by that call an addiction. What is overthinking? You know, you said a second ago overthinking automatically means under feeling, which I want to maybe explore a little further because I need to think about how I feel about that.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:55  But let’s start by trying to say what is overthinking.

Alex Olshonksy 00:31:57  Yeah. I mean, overthinking is I sort of use these two terms interchangeably, which is that overthinking or compulsive thinking. And so that’s pointing to like the lack of control. And so I mean, the classic scenario of overthinking is like an example I described where you text, let’s say, you know, a friend that you, you really like, but there’s also maybe some charge there. And, you know, the moment you do that and there’s no response for let’s just say ten minutes like this can be a really relatable thing to be like, oh, like, man, Eric so busy. He just launched his book. Like, I shouldn’t be bothering him. Like, let me what did I write? Like, oh, that wasn’t that smart. Like, should I follow up or should I can I send it to you? That is overthinking in my book, right? And the thing is, and this is the thing is why it gets really subtle.

Alex Olshonksy 00:32:46  It happens without most people even realizing that it’s happening. This is just the default state of the thinking mind. But typically like overthinking, you know, I think to to be more clear for folks, it’s like it has that quality of rumination, obsession, second guessing and pain. Really?

Eric Zimmer 00:33:24  You’re good with words. So I want to ask you. I find this lost in thought idea such an odd thing because on one hand, I am completely taken over by it, and on the other hand, I have absolutely no idea it’s happening. It’s weird in that way. You got any word for that?

Alex Olshonksy 00:33:46  So say more. I’m curious to hear a little bit more about your experience when when you say that you’re so you’re so lost in it.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:52  Let’s take your scenario and let’s just turn the emotional stakes up on it to make it a little bit more fun. It’s somebody I’m early in a relationship with, and I text them and they’re not texting back. And I am just like you said, I’m ruminating.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:06  I’m spinning. What did I get? What if she doesn’t like me? What is she going, you know, you know, I got a diet and my old relationships are flashing into my mind. I’m feeling anxious. I get all this is happening and I am deeply immersed in it. But another part of me is not aware that that’s going on at all. And I guess it’s that my meta awareness or my my bigger awareness isn’t aware that it’s happening, but I just find it such a strange thing. It’s like being on a roller coaster and not knowing you’re on a roller coaster. It doesn’t. You’re like, well, hang on a second, I surely I would know I’m on a roller coaster, but not in this case.

Alex Olshonksy 00:34:43  That’s right. And that’s the subtlety. And this goes back to what I was talking about earlier with the two modes of attention, like either being aware or unaware, and unawareness happens like it is legitimately out of our control. We don’t control. That’s the nature of being unaware.

Alex Olshonksy 00:34:58  It’s like we don’t control when it happens. I’m really glad you mentioned the like thinking about courting love like that, and that I don’t even know if that’s a real life scenario, but that is the best. Of course. Overthinking when you’re left on red with someone that you, that you, that you love or you’re into. And so like, that’s the compulsive element that I think where I really see it as having that addictive quality is because we can’t recognize at times that it’s happening. However, there are always moments where, you know, you sort of like wake up and you’re like, oh man, I’m really losing it here. Yeah, can you stop? And then usually there’s more self-referential, negative thoughts about the overthinking itself. Yes. And so part of why I bring the recovery frame in the addiction frame into this is because one of the things that we’ve been gifted with Eric is like the ability to look something square in the eyes and to be really honest about what it’s doing in our lives.

Alex Olshonksy 00:35:51  And for me, knowing what my life is like now, there’s sort of an auto release, as I call it, towards the overthinking that came from a lot of the practices that I describe and try to try to share. It really is painful to be living in that other way. And I just noticed how how much struggle and suffering I was creating for myself. And once you remove all the other kind of substances and you’re not numbing yourself with drugs or screens, like really, you’re just left with relational experience, relationship with yourself, relationship with others. And it feels a lot better to me to not be sort of constantly second guessing myself and running a war in my own mind.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:32  Yeah, there’s a term that I got from acceptance and commitment therapy that I think about an awful lot, and it’s the idea of something being useful. And so when I think about like what constitutes ruminating versus thinking, that’s usually the line I draw. There’s a place where my thoughts, they’re doing something useful, I’m solving a problem.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:55  I’m brainstorming a thing. Something useful is happening, something generative is occurring. And then there’s a point at which it tips over and nothing new is coming. Nothing generative is coming. Nothing useful is happening. All that’s happening is I’m spinning in the same place, deeper and deeper, and it’s getting worse and worse, you know. And so that’s for me kind of how I try and think about that. Now that’s sometimes difficult to suss out, but I can tell there’s a feeling of rumination that I know now, I understand it now I feel it in a different way. I mean, almost all of it. And you’d be in a somatic practitioner, you know, this is a simplification. But for me, most everything that causes some part of my body to loosen and relax, I tend to think I’m on the right track and the parts of it that cause my body in whatever way is to start clenching up is a sign that like, I want to pay closer attention to like, okay, what’s happening here?

Alex Olshonksy 00:37:57  Right? Right.

Alex Olshonksy 00:37:58  And I’m glad you mentioned this because this points to an important distinction, which is what I would say is the difference between thoughts and compulsive thinking, which is what you’re really just sort of gesturing to. And because like the the point of what I’m trying to share here isn’t to make thinking a problem or go to war with the mind. It’s more about actually like helping people get into what, you know, people in psychology calls flow states, where you’re in the flow and thinking is happening on its own, and it’s generative, and you’re sort of out of your own way, such that thoughts can arise as these unbidden manifestations of inspiration or creativity or insight, whereas compulsive thinking is the thoughts about thoughts running in this unaware loop that often has this really negative flavor that go with it. And so the interesting thing is that, yeah, the more you sort of practice and the more that you, you also mentioned sort of like the meta awareness, because it does take some introspective awareness to like catch your thoughts happening and to, to notice, like when you’ve crossed over as in your words from sort of thinking to rumination.

Alex Olshonksy 00:39:10  One of the best gateways in there for me is always like, yeah, checking in with the body and trying to get a sense of like, oh, when it feels like I’m ruminating or overthinking, like, what am I actually feeling here? Can I slow this down and notice that and scan the body and then maybe even stay with some of those sensations? Because giving the body time to kind of complete these cycles of activation will allow the thinking to, to quiet on its own. And then the more that one can do that, the more that actually we get access to, to flow, which is where thoughts just happen. And like it’s actually thinking is way better and it’s way less effortful than the alternative.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:52  In this essay that you talk about, you keep going. But you ultimately say this ability to drop, how would you say out of thought? What’s the state when I disengage?

Alex Olshonksy 00:40:04  It is a relaxing move, right? So instead of the closed fist, it’s the open fist. So it’s this mode of just like letting go and softening such that thoughts.

Alex Olshonksy 00:40:13  The thoughts can still be happening and they can actually be pretty high voltage. But you’re not identified with them. You’re not taking them to mean a code red fire drill. You know, every time they arise. And so it is a releasing identification with the thoughts which like that’s the thing that is trainable. It’s not about stopping thoughts. And this is another, I think common misconception. And it’s like everyone’s like, oh, I want to have a totally zen quiet, you know, still mind and look that that can happen. That does happen. You know. But more I think what you know, more fundamental and more realistic is and actually more liberating is to understand that, like, the thoughts can totally still be happening, but you’re letting them happen and you’re something much, much bigger than the thoughts themselves.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:03  Yeah, you’re talking about that. This can be trained and you say the time and effort may vary, but you sort of make the point. I don’t have it cut into my notes here, but I think you made a point that you spent time practicing in a way that didn’t lead you here.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:18  Had you understood how to do this better, you might have made faster progress. What was the mistake you were making because you were in contemplative practice, I assume. So what was the what was the mistake you were trying to make? And what does it look like to correct it?

Alex Olshonksy 00:41:34  That’s such a great question. I was and I had was a fairly experienced meditator and Yogi. I mean, I think for someone who’s a non monastic, I was about as dedicated as one can be, you know, studying with many different teachers and going on retreats and treating it like a full time job outside of my my day job. And I think early, like I fell into sort of like the mindfulness trap, which is, you know, there’s a lot of schools of like Theravada Buddhism, which really are just about well, and I want to be careful here, but I think at the end of the day, I was there was a lot of just sort of following the breath or noting, noting practice.

Alex Olshonksy 00:42:15  And a noting practice is sort of when you’re just labeling, labeling what arises and different flavors of that. And that’s all great. Those are both phenomenal practices that like I recommend and endorse, but noting in particular when you’re sort of just like thought or sound or sight, it’s useful to a point to, especially at the beginning. But then after a certain point, you’re actually kind of still engaging the machinery of mind. It was something that I think, for me, actually aggravated a sense of just like this hyper analytical, left brain guy like, overly intellectual man who had trouble getting into his heart and his body. And then the other element was, I think when when I more later on my spiritual path discovered this, the non-dual traditions which have a fundamentally different premise than the progressive path. And so.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:07  Describe that for people who don’t understand what that means.

Alex Olshonksy 00:43:10  The non-dual tradition.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:11  Yeah. And how it’s how it’s different.

Alex Olshonksy 00:43:13  Yeah. Right. There’s considered to be like sort of two meditative paths.

Alex Olshonksy 00:43:16  One is the progressive path where you’re you’re slowly building insight and honing the mind and developing concentration. And then there’s the, the direct path or the non-dual path and the non-dual path. The fundamental premise is that you are already awake and enlightened and free, and you simply just need to relax more and open to what’s here. And I had not been given that instruction until much later, like halfway through my my meditative training and for again, someone like me who had, you know, hustled his way into the Ivy League and had this real striver identity for someone to tell me like, oh, to, because I had I had, for better or worse, I had got the enlightenment bug and no one had ever just told me like, oh, you actually can just relax. And so that element of relaxing the body that is so fundamental to this process because again, coming back to the overthinking is is under feeling like compulsive thinking is a result of contraction in the body. And so the more that we can relax the body, the more that actually we can soften the mind and allow the allow it to just do its thing.

Alex Olshonksy 00:44:24  And so what I didn’t know was one that sort of direct path teaching, which I hadn’t been given that earlier, and then two, I hadn’t been given the somatic psychology understanding, which I think is really what I see as missing in this conversation in general, bridging the two, which is that we as humans in the modern world are kind of living in chronic activation, where our bodies are in like mild flight or flight stress response, trauma responses. In my case, like working in a high stress environment, for many years, I was basically living in a sympathetic nervous system or I was like, I just started that just became my normal. And then once I started getting training on that and understanding actually how the body responds to stimulus and what the body needs to unwind. And one of the core premises of Hakimi and somatic psychotherapy is that in the same way, if you got a cut on your hand, the body, like in the right conditions, is just going to heal itself miraculously. It’s the same for the psyche, but we need to allow when we actually give loving attention to what’s happening in your body.

Alex Olshonksy 00:45:33  The body will just allow the psyche to sort of reorganize towards wholeness and healing. Those were the elements that I didn’t get until later in my journey that I felt were were missing and could save people a lot of time.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:46  All right, somebody hears this, they go, yeah, that’s me. I mean, I think almost everybody hears a little bit whether you want to call her an addiction or not. Almost everybody would be like, well, God, my thoughts sometimes drive me up the wall, right? I mean, at the very least, like, can we just. Could they just turn down a little bit or so everybody feels that if somebody was going to say, all right, you know what, I do want to deal with this again, I’m going to give another run at this. Maybe they’ve maybe they’ve tried to meditate a little bit. Right. Maybe they’ve never tried it. Maybe they’ve listened to an app a few times. But for not somebody who’s not a dedicated practitioner.

Alex Olshonksy 00:46:17  It’s a great question.

Alex Olshonksy 00:46:17  And there’s a there’s a few different angles to, to take here. And so it really one requires a holistic approach. But just for someone who’s listening who might want to say like, okay, what can I start practicing immediately? The first thing is actually having just some awareness that the overthinking is the result of a protective strategy from the thinking mind trying to keep a part of you safe, right? And so that there’s a part of you when something that you’re feeling in those moments that is begging some some care and some love. And so I like to first just invite people to, just to, to have some awareness that like, oh, there’s something in you that is working really hard to keep you safe and to keep you well. And then from there, I think a really great entry point is actually to like, really drop down into the body with some meditative awareness. And the reason being that like most people, we most, most for most people, it feels like our thoughts are located up here in the head.

Alex Olshonksy 00:47:22  For some it’s in the heart. But most people, especially in our Western cultures, in the head. And so the more that actually you then can start resting attention on that, which is not a thought. And so one just allowing attention to drop down and into the pelvic bowl. breathing and filling up the three dimensional space there. Maybe even going even lower all the way down to the soles of the feet. And one of my favorite prompts is like imagining that each sole of your foot had nostrils, and you’re literally just like breathing from the earth, from the soles of your feet. And even if, like, someone’s listening along and maybe just practicing that, you might notice, like just even as I narrate this, it just slows things down, right? And the more we slow down, the more that the thinking mind can relax. And so that, in a nutshell, is just one really basic great practice that you can do at any time. And so like I encourage people like if they’re busy and working and like so some people might be like, I don’t have time to meditate.

Alex Olshonksy 00:48:17  It’s like, hey, you can be in your zoom meeting and rooting into your back body, which signals safety to the brain. Psalm feeling the pelvic bowl. Breathe, feeling the feet breathe. And really just allowing attention to to be aware of those areas while you’re engaging with anything else, and that will help to just reduce the noise and the thinking mind. Yeah, maybe I can start there. There’s a lot more I could share about where people can go after that.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:46  That’s a good start. I’m going to ask a couple questions. Let’s say somebody did say, all right, I’m going to give this ten minutes a day. You, in your article, claim that with ten minutes a day, you can make some progress on this. Yeah. Would that be it? Like, just keep my attention in my feet or in my pelvis area. And every time my attention wanders, as it inevitably will of, you know, countless times I just bring it back to that. And that’s what I kind of want to do as a starting point.

Alex Olshonksy 00:49:14  I think that’s a great starting point, but essay that I mentioned that I wrote and I’m working on follow ups, I have some follow ups, have other like a whole set of practices. And so really you’d want to be doing each practice for, let’s say, ten minutes a day for three weeks at a time until you felt good at it. And so I’d start, though with something like that, where you’re actually building the skill. Going back to where we started, the conversation of training attention to rest on something that’s not thought in the body is one of the most reliable ways to get there, because we all have access to it. But then from there, like I’d also invite people to start paying attention to like just your whole field of experience and starting to zoom out and notice, like the entirety of the visual field. And I can give a little practice here. Sure. Yeah. And so one thing that people can do that I really like is to so if you bring your hands to the, the sides of your, of your head like this, like right by your ears and what you do is you move your hands forward and back in space like this.

Alex Olshonksy 00:50:13  And what you’re doing is you’re looking for the point in which in your periphery, as you look straight ahead, the hands disappear. And when you do this in this way, it just allows your, your, your field of vision to get much wider. And you notice that there’s actually this really big, Miraculous like ultra 4K display just happening right before you. And so there’s this huge thing that’s right here that’s not thought. And humans are primarily visual creatures. Creatures. Something like 60% of our processing happens from like the visual cortex. And so using this like this whole the bigness of the visual field is a great thing for people to notice, because that’s all this is not a thought. Right. And so that would be like a progressive practice of continuing to get like really more interested in that, which isn’t a thought. And then eventually, as in I’ve described this in some of the other practice guides, like you want to start looking into the nature of thoughts themselves, like, am I in control of my thoughts in the way that I think I am? I the voice in my head that I often mistake myself to be? And this is where the spiritual kind of insight comes in.

Alex Olshonksy 00:51:28  And you can even make that practice digestible for ten minutes a day, but it is a good progression to follow, I believe, where it’s sort of like one, you start with the basis of sort of like recovery, then the somatic of building into the body, working with the sense gates, and then eventually start looking into the nature of sort of thought itself and like, who? Who are you really? And I could give a quick practice to help with that. Or we could just save it for another time, too.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:57  Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, how will I practice this before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly Bites of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection and links to former guests who can guide you even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose and habit change. Feed your good wolf at one you feed.net newsletter again one you feed.net. So I want to end with something that you mention in your writing. And I talk about all the time and is in my book, and I think it comes from the 12 step world idea, though, which is this idea of it’s easier to actuate into, you say, new ways of thinking than it is to think your way into new ways of acting.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:49  Give me your take on that.

Alex Olshonksy 00:52:50  Yeah, yeah, it’s such a such a good one. And I think something that surprises people, like going back to the last question, I was like, if I actually want to practice not overthinking, like, what do I do? And I’ve been teaching workshops on this. And what has surprised people is that you’re actually already doing so much without thinking about it, whether that’s walking or driving or playing certain sports. Like, we actually know how to move through the world and move through this life without thinking about it. And so one, you can start paying attention to the ways in which that’s already happening. But I think just more like fundamental to this quote and recovery itself is that, you know, you can’t think your way out of addiction, you can’t think your way into healing, you can’t think your way into spiritual insight. You have to actually take action and move. That’s what leads to lasting change. And so this one for me, I think is so important, especially in a world in which it’s so easy to distract ourselves or outsource our thinking now to AI, where instead just do the thing, just put one step in front of the other, like perfection is the enemy of good in this case, and in my in my life, I certainly had to just literally move forward in order to start making some things happen.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:22  Beautiful. That is a great place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to go deeper into aspects of contemplative practice in the post-show conversation, where I’m going to actually get to nerd out on a couple things. So if you want to hear that listeners and you want to add free episodes and you want to support this show, you can go to one you feed. Thank you so much, Alex. It’s been a pleasure to have you on.

Alex Olshonksy 00:54:47  Thank you Eric. This has been a real honor.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:49  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.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:15  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.