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

43:33Then I might say, right now I notice Donald's worrying about his taxes. I don't need to think about that right now. I'll set it aside and back to it later when I can give it my full attention. So again, there's a subtle point here. Someone would easily turn that into an avoidance technique. But the point is to emphasize that you're going to come back to it later and give it your full attention. Sometimes there's a knack to turning what seems like avoidance into its opposite. into a form of acceptance. I want you to think about this properly, so I'm going to come back to it later when I can give it my full attention.

44:07So that way you're not sending the message to your brain that you're scared of these thoughts or that they're dangerous or a problem. They're saying, no, I want to look at them. I'm going to look at them actually more fully, in a more committed way. And that tends to create a sense of confidence and it takes the edge off the anxiety as well. what's the cbt process for someone who says i know it's irrational but i still feel it right it's gone below the neck now it's in the body and i'm feeling it here like anxiety i've just got this kind of visceral feeling of anxiety well the c i mean different cbt practitioners will maybe say different things about that depending what flavor of cognitive therapy or behavior therapy they're into right some people would say okay well let's just teach you relaxation techniques then to lower nervous arousal if that's what you need like someone who's more behaviorally inclined would do that maybe um or coping skills someone like beck in traditional cognitive therapy might say it may be that you've got automatic thoughts that you're just not fully conscious of right so you need to kind of like just pay closer attention and catch those very rapid pre-conscious thoughts when they're flashing through your mind someone like albert ellis who's more philosophically inclined would say well your beliefs might not be fully conscious right most of our beliefs aren't they may be implicit in your behavior and in your feelings like for example chris how many beliefs do you have buddy millions millions too many probably right yeah so you don't count so you don't go around repeating them all in your head all of the time right you've probably got loads of beliefs that you haven't even really formulated in words they're just kind of implicit and your personality and your behavior and stuff and that's what ellis is more focused on he'd say you've got these underlying beliefs and attitudes that we could target so maybe it kind of feels as if you're demanding that you have to get things right otherwise it would be a catastrophe.

46:13It doesn't mean that you necessarily say that to yourself, but that might be how you're acting and feeling. And so those beliefs could be disputed, even though they're maybe not things that are taken in the form of conscious sentences that you're repeating to yourself, right? Or you can just, you know, like I said, some people might just teach you tension-release, relaxation techniques. I feel inclined to say something about that as well, So just to kind of highlight, there's another example of an area. The guy that developed the main relaxation techniques that I used in CBT was a professor of physiology called Edmund Jacobson back in the 1920s, one of the pioneers of biofeedback.

46:56And Jacobson studied muscle relaxation in minute detail. And what he discovered was a paradox. he found that most people can relax to a kind of medium level but then when they try to relax deeper they actually tense up and he said they're committing right he said they're committing what he called the effort error so they're like i'm trying really hard to relax god damn it yeah like and then they have a kind of rebound ancient uh yeah philosophy we wait trying not to try way there yeah you have to uh reduce the effort somehow and so jacobson thought well like how can you carry on relaxing but without trying to relax and so his technique he figured out a way around that which is that you tense your muscles and you study the feelings of tension for like 30 seconds or whatever um and then you you let go of the tension so you focus on tensing up first and then the feeling of letting go of that and by doing that progressively you should be able to let go more deeply each time but why is bodily relaxation why is relaxing of the muscles so important it tends to lower sympathetic nervous system arousal i and so it could be it's one way of potentially damping down the kind of physiological side of anxiety but again you know that can sometimes that can backfire because people might use relaxation as a way to try to get rid of their anxiety it's another avoidance strategy right but you can i believe there's some debate about this this is where we get into the kind of nerdville of like therapy therapists just disagreeing with things and like putting different spins on them arguably you can kind of just modify it a little bit and you could say well what if the goal is to let go of the muscular tension and kind of relax into acceptance of the other symptoms of anxiety so my heart's beating really fast what if i kind of let go or what if i just think of myself as not tensing up in response to that and kind of letting go and relaxing into the feeling of my heart beating fast and the other involuntary sensations of anxiety right but if i think i'm trying to relax away the feelings of anxiety that might backfire if i imagine myself as relaxing into them then it could actually be turned into a form of emotional acceptance technique, arguably.

49:29Obviously, there's a lot of, I guess, up until maybe about 10 years ago, if we were having a conversation about anxiety, a lot of it would have felt very top down. Now I'm seeing increasing amounts of nervous system regulation, dysautonomia, vagus nerve stimulation, bottom-up approaches to this um what's your perspective on how the blend what the proportion is of bottom-up versus top-down for something like worry or anxiety still i lean more towards the cognitive perspective like i mean i to be truthful in practice like both approaches can work right but what we lack annoyingly is we've got loads of really good research on psychotherapy but the one thing that's trickier is longer term follow-up research like a year later two years later um so there is an argument that certain types of cognitive change might be more lasting like learning to regulate anxiety by relaxation techniques or acceptance techniques and things like that like those those skills can be powerful and those can change your beliefs because you can prove to yourself that you're capable of coping and enduring the feelings for example if you apply those skills in the right kind of way you know they can change your thinking um but they can also be ways of dealing with a problem temporarily and then when you maybe encounter a more stressful event in the future like that overwhelms your coping strategies you might potentially be back to square one um or you might some people might what one problem with coping skills is that people just stop using them after a while like so that's one of the things that we've found potentially but sometimes people get lasting benefits you know from managing how they feel so it varies a little bit but cognitive and kind of behavioral changes overlap quite a lot and interact with each other so it can be a little bit tricky to tease them apart but i believe say for example your underlying attitude albert ellis was the one that probably went most to the extreme and trying to aim for very general underlying cognitive change like so ellis would say to people you know not just that maybe you're exaggerating how bad particular situations are or you're misinterpreting them which is one way of doing cognitive work um but ellis would say are any situations really intrinsically awful like are you making a kind of error by like projecting subjective values onto external situations are you causing that by imposing rigid demands like that i almost must succeed and i must never make mistakes for example that are bound to make you feel anxious about your performance but ellis thought these kind of rules that people have shaped their character and their feelings in a very general way needed some attention and it may be like that has more general benefits and more lasting benefits than the more kind of coping skills or emotional self-regulation kind of approach that you're talking about it's not just how you feel it's how you think why is that why is that such an important sentence because emotions aren't just like a blob of energy like they're the cognitive you know they're intertwined with our thinking and we have a lot of control over our thoughts and beliefs we can change them like we as soon as we realize that our anxiety often like is very closely intertwined with catastrophic thinking for example we open up a whole toolbox of cognitive therapy techniques that allow us to begin working on that we can change our perspective we can challenge our beliefs like we can write different scripts we can gain verbal diffusion or cognitive distancing but a whole we have a much bigger toolbox of techniques that we could potentially use then for a start and also it might be that somebody for example manages their anxiety but they could still have other problems like they might still be exhibiting avoidance so you get guys like i don't really feel any anxiety anymore because i drink so much whiskey like i'm pretty much anxiety free hey you go but you know you've got you've got other problems now and also you're still kind of avoiding like i don't know asking girls out on dates or whatever it is you know like you've got kind of false courage it's not you know it's not really benefiting you in other ways so addressing the cognitions can sometimes help us to get more deep and pervasive improvement especially if we go for these real underlying attitudes by certain tendencies that are very very common that we all exhibit i'll give you an example you know you could work on anger management with people and teach them coping skills like spot when your anger is beginning to arise catch it really early, nip it in the bud, take three deep breaths to kind of downshift your nervous arousal a bit to put your prefrontal cortex back in control, buy yourself some time so that you can think of a different way to respond.

55:06It's kind of a coping skills approach, right? But you might still think if somebody insults me, then that just means that they're a total jerk. if Chris says something I don't like it means he's an asshole so I might have a tendency cognitively in anger to reduce people's personality to a single negative trait Is that similar to the fundamental attribution error? Yeah I guess maybe it's related in some ways It feels like a reductive I guess it's related to attributional style in a sense it's also related to philosophers have written about it many different authors have approached it from different perspectives so you could describe it as a form of objectification of the other person as well we don't really perceive them anymore as a living breathing human being, if somebody's just an asshole just an idiot or just a jerk they're not really a fully formed human being in our eyes anymore, so it kind of distorts the nature of our relationship And some people, especially angry people, will tend to think that that's fine.

56:24He is a total jerk, right? I think the best way to respond to that is it's one of the reasons that when people get angry, their problem-solving ability tends to be impaired. So if you can't empathize with people or put yourself in their shoes, you can't really anticipate their actions or understand their motivations. that makes it pretty hard to actually deal with them effectively or negotiate with them or problem solve you're going to basically be stuck with pretty crude and simplistic solutions like punching the guy in the face or something like that you know so that reductionist way of looking at people um individually also you could argue it affects society as a whole you know we maybe think of whole other nations and groups of people in a reductionist way sometimes.

57:15So social psychologists and other researchers have talked about this kind of objectifying tendency as being the basis of a more serious problem, which is called dehumanization. Throughout history, people have had moral codes most societies agree that it's wrong to steal from people or to kill them with one exception which is if they don't count as fully fleshed human beings then it's fine in the ancient world those were barbarians so the Greek word do you know what it means originally? Rodent? Non-human? Vermin? No, it's better than that. It's onomatopoeic, Chris. It means people that go bar, bar, bar.

58:12Sheep? No, it just literally means people that talk nonsense. It means people that sound like they're going bar, bar, bar. Forgive me for thinking that people who go bar, bar, bar are sheep. because animals who go... Yeah, thank you. Animals that go bar, bar, bar are sheep. Correct. But the Greeks thought that's what barbarians sounded like. It means people that don't speak Greek. When we saw, do we not see this with the Nazis? They used this sort of discussed language towards Jews. They were rodents. They were vermin. Yeah. So they don't count. Moral consideration doesn't extend to them because we've dehumanized them.

58:53They're less than human. and that means anything goes like morality, we might have a very sophisticated morality that we can sit and debate till the cows come home, but it doesn't apply to those guys, because they're not humans also slaves, generally throughout history, were treated as less than humans, so rules didn't really apply to them and in some cases maybe children or women in some societies aren't extended moral consideration in the same way but they're sometimes criminals, they don't count they don't have any rights, or whatever They're not really human. So you could trace that back arguably to certain features of anger.

59:30So you could say, well, we can teach coping skills to manage anger. But are we then really addressing the tendency to treat individual traits that people have as defining their entire character negatively? It's a very reductionist way of viewing other people. It tends to lead a lot of problems. If you think that's a problem dealing with other people, we get angry with ourselves a lot as well. You can get angry with other people, but you can get angry with inanimate objects, like your laptop not working. You can get angry with yourself as well. People love getting angry with themselves, right? And they do the same thing.

1:00:09So they go, I'm such an idiot. I'm completely useless. And they'll self-flagellate, self-castigate using these, what psychologists sometimes call global negative ratings of value or global negative labels, right? I'm just useless. I'm an idiot. I'm crap. I'm incompetent. I like to refer to that is the world's worst self-improvement technique. it's incredibly popular like everybody does it to some extent but if you had a classroom full of little kids and i don't know they were studying for a math exam and all the kids kind of got one of the questions wrong you wouldn't go back the next day and say listen kids i had a look at your answers to that exam and basically the problem is that you're all just a bunch of complete idiots essentially.

1:01:01That's where you went wrong here. So go away and have a think about that. You might, but you probably wouldn't be a very good teacher. Constructive feedback tends to encourage people for having made an effort. It tends to reinforce the bits that they did right. And then it tends to be pretty specific about what you did wrong and nudge you in the direction of finding a better solution. It's not rocket science, right? But saying you're all just a bunch of idiots, it's kind of like trying to climb on glass then. You kind of go, what am I supposed to do? So the solution to that would be get a personality transplant or something like that.

1:01:39What am I supposed to do about that? It's paralyzing. If you turn, it's highly demotivating, generally speaking. So we don't usually do that. It's not a technique. I say to my clients, this isn't a known self-improvement technique. There aren't books that you can buy on the self-flagellation method of self-help. like it's not something that i do in coaching unless you would like me to start you know i guess we can give it a go how do you think it would work out but it's something that people do to themselves when they're angry with themselves and it tends to backfire in a number of different ways but it's essentially making the same error as when we objectify dehumanize other people in anger and so again the coping skills wouldn't necessarily fix that they might snap you out of it but it would be potentially more useful if you addressed that at a cognitive level to make sure you kind of mop up any tendency towards that thinking error this episode is brought to you by whoop i have been wearing whoop for over five years now way before they were a partner on the show i've actually tracked over 1600 days of my life with it, according to the app, which is insane.

1:02:52And it's the only wearable I've ever stuck with because it tracks everything that matters, sleep, workouts, recovery, breathing, heart rate, even your steps. And the new 5.0 is the best version. You get all the benefits that make Whoop indispensable, 7 % smaller, but now it's also got a 14 day battery life and has health span to track your habits, how they affect your pace of aging. It's got hormonal insights for ladies. I'm a huge, huge fan of Whoop. That's why it's the only wearable that I've ever stuck with. And best of all, you can join for free. Pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 5.0 strap.

1:03:26Plus you get your first month for free and there's a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free. Try it for free. If you do not like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now, you can get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and that 30-day trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. What are the differences between beliefs and feelings? Are they an important distinction between those two? It's hard to define what's meant by feelings. And also, some of these concepts are really debated to this day by a lot of contemporary psychologists.

1:04:08And also, partly because in English we use some of these words quite vaguely. And interchangeably. And we can use them interchangeably. I would say that generally speaking, if we're talking, by feelings we might mean physical sensations. Or you might be talking about emotions. For example, particularly if we're talking about emotions, generally speaking, I would say there's probably quite a pronounced cognitive element. There'll be a lot of beliefs tied up in them. And throughout history, people have defined emotions cognitively. The Stoics did. They sat down and wrote almost like a dictionary definition.

1:04:49They say anger is the desire for revenge. Fear is the belief that something bad is about to happen and that you should flee from it. by and so they well just to interject uh i can see the desire for doing that because when you think about what a feeling is in your body you have some sort of an emotion it is this global foggy slippery ephemeral fucking morphing and mutating thing and yeah you know i i use this bit in my live show where i actually i don't anymore but i used to where i was talking about why you could understand why the ancients would think that mortals were the gods play things because rage doesn't just feel like some neurochemical imbalance inside of my brain and body it feels like i've been possessed imbued with this you know strange like parasite demon thing that's taken over me or oh the deep depression you know it's sort of it's weight the gravity is heavy it's more than the sensation and i think that the desire to try and bring into the um easily communicated transferable oh when you say that do you mean the same thing as me me and you have never had to have a debate really over whether that football is a ball well you know when you say ball that's what i mean when you say but yeah of course because you can touch it feel it and assess it but because it's so internal and so uh challenging to show objectively to other people you need a way of being able to exchange and communicate this yeah and arguably that's how we figure out how to use the words is by having some kind of definition that our society agrees on you sound like an effective neuroscientist so sometimes they'll say you know the the kind of raw affect the emotions are are built out of they some psychologists will say it's like color words like red and blue right how do i know that what i mean by red is the same as what you mean by red maybe what i mean by sadness is different from what you mean by sadness except that we can associate it with certain kind of stereotypical patterns of behavior and things that people say you know even then there might be some exceptions so somebody might be really sad and fake a smile right so it can be like tricky but we do we do have these kind of rough templates that we apply in order to know how to use the concept.

1:07:21But to this day, psychologists still argue about this quite a lot. I want to make it, you reminded me of a distinction that I think is important, though, that I wanted to emphasize. And it's something, I'll talk a little bit about the Stoics, because I think the Stoics got a lot of things right. Did you know, what do you think is the first ever book on psychotherapy? on psychotherapy. You're going to tell me it's fucking epictesis or something. Yeah, it's fucking epictetus. You tried to catch me. It goes back even further than that. This is kind of nerdy and cool, right? There's a lost book by Chrysippus, the third head of the Stoic school, called The Lost Therapeuticon.

1:08:10Like the Necronomicon or something. and it was probably in a sense the first ever book on psychotherapy so Epictetus and Seneca and those guys had probably read it it was very well known back in the day and we know a bit about it because there are fragments of it preserved in other authors like Galen, Marcus Aurelius' physician goes on about it and quotes quite a lot from it so the Stoics got a lot of things right and one of the things that the Stoics said I said earlier, a big problem is we start off at a disadvantage because we think of emotions in this kind of vague way, right? It's just like a blob of energy or whatever.

1:08:51And for a start, emotions are generally speaking much more cognitive than that implies. And there's probably a mixture of phases to them and different ingredients and stuff. The more knowledge is power, the more we understand about emotions, the more we can kind of control them, do something with them. but another really important distinction would be to say maybe there are kind of involuntary aspects to emotion we all agree about that but there maybe there are more voluntary aspects as well or bits that could potentially be brought under voluntary control i was kind of implying that a bit earlier when even when i was talking about relaxation you know and anxiety so the muscular tension part of from the physical side of anxiety is semi-voluntary like so it's a kind of bracing response like you tend to those muscles you're not doing it on purpose but you can actually let go of some of that tension if not all of it like so you have some voluntary control over it if you're like breathing rapidly to some extent you could potentially slow down your breathing right but you don't have complete control over it you can't directly control your heart rate and some of the other things that are going on so there's bits of what's happening that you have very little control over there's bits that are easily under voluntary control and then there's other bits that are maybe in this kind of gray zone somewhere in the middle it's kind of like semi under your control basically so that's where it gets a little bit fuzzy so acceptance strategies you're going to have to use for the stuff that you can't control right if i'm anxious and my heart's beating fast i don't really have much choice but just to accept the feeling and ride it out really you know distraction techniques and suppression techniques stuff like that don't really work that well so probably i'm going to have to accept it if i have an automatic thought oh my god what if i get hit by a bus tomorrow and die i can't unthink it like it's too late I've already had the thought.

1:10:47So to some extent, I just need to accept the presence of that thought and kind of detach from it and just not elaborate on it. But like we were saying about worrying, worry is a good example. Because often people, what people tend to do is they try to take too much control and struggle against the bits of an emotion that are automatic. So that's like banging your head against a wall. but they neglect to take responsibility for the aspects that are under voluntary control so choosing to stay in the room with a cat is largely under your voluntary control as behavior therapists sometimes say it's a thing you do with your arms and legs right you can literally move one foot in front of the other right so it's basically that's voluntary you can control that right even though it might feel like you can but basically those are voluntary movements the worry postponement is largely voluntary you can choose not to continue having a conversation the automatic thought might keep coming back of course but then each time it does you can just go yeah i'll come back to this later you don't have to have a conversation about it is this you mentioned that the stuff that can be written on the back of a business card tend to be the most effective strategies i have to assume that that's because because even if there was something more effective, compliance and the ease of the patient to be able to recall what it is that they're supposed to do has got to be probably the single biggest determinant.

1:12:18It doesn't matter how great the technique is if you don't do it, basically. That's a problem in some areas of psychotherapy because there are techniques that work well in clinical trials. And then sometimes clients like doing them. And then there's other techniques that people hate doing and have a very high dropout rate what what is a what are some of the examples of techniques that are very successful but people fucking hate exposure and response prevention for ocd obsessive compulsive disorder it's like one of the most effective techniques for someone who's got bacteria phobia which is like a form of ocd you'd get them to kind of put their hand in toilet water and things like that or you know like lick the bottom of their shoe or whatever like expose themselves to things that they think have got bacteria if they do that repeatedly like eventually they'll habituate to it they'll prove to themselves that nothing catastrophic happens like and so it has a very high success rate but it's so aversive that that approach like in real world settings often has a very high dropout rate so we're like oh man we know that if you did this you would get over your anxiety but it's really hard to kind of drag people kicking and screaming sometimes into presumably that would be a place for something like a retreat or a uh an intensive you know if you said hey uh your ocd is stopping your life come and live at this retreat for four weeks and we will slowly coach you through it because we know that your compliance on your own would be yeah it would what a great way to spend the summer yeah the ocd hotel like something like that yeah that'd be that'd be fun yeah they there are i definitely think there are advantages.

1:13:55I mean, sometimes I thought the main way that we could improve traditional psychotherapy would be just not doing it in a consulting room for an hour on a weekly basis with the client. I used to think breaking out of the consulting room in some ways, rather than just coming up with loads of different variations of things that we can do in a consulting room, would potentially open up a lot of opportunities. And researchers and clinicians do do that to some extent. and they do group stuff they take clients out and kind of excess behavioral exercises out of the i used to take clients who had uh social anxiety into starbucks or whatever and like i'd spill my coffee or whatever or like i'd get them to practice going up to people on the street and asking them what year it was and you know these are kind of typical shame attacking or like behavioral experiments that we get people to do but you have to go out the consulting room to do that which is sometimes a little bit tricky to organize i went into so many shops in oxford street um and told them with clients that had ids one of their problems is they have almost a phobia often of uh but not always of uh losing control of their bowels whatever needing to use a bathroom not being able to do it so i used to go around and go into shops and with the client and say listen i'm really embarrassed i've kind of had an accident shot myself like is there any chance i could possibly use your washroom the clients would be like there's no way i'm doing that you know but then i say well that's like a red rag to a bull when it comes to exposure therapy because then we should probably do it like if you could do that though and it didn't bother you at all like what difference would that make and they say well yeah like i wouldn't really have a problem anymore like deal with a lot of my problem i figured out earlier i said with social anxiety it can be tricky to get people to expose themselves to the fear of negative evaluation because it's more conceptual hypothetical like people might criticize me but i figured out a way to do it there's a bunch of ways you can do it but my favorite way of doing it was that i'd go into like a coffee shop or a restaurant or whatever and i'd walk into the middle of the room and i'd say excuse me everyone excuse me uh i was in here earlier and i think i might have left my book behind that i was reading and i just wondered if anybody's found that lying around it's called how to overcome social anxiety, blushing and shyness.

1:16:40Has anybody seen a copy of overcoming social anxiety, blushing and shyness lying around? And my social anxiety clients would say, there's not a cat in hell's chance that you're going to get me to do that. And I said, well, I'll do it first, right? And you can come and watch me. And then when we get bored doing that, it could be your turn and you can start doing it. And once you've done it, even just three or four times, usually it gets the novelty wheels off and I don't really care anymore. But when people prove to themselves that they can do that, like, and experience the kind of self-consciousness, but not really be freaked out by it, it's often very liberating.

1:17:16Ellis, do you know what Ellis used to do? He'd get people to go to the shops and buy a banana and a bit of string. And you can look this up. There's videos of people doing it on YouTube, right? And they'd tie a bit of string around the banana and they'd walk around the shopping mall like it was a dog. is what you call a shame attacking exercise so people who are very shy or self-conscious but there's no way i'm going to do that but by doing it and forcing themselves to get over themselves that can often have like earth-shattering effect on liberating people i mean like you know when we when we look at uh some of the solutions from history the witch's brew of eye of newt and tail of frog and such uh string and piece of banana uh doesn't sound actually all that all that much more insane so who knew many of these techniques existed in the ancient world like so i was going to say the stoics have this much more they start right out the gate with a more philosophical sophisticated understanding of emotion first of all they're like emotions are cognitive then they're like but there are these there's a proto emotion they call it the propatheia so there's the initial physiological reaction and initial automatic impression that precedes full-blown emotion so you could say there's anger and proto anger so the stoics say well proto anger is neither good nor bad you know you just need to kind of tolerate it basically but not get sucked into it and allow it to escalate.

1:18:51And so, for example, one of the big debates about anger is, is it good or bad? Could it ever be healthy and stuff like that? You know, for the Stoics, they help to solve that problem by saying the automatic part of anger at the beginning is like neither good nor bad, really. You know, what matters is the use that you make of it, how you interpret it. But then the passion where you buy into the distorted thinking and start to believe it is kind of inherently problematic because it's not very, like Seneca said, it's temporary madness. You're now handing over your thinking to a bunch of assumptions that are flawed right out of the gate, basically.

1:19:31So that's problematic. But the Stoics had these techniques, like, you know, the Cynics, who were the Stoics' kind of cousins, Stoicism and Cynicism were sort of overlapping traditions. the cynics used to tie a bit of string around the neck of a bottle and walk around the keramicus where all the prostitutes were in Athens they had a bunch of they called them shamelessness exercises hang on, hang on, hang on, really similar hang on, tie a piece of string around the neck of a bottle and then walk, making it make a noise behind them yeah, well I guess like it's walking a dog like you know around prostitutes a bottle dog around prostitutes yeah it was the graveyard in Athens the prostitutes used to work in the graveyard weirdly but so it's both you play it's both the graveyard and where the prostitutes would hang out the end of life and the creation of it as well before reliable contraception how fantastic yeah so that these are some of the things that i think we can learn from ancient philosophy that we end up kind of reinventing.

1:20:41Graveyard, prostitutes, piece of string, bottle. That's all you need to know, basically.

1:20:50You know, I should give people... Let me give you some more constructive... No, these are great. These are better. I mean, look, people listen to lots of podcasts, including this one, and they don't always remember everything. I can promise you they will remember a story about a piece of string in a bottle being dragged through a graveyard filled with prostitutes. let me tell you i'll tell you the many ways in which the stoics highlighted some of the things that are actually important that benefit people who are trying to do it's why also why self-help doesn't always work right so number one the clients that i work with one of the main things that i notice is you can think of therapy and behavior psychology terms as often about skills acquisition and skills application right so you learn how to do relaxation techniques or repeat coping statements or whatever or you learn how to assertive communication and then you actually use it under stress and difficult challenging situations repeatedly right i think the balance has shifted over time in the clients that i see and now because they're consuming this kind of fire hose of self-help information uh almost all my clients are male right so the guys that i see often have loads of skills that they've learned they're all doing journaling they all do mindfulness meditation like they've all got their affirmations and whatnot but there's often a massive deficit in terms of skills application right so the skills become compartmentalized or as i like to say they kind of leave it on their yoga mat or whatever you know they leave it in their journal so what benefit does it do someone if they practice journaling for 10 minutes every morning and they're kind of working on their thoughts but then they go out the door and they stop thinking about that and just revert back to negative thinking all day long for the rest of the day and i certainly know i mean i i certainly know that i did that for a very long time so yeah so i hate to break it to your kids but if you want to actually improve i know i like i like these situations there's so many situations in life where you think oh you could do this or you could do that there's one or two situations where i think i know of no other solution right there's a few times in therapy i think i in all honesty i can only figure out really one two things although there's one main thing really that you're gonna have to do here which is you would have to have some kind of ongoing mindfulness or self-observation throughout most of the day in order to be assured that you're going to be applying your skills consistently.

1:23:32Otherwise, you'll just compartmentalize them. So you'll be really good at doing your meditation and your journaling, and then potentially it just kind of goes out the window when you go to the office and start interacting with people. or you might not even notice that you're thinking negatively and practicing avoidant ways of dealing with things. Unless you're observing what you're doing, maybe not all day long, but pretty consistently, right? The Stoics knew that. They called it prosoke. So they had this idea of watching yourself and paying attention to how your thoughts, feelings, and actions were interacting to avoid this problem of Epictetus says to his students, you guys are like lions in the school and foxes in the streets.

1:24:19Right? You're talking the big talk about Stoicism and then as soon as you go out the door it all goes out of the window. There's only one solution to that which is that you'd have to practice continually and be constantly observing yourself. Like the Buddhists do. They practice continual mindfulness throughout the day. The Stoics had exactly the same idea. but the people that I work with today like most of them they see self-improvement as something that's highly compartmentalized and I think that's a form of avoidance in a way and so they don't also practice facing their fears again it's unlikely people will do that unless a therapist or coach or a friend or a parent is encouraging you to do it unfortunately right and the Stoics knew that as well so they said look you have to go and endure voluntary hardship and get out of your a comfort zone to some extent if you want to do self-improvement but you should also use your imagination use your noggin right and visualize anticipating in advance they call this premeditatio malorum right so the premeditation of adversity or bad things the stories say every day you should imagine death exile poverty illness all of the common problems that can befall people and practice responding to them with a philosophical attitude.

1:25:39So people are like, well, I can't really bother doing that. But if you don't force yourself in your imagination to face potential catastrophes, then you'll meet them unprepared. Basically, you're practicing the skills, but you're not really... You're doing your boxer training in the gym, but you're never getting into the ring. Practice sparring or fighting anybody. You need to get in the ring, at least in your imagination like that's like sparring and then out in the real world actually pushing out your comfort zone a little bit facing things like otherwise you get what i sometimes call the pen and paper problem so people are kind of like on paper good at doing self-improvement stuff by using coping skills meditation and things like that but it never really gets applied in practice trust really is everything when it comes to supplements a lot of brands may say that they are top quality, but very few can actually prove it, which is why I partnered with Momentus.

1:26:35They make the highest quality supplements on the planet, and their whey protein is literally the cleanest on the market. It's fast-absorbing, isolate, sourced from grass-fed European cows, which means no hormones, no antibiotics, no GMOs, plus it's NSF certified, meaning that even Olympians can use it. And unlike most proteins, it's designed for gut health. No fillers, no junk, low in lactose, and it mixes amazingly. This is fantastic. Clean protein usually tastes awful, and this is unbelievable. Best of all, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can buy it completely risk-free, plus they ship internationally.

1:27:06Right now, you can get 35 % off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. It's an interesting challenge because the compartmentalization, I certainly know for me, I relied on a morning routine for fucking ages. And that was nine gratitude meditation journals in a row, every like six months worth, nine of them, and like thousands of sessions of meditation and breath work and reading and note taking and yin yoga and all of this stuff.

1:27:51But I was very much treating it like because it's so detached from the situations that you use it in like you think about something that you're grateful for or that you're hopeful for or your plans for the day or whatever but then when something to be grateful for or to not be fearful for or a plan for the day appears you're not in the same location mind space like regulation like signature you're not feeling that so taking it off the cushion as it's known in meditation is a that is the skill and that's the same as what we said before if you can write it on the back of a business card your compliance and therefore your application are going to go up you get state-specific learning or it gets compartmentalized so the most effective treatment for example we'll talk a little bit about anger and that's i said that's kind of like my hobby at the moment are you still doing your book on anger i'm doing i'm working on it's gonna take forever right but i'm working on a book about anger it's gonna be like the greatest book ever written on anger basically because if anyone's gonna do it i back you to do it i'm gonna do it i'm gonna write a book all about anger it's my favorite thing like it's quite a exciting emotion like it's colorful right so there's a lot of interesting things.

1:29:09And we have this whole book by Seneca called On Anger, which is really good, like about what the Stoics said about anger. And we can compare that to CBT. CBT for anger works pretty well. It's actually, here's something about your self-improvement audience, right? Anger, the success rates in treating anger with CBT are about 70 % mean success rate in terms of measures a clinically significant improvement. It's about a 70 % rate across the board. The largest meta-analyses, these are studies that combine statistically lots of RCTs, like randomized controlled trials. It's the gold standard for doing clinical research.

1:29:57There are about 50 in the main ones. I think more recently, there are about 70 individual studies that they pull data from. And from that, they have like a mean success rate of roughly 70%. So interesting, bit of trivia for you, right? CBT for anger has a higher success rate than CBT for depression or PTSD or a bunch of other common problems, right? People with PTSD and depression often have anger problems, right? So there's a low-hanging fruit argument, which would be you should treat the thing first that has the highest success rate, potentially. Ah, because it's going to make everything else after that become a little bit easier.

1:30:41It's a blockage that you've managed to get rid of more quickly. Yeah, you'll get some kind of knock-on benefit, but also you become more skilled at using the techniques, and your confidence grows in using the techniques that you're learning, right? So it tends to start a domino effect, right? So there's an argument there. There's good reason to argue that in many cases it might be an idea with people that have anger and other problems to target the anger first. But another argument when you're prioritizing things clinically is you might go for low-hanging fruit. You might also go for dealing with something that's most urgent.

1:31:18Well, you know, anger potentially is an urgent problem because it can lead people to harming themselves, harming other people, destroying their relationships. So you get potentially more bang for your buck in therapy terms by fixing that problem because the consequences of not fixing it might potentially be worse in many cases. Not always, but it's a serious contender for thinking we should probably do something about that first before your wife divorces you, right? Or you traumatize your kids or get yourself killed in a road rage incident or something like that. So you might say, well, hang on a minute.

1:32:01People, guys out there that are drinking from this fire hose of self-help stuff online and self-improvement, maybe they should be targeting their anger. I think of it in some ways as the sort of royal road to self-improvement. it's maybe one of the areas where there's the most room for improvement it's the forgotten problem the forgotten emotion because for a star well why would that be right you don't see that much self-improvement content about anger yeah a few anger management books but it's a drop in the ocean buddy right people generally ignore it because it's an externalizing emotion there's something about the very nature of anger that makes people say if i'm angry chris i'm going to think you need therapy not me buddy right it's because it's all your fault that i'm upset obviously right because you're a jerk like you didn't send me a christmas card now i'm pissed off it's your fault you should be in therapy not me so angry people tend not to self-refare for treatment and they tend not to use self-help unless their anger reaches a kind of critical point and then often it's at the behest of someone else like their wife says you need to go and do something about your anger or the what anger what anger or in prisons or in schools like in institutions people get sent for anger management or a court might mandate it right but angry people are often kind of kicking and screaming like they can be reluctant to have it so they're like soap dodgers in therapy terms the therapy soap dodgers right generally speaking but that means that it's like an untapped vein like it's the biggest opportunity we have a high success rate and working with it so it's like low hanging fruit but they're avoiding doing anything about it you have to identify that you have anger problems though two examples come to mind here so i did um a big retreat i keep telling this story because it blew my mind it's probably going to be it's probably going to be the thing that i remember one of the lessons that i remember most from this year um do this big retreat.

1:34:06It's 12 hours a day, seven days of deep emotional work with a coach who I trust unbelievably deeply has been on the show a ton called Joe Hudson. I think you'd love him. And I'm a small, very small group, completely sober. And one of the days was anger. And I'm looking at like the other days, I'm looking at sadness, I'm looking at grief, I'm looking at, you know, some of the other emotions. One of the days was anger. And I was looking at the anger day thinking, ah, no, like, you know, maybe there's a whatever, whatever. I was the first person to like move from the initial part to the second part of anger.

1:34:42And I was up before anybody. And I was like, maybe I'm more angry than I thought. Maybe I'm more, cause I don't, I don't present as an angry person, but Joe then told this story, told this fucking wonderful story. and he said, my daughter was nine and she was crying in the bathtub and she'd done it a couple of times this week. I went in and spoke to her and I said, why are you crying in the bathtub? And she says, because I'm sad. She's like, you don't sound sad. You sound pissed off. And she went, I am. She said, okay, you know when you're crying in the bathtub, how often are you sad and how often are you pissed off?

1:35:23She says about half the time. she's like well if you piss off about half the time how can you cry 100 % of the time you said well when I'm mad and when I'm pissed off when I'm angry my sister runs away but when I'm sad she comes and gives me a hug and it just blew my mind the sort of pro-social nature of sadness when you can convert anger into it and the anti-social nature of anger I thought that was so fucking cool yeah yeah it's like it's it's sneaky like and it's often hidden and anger often as well is a way of coping like you people use anger as a way of dealing with other feelings Aaron Beck the founder of cognitive therapy he wrote a book called prisoners I hate it's a really good book about anger and he said that most of the clients that he asked who had anger problems initially yeah they didn't uh maybe it was like 50 50 whether they thought their anger was in response to something else but beck was really into getting people as i mentioned earlier to spot the automatic thoughts and record them very carefully and he said that when he trained people to observe their feelings very closely almost all of the clients with anger that he spoke to noticed there was a preceding emotion that came before it that they were using their anger to cope with sometimes anger can be turned into other emotions but very often it's another emotion like being hurt like i said earlier chris didn't send me a christmas card like and i'm really mad about it but probably at first like i i was hurt right in many cases people are ashamed they're hurt they're anxious and then anger actually take so we we think of emotions in this kind of homogenous way but in many cases anger and other feelings but anger's one of the worst contenders for this is used as a sort of coping strategy it's a way of dealing and i'll tell you a weird thing about it is one of the ways that anger helps people to cope when people are anxious they often activate schemas a helplessness right so they momentarily they feel kind of like oh what the fuck am i going to do like helpless anger makes you feel powerful right but it's kind of an illusion in a way it's like dutch courage or whatever like you know you're just it's magical thinking you're tricking yourself into feeling more in control and more powerful than you are nothing has changed about the situation but you feel like so committed to taking action and fighting back that it gives you this kind of surge right and it conceals or compensates for its overcompensation in many cases for feelings of powerlessness and helplessness i'm going to take back control of this situation but getting really angry and it also one of the most dramatic things about it is it shunts all of your attention outward like so it this is a very simple way of putting it and you know i'd be interested to know you know what your uh your audience think of this in some ways anger very simply functions like a distraction technique like if i get really angry then i'm not really paying attention to how hurt i am anymore because i'm just thinking about like how i'm going to deal with you like what a jerk you are and maybe i should i don't need to reflect yeah i don't need to i i'm not even feeling my pain anymore because all of my attention has literally been diverted away from it like externalized like so it's a big fat distraction technique in many cases yeah i wonder it seems like anger kind of goes in one of two directions people get angry when they should be doing something else and people feel something else when they should be feeling angry like some people flee from anger and some people suck it in and use it to avoid feeling other stuff does that make sense yeah yeah definitely it's often the case so we have to look very closely at our feelings and try and understand what's going on with them you know they cover it they're very often like covering up something else very often they're functioning in a kind of defensive way i really understand you know what's actually going on i'll tell you well i was going to talk about like very simple techniques yeah and what i mentioned earlier like some of the most effective techniques and maybe this is another reason that people don't get as much benefit from self-help is they can't see the wood for the trees problem right and the most effective advice is often so banal and so simple you know it's strange you kind of come back to simple things you come back to the beginning but recognize it for the first time and you think maybe it really does boil down to something as simple as just doing this so one of the most effective strategies for anger is just catching it early noticing the early warning signs of it but at an earlier stage than you would typically spot it like and then accepting the initial feelings like so say feelings of being hurt by somebody uh diminishing you or disregarding you or not respecting you and accepting those feelings and sitting with them for a bit longer than normal so that you have time to process them.

1:40:33And it might in some cases be like 30 seconds. But that's an incredibly minimal technique. Just pause and notice what the feeling is that's coming before anger. So you'll get an urge to start blaming the other person or yelling at them. Set with that urge and with the feelings that surround it for just a bit longer than normal. And you might go, man, my feelings are really hard because Chris doesn't send me a Christmas card. But then that might be long enough for me just naturally to think, I didn't send him a Christmas card. Or, you know, who gives a shit about Christmas cards, right? And for natural, spontaneous cognitive reappraisal to happen, for instance, or for the feelings to peak and then naturally kind of like wane again, right?

1:41:20But if I launch immediately into anger, I never have an opportunity to process or reappraise those initial feelings. and it might only it might only take a minute or less you know for me just to give myself a chance you know to really experience what it is that the anger's covering up and process it like so that it's not as much of a problem anymore why did you give up on psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapy after so long that was ages ago we're going back a ways now like so i started off doing psycho uh i did a master's degree in psychoanalytic theory and this is like 25 years ago or something and i practiced psychodynamic therapy for like a year the reason that i there were multiple reasons why i quit i wonder some of them maybe i can't share in public i got a bit disillusioned with my own personal training analysis and with uh approach that I was studying and also some of the stuff that I was reading.

1:42:26The last book, the last journal article that I read, I can remember vividly. The last article I read was by a very like a well-known psychoanalytic theorist who wrote an article about sublimated anal masturbation.

1:42:47and he believed that golf okay as a form of sublimated anal masturbation okay um because he'd analyzed like one client or whatever and this is what had emerged from it so he decided he was going to write like a paper theorizing this or whatever because you have to put he said and i'm not kidding i'm repeated his words not mine he said you have to repeatedly put your fingers in and out of dirty holes like when you're going around the golf course taking the like the golf ball out of the out of the hole after you've taken a shot okay and i read that and i thought i think i'm done with this like i can't i can't really take this seriously anymore so i mean that's the more extreme end of psycho analytic interpretation, right?

1:43:38Some of it is a lot more down to earth. Like definitely in recent, probably since the 1950s and 60s onwards, and particularly more recently, there are forms of psychodynamic therapy that are much more down to earth. But even when I was training in it, we read Lacan, we read Klein, we still were reading Freud and stuff. And so a lot of the literature we're reading was kind of bonkers, really. And based on like zero evidence as well, Freud, do you know how much clinical research Freud did to develop his theories? Zero. Zero? Nothing. Like, he literally wrote the interpretation of dreams after his father died, and he sat and analyzed his own dreams.

1:44:23And that was how he basically came up with most of the stuff. So it wasn't based on any client work at all, really. Like, it wasn't based on any clinical research whatsoever. Freud was pretty much dead against that and yet it produced volumes of stuff in this tradition that went on for ages so there were some personal reasons why I kind of got a bit disillusioned with it I thought this isn't really sitting comfortably with me I'll tell you another little anecdote that I can share with you as well so when I did my master's degree some of the lecturers were really into Jacques Lacan who's a philosophical French post-structuralist psychoanalytic theorist who's big in the 60s, the early 70s and stuff, right?

1:45:10And we read this book by a guy called Dylan Evans. It was a dictionary of Lacanian thought. And so this was the main reference book. And I and some of the other people, particularly people that were working in psychiatric nursing and therapy and stuff, we'd sit there every week in a little seminar room and the guy that was teaching us would go on about lacone or whatever and we'd sit there scratching our heads being like we can't really for this doesn't make any sense it doesn't bear any resemblance to what actually happens with our clients and we can't really make head and tail about what this guy's going on about and i remember our the the guy teaching us said to us once he got frustrated and he said you guys just don't get it, do you?

1:45:57Right? And we were all thinking, maybe there isn't anything to get, right? But okay, you seem to believe that this is, you know, it's not the emperor's new clothes, or anything like that. There's something to get here that we don't understand. So I thought, eh, I give up on this. It's not really panning out for me. You know, a cognitive behavioral approach appealed to me a lot more. Years later, I was reading a newspaper, and I saw a column by Dylan Evans, and he was talking about I think he might have mentioned CBT, and he was talking about evolutionary psychology and stuff. So I emailed the guy, and I was like, hey, I thought you were into Lacan.

1:46:32And he said, I get this question asked away all the time. And he emailed me back a biographical essay that he'd written. And in it, he said he trained as a Lacanian therapist, and he was practicing in the NHS doing Lacanian analysis. And he said that none of his clients were getting any better. his own personal therapy after so many years he'd figured out wasn't really doing him any good he wrote this book to try and sort out in his own head what Lacan was talking about but by the end of writing it he'd basically just convinced himself there was nothing there like and it didn't make any sense and so he reached this kind of crisis point and he thought like me in a way he threw the towel in on the whole thing and gave it up, right?

1:47:24And I thought, I wish I'd known that when we were sitting reading this book and studying at a university and the lecturer was like, you guys just don't get it, right? Because the guy that wrote the textbook had become completely disillusioned with the whole thing and thought it didn't make sense. And we were sitting there going, maybe we're just too thick to understand it, Chris, you know? That is usually the default assumption. Maybe I'm just too thick. I don't understand what this guy's going on about. Right, okay. So the fear of being too thick and the concern of autoerotic anal masturbation from golf, those were the two nails in the coffin.

1:48:09So I started to learn a bit CBT, and it resonated more with me. I'll tell you another story. So when I was a kid, I was very angry, right? So I'm a little bit in some ways like a recovering alcoholic in that regard. So I was saying the other day, I thought about it and I realized some of the people, people ask me occasionally on podcasts, they'll say, who's your role model, you know, from the perspective of stoic philosophy or the people that you particularly admire. And they want me to say Nelson Mandela or something like that. Right. And I think, well, I've never met any of those guys. Right.

1:48:43So I don't really know. But the people that impressed me most were guys that you won't have heard of. And if I think about it, like some of them were people that were recovering drug addicts or alcoholics that I've met, or in some cases, people that were really angry and had maybe got into trouble with the law, but then had turned their life around. and I started to think it may be like that some of the wisest people that I've met and the ones that I think exemplify the best character traits are actually people that were really angry previously but overcame their anger and I thought well maybe also because that's the kind of journey that I went on I started off being really angry and then like an alcoholic you know I reached a point where I thought this is I need to do something about this it's too much it's kind of getting out of control and it's going on too long and so then i thought i have to dig really deep to get myself out of this hole and in doing that you know i guess i changed my whole philosophy of life in some ways i think that was what got me into the stoics and what got me into uh into practicing cbt basically ultimately the sort of philosophy that's right for you and the worldview that's right for you ends up finding you, I think, given a long enough time horizon.

1:50:00And if you're sufficiently flexible to not hold on to shit that you're not supposed to still hold on to. So yeah, if you're doing something that at the time was the incumbent, sort of the cool kid on the block, but it didn't speak to you, you find the one that you have the most belief in. And if you're going to try and transform the world and write nine books and speak to tens of thousands of people about coaching and courses and all that stuff you're going to believe in the one that transformed your life way more than the one that you're super skeptical about but dude donald i you're so fantastic every time we get to speak i love it um how long is it going to be before we have a book on anger tell me come on ages like it'll probably be like another year or a year and a half or something i'm going to take my time over it because i'm going to try and do a good job of it but i want to talk about stoics and how they kind of set the stage for how much we can learn from them but also what cb there's a lot of really good cbt like i say in the solid research but we also know lots from other branches of psychology about anger did you know social psychology like do you know americans i think there might be a thing called american anger like i think different countries different cultures experience anger differently You know, do you know what Americans report, according to Gallup polls, getting angry about 25 % more often than Canadians and Brits?

1:51:27Okay, that wouldn't surprise me. And Americans get angry three times more often than the Japanese. Japanese don't get angry that often, they claim. Okay. Some sort of shame or a culturally mediated anger? anger's been growing like for sure there's many different measures that show it's becoming a bigger and a bigger problem so i think one of the reasons it was because it appealed to me it was the problem that i did i specialize in anxiety like i said earlier and i thought i want to do something a bit different i thought i thought i've always wanted to go back and look at anger because that was the problem that i dealt with when i was younger it's something that really resonates with the stoics also i'll look out my window and i can see you know the world does seem like an angrier place in many ways since i was a kid i think social media fuels it a little bit there's a disinhibition that happens from the anonymity of being online that allows people to become more verbally aggressive towards each other and it causes more and more political division like and it causes a lot of social problems i think you know do you remember people you say a lot of people in america would be going around saying we think we're on the verge of a civil war or something like that you know and they meant it really seriously but for sure you just need to go on twitter and see how angry people seem to be about politics do you remember when people used to be able to have a conversation with somebody that they disagreed with no that's ancient history that doesn't exist i think that's a myth back in medieval times that's a myth yeah correct that's correct that was i have newton a conversation with someone that you disagree with without shouting.

1:53:06Donald Robertson, ladies and gentlemen, Donald, you're so great. Where should people go? It's been a pleasure. To watch, read, listen, your things, where do you want to send them? On Substack. Like, I do everything on Substack now. They can just find me on there. I've got lots of articles and things. Beautiful. Mate, until next time. I appreciate you. Awesome. Cheers, Chris. If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out.

1:53:38And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful, and entertaining that I've ever found. Fiction and nonfiction, and there's real life stories, and there's a description about why I like it, and there's links to go and buy it, and it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books. Thank you.