#92 Lisa Feldman Barrett: Balancing the Brain Budget

Neuroscientist, psychologist and author, Lisa Feldman Barrett discusses the complexities of the brain, our emotions, improving ourselves and our relationship with others, making good decisions and giving yourself an existential break. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you love something, you're reading something or you're hearing something and, you know, on the news maybe, or you're watching a YouTube thing or whatever, and you love it, whatever was just said validates some deeply held belief that you have. And whenever you hear something that you hate, that just violated probably some deeply held belief that you just had. So stop and take a moment and think about it. And try to, try to observe what's going on. You know, if you take a moment before the heat of the moment has you in its grip, you will make better decisions.

• 0:50Shane Parrish?

  Hello and welcome. I'm Shane Parrish and you're listening to The Knowledge Project. This podcast and our website, fs.blog, help you sharpen your mind by mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a premium version that brings you even more. You'll get ad-free versions of the show, early access to episodes, transcripts, and so much more. If you want to learn more now, head on over to fs.blog/podcast or check out the show notes for a link. This week I'm talking with Lisa Feldman Barrett, a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University. What first attracted me to Lisa's work was her book, How Emotions Are Made. And while emotions feel automatic and uncontrollable, Lisa's theory is that

• 1:34Shane Parrish?

  emotion is constructed in the moment. This conversation focuses on emotions. We'll dive into what they are and how they're made, and how this understanding helps us perform at our best, raise kids, and understand others. It's time to listen and learn.

• 1:56Shane Parrish?

  Can you tell me how you got interested in emotions? Where did that come from?

• 2:02Speaker 00

  Wow, well, you know, who's not interested in emotions since we all have them? But when I was a graduate student, I, when I went to graduate school, I did not go to graduate school to study emotions. I went to study the self, you know, your view of yourself and why that matters. And I was using some measures of emotion that were not behaving themselves. They just weren't working the way they were supposed to work. So I thought, all right, I'm going to use very objective measures of emotion. So I'm going to, rather than asking people how they feel, which is what I was doing at the time, I thought, all right,

• 2:45Speaker 00

  I know that there are universal facial expressions. That's what every textbook says. So I'll just learn how to measure emotion in people's faces. And then I went to the scientific literature and I read and I realized, actually, there's, even though people claim there's a lot of evidence for universal facial expressions of emotion, that everybody scowls when they're angry and...

• 3:09Shane Parrish?

  Are those the micro-expressions that people talk about?

• 3:12Speaker 00

  Well, these are actually not micro-expressions. They're, the idea that there are micro-expressions and the idea that there are full-blown facial expressions of emotion, scowling in anger, smiling in happiness, pouting in sadness, come from the same theoretical view. And although there's a lot of claims that, you know, everyone in the world scowls when they're angry and everyone in the world recognizes a scowl as anger, that's not actually what the data show. And I was, so I thought, oh, okay, well, I guess I can't measure emotion in the face. I'll measure emotion in the body because everybody knows that, you know, there's one bodily pattern for anger and one for fear and one for sadness.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  You know, so your blood pressure goes up and, and maybe you flush a bit, you know, in anger, but your heart races in fear and so on. And so again, I went to the research literature and I, I read what the papers said and then I read the data and they didn't match. In fact, there is no universal physical signature for any emotion that's ever been studied. And I thought, okay, well, I, I guess I better figure out how to image the brain, because, you know, everyone knows that there's going to be one circuit for fear, one circuit for anger, one circuit for sadness. If everyone in the world has these circuits, are born with them, and maybe even some animals have them too. And, you know,

• 4:39Speaker 00

  what I found for the body and for the face is also what seemed to be emerging from evidence from the brain. And I thought, wow, so many people believe that there are these diagnostic signs, objective signs for emotion, but they're, they don't exist. But we feel emotions. I mean, I feel angry sometimes, I feel happy sometimes, I feel so, and these feelings, they feel, emotions feel like they happen to you, like they hijack you and take you over and cause you to, you know, think and do and say sometimes things that you rather would not have. So I

• 5:22Speaker 00

  thought, this is a real mystery. And I just abandoned the work that I was working on. And I completely switched my research program at that point, because it was a real puzzle. And I'm, you know, here I am, almost 30 years later, so.

• 5:38Shane Parrish?

  Let's start at the beginning. What are emotions?

• 5:41Speaker 00

  That's not starting at the beginning.

• 5:43Shane Parrish?

  Where's the beginning?

• 5:45Speaker 00

  Well, you know, here's the thing. The linguist George Lakoff calls emotions essentially contested concepts, which means, we all think we know what emotions are, but no one can define them. No one can agree on their definition. So for example, scientists, the way they typically define emotion is a package of thoughts and feelings and facial movements and bodily changes that are all coordinated with each other. That's the way they define anger and sadness and fear.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  The evidence from science tells us that those coordinated packages don't exist. There isn't one coordinated package for anger, that when you're angry, you always feel the same way and your body's always doing the same thing and your face is always doing the same thing. All the pieces are coordinated, but they look different every single time. Well, maybe not every single time, but they look different in different situations. Um, and it's not easy to scientifically define what emotions are. Uh, if I gave you a definition, it, it, I don't think it would be meaningful to you or your listeners. So the way I would define emotion is the way I would define thinking, what a thought, what is a thought or what is a belief? What is a memory?

• 7:07Speaker 00

  Your brain is conjuring all of these events in exactly the same way. It's just using different information to make sense of uh, what's going on in the, in the immediate moment.

• 7:18Shane Parrish?

  So there are no telltale signs that you could see, even if you could see inside somebody? Would you see that this is anger or is there something in our blood or physiology that know? And it's not cultural either?

• 7:31Speaker 00

  Well, I, it's not completely a big random mess. I think the, the way to think about it is this, that first I'll give it to you by analogy, uh, and then, and then we'll say it by emotion. So before Charles Darwin wrote his book on the origin of species, people believed that a, a category of animal, like a species of animal, like say a dog. There was a, a particular perfect dog. You know, there was a dog, it's kind of like the dog show view of, of dogs. There was a perfect Cocker Spaniel. There was a perfect Dalmatian. There was a perfect Siberian Husky.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Every dog had some of the features of what made that breed perfect. Um, but there was a perfect animal with the perfect tail length and the perfect coat thickness and the perfect eye color. And all the individuals that you would see of that kind of dog varied from each other. But that was just error, was just mistakes. That really there was, there's, there was this perfect dog out there and um, philosophers would say there was an essence, you know, an essence of Cocker Spaniels. That was there, but what we saw in the world, all the cocker spaniels we saw, you know, they had varying features like, and so there was a lot of error in the mix.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  And Charles Darwin came along and said, no, actually, what a species of an animal is, like a breed of cocker spaniel, is a collection of highly variable individuals. That what's real and meaningful is that variation. And our idea that there's this ideal cocker spaniel is actually a myth. It's a fiction that doesn't really exist in nature. So scientifically, what Charles Darwin was saying was that there aren't fixed types of animals. Each animal is a population, each category or class of animal is a population of highly variable individuals.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  And the variation is really important because some animals will do well in, in one context and some will do well in, in another context, right? So they'll, they'll, and they'll differentially breed based on how well they're doing. So you can look at any biological category that way, like anger or sadness or fear. There isn't a perfect example of anger with a perfect facial scowl and a perfect change in the body and a one particular circuit firing or pattern in the brain. Instead, what your brain is doing is it's making instances of anger that fit the situation that you're in.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  So sometimes when you're angry, you might shout, you might raise your voice. And sometimes when you're angry, you might laugh. Sometimes when you're angry, you might cry. Sometimes when you're angry, you might sit quietly and plot the demise of your enemy. You know, sometimes when you cultivate anger, it feels pleasant, actually. And sometimes it feels unpleasant.

• 10:46Shane Parrish?

  Wait, say more about feeling pleasant.

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• 11:20Speaker 03

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• 11:42Speaker 00

  Well, have you never, you've never felt aggressive and felt like it was really good to, to express that aggression? Like when you're playing soccer or you're trying to beat somebody in cards or?

• 11:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  You know, so there are some people who, for example, when they're about to debate someone or negotiate with someone, or they're about to enter a competition with someone, you know, they get themselves pretty worked up and angry. So it feels good to be angry and to express that anger. And, but at other times it doesn't. And that's not error in the system. That's not stuff happening randomly. That's not a bug. That's a feature of how the brain, your brain works. It's a feature of how brains work. They, there is no essence of anger. There's no essence of sadness. Your brain is creating instances based on what you learned in the past.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  It's creating instances that will work in the present. You know, it's the same thing is true for fear. The same thing is true for happiness and so on. So sometimes I'll, you know, when I say that, people say, really? When are you ever happy when you're afraid? And I'll be like, well, have you ever been on a roller coaster? Have you ever gone to a haunted house? I, for 13 years, we had a haunted house in my basement on Halloween, right before Halloween. We did it as a charity. All my graduate students and postdocs, we would get all dressed up. We orchestrated the whole thing because, you know, we're really good at scaring the crap out of people in a lab, right? So we thought, well, hey, let's just do this for, you know, we'll scare little kids in for money and then give all the money away to the Boston Food Bank, which is what we did for many years.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  But we would all get together and we would scare the crap out of people, like little kids, you know, again and again and again. And they loved it. And they were really enjoying themselves. One time, I talk about this in my book. Um, I threw a birthday party for my daughter when she was 12. It was a disgust party. And so these, I made these kids like exuberantly disgusted. They were having the time of their lives and they were totally grossed out. So disgust is often unpleasant, but sometimes it's really pleasant. And, you know, you often when you're disgusted, you, you withdraw from something, but sometimes you approach it, uh, cause it's more interesting

• 14:05Speaker 00

  or it's fun or it's, um, you know, a challenge. So I think the point is that when it comes to emotion, a- as with almost everything in, in biology, um, variation is the norm. There isn't one anger. You have a whole population of angers that you can feel and your brain doesn't conjure them randomly. It conjures them according to your brain's best guess of what's going to work in a particular situation.

• 14:31Shane Parrish?

  Is there a difference between feelings and emotions or are those interchangeable?

• 14:36Speaker 00

  So again, you know, I have to give you the, the wishy washy science answer, which is that some scientists want to define emotions as actions, behaviors, not as feelings, because they would like to search for a common physical basis of those actions in humans and in non-human animals.

• 15:06Shane Parrish?

  Cause they want the pattern.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  Cause they want us, they want, they're looking for the one pattern of that emotion. So for example, oftentimes you'll hear about, you know, fear learning or fear. And then you, when you read the article in the newspaper or you hear it, you know, on a podcast or whatever, it turns out that. That the scientists have studied a fly, or they've studied a rat. And what they're studying actually is freezing behavior. That if you create a situation where an animal freezes, because the animal is uncertain about whether or not a threat is present, they call that fear. And the assumption is that the circuitry is very similar across all different species.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  Well, it turns out that the circuitry, it's more complicated than that. But it turns out that, you know, in mammals, for example, the circuitry for freezing, freezing behavior, where you, you know, is somewhat similar across, you know, rats and monkeys and humans. But the only way you can say that's a fear circuit is if you define fear as freezing. What about all the other parts of, you know, what about when animals escape, try to escape a situation? Or what about when they attack a predator, which happens often? So rats, for example, if they can't escape the situation, they'll attack, they'll attack the predator, particularly if it's a mother and she has pups.

• 16:35Shane Parrish?

  And in humans, like it can motivate us, right? Like sometimes fear drives us to do other. Is that because it's a particular type of fear? Or is that because?

• 16:43Speaker 00

  Right, so that's the, that would be the old way of doing things. You could say, okay, well, instead of saying, I have this category that's highly, with highly variable instances of population in the Darwinian sense, you say, no, okay, really, I just have to find types of fear. I'm just gonna, so I'm gonna take the category fear and I'm just gonna chop it up into smaller bits. So because of what you're trying to do is say, okay, all the instances in, you know, this kind of fear are the same. But even, no matter how small you make those, those, those boxes, there's still variation in the boxes. You just can't get rid of the variation because it's inherent in the phenomenon. So there are some scientists who define emotions as behaviors.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  There are other scientists who define emotions as feelings. In our culture, colloquially, as people, we tend to define emotions as feelings. In other cultures, emotions are the action that's predicted in a particular situation, and feelings don't really play into it at all. It's in fact seen as kind of disrespectful to presume that you know how someone feels by how they act. In our culture, we very much think that we know how people feel and what they think by what they act. That's why words like microaggression, you know, or micro expression exists because we make an inference.

• 18:06Speaker 00

  The brain, your brain is automatically making inferences about the internal thoughts and feelings of people based on their actions, but we are blinded to the fact that they're inferences, that they're guesses. We, we think we're reading people when in fact really all our brain is doing is guessing.

• 18:23Shane Parrish?

  Is there a way that we can check ourselves on that?

• 18:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, ask.

• 18:29Shane Parrish?

  But how do you remember to do that in the moment, right? Because you just instinctively, like, somebody's acting like that. Do we learn that, like, somebody's acting like, is that cultural, like, we were taught that?

• 18:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're taught that, and you're taught that in ways. It's, you know, when I say this, well, yeah, we've learned it. I think people, people need to understand a little bit what it means to say that something is learned. They'll say, oh, so it's not hardwired, it's learned. But actually, anything which is learned is wired into your brain. If it wasn't wired into your brain.

• 19:06Shane Parrish?

  It wouldn't be learned.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  It wouldn't be learned. So the question is, were you born with it? Or was it bootstrapped into your wiring by experience? So one, you know, I just, I have a book coming out in, in the fall. It's called Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. And it, it covers some of these ideas because I, I think they're really fascinating, but also most people just don't know. So most people don't know, for example, that. An infant brain is not a miniature adult brain. It's a brain that's... When human infants are born, they're born with unfinished brains. And those brains are waiting for wiring instructions from the world.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  And little brains wire themselves to the world, to the physical world and to the social world. So for example, the brain needs information from your eyes in order to finish wiring itself so you can see. And if it doesn't receive that information after you're born, you will never see normally. Similarly, so it's learned something that's been wired into the brain. And if you live in a culture like ours where there are rooms with corners and, you know, buildings and square things with corners and edges,

• 20:34Speaker 00

  you learn to see the world in one way, physical world in one way. And if you live in a culture where there's nothing square and there are no corners, you learn to see the world in a different way. So much so that some things for us that are visual, we have these like visual illusions where we see something and, you know, we see two lines and they actually are the same, but, you know, if one line, there are arrow heads pointing inwards and on the other line it's pointing outwards, called the Mueller liar illusion. The one with the ones pointing outwards look like a longer line than the ones with the arrow heads pointing inwards, but actually they're the same. So that illusion doesn't happen for some people in the world

• 21:13Speaker 00

  because they didn't, they weren't exposed to buildings and boxes and corners and things when their brain was finished wiring itself to be able to see. And so similarly, everything you do, everything an infant experiences is fair game for it to learn about and that becomes, you know, shapes its wiring, including... When you label things for the child, so, or you speak to someone else in the child's presence with words. So, for example, in our culture, we do a lot of curating of objects for infants.

• 21:55Speaker 00

  We'll say, you know, we'll hold up a dog and say, you know, like a play toy dog. It's like, "Look a doggy," or like, "Look a truck," or "Look a train." We do that kind of labeling. But then we also say to kids, you know, "Oh, you're crying. Don't be sad." Or, you know, when the kid, you know, throws, you know, his Cheerios on the floor, "Oh, don't be angry," or when he cries, when, you know, someone takes his toy away. Those incidental things, the child's brain is picking it all up and learning it. And so what the, what the brain is doing is it's learning patterns. And then those patterns are in, are, are available for the brain to use later to make sense of, of what's happening.

• 22:39Shane Parrish?

  That's really interesting. And like, should we label emotions with kids?

• 22:44Speaker 00

  Absolutely, in this culture. I mean, in all culture, I think that kids have to learn, they have to become culturally competent in the categories that are meaningful in their culture. Otherwise, they can't communicate with other people. So remember, what a, what a word is referring to is a whole event that's occurring. That is how the child feels, what's happening in the world around the child in that moment, what's going on in the child's body in that moment, and then what actions are, happen next and what the consequences are. For example, when you feel bad, do, do you know what to do next to make yourself not feel bad? Not really. It's a kind of a crap shoot.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  But if you know that you're sad, or angry, or afraid, well, there might not be one thing to do when you're sad, but then maybe there are two or three, and your brain can kind of make a pretty good guess based on the situation, which one of those you should try. And so in a sense, you know, emotions are ways of understanding what's happening in your own body in relation to what's happening in the world as a prediction for what to do next to make yourself. Feel better or worse, or get yourself into a state that that your brain, you know, thinks will be a good state to be in. And I say it that way because people don't consciously do it a lot of the time. It's just that's just business as usual for how brains work.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  And so there's research which shows really clearly that in in Western cultural contexts like ours, knowing a lot of emotion concepts and a lot of emotion words and and being able to use those to create very nuanced, precise emotional events actually is really helpful. It's helpful socially, it's helpful in school, those kids do better, they perform better in school. It it is allows you to be resilient to when bad things happen to you. It helps you cope.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  So kids who what we call this emotional granularity, meaning your emotional life is very precise and granular, you know, so one grain of sand is not the same as another grain of sand. So one instance of anger is not the same as the other instance of anger. Those kids, you know, tend to use alcohol less when they're stressed. People even recover faster from physical illness when they're more granular. And that sounds like magic, but it actually isn't magic. If you understand how the brain works and and you understand kind of what's going on under the hood, well, we don't understand everything, but we understand some things. It makes complete sense that that these things would be true.

• 25:33Shane Parrish?

  Do we unconsciously send the message that you shouldn't be feeling when we say, don't be angry or don't be sad?

• 25:39Speaker 00

  Well, I think that's really complicated.

• 25:42Shane Parrish?

  I'm full of complicated questions today.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. So here's the thing. You and I are not in the same physical space, right? You know, I'm in my office at home and you're in your studio. But let's just say we were, let's say we were both in the same studio, or maybe we were having a cup of coffee. Even though we don't know each other, if we like each other, if we're getting along pretty well, if we trust each other in the moment, our biological signals will start to synchronize. Our heart rates will synchronize, our breathing will synchronize. And if we know each other really well, when I get a little worked up, you might get a little worked up. Actually, we don't even have to know each other that well. We, we just have to be around each other for a little bit of time.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  People call that emotional contagion, but it's actually not emotional. What's happening really is that human nervous systems regulate each other. We're, we're social animals. We evolved that way. So we are, we have lots of ways that we affect the nervous system of another person. And when I affect your nervous system in a way and you're not aware of it, your brain's just gonna try to make sense of it. And so it makes sense of it sometimes as emotion. So my, my point is that when someone else gets worked up, you're more likely to get worked up too. And if you don't want to be worked up, you don't want that person to be worked up. So a lot of times when people say, don't be sad, don't be angry. Really what they're saying is, I don't want to deal with you being angry or sad.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  And I don't want to feel that way, so I want you to calm down.

• 27:14Shane Parrish?

  Oh, that's fascinating. I'd never heard it explained that way before.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. You know, I trained as a therapist a really long time ago, like in another life. And one thing I learned is that it's really hard to sit with someone else's distress and just let them.

• 27:31Shane Parrish?

  Be distressed.

• 27:32Speaker 00

  Be distressed. It's like one of the hardest things to learn to do. Instead, you're almost, your knee jerk reaction is to help them regulate. Because really what you're doing is you're helping yourself regulate. You don't want them to be upset because you don't want to be upset. It's not a, it's not a completely selfish act. It's just that part of the mechanism is, part of the mechanism for you to have empathy is to feel what, what someone else feels. And that can be a really challenging thing.

• 28:04Shane Parrish?

  And often, we don't even want to feel it in ourselves, let alone with somebody else, right? Like we, we, it seems like we suppress a lot of feelings. Talk to me about that. Like, does that come back to bite us? Does it make them linger? Does it cause other behaviors later on?

• 28:19Speaker 00

  The, the idea that, that suppressing feelings is really bad for you is part of an old hydraulic model of emotion that, you know, an emotion triggers in your brain. You need to let off steam, have catharsis, kind of get it out. And if you don't, something bad will happen. That's not really true. Here's more of the way it works. You can think about your brain as. Running a budget for your body. You have cells, those cells require energy. You're thinking, what the hell, I just asked her a question about, you know, is it bad not to express emotion? She's talking about cells. I'll get there. But I mean, I think the problem is that if you really want to understand it, you have to start.

• 29:02Shane Parrish?

  Oh yeah, let's go into the weeds.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, you have to, well, we're, we're only gonna, we're only gonna like briefly glimpse the weeds and then we'll get right back out. But my point is that what's your brain's most important job? Why do you even have a brain? Why did a brain evolve? It didn't evolve for you to think or feel or see. It evolved to regulate your body. As brains get bigger, bodies get bigger. As bodies get bigger, brains get bigger. What is your brain doing? Your brain is regulating, it's running a budget for your body. Oxygen, it's not budgeting money, it's budgeting oxygen and salt and water and sodium and all these hormones and all this stuff. All this junk that your body needs to function.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  So in a sense, you can think about your brain as kind of the financial office of a very large company. That's like a multinational company. It needs to try to get the resources where they need to be before they're needed. Just like if you're gonna spend a lot, you, you wanna go buy something really expensive. It's better to have the money in the bank and buy it than it is to buy it on your credit card and try to pay it back with interest. Right? And so that's how your brain basically tries to work. So what's bad is if you make an expenditure, so let's say you buy a bunch of stuff on your credit card. And you pay the bill really fast. There's no tax, you haven't paid any interest. I mean, there's no additional tax, right?

• 30:31Speaker 00

  You pay, there's no interest, you just pay the bill and it's paid. That's like your brain preparing you to do something, to, to yell, to talk, to breathe, to run on the treadmill. To get into an argument with a friend, to have sex, to do something, to eat. Right, your brain prepares, it makes an expenditure and it's preparing to get something in return. Like the, to have the bill paid. But let's say that doesn't happen. Well, then your brain is, your body starts to run a bit of a deficit, right? And then there's a little bit of interest. And if that builds up over time, that's very bad for you.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  So the thing is that when your brain is about to make a big expenditure, those happen to be the moments that we call emotions. When your brain is preparing your body to do something, or even thinking about it, you have a big cortisol release in your bloodstream. People say, oh, that's the stress hormone. No, it's not. It's a hormone that has, it's a hormone that is secreted in what we call stress. But basically, gluc, what cortisol does is it gets glucose into your blood really fast, so that, so that cells can use it really fast. So when you get up in the morning, you have a cortisol surge. When you're running on the treadmill, you have a cortisol surge.

• 31:59Speaker 00

  It basically means your brain is preparing to make a big expenditure. And when you do that, and you don't, and, and as a consequence, you know, there are sensory changes in your body. Your heart is pounding, you're starting to sweat, uh, whatever it is. And you feel that as, as a emotion. You feel that as emotion. And if the expenditure doesn't come, and the reward doesn't come, you don't, you don't replenish, that's actually really bad. So if you're continually getting stressed over and over and over, you're getting mad over and over and over, or you're getting afraid over and over and over, and that expenditure isn't paid back.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  You're not sleeping enough, you don't eat healthfully, you're not getting hugs from your loved ones, you know, whatever kind of, you know, you're not exercising sufficiently, you will start to run a deficit. And that, what that translates into is illness. It translates into depression, anxiety, heart disease, diabetes. They're all metabolic illnesses that come from a debt, running a deficit in your body budget.

• 33:11Shane Parrish?

  What are the actions that we can take that might build up some of that account balance or prevent the deficit from accumulating? You sort of said sleep, exercise, sex, what else?

• 33:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you know, I think usually what I say, when I talk like this, you know, I don't sound like a neuroscientist. I sound like someone's mother. And I, and I am someone's mother. But I think one of the really big changes in, in neuroscience in the last decade is the realization of just how important sleep is. So literally, if there was only one thing that you could do in your life, only one, it would be sleep a decent amount every day, whatever that means for you. It's usually somewhere between seven and eight hours for most adults, and it's longer for kids and adolescents. So for example, one reason that the rate of adolescent depression is so high in this country is because adolescents go to bed late.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  They're on their computers and their devices, which has light at a particular frequency that stimulates their retinas to keep them awake. So it's disrupting their circadian rhythm, which is the rhythm that helps your sleep-wake cycle. So they can't get to sleep. And then they have to get up at a really early time in the morning to get to school. So whereas an adolescent brain might need 10 hours a night, most kids are getting five, six hours. That's really bad. Like, it's not just bad because they won't learn well. I mean, they won't learn well. It's not just bad because they'll be more impulsive. It's not just bad because they'll be a complete pain in the ass, you know, if you're their parent.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  It's also bad because there's this small metabolic tax that's being charged every single time. And those kids, when they become adults, middle-aged, will be more likely to develop diabetes, heart disease, you know, metabolic illnesses, which by the way, are also at record numbers in this country. Of course, it's not the only reason why, but it's one reason. So I think the issue isn't whether you express your emotions or not. The issue is, don't get riled up with any emotion without paying the bill. And part of paying the bill means getting enough sleep.

• 35:27Shane Parrish?

  So are some people actually more emotional than other people? Is that a thing? Or do they just have a bigger deficit than other people?

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Yes, both. So here's the thing. I sort of skipped over one piece because I'm already giving you all this complicated science stuff, but I'll just complicate things further and give you one other piece. So when your brain is regulating your body, your body is sending sense data back to your brain that your brain needs in order to keep that regulation going. And you don't experience those sensations typically in a very precise way. So when your heart is beating and your lungs are expanding and you know, everything else that's going on in that little internal drama. That's like right now, for example, you're sitting there, you look like you're sitting quietly. But you have a whole, you know, symphony of physical changes going on in your body.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  And your body is sending that sense data to your brain. Can you sense your liver functioning? Can you sense your heart beating?

• 36:30Speaker 04

  No.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  Even now? No, you can't, exactly. And we're not wired to be able to do that. And there's a good reason why. And that is, if you could, you would never pay attention to anything outside your own skin ever again. It's a big drama going on right now. For example, if you've ever been in a, like a, one of those deprivation tanks, you know, like a soaking tank where they block out all the external sense data, so it's completely dark. You can't, you have earphones that you can't hear anything, you're floating in, in, you know, salted water, so there's, you can't feel any touch. And then it's like this symphony of internal sounds just emerges.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  You can hear all this stuff going on inside your own body, but you can't feel it. Cause we're not wired to feel it. So instead, what we feel is, is, um, is a simple physical feeling that scientists call affect, or we call mood. So you feel good, or bad, or pleasant, or unpleasant, or worked up, or calm. It's like a general barometer for how your body budget is doing. And we make sense of those sensations as emotions sometimes. But only when they get really intense, but they're with us all the time, because your brain is always regulating your body. Your body's always sending sense data to your brain.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  So you're always, affect is a property of consciousness, it's not emotion, but it's an ingredient, it's a feature in emotion. It's also there when you're having thoughts or perceptions, right? So you're driving on the highway, somebody kicks you off and you're like, your reaction is like, that guy's an asshole. Well, that's a very affective perception. You know, if you ask people, they'll be like, well, no, I'm not mad, that guy's an asshole. Like asshole-ness is a property of that guy who just cut me off. And you might say, uh, well, you're just angry and you don't know it. Well, how can you tell? There's no objective, you know, marker for anger. Who's right? And the answer is, that's a bad question.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  You're perceiving anger and that person is experiencing assholness in that driver. And they're both actually valid perceptions. So my, my point is that, do people differ in emotionality? Sure. Why? Because, because first of all, some people just differ in mood. And they differ in mood because some people, their brains prepare them to expend energy just more frequently than other people. It's, you know, something that in babies, we call temperament. You know, it's called arousability in babies. Some babies are perturbed by every little thing, you know, and others, not so much.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  So there are some people who react to, you know, they, they sort of swim in a sea of drama. Every little thing is meaningful to them. Every little thing, their brain is reacting to, preparing the body for some expenditure. And for other people, you know, that's one end of the continuum and the other end of the continuum. You know, people are kind of like floating in a calm sea, right? Of tranquility. And occasionally, they might get, you know, perturbed, but mostly they're just sailing along. And then there's everybody in between. For example, my husband is one of these people who floats in a sea of tranquility. Mostly, I admire it. Occasionally, it irritates the shit out of me, but mostly I admire it.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  Uh, and I'm more, I don't react to every little thing, but my nervous system is a little on the, more on the other, you know, somewhere on the other end, where I react to more things. The thing is that you can take anybody, deprive them of sleep. Maybe they get five or six hours a night instead of eight for a couple of nights, and they just become more reactive. It's just, um, the nature of, uh, the system for that to be true. If you take a person and you add some testosterone to their bloodstream, they become more reactive. And here's a contentious thing, but I will say it. If you take a woman who's still fertile and you, you start to withdraw estrogen and add progesterone.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  She will also be more reactive. So it's not just women, men have it too. For men, it's, you know, runs on a daily cycle. Your testosterone goes up and down on the daily cycle. It might not be extreme enough that you can tell, but it is observable by careful scientific means. And, you know, do women, do they get, you know, uncontrollably emotional, you know, right before they get their period? No, that's a myth. You know, are women, you know, unable to make good, sound decisions right before they get their period? No, that's a myth. But is it the case that they are even in a miniscule way, their brains are more likely to prepare them for,

• 41:31Speaker 00

  to do something, for a challenge, for more things than when they're at some other point in their cycle? Yeah, on average, that is true. In my data, at least, it's true.

• 41:43Speaker 02

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• 42:37Shane Parrish?

  I want to go back to something you said. So is the brain just constantly interpreting the outside world? And that is the process of sort of like how we construct emotions?

• 42:47Speaker 00

  The brain is constantly interpreting the meaning of internal sensations and external sensations.

• 42:55Shane Parrish?

  And it's making meaning. It's a meaning-making machine.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  It's a meaning-making machine. And sometimes it makes meaning as a thought. And sometimes it makes meaning as a perception. And sometimes it makes meaning as an emotion. And I should say, that's our understanding in this culture. Because we have events that we experience as thoughts and feelings, or as physical symptoms, right? But like a stomach ache. But in other cultures, some cultures don't make a distinction between thoughts and feelings. It's all one thing to them. And it's not that they're wrong and we're right. It's that their brains have learned a way to make sense of their sense data

• 43:42Speaker 00

  in relation to what's going on around them in their world in a fundamentally different way than we do.

• 43:51Shane Parrish?

  And neither way is right or wrong. They're just different.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  Right. And so let me give you an example of one way that we make sense of things that's really not helpful for us. And that is the idea of there being mental and physical illness. You have a mental illness, you see a psychiatrist. You have a physical illness, you see an internist. There's actually no fundamental difference biologically between a mental illness and a physical illness. In depression, you have a metabolic problem. And you also feel bad. And those two things are related. In heart disease, you have a metabolic problem. And you feel bad. And those two things are related.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  So sometimes you'll hear people say, well, the comorbidity of depression and heart disease is about 70%. Meaning 70% of people who have heart disease also develop depression. And they talk about depression causing heart disease, or heart disease causing depression. But actually, there's probably a common metabolic problem that's causing both.

• 44:57Speaker 00

  Both a problem with your heart and a problem with your mood because they're related. Or Alzheimer's disease, for example. Alzheimer's disease also is the result of a pervasive, persistent metabolic problem. I mean, I made this conjecture probably, I don't know, 15 years ago. And now there's actually starting to be evidence for about what I'm about to say, which is the most expensive organ you own is your brain. Your brain costs you 20% of your metabolic budget. That's, there's no other organ that comes close to being that expensive. So neurons are really expensive little cells to keep alive.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  And there are certain cells in your brain, certain neurons, that are much more expensive than others. And so when you are running a deficit in your budget, in your bank budget, what do you do? You stop spending. So what does a brain do when it's running a deficit? It's also stopped spending. So what does that mean? Well, it might mean you're too tired and you don't move as much. It might mean that you stop learning about what's going on around you in the world. Because that's, it turns out, learning is, is expensive, metabolically speaking. And so let's say you do that. You slow the body down, you make the body tired, you, you stop moving so much.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  You, you stop really paying a lot of attention to what's going on around you in the world. You sort of just, you know, use what you've learned before to, you know, help you make sense of everything. And that's not enough. What do you do? Well, you start getting rid of some of the really expensive parts. You start killing off neurons.

• 46:44Shane Parrish?

  And that, that's where these, these things start cropping up?

• 46:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, so neurodegeneration that happens in Alzheimer's disease, or even normal aging, is really about trimming your metabolic budget, basically.

• 46:57Shane Parrish?

  That's super interesting. And so just to recap, the things that we can do to sort of like, make sure we have the money to spend is sleep is number one, sex, exercise. What are the other things that we can do to sort of like recharge?

• 47:13Speaker 00

  Well, um, there are lots of things you can do. Uh, you can, I mean, having sex is good. Who doesn't like that? But, uh, but even just a hug.

• 47:23Shane Parrish?

  Physical connection.

• 47:25Speaker 00

  Physical connection is good. Any kind of social connection can help. It can also hurt. But one thing we can do is you can be kind to someone. Actually, that, that actually helps you metabolic budget. It actually is helpful when you are kind to someone. Um, it also thankfully increases the likelihood that that person will be kind to you. And that also it diminishes the burden on your, on your budget. I mean, the degree of animosity and casual brutality that we see in the media and so on. People think of it as like this sort of decrease in civility as a social problem. But it's actually a public health problem, too.

• 48:10Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm not saying be, become like milquetoast and let people walk all over you. I am saying, though, that treating other people with a certain degree of human dignity and kindness and having them, you know, treat you in the same way is actually really helpful. Physically, biologically helpful to you. And I'm not saying this because I'm like a bleeding heart liberal academic. I'm saying it because I'm a neuroscientist and it just, that's what the data show. If you exercise and you expend a lot of, um, uh, energy, you have to recuperate. You have to drink enough water. You have to eat something. You have to rest. You have to let your muscles rest. You have to recuperate.

• 48:53Speaker 00

  And so, you know, a big argument with someone is sort of the same thing. Uh, it's, it's not even sort of the same thing. I mean, it's like pretty much the same thing from a metabolic standpoint. I mean, your heart rate will go up higher if you're running and, uh, probably. And, you know, it'll, it, the, uh, expenditure will last for longer. But it's in principle, the dynamics are the same. So you have to replenish yourself. And if you don't, and you're just sort of swimming in this sea of like icky conflict all the time, it's actually not good for your physical health. One thing we can do is we can. We can sleep, we can eat healthfully, we can, you know, make good social connections to other people where,

• 49:37Speaker 00

  who we like and who we trust and, and, and who we value and who value us. And, you know, we can generally just be kinder to each other.

• 49:50Shane Parrish?

  What do we do when our partner or our friends are, are feeling something when they have anxiety or anger or, what are the ways that we can be helpful in our response? Or what are the most helpful ways, I guess, to respond in those situations?

• 50:05Speaker 00

  So I think the first thing that you have to do, which is actually a really, really hard thing to do, is to figure out what they want. So sometimes what someone wants is just empathy.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  And sometimes what they want is help. They want you to help them, instrumentally help them figure out how to solve a problem. If you offer your advice for how to solve a problem to someone who in that moment really just wants a pat on the back or a hug, do you know what happens?

• 50:39Shane Parrish?

  Not good things.

• 50:40Speaker 00

  Not good things, right? Anyone who's ever been in a relationship or had a kid knows exactly what we're talking about here. So the first thing I do, the first thing that we do in my house is we say, do you want empathy? Or do you want a solution? What do you want?

• 50:55Shane Parrish?

  And, and how does that skew? Is it 50/50 between empathy and solution? Or is it mostly empathy?

• 51:00Speaker 00

  It depends on the person, you know? If you ask my daughter, who's 21 now, she will tell you almost 100% of the time, I want empathy. And if you asked her, she would say, and my mother is constantly trying to solve problems and all I really want is just a little empathy. But if you ask my husband, he would almost always say, I want a solution. I want you to help me find a solution to this. I want, I want instrumental help is what we would call it as a scientist. And I think I probably am more like him in that sense. I, I certainly want to feel understood. But I usually, what I want is, is help with the, a solution. That actually makes me feel better. I don't need someone to just give me a hug and pat me on the back.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  But occasionally, that's very welcome. I think it really varies from person to person, which is why it's really helpful to ask.

• 51:54Shane Parrish?

  What's the next step? If that's the first step in your house, what is the next sort of, walk me through that whole tree?

• 52:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it really, it really depends. So, for example, I mean, it's a little hard in this culture at this particular moment in time to say, walk up and give somebody a hug, because that can land you in jail. But, you know, sometimes, for someone who you're close to and you have permission to do it, empathy, what empathy can mean is really just giving someone a hug and, or patting their arm, or...

• 52:30Shane Parrish?

  Just being there with them in that moment.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  Just being with them in the moment and sitting with it.

• 52:35Shane Parrish?

  That's really hard. I agree with you.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  It's really hard. It's really hard. Sometimes it means letting them talk, and, but then you have to reflect back what they said and not add anything, right? Just really let them know they've been heard and that they're understood. And that, again, that may sound like, you know, psychological mumbo jumbo, but there's like a real biological consequence to doing that. Sometimes, literally, it means, in my house, it means doing some breathing exercises, because breathing is really the only way that we know of, biologically speaking,

• 53:18Speaker 00

  that it's the only way that you can kind of deliberately get a handle on your nervous system. You know, you've got this nervous system in your body called the autonomic nervous system. You have the sympathetic side and the parasympathetic side, and they work together in a complicated kind of dance. It's called the autonomic nervous system because it's... It's automatic and you have no control over it. But the only, there is one way to get control, a little bit of control. And if you practice more than a little bit, is, or a little bit more, I would say, is breathing. For some people, it's a seven, six second or seven second breath.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  For some people, it's eight seconds. But if you breathe regularly and deeply, diaphragmatic breathing, after a couple of minutes, you can slow your heart rate. You can, basically, it sort of calms your system down.

• 54:17Shane Parrish?

  Well, let's do that right now. Walk me through how we try this.

• 54:21Speaker 00

  I mean, a lot of people know how to do this. They just don't realize it. So, for example, you know how, when you cry, like, you know, you have a big cry, and then there are times when you just take a big breath, and you let it out? And then, you know, crying feels cathartic, because like, everything is calming down. It's those breaths, actually, that are calming you down. Or in yoga, for example, you know, when you're doing a yoga class, even in something like hot yoga, where, you know, you're just, you know, drenched in sweat, you're pacing your breathing. So, I think people intuitively know how to do it. What I should say is, for some people, doing this causes them to hyperventilate, so...

• 55:04Shane Parrish?

  Okay. You've been warned if you're listening to this or watching.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, but basically, so, put your hand on your torso, on your tummy. So, you're not going to be breathing from your chest. You're going to be breathing from your diaphragms. When you breathe in, you don't want your chest to expand. What you want is your stomach, kind of, to expand. So, breathe in and have your stomach expand.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, so what's happening is, you're actually taking in breath down to the bottom of your lungs, instead of just the top.

• 55:36Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 55:36Speaker 00

  And then, so you breathe in on a count of, like, say, three or four, and out on a count of three or four. So, let's do that one breath, okay?

• 55:45Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  Okay, ready?

• 55:46Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 55:56Speaker 00

  You try to push all the air out.

• 55:59Shane Parrish?

  It feels different like to breathe that low in your, is that how we're supposed to be breathing all the time?

• 56:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:05Shane Parrish?

  So why don't we breathe that way all the time? Like why, it's like we're lazy breathing almost.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  If I could answer that question, I, you know.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  I think there are lots of reasons. Here's one. I can't actually see how you're sitting right now because you have a black t-shirt on and I can only see you from here.

• 56:23Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 56:24Speaker 00

  But are you sitting straight up or are you slouched over?

• 56:27Shane Parrish?

  I'm pretty close to straight up. I mean, this is like fully straight.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  Right. Okay. So for me, I'm sitting fully straight right now.

• 56:34Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 56:35Speaker 00

  This is how I normally sit. So I'm like pretty crunched up. If I tried to expand my diaphragm right now, I wouldn't get very far because I'm kind of hunched over. I'm not supposed to sit like that. It's very bad for you to sit like that. But a lot of us do a lot of the time. I actually really admire people who have great posture all the time.

• 56:57Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, me too. I also hate them in some way.

• 56:59Speaker 00

  I know, I do too. Right, exactly. So that's, so that's one reason. I think another reason is that to be able to breathe like that, for most of us, requires a lot of mind, like we have to really pay attention. I mean, we can practice and practice and practice and then eventually we can breathe more like that. But that's a really kind of a, for lack of a better word, mindful breathing. It really requires a lot of attention. And most of us have other things to do in the day. It turns out that there is research which shows that if you

• 57:34Speaker 00

  breathe that way, say for five or five, five minutes in the morning and five minutes at night, you know, like so you take a period and you'd kind of do it, you know, a couple of times a day. Over months, your resting heart rate will go down. You'll be able to calm yourself faster when you get really worked up. It's a really useful strategy. And so that's something we do in our, in our house. We call it a yoga breath, you know? Let's do some yoga breaths. And just because when my daughter was a little girl, that's what I would, that's what I would call it when I wanted her to just to calm down and, and breathe a bit. It's a, it's a really, really helpful strategy.

• 58:13Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, breath is really interesting when it comes to emotion and feeling too, right? It, it helps you center and helps you focus and sort of like, not only that, there's the physiological like response of just breathing in a, a deeper, uh, more connected way.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, it also though helps you learn better. I mean, because if all of your brain's, you know, energy isn't tied up here, there's a lot more left over for learning stuff. You know, taking some breaths actually affects even how you learn in the moment.

• 58:45Shane Parrish?

  What are the core emotions? Like are, are there universal emotions or there like, how many emotions are there? Are there millions or there four or there five?

• 58:55Speaker 00

  You know, some scientists will tell you that there are six and some will tell you that there are 22 or 24. I mean, I think if you look at the evidence, there's not really good evidence for e- either of those answers. In fact, there's evidence against both of those answers. I would say, um, there are no core emotions and there is no set of universal emotions. What's universal is affect. Your brain regulates your body. Your body sends, sends data to your brain and you feel it is affect because that's how you're wired. That's how everybody's wired. You know, affect is like this kind of like general barometer that lets you know how your body budget's doing. And that's true for everybody.

• 59:41Speaker 00

  As far as we can tell, from all the cultures that have ever been studied, that's universal. But more than that, how you make sense of, you know, for example, there's one culture where the prescription for what you're supposed to do when you're afraid is go to sleep.

• 1:00:00Shane Parrish?

  Interesting. Yeah, that's way different than what we do.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  Right. If we were to translate that into a Western meaning-making, the analogy would be play dead, you know, so the threat doesn't, doesn't take any interest in you. Go to sleep. Whereas that's not, that's not typically what we uh, think of as the modal response to fear, the stereotypic response to fear in our culture. So, and if you don't understand that, that just means that you don't have that kind of mind that was pickled in that kind of culture. You have a different kind of mind that was pickled in a different kind of culture. In a neurotypical brain, everyone is equipped to run, but when you run, how you run, that's not universal.

• 1:00:45Shane Parrish?

  Is love an emotion?

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  Oh, I just, you know, here's the thing, to people who believe that there are different mechanisms for emotion and for think, you know, for, for emotion and for cognition, for thinking and for perceptions, for seeing and for thinking and whatever. That's a really meaningful question. To me,

• 1:01:09Shane Parrish?

  Not meaningful at all.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  Not meaningful. It's all, the mechanisms are all the same. It doesn't matter whether you're thinking or feeling or seeing or hearing or whatever. It's all the same mechanisms. Your brain is taking in sense data from the body and from the world, and it's using past experiences to make sense of what that means. So, is love uh, an emotion? I,

• 1:01:32Shane Parrish?

  We're labeling it that through, through our brain almost.

• 1:01:35Speaker 00

  Sometimes when people ask that question, they're asking because it, because they're looking for evidence of something. You know, so for example, sometimes people ask that question, I'm guessing, because there's this belief that we are less in control of our emotions than uh, we are of our thoughts, which is really false, actually. So this is something I talk about in How Emotions Are Made, uh, my uh, book that is in print now and my new book. Um, this is something I talk about in both books, although in a, in a, in a bit of a different way. The idea that Uh, you know, you're not in control of your emotions, the moments of emotion,

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  and therefore you're less responsible for them, you're less culpable for them. Um, and so if we say that love is an emotion, then it means that you're sort of less responsible for what you do.

• 1:02:29Shane Parrish?

  Well, no, can't, can't love be an emotion, but you're still responsible for what you do?

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  You, you can, but I'm saying when people ask that question, that's usually why they're asking. It's like, you can't help who you love. Well, okay, sure, but uh, you can help who you put yourself in, in proximity to. Um, you know, if I don't wanna eat potato chips, I don't put potato chips in my cupboard and then try really hard not to eat them. I just don't have them in my cupboard. You can't help who you love, you can't help who you become attached to, is, is sort of not true. But what it means to be in control is different than what people usually think. They think, they think about overcoming something in the moment, as opposed to making

• 1:03:14Speaker 00

  good decisions to architect your environment in such a way as to not let there certain things happen.

• 1:03:20Shane Parrish?

  Right. I like the architecting environment angle. How, how do we work to overcome or, you know, we still have to function, right? How do we make good decisions when we're feeling emotional? How do we, how do we architect an environment? Those are sort of like three separate questions.

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I think the first thing I would say is that when you're in an emotional episode, people often do make really good decisions. The idea that emotions are foibles, that they kind of trip you up, is a really old view. It's not supported by the evidence. Do emotions sometimes trip you up? Yeah. Does thinking sometimes trip you up? Absolutely. Right? So there are just times when you're making good decisions and times when you're not, but it's not really aligned with whether or not you're emotional, or whether or not you're being, you know, rational or thinking. I mean, even the whole idea that, you know, your brain is a battleground between emotion

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  and reason, you know, battling it out for control of your behavior is a very old. Story, but it's a myth. It's not how your brain works. Your brain didn't evolve that way, doesn't work that way, it's not structured that way.

• 1:04:35Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me about that because we tend to think there's this continuum when we're making decisions between emotional brain and rational brain and you, you sort of like want to know where you are on that continuum and society sort of seems to nudge us towards more rational and less emotional as if they're, they're sort of like less valuable in some way.

• 1:04:55Speaker 00

  You have one brain. You don't have two brains or three brains. You don't have an emotional brain. You don't have a rational brain. There's no part of your brain that's devoted to emotion that isn't used when also in moments when you are being rational. So that's the first thing to understand. There are, certainly there are times when you feel more in control of your behavior and times when you feel less in control of your behavior. Meaning there are times when it, when your behavior feels more automatic and there are times when it feels more effortful, your actions feel more effortful. There are times when affect is very, you're feeling it very strongly. Those are moments where the brain

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  would typically be making emotions. But that can, that can trip you up. It can also lead to great, it also occurs in, in, it also occurs in great moments of heroism and great moments of valor. We tend to think about emotional moments as hot and intense and rational moments as cool and not intense, but that really just has more to do with how much affect you're feeling in that moment. And in fact, you can have very rational decision making when, when there's a lot of affect going on.

• 1:06:14Shane Parrish?

  Are there certain things that we can do to make better decisions when we are feeling emotional?

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  This is what I say to my students too, actually. Whenever you hear something or you see something and you have this intense reaction of, I love it. This is awesome.

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  Or a really negative reaction, tense, intense negative reaction like, I hate this, that's stupid, or this is, you know, I hate that person, or whatever. Those are the moments to just stop and, you know, use the intensity of your affect as a cue to stop and interrogate what's going on. If you love something, you're reading something, or you're hearing something and, you know, on the news, maybe, or you're watching a YouTube thing, or whatever, and you love it, that, whatever was just said validates some deeply held belief that you have. And whenever you hear something that you hate, that just violated probably some deeply held belief that you just had.

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  So stop and take a moment and think about it. Try to, try to observe what's going on. You know, if you take a moment before the heat of the moment has you in its grip, you will make better decisions. But that's not about really being emotional or being rational. That's about using your affect as a cue, as a, using it as a barometer, the way, what it was designed by evolution to be, as a cue, that this might be a moment where you want to slow down for a minute and take stock.

• 1:07:52Shane Parrish?

  What are the things that we can do environmentally? You mentioned sort of like not having the chips around. Are there other things that you've learned that we can increase our environment to nudge us toward, or put us on the path to success?

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  A lot of things that we know of that help to put us on the path to success are things that are only easy for people to do, who have enough privilege to have control over their environments. So, things like, you know, getting enough sleep. I mean, you know, I said, well, that's the, that's the one, if you could only pick one thing, that would be the thing, but not everyone actually has that luxury. You know, ambient noise is, is, uh, random, kind of loud, you know, bangs and, and kind of loud noise is, you know, what happens, for example, if you live in New York, or whatever, you know, you, eventually your brain stops.

• 1:08:49Speaker 00

  Hearing that noise, it just becomes background.

• 1:08:53Shane Parrish?

  But every time I go there, it's like, holy cow, what is going on?

• 1:08:57Speaker 00

  Right, right. It's really hard on your nervous system because your brain is, it's, it's trying to figure out what is signal and what is noise. Like, what do I need to pay attention to and learn and make sense of? And spend on and what do I, what can I ignore? That in and of itself, like the amount of uncertainty and is actually really hard on nervous system.

• 1:09:17Shane Parrish?

  It's so weird. Like, there'll be a fire truck that'll go by my bedroom with, you know, at night and I won't notice a thing. The window could even be open. But if my kids cough, I'm like alerted right away to like, what's going on? And you know, I often can't even go back to sleep because if they, if I wake up, I'm like on high alert. It's not even like I wake up in this. It's like, what happened? Oh, they need me and they don't need me at all. They're like back asleep and I'm wide awake and wired and yeah.

• 1:09:46Speaker 00

  This is the reason why when my daughter was like six weeks old, I told my husband, she cannot sleep. She cannot continue to sleep in our room. I will never get another night's sleep ever in my life while this kid is in my room. Like, because every little thing, I would hear every little thing. And now we have a puppy and it's exactly the same thing.

• 1:10:07Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me more about sort of like the brain interpreting things and it's almost like a reality distortion.

• 1:10:13Speaker 00

  No, it's not a reality distortion. It's a reality creator.

• 1:10:17Shane Parrish?

  Reality creator. Okay. So what can we do? Understanding that, like I'm thinking, is there anything that we can do to get closer to truth or reality? Like, understanding that our brain is sort of like stimulating and interpreting and sort of like making meaning. Is there anything we can do to make? To get closer to what's actually happening or closer to some sort of like objective truth, if you will? Like when that person cuts you off or you're going to make meaning out of it, make sense of it. Is there anything that we can do to, to get closer to the reality of the world versus the reality of our head?

• 1:10:52Speaker 00

  Well, the reality of your head was wired by the reality of the world. That's of some world that you grew up in. So oftentimes, what happens is that the micro wiring of your brain is, is shaped by one kind of world and then you move to a different kind of world and.

• 1:11:15Speaker 00

  Then it's really expensive to retool. And some brains do it well and others don't. And then mistakes are made and things become very expensive in various ways. I'm gonna answer your question, assuming that your question is valid, which is that we wanna be closer to reality.

• 1:11:36Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:11:36Speaker 00

  Whatever that means, because sometimes I don't know that that's always really the right thing to do. But, so here's an example. So, somebody cuts me off and I'm really rushing to get someplace and someone cuts me off. But the initial meaning my brain is gonna make is from my own personal perspective, because of course, that's how we all see things. You can practice trying to see something from another person's point of view. So, maybe that person just didn't see me. Maybe that person's rushing somewhere. Maybe that person has a kid who's in the hospital. Maybe that person has a really important meeting to be at, or something really important to take care of.

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  There's this saying that comes from contemplative philosophy, which is that anger is a form of ignorance. And what that means is, when you only see something from your own perspective, and you fail to acknowledge that there's another perspective, you are ignorant of something. And what you're ignorant of is the fact that, you know, you exist in a complicated network of connections to other people.

• 1:12:44Shane Parrish?

  You just can't see something and therefore you're ignorant and angry.

• 1:12:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you can try, you can practice. You can, before, what it means to have control is not to then really try hard to take that person's perspective in that moment, because that's really hard. What it means to have control is that you practice taking other people's perspective before that moment, so that when that moment comes, you can do it very automatically. You know, it's like, if you need to build a skill, you don't wait until the exact second that you need the skill and then try it. No, what you do is you practice the skill in advance until you get really practiced at it, really automatic at it, and then you can kind of do it without a lot of effort.

• 1:13:34Speaker 00

  For example, taking somebody else's perspective is one way to get closer to reality because it dislodges you from the illusion that your way of seeing things is the only way. And in fact, in science, there's a wonderful book by this historian of science, her name is Naomi Oreskes. And the title of the book is called "Why Trust Science?" And her argument, which is a really intriguing argument, is that the way that we know that something is true in science, true with scare quotes, is that a group of scientists who

• 1:14:18Speaker 00

  come from diverse backgrounds and have diverse beliefs and diverse values, all come to consensus about what the evidence says. Then you can have much more confidence to call that finding a scientific fact. I mean, scientists don't like to use the word "fact," and they don't like to use the word "reality" usually very much. But fact is a real no-no. It's an F-word we just don't use in science because it's always conditional, it's always probabilistic. Really, there's a wonderful phrase by Henry Gueye, who is a paleontologist who works for the journal Nature.

• 1:15:02Speaker 00

  And he wrote, "Science is the quantification of doubt. It's not about finding facts. It's about how likely is this observation to be true in these circumstances?" And if you get a group of scientists who all have different backgrounds and different assumptions, and they come together in consensus, you can be much more sure that what you're observing is very likely to be the case in this circumstance. Right? However, you have no diversity in science, and you have really, you know, a bunch of people with the same background, the same history, and the same assumptions, and they come together in consensus.

• 1:15:47Speaker 00

  What you're likely there to have is bias, usually bias that upholds whatever advantage those people who are making the decision actually have. And so, but the same principle is useful in your own life, I think. And that is that you can choose to try to take somebody else's perspective. Like, right now, you can, you can look around the room. You can listen. If you pay attention to your body, there are some things that you can focus on that you weren't focusing on a moment ago. And you can change your experience. Like, right now, what I'm about to say, there's something that we're, that you and I are both doing right now.

• 1:16:30Speaker 00

  That our brains were not tracking. Well, our brains were tracking, but we weren't, we weren't, we weren't really aware. It wasn't in the forefront of awareness. But the minute I say it, it will be in the forefront of your awareness. And that is your legs pressing against the seat of your chair. Or your back pressing against the, um, the back of your chair. That sense data is always there. But you mostly don't pay attention to it unless you're in discomfort in some way.

• 1:17:00Shane Parrish?

  Your focus determines where your, your attention goes, yeah.

• 1:17:03Speaker 00

  So here's an example of something that's similar that I do almost every day. Not because, I'm, I'm just trying to build a skill, like build a muscle, you know? Every day, I, you know, as I'm walking on the sidewalk, say, I look for a weed. I look for a moment where I can feel awe over the power of nature. That is just, will not be, you know, repressed, will not be contained by, uh, by humans' need to try to control it. And for me, the perfect example is a weed. When I see a weed popping up through the crack of a sidewalk.

• 1:17:44Speaker 00

  I almost always now practice trying to see that as a really wondrous, beautiful thing. Because it, it's a symbol of, um, the fact that, you know, nature is irrepressible. And there's, there are many things in life which are much bigger than you. And when you cultivate those moments where you realize that the world, that the natural world is much bigger than you, well, at least for me anyways, I don't, I don't experience that as an existential crisis. I experience that as an existential break. Like, okay, something's bigger than me. Many things are bigger than me. That means my problems in the moment are really small and conditional. And that gives my nervous

• 1:18:28Speaker 00

  system a break for a minute. You know, I, I really try to cultivate every day at least one moment where I feel like a speck.

• 1:18:36Shane Parrish?

  Because it puts everything into perspective.

• 1:18:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And I try to do this whether I'm feeling, you know, stressed or not, whether my brain has been busy trying to prepare me for expenditures or not, because I'm trying to build a muscle and keep it fit for when I need it.

• 1:18:56Shane Parrish?

  That's an excellent place to end this conversation, Lisa. I really want to thank you for your time. This has been phenomenal.

• 1:19:02Speaker 00

  Oh, it's my pleasure. It was so much fun talking to you.

• 1:19:13Shane Parrish?

  Hey, one more thing before we say goodbye. The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Fernham Street. I want to make this the best podcast you listen to, and I'd love to get your feedback. If you have comments, ideas for future shows, or topics, or just feedback in general, you can email me at [email protected] or follow me on Twitter at Shane A. Parrish. You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at fs.blog/podcast. If you want a transcript of this episode, go to fs.blog/tribe and join our learning community. If you found this episode valuable, share it online with the hashtag The Knowledge Project or leave a review. Until the next episode.

• 1:20:12Shane Parrish?

  The.