Practical Tools for a Less Anxious Life - Donald Robertson

Donald Robertson is a cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist, an author and an expert on ancient philosophy. Why are we so anxious in the safest time in human history? Our brains evolved for real danger, predators, hunger, survival, not notifications and deadlines. So what are the modern tools for calming our primitive nervous system in a modern world? And is the answer something our ancestors already knew? Expect to learn what Donald wishes more people knew about anxiety, how it works and what causes it, how CBT might be the best therapy to combat chronic anxiety, what the main problem with the major psychoanalytic theorists is, why CBT is just a modern extension of Stoicism, why modern American culture has become extraordinarily passive aggressive, how people can keep their life in alignment with their values and much more… - 0:00 How Anxiety Actually Works 15:40 Is Self-Help Actually Helpful? 25:55 Why Avoidance Makes Anxiety Worse 39:22 Useful Skills to Tackle Your Anxiety 48:47 Top Down vs Bottom Up: What’s the Best Approach? 01:03:08 Were the Stoics the Original Psychotherapists? 01:11:14 Why People Fear Exposure Therapy 01:26:42 Should We Prioritise Targeting Anger? 01:41:01 Why Donald Quit Psychodynamic Therapy 01:52:24 Where to Find Donald - Get 10% discount on all Gymshark products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Good news, I'm going back on tour with a brand new live show in Australia, New Zealand and Bali. If you are interested in learning how to overcome imposter syndrome, reach your goals while not missing your entire life, my perspective on where true confidence comes from, everything I've ever discovered about discipline, plus brand new insights that I've never spoken about on the podcast, then join me on stage as I explore all of these topics with you. And you can get involved during an extensive Q and A where we work through the biggest questions that you have right now. Perth and Brisbane are completely sold out, but there are still tickets available for Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Christchurch, Auckland and Bali. And you can get yours right now by going to the link in the description

• 0:38Chris Williamson?

  below or heading to chriswilliamson.live. What do you wish more people knew about how anxiety works and what causes it from your perspective?

• 0:50Donald Robertson?

  Gosh. Well, anxiety used to be my specialism although now I focus a bit more on anger these days. But they're two of my favorite emotions. The main thing I think that people should know about anxiety is it's, we tend to think of emotions in a very simplistic way in our society. We have very simplistic language for emotions and most people buy into something that psychologists sometimes call the hydraulic model of emotion, which is the idea that emotions are just like a blob of energy that sort of wells up inside you and you can sort of try and push them down or you can sort of vent them or whatever.

• 1:30Donald Robertson?

  And that's wrong. It isn't how emotions work, basically. It's massively overly simplistic, unfortunately. That's what we sometimes call the folk psychology or kind of default psychology. So we get off to a bad start by not having the faintest idea how our emotions work in the first place. So the main thing I would say is I think of an emotion like anxiety more like a recipe for baking a cake. Like it's got milk and sugar and eggs and raisins and whatever else you want to put in. So the thoughts, actions, feelings, mental images, memories, all these things kind of get mixed together and that bakes the cake of whatever type of anxiety that you've got. And the main thing people should know about treating

• 2:11Donald Robertson?

  anxiety, I'll hammer this home because it really is one of the main things. I like to call this the most robustly established technique in the entire field of psychotherapy research.

• 2:23Donald Robertson?

  How would you like to hear about that? Right? And that's no exaggeration.

• 2:28Donald Robertson?

  So there's a thing that we use in CBT that we've known about for like well over half a century. Maybe it's cracking on like 70 years or more now that it's been used in therapy called exposure therapy, right? And it's probably the most reliable type of therapy that we have. Basically, it's used for phobias and other types of anxiety as well. So Chris, what would happen if you take someone that's got a cat phobia? Animal phobias are generally considered to be pretty much the simplest type of anxiety. It's pretty straightforward. There's other types of anxiety. It comes in flavors like social anxiety, panic attacks, PTSD, stuff like that, right? But we'll start off with a nice, easy snake phobia or a cat phobia.

• 3:12Donald Robertson?

  So you get someone with a cat phobia, right? And you sling them in a room with a bunch of cats. What's going to happen to their heart rate for a start? It's going to go up a lot. It's going to go, it's probably going to almost double, Chris, like as if you're sprinting or something like that, and it'll do that in less than five seconds. And that's a pretty robust measure of anxiety, generally speaking, certainly for phobias, it is, right? So that's easy. We start off with an easy question to kind of lure you in, buddy. Now I'm going to ask you a slightly trickier question. What happens next? Does it stay there? Forever. Uh, what, until the cats are removed? Until the cats are removed. You know, what goes up must come down, right?

• 3:55Donald Robertson?

  So we could wait, we could wait as long as we like. Like, is he just going to stay there forever? Like, it's probably going to start to come down eventually, right? And it'll return probably to almost its starting level if we wait long enough, right? And nothing catastrophic happens. Actually, the first thing that will happen is this cat phobic is going to want to get out of the room desperately, right? But they can't because we locked the door so tough, right?

• 4:23Donald Robertson?

  Hey, but there'll be an urge. This is why people often don't overcome their fears, right? Because there'll be a powerful drive to avoidance, obviously. So interestingly, what's one of the main things that would encourage somebody to stay in the room even though they desperately want to run out the door would be the presence of another person encouraging them to do it. Now, that might be somebody that's getting paid money for doing it, like a therapist or whatever, you know, good for them. But back in the day when you were just little, Chris, it might have been your mum or dad, basically, that was encouraging you to do things that were maybe making you feel unnecessarily anxious at first. They were saying, Chris, it's gonna be okay, you don't need to be scared, it'll be fine. You know, you'll get used to, you know, playing a sport or petting

• 5:07Donald Robertson?

  a big dog or whatever, is he a bit nervous about initially? So the presence of another person can be a game changer and getting people to stay there for longer. So the heart rate's probably gonna come down, right? How long do you think that might take?

• 5:23Chris Williamson?

  Two hours?

• 5:25Donald Robertson?

  Might be. If it's a really severe phobia, it could take two hours. It might take, you know, usually it'd be less than an hour. It might, in some cases, it might even just be like 10, 15, 20 minutes if it's kind of milder phobia, right? So let's assume that's what happens, you know, because that's generally be, that's generally what we'll find, maybe at least 90% of the time, right? Unless there's some kind of complicating factor. So what happens if you manage to get a hold of this woman and you bring her back and you do the same thing the next day?

• 5:54Chris Williamson?

  Heart rate doesn't spike as high and doesn't stay high for as long?

• 5:58Donald Robertson?

  Well, you're getting better at this. You learn fast, right? So our heart rate will go down and then day three, you bring her in, it won't go up as high again, it'll come down faster. Like, I like to call it like a stegosaurus's tail, you know, like it kind of the smallest spikes and then it kind of fades over time. There's a very low relapse rate for animal phobias unless there's some, unless you get attacked by a cat or something like that, it traumatizes you again. But generally speaking, if you overcome an animal phobia, 90% of the time it will stay gone, right? Basic kind of Pavlovian conditioning, essentially. So one of the main things, the one of the foundational gold standard things in anxiety.

• 6:40Donald Robertson?

  Is that this process happens, it goes by various names, it's sometimes just called emotional habituation. Like it's very well established. If you think about it, animals would need to experience that for adaptation to occur. Like if you, do you remember back in the day when we were all like little furry animals, like we lived out in the African plains or whatever, right? So you're going to the place that you usually get your nuts and berries or whatever, a tree falls down or something and it freaks you out. Like you run away and you go back again the next day, but you're kind of anxious because you don't want to get squashed by a tree. But nothing happens, right? So then you go back the next day. Like, and maybe your anxiety's gone down a bit.

• 7:20Donald Robertson?

  And then you go back the next day and you're still not getting squashed by trees. Your anxiety goes down and eventually getting nuts and berries again, right? The point being that anxiety, we would hope, would wear off naturally. Like through repeated prolonged exposure to the triggers, if nothing bad actually happens. Otherwise you'd just be trapped. We're by anxiety, it wouldn't be very flexible or very adaptive. Um, and so all forms of anxiety pretty much respond to exposure. Um, with some things it's trickier. My favorite example would be social anxiety. That was my specialism years ago as a clinician. At a clinic at Harley Street in London and I mainly treated social anxiety for a long time.

• 8:03Donald Robertson?

  People with social anxiety don't have a phobia for other people's faces, right? It's not exactly the same as an animal phobia, but it's similar. Like they have more what you can describe as fear of negative evaluation, what psychologists call it. So if I have social anxiety, I'm worrying about what you might think of me. And how I come across to you and what you guys might say about me afterwards and things like that. So it's more cognitive. Like it's kind of hypothetical. So exposure therapy is a little bit trickier in that case, right? Because I'd need to kind of expose myself to maybe embarrassing situations. Or expose myself to the idea that people are thinking critically of me.

• 8:45Donald Robertson?

  So exposure therapy for animal phobias has like a 90% success rate within about three hours now when it's done optimally. With social anxiety, it takes a bit longer, but the success rate's on average about 75%ish. Like a bit lower, but still pretty high. How's that for a crash course in anxiety? That's what I want people to know about anxiety. Those are some of the things, anyway.

• 9:07Chris Williamson?

  Unbelievable. Um, a couple of things. Uh, first off, when you were talking about somebody in the room with you helping, uh, one of the first places that my mind went to was soldiers in battle, medieval battle, being next to each other.

• 9:23Donald Robertson?

  That's where your mind went.

• 9:24Chris Williamson?

  Well, look, I'm used to speaking to you, I'm used to speaking to you about fucking ancient history and swords and gladiators and stuff. Forgive me for my Pavlovian conditioning when speaking to you. So, uh, that was the first thing that I thought of. Um, the habituation thing, um, I then thought, well, what if every time that you went back to this place, a bad thing happened? Um, every time that the owner comes home, the dog is mistreated. Every time that you have a conversation with your partner, you're disappointed or made to feel sad, or you're abused, or neglected, or whatever. The habituation works in both directions. So it can presumably work to reinforce anxiety as well as to tune it down.

• 10:10Donald Robertson?

  Yeah, for sure. Like, you could, that will maintain your anxiety. And it, but if you're, something really bad is happening, then you might be justified in experiencing anxiety and being motivated to escape a dangerous situation, right? Um, there's like, the other good question would be, what happens if the anxiety is not really justified, but it doesn't go away? You know, what the, what might explain that? The funny thing is, we now know, one of the main things that explains it is what psychologists tend to call experiential avoidance, which is people doing things to try and avoid feeling the anxiety. Like, so, I try to distract myself from it. Social anxiety is a good example. So we, again, once again, like, so

• 10:51Donald Robertson?

  with social anxiety, I might kind of avoid eye contact, because looking at the audience kind of makes me more, makes my anxiety spike. So I might avoid eye contact. Uh, I might over-prepare before a meeting, because I'm convinced that if I really prepare perfectly, then that'll kind of reduce my anxiety when I actually go into the thing. I might be concentrating on my breathing, like, to try and control my anxiety and/or to distract myself from it. You know, there's various, often self-help type techniques that people might be using to try and avoid contact or distract themselves from their anxiety or control it. We now know that those actually interfere with natural emotional processing, like to prevent habituation happening.

• 11:34Donald Robertson?

  Or you're sitting there thinking, I'm not, I'm going to avoid eye contact with you. I'm just going to stare at my notes here. You'll never really get used to the anxiety, ride that out and allow it to extinguish then. You know, you kind of have to face your fears in order for your brain to process the feeling. But even things like breathing techniques, sometimes they work, but sometimes they can actually backfire and maintain the problem. Why? Essentially. Because you need to allow yourself to experience anxiety for your brain to kind of process it, like basically. Also, if you're trying to get rid of anxiety too much, you create what we now know as a second order problem. As if it wasn't bad enough, Chris, that we've got problems, we have second order problems and third order problems, right?

• 12:19Donald Robertson?

  So, social anxiety is a classic example of a second order problem, funnily enough. It's really serving me well here because it's been a convenient example at three times in a row here, right? But I'll throw in another one to the mix in a minute. So with social anxiety, not only are you anxious about talking to people, you're anxious that they might see that you're anxious. Because you're like, oh man, I hope people don't see I'm sweating and my hands are shaking and all that. I hope they don't notice my blushing or hear my stammering because then they're going to think I'm a big old phony and I shouldn't be here. Like, you know, they're going to think I'm an idiot or something like that, right? So now I see anxiety itself as dangerous because people might judge me even more harshly.

• 13:00Donald Robertson?

  If I didn't give a monkey's, right, whether people see my hands shaking or hear me stammering, then I would probably remove most of my social anxiety, to be honest, right? So second order anxiety, anxiety about anxiety maintains it during exposure, can prevent it from habituating naturally. And when you're trying to kind of get rid of or distract yourself from anxiety, often that reinforces the underlying attitude that anxiety itself is the problem, it's dangerous. I'm now framing it as a threat and that can, that can prevent me from overcoming it. Another different example would be panic attacks. That's like a different flavour. You've got raspberry and vanilla and blackcurrant flavour anxiety, right?

• 13:43Donald Robertson?

  Panic attacks escalate very rapidly and they feel like they're spiralling out of control. They come in a number of varieties, but people sometimes, for example, might fear that they're having a heart attack or a stroke and they're going to drop dead. So you see them a lot in accident and emergency, like people go in and they think, I'm in a heart attack or something. The doctor's like, just anxious, buddy. You're having a panic attack, right? Hmm. But they feel their heart racing and some people will interpret that as a sign that they're going to drop dead. And of course, that's scary. So now you become anxious about the symptoms of anxiety. That doesn't sound too good, right? So it's going to spiral really fast. Your anxiety is feeding off itself, basically. Hmm.

• 14:27Donald Robertson?

  And then you're going to, you're going to freak out. So what do you do? You have to learn to tolerate the feelings. Accept them, view them as harmless, get used to them. Like, which in some ways is harder than it sounds, in some ways it's easier than it sounds. A big problem is the way we talk about and think about anxiety. Again, a big problem is the fact that we see it as kind of a homogenous blob, rather than kind of seeing it as made of different ingredients. So if you think, what is anxiety? Imagine, Chris, you've got a big label and you've written the word anxiety on it and you've slapped it on your anxiety, right? And now imagine that you're peeling back the label and you're going to look underneath it and go, what is this thing they call anxiety?

• 15:12Donald Robertson?

  If I look underneath it, you know, actually, that's one of the best pieces of advice I can give a lot of people. Just literally imagine you're peeling back the label and thinking, what is it we're talking about here in real terms? My heart beating faster, maybe my hands shaking, like maybe kind of trembling, maybe some thoughts flashing through my mind about bad things happening. Hmm. My heart goes faster when I jog. It doesn't freak me out. If I drink a lot of coffee, my heart beats faster. That's not scary. Like, if I'm really happy and euphoric, like my heart might beat faster. That's not terrifying. So why should I frame it as scary or dangerous in this context, right?

• 15:52Donald Robertson?

  So we interpret pretty banal cues, physical sensations in a threatening way sometimes. And we can get beyond that by questioning the way that we're framing it. So learning to normalize the feelings, view them from different perspectives. It helps us to take away the catastrophic expectations and become more accepting of them. That allows us to habituate or to process the feelings more naturally.

• 16:22Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting to think about how intervening with the thing that's happening and pushing it away. I'm going to do breath work. I'm going to meditate myself away from this thing. I'm going to not look at the person. I'm going to expose myself to the situation, but not the specific part of the situation, which is what I'm concerned about, going to over prepare so that I try and reduce down my error rate moving forward. That seems to me, at least from a little bit of the research I did this year, like a big element of acceptance and commitment therapy. And I'm interested in the sort of whether there is something from ACT which is missing from CBT or if, how you come to think about that when it's relating to anxiety.

• 17:07Donald Robertson?

  Well, now we're getting pretty nerdy, right? So I like that. Like, let's go for, like, ACT is a state of the art form of behavior therapy, basically. But it didn't come out of nowhere, Chris. Like, it didn't spring fully armed and armored from the womb like the goddess Athena, right? It kind of evolved out of stuff that was already happening. And actually, standard CBT, Aaron T. Beck's cognitive therapy, the earlier form of cognitive therapy for anxiety, already, I think by the 1980s or whatever, was incorporating some of these kind of acceptance techniques and stuff like that. So were other therapies. So ACT, you could see is the kind of culmination of things that were already happening.

• 17:51Donald Robertson?

  And the evolving field of psychotherapy, psychotherapy. Clinical psychology don't stand still, you know, those research studies coming out every day and things are naturally progressing. But the general public often don't really hear about that. They kind of, things sort of filter down maybe decades later. But I think another way of putting that would be most CBT practitioners now have progressively moved towards a broadly similar set of views. About, you know, they maybe put slightly different emphasis on things. ACT is part of a cluster of different therapies. That are usually lumped together under the CBT umbrella and we call them the third wave in CBT.

• 18:31Donald Robertson?

  So the first wave is early behaviour therapy. The second wave is your classic Beck and Ellis. Kind of cognitive behavioural therapy is most people think of it. And then the third wave is sometimes called the mindfulness and acceptance stuff and ACT would be one of the leading forms of that, although there's a bunch of other variations of it. So, I mean, it is, a lot of researchers and clinicians were kind of arriving at similar conclusions, maybe putting a slightly different spin on it. But thinking, it's like maybe acceptance is a thing from different perspectives. We know, for example, that people who answer,

• 19:11Donald Robertson?

  who strongly agree with the statement anxiety is bad in questionnaires, that statement alone correlates with poorer mental health outcomes in the longer term. That's pretty revealing, right? But Chris, you'll notice a paradox here, like people that come to therapy generally do think anxiety is bad. You know, in a way, that's almost what they assume the whole thing is about and self-help, you know, traditionally encouraged it. So in some ways ACT is, you know, in a sense was shaking things up because certainly there's been a tendency. At least, you know, superficially for people to assume most therapy and self-help is about getting rid of these feelings and, you know, figuring out ways to suppress them.

• 19:54Donald Robertson?

  I thought you were also maybe going to say, Donald, what you're saying, you're kind of, it sounds like you're slagging off self-help and stuff. You know, maybe some of it backfires. But there are problems with self-help. I'll point to the really, I'll start by pointing out the really obvious one, Chris, right? When I was a wee boy. That was a long time ago. You know, do you remember when everything was made of wood? That was, that was when I was a wee boy.

• 20:23Donald Robertson?

  And I'd go in the bookshops. This is before the internet, right? And, you know, they didn't, like, we didn't have, we just did, there was nothing in Scotland except sheeps and whiskey. I'd go in the bookshops and there'd be like one or two self-help books if you were lucky, right? Now you guys are drinking from a fire hose of self-improvement bump like 24/7. If you like, you can do courses, watch videos, you know, listen to podcasts. People consume way more self-improvement and self-help stuff than they did in the past, at least when I was growing up, right? Do you think, well, this is awesome, man. Everybody must be improved significantly.

• 21:06Donald Robertson?

  And, you know, the thing is, it wouldn't be too contentious to say they haven't improved though. Like, society consumes all this self-improvement and self-help stuff. But rates of depression, anxiety, mental health problems in general are escalating every year. Like, there's no evidence that people on the whole, like culturally, are being improved by self-help and self-improvement content. And I think there are probably multiple reasons for that, right? But one of them is that some of the techniques that people learn are actually just maladaptive.

• 21:43Donald Robertson?

  Although I think that, you know, the, the, a more annoying point is that you could take almost any good piece of advice and turn that into bad advice, you know? So there are techniques and strategies that potentially can work, but sometimes they need like a little bit of nuance. And that kind of gets lost a little bit in the messaging. And so people will kind of take away maybe what could be an effective technique, but they misapply it. And then it ends up backfiring for them if they're not careful.

• 22:10Chris Williamson?

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• 22:54Chris Williamson?

  But it also could be that the modern world is anxiety inducing and that self-help is an artificial solution to an artificial problem. That how bad could it be without all of the breathwork and the other strategies?

• 23:10Donald Robertson?

  I mean, I was kind of, now you've got me thinking about medieval nights again. And I was like, was there world any less anxiety? And just saying, I think it'd be pretty, do you not think it'd be scary to live before there was a police force? Like you got to the edge of your village and you're like, the brigands might come and slit my throat. If I want to walk to go see my granddad, you know?

• 23:32Chris Williamson?

  Well, we're often told about, we're often, you get pirates as well. Unless you're, well, you just move away from the coast, right? It's the same argument that's made about climate change. Move away from the coast.

• 23:44Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. I wondered then why, why the chronic anxiety, chronic stress thing seems to be banded about much more in the modern world. And there's an assumption that at some point in the past, being a caveman and not having reliable, reliable heat to make it through the winter. Presumably, we couldn't have been chronically stressed because we would have, it would have just been so maladaptive. It would have been selected against.

• 24:09Donald Robertson?

  Um. I think it's a tricky question. It is a very good question. You know, a lot of people, I think intuitively feel there is something a bit wrong with modern society in this regard. Um. I feel it's lazy to blame the internet, but I can't help but feel that social media is contributing to some of our psychological problems. I think there's some evidence to substantiate that, although there's still a little bit of debate about how to interpret it. Um. We do live in a society where I think people increasingly, increasingly uh think about things without necessarily learning how to cope with them.

• 24:48Donald Robertson?

  Right. So in the past, you know, people encountered threats and risks at more of a visceral kind of practical level. Whereas we watch it on the news now and read about it on social media. And I think this kind of abstract, you know, verbal processing is harder for us to deal with in some ways. Hmm. We, so we talked about flavors of anxiety earlier, right? Phobic anxiety. Like will tend naturally to reduce over time, as long as you actually face it. It feels it's a simpler type. Comes from a simpler age, a simpler world when you get a phobia and then you deal with your anxiety, right? But another type of anxiety I didn't mention yet is worrying, right?

• 25:29Donald Robertson?

  And by worrying, we're usually referring much more to a cognitive process. Dogs don't worry, as far as I know, but they might get phobias, right? Worrying is like a conversation that you're having with yourself and it stereotypically, it sounds like this. What if this happens? What if that happens? How am I going to deal with it? And it goes round and round like that, you know, about hypothetical things, you know, catastrophes. Basically, worrying is a trickier problem when we have a lower success rate in treating it.

• 26:08Donald Robertson?

  Unfortunately, um, it's a paradoxical thing because people can spend many hours a day worrying about stuff. And you'd think again, then they would figure out solutions or they'd adapt to the stuff that they're worrying about. But what worrying seems to do is maintain anxiety at a kind of moderate level chronically. If you're not careful. And I think social media and the news cycle and stuff like that probably fuels worrying.

• 26:37Chris Williamson?

  What are the bad strategies for dealing with anxiety? If those are some of the good ones, what are some of the bad ones?

• 26:46Donald Robertson?

  Bad strategies for dealing with anxiety, everybody's favorite, this is a boring answer in a way, but everybody, the number one most popular coping strategy in the world is avoidance, right? So generally speaking, avoidance is a problem because it prevents habituation from happening. It prevents you demonstrating to yourself or discovering that nothing catastrophic happens, assuming it's an irrational or an unfounded fear. So you carry about certain false assumptions or unrealistic assumptions that never get disproved in practice. It prevents you from evaluating your coping ability and maybe refining and improving your coping skills.

• 27:31Donald Robertson?

  Basically, which would be another key thing. So you face your fears enough time, you kind of figure out ways of dealing with them. Basically, you don't get a chance to do that, you know, you've got zero practice or time on task if you're avoiding stuff. And it increases sensitization to the cues over time. So anxiety really is the root of all evil from a kind of, avoidance, sorry, is the root of all evil. I mean, you'll notice the paradox here is that most people assume anxiety is the problem and maybe avoidance is a way of coping with it. But it might be that anxiety in itself isn't actually that bad and that avoidance is the bigger problem. Right? Because avoidance damages your life and relationships, it prevents you from applying for jobs.

• 28:16Donald Robertson?

  Like it changes your behavior in ways that have a wider impact and a longer term effect on your ability to flourish as a human being. You can do a lot of stuff while feeling anxious. Anxiety isn't as bad as people think, right? Once you get used to it, you think, so what? My hands are sweating and stuff like, you know, my heart's beating a little bit faster. You can even reframe it as excitement. I used to say it's just an adrenaline rush, like it's not a big deal. So you'll see a lot of performers will just ride out their anxiety, especially comedians, stand up comedians. Like if you go and see them live, like I think I used to go and see a lot of shows in London and those guys often maybe ones I saw weren't as experienced.

• 28:57Donald Robertson?

  Just in function rooms above bars and things like that. More like probably the majority of them looked terrified. Right. But they just kind of incorporated it into their act a lot of times. So I think you can, first of all, we've got to deal with avoidance, right? Distraction techniques. Um, suppression of the feeling, using drugs and alcohol to cope. Like impulsive behaviours like masturbation. Um, but also worrying itself is kind of like a maladaptive coping strategy. Hmm. Worrying is kind of like failed problem solving, or it's kind of overlaps a bit with over preparation and stuff like that.

• 29:41Donald Robertson?

  There's a guy called Tom Borkavec, who's one, basically probably the leading researcher on worry. And he followed a theory called conceptualising worry as a form of avoidance. He calls it the cognitive avoidance model of worry. So people, when they worry about stuff, they they kind of trick themselves into thinking they're facing the problem. I've got, I've got to think about this problem, like to kind of, I've got to figure out a solution, buddy. Like, oh, man. I'm up, I woke up at three in the morning, Chris, and I'm like, just thinking about a mistake that I made in my taxis or something. I was up all night, like worrying about what if this happens, what if that happens, how am I going to cope with it? Try to figure out a solution.

• 30:23Donald Robertson?

  And, but what worrying does is it causes you to kind of jump around in an abstract way. Like, so it prevents you from really confronting your problems in a concrete way. Where your anxiety would spike and then you'd get through it. And it, so it kind of maintains anxiety at a moderate level. So it's actually more like a kind of weird, it's like avoidance in disguise. You think you're facing problems and trying to solve them, but you're not really doing it. Like, and so the anxiety never really extinguishes. I'll, I'll back that up with a weird piece of research, right? I talked to you earlier about the women with the cats. With most forms of anxiety, heart rate is a pretty robust measure.

• 31:06Donald Robertson?

  Researchers looking at people who experience severe pathological worrying, they have GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, right, is something called the worrying disorder. So with those people, you can induce, you can get them to practise worrying about stuff in just worry episodes and, you know, measure their heart rate and scovanic skin response, their respiration and stuff like that, the brain imaging and stuff. And what researchers found was these people will say, "My level of anxiety is a hundred percent, I'm up to high dole", as we say in Scotland, like "I was freaking out", right? "So my anxiety is really high, like I'm having an anxiety attack", they'll sometimes say, but the heart rate doesn't go up that much.

• 31:52Donald Robertson?

  And the other physiological signs of anxiety don't really appear. Like the women with the cat phobia, Chris, I'm pretty much guarantee you your heart rate's going to show up, right? Someone with a panic attack, I pretty much guarantee you the heart rate's going to go through the roof. But somebody who's in a worry episode, the heart rate doesn't really go up that. And sometimes it even goes down slightly, which is pretty paradoxical, right? There's one symptom of anxiety that appears consistently in worry episodes, and that's muscular tension. So people that are worrying tend to tense up their neck and shoulders and they tense their forehead muscles, like other muscles around their body as well, for some weird reason. Right, so they're kind of, that fuels the idea that maybe they're not really engaging

• 32:35Donald Robertson?

  with their fears sufficiently to actually process them emotionally. I'll tell you what we tend to do with worrying that works pretty well. In the 1980s, researchers introduced a protocol.

• 32:48Donald Robertson?

  Most clinicians call it worry postponement. It was originally called the stimulus control method, right? And it sounds odd at first, it's, it's the most effective treatments and the history of psychotherapy tend to be the simplest ones.

• 33:05Donald Robertson?

  In all honesty, not like, you know, Sigmund Freud with his Oedipus complex and interpretation of dreams and all that kind of stuff. The things that actually perform best in clinical trials are usually incredibly simple, you know, and we just kind of figure out this is like exposure therapy, right? Worry postponement, you could write the instructions almost in the back of a business card. They gave instructions to college students in the eighties and this has been replicated many times. We now use this method not only for GAD, pathological worrying, but it's also used in even in treating clinical depression and treating anger, like modified versions of it, because it's been such a robust technique. So the instructions are you need

• 33:48Donald Robertson?

  to spot when you're beginning to worry and catch it early. And then you say to yourself, I'm not in the right frame of mind to think about this right now. I'll come back to it later at a planned worry time that I've set aside, like seven o'clock this evening, when I like to do my worrying, right? So I'll maybe write down on a bit of paper worrying about taxes, worrying about what I'm worrying about running out of things to say to Chris, right? I'll write that down on a bit of paper, stick it in my pocket, back to that later, right? And then at seven o'clock or wherever your prescribed worry time is, you sit down, if it's still a real problem, you sit down and problem solver or like think about it. If it doesn't seem like it's a real thing, then you just kind of forget about it. And

• 34:33Donald Robertson?

  that's more or less all there is to the simplest version of the protocol. That reduces the frequency, intensity and duration of worry episodes by roughly 50% within two or three weeks, right? You think, what the hell is going on there? Right? It doesn't seem like they're really doing all that much. But the trick is that worrying feels like you're fixing a problem. But you need to understand that your brain goes into different states of functioning. It's like being drunk versus being sober or being drowsy versus being fully awake. So when anxiety is triggered, fight or flight response is triggered or whatever, you think, I'm gonna, I need to solve this problem urgently.

• 35:15Donald Robertson?

  But you're not in the ideal problem solving state of mind because anxiety biases your thinking. It causes you to exaggerate the severity and probability of risks, causes you to underestimate your coping ability, you revert back to more simplistic black and white thinking because you've basically flipped a switch and turned on the emergency mode. Your amygdala is kind of like starting to hijack your thinking. So you're now thinking in low bandwidth, rapid terms, in extreme terms. Like you're not, your brain isn't in the right mode of functioning to engage in problem solving, especially for like complex interpersonal problems and things like that. So that's partly why you'll go around in circles, right? But if you say, I'll come back to this later.

• 35:59Donald Robertson?

  Seven o'clock tonight, I'm going to sit down, I'll put on my favourite worry music. Like I'll slip into my comfy worry slippers and put on my little worrying hat that I like to wear and I'll sit and have a good old think about my worries, right? But when you're doing that now, you're using your neocortex, your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that's actually designed for problem solving and looking at the bigger picture and thinking rationally. So now, because you're choosing when you're going to do it, the trick is you're using your brain in a different mode of functioning, basically, and you're probably going to think things through in a more balanced, nuanced way. That's why it tends to work better.

• 36:40Donald Robertson?

  Some people think it seems weird to postpone thinking about problems. But if you were drunk, Chris, you just had a bottle of whiskey, right? You wouldn't sit there and think, well, this is a good time to get on my motorbike or operate heavy machinery or whatever. You think I should probably just wait until it's sobered up. And you might think it's not a good time to phone up my sister that I haven't spoken to for years and have a debate with her about our like family feuds and things like that. I may think I should wait until it's sobered up, right? In the same way, we postpone thinking about things all the time. Like the best, simplest example would be the middle of the night.

• 37:21Donald Robertson?

  So people with pathological worrying almost always have incipient insomnia as well. They can't get to sleep usually like because they lie in bed worrying about stuff. Whereas normally what the normal people do, they think, oh, man, maybe I've got something wrong in my tax returns or whatever. They think, yeah, but it's like two in the morning. I'll think about this tomorrow. Right. So they they kind of set shelf it and they go, I'll come back to it later. But some people find that they can't do that. They don't have the cognitive skills to be able to postpone thinking about things. So they they're worrying spirals out of control because you're half asleep as well. It's not really an appropriate time. But if you were telling your kids a bedtime story and you suddenly thought, oh, man, like, I still haven't figured out what questions I'm going to ask Donald

• 38:06Donald Robertson?

  in that interview that I'm doing tomorrow or whatever. You wouldn't think, hang on, kids, like, let me just go away and worry about this for a bit. And then when I've finished, I'll come back and finish your story. You would say to the thought, I'll put pin in this and I'll come back to it later. Because I'm kind of busy right now. I so it's actually completely natural to postpone responding to intrusive anxious thoughts until a more appropriate time. But a lot of people don't know that. They don't tell kids that at school, you know. And some people just get in the habit of allowing their anxious thoughts to hijack their thinking. Right. So that simple skill alone can make a big difference.

• 38:46Donald Robertson?

  And it shows, you know, worrying in a way can be seen as a problem of avoidance. Because we were thinking about things and we'd feel that we're solving a problem, but we're not in the right state of mind to do it. And we're doing it in such an abstract way, usually it's not really beneficial.

• 39:05Chris Williamson?

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• 39:48Chris Williamson?

  Right now, you can get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below. Or heading to r p strength.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's r p strength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. You mentioned that some people who have anxiety struggle to be able to deploy that worry time delay strategy. What if someone says, okay, I realize I'm worrying too much. I have intrusive thoughts, I'm ruminating, I don't get to choose when it happens. And when I say, I'll do this at 7pm tomorrow, my brain goes, okay. And then just goes straight back to worrying about the intrusive thoughts over and over again.

• 40:32Donald Robertson?

  They need to learn certain metacognitive skills or whatever you like, cognitive skills.

• 40:40Donald Robertson?

  So you can learn how to do that, right? They need a lot of that training, right? This is the other reason self-help has some limitations because some of the techniques that you would learn from a therapist, I guess it would be like going to a fitness instructor or something. There's certain exercises that might benefit people, but they probably need to be taught how to do them properly. And they maybe need a bit of preparation, like before they kind of get fully into doing them. So they might, to do worry postponement effectively, you might need a bit of preparation, a bit of coaching, a little bit of training to actually get the most out of the techniques. So short answer, they need to probably develop a skill that we call cognitive diffusion. There's different names for it, right? Sometimes it's called cognitive distancing or verbal diffusion.

• 41:22Donald Robertson?

  It's a big part of ACT, acceptance and commitment therapy that you mentioned earlier. There's like half a dozen or more like strategies for doing it that are commonly used in therapy. So. It's an important concept, so I'll explain a little bit about it. Normally, when people have thoughts, they kind of look at the world through the lens of the thought. It's like you're looking through a telescope or something, right? You're not looking at the telescope, you look through the telescope like at things way off in the distance. When you're catastrophizing about the future, you're kind of looking through catastrophic binoculars or a catastrophic telescope, like, oh, man, what if that happens? That'd be awful. How am I going to cope with it, right? So diffusion would be taking a step back and looking at the telescope.

• 42:07Donald Robertson?

  It's observing your thoughts kind of from one side almost. Or sometimes you would say it's like observing your thoughts as a process or an activity that's taking place in the present moment in your mind, rather than allowing your attention to be funneled or channeled through those thoughts. It's a little bit of a weird concept at first, but in a way, it's a simple concept. You know, some of the things we know about psychology are like kind of simple ideas, but we don't always have good language to articulate them. And so that, again, that's another reason people sometimes do a lot of coaching to get the knack of it. But diffusion is a simple thing. You could, the simplest way to do it would be just to say to yourself, right now, I noticed that I'm worrying about paying my taxes.

• 42:51Donald Robertson?

  Right? And that forces you into metacognitive awareness or like this kind of detached perspective, observing your own thoughts. And then it becomes easier to disengage from them, basically. Or you might say, another trick you can play is you could say, uh, right now, I noticed that Donald is having the thought, what if this happens, what if that happens? And by, that pushes me into a third person perspective by referring to myself in the third person, like using my name, like, or using like third person pronouns or whatever. I can trick myself into stepping to one side and becoming an observer of my thoughts.

• 43:33Donald Robertson?

  Then I might say, uh, right now, I know it's Donald 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 that someone would easily turn that into an avoidance technique. But the point is to emphasise that you're going to come back to it later and give it your full attention. So you might, sometimes there's a knack to turning what seems like avoidance into its opposite, into a form of acceptance. They, 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. So that way, you're kind of, you're not sending the message to your brain that you're scared of these thoughts, or that they're dangerous and a problem. They're saying, no, I want to look at them. I'm going to

• 44:16Donald Robertson?

  look at them actually more fully, like in a more committed way. And that takes the, that tends to create a sense of confidence and it takes the edge off the anxiety as well.

• 44:26Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 44:37Donald Robertson?

  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 flavour of cognitive therapy or behaviour 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 behaviourally inclined would do that maybe, 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 close attention and catch those very rapid pre-conscious thoughts when they're flashing

• 45:21Donald Robertson?

  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 behaviour and in your feelings. Like, for example, Chris, how many beliefs do you have, buddy?

• 45:42Chris Williamson?

  Millions, millions.

• 45:43Donald Robertson?

  Loads, 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 in your personality and your behaviour and stuff. And that's what Ellis was 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. 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 the the form of conscious sentences that you're repeating to yourself, right?

• 46:28Donald Robertson?

  Or you can just, you know, so like I said, some people might just teach you tension release, um, relaxation techniques. I feel inclined to say something about that as well, like, you know, just to kind of highlight, there's another example of an area. The guy that developed the main relaxation techniques that are used in CBT was a professor of physiology called Edmund Jacobson, back in the nineteen twenties, one of the pioneers of biofeedback.

• 46:57Donald Robertson?

  And Jacobson, uh, 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 that 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.

• 47:24Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 47:25Donald Robertson?

  Like, and then it's kind of rebound.

• 47:28Chris Williamson?

  Ancient, uh, yeah, philosophy.

• 47:32Donald Robertson?

  Woo wee.

• 47:32Chris Williamson?

  Trying not to try.

• 47:33Donald Robertson?

  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 thirty seconds or whatever. 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.

• 48:08Chris Williamson?

  But Why is bodily relaxation, why is relaxing of the muscles so important?

• 48:14Donald Robertson?

  It tends to lower sympathetic nervous system arousal. I, and so it could be, it's one way of potentially dumping 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 of trying to get rid of their anxiety.

• 48:32Chris Williamson?

  It's another

• 48:33Donald Robertson?

  Maybe I, I see, it could be an avoiding strategy, right? But you can, I believe, there's some debate about this. This is where we get into the kind of nerveville of like therapy, therapists 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?

• 49:16Donald Robertson?

  But if I think I'm trying to relax away the feelings of anxiety, that might backfire.

• 49:21Chris Williamson?

  Different.

• 49:21Donald Robertson?

  If I imagine myself as relaxing into them, then it could actually be turned into a form of emotional acceptance technique, arguably.

• 49:29Chris Williamson?

  Obviously, there's a lot of, I guess, up until maybe about ten 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. What's your perspective on?

• 49:56Chris Williamson?

  How the blend, what the proportion is of bottom up versus top down for something like worry or anxiety?

• 50:02Donald Robertson?

  So I'll lean more towards the cognitive perspective. Like, I mean, 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. 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 skills can be powerful and those can change your beliefs because you could prove to yourself

• 50:43Donald Robertson?

  that you're capable of coping and enduring the feelings, for example, if you apply those skills in the right kind of way. And they can change your thinking.

• 50:54Donald Robertson?

  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.

• 51:10Donald Robertson?

  Or you might, some people might, 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 and 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.

• 51:54Donald Robertson?

  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. 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,

• 52:35Donald Robertson?

  that shape their character and their feelings in a very general way, needed some attention. And it may be like that 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.

• 52:53Chris Williamson?

  It's not just how you feel, it's how you think. Why is that, why is that such an important sentence?

• 53:01Donald Robertson?

  Because emotions aren't just like a blob of energy, like they're, they're 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 realise 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.

• 53:43Donald Robertson?

  But 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 that are 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

• 54:24Donald Robertson?

  can sometimes help us to get more deep and pervasive improvement, especially if we go for these real underlying attitudes, my 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's 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, like, so that you can think of a different way to respond. This is kind of coping skills

• 55:07Donald Robertson?

  approach, right? But you might still think, if somebody insults me, then that just means that they're a total jerk, right? If Chris says something I don't like, it means he's an asshole, right? So I might have a tendency, there's a tendency cognitively in anger, to reduce people's personality to a single negative trait. Is that similar to the fundamental attribution error?

• 55:38Donald Robertson?

  Yeah, I guess it's, you know, maybe it's related in some ways. It feels like a reductive, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a kind of, 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. Right, just an idiot, just a jerk. They're not really a fully formed human being in our eyes anymore. So they kind of distorts the nature of our relationship.

• 56:20Donald Robertson?

  And you might, some people, especially angry people, will tend to think that that's fine. He is a total jerk, right? And 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. So it makes it pretty hard to actually deal with them effectively or negotiate with them or problem solve. You're gonna 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

• 57:04Donald Robertson?

  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. So social psychologists and, you know, other researchers have talked about this kind of objectifying tendency as being the basis of a more serious problem, which is called dehumanization.

• 57:31Donald Robertson?

  Throughout history, you know, people have had moral codes. You know, most societies agree that it's wrong to steal from people or to kill them.

• 57:42Donald Robertson?

  With one exception, which is if they're, if they don't count as fully fleshed human beings, then it's fine. Yeah. Right. And the ancient world, those were barbarians.

• 57:55Donald Robertson?

  So the Greek word barbaroi, do you know what it means originally? Uh, rodent, non-human, vermin? No, it's better than that. It's onomatopoeic, Chris, right? It means people that go bar, bar, bar.

• 58:12Chris Williamson?

  Sheep?

• 58:14Donald Robertson?

  No, it just means, it just literally means people that talk nonsense.

• 58:17Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay.

• 58:17Donald Robertson?

  It like, it means people that sound like they're going blah, blah, blah.

• 58:20Chris Williamson?

  Hey, like, like, forgive me, forgive me for thinking that people who go blah, blah, blah are sheep. Because sh- sh- animals who go, yeah, thank you.

• 58:29Donald Robertson?

  Animals that go blah, blah, blah are sheep.

• 58:31Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 58:31Donald Robertson?

  But the Greeks thought that's what barbarians sounded like. Like, they, cause they don't, it means people that don't speak Greek.

• 58:38Chris Williamson?

  Well, we saw, do we not see this with the Nazis? They used the disgust language towards Jews, that they were rodents, they were vermin, yeah.

• 58:47Donald Robertson?

  Yeah. So they don't count. Moral consideration doesn't extend to them, cause we've dehumanized them, they'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, cause they're not humans. Also slaves generally throughout history were treated as less than human, so rules didn't really apply to them. Um, and in some cases, maybe children or women in some societies aren't extended moral consideration in the same way. But there's sometimes criminals, they don't count. They don't have any rights or whatever, they're not really human or, you know. So you could trace that back arguably to certain features of anger.

• 59:30Donald Robertson?

  Um, so 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 to a lot of problems. If you think that's a problem dealing with other people, we get angry with ourselves a lot as well.

• 59:56Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 59:57Donald Robertson?

  You 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.

• 1:00:06Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:07Donald Robertson?

  Right? And they do the same thing. So they're going, I'm such an idiot, I'm completely useless. Like, and they'll self-flagellate, self-castigate using these, what's I call, they're sometimes called global negative ratings of value or global negative labels. Right? I'm just useless, I'm an idiot, crap, I'm incompetent. Um, 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.

• 1:00:49Donald Robertson?

  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, like that's where that's where you went wrong here. Like, so go away and have a, I think about that you might if, you know, 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. There'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, like you can't go, what am I supposed to do?

• 1:01:35Donald Robertson?

  So the solution to that would be get a personality transplant or something like that, you know, it's what 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 could 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.

• 1:02:22Donald Robertson?

  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 can mop up any tendency towards that thinking error.

• 1:02:38Chris Williamson?

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• 1:03:19Chris Williamson?

  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. Plus, 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/modernd wisdom. That's join.whoop.com/modernd wisdom. What are the differences between beliefs and feelings? Are they an important distinction between those two?

• 1:03:57Donald Robertson?

  It's hard to define what's meant by feelings. You know, and also, some of these concepts are really debated to this day by a lot of contemporary psychologists. So, and also, partly because in English, we use some of these words quite vaguely.

• 1:04:14Chris Williamson?

  And interchangeably.

• 1:04:16Donald Robertson?

  And we can use them interchangeably. I would say that generally speaking, if we're talking, we might, by feelings, we might mean physical sensations. Or you might be talking about emotions, for example, particularly if we're talking about emotions.

• 1:04:34Donald Robertson?

  Generally speaking, I would say there's probably quite a pronounced cognitive element. So 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 kind of dictionary definitions. They'd 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. But and so they.

• 1:04:59Chris Williamson?

  Well, I can see, just to interject there, 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, you know, I, I use this bit in my live show where, 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.

• 1:05:40Chris Williamson?

  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 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 ball. Yeah, of course, because you can touch it, feel it and assess it. But because it's so internal and so challenging to show objectively to other people.

• 1:06:23Chris Williamson?

  You need a way of being able to exchange and communicate this.

• 1:06:28Donald Robertson?

  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 that emotions are are are built out of, they some psychologists will say it's like colour 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 behaviour and things that people say, you know, even then there might be some exceptions. So somebody

• 1:07:08Donald Robertson?

  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 apply into also know how to use the concept. But it is 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 to emphasise. 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 um, what do you, what do you think is the first ever book on psychotherapy?

• 1:07:46Chris Williamson?

  On psychotherapy? You're gonna tell, you're gonna tell me it's fucking Epictetus or someone else?

• 1:07:51Donald Robertson?

  Yeah, it's fucking Epictetus.

• 1:07:52Chris Williamson?

  Ah, you tried to catch me.

• 1:07:54Donald Robertson?

  It goes, it goes back even further than that. There's a

• 1:07:57Chris Williamson?

  Ah, no.

• 1:07:58Donald Robertson?

  This is cool. But this is kind of nerdy and cool, right? There's a lost book by Chrysippus, the third head of the Stoic school, called the Lo, the Lost Therapeuticon, right? Like the Necronomicon or something.

• 1:08:13Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:08:13Donald Robertson?

  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.

• 1:08:26Donald Robertson?

  And we we know a bit about it because there are fragments of it preserved in other authors like Galen Marcus Aurelius's 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 like, 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. And 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.

• 1:09:07Donald Robertson?

  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 I, even when I was talking about relaxation, you know, and anxiety. So the muscular tension part of, from the the physical side of anxiety is semi voluntary. Like, so it's a kind of bracing response, like you tense 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,

• 1:09:51Donald Robertson?

  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 gonna 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

• 1:10:35Donald Robertson?

  well, so probably I'm gonna 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. So 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.

• 1:11:16Donald Robertson?

  So choosing to stay in the room with the cats is largely under your voluntary control. Because behaviour therapists sometimes say it's a thing you do with your arms and legs, right? You could 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't, 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, eh, I'll come back to this later. You don't have to have a conversation about it.

• 1:11:55Chris Williamson?

  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 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 about if you don't, it doesn't matter how great a technique is if you don't do it, basically.

• 1:12:22Donald Robertson?

  That could be, 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.

• 1:12:34Chris Williamson?

  What, what is a, what are some of the examples of techniques that are very successful, but people fucking hate?

• 1:12:42Donald Robertson?

  Exposure and response prevention for OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, it's like one of the most effective techniques. For someone who's got bacteriophobia, 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 it sort of 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

• 1:13:23Chris Williamson?

  into it. Presumably that would be a place for something like a retreat or a, an intensive, you know, if you said, hey, 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.

• 1:13:45Donald Robertson?

  Yeah, the OCD hotel, like something like that. That'd be, that'd be fun.

• 1:13:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:51Donald Robertson?

  They, there are, I definitely think there are advantages. I 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, like on a weekly basis with the client. Like, but I used to think breaking out of the consulting room in some ways, you know, rather than just coming up with loads of different variations of things that we can do in a consulting room, like would potentially open up a lot of opportunities. And I, researchers and clinicians do do that to some extent. And they do group stuff. They take clients out and kind of access behavioural exercises out of the, I used to take clients who had social anxiety into Starbucks or whatever,

• 1:14:37Donald Robertson?

  and like I'd spill my coffee or whatever, or like I'd get them to practise going up to people in the street and asking them what year it was. And, you know, these are kind of typical shame attacking or like behavioural experiments that we get people to do. But you have to go to the consulting room to do that, which is sometimes a little bit tricky to organise. I went into so many. Shops in Oxford Street and told them with clients that had I D S, one of their problems is they have almost a phobia often of, but not always, of losing control of their bowels, that whatever, needing to use a bathroom, not being able to do it. So I used to go around and go into shops

• 1:15:22Donald Robertson?

  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'd say, well, that's like a red rag to a bull when it comes to exposure thing, 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'd say, well, yeah, like, I wouldn't really have a problem anymore, like, deal with a lot of my problems. I figured out, earlier I said with social anxiety, it can be tricky to get people to expose themselves

• 1:16:02Donald Robertson?

  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.

• 1:16:25Donald Robertson?

  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 it lying around. It's called How to Overcome Social Anxiety, Blushing and Shyness. Like, has 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 you're like, 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 whalers off and they don't really care anymore.

• 1:17:05Donald Robertson?

  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. Ellis, 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 there's you can look this up. There's videos of people doing it on YouTube, right? And they tie a bit of string around the banana and they walk around the shopping mall like it was a dog. It's 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 effects and liberating people.

• 1:17:50Chris Williamson?

  I mean, like, you know, when we, when we look at uh some of the solutions from history, the witches brew of Eye of Newt and Tail of Frog and such. String and piece of banana doesn't sound actually all that, all that much more insane. So who knew?

• 1:18:08Donald Robertson?

  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 of 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 propathia. 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.

• 1:18:51Donald Robertson?

  And so, for example, one of the big debates about anger is, is it good or bad? Is it hell? Could it ever be healthy and stuff like that? You know, for the Stoics, they helped 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 you interpret it.

• 1:19:13Donald Robertson?

  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 not, you're now handing over your thinking to a bunch of assumptions that are flawed, right, right out of the gate, basically. So that that's problematic. But the Stoics had these techniques like. Um, 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 karamakas, the, where all the prostitutes were, uh, in Athens.

• 1:19:55Donald Robertson?

  Like, they had a bunch of, they called them shamelessness exercises.

• 1:19:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, hang on, hang on.

• 1:20:00Donald Robertson?

  Really similar.

• 1:20:00Chris Williamson?

  Hang on. Tie a piece of string around the neck.

• 1:20:03Donald Robertson?

  The neck of a bottle.

• 1:20:04Chris Williamson?

  And then walk, making it, make a noise behind them.

• 1:20:08Donald Robertson?

  Uh, yeah, well, I guess like it's walking a dog.

• 1:20:12Donald Robertson?

  Like, you know.

• 1:20:15Chris Williamson?

  Around prostitutes, a bottle dog around prostitutes.

• 1:20:18Donald Robertson?

  Yeah, it was the graveyard in Athens. The prostitutes used to work in the graveyard, weirdly. But so it's both, like, it's both the graveyard and where the prostitutes would hang out.

• 1:20:28Chris Williamson?

  Ah, the, the end of life and the creation of it as well before reliable contraception. How fantastic.

• 1:20:34Donald Robertson?

  Yeah. So that, but these are some of the things that I think we can learn from ancient philosophy that we end up kind of reinventing.

• 1:20:41Chris Williamson?

  Graveyard, prostitutes, piece of string, bottle. That's.

• 1:20:44Donald Robertson?

  Yeah, that's all you need to know, basically.

• 1:20:50Donald Robertson?

  You know, I should give people, but I, like, let me give you some work instructions.

• 1:20:55Chris Williamson?

  No, these are, these are great, these are better, these are, 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.

• 1:21:09Donald Robertson?

  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, is 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 assertive communication, and then you actually use it under stress in difficult, challenging situations repeatedly, right?

• 1:21:50Donald Robertson?

  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? Uh, 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?

• 1:22:36Donald Robertson?

  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.

• 1:22:46Chris Williamson?

  And I certainly know, I mean, I, I certainly know that I did that for a very long time. So, yeah.

• 1:22:52Donald Robertson?

  So I hate to break it to you 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, ah, you could do this or you could do that. There's one or two situations where I think I know of no other solution. All right? There's a few times in therapy where 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 gonna be applying your skills consistently. Otherwise, you'll just compartmentalize them.

• 1:23:35Donald Robertson?

  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 practising like avoidant ways of dealing with things, you know, unless you're observing what you're doing, maybe not all day long, but pretty consistently, right? The Stoics knew that, they called it prosoky. 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, right?

• 1:24:19Donald Robertson?

  You've kind of, you're talking the big talk about Stoicism, but 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 practise continually and be constantly observing yourself. Like the Buddhists do, they practise 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 compartmentalised. And I think that's a form of avoidance in a way. And so they don't also practise 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.

• 1:25:03Donald Robertson?

  So they said, look, you have to go and endure voluntary hardship and get out of your comfort zone to some extent, if you want to do self-improvement. But you should also use your imagination, use your noggin, right? And visualise, anticipating in advance. They call this premeditatio malorum, right? So the premeditation of adversity or bad things. The Stoics say every day you should imagine death, exile, poverty, illness, all of the common problems that can befall people and practise responding to them with a philosophical attitude.

• 1:25:40Donald Robertson?

  The people are like, well, I don't really, I can't really be bothered doing that. Right. 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, it's like a ball, you're doing your boxer training, right? At the gym, but you're never getting into the ring. Practice like sparring or fighting anybody, right? Just so it's like, you need to get in the ring, like 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.

• 1:26:21Donald Robertson?

  Like using coping skills, meditation and things like that, but it never really gets applied in practice.

• 1:26:27Chris Williamson?

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• 1:27:12Chris Williamson?

  or heading to livemomentous.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 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.

• 1:27:36Chris Williamson?

  Gratitude meditation journals in a row, every like six month worth, nine of them. And like thousands of sessions of meditation and breathwork and reading and note taking and yin yoga and all of this stuff. But 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 that 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

• 1:28:18Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:28:32Donald Robertson?

  You get state specific learning, or it gets compartmentalized.

• 1:28:36Chris Williamson?

  Much better way to put it, yeah.

• 1:28:38Donald Robertson?

  Um, so the most effective treatment, for example, we talked a little bit about anger. And that's, I said, that's kind of like my hobby at the moment.

• 1:28:47Chris Williamson?

  Are you still doing your, are you still doing your book on anger?

• 1:28:50Donald Robertson?

  I'm doing, I'm working on that. 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.

• 1:28:58Chris Williamson?

  If anyone's gonna do it, I back you to do it.

• 1:29:00Donald Robertson?

  I'm gonna do, I'm gonna write a book all about anger. It's my favorite thing. Like, it's quite an exciting emotion. Like, it's colorful. So there's a lot of interesting things. And 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. Like, it's actually, here's something about, for your self-improvement audience, right?

• 1:29:27Donald Robertson?

  Anger, eh, the success rates in treating anger with CBT are about eh seventy percent mean eh success rate, like measures of clinical, significantly clinically significant improvement. It's about, it's about a seventy percent rate across the board. The largest meta-analyses, like these are studies that combine statistically lots of RCTs, like randomised controlled trials, it's the gold standard for doing clinical research. There are about fifty in the main ones, I think more recently there are about like seventy individual studies that they pull data from, and from that they have like a mean success rate of roughly seventy percent.

• 1:30:10Donald Robertson?

  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.

• 1:30:38Chris Williamson?

  Ah, because it's going to make everything else after that become a little bit easier. It's a blockage that you've managed to get rid of more quickly.

• 1:30:45Donald Robertson?

  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, like 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 prioritising things clinically is you might go for low hanging fruit, you might also go for dealing with something that's most urgent.

• 1:31:19Donald Robertson?

  Well, you know, it's anger potentially is an urgent problem because it can lead people to harming themselves, harming other people, destroying their relationships. Like, so you get potentially more bang for your buck in therapy terms by fixing that problem. Like, because the consequences of not fixing it might potentially be worse in many cases. Not always, like, 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.

• 1:32:01Donald Robertson?

  People, 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. Like, 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 start, well, why would that be, right? You don't see that much self-improvement content about anger. You get 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,

• 1:32:45Donald Robertson?

  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-refer 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 their. What anger? Well, anger or.

• 1:33:19Donald Robertson?

  Or in prisons or in schools, like in institutions, people get sent for anger management or a court might mandate it, right? 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, they're 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.

• 1:33:48Chris Williamson?

  You have to identify that you have anger problems, though. Two examples come to mind here. So I did 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. Do this big retreat. It's 12 hours a day, seven days of deep emotional work with a coach who I trust unbelievably deeply. He's been on the show a ton called Joe Hudson. I think you'd love him. And 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.

• 1:34:29Chris Williamson?

  One of the days was anger and I was looking at the anger day and thinking, ah, no, like, you know, maybe there's a whatever, whatever. I was the first person to like move from the, the initial part to the second part of anger. And I was up before anybody. And I was like, maybe I'm more angry than I thought. Maybe I'm more, because 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, um, 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? Like, and she says, because I'm sad. She's like, you don't sound sad. You sound pissed off. And she went, I am.

• 1:35:14Chris Williamson?

  Said, oh, okay. You know, when you're crying in the bathtub, how, how often are you sad? And how often are you pissed off? He says about half the time. She's like, well, if you're pissed off about half the time, how can you cry a hundred percent of the time? He 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 antisocial nature of anger. I thought that was so fucking cool.

• 1:35:51Donald Robertson?

  Yeah, yeah, it's like, it's sneaky, like, and it's often hidden. And anger often as well is a way of coping. Like, people use anger as a way of dealing with other feelings. Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, he wrote a book called Prisoners of 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, they didn't. 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.

• 1:36:34Donald Robertson?

  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, Kristen sent me a Christmas card, like, and I'm really mad about it, but probably at first, like, I was hurt, right? In many cases, people are ashamed, they're hurt, they're anxious. And then anger actually takes, so we think of emotions in this kind of homogeneous way. But in many cases, anger and other feelings, but anger is one of the worst contenders for this, is used as a sort of coping strategy.

• 1:37:21Donald Robertson?

  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 scheme as 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 it's kind of an illusion in a way. It's like Dutch courage or whatever.

• 1:37:41Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:37:42Donald Robertson?

  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 also, one of the most dramatic things about it is it shunts all of your attention outward. Like, so it it, this is a very simple way of putting it. And, you know, I 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.

• 1:38:27Donald Robertson?

  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.

• 1:38:38Chris Williamson?

  I don't need to reflect.

• 1:38:40Donald Robertson?

  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.

• 1:38:55Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 1:39:11Donald Robertson?

  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 gonna 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.

• 1:39:50Donald Robertson?

  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. You think it maybe 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. Right? And then accepting the initial feelings like so say feelings of being hurt by somebody. Diminishing you or disregarding you or not respecting you, whatever, and. Accepting those feelings and sitting with them for a bit longer than normal.

• 1:40:31Donald Robertson?

  So that you have time to process them, right? And it might in some cases be like thirty seconds. You know, but there's nothing, that's an incredibly minimal technique. Just pause and notice what the feeling is that's coming before anger. So you'll get like a, an urge. To start blaming the other person or yelling at them, set with that urge and with the feelings that surround that. For just like a bit longer than normal. And you might go, my, my feelings are really hurt because Chris doesn't send me a, 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.

• 1:41:14Donald Robertson?

  Or for the feelings to peak and then naturally kind of like wane again, right? But if I launch immediately into anger, I never have an opportunity to process or reappraise those initial feelings. And it, 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 is covering up. And process it, right? So that it's not as much of a problem anymore.

• 1:41:43Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Why did you give up on psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapy after so long?

• 1:41:49Donald Robertson?

  That was ages ago. We're going back always now. Like, so I started off doing psycho. I did a master's degree in psychoanalytic theory. And this is like twenty five 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 the approach that I was studying and also some of the stuff that I was reading. And the last book, the last journal article that I read, I can remember vividly.

• 1:42:32Donald Robertson?

  The last article I read was by a very, like a well-known psychoanalytic theorist who wrote an article about sublimated anal masturbation.

• 1:42:48Donald Robertson?

  And he believed that golf

• 1:42:52Donald Robertson?

  Okay. is a form of sublimated anal masturbation. Okay. Um, because he'd analyzed like one client or whatever. And this is what I 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 repeating, 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 psychoanalytic

• 1:43:36Donald Robertson?

  interpretation, right? Some of it is a lot more down to earth. Like definitely in recent, since the, probably since nineteen fifty's and sixty's onwards, and particularly more recently, there are forms of psychodynamic therapy that are much more down to earth. But even when I was training and 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.

• 1:44:20Donald Robertson?

  And he sat and analyzed his own dreams. And 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. And I thought this isn't really sitting comfortably with me. Um, I'll tell you another little anecdote that I can share with you as well. Like, so when I did my master's degree, uh, some of the, the lecturers were really into Jacques Lacan,

• 1:45:00Donald Robertson?

  who's a philosophical French post-structuralist, uh, psychoanalytic theorist, who's big in the sixty's, the early seventy's and stuff, right? And, uh, we read this book by a guy called Dylan Evans, uh, who, it was a dictionary of Lacanian thought. And 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, we'd go on about Lacan or whatever. And we'd sit there scratching our heads, being like, we can't really, this doesn't make any sense. It doesn't

• 1:45:42Donald Robertson?

  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 the, the guy teaching us said to us once, he got frustrated and he said, you guys just don't get it, do you? Right? And we're all thinking, I don't like, 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 quote, you know, or anything like that. Like, there's something to get here that we don't understand. So I thought, I give up on this. It's not really panning out for me. You know, cognitive behavioural approach appealed to me a lot more. Years later, I was reading a newspaper and I saw a column by Dylan Evans.

• 1:46:23Donald Robertson?

  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 Lacon. And he said, I get that 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 Laconian therapist. And he was practising in the NHS doing Laconian 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 Lacon was talking about.

• 1:47:06Donald Robertson?

  But by the end of writing it, he'd basically just convinced himself there was nothing there. Right? 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? And 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?

• 1:47:48Chris Williamson?

  That is usually the default assumption.

• 1:47:52Donald Robertson?

  Maybe I'm just too thick. I don't understand what this guy's going on about.

• 1:47:55Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay. So the fear of being too thick and the concern of auto erotic anal masturbation

• 1:48:03Donald Robertson?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:03Chris Williamson?

  from golf, those were the the two nails in the coffin.

• 1:48:09Donald Robertson?

  And also I got, I started to learn about CBT and it resonated more with me. I'll tell you another story. Like, 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, I was saying the other day, I, 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, 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? So I don't really know. But the people that impressed me most were guys that you wouldn'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.

• 1:48:54Donald Robertson?

  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.

• 1:49:38Donald Robertson?

  And in doing that, you know, I guess I changed my whole philosophy of life in some ways.

• 1:49:44Chris Williamson?

  Well, I think.

• 1:49:44Donald Robertson?

  And I, that was what got me into the Stoics and what got me into, into practicing CBT, basically.

• 1:49:53Chris Williamson?

  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. And 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, you know, 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, you're so fantastic. Every time we get to speak, I love it. How long is it going to be before we have a book

• 1:50:38Chris Williamson?

  on anger? Tell me, come on.

• 1:50:40Donald Robertson?

  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 it, how much we can learn from it, but also what CB, there's a lot of really good CBT, like I say, solid research, but we also know lots from other branches of psychology about anger. Did you know, social psych, like, do you know Americans? I think there might be a thing called American anger.

• 1:51:09Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 1:51:10Donald Robertson?

  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?

• 1:51:27Chris Williamson?

  Okay, that wouldn't surprise me.

• 1:51:29Donald Robertson?

  And Americans get angry three times more often than the Japanese. Japanese don't get angry that often, they claim.

• 1:51:38Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Some sort of shame or culturally mediated anger?

• 1:51:44Donald Robertson?

  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 dealt, 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 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

• 1:52:25Donald Robertson?

  aggressive towards each other. And it causes more and more political division. Why, 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, I 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?

• 1:52:56Chris Williamson?

  No, that's ancient history. That doesn't exist. I think that's a myth.

• 1:52:59Donald Robertson?

  Back in medieval times.

• 1:53:00Chris Williamson?

  That's a myth. Yeah, correct. That's correct. That was eye of Newton, a conversation with someone that you disagree with without shouting. Donald Robertson, ladies and gentlemen, Donald, you're so great. Where should people go?

• 1:53:09Donald Robertson?

  Thank you, Chris. It's been a pleasure.

• 1:53:10Chris Williamson?

  To watch, read, listen to your things. Where do you want to send them?

• 1:53:14Donald Robertson?

  On Substack. Like, I do everything on Substack now. They can just find me on there. I've got lots of articles and things.

• 1:53:21Chris Williamson?

  Beautiful. Mate, until next time. I appreciate you.

• 1:53:24Donald Robertson?

  Awesome. Cheers, Chris.

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