The Only 12 Lessons Buried In Every Self-Help Book - Spencer Greenberg - #1161

Spencer Greenberg is a mathematician, founder, CEO & creator of ClearerThinking.org Expect to learn the most valuable lessons from over 500+ personal development books, why understanding values are so hard, which popular self-help advice turned out to have surprisingly little substance behind it, why intelligent people seem particularly vulnerable to overthinking, how people tell the difference between hype and legitimate effective strategies or innovation and much more… Sponsors: Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Timestamps: (00:00) Why Have We Become So Disillusioned With Self-Help? (05:00) Is Self-Help Just Old Advice Repackaged? (06:55) The Biggest Self-Development Strategies That Aren’t Backed Up (08:59) How to Find the Right Self-Help Strategy (12:56) Should We Focus on Intrinsic Values? (18:18) How to Work Out What You Actually Value (20:47) The Science of Building Habits That Stick (25:42) Are You Setting Goals the Wrong Way? (27:42) Why Is Focusing on Fear So Important? (38:13) How Your Mental State Controls Your Performance (40:36) The Relationship Between the Mind and Body (42:27) The Best Ways to Combat Overthinking (50:22) Can Anyone Rewire Their Thinking? (55:25) The Peak Productivity Formula (01:00:07) How to Become More Efficient (01:03:05) Why Everyone Needs ‘Glad You Did It’ Activities (01:08:26) Is Willpower Enough to Solve Your Problems? (01:12:16) The Power of Positive Thinking (01:20:38) How Much of Self-Development Is Following Your Focus? (01:22:02) The Self-Development Strategy You Shouldn’t Ignore (01:26:55) Where to Find Spencer Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  You researched nearly 500 self-improvement strategies. What did you learn?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so my co-author Jeremy and Stevenson and I, we had this crazy project where we're like, what if we could gather all the good stuff in self-improvement and try to cram it down into one book? But there's a big problem with that, which is there's so much stuff. How could you possibly make sense of it all? So our idea was, can we find the underlying psychological drivers behind each of the self-improvement techniques? So, once we'd gone through over 100 self-improvement books and over 20 types of therapy, and taken out every method that they had, we asked ourselves for each one, what is the psychological method behind it? And much to our surprise, we were able to boil it down to just 12 levers, which is these 12 underlying psychological strategies. And that's the name of our book, 12 Levers.

• 0:46Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think so many people have become so disillusioned with self-help?

• 0:51Speaker 01

  I think one of the problems is that they're taught that there's a silver bullet. You know, someone has some new cool idea and they say, this thing is going to solve your problem. And often the author says, I used to be like you. I can relate to you, but look, I turned my life around and look how great I am now. And the reality is, there isn't one silver bullet that works for all people at all times. There are some really, really good methods, but even the best methods, they're contextual. You have to use them on the right person at the right time. And it may not be the first method that you use that's actually going to solve your problem.

• 1:23Chris Williamson?

  What's been interesting to me, working with doctors and working in health and stuff like that, since I've moved to America, every single specialist has, and these are the teachers, right? Not even the students, who are maybe even more fervent or ardent about like, whatever the thing is that saved them. Every single person, the sleep guy, has a story about how someone started using CPAP and went from being a brain foggy mess into a superstar. And he went on to become a millionaire and all of this great stuff happened to him. Or the nutrition people will tell you about how someone was allergic to Blue Forty and peanut butter and seed oils. And they cleaned their diet up and it totally transformed them. And now they're a Olympian bodybuilder or something.

• 2:05Chris Williamson?

  Like for every single strategy, there is an outlier success story. And those people, if you went to them and you were to say, hey, man, like my health's not feeling too good. Or I want to be a bit more productive. And they go, dude, I've got the strategy. And it's weird because those people, it's quite easy to accuse them of being like grifters or overzealous or overselling what the strategy can achieve. But no, what you're doing by a process of selection, like by selection bias, self-selection bias, you are seeking out people that are hyper responders to that particular strategy. And they are telling you, sometimes they're lying, but a lot of the time, they're just telling you their real experience. This is actually what happened to me, or this is exactly what happened for a client of mine.

• 2:48Chris Williamson?

  And then if you embark on this, but it's the wrong context, the wrong time, you don't apply it right. It's not right for your physiology or psychology or particular situation or whatever. You're like, well, this is bullshit. You lied to me about what it does for you. And it's like, no, no, no, no, it is right for the right person at the right time, applied in the right way. And that, you know, the idiosyncratic nature of any intervention is why blanket coverage advice is probably bullshit.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  You know, if you look at lists of cognitive biases, you'll see there's over 100 of them. But I've been thinking about recently, what are the ones that the smartest people fall for? And I think this is one that the smartest people fall for. They find something that was genuinely life-changing, like truly life-changing and amazing. And then they just say, everyone's got to do this thing. And I know so many smart people have done this and I don't blame them for it, but it's a huge mistake.

• 3:37Chris Williamson?

  One of my friends, Gwyneth Boghul, has got this idea called the Golden Hammer. And he says that a public intellectual, usually one that's got famous for a small number of principles, sees that principle in everything. And then he's got in brackets afterward, every definition of this should come attached with a photo of Nassim Taleb, which is like, you know, someone who's got an amazing idea set, but is able to like retrofit lots of insights to this idea set. And it's kind of the same as this. What's your problem? Oh, athlete's foot? Allow me to show you my CPAP machine. Like I fixed fucking athlete's foot with a CPAP machine. Like all of these things, and you're right, like this, this golden hammer kind of approach seems to be a master cognitive bias that a lot of smart people, that are the kinds of people

• 4:22Chris Williamson?

  who have gone through lots of these spirals that they're going to fall for.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Right, and there are methods that really don't work, like they're genuine bullshit. And then there are genuine grifters out there that are lying to you. But there's a lot of what's happening is that people genuinely found something really useful and they're just trying to apply it to everything.

• 4:38Chris Williamson?

  How much of the self-help industry is just old-school psychological techniques repackaged with new terminology?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Well, it's so funny because sometimes you're reading about some cool new technique and you realize it was discovered by the Buddha or something. And you're like, wow, this has been around well over a thousand years. But that doesn't mean it's not useful. Like maybe it has a new twist on it. Maybe it's better adapted to a modern audience, right? You can't necessarily work with this thing that's thousands of years old. But I would say a lot of it rhymes, right? You're seeing the same thing again and again and again. And this is part of what set us down, this journey of writing the book, The 12 Levers, was that my co-author and I had both seen the same methods come again and again and again. And it started to make us think, maybe there's a pattern here, right? Maybe there's less behind it all than you might think at first, when you look at hundreds of techniques.

• 5:27Chris Williamson?

  Why these 12? Like what was special about this particular bucket of 12? Was there one that was nearly 13, but that actually got fucked off?

• 5:35Speaker 01

  It was really that, once we sat down with this list of almost 500 techniques, we went through each one, one by one, and said, what's the psychological principle? And just attached it. And then when we got to one where we didn't have a psychological principle, we had to add one.

• 5:47Chris Williamson?

  That's new.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  And then sometimes we would go back and merge some. And we're like, oh, that one's kind of the same as that one, merge them. And literally by the end, there were 12. And we, all the techniques fit into 12, which was shocking.

• 5:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If self-help is already for a lot of people overcomplicated, is this not risking just being another complicated system? Like, is this the last personal development book that I'll ever need?

• 6:09Speaker 01

  We give references to tons of really great books that can help you go deeper on any topic here. So I think of this as a map. It lets you see the whole space of what are all the levers that you can pull to improve your life? And we give you really concrete steps that you can put them into action. But you may want to go really deep on that specific lever that's helping you or the specific technique. And there's, we have references to so many great books in here that can help you go follow that thread.

• 6:33Chris Williamson?

  What were some very well-known personal development strategies that had surprisingly little legitimacy backing them up in terms of effectiveness, science, et cetera?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so one interesting one is cold exposure. And so we focus on, we focus on psychology, right? Our book is about psychology. But we do talk about the intersection between the body and the mind. At the end of the day, we're minds attached to these biological robots. And what happens in our bodies just has a great impact on our psychology. So you kind of can't ignore that. And techniques like cold exposure really have an influence psychologically. And we, one thing that we did for our book is really go through the evidence, looking at like what's known, what studies have been run, what's been tested in the psychological space, and trying to navigate through an evidence-based lens while also bringing in our experience. Jeremy Stevenson, my co-author, is a clinical psychologist who treats patients. I've built many, many tools for people on our website, ClearThing.org,

• 7:31Speaker 01

  where we teach people psychological skills. So we also bring in our own experience from that. But if you look at something like cold exposure, many people report more alertness. Many people report feeling good doing it, and that's fantastic. But the evidence base for having long-term health benefits is actually much weaker than you might think. There's some suggestive evidence, there's a little bit of research, but we really need way more research, like looking at long-term people. So, you know, randomizing some people to do it for a year and some people not, and really looking at what changes about them.

• 7:57Chris Williamson?

  I imagine that cold exposure is going to be very difficult to do a double-blind placebo control trial. Like it's very hard to convince them on they've been in cold water when they actually haven't. But yeah, so the point around cold exposure is not, it doesn't necessarily make people feel better, because it can, and it can improve their performance over the, like, from a state perspective.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Right, short-term effects.

• 8:19Chris Williamson?

  But getting into a trait perspective, the evidence is much more wishy-washy.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and you just need much longer-term follow-up to really see what happens when people do it for a long time. Now, that's a funny one also because it traces back so long, like early humans were doing cold exposure, right? But it's, but it's obviously, some people get really good benefits out of it. And if you feel great doing it, that's awesome. That's good enough reason to do it.

• 8:37Chris Williamson?

  How should people go about diagnosing their actual problem then? So that they can actually choose the right technique?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is why we put this as literally the first lever of our book. We call it unravel the causes. It's about figuring out the deeper controllable causes of your life challenges. And we put it at the beginning because often, without really understanding your challenges, you can't have good solutions. Better understanding leads to better solutions. So one example you might think about, suppose you're having fights with your girlfriend regularly. And you might think, well, I know why we fight, right? Like she wants one thing, I want another thing. And that's like one level of understanding. We call it level one causal understanding. But then you could ask yourself, huh, but I know other couples where they want different things and yet they're not fighting about it all the time. What's going on? And you start reflecting and you realize, well, every time we try to have a discussion about it, we both start getting angry.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  So that's level two understanding. But there's an even deeper understanding of that. Well, why is it that you're both getting angry? What's bringing up that angry? Is it some deep-seated resentment? And that could get you to level three understanding. So the idea is these tools that can help you figure out, what are the deeper level causal structures? It's kind of like if you were trying to fix your car that won't start and you just start fixing things at random, it's going to take you a really long time to fix it. If you go get a diagnostic, now you can fix it right away.

• 9:53Chris Williamson?

  What is the best diagnostic tool or your favorite one, the simplest one that you found?

• 9:58Speaker 01

  A simple one that's quite powerful, it's called the ABC technique. A stands for activating events. So that's what is the event that occurs right when the situation's happening? So maybe it would be, you know, your girlfriend sees dishes in the sink and says, I told you not to leave dishes in the sink. That's going to be the activating event, right? B stands for beliefs, which also includes thoughts. And so that would be like, well, what, what do you, what do you think in your mind when your girlfriend says that? Maybe you have the thought, well, I just want to be able to like live in the peace. I don't want to have to think about the dishes all the time, right? And then C stands for consequences, which could be behavioral, could be emotional. So maybe you start feeling annoyed. Maybe you start engaging in a certain behavior, like you raise your voice.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  And you can start tracking these situations where things are going badly for you with a simple ABC technique. And as you map it out that way, you can begin to see things that you never noticed before.

• 10:49Chris Williamson?

  What happened? What was my belief about it? And what were the consequences that came of that? Why is that format? How can that be revealing? Like, what's what happens to somebody's life if they start to investigate that more deeply?

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Well, fascinatingly, let me ask you a question. How many thoughts do you think you have in a day?

• 11:05Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, I remember, is it like 70,000 or something?

• 11:08Speaker 01

  My, I think estimates are, you know, 5,000, 7,000, something like that. But it's tough to estimate. It's honestly tough to estimate, but it's a huge, it's a huge number.

• 11:15Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  At the end of the day, if I asked you, how many do you remember? How many could you write down?

• 11:19Chris Williamson?

  Essentially zero.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Essentially zero, like a few, right? And it's fascinating, that discrepancy. What it shows us is that we're not very aware of our mental life after the fact. But when it's happening, if someone were going to ping you right in that moment and say, what did you just think like five seconds ago? You could tell me, right?

• 11:35Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  So.

• 11:36Chris Williamson?

  It's like a permanent forgetting.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  It's a permanent forgetting. So there's the technique that I developed called the inner why technique that helps with this. It also relates to ABC technique. The inner why technique is very simple. It just says, notice when your emotion suddenly shifts negatively. And then ask yourself, why? What was the thing that just happened? And if you can catch it in the moment, usually only one thing happened and then you only had one thought. And you immediately know why your emotion shift. But if you wait 20 minutes, you might not be able to identify.

• 12:04Chris Williamson?

  Now I'm just in a bad mood.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 12:07Chris Williamson?

  So it's big, like amorphous sort of like clouds that you're trying to move through after the fact.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Exactly. Even 20 minutes later, you may not be able to piece together what happened. So you can make a little game out of it for the next few days. Say, how many times can I catch my negative emotion suddenly starting and just ask why? And then that can start turning into the ABC technique. We were like, okay, now that I'm having more awareness of when this is happening, I can now break it down, activating of that belief consequence. And I can start to understand our problem.

• 12:34Chris Williamson?

  What did you learn about values? I think a lot of people with personal development really begin there. Every time that you sign up for some new personal development course or coaching or whatever, like the first place that'll get you to start is their values. What did you learn about them?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  So values, a topic I've actually done a ton of research on. We try to make a categorization system of the entire set of human values. To start, we created a little training program that taught people about the distinction between intrinsic values and instrumental values. Intrinsic values are things that you value for their own sake. You don't value them merely as a means to an end. Whereas instrumental values are things you value because they get you other things. So for example, watch, you know, watch is really nice to have. It's convenient and it helps you in a bunch of ways, but nobody values it intrinsically. You value it because it gets you stuff, right? Or cash, you value it because it gets you stuff. But happiness, you value it intrinsically. If someone said, well, why do you care about being happy? You'd be like, you don't even know how to answer that because of course I care. Or connection with other human beings, you probably care about that intrinsically.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  But there are a lot of things that people care about intrinsically. We try to map them all out because these are at the core, at the root of everything else. These are the things we're fundamentally after, right? And what we found is 22 categories of intrinsic values. So it's quite a bit, big set, includes everything from longevity, like living a long time, reducing suffering, not just for yourself, but it could be for everyone in the world or all conscious beings, you know, people have different values. It could be around, you could have values around nature or you could have values around spirituality, many different things. So it's really a diverse set, but almost everyone has multiple intrinsic values.

• 14:09Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Why is understanding your values so hard? I think a lot of the time people do their self investigation. This one and this one seem in conflict with each other. I like connection, but I also like autonomy, perhaps. This one and this one kind of overlap, but they also feel distinct. And sometimes I have this and other times I have another like, why is, why is there so much conflict when it comes to understanding our own values?

• 14:35Speaker 01

  It's funny because the human brain seems to encode values directly, but not intrinsic values. If I showed you something, you could say whether you wanted it, right? Whether you valued it. But to figure out whether it's an intrinsic value actually takes this extra cognitive effort to feel, do I really like that for its own sake? Or am I just trying to get something out of that, right? There's something else I'm after. It's a tricky kind of thought experiment you have to do. We developed a test called the intrinsic values test. It's totally free. It's on our website, clearerthinking.org. It's exactly for this purpose to help figure out what their actual intrinsic values are and separate them from the instrumental. And it's kind of shocking because sometimes people will go years and years or decades and confuse their instrumental values with their intrinsic values.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  I had a funny example of this where a friend of mine was feeling very depressed. And she came to me and she said, you know, I can't really tell why I'm depressed. I think it has to do with my boyfriend, but it's really confusing because he's a really great guy. And I said, okay, interesting. Like, tell me, like, why do you write down his positive qualities? And she wrote them down and I was like, yeah, he seems like a really awesome guy. He's all these great qualities. Now write down your, your values. And she wrote those down, zero overlap in the list. And I was like, wow, that's fascinating. And I had this idea, write down your parents' values. And she wrote them down and it was a perfect match to her boyfriend. And I was like, you're dating your parents' ideal person. Of course you're not happy because that's not the person that you want to be with.

• 15:57Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  And she broke up with him as much happier after. So yeah, we can easily confuse these things.

• 16:04Chris Williamson?

  Is it your perspective then that people should focus on their intrinsic values? But presumably we can't always get directly to happiness. I value happiness, right? Or I value adventure. We can't get directly to that. That means I need to work or travel or spend time in the sun or whatever. The proximate versus the ultimate in EP language. How much should I work on the first order thing? And how much should I work on the end result thing?

• 16:37Speaker 01

  There's a funny paradox where some things, when you try to do them too directly, it undermines it.

• 16:41Chris Williamson?

  What like?

• 16:42Speaker 01

  So in meditation, if you say to someone, okay, I want you to, I want you to meditate as well as you can right now. Trying to meditate well actually tends to undermine your ability to meditate.

• 16:50Chris Williamson?

  Sleep is another one.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Sleep. There's a really funny study where they had two groups and one group, they said, okay, we want you to try to sleep. And the other group, we said, we want you to try to stay awake, even though you're in bed. And the group, they told to try to stay awake, fell asleep faster.

• 17:02Chris Williamson?

  Hilarious.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  So happiness can be a thing like this, where trying to be happy is not actually the way to be happy usually. To be happy, you focus on the things that generate happiness rather than trying to get it like straight on.

• 17:15Chris Williamson?

  I imagine human connection is not one of those though. Human connection to me seems to be the sort of thing that you actively can seek directly. I am at the checkout counter in front of the lady and I'm going to say something nice to her. I ask how her day is going. That is the most direct way. Yeah, it's intrinsic, like I'm using words to get connection, rah, rah, rah. But like, that's pretty direct. And I do think that that's one of those. So this begins to get a little complex now, which is, I guess, where the devil is in the details.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. And for some things, even with human connection, some people, as soon as they think, I want to make more human connection, they're going to know exactly how to do that. And other people are going to be like, how the hell do you do that? And you know, that's where tools start to come in, right?

• 17:56Chris Williamson?

  Okay. What is your advice for people about working out what they actually value in terms of stuff that's in conflict with each other? A lot of the time their intention, this, this thing feels opposite.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So our values genuinely conflict. And the reason that they conflict is because trying to get one thing often is at odds with getting another thing. If you're going to put time into seeking adventure, that's going to be less time for your family, right? There's a fundamental conflict there. Also, the world sometimes puts them into conflict. For example, you suppose you go to your friend's play. They're really excited to have you there. Afterwards, they come up to you and they say, what did you think? Did you like it? And you actually hated it. You thought it was terrible or you couldn't think of a single good thing to say about it. What do you do? And that's a genuine values conflict. And some people are going to say, well, that's easy. You just say, oh, it was great. And other people are going to say, well, no, I like, I care about being truthful more than I care about protecting their feelings. Right? And suppose here that they're not going to learn a great lesson from you.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  They're just going to feel bad, right? If you tell them it sucked. So yeah, the world puts our values into conflict and effort puts our values into conflict. The only thing you can do, because they're your values, they're the things you care about, is you have to then carefully reflect and say, well, how much do I care about this thing versus this thing in this situation? And thought experiments can be really useful. Sometimes you can ask yourself, okay, suppose I knew that it was going to, my friend was going to cry for three days and be brokenhearted if I told them their play sucked. Would it still be worth it? And you could start to play with this to figure out the trade off between your values, right? Because you're figuring out your own trade off curve. Essentially, it's a form of introspection.

• 19:29Chris Williamson?

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• 20:11Chris Williamson?

  Right now you can get up to $350 off the Pod 6 by going to the link in the description below or heading to eightsleep.com/ModernWisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's E I G H T sleep.com/ModernWisdom. A Modern Wisdom at checkout. I think when people think about personal development, self-growth, self-help.

• 20:31Chris Williamson?

  Habit building, habit setting is maybe at the top, certainly be in the top three. You tested a bunch of habit building techniques. What did you learn?

• 20:40Speaker 01

  We ran a giant study on habit formation. It was kind of like a horse race, pitting the techniques against each other.

• 20:46Chris Williamson?

  Were you the one that was trying to embed the habits?

• 20:48Speaker 01

  No, we ran it on hundreds of people. So we, we took 20 different habit formation techniques. We randomized people. So each person in our study got five out of the 20, picked it random. Plus, there was a control group and we tracked them for a month to see who stuck with their habits better. And the fascinating thing was that almost none of the techniques worked, first of all. But we did find some things that worked. The things that were most promising, we actually ended up doing a follow-up study with the things that most worked. We bundled them together into a package that you can use. We actually call it daily ritual. It's also available for free on our website, clearthing.org, but you can use this habit packet that worked. But the things that worked were, one, the ridiculously stupid method of writing on a note, like a piece of paper

• 21:32Speaker 01

  and sticking it somewhere in your office or your home that just says, here's my habit. It actually increased people's sticking to their habits.

• 21:39Chris Williamson?

  What, was there a particular category of habits that that worked more effectively for or less effectively for?

• 21:45Speaker 01

  It tends to work for people that tend to be more forgetful because some people, they just are gonna remember. Like memory is not even gonna be an issue. But for people like myself, I'm kind of forgetful. Like that actually probably would help me just like reminded every time I walk by. Oh yeah, I have an intention to do that. So that was one that worked a little bit silly. A second that worked is kind of a famous technique, sometimes called tiny habits or similar names, is you make a version of your habit for days when you can't do the whole habit, right? And the idea is you never miss your habit because this tiny version you're allowed to do instead. And there's no excuse ever to not do the tiny version.

• 22:20Chris Williamson?

  You didn't get to the gym, you do 10 squats on a day that you don't go to the gym.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Exactly. There's no excuse not to do 10 squats. You should be able to hit it every time. And what's really cool about that is it helps not break the cycle. So the, the mental machinery of forming the habit never gets broken, which makes it stickier. And you might think, well, aren't people just gonna start cheating, right? And just do that instead. But in our study, they actually didn't. They actually were more successful with the big habit, even though they had the option of doing the tiny habit, which is kind of fascinating.

• 22:47Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the best habits that you found the tiny habits intervention effective for?

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Well, I think it tends to be good for things where life really will get in the way sometimes of doing it. And you're just like, look, today's just too crazy. I cannot go to the gym for 30 minutes. Like it's just not gonna happen. And, you know, and yeah, just having that, that.

• 23:05Chris Williamson?

  Meditation for one minute.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 23:07Chris Williamson?

  Reading a single page, half a page, a fucking poem, whatever.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 23:11Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  So you're never gonna miss it. But I'll tell you the, the most effective technique we found, the most promising one in our study, was one that we call habit reflection. And the way it works is you first think about a habit you succeeded at in the past. Then, and I recommend you write it down, you write down, what did you do to help you succeed? Did you tell your friend that you were gonna try to do it? Did you pre-plan it in advance? So it was easy to do every day. What did you do that helped? Then the final step is you write down, how can you apply what you learned from doing that past habit to this new habit? So that was sort of the, the one standout technique from our study.

• 23:45Chris Williamson?

  What do you think's going on there?

• 23:47Speaker 01

  It's self-adapting. Many habit techniques, they assume you have a certain challenge, right? Tiny habits is great, but it assumes that your problem is that you kind of don't have time to do it some days.

• 23:57Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Or, you know, so every technique sort of has a certain group that it works with. You know, putting a little notepad with your habit, that's great if you're the sort of person that tends to forget. But if you don't forget, then it's not useful. What's cool about this, it's self-adapting. You're, you're just remembering to use whatever it is you learned.

• 24:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's like a survival of the fittest, survival of the most effective within yourself. You are the system, you are the testing ground, you've A B'd whatever happened in the past. Shock, horror, if it worked for you previously, it'll probably work for you in the future.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  But it also shows that people like somehow are not applying that knowledge, right? Even though they succeed.

• 24:30Chris Williamson?

  I have evidence that this worked before. And for some reason I've discarded it now and I'm trying to do the new thing, the new sexy thing. I guess that's a, that's a question. You talked about biases before. How much of what you found is people already knowing what they should do or having an insight, but just not applying it or being seduced by something that's more recent, that's a little bit more available to them?

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Well, knowing what you should do is a tricky thing, right? So you could say, well, everyone knows they should exercise a whole bunch, right? But maybe that's not the most useful way to think about what they should do. Because maybe what they should do is find a form of exercise that's incredibly easy for them, that they really enjoy doing, rather than trying to do, you know, the right form of exercise. So sometimes what they should do is, is something that's actually super customized to them, rather than the best thing. And, and maybe we can get lured in to wanting to do the best thing, even if it's not working for us.

• 25:20Chris Williamson?

  What do people get wrong about setting goals? Cause habits and goals typically, a habit is a daily or, you know, hourly, weekly engagement to move somebody toward an outcome. And goals feel slightly different to values, like sort of instrumental, like I have this value. There's this goal, which is like a physical thing that's typically gonna get me towards something that I value. But habits also aren't goals and values aren't goals. So is, does goals deserve its own set here?

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Actually, I'll tell you about one of the biggest disagreements me and my co-author Jeremy Stevenson had when writing the book, which is that he doesn't find thinking about values that useful, which I think I find it incredibly useful. And I know many other people that do. So we kind of had this, well, what do we do about that? Cause he's like, I don't know. I don't know if it's that useful. So I was like, well, how do you do it? And so through this discussion, we realized there's this broader set of things that we call your guiding foundations. Your intrinsic values is part of it, but also your principles, which are essentially the rules you decide to live by to help implement your values. So you might have a principle like always tell the truth or principle like family comes first. It's essentially pre-deciding on how you're gonna make your decisions so that you live by your values. And then the last one is priorities.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  These are the areas that you're deciding to focus on. So you're gonna say, I'm gonna prioritize health in the next three months. I'm gonna prioritize family in the next three months, whatever, whatever it is. So that's your guiding foundations. And the thing about guiding foundations is you never complete them. They're ongoing processes. You just keep going and going and going for the rest of your life. Goals then relate to those, but they're, it's, but are distinct because goals, they end. You, you achieve a goal, you're done with the goal. But my view is what people often get wrong is they don't build them on their guiding foundations. Your goals should be built out of your guiding foundations. They should be reflective of your deepest values.

• 27:07Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, it's complex.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  It is.

• 27:09Chris Williamson?

  It feels, it feels like very, it doesn't surprise me that you had to do what 450 different techniques in order to refine them down and bucket them into 12. And yeah, that, that doesn't surprise me. Why, why is focusing on fear important?

• 27:24Speaker 01

  You know, I know some people that don't feel afraid ever, but much, much more common is that people are limited by fear. And it's just such a big problem that I would say many people could benefit from not letting fear stop them from the things they find most valuable. And I'm a perfect example of this. I'm someone who was always anxious my whole life from, from childhood. And in particular, there were certain situations that were devastating to me. If I had to go up to a stranger at a party, my heart would be pounding in my chest. My brain was like predicting that I was gonna die. Now, obviously that's ridiculous. It's totally silly.

• 28:01Chris Williamson?

  As a educated, rational person who knows how the world works.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I didn't believe, you know, on a reasoning level, of course I knew it was safe, but my brain did not perceive it as safe. And if you've ever had a phobia of anything, whether it's snakes or spiders or flying, you know what it's like. You could, your brain is like, I know that's safe, but it, your body is completely freaking out as though it's the end of the world. And finally, when I was in my early twenties, I said, I have to do something about this. This is ridiculous. So I went to find a therapist and I found a specialist who works on anxiety. And he said, you know, Spencer, I can help you, but you're not gonna like it how I'm gonna do it. And I said, well, how are you, how are we gonna do this? He said, you're gonna have homework to go to a bar every weekend alone and you're gonna talk to five strangers. And for me, this was, oh my God, I can't do that. That's insane.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  But we started small. We built what's called a fear hierarchy. The bottom of the fear hierarchy is something that's stressful to you, but bearable, right? So a one, for me, that was go up to people and simply ask what time it was. And I was quite afraid doing this, but I could handle it. It wasn't too much fear.

• 29:05Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  And then when that got easy, we took it to the next level, which was going up to people and saying, excuse me, what is that you're drinking? That looks good. And we worked our way up. All the way, at the very top, it got really crazy. The, the final culmination of this is I went up to people at bars and this was in Manhattan. And I said to men, excuse me, would you give me a hug?

• 29:24Chris Williamson?

  And fuck me. Brilliant.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  My, my, literally I thought I was gonna die. Like I thought that I'm not, but amazingly, not only did I not get punched in the face, like the worst reaction I had was like people laughing or being like, no. And it was shocking. It totally transformed me.

• 29:40Chris Williamson?

  How many hugs did you get?

• 29:41Speaker 01

  I, I definitely got a few hugs. I definitely got a few hugs.

• 29:43Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, you know, maybe it wouldn't work out everywhere. I don't condone, I don't condone doing that, depending on where you live. But, um, but my social anxiety felt dramatically and I certainly still have social anxiety sometimes today. But it's shockingly less than it was. And it, it all took place over, you know, maybe six months.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  And there's some situations today where I'm sitting in a room of people and I'm like, I think I'm less socially anxious than the other people here. This is amazing.

• 30:08Chris Williamson?

  What is the principle that's underlying that? Is it basically the same thing as exposure therapy typically for phobias?

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Yes. So it is this idea of exposure. Basically, the way fear typically works is that when we're exposed to really frightening things, we start associating that with frightening things and pattern match. So it extends beyond that initial thing that made us afraid. So let's say you got assaulted while you were walking down the street one day. That whole neighborhood start might, might be frightening to you, even if rationally you know the chance of you getting assaulted again is incredibly unlikely. And unfortunately, fear can tend to propagate, especially when we engage in avoidance. So suppose that you always avoid that neighborhood. You just never will go near it. Now maybe you'll start avoiding even the areas around it and the areas around that. And it can, it can be pernicious. It starts spreading. And this is why fear can be such a big problem for so many people.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Because it starts carving these boundaries about, around what you're willing to do. And you start avoiding all these valuable things.

• 31:06Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  And the basic idea of exposure therapy is you expose yourself to the things you fear. But, and here's something that almost everyone misses, you have to avoid engaging in safety behaviors. So safety behaviors are things we do to make ourselves feel better in those situations, but they cause our brain to learn the wrong rule.

• 31:24Chris Williamson?

  Can you give me an example?

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I have a friend who is extremely afraid of flying, but he flies regularly. Isn't that strange? How could he be afraid? Like, wouldn't he be doing exposure therapy by flying regularly?

• 31:36Chris Williamson?

  By flying so much, he should have dissolved his fear.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Exactly. But here's the issue. Right before he flies, he's constantly obsessively checking the weather reports to make sure that the weather is perfect and he cancels his flight if it has bad weather. So his brain doesn't learn flying is safe. His brain learns flying is safe if the weather is perfect and I carefully check the weather report every time. So it essentially prevents his brain from learning the rule that the thing is actually safe to do.

• 32:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a fragility. You're programming a kind of anti-robustness into your system by doing that. What is some other? Can you give me another example of safety behavior that people might do?

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Yes, so in social anxiety, you might do a safety behavior of leaving an event early. Like, it's like, oh, I go to parties. I'm socially anxious, but I go to parties. Why isn't it work? But maybe halfway through the party, you're like, okay, I'm getting stressed out and I'm gonna leave, right? Or maybe during conversations with people, when you're feeling socially anxious, you start laughing at all their jokes and being overly friendly. And that's your safety behavior because you think, if I don't do that, they're gonna hate me.

• 32:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's interesting. What about? The fear thing is fascinating because it really does feel to me like if you haven't worked out fears in at least a good chunk of them in most areas of your life, they are like a speed governor on your system. There are certain things that you are going to be unable to get, like the territory idea is great. There's certain bits of the map that are just going to be inexplorable to you. The cognitive map, the world map. I'm terrified of intimacy. Okay, well, that means that the world of intimacy is not going to be open to you. And then the world of stuff downstream from intimacy, maybe that means that you can't have a family. Maybe that means that you're not gonna be able to get a dog. Maybe that means, like, all of these things.

• 33:25Chris Williamson?

  I have to assume that thinking about fear reinforces the fear or talking about fears to some degree, obsessing over them, as your friend would have done. He's now got this weird rain dance ritual that he has to do before he gets onto a plane. How do people work through their fears without obsessing over them so much that they reinforce them and then become like completely obsessive about that?

• 33:49Speaker 01

  If we're talking about something non-dangerous, because you shouldn't do exposure therapy if you're feeling truly dangerous. Like, don't do exposure therapy for swimming with dangerous sharks. Like, this doesn't make any sense. But if we're talking about something non-dangerous, the first thing is to make sure that you really are on board intellectually, that it's not dangerous. That's where I would start, right? Because if you are convinced that flying is actually incredibly dangerous, well, of course, you're afraid. That makes perfect sense. So the first thing is to work on the cognitions and try to understand, well, how dangerous is this thing really? Do I intellectually buy into this being safe? Once you've intellectually bought into it actually being safe and now it's just an emotional thing, there, it's not really about doing lots of additional thinking about it. It's really about exposing yourself in a controlled way and letting yourself sit with the fear.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  A really crazy example, but it actually is, if it's the theory, and I'm pretty sure it actually would work, is imagine someone is terribly afraid of snakes and they fall into a pit of harmless snakes, right? The snakes don't hurt them, right? They're in the pit of snakes. How many hours do you think it'll be until they're bored?

• 34:51Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, fuck. 12?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Eventually, the thing is, they will be bored. Like, eventually, they're gonna be like, oh, fuck, I can't wait to get out of this pit, right?

• 35:02Chris Williamson?

  I'm bored of these snakes. I wish they would bite me, Jesus Christ.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Like, your brain just cannot freak out indefinitely.

• 35:08Chris Williamson?

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• 35:54Chris Williamson?

  Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below, heading to drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. Someone told me a story about this years ago, that the same thing for animal exposure, which is kind of one of the gold standards for exposure therapy stuff, I think, like single intervention, relatively simple phobia, and that you can basically, you can sort of titrate people up, but assuming that there isn't an adverse event during it, you can just throw someone in a room filled with cats and just wait, like, lock the door, leave them in there, like, highly unethical. But I guess some people might choose to be like, all right, I could step my way up to

• 36:38Chris Williamson?

  this thing, or I could just ask a bunch of people for a hug. I suppose the high-risk side effect of this is that if you get a rejection on asking for the hug, you've now taken steps back. So that's why you begin with the exposure therapy. So you learn, okay, this is safety. And even if I fall back, I fall back to now a higher baseline because the rejection did hurt, but I have some degree of momentum which is moving me forward.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  This incredible psychologist, who actually was one of the people that popularized cognitive therapy for the general public, his name is David Burns, and I had him on my podcast, Clear Thinking, and he, I'll try to do this from memory, but he tells these crazy stories where he uses this, like, these one-shot exposures. Sometimes it's called flooding. And if I recall correctly, it was a patient who was terribly afraid of contamination. And he brings her into the bathroom and is like, okay, we're gonna lick the toilet seats.

• 37:28Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, I've heard about this.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  We're gonna lick the toilet seats. He's like, I'll do it first. I'll do it if you do it, right? And so he has these incredible stories, but it's generally not recommended. Obviously, when you're with an expert, that's one thing, like, you can decide with the expert together. But it's generally not recommended because people often freak out and run out of the situation and that can reinforce their fear. So you really have to stay with it.

• 37:51Chris Williamson?

  What about mental states? How do people control the state that they're in to control their performance?

• 37:58Speaker 01

  You mean if you're feeling like emotionally dysregulated?

• 38:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's interesting. When people are really highly emotionally dysregulated, often kind of grounding outside of the body is really, really helpful. So there's a very simple technique where you simply look at three things, notice three different things outside of yourself. You notice three things that you can hear, and then you notice three things in your body, and kind of you switch between these, and it kind of grounds you outside of your mind. Because when you're feeling like really emotionally dysregulated, often there's sort of chaos going on in your mind and you actually kind of get out of there to temporarily feel better.

• 38:34Chris Williamson?

  And focus on that outside of me, gonna focus on this that's on me, and then I'm gonna focus on this that's in me.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then if that doesn't work, there are more intensive techniques, like, you can shock yourself. And so not with electricity, but with, for example, you could do it with cold water. So just splash yourself with super cold water briefly, actually can suddenly shock you out of a kind of emotional disruption.

• 38:56Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. Is that mammalian dive reflex adjacent stuff?

• 39:00Speaker 01

  That's interesting. So, you know, it may be, because I think the mammalian dive reflex, which triggers when you're in cold water, does lower your respiratory rate, as I understand it. So it might be related to that. But this was a technique that was developed, as far as I understand it, for people with borderline personality disorder, because people with that disorder tend to be very emotionally dysregulated easily. And so they had to figure out techniques, like, what do you do? Because you can't, like, have a conversation and reason when a person is in such a dysregulated state, so you need to give them something to do.

• 39:27Chris Williamson?

  Throw water at them.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Well, you have, you teach them to do it for themselves.

• 39:32Chris Williamson?

  Throw the bucket.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  I think that probably makes them more upset. But you teach them to do it for themselves, so they can use it to kind of come out of that state.

• 39:38Chris Williamson?

  How many self-help books do you think should have just said, move your body and go outside?

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it depends on, it depends on the person, it depends on your goals. Yes, there are so many people that would benefit from just, like, move your body, go outside, 100%. But if you're depressed, is that gonna solve your problems? Maybe it'll help a little bit, but why are you depressed? What's really going on? Is it because you think you're ultimately worthless and unlovable? Well, okay, you may feel a little better moving your body and going outside, but it's probably not gonna solve the underlying issue. So my view is that there are a number of kind of powerful techniques, and we need to know the right one, the right time, for the right person.

• 40:14Chris Williamson?

  What did you learn about the relationship body-mind?

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's so many ways that our mind and body can affect each other and interact. And a really fascinating one is that when we're anxious or stressed, we tend to tense our muscles. And presumably, this is because tensing your muscles prepares you to fight, prepares you to run. But you then find that people who have chronic anxiety will have neck pain, shoulder pain, lower back pain. Right? So because it's actually this chronic anxiety impinging on the body. And they might go out and spend years trying to solve their back pain with surgery or something like that. Only to discover, oh shit, it's like literally muscle tension from chronic anxiety. Right? Not always, obviously, but but sometimes it is. It's just kind of remarkable, but it can also go the other way, too, which is fascinating.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  So there's a method called progressive muscle relaxation, where you alternately tense and relax different muscle groups. After each one tensing, relaxing, you kind of like feel into the relaxation of it. And it works in reverse by relaxing your physical body. It actually starts to relax your mind, just the way a tense mind tends to produce a tense physical body.

• 41:21Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. I think a lot of NSDR is similar to that, right? Yoga nidra, body scan type things. And you're realizing just how much tension was held in your eyebrows. Right? Or in your lower back or something, despite the fact that you're laid on the ground. If you do, classically, is an entrance into a meditation set. Okay, so I'm going to scan through my body. And there are weird places that you go, huh. I had loads of tension in like my right forearm for no reason. And it's just like ambiently sat there. And until you pay attention to it, you don't really notice it.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  A technique I just started exploring just the other day out of curiosity. It was one where you find the point of your body that has the most tension. You try to relax it, then you're trying to find the next point that has the most tension, relax it. You kind of work your way through it. It's kind of interesting.

• 42:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's fun. I imagine that a lot of the people who are into this sort of stuff. One of the biggest afflictions that they need to get past is overthinking. That overcomplication, intrusive thoughts, rumination. What did you learn about how to combat overthinking itself?

• 42:26Speaker 01

  So there's an interesting bifurcation here. There's strategies that try to combat thinking with thinking. For some people with overthinking, that can be a problem. Like people with obsessive compulsive disorder, trying to go that route of combating thinking with thinking can be problematic. And then there's trying to combat thinking with not thinking. And so if we're taking that route, there's methods known as diffusion. Where you're trying to take the thought, diffuse from it. So you're noticing you're having a thought, you're diffusing from it, like separating yourself from it. And viewing it from an outside perspective. So an example is suppose you have the thought, I suck, I can't believe I did that. You can notice, oh, I just had this thought. That's not reality, that's just a thought about a thing. A thought is not always true.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  A thought is a process in my mind, it's not the reality of the situation. And then, once you've stepped outside of it, you can do things with it. You can let it go, you can imagine drifting away on the clouds. You can make fun of it. There's literally one of the most ridiculous techniques that we talk about in our in our book, The Twelve Lovers. Is you can literally sing the happy birthday song to your thought. Or you do a silly Daffy Duck voice to your thought. Because the idea, the idea is just finding separation, saying, yeah, I have the thought that I suck. That doesn't mean I suck, that is literally just a thought. And so people actually find this really useful, especially people who are overthinking and trying to engage in thinking with thinking. Maybe it's part of the problem.

• 43:46Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, that is interesting. I guess a good bit of the problem with overthinking is thinking that overthinking is useful. Like believing that if I do this more, some sort of outcome will, some beneficial outcome, desirable outcome will happen on the other side. The same with worry. I mean, I'm going to worry and that's going to give me some degree of maybe control or a sense of ownership or sovereignty about the future, reduce uncertainty or whatever. So yeah, it become, even if it never actually becomes effective, it can feel effective during the moment.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  People with a lot of anxiety tend to have these beliefs about anxiety that are counterproductive. For example, they tend to believe that anxiety and worry is urgent. If you're having to worry, you have to worry about it now. They also tend to believe that they can't do anything other than worry about it. Like, oh, I have, like, literally, I'm not capable of not worrying. And they tend to believe it's really useful, like, oh, it's really valuable that I'm worrying. If I didn't worry, something bad would happen. And there's this technique that is really not well known, but that I love, that's sometimes called the worry time. And the way it works is you pick a time of day, let's say 5:00 PM. You don't want to pick before bed, that's important, say 5:00 PM. And throughout your whole day, every time you have a worry, you write that worry down if you haven't yet written it down.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  So let's say you have the worry, oh, no, I don't know if my project is going to go well tomorrow. You haven't had that yet, so you write it down. The next time you have that worry, you don't write it down, right? You're just going to write it once per day. And then the idea is you're not allowed to worry about it, you have to wait till 5:00 PM. So you're essentially batch processing, you're saying, I have to defer my worry until 5:00 PM. And if it keeps coming back, you just say, no, I need to wait till 5:00 PM. And then, when 5:00 PM rolls around, you worry as much as possible about all those things you wrote down.

• 45:29Chris Williamson?

  High intensity worry training.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the really funny thing that happens is that, first of all, people start to realize, huh. I seem to be to have more control over my worry than I thought. Like, yes, my worry might keep coming back, but I can keep just redirecting and say, I'm going to worry about it at 5:00 PM. Second, when they get to the worry time and they sit down and like try to really worry about all this stuff. They often are like, this is not that useful, like, what am I doing here? This is ridiculous.

• 45:52Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Like, it kind of calls it out as not that helpful. And then, when you finish worrying for the for 15 or 20 minutes, you can then transition to problem solving and say, well, what am I going to do about this stuff? Let me pick one of these worries and actually create an action plan to try to improve it. And so it can be a shocking intervention for people that have worried their whole life.

• 46:10Chris Williamson?

  One of the interesting insights from CBT is worries and fears are often like bullies on the playground. That they want to come up to you when you're not ready for it. But if you go to the bully and you're saying, okay, now's the time. It's like, no, no, it's not, like, I want to jump scare you as you're walking around a corner. You go, no, no, no, I'm choosing the time. And I think that that there's something about that volitional versus surprised relationship between you and a fear or you and a concern. That is, from my time in CBT, is like one of the best things. Okay, I'm going to go and find the bully, whatever it is I'm concerned about.

• 46:49Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to go in when I want and I'm going to make it start, I'm going to start the fight now. It never wants to engage. And yet, when you're trying to do something else, that's when it wants to come over. So yeah, the flipping of that power is interesting.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's also funny that when we're worrying, we often feel like we're doing something. But then, when you switch to problem solving, you're like, well, what was I doing there? Like, I was just cycling on the same thought over and over again. It's almost like worries often don't complete. You don't think, so you think, oh, no, what if my project is bad tomorrow? And then you're like, you know, thinking about that and you're stressed about that. But like often, it doesn't turn into the useful thing of, okay, like, what can I do right now that's actually going to help tomorrow go well?

• 47:30Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Are intelligent people particularly vulnerable to worry and overthinking?

• 47:35Speaker 01

  I don't think, I know there's a perception that they are, but I don't think it's actually very linked to worry per se. Overthinking probably more so. There's a, there are kind of cognitive traits around enjoying thinking, thinking more often. And I think more intelligent people tend to have those traits, but not necessarily.

• 47:53Chris Williamson?

  Overthinking comes along for the ride with enjoying thinking generally.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  I would guess so, yeah, but I don't think worry does.

• 47:59Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people who believe that basically if they're anxious about work and their work, that they're being responsible. They almost sort of feel like it's their duty to worry. And is that actually true? Or is that sort of one of the biggest myths about anxiety, that it's dutiful to do it?

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely some people have that attitude. For, for example, parents often feel, if I'm not worried about my kids, I'm not a good parent, right?

• 48:25Chris Williamson?

  Responsible parent, yep.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  But being a responsible parent is not really actually about the worry, it's about.

• 48:30Chris Williamson?

  Making sure your kid's not safe, make sure your kid is safe and not dead, yeah.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Exactly, and if the worry about your kid is like damaging your relationship with them, for example, or driving them crazy. Well, then maybe it's not actually helping you be a better parent. So, but yeah, sometimes people think their worry really is important. Religious people sometimes worry that they're not following God's laws well enough. And they might think that's part of being, you know, a good religious person is worrying about that.

• 48:54Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether overthinking is partly an addiction to feeling like you're solving something. It's like, there has to be a problem. I have a particular demand for problems. And I will broaden the category for what I determine a problem to be until the supply reaches my demand, if that makes sense.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean. I think sometimes people think the more they think about something, the better solution they're going to have, or the more they're going to be able to handle it. But after a certain point, we not only hit diminishing marginal returns, but often actually makes things less clear. You know, if you've spent three hours thinking about the thing and you're no clearer than you were before, you're probably thinking it's not the next thing to do, right? Maybe you need to take action, maybe you just need to take a step back from it for a little while. And so I think it's important to track, well, how much progress did you make in the last 10 minutes of thinking about it, or 20 minutes of thinking about it and calibrate that way?

• 49:48Chris Williamson?

  That is how you would tell the difference between productive thinking and rumination.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, now, of course, it's always possible that you're, you're going to have some breakthrough after three hours, but I think it's a good indicator if you're stopped making progress.

• 50:00Chris Williamson?

  What's cognitive restructuring?

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Cognitive restructuring is this idea that you can learn to actually change the thoughts that you have over time. Now, of course, you often can't change the first thought, right? Something, if someone jumps out, you might have a thought and you're not in control of that necessarily, but you can often change the second thought, the response thought, and that can make a tremendous difference. So, for example, let's say, let's go back to the example of fighting with your girlfriend a lot, right? And let's say when your girlfriend asks you, oh, you know, why did you leave the dishes in the sink? You know, I don't like that. Your first thought might be, well, I just want to do things my way, right? I want to feel comfortable in my home, right? Maybe you don't control that thought, but you can learn to have a different thought after that and you can, you can ask yourself, well, is that the most helpful thought to have right now?

• 50:48Speaker 01

  And what would a more helpful thought that's at least as true, so not self-delusion, but at least as true be? And you can, you can actually learn and practice to have that be your response thought. So maybe a more helpful thought that's at least as true is, well, this is her home too, and we need to find a balance, right? And so after you have that first thought, you can train yourself to have that second thought, and then that can set you up in a better position for success.

• 51:11Chris Williamson?

  Similarly, I learned about parts work when I went to a meditation retreat recently. Why did that make it into the book?

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Well, there are a lot of people that find that thinking of themselves as having parts gives them self-insight. And so we included it just because there are a lot of people out there that particularly like this sort of techniques. It's most famously associated with internal family systems, but it's actually used in other therapies. For example, I believe it's used in schema therapy, which actually has surprisingly more evidence for its efficacy than internal family systems. So I think it actually does work for some people. The basic concept, as I think about it, is we're not literally different parts, right? We have one brain, but we have sort of activation patterns of emotions, beliefs, motivations, drives that get activated together.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  And when you have these things get activated together, it's almost like you're a different person temporarily. Like, maybe there's a child part of you that never got enough love, and sometimes in certain situations in adulthood, that gets activated. And suddenly, it's almost like you're back there being that child that didn't get enough love, and you're being really needy, and you're having certain fears come up, et cetera. And so the idea of parts work is you can learn to try to communicate with these metaphorical parts, try to really understand where they're coming from, what they're trying to do, validate what their needs are, try to help their needs be met, and really approach them from a place of, of deep compassion and understanding. And some people find that really unlocks insights for them.

• 52:40Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how much of that strategy is to do with the same principle around fears and worry that in the fighting with it is the reinforcement of it, that like you're not pushing it away, you're sort of bringing this thing in. Oh, there I am again, worrying about being perfectionistic. Oh, well, that's the part of me that wanted to get a lot of love as a kid and felt like love was going to be predicated on performance. Oh, well, like if I saw that version of me now, I'd pick him up and give him a hug. Wouldn't that be nice for him? Oh, well, that's like, there's compassion. I'm no longer in tension with that thing. I am that thing, and it is a part of me, and I'm trying to offer it some, some care.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  It's often recommended that you give these parts names, because it kind of makes it easier to talk about them, like the scared part, or the perfectionist part, or whatever it is. And it's often also recommended you not give them mean names.

• 53:33Chris Williamson?

  The idiot.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, the idiot, or that guy who's ruining my life, or whatever. And the reason for that is that the parts of you are trying to do something, right? They're trying to achieve something, and it's useful to think about that. They're trying to protect you, even if they drive you crazy, they're trying to protect you. And it's, it's a useful reframe to say, hey, that thing that's beating me up, it's because it's scared that I'm not going to achieve enough if it doesn't do that. And holy shit, maybe I can, I can explain to it, I can achieve my goals in other ways, and it doesn't have to beat me up so much.

• 54:05Chris Williamson?

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• 54:49Chris Williamson?

  And right now, you can get $25 off, bring it down to $340. Get the exact same blood panels that I use and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. Talking about achieving things, productivity is kind of the buzzword of the decade. What did you learn about productivity?

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Well, I'm a mathematician, I don't know if you know that. And I, so I was so tickled when I realized I could create an equation for productivity. There's literally an equation, it's, it's true. And it's that productivity equals time times efficiency times importance. And I'll break that down. So productivity is the amount of value you produce each week based on what you fundamentally value. And that's what I like to call healthy productivity, where it's based on everything you value, not just producing one type of output. If you focus on productivity on just one type of output, like how much can you create, you know, just your job? The problem with that is it can often come at the expense of the other things that you

• 55:53Speaker 01

  fundamentally care about, like your, your family life, your relationships, your hobbies, et cetera. So, so that's the first part. Productivity is the value you create each week based on what you fundamentally value. Then we can break down the equation. It's time, which is the number of hours you work, times efficiency, which is the fraction of your project you complete with each hour, times importance, which is the total value based on what you care about of completing your project. And having this equation, we can then start to think about how do you tune it?

• 56:24Speaker 01

  For some people, you're going to tune it by saying, well, if you're not working very many hours on the things you care about, you're going to want to get up time. But if you're already working 70 hours a week, that's a trap. Trying to push up time, you're not going to get much out of that. Those last few hours are going to cost a lot, and they're not going to give you very much. Okay, well, what else? You could work on efficiency. There's a whole bunch of techniques you can use for efficiency, but often, one of the most overlooked ones is importance. That by, you know, you can't work 100 times more than a person, it's literally impossible. There's 24 hours in a day. But sometimes you can find something 100 times more valuable for yourself. You, you can get sometimes incredible gains in thinking about the importance part of what's actually truly valuable to you, what do you want to work on?

• 57:02Chris Williamson?

  How long you work? How well you work? And what you're working on?

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Basically, yeah.

• 57:08Chris Williamson?

  Right, yeah, that's cool. That's, that is cool. And you're right, that work done is time times intensity, but that work done can be in service of a thing that you don't really care about. And you saying you're being productive, I suppose, so like you have produced things, you have certainly produced something, but whether that is salient or valuable to you in your life, or even the thing that is being given to you, that sometimes you don't get to always choose what it is that you need to work on. Like, someone might not want to work on their taxes, but I would imagine that you can link that to a deeper value, something that you do care about, and then you go, okay, how efficient can I be at filling in the spreadsheet, and how much time are we going to spend doing it?

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And when you take that broader view of productivity, you realize that some things are just not worth it. You know, imagine a truck driver who's trying to get valuable merchandise you know, from point A to point B. Well, if all they care about is getting the merchandise there, they can drive over the speed limit, they can not sleep the entire trip. But you know, clearly that's not worth it. Why is it not worth it? Maybe the merchandise would get there faster on average, but they're going to put people's lives at risk. They're going to be absolutely miserable, et cetera. Right. So they're going to burn the things they care about to produce this sort of narrow view of productivity.

• 58:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, most productivity advice then is focused on efficiency. Like very little of it is like, just work longer. It'd be an incredibly short book.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Well, there are some interesting techniques around time as well.

• 58:30Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. So one thing we we talk about in our book, The Twelve Lovers, is doing a time audit. And you can, if you have a very, the same schedule every single day, you can just do it for one day, but you could also do it for a few days if your schedule tends to vary. And it's just looking for, how do you actually spend your hours? So every time you transition activities for a few days, just simply write in a notepad, what were you doing and for how long? And when people do this, they're often shocked to discover what they're actually spending their time doing. Oftentimes, people spend way more time scrolling their phones than they realize. Like they often underestimate by like literal hours sometimes. They think that they're working more than they're actually working. So a time audit can then help you look back and say, hmm, maybe I do have like an extra hour or two more than I thought. And then you can start being strategic.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  So obviously you can't make time out of nowhere, but you can make time out of time that you're, you just think is not a good use of time.

• 59:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think that's the number one realization that people get from wearing a sleep tracker like a Whoop or and using an Eight Sleep or something, which is just, dude, you are sleeping less than you think you are. Like you're not sleeping that much. Yeah, man, I was like, I got eight hours.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  That's what happened to me when I started wearing one.

• 59:34Chris Williamson?

  No, you were in bed for seven fifteen. And after it took you a little while to get to sleep and then you woke up a couple of times for a piss. It's like you got six hours and you thought you got eight. And there's a big difference in that. What about efficiency? What were the best ways for people to improve efficiency?

• 59:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. So in terms of efficiency, we talk about, first of all, coming prepared. And there's different versions of coming prepared to work. One is, I know so many people that like type a lot as part of their job. And some of them are really slow typers. And it's fascinating to me because it's like, you type so much part of your job. Maybe you type a lot on your phone, but you like actually kind of suck at typing. If you just spend like five hours for improving your typing, that's going to give gains for the rest of your life. So that's one version of coming prepared. Another version is when you sit down to your desk, is everything there ready to go? You know, chefs have this idea of having like everything laid out in the perfect position, all ready to go. So you can just focus on cooking. And so we could take that to heart with many different types of work.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  And it could be just clearing away all the frigging windows of your computer. So you can focus on what you're doing, right? So coming prepared. The second thing, second thing is avoiding distractions. So this is a big one. When people, when people start getting into their work, things often pull them away. And you know, there's a bunch of things you can do, whether it's, you know, silencing notifications, changing your work environment, using noise cancelling headphones, whatever distracts you and figuring out how do you remove that? So it's not going to be a problem.

• 1:00:58Chris Williamson?

  I love the idea of the component skills. I totally didn't think about if you're writing anything ever, which almost everybody is, hey dude, how good are you at writing? How many hours? How quick can people become better at typing shit? Five hours of training?

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  That's a good question. So I was working on improving my typing speed on my phone. And I felt like I got significant benefits after like five hours of practice. But I mean, you know, not that I'm amazing.

• 1:01:23Chris Williamson?

  Where you can go to like?

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  You can literally get a game. It's like a game where you have to blow things up by typing. Like there's like, there's so many different apps and all kinds of stuff that you can just practice.

• 1:01:32Chris Williamson?

  Stuck about your, your typing?

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  I think I have, yeah, I think it's stuck. I mean, look, I'm not the fastest typist on my phone, but I'm faster than I used to be.

• 1:01:39Chris Williamson?

  My girlfriend's a freak. Like she is able to get stuff out quicker than I can think it. Like what the fuck is going on? Like watching, what's that, watching Dead? Not Dead Devil, who's the guy? The Flash, it's like watching The Flash on the, on the, on the phone. Anyway, um, well, that, that's an interesting insight that your voice, especially now chat GPT, uh, voice commands and stuff. I wonder what additional efficiency gains will be able to be made by people that are using voice as opposed to having to. And then we go to Neuralink and we start to speed these things up. But that will change some of the input restrictions that people have in terms of that being the rate limiter, the skill of being able to do that into, okay, well, how often are you being distracted?

• 1:02:22Chris Williamson?

  Okay, well, how are you prioritizing the sequence? Are you coming prepared in terms of making sure that you actually have everything that you need before you begin that task? A lot of stuff like that.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, technology, I think is going to be huge for efficiency. I mean, I'm just going crazy trying to figure out all the ways to use AI to make my life more efficient. And I think there's tremendous opportunities there.

• 1:02:43Chris Williamson?

  What does the research say about scheduling fun? Like a lot of what we've talked about so far is kind of grindset, grindset adjacent. I'm making things happen. I'm dealing with my problems and I'm expediting my goals and stuff. But like presumably fun is good in and of itself and also a strategy for a more fulfilling life and presumably a more effective life too.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  Sometimes I worry about saying things that are too obvious. But then what, what I came to realize over time is if you say something obvious that someone hasn't heard before, it can actually be really valuable because they just immediately get it. They're like, oh shit, you're right. Because it's obvious, right? And we were worried about this with one section of our book. We call it glad you did it activities. And the idea of a glad you did it, did it activity is very simple. It's just an activity where afterwards you're glad you did it. You're like, yeah, hell yeah, I'm glad that I did that thing. Very often we do non glad you did it activities, right? We're scrolling our phones or, you know, we, we watch too much TV or whatever it is. And I think sometimes people make the mistake of thinking, oh, I should be replacing all my downtime with something productive, right? But that's a denial of your own needs.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  When you get home from work and you're tired, you need to relax. Yeah, that's why you sit and scroll on your phone. It makes sense to just replace it with work is to deny those needs. And it's not a very healthy thing to do. But you can be smart about it and you can say, well, how do I replace that with a glad you did it activity? Cause you probably aren't glad afterwards that you scrolled on your phone. And for me, for example, I love watching documentaries. And there's so many I haven't seen that I want to see. So a simple thing I can do is be like, instead of doing whatever bullshit to relax, pull up a documentary I wanted to see and watch that. And I'm, and I'm like, it feels like a meaningful use of time. I'll remember having watched that for years and be able to discuss it with people. And so it's about finding ways to meet your existing needs that give you more benefit in the long term.

• 1:04:32Chris Williamson?

  It's such a good switch. That's really good. That's, I think that's probably my favorite one from the book. For me, uh, if, and you can even switch screen for screen, I guess, if you kind of kindle as being a screen. But I'm obsessed with this. I'm wearing my new Dungeon Crawler Carl T-shirt today. Shout out to the people that know my T-shirt collection is ever expanding. And this, it's a eight book series, at least at the moment. And there's probably going to be like 18 or something when Matt Dinnemann finishes up. And I'm like, well, I'm already on my phone. If I just do, that device goes down and this device, or I guess even like a paper book comes up. My felt sense of, and this is interesting as well.

• 1:05:12Chris Williamson?

  Glad you did it activities

• 1:05:15Chris Williamson?

  aren't just things that you enjoy doing in the moment. But even longer than that is the story that you tell yourself about what you did and about being the sort of person that does that sort of thing. And then the identity that is built up by being the sort of person that tells yourself the sort of story about being the kind of person that does that sort of thing. Like it is so recursive and just what the fuck you do with your time is kind of the pebble at the top of the avalanche. And then downstream from all of this are habits, fears, a story, narrative, identity, all of this shit sort of falls downstream from just like this one switch or going for a walk with the dog instead of lying on the couch and vegging out or whatever.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  There's this interesting word that most people haven't heard of, which is choice points. The idea is that we make many micro decisions where we can move towards our values or away from them throughout every single day. Right? Your mom calls you, do you pick up the phone? You know, what do you decide to buy at the grocery store? And there's actually these tiny little decisions add up. Are you moving towards your values or away from them? And I think it's empowering to realize that because you don't have to transform your life with giant bold actions. You can also do it through tiny micro decisions.

• 1:06:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Other than for you documentaries, what are some of the most commonly rated glad you did it activities that people can do easy switches for?

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  If you have a pet, like spend time with your pet, right? Like that's relaxing, it's, you know, fun. And typically more meaningful than like a lot of the things that people, you know, do for relaxation. Obviously, you know, if you're not in Gen Z, you can call a friend. I don't know if Gen Z does that anymore. You can take a walk outside. A lot of people like being in nature often, people feel good about having done that.

• 1:07:05Chris Williamson?

  Call and a walk at the same time.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  Oh, it's great.

• 1:07:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Is, and I, how, this is the problem. What I guess when you distill things down, they end up being so cliche or tried or like seemingly obvious, like shock horror. You've got to be an hour and 10 minutes into a podcast to find out that going for a walk and calling a friend is something good for you. And it's like, all right, dude, if you're so fucking smart, why aren't you doing it? It's the same thing. Every time that I sit down with Huberman, Andrew Huberman's on the show this week. I'm like, he'll go cold, dark, quiet for sleep. Like that's the thing. And people want the recency bias, the, you know, the new novel insight. What's the cutting edge tool? It's like, bro, if you're so bored of the basics, why aren't you doing them? Why are you not doing that?

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  And that is such a great question. And it's like, well, that, that is actually maybe the next step they need to take. Why are they not doing it? That's the thing to dive into, right? Rather than, oh, try to do the next technique. It's like, well, why aren't you doing? Because there's a reason, there's a psychological explanation for that that they may not understand yet.

• 1:08:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, which is the investigation, the reflection. That's kind of important. Did you look at discipline? Because discipline, willpower, resilience, motivation, you know, it's second after maybe habits and productivity, sort of the buzziest of buzzwords coming out of this kind of world?

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  So there was a lot of research on what they called ego depletion, which is the idea that your willpower is kind of like a muscle and it gets tired out after you use it. So there were a whole bunch of studies where they would do things like, you know, get people, they would give people like cookies, but then have them not eat them. So they'd be like exerting willpower. And then they would test them afterwards and find that they had less willpower after that. So it kind of would get depleted and it built this whole beautiful theory around it. And then researchers tried to replicate it and it did not replicate. Like they could not replicate the, like a bunch of the basic findings. Now, does that mean willpower doesn't exist? No, willpower, but clearly there's a thing willpower. But unfortunately, our scientific understanding of it kind of collapsed when, due to the replication crisis.

• 1:09:02Chris Williamson?

  Roy Baumeister's been on the show and I've like harassed him a bunch of times. And each time he comes to like, he comes out with a new weapon. He's like a guy that's going through a rotating door and every time that you throw him in, he's like, now I've got a mace. Now I've got a lance. Now I've got a flamethrower. Like, um, so that battle is kind of going to be fascinating to unfold. I think like, what does ego depletion tell us? Because they, they're constantly iterating at least. Sorry for interrupting.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, but what I would say is that one of the things that people do too much is they try to use willpower to solve their problems. And the, the problem with willpower, like, yes, there are, there are savants who are like willpower savants, right? They're just gonna, they're gonna like use it to do everything. You know, I know someone like this who's an ultra runner and nothing's going to stop her. She can just use willpower to solve her problems. The rest of us though, willpower is usually not the best solution. And the reason is because, well, you might be really psyched up today and be able to push through. But will you be able to do it tomorrow and the day after that, and the day after that? And as soon as your motivation flags, you're in trouble. So I prefer easier methods that require less willpower. So for example, if I encounter someone who doesn't exercise at all, and they say, I really want to exercise. And I say to them, what kind of exercise do you most love?

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  What's the most fun type of exercise that would require the least willpower possible? And if they say, I hate all, I hate all exercise. It all sucks. Then I'd say, have you heard of temptation bundling? So this is a phrase coined by Katie Milkman, the psychology researcher. The idea is pairing something that we don't like, but that's good for us with something we really do like. So you hate exercise? Well, go run on your treadmill and play video games, right? Combine the thing you really like with something you don't like to do the healthy thing.

• 1:10:38Chris Williamson?

  Let's say that you didn't enjoy walking, call a friend.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Walk when you call a friend. Find a way to make it enjoyable, make it good enough that it's no longer.

• 1:10:45Chris Williamson?

  If you hated calling a friend, you could walk at the same time if you enjoy walking.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. There you go.

• 1:10:51Chris Williamson?

  I don't want to talk to, ah, mum's ringing. Fuck, I don't want to answer it. I do enjoy walking. I'll go for a walk and I'll pick it up. The supplement industry is full of products making claims that they can't back, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentus. Their co-founder Jeff By is played in the NFL and saw firsthand just how wildly the quality of supplements can vary. So he built Momentus around a higher standard. Every product from Momentus uses evidence-backed ingredients, transparent doses and independent third-party testing. Everything is NSF certified for sports, so what's on the label is actually what's in the tub. It's why Momentus is trusted inside all 32 NFL locker rooms. It's why I've trusted them with my own supplements for years. Best of all, Momentus offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it and try it for 29 days.

• 1:11:34Chris Williamson?

  If you don't love it, they will give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below. By heading to livemomentus.com/modernd wisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. How does positive thinking factor into all of this? The framing that we place around it, optimism, resilience, stoicism, stuff like that?

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Positive thinking is often talked about like, oh, you know, if someone's depressed, they should think positively. That is probably the most annoying thing you can say to a depressed person is think positively. And I think in general, people are confused about it because they think, well, when I have positive thoughts, I feel good. So then what I should try to be doing is having positive thoughts. But I think that's actually not the most healthy, healthy way to think about it. I think in terms of, so strangely, oftentimes positive thinking follows our behavior rather than something we generate from nothing.

• 1:12:34Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  There was a really crazy study done on depression. It kind of blew everyone's minds where they had one group that was getting kind of standard cognitive behavioral therapy, very well proven to help with depression. And they had another group that was getting, basically they were saying, okay, just find things you really enjoy doing. And you're going to schedule them and you're going to go do them regularly, right? And like the researcher talks about how like they kind of felt bad for that group that was randomized to that. Cause like, nobody thought that was going to be very effective. And shockingly, it worked really well. And then now there's a whole therapy around it. It's called behavioral activation. And the strange thing about it is you think, you take a depressed person and they have all these negative thoughts. And you think, well, if they're having all these negative thoughts, like surely just.

• 1:13:16Chris Williamson?

  The problem is the thoughts.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  Exactly. But fascinatingly, just getting them to do more positive activities that they really enjoy, actually tends to produce more positive thoughts, which is kind of mind blowing.

• 1:13:26Chris Williamson?

  What do you make of this battle between sort of bottom up and top down? For behavior change, for mood change especially as well. Like, it seems to me, I don't know, very seductive to a lot of people. And maybe it's the, look at how smart I am. I'm going to think my way out of this problem.

• 1:13:44Chris Williamson?

  Presumably there is a limit to how much we can just bottom up, create the state. If people could do that, they would be by split testing the evolution of their own life strategy, constantly going for a walk or playing pickleball or dancing with a friend or whatever it is that they're supposed to do. How do you come to think about the top-down versus bottom-up for moods approach?

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  Have you heard of the Jhanas?

• 1:14:06Chris Williamson?

  That's, that's the meditation retreat that I went to.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  Oh, great.

• 1:14:09Chris Williamson?

  I went to Journey.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Oh, you went to Journey. So I had, I had the founder of Journey on my podcast, Clear Thinking, the other day. Yeah. Yeah. So, so interesting. So it's funny because you really can learn to generate positive feelings.

• 1:14:22Chris Williamson?

  From nothing.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  From nothing. And actually, part of my morning routine is I spend one minute trying to generate the most positive feelings I can.

• 1:14:28Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  Just do it.

• 1:14:29Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever managed to hit any of the Jhanas in a minute?

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  No, I can't have it in a minute, but I have, I've had a couple of experiences with Jhanas, which is.

• 1:14:36Chris Williamson?

  Cool. What have you got? J1, J2?

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  Well, uh, but my crazy.

• 1:14:40Chris Williamson?

  You strike me as a J3, J4 kind of guy.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I'm, to be honest, I haven't spent that much time exploring that. But my crazy meditation experience was trying to generate feelings of pleasure. And eventually getting to the point where everything went white. I couldn't see. And I was like, I remember having the thought, holy shit, this is better than an orgasm. Oh my God. That's, that was, that was.

• 1:15:02Chris Williamson?

  That sounds like J1. That could be, that could be pretty good for J1, J2. It's, I mean, we're deep in the weeds here, but fuck it. I went, I spent a week silent, right? I'm allowed to indulge. Um, it's kind of fascinating. One of the things that I realized from a Jhana perspective, that I spoke to the guys about that too. Basically for the people at home, we're talking about different levels to a type of progressive meditation. And you go from J1 to J8 and J8 is disillusion of the self and everything in time and space and all the rest of it. But going down to J1, which is like very exciting, it's kind of like going to a rave a little bit, like, like a high energy state. But what was interesting and I thought was really telling, not everybody enters into the Jhanas at J1,

• 1:15:45Chris Williamson?

  even though they kind of are sequential and the first three are in, the first four are embodied and the second four are sort of disembodied. That I found I was much closer to like J3, J4 adjacent, because for me, one and two were way too energetic. It's like, holy fuck. Like every time I glanced off the side of them, it was like, uh, I don't know, like holding on to an electrical cable or something. I was like, oh, that's just too much. And there were a bunch of other people, including some of the facilitators who said the same. And the long realization I had around that is basically what a lot of, how we framed the beginning of this conversation, which is even a singular technique which works for you, works in an idiosyncratic kind of way.

• 1:16:27Chris Williamson?

  Like you're entering into this ladder that other people have been there, but the way that they got to the location that you got to, you just entered straight in at J3 or J4 and everybody else had to ladder up from one to two to three to four. And you can't go back down. Like you would actually struggle to go back to where they came from. I just like that whole thing, the idiosyncratic nature of ourselves, following the same practice with the same wetware. And, you know, largely like constructed from the same stuff, like is completely different.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  Having run over a hundred studies on human psychology, my biggest takeaway about human nature is that we humans are way more different from each other than we realize. There we, we don't think about it because we just have one mind to go off of. You only have access to your own mind and you kind of assume other people must have a similar thing going on. But also, social norms tend to compress behavior tremendously. So you know, you imagine going to a wedding, like people are, you know, dancing on the dance floor. They're having a cocktail, they're sitting eating dinner. Nobody's like dressed in alligator costume, like leaping onto the table, right?

• 1:17:28Chris Williamson?

  Been to the wrong weddings.

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Well, maybe that's my problem. But, uh, social norms make people behave so similarly that we think, oh, what's going on in their minds must be similar. But it's really, really not. And so as I study people, I've really come to discover like, what's going on is so different. So it's not all surprising to me that the way people enter the John is really different.

• 1:17:48Chris Williamson?

  That's such a good point. I, I've tried to say that in the past, less elegantly than that. That we're never going to experience anybody else's mind, even if you're born with a twin. The closest that you're ever going to get to them is by having some theory of mind of how you think. And then like porting it onto them. And from the outside, because we only get to see this tiny aperture of the things that people think. And then hit consciousness from subconsciousness and then choose to share or act out in front of us that we are there to interpret. And then we feed it through our own lens and finally come up with a theory about what it was that they were thinking, based on their thoughts or actions, their words or actions, sorry.

• 1:18:27Chris Williamson?

  Like, that is the, you know, galaxy sized input to grain of sand output. Like aperture that everything gets squeezed through. And then you look at this person and you go, yeah, that's a rational agent. They seem kind of like similar to me and we do the same sort of things. It's like, no, you behave in the same sorts of ways because cultural and societal norms kind of expect you to do that. And you're right, you go to a wedding and people are largely behaving in the same way. Despite the fact that the galaxy of bullshit that's behind each of them could be universes apart. But like, you don't want to be that weird and non-fungible at a wedding. Because like you will be the story, you're the headline of the fucking wedding there. Or you're the headline of the office or whatever it might be.

• 1:19:12Chris Williamson?

  This is how, it's kind of crazy that we can be so different as humans. And yet, like civilization just takes along and people stay in their lane when they're driving the car. And like people don't just shriek, like most people don't just shriek random things on the street. And like, they wait in a queue when they're going for food. And then they put the knives and forks away once they're finished up. And they don't stab someone with it on the way out or like throw all the cookies on the floor or whatever, like start eating all the salt. Like people behave in relatively predictable ways that are relatively, uh, normalized. And yet, all of us, it gives the impression that we're kind of similar whilst being like wildly different.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  Very well said.

• 1:19:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it may be part of why humans survived, because we have so many different types of people. You know, there's the adventurer that's going to go find that next area that has the great berries nobody's found. And then there's the worrier who's going to make sure that, you know, the tribe has everything they need, but is never going to go adventuring and, and so many other distinct, you know, types.

• 1:20:10Chris Williamson?

  Psychopath that'll go and invade Lindisfarne and come back with a bunch of gold and some new insights of the, yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you're sort of thinking about this as a whole, how much of the fundamental strategies of self-growth, personal development are just where you focus your attention? That's where your life goes. There's this famous piece of advice, we, Newt, this company, we've got a Formula Three racing team at the moment, AIX. And there's this famous piece of advice from racing, which is, don't look at the wall. Like where you put your eyes is where the car goes. Don't look at the fucking wall. If you're in Monaco, we were in Monza last week. We're in Monaco, don't look at the fucking wall, because there's walls everywhere. How much of this is where you focus your attention, that's where your life ends up?

• 1:20:54Chris Williamson?

  Where you, when you look at the wall, that's kind of where you're driving the car?

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  This goes back to the idea I mentioned before, which I call the unsaid obvious. The things that are so obvious, but you usually don't think about. Everything you experience is where your attention goes. Like that literally is your life, what you're paying attention to. And when you realize that, you're like, oh shit, what I pay attention to matters a lot. If you're walking down the street and you're the person that notices the beautiful flower beds, rather than the person that notices the dog shit near the flower beds, that's going to have a big difference in your life. Of course, you need to make sure you don't accidentally step in the dog shit. But that is really a profound difference between people. And you can learn to begin to control your attention and pay more attention to the things you want to. More to the things that, that bring good things to you than make life happy.

• 1:21:40Chris Williamson?

  Was there anything that you struggled to categorize? Or is there anything that's important when it comes to people framing the way that they should think about a psychological toolkit for improving their life that isn't in the book or that you struggle to communicate?

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  You know, we thought a lot about how do you communicate which tool is right for which person? Because it is a difficult challenge. We wanted to catalog all the best tools, but then you still have the question of, okay, you've got a bunch of tools, which do you use? We tried to map it out and we actually, at the back of our book, we have a decision tree to help you, a little map to help you figure out which tool. But I think it is really hard to capture, when is a tool going to be right? And, you know, maybe the first thing is what tool resonates with you? But there's probably a more nuanced way to kind of get to really core of like, who's going to benefit from what?

• 1:22:28Chris Williamson?

  What do you think people are going to overlook the most? Well, what's the least sexy but high impact strategy that probably more people should pay attention to?

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  The least sexy, highest impact thing is that you can't just learn techniques. You have to literally sit down and make time and do them. Like, and it's, it's so stupid and obvious, but many people read self-improvement books and they do nothing differently afterwards. It will not change your life until you actually put it into action. And we, we like, I don't know how to say it more emphatically, then you have to do something.

• 1:23:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So it would probably be better to read one chapter and then go away or to have a single strategy. I suppose this is probably one of the advantages of a book like, let's say Atomic Habits or Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg. And you go, okay, there is a, I'm aware there's varieties of interventions and you sort of, there's this lattice work that you're building, your understanding of how habits happen. But it's like, you're still doing a thing. It is a singular track. You're sort of following along with this as opposed to having, uh, like much more disparate. Like, for instance, human, humans new book, Protocols, it's a fucking tome. It's like 500 pages and there's all of this stuff in there.

• 1:23:46Chris Williamson?

  But there really should be, I don't know, like a way that you can register that you went away and did a thing for long enough time for it to actually impact you. Because reading the thing is not doing the thing. And unfortunately, until you do the thing, it's not going to have the impact on your life. And then reading sometimes or learning about something can give you a simulacrum of the progress that doing the thing would have given you. So like the consumption of more knowledge about it feels like progress, whilst actually taking away from the time that could have been spent acting in a way that could have given you real progress.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  You know, this reminds me, some people in this world of AI, they're like, well, why write a book? Why not just like, you know, talk to GPT about it or something like this? And I think, I think the best argument for a book is that a book isn't just a packet of information. Ideally, a book is an experience.

• 1:24:36Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:24:37Speaker 01

  And the hope is that from the beginning of that experience to the end, you've written the words of certain order for a certain purpose to change a person, right? So that's the ideal, is the process of reading the book creates some kind of change in them.

• 1:24:50Chris Williamson?

  I completely agree. I also think part of the Socratic dialectic relationship that you have when speaking with an LLM or now with using voice and, you know, chat GPT has got like this live thing where it can just sit. And like, it'll only pipe up when you want to speak to it. It's pretty fucking cool. But it, there is something about the optionality, which can, I think, take you out of the experience of what you're doing. It's like a choose your own adventure book a little bit, as opposed to just reading something that is a linear path, where an expert who has spent fucking ages crafting this thing to make it into an arc that brings you into land at a place that they have predefined as useful to you.

• 1:25:33Chris Williamson?

  From a place that they have predefined as probably the like normative starting point for most people. And this is where we go, as opposed to you kind of ripping yourself around all over the map. And sometimes you have insights and sometimes you get bored and sometimes you're not sure if you should stop. And sometimes you should maybe change to another, da, da, da, da, da. Like the optionality that is baked into that choose your own adventure with LLMs. I, it's a blessing in some ways, but on average for this kind of stuff, I actually think it's, I think it's just less effective.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's really fascinating now, having written a book for the first time of like, how much effort you put into the order of the words and what exact words. I don't think I've ever had that much care before in the words that I've written in a certain order. And, you know, I love podcasts. I think podcasts have a ton of value. But it's almost like the opposite end of the spectrum where like a podcast is an unstructured conversation. You don't know where it's going to go, you know, what's going to happen. And a book is like, no, you're going to read this exact thing.

• 1:26:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So curated, so carefully put together. Dude, you're the best. I, I love everything that you do. I think Clearer Thinking, podcasts and website are great. I keep on sending people back to our IQ and astrology episode from a couple of years ago. Where should people go to keep up to date with everything?

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  Oh, thanks so much. It's been so fun to chat with you. Yeah. So I actually have a new YouTube channel. So search Spencer Greenberg on YouTube. Just had my first video had a million views, so I was really excited about.

• 1:26:54Chris Williamson?

  I was looking at it the other day. Very good.

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  And yeah, our website, ClearerThinking.org. If you're interested in the book, go to 12loversbook.com. We've got three cool free bonuses you can get when you get the book, including a little AI bot that will help you apply what's in the book. So that's.

• 1:27:07Chris Williamson?

  Awesome. Dude, you're the best. Appreciate you.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  Fantastic.

• 1:27:11Speaker 02

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