Self-Help, Solved

We pulled over 2,600 studies and ranked 19 of the most common self-improvement techniques across three dimensions: research quality, consistency of results, and actual effect size. Then we sorted them into four tiers: legitimately works, works sometimes, probably not helping, and straight up bullshit. Microdosing landed in the bullshit tier. Crystal healing outperformed several "serious" techniques. And the number one most effective strategy is something so stupidly simple it's almost annoying. We also get into why everything at the bottom of the list shares one thing in common, why the middle of the list is mostly a fancy placebo, and why nearly everything at the top has been around for thousands of years. Get your free episode guide: https://solvedpodcast.com/self-help/ CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction 00:06:02 Category 4: Bullsh*t 00:06:13 Suppressing Negative Thoughts 00:10:53 Microdosing Psychedelics 00:17:29 Intuitive Decision-Making 00:24:11 Catharsis / Venting Anger 00:27:29 Category 3: Probably Not Helping 00:27:45 Crystal Healing 00:30:11 Willpower / Ego Depletion 00:35:02 Power Posing 00:39:57 Learning Styles 00:41:18 Positive Affirmations 00:44:58 Morning Routines 00:51:37 Category 2: Works Sometimes 00:52:36 Positive Visualization 00:59:59 Energy Healing 01:09:35 Cold Water Immersion for Mental Health 01:16:53 Speed Reading 01:23:50 Category 1: Legitimately Works 01:23:54 Gratitude Interventions 01:29:45 Meditation for Stress/Anxiety 01:33:31 Eat the Frog / Hardest Task First 01:38:42 Bibliotherapy 01:47:30 Behavioral Activation 01:59:19 Conclusion ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://go.markmanson.net/cdi1xzha ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at https://go.markmanson.net/217i5ys5 FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: https://www.instagram.com/markmanson Solved IG: https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/ Twitter: https://x.com/markmanson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson

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

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  If you're listening to this podcast right now, chances are you have listened to multiple self-improvement podcasts. And if you've listened to multiple self-improvement podcasts, you have probably been told like 28 different things to do to improve your life. In fact, there's so much different advice coming at you from every different direction that sometimes it feels impossible to know what is actually credible, what actually works, and what doesn't. And so here at the Solve Podcast, what we do is we over-research everything. I've been in this space for almost 20 years. Drew, my co-host and lead researcher here, has been with me for over a decade. And in that time, we have dug deep into the

• 0:39Mark Manson?

  science on so many different techniques, tactics, tropes, cliches, conventional wisdoms, that we decided to actually sit down and rank them. We took 19 of the most conventional cliche pieces of self-help advice, things that you've heard a million times in a million different places, and we decided to go into the science and find a way to rank them from worst to best. Which self-improvement techniques, you may be asking? Here is the full list in alphabetical order. We looked at affirmations, cold water therapy, crystal healing, eat that frog, which is do the hardest thing first, energy healing, fake it till you make it, gratitude journals, intuitive decision-making, learning styles, meditation, microdosing psychedelics, morning

• 1:24Mark Manson?

  routines, positive thinking, power posing, self-help books in general, speed reading, venting emotions, visualizations, and of course, willpower. Now, in the process of putting this episode together, I definitely was surprised by a few of these. I don't know about you, Drew.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  There's a few shockers in there, yeah.

• 1:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah, there were some things that showed up way higher on the list than I expected, and a few that were actually much worse than I expected. So it was a little bit illuminating. Obviously, there's a bunch of nuance and context for each of these things. Some of it is determined by how you actually define some of these practices or some of these pieces of advice. So we will talk about all of the different specifics and angles and caveats, whatnot, when we get to the rankings themselves. But- I actually want to ask you a question. I aggregated all of the research that we had on all of these techniques. A lot of this is left over from previous episodes that we've done. A lot of this is new. A lot of this was compiled by the research team. And of course, a lot of this was scooped up by AI.

• 2:25Mark Manson?

  How many studies do you think in total were at least looked at for this episode?

• 2:31Speaker 01

  I never looked, I guess I didn't see, I couldn't even, I don't know. A thousand, I don't, I don't, I don't know.

• 2:37Mark Manson?

  Two thousand, six hundred and three.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Really?

• 2:40Mark Manson?

  Two thousand, six hundred and three.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:42Mark Manson?

  Obviously, not every single one of those was read.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45Mark Manson?

  But a lot of them were. And I would say at least the abstract was read of probably at least half of them.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Right, right. We did some quality vetting too, like really shitty studies. We just didn't even bother with necessarily, but it was taken into consideration, sure.

• 2:59Mark Manson?

  Which brings me to the question of how we actually went about ranking these. So we looked at three different factors. One is just the quantity and quality of the research. How many studies have been done on this particular piece of advice? And how good was that research? Was it, was it actually respectable? Was it done at a very credible institution? Was it a very large sample size? Was it done cross culturally? Was it replicated, all that stuff?

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Controls, all of that, yeah.

• 3:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah. The second thing we looked at is what percentage of the studies came out in support of the practice? You know, say there are a hundred studies that, that we found on it. Fifty of them say it works, fifty say it doesn't. There are other ones that out of a hundred studies, ninety-eight say that it works and two say it, it doesn't. So obviously, the one that had ninety-eight that says it works is going to be ranked higher than the one that says fifty. And then finally, we looked at effect size. So effect size is essentially just how much does it work? Does it work a tiny bit? Or does it work really, really well? Like if you take a hundred people and you have them gratitude journal every single morning for a month. And then you have, take another hundred people and they do nothing.

• 4:04Mark Manson?

  Not only do you look at whether the people who gratitude journaled are happier, but how much happier are they? What is the degree of difference in the practice? And what we find is that there are some things that work very consistently, but only a tiny bit.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:17Mark Manson?

  And then there are other things that can work a lot. But they work very inconsistently. So out of these 19 practices, we're going to go through them, starting at the worst, and working our way up to the first. And we have four categories that we're going to work through. So at the top of the pyramid, we have stuff that legitimately works and is good advice and should probably be adopted by most of us. The second category we have is the maybe depends category, which is this can work, but it kind of depends on your situation, who you are, the way you do it, why you're doing it, and so on. The third category is the probably nothing category. It's, you know, it's not hurting anybody, but it's probably not doing anything either.

• 5:01Mark Manson?

  And then finally, the fourth category, which is our bullshit category, is it actually might be hurting you and you should probably stop doing it.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  There's, like I said, there's some shockers in here, a few things that surprised me even to.

• 5:11Mark Manson?

  We go way too deep. We over-research everything. We over-complicate everything, Drew. Why do we do it? Why do we do this to ourselves? Why can't we just interview fucking Instagram influencers like everybody else? God damn it, Drew.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Because we're trying to solve actual problems. That's why. So here we go.

• 5:29Mark Manson?

  All right.

• 5:41Mark Manson?

  We are going to start with the bullshit category. We're going to start with number 19. The worst of all of the practices that we examined is.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Suppressing negative thoughts.

• 5:52Mark Manson?

  Yes, suppressing negative thoughts and emotions. You could call this, if you want to be uncharitable, you could call this like the hardcore version of positive thinking, which positive thinking often does get interpreted in this way, is that people hear that, hey, I should think positive and they immediately assume like, oh, if I have a negative thought or emotion, I should, I should just push it away and pretend like it's not there.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:16Mark Manson?

  So take us through, why is suppressing negative emotions a bad thing, Drew?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  The biggest piece of evidence we have against suppressing thoughts and emotions is what they call the ironic process, which is basically if I tell you not to think about something, you're going to think more about it, right?

• 6:34Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  So if you have some negative or traumatic event or something like that in your life, and I tell you, okay, here's all these ways we can go about not thinking about this, then when that thing pops up, you start thinking, how do I not think about this? And it just amplifies it in your mind, right? It just makes you focus on it more, and it pushes out all the other good or neutral things that are going on in your, in your world or in your life at that time. So, you know, people think that it, it reduces intrusive thoughts and images, not really true, there's not a whole lot of evidence for that, improves your mood, you know, decreases anxiety, depression, again, not much in the way of that. For people who have, let's say, like traumatic stress disorders, like PTSD or something like that, in certain, very limited, structured situations, where they need to avoid that

• 7:19Speaker 01

  triggering event or that thought, under very close, careful supervision, that can maybe work sometimes. But it's not just for your average person walking around like, oh, like, you know, my girlfriend left me, or, you know, I lost my job and I don't want to think about it. It's, it's not helpful at all to go about just shoving that all down, basically, right?

• 7:39Mark Manson?

  And this is, I feel like, at this point in 2026, like, we, we kind of know this. This is, this is a bit of our parents and grandparents' generation of like, just like, just bury it.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:51Mark Manson?

  Just, just push it down here, have a drink, push it down further. I think our generation and Gen Z have grown up with, with the knowledge and understanding that like, this is a bad long-term strategy. So there are a number of recent meta-analyses on this, and one of the ones that I found actually quite interesting, is that it found that, for some people, suppressing negative thoughts and emotions can be beneficial in the short term. So if you're in like a high-pressure, high cognitive load situation, and it's just like, I can't deal with this right now, it can be short-term effective for that very moment, like, get you through that one little moment. What they found, though, is that it made things worse over the long term.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  The rebound effect was even worse.

• 8:30Mark Manson?

  Right. So the rebound effect comes back harder, you are even more upset, more angry, more stressed out, more anxious in the long term. But the funny thing I found too, and I'm, I'm just going to translate this very crudely, the researchers found that The people who did this best, who actually like, let's call it a successful suppression. The people who did it best, or who benefited the most in the short term, were people who had high levels of working memory and high fluid intelligence. So it's basically like, very smart people can do it.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:01Mark Manson?

  Whereas if you're not a super smart person, it's probably just gonna backfire super hard on you in the immediate term. But it was interesting because it's my stereotype of a very smart person is that they're actually very good at repressing their own emotions if they have to.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, true. No, that's a good point. Yeah.

• 9:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  But I think you're right, though. It is kind of like a tracheotomy, right? Like, only use it if you absolutely have to. If you can't breathe, sure. And you need to just get through some rough situation. I get that. But just know that's gonna probably bounce back harder.

• 9:29Mark Manson?

  The interesting thing, and I'm gonna foreshadow a little bit, is that because it is so popularly and widely known now that you're not supposed to suppress your negative emotions, a lot of people kind of assume the opposite must be true, which is you should express every negative emotion. And we're actually gonna get to that in a minute. That did not score super well either. So there's probably a happy medium here that we're gonna investigate. But that's number 19, suppressing negative thoughts and emotions. The effect size was relatively modest, but it was negative. It is not helpful. It's a pretty consistent finding. You're not doing yourself any favors. Don't pretend like the shit doesn't stink. Don't pretend like there's nothing wrong if there's something wrong.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Turn and face the pain.

• 10:14Mark Manson?

  Just, yeah. Just take it, take it on the nose.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  There's something to be said about dealing with it, right? Just deal with it and don't just brush it aside.

• 10:23Mark Manson?

  Number 18, this one's gonna be spicy. I can already see a bunch of angry commenters coming at us. Microdosing psychedelics.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  I'm bummed by this one.

• 10:34Mark Manson?

  I'm happy.

• 10:37Mark Manson?

  I live in California. I can't tell you how many fucking people walk around here, microdosing a bunch of crap, telling me that they're more creative, they're getting in touch with the universe and their spiritual, like, bunch of bullshit. And sure enough, the research on this shows pretty consistently that not only is there not really any measurable benefit with any consistency, but there is a decline in cognitive functioning and executive reasoning. The only benefit that was found in the meta-analyses was improvement of mood. So it's like, dude, you're getting high. Like, this is what you're doing. You're getting high and you're telling yourself that it's a productivity hack, or you're like getting in touch with your creativity or whatever.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  And technically, that's not even a microdose. If you can feel something, it's technically, it's supposed to be subperceptual.

• 11:24Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:24Mark Manson?

  So. The complicating factor of this is that there are reams and reams and reams of anecdotal case studies. There are plenty of case studies of people who claim that they suffered from lifelong depression, that they had anxiety disorders, that they had all sorts of like, you know, crippling conditions that they struggled to get over, and then microdosing changed their lives and saved them. There's also plenty of case studies of people who microdose for extended periods of time and fucked up their own mental health. So it is, it is all over the map. There is no consistent benefit. It is, in my opinion, just getting high.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:02Mark Manson?

  And it's the 2020s version of smoking a little weed before you go into work in the morning to like, ease the stress.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:11Mark Manson?

  Like, I knew people in college and some of my early jobs who like, that made them a little bit more effective. Like, they were very high-strung, anxious, like, stressed-out people, and it's like, taking a little hit of weed like, helped, you know, smooth the rough edges before they went in for the day. If that's what you're doing, that's fine. It's just like, don't kid yourself. You're not getting in touch with like, some deeper creativity, that you're not like, accessing better decision-making. It's not happening. There's no evidence of it. It's like, it's mixed at best, and it is just nonexistent at worst.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. There are a lot of people too, with ADHD. There's a randomized control trial that came out. There was no improvement over placebo effect. A lot of it's either probably a placebo effect. Again, if you're taking a subperceptual dose of anything, is it really doing anything anyway, other than a placebo? When they do really careful studies on these, they find nothing, or a decline in cognitive function.

• 13:05Mark Manson?

  Cognitive functions, yeah.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just not.

• 13:07Mark Manson?

  Reasoning, decision making, yeah.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  The evidence isn't out there. I said I was bummed because I was, I was in the probably, you know, 2015, 2016 era when everything was kind of ramping up with psychedelics. I was real excited. I was like, oh, here's kind of a safer way we can explore with these. And then nothing came of it.

• 13:22Mark Manson?

  All of the promising research is around the macrodosing.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:26Mark Manson?

  And it is, but the macrodosing is like, that's a lot.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:31Mark Manson?

  Like now you're entering.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  You can't not feel something.

• 13:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and it's also like, you really need to be careful about how you approach a macrodose, which we did not evaluate in this ranking. But it's funny, because I remember when a number of friends of mine started microdosing, probably around the same time, 2016, 2017. And they kept telling me how it made them more productive, and it made them like, do this, and they're like, more creative at work and all this stuff. And I remember I microdosed once, and around that time. And it was like, it sucked. It sucked. I just felt like, I just felt giggly, and like, I couldn't really think straight. And I was like, I feel like this is bullshit. And I remember looking at some of the early research at the time, and it was basically turning up that there was nothing there. And it's

• 14:15Mark Manson?

  nice to see that now that there are some meta-analyses that follow through on that.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  So that placebo effect, though, is going to be important through all of this as well. Again, if you're one of those people who are already typing in the comments, like, well, it works for me. It was like, okay, compared to what?

• 14:27Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Okay, if I gave you something and I said it was psychedelics, you would probably still experience many of the same effects.

• 14:33Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Or nothing at all. So, yeah.

• 14:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah, that's the tricky thing with self-help advice, personal development advice, is...

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Compared to what?

• 14:41Mark Manson?

  Right. And placebo effects are powerful.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, they are.

• 14:45Mark Manson?

  They are. Like, if people believe that something works, it can really work for them. And you could argue that a lot of this industry is kind of just a fancy way of inducing placebo effects in people. My issue with the microdosing is that actually that they have seen in like, long-term microdoses, that there are, there are some adverse health.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  You're taking this psychoactive compound, long-term, even at low doses, that can have the tremendous effects.

• 15:10Mark Manson?

  Yes. And so that's why this is in the bullshit category, the stop doing it category, rather than the probably nothing category. So if we haven't pissed off all of the California hippies yet with that one, we're definitely gonna piss them off with this one. How many times, Drew, have you heard that you should trust your intuition, trust your guts, that you should listen to your deep inner voice, that your inner wisdom knows best for you? How many, how many times?

• 15:39Speaker 01

  I, I hear that all the time. In some form or another, and sometimes it's dressed up in ways that kinda hide it. But yeah, you hear it a lot. I don't know, I might push back a little bit on this one. We might argue a little bit on this one.

• 15:49Mark Manson?

  All right, let's, let's butt heads on it. This one, there are caveats to this. There are caveats to it, which we will get into. Speaking generally, general life decision making. You've got a choice in your life. You can have dinner here or go there. You can call this person back or you can decide to be single. Any of these sorts of life decisions, following your gut, following your intuition, it does not make for a better choice. It often makes you feel better about your choice, which is a very different thing.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 16:23Mark Manson?

  Which is a very different thing. But it doesn't make a better choice. And I think that's the distinction. I think most people who really subscribe to trusting their gut, listening to their intuition, listening to their inner wisdom, all that stuff, really what they're optimizing for is just feeling good about their choices and like minimizing doubt or regrets or insecurity, which is fine, but you're not making better decisions. Your gut doesn't know better. Like, all of the evidence suggests that your, your gut does not know better, except, and I feel like this is what you're gonna bring up, in very specific cases of expertise.

• 17:04Mark Manson?

  So if you are a domain expert, so if somebody has been a brain surgeon for 40 years and they are brought into a surgery room and they are shown a patient and they see something. Their gut instinct is actually going to be accurate a lot of the time.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:23Mark Manson?

  And you see this consistently around people who have lots of experience. And that's because like Danny Kahneman talks about this and you know, there was that famous book, Thinking Fast and Slow, you know, system one, system two, like really what your gut reaction to things is, is it's it's pattern matching based on experience. So if you have tons and tons of experience in a certain area, you're probably going to pattern match extremely well. But most of us are not experts at the vast majority of things we do. Therefore, I would be very, very careful relying on your gut or intuition.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 17:57Mark Manson?

  What say you, sir?

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, okay, definitely agree with that. If you're a surgeon, you're in the middle of surgery, something goes wrong, you don't have time to sit there and you know, do a cost benefit.

• 18:05Mark Manson?

  Pros and cons, yeah.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Trust your gut in that situation, a fighter pilot or you know, something like that, even a commercial pilot. If something goes wrong, trust your gut, sure, I get that. Actually, what you said at first makes a lot of sense, where it's like you might feel better about the situation. Cause I was going to bring up my own situation where I left academia and came to work for Mark Manson like.

• 18:22Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  And so that was, a lot of that was around a kind of a gut, like minimizing regret, which again, what you said was is fine. I still think it was the right decision. That might be the key point. You actually might have like taken care of my skepticism with this or with that. Like if you might feel better about that decision. But I mean, you know, there are certain situations though too, where it's just like, there's not really a right or wrong outcome. It's just a values thing.

• 18:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah, or an emotions thing.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Like with a job, like a long-term, my long-term fulfillment, like I knew in academia, there was this narrow path and there were a narrow set of outcomes.

• 18:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  And I was like, well, I'm going to go take the more variable path here with more variable outcomes and see what happens. It worked out and there's some survivorship bias there, I get that.

• 19:05Mark Manson?

  Totally.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  But like a lot of that was a gut decision for me, yeah.

• 19:08Mark Manson?

  I will, I will grant you that I think when it comes to primarily emotionally laden decisions or value-based decisions, then your gut probably has actually better access to that than, than your, your mind or your slow thinking system.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:23Mark Manson?

  And I do think there is something to that, like trusting your intuition to know what's best for you or to know when you're going to be happiest. But it's like if my agent comes to me tomorrow and she's like, "Look, we've got three different publishers offering you three different book deals with different terms. What do you want to go with?" I'm gonna be like, "Okay." Obviously, I'm gonna have a gut reaction. It's probably useful to acknowledge that and like recognize it, but it's also like you should sit and argue against it and think, you know, think in other terms.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  I would also argue in, in situations of like immediate, potential immediate danger. Like if you come, if you meet somebody, you know, like something's just off, I'm gonna trust my gut and not interact with them. I'm okay with that.

• 20:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Like, I'm okay with that. You might, you might err on the side like of being a little-

• 20:11Mark Manson?

  Right, you might have some false positives.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah, that, that intuitive decision-making, I would say this is probably only harming you if it is chronic. And like, I definitely know some-

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 20:22Mark Manson?

  Some very, very woo-woo people who it's like-

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 20:27Mark Manson?

  Everything is like, "Oh, I'm trusting my, my intuition." Or like, "Oh, the universe is telling me to do this." Actually, yeah, I have a friend who is that way and uh-

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Telling me to eat three pieces of cake today and, you know, sleep with the next person I see.

• 20:41Mark Manson?

  No, I, it's funny, actually, no, I have a friend who they got very much into kind of the Joe Dispenza world-

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:49Mark Manson?

  And like, trust the energy, like the universe is telling you and trust your, like you're, you're attuned to the energy of the universe and so you just trust your gut. My wife and I, we've basically watched them turn into the most self-serving, selfish, self-indulgent, completely detached from reality human. And it's, it's like, it's fucking up a lot of their friendships, it's fucking up a lot of their relationships. Like, it's, it's a problem. It's a problem. And so I do think you have to be careful with your intuition because ultimately, your intuition is self-serving. And that's fine in a lot of contexts, like, like making a career decision. That's a self-serving decision, so you need to like, it's important to listen to yourself.

• 21:33Mark Manson?

  But if you're thinking about in terms of like, what party to invite people to, or like, what to do with your Saturday night, or who to call when, like, if somebody, a friend's going through a hard time, like, how to respond to that. Like, it's, your guts probably, it's probably not gonna be the best judge of a lot of those things.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  When the situation warrants a measured response.

• 21:55Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Okay, alright, alright.

• 21:57Mark Manson?

  This was also Kahneman's point too, right? It's like, ultimately, system one and system two, you need both.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:03Mark Manson?

  And they balance and counterbalance each other in various ways, so. The last of the bullshit section, I think this one, this one might surprise some people.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  It surprised me a little.

• 22:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah? It's funny, I had researched this before, so it did not surprise me, but I think this is definitely another holdover of probably our parents' generation. So, the conventional wisdom, especially back in the 70s and 80s, they actually used to have therapeutic methods in the 70s around this, of like, scream into a pillow, and like, write all of your angry feelings onto a piece of paper, and then flush it down the toilet, like, we'll call it catharsis theory.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:37Mark Manson?

  I've also seen it described as like, the hydraulic pressure theory of emotion, right? It's like, oh, there's anger pent up, and you need to let it out.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:46Mark Manson?

  Otherwise-

• 22:47Speaker 01

  It's gonna boil over.

• 22:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah, otherwise you're gonna explode and all this stuff. This is bullshit, most evidence shows no effect, like, screaming into a pillow, or punching a wall, or whatever. And what little effect size there is, is actually on the negative side. So, it shows that the more you scream into the pillow, the angrier you're gonna be, and the more angry you're gonna be more often. And so, it's this venting practice, or the catharsis effect, actually backfires. And it just, and which makes sense, because you're kind of training yourself to indulge in an emotion, which might be, I guess, marginally beneficial, if it's an emotion that you've like, traditionally suppressed within yourself, but-

• 23:30Mark Manson?

  Indulging in emotion is probably just going to lead to more, like a greater tendency to indulge that emotion.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Now, you still need to process the emotion, which is what the research finds is that actually finding better ways to actually calmly process, analyze it, be more introspective about it, be more self-aware around it, that's a much better way to deal with things like anger and frustration, any kind of angst that you have, rather than just like, yeah, acting it out. There was this one small study I did find though, that it was like violent criminal offenders, right, in a very controlled setting where they did some forms of catharsis with them, it seemed to help a little bit, but again, it was a highly controlled setting. And the times that do find either nothing or small positive effects that they do find,

• 24:18Speaker 01

  there's usually a lot of processing afterwards about the anger that they let out. So sometimes I think what it is, is those people who are just so disconnected from their emotions to begin with, you use that anger to like maybe get them connected with it, and then you really process it afterwards, but it's gotta be highly, highly structured with somebody who really knows what they're doing. Most of the time though, in the kind of colloquial way we use it, it's, yeah, it's harmful, actually.

• 24:41Mark Manson?

  What I just noticed too is everything in our bullshit category is, it's basically unbridled, it's like letting your emotions loose without any check from the rational side of your brain. So whether it's just suppressing negative thoughts and diluting yourself into positivity, microdosing psychedelics, which suppresses your executive function, intuitive decision-making, or catharsis, venting, you're in each and every case, you are kind of letting your emotion, your feeling brain off the leash.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  It's very indulgent.

• 25:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and it makes things worse.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  No, I think that captures that category very well, actually.

• 25:27Mark Manson?

  So moving on, that was number 16. We're moving up our ranking, up the charts. We're now moving into things that aren't harmful, but they're probably not helping either.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:38Mark Manson?

  This is our probably nothing category. Starting with number 15, this one was very upsetting, Drew. Very upsetting. Crystal healing.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 25:49Mark Manson?

  I had such high, I had such high hopes.

• 25:53Mark Manson?

  You know, you don't know this, but

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 25:55Mark Manson?

  Every, every podcast,

• 25:58Mark Manson?

  I sit with my crystals here.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:00Mark Manson?

  Behind the table. And, and I, I, I rub them.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Did you get these?

• 26:08Mark Manson?

  My, they're my crystals. They're my, my, they heal my podcast chakra.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  I really don't like how you're touching those.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Sorry, sorry.

• 26:18Mark Manson?

  All right, we're, before we get canceled.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Okay, so no, no effects of these.

• 26:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah, nothing. And in very little research, too. I kind of threw this in just for the lols.

• 26:32Mark Manson?

  But I mean, there are a lot of people who are really into the crystal thing. I mean, I, I know a certain somebody whose, uh, whose girlfriend is

• 26:40Speaker 01

  It was so funny.

• 26:41Mark Manson?

  Buying him crystals recently.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  I was giving pictures like, you like this one? You like this one? Right before we started recording. Yeah.

• 26:48Mark Manson?

  What, what was the meme that you were talking about at lunch today? It's the, the

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, single guys. The single guy dilemma.

• 26:54Mark Manson?

  Which, which is what?

• 26:56Speaker 01

  It's, every single guy has a dilemma of, uh, making fun of, um, like astrology and spirit crystals or getting laid.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  These aren't for decoration, though. That's what I'm looking at.

• 27:10Mark Manson?

  Okay, okay.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  They're decorative.

• 27:11Mark Manson?

  Quote unquote decorative. Okay.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  It's true, though. There really is no evidence.

• 27:14Mark Manson?

  Do, do we, do we have anything to say about crystal healing? Um, and aligning our chakras to the, to the vibrations of, uh, the, the, the crystal wisdom of the universe?

• 27:24Speaker 01

  They're rocks.

• 27:25Mark Manson?

  They're expensive.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  They're very expensive. That was one thing I noticed when she was sending me pictures, the price tag on them was.

• 27:30Mark Manson?

  Maybe we should drop this into the bullshit category, simply because, uh, if anything, it's just gonna harm your bank account.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  This one show, is the placebo effect, like on steroids. Okay. If you, if you believe that crystals will have some healing power over you, whether that's like some mild pain or anxiety or whatever, whatever problem in your life, uh, and you engage in some ceremony, then yeah, you're probably gonna see a little bit of something. If you don't, It's not going to. That's just, that is the placebo effect. That's a definition of the placebo.

• 27:59Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  So, there's a lot of ways you can go about doing that and spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on rocks is probably not the best one.

• 28:08Mark Manson?

  It's pretty harmless. Yeah. This next one, though, might, might actually not be harmless. Number 14, willpower. In the literature, this is known as ego depletion. It's actually a very controversial concept within the psychological literature. A lot of psychologists strongly argue that it's, it's just not even a thing. A lot of psychologists argue that it actually is very much a thing and it's very important. I guess, how would we categorize this? It would probably be like, the, would you call it like the willpower as a muscle theory of effort, right? It's like this idea that willpower is finite. It's something that you need to work and improve

• 28:46Mark Manson?

  and practice and you can overexert yourself or some people just are born with a weak will and some people are born with a lot of willpower and like, how would you characterize this?

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's, I mean, you know, the whole ego depletion theory is basically you have a tank of willpower, whatever it is. If you work on something or you're focusing on something or you're spending a lot of time and energy on something, then your tank is drained over time and then afterwards, you're not going to be able to apply any of that time and energy to anything else very effectively. You know, this, there was some early evidence for those kinds of things, even like the whole, the lemonade study. I think if you remember that one, like

• 29:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah, with the sugar.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  If you don't have enough, if your blood glucose is low, you won't have enough willpower. So you should have a little bit of sugar before. That turns out to be, you know, there's more careful studies done, not true. Willpower, though, it's treated like a resource. I mean, yes, you have energy levels, like just metabolic energy levels in your brain or whatever it is, but like the actual, is there a willpower center? No, probably not. The harmful thing is when you start to think that, oh, I only have so much, I have this little bit of willpower that I need to piecemeal out throughout my day or whatever it is. Otherwise, I'm just going to be exhausted in the middle of the day and I won't be able to get anything done. I think that's where like the more harmful.

• 30:03Mark Manson?

  What's interesting to me is that what you just said is probably super ineffective. Like if you really believe that you only have so much energy in the day and that you have to be very careful of like how you expend it, yeah, you're probably really gonna underperform your potential. What's interesting though is that observationally, you see the opposite as well. Like you see, there's so much stuff out there that's just like, dude, you gotta grind, you gotta hustle, you gotta push yourself, you gotta do all this. And we consistently see that that advice also doesn't work. So it's like, the people who are telling you, hey, willpower is kind of this fragile thing that you need to manage, that's not showing up in the research. But just from my experience in this industry too, it's like all the people who are like, dude, you just gotta fucking grind, bro, you gotta push yourself, you gotta, like

• 30:48Mark Manson?

  all the New Year's resolutions, like none of that works.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:51Mark Manson?

  None of it works. None of it is like, oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna lose 40 pounds and work 12 hours a day and run a marathon next month and, you know, start getting up at 4 a.m. Like, it doesn't work, no matter how hard you go, how hard you push yourself. It's just, to me, it just seems like such a faulty framing

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:13Mark Manson?

  of how things get done, of how, like, of like what motivation is, or like what effort is.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  The better version of the advice out there that you sometimes hear, if you hear it at all, is, you know, set up the discipline systems, right? So even when you don't feel like it, even when you have no willpower,

• 31:30Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  quote unquote, willpower, you set yourself up where it's more likely that you're going to do what you need to do.

• 31:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Whether you want to or not.

• 31:39Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  That's not willpower, though, that's just a form of discipline.

• 31:42Mark Manson?

  This hearkens back to our procrastination episode last year, where really, the big conclusion we arrived at in that episode is that really productivity problems are emotional problems disguised as productivity problems. It's either you are, the work doesn't feel meaningful, or it, it doesn't, it's not fun, it's not interesting, it's not connecting you to others, it's not fulfilling some deeper value or purpose. And I feel like this is kind of, like motivation in a nutshell is kind of the same thing.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:11Mark Manson?

  Like, willpower as a concept is just, is the idea of trying to force yourself to do something you actually deep down don't want to do, or don't see the value in doing, which by definition means it's self-defeating in a lot of ways.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 32:27Mark Manson?

  Right?

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, example, like you go to a job you hate all day. Yeah, that's gonna take a lot of willpower, quote unquote.

• 32:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  And then, but then you get home and you're like, I don't know, you wanna play video games. You go out with your friends or like all of a sudden you have all this energy to and motivation to do things. It's not because you don't have any willpower, like your willpower hasn't been drained.

• 32:43Mark Manson?

  The irony-

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Motivation has been directed in the wrong place.

• 32:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah, the irony is that if you're living very aligned, you don't experience anything as willpower.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 32:54Mark Manson?

  Right, it's just, you're just doing things.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Just doing it, yeah.

• 32:57Mark Manson?

  You can just do things.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:59Mark Manson?

  All right, that's number 14. Number 13, uh, power posing. I remember when this, this was a, a thing for a hot minute. Uh, there was a big TED Talk, I think in 2013.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did, I never saw any of this stuff, so this was all new to me.

• 33:12Mark Manson?

  You know, it's funny, uh, this was a big thing. It, it was funny seeing this blow up because this was a big thing in the pick-up artist community back in the 2000s. So the pick-up artists, like a big part of the, the pick-up artist scene, and for people listening who don't even know what this is.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:27Mark Manson?

  First of all, I'm sorry. Uh, second of all, what it was is, uh, a bunch of nerds in the mid 2000s got online together and started scientifically studying what attracted women and calling themselves pick-up artists. It went about as well as it sounds like it went. But one of the things that they got really into, I, I remember at the time, is they got really into body language research. And they developed a lot, they actually, like, a lot of the old pick-up artists were like, no, put your shoulders back, stand up straight, because that, it's not just that it exudes confidence, it like, trains you to feel confident.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 34:03Mark Manson?

  And so I remember when all the power posing stuff came out, uh, Amy Cuddy, I think, was the big researcher behind it. She did a TED Talk in 2013, it went super viral. She framed it much more in a professional setting, right? So it's like, if you've gotta give a presentation at work and you're like, really unsure of yourself, it's like, put the shoulders back, stand up straight, like, you know, create a power pose for yourself and then you'll suddenly feel confident. And there's all this kind of evolutionary backwards rationalization explaining it. Um, I, I think even Jordan Peterson has gotten into it. I, I remember in 12 Rules for Life, he talks about how like, shoulders back is like a status symbol and it trains your reptilian brain to see yourself as higher status and all this stuff. Anyway, I could keep going. Basically, nothing there.

• 34:49Mark Manson?

  Long story short, there's nothing there.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  There's some of the nuance here.

• 34:53Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  You can have very short term, like little boosts in your mood or, or just energy, I guess, levels. Very short term, very transient. There were some early studies too, that purported to find some hormonal changes, like increases in testosterone, that sort of thing. That's been debunked since then though too. So you can maybe get a tiny little boost out of it in some situations, but it's very transient. And there's, it's not really clear if that even translates to anything tangible anyway.

• 35:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 35:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I wonder if it's just, and again, speaking of placebos, right? Like, I wonder how much of it is just being aware of your posture in the moment, right? Like, I can sit here, I'm kind of slouched over, over the mic right now, right? Like, let's say I'm sitting here and I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna scoot up, I'm gonna stand up straight, shoulders up. This is my, this is my power pose, Drew. You fucking ready for my power pose? About to crush this fucking podcast. It gives you an in to create a narrative in your brain.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've activated some self-awareness there.

• 35:53Mark Manson?

  Yes. And then, and then you, there's like a little embedded mini narrative there of like, okay, I'm, I'm sitting up with my shoulders back, I'm gonna crush this podcast now. Which then, you know, a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy of like, you tell yourself that narrative, it generates the emotion that you're thinking about. Whatever you think about is, is just gonna, it's just gonna multiply. Okay, power posing, number 13, kind of a nothing burger. This one was interesting. This was a bit of a surprise. And it was funny because this actually got roped in, you know, when, when we, when I was doing the initial, kind of sending the AI out to like, go grab early research on a bunch of different topics. It just kind of lumped this topic in and I was like, wow, I never thought about that topic. I don't know about you, but I remember when I was a kid, there was a whole thing about like,

• 36:36Mark Manson?

  are you a visual learner, an auditory learner, a kinesthetic learner? And, uh, you know, if you're a visual learner, it means that you need like diagrams and, uh, videos and pie charts to understand a topic, whereas if you're an auditory learner, like you need to like, listen to a lecture and kinesthetic, kinesthetic learners need to like, touch and feel the thing and all this stuff. Uh, anyway, not, not really a thing.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:00Mark Manson?

  Not, not a whole lot there.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Kid, I still hear that today. Like, you still hear about learning styles today.

• 37:04Mark Manson?

  So crazy.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  This one shocked me.

• 37:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah, crazy thing. I saw, when we were researching this, I saw that over 90% of teachers in the United States believe this is a thing, and they're actually trained on it. Like, there's still training that goes on, on V A K learning styles.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:19Mark Manson?

  On, uh, grade school teachers. And there's actually, like, the research consistently shows that there's not really anything there.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  People who take this seriously and are doing more careful studies, they've kind of concluded what it is is more that you're giving the person a choice or agency in the matter. Not necessarily their learning style. It's not that you're just sitting down and say, this is how we're doing it. You're giving them some choice in the matter.

• 37:43Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Whatever that is.

• 37:44Mark Manson?

  Which is, which they're probably gonna, whatever they choose, they're just gonna like more.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's more of a liking effect than anything.

• 37:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah. All right. Number, that was number 12. Number 11, affirmations. As you know, I've been shitting on affirmations for, this has been, this has been paying my bills for a long time.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 38:02Mark Manson?

  A long time.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 38:05Mark Manson?

  Um, affirmations, I mean, kind of similar to power posing.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 38:10Mark Manson?

  There's a little bit, little, like, little.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  For certain people and certain situations.

• 38:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:15Mark Manson?

  Um, what, what I found interesting is that the most evidence that they see of this is around people who are around, like, minorities, underprivileged people, people who feel like, who have been, like, oppressed against or, like, uh, discriminated against in some way. That, those people are, are some of the only people that you actually do see, uh, legitimate effect size. The rest of the population, it seems to be a bit of a nothing burger.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Right. I think you've said this before though, too, just like, if you're going from, uh, you just completely, no self-worth whatsoever, and, you know, completely just fixated on a negative, a huge negativity bias, then going to some form of positive thinking, then yeah, that's gonna help, right?

• 39:00Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Like, in some, in most situations. Most people, though, you're going to get little to no effect whatsoever.

• 39:06Mark Manson?

  I, I think that the thing that's interesting about the marginalized groups is that if you take people who have, like, actually seen evidence of the world treating them worse.

• 39:16Mark Manson?

  Then I think it makes sense to like tell yourself like, no, no, I am smart. I am able. I am lovable. I am, uh, people do like me. Like, I can see why that would have power. Whereas if you're just like a random person living their life, it's, what, what you see is that it, it actually, affirmations often backfire for people, right? It's like secretly, it's like, you know, they're like, oh, I, I have to sit here and like tell myself I'm, I'm smart and likable. It must be that I'm not very smart and likable. And so what you see is that affirmations are kind of, I consider them like a win more strategy. And there's actually, there's a few things in here that I, I would consider what I'll call win more strategy. So like, anybody who's played strategy games, oftentimes what, what will happen is that you'll,

• 40:01Mark Manson?

  you'll find a strategy that seems on the surface like a really good strategy, but actually it only works if you're already winning. So it takes somebody who's winning and it just helps you win a little bit more. Whereas if you're not winning, it's actually not going to help you win at all. Affirmations is totally the same way. So what the research finds is that people who already feel good about themselves, if they give themselves affirmations, yeah, they feel a little bit better. But they already feel good about themselves. So they don't really need it. Whereas the people who feel bad about themselves, when they use affirmations, it actually makes them feel worse.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:30Mark Manson?

  Because what happens is that they stand there in their bathroom and they're like, wow, I'm the kind of person who has to fucking look in the mirror and tell myself that I'm, I'm beautiful and that I'm smart and that I'm lucky.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  That gap, right?

• 40:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Yeah, like what a loser I am. I can't believe I have to do this.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:45Mark Manson?

  So it's, it is, uh, in a way, it's like polarizing.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:48Mark Manson?

  Mental health outcome.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  It really, what it does is it highlights whatever the underlying belief actually is. Either positive or negative, right?

• 40:56Mark Manson?

  That's a good way to look at it.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  If you're, if you're already there, if you are like that star athlete and you're on the free throw line, one second left, and you tell yourself, you've got this, you're the man.

• 41:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Probably going to help you a little bit.

• 41:04Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  If, but yeah, if you have just been taking loss after loss in your life and you're down and out and you tell yourself, no, I'm an amazing, good looking, hardworking, rich, whatever, you know? That's just going to highlight how you're not all of those things.

• 41:19Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  So, yeah. Yeah. And that's what they found in the research as well. People with lower self-esteem actually don't benefit from this very well.

• 41:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's a mixed bag. It's definitely a mixed bag, and even when it works, it doesn't work much.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:31Mark Manson?

  It's a very, very small effect size. Last one in this category, in the probably nothing category. This one's a little spicy. I feel like we're gonna get a lot of the Huberman, Tim Ferriss biohacker people in our our comments for this one. Morning routines.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:47Mark Manson?

  Morning routines, number 10.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  You've been shitting on these for a while, too.

• 41:50Mark Manson?

  Dude, who cares?

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Do you not have like any morning routine?

• 41:55Mark Manson?

  You know what my morning routine is?

• 41:56Speaker 01

  What is your morning routine?

• 41:56Mark Manson?

  I wake up, no alarm. I wake up, I go to my desk, and I work.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  And you get to work, yeah. Pretty much what I do, too.

• 42:05Mark Manson?

  I don't fucking do anything. Nothing. I don't need to, like, come on. Come on, guys. Like, just do the thing.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Okay, so what's so wrong about morning routines?

• 42:14Mark Manson?

  There's nothing, okay. First of all, I do think this is a very personality-based thing.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  I would agree with that, yeah.

• 42:20Mark Manson?

  And this is also, this bears on the research, is that it's, it is a very personal thing. Some people love their morning routines and they swear by it. Other people, like me, could not give two fucks. So, my guess is that it probably maps very, very strongly to conscientiousness and probably a little bit to neuroticism as well. I think it's one of those things that because it's very tangible and measurable, like, we all want an answer that feels very explicable, right? Like, if I look at, if I look at some super-successful, admirable person that, like, I really admire and I want to be like them. Like, the thing that actually makes them successful is that they have like this very rare combination of

• 43:04Mark Manson?

  of personality traits and, and background and history and various social influences and connections and relationships in their life. Like, that's so messy and intangible and indefinable that like, it's, it's hard to get motivated and, and feel good about myself learning about that. Whereas, if you tell me what they eat for breakfast...

• 43:29Mark Manson?

  And like how long they meditate in the morning. I'm like, I can do that. Let me do that.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  It gives you a sense of control.

• 43:37Mark Manson?

  Exactly. It's like, it's like, well, let me just do what, I don't know. Steve Jobs does, and then maybe I'll be a little bit more like Steve Jobs. So it scratches that. That underlying emotional itch. But it is, the evidence is mixed at best.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Yes, it is very mixed.

• 43:54Mark Manson?

  It's useful for some people. Not useful for a lot of people.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:59Mark Manson?

  And it is all over the map.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  So yeah, some of the, some of those situations in which it's not helpful. Okay. Again, it's mixed. It can be helpful, but some of those situations where it's not. Matching your chronotype, right?

• 44:10Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  So if you're not a morning person and you try to like be a morning person with a morning routine.

• 44:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  You know, there's, there's genetic phenotypes of like early risers versus night owls, all of that, right? That can change over time. Again, you, you're an example of that. You used to be a night owl. Now you're an early bird, pretty much, right?

• 44:28Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, the point though, is, is that if you're mismatching those things and trying to like shoehorn in, you know, this morning routine and you're just not a morning person. Like, yeah, don't, don't force that, right?

• 44:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  People who are very rigid around this are probably those highly conscientious, highly neurotic people you're talking about. You almost get attached to that morning routine as like a, oh, it's almost a superstition.

• 44:50Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Like I have to start my day like this, otherwise.

• 44:53Mark Manson?

  It's another placebo.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  The whole day is ruined, right? Like I missed my whatever. My workout because something popped up with work or the kids or whatever it is. Now my whole day is ruined and I can't get anything done. There, there's some evidence to that. They, they found like a subset of people who are like that. Where it's just like, can't function without it. Well, that's, that's not a, a healthy coping mechanism at all. That's just a crutch you're trying to leave at that point. Again, probably for some sense of control.

• 45:19Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  You're seeking.

• 45:20Mark Manson?

  It's really like a placebo is probably inspired by some credible story of like, okay, this, I, it makes sense why this would work. There needs to be some sense of meaning behind like whatever it is, right? So it's like the people who believe in the crystal stuff, like there's some sort of metaphysical, spiritual explanation that makes them believe it. And because they believe it, they actually get some benefit out of it. I, I kinda, same thing with the power poses. Like I feel like morning routines is probably in the same boat, right? It's, it's, there's something about. Knowing like, well, uh, the science says that it's optimal to, uh, work out at this hour and eat this macronutrient at this, this hour of the day and it's, uh, and these really

• 46:04Mark Manson?

  successful people wake up at this time and they do these things first. If that gets you into a, a good emotional state first thing in the morning, if like, that's what it takes to get you fucking fired up by 7:30 AM, 8 AM and like ready for your day, then great. Like that's, that's wonderful. There's nothing wrong with that, but again, it's like, let's not pretend it's the root, there's anything magical about the routine itself. It's the confluence of understanding your own biology, psychology and your environment. And then just finding the repeatable pattern that is, that reduces friction as much as possible. For me, it's just like, I wake up excited to work. I, by the way, I've tried all this shit. I've tried literally everything.

• 46:48Mark Manson?

  I've, I've done all of, boogin' up at every time. I've done like morning stretches, yoga, meditations, workouts, ice baths, uh, smooth, like every smoothie, supplement, fasting, like everything. None of it stuck. Eventually, by the time I was in like my late 30s, I was like, you know, I just kind of wake up wanting to work. Why don't I just work? And so I start working at like six.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:12Mark Manson?

  Like I'm lit, within two minutes of opening my eyes, I'm working. And, and then I actually, this is the ironic part, I have a little bit of a morning routine, like two or three hours later. So when I go have like my breakfast, I've got a whole routine around my breakfast, which is like, that's when I do my household chores, that's when I listen to the podcasts I like, that's when I, you know, I eat, any sort of like, uh, hygiene stuff I do then.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, this isn't, but it's not an argument against good habits.

• 47:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah, but it, but it's not, yeah, but it's not, that's not making me better.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:49Mark Manson?

  It's not, that's, it's just, I like it.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  If you're, if you are in like some sort of rut or something like that, and like you change to a new morning routine or whatever, the, again, it's a placebo effect probably, but it's just like, oh, now you're seeing the world in a different way, a slightly different way, and that could change something, but there's a lot of different ways you can do that. It's not necessarily the morning routine that's responsible for that.

• 48:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 48:13Mark Manson?

  We are halfway through, Drew. We just wrapped up. We started with the bullshit section, the stuff that not only doesn't work, but may actually be harming you. We noticed that that was mostly emotionally indulgent behaviors, things like intuitive decision making or catharsis. We just went through the section that was, we agreed was probably mostly placebo, like kinda nothing, probably nothing there, but it's not really gonna hurt you. That includes everything from power posing to positive affirmations to morning routines. Now we're getting into the stuff that works. And by works, I put like, for this next section, I put an asterisk next to works, which is that it technically works, but there are

• 48:55Mark Manson?

  real questions around how much does it work, when does it work, for who does it work?

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Mechanisms, yeah.

• 49:03Mark Manson?

  Basically, this next section, it's all about stuff that kinda works some of the time a little bit.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  For some people.

• 49:08Mark Manson?

  For some people. Starting with number nine, everybody's favorite, this is a classic, visualization.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:18Mark Manson?

  Visualizing the future outcome that you want, visualizing the success, being confident. Oh, look at you, Drew, on that mic, just fucking owning this podcast.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Seeing myself killing it.

• 49:29Mark Manson?

  Crushing it, millions of people out there in their cars, taking out their trash, being like, that Drew Bernie, man, he's got it figured out. How's that visualization working out for you?

• 49:40Speaker 01

  That's my routine every time I record.

• 49:42Mark Manson?

  That explains the success. That's why we're doing so well. Got it. All right. Visualization. I will admit, I, you know, the affirmations, I could always kinda understand why some people did them, why it worked. And I will say this too, on the margin, like, I've definitely used affirmations on the margins. For example, like, if I'm about to go on stage in front of like 2,000 people, and I'm like fucking nervous as shit, I'll be like, "Bro, you're gonna kill this." Your talk is awesome. You're gonna nail it. Like, I'll give myself that little pep talk beforehand, but other than that, I've never really used affirmations. Visualization, I've never really been able to bring myself to do.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, same.

• 50:28Mark Manson?

  I don't totally know why, but I do know some people who swear by it, and especially these days with manifestation coming back with the vengeance, like it is, there's stuff all over TikTok and Instagram of telling people to visualize their future, visualize their success, and then it will make it happen. Tell us, Drew, is it that simple?

• 50:47Speaker 01

  No.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  This one did, it surprised me a little bit in some ways, but then when you dig into it, you're like, oh, this makes a whole lot of sense.

• 50:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  Okay, because, because what they find, especially for like athletes, or really any, any physical like activity that you're doing.

• 51:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  And you have some level of competence around it, positive visualization works fairly well.

• 51:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  They've done a lot of studies, especially with athletes, especially like elite athletes.

• 51:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  So as, as the competence level goes up, I think this works a little bit better, too.

• 51:17Mark Manson?

  To me, that makes sense.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  That kind of stuff makes sense to me, too.

• 51:19Mark Manson?

  Anything physical, if I'm like a basketball player and I need to, if I need to like, think about how I'm going to play against the guy who's gonna play defense against me, it makes sense to me that visualizing that process, imagining him in front of me, imagining me like, going around him, shooting over him, or whatever, I can see why that sort of mental rehearsal works. What I don't understand is like, I don't know, you're sitting in your bedroom,

• 51:48Mark Manson?

  playing, you know, like, I don't know.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  You're a slob on the couch and you're like.

• 51:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah, you're playing Grand Theft Auto and you're just like imagining yourself

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:55Mark Manson?

  surrounded by dozens of beautiful women cheering for you for existing.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  Well, you, you, you said the word already, there's a, there's a finer point we have to put on this.

• 52:06Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  When you're talking about the athlete and, you know, if you're a basketball player or something like that, and you are visualizing the process, you said, of how do I beat this opponent? How do I make this shot? How do I, whatever it is, right? Make this awesome pass?

• 52:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Okay, you're visualizing the process

• 52:24Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  of that happening.

• 52:25Mark Manson?

  Not the result.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Not the result, okay?

• 52:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  And that's what they found in the research, is that if you, the positive visualization around the process of getting to where you want is actually what's the most important part. So yes, you're a slob sitting on the couch playing video games, nothing going on. Just imagining that tomorrow is going to be different is not going to do anything for you. Now, imagining getting off the couch and going to the gym and, you know, like actually trying at your job or whatever it is, and all of the actual things that will get you somewhere, positively visualizing around those things, that's what's most important.

• 52:59Mark Manson?

  This maps to, from what I saw with some of the meta-analyses, the largest moderator by far on whether visualization works or not is whether it is accompanied with planning.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly, the process.

• 53:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah, like if you, it's, if the whole manifestation juju, like it can work if it's accompanied with an actual action plan of like, okay, these are the five steps I have to go through. And okay, now I'm going to visualize what success looks like at the end of those five steps. Whereas if you're just visualizing the success and have no idea how you're going to get there, then it doesn't really do anything.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, exactly. There's one, one study in particular that I found around health behaviors, actually. So it's people who were unhealthy or felt they were unhealthy and wanted to change something about their lifestyles, right? And so they had, it was a, it was a control study that they used and they have some people visualize around the health behaviors that they wanted to engage in with a commensurate plan.

• 53:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  That went along with it. Those people stuck to those health behaviors much more than the control group who didn't have the planning or the visualization around it. So, yeah, the, the plan and the process is actually the most important part around visualization. That makes total sense to me.

• 54:07Mark Manson?

  Right, which, which makes me wonder if you just take that away, how much benefit is actually left?

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Take what away?

• 54:13Mark Manson?

  The planning.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Oh, the planning, oh, yeah.

• 54:15Mark Manson?

  Probably not much, if any.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:16Mark Manson?

  It's a, maybe a little bit of a mood boost. And then, like you said, if, if it's like a physical activity, the mental rehearsal of that, that activity, like there's probably a marginal benefit to it.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Definitely. Yeah, there, there was another study too, um, around just motivation and energization towards your goals.

• 54:36Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  And they just had people purely focus on results, on the outcome base, what they call outcome-based imagery.

• 54:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Around this, and it decreased motivation for those people. Like, yeah, if you just positively visualize that.

• 54:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  You're immediately less likely to be motivated to go do those things. Whereas when you focus on the process and the planning,

• 54:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Then you actually like create some momentum.

• 54:58Mark Manson?

  So like with affirmations, there's a bit of a backfire effect here.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 55:02Mark Manson?

  Potentially.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could be a rebound effect there. Yeah.

• 55:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  So, so, okay, if somebody wanted to put up a vision board, let's say, right? Like, I've never been into those for sure. But usually those are very much outcome based and just, you know, I'm here, this is where I want to go, nothing in between.

• 55:16Mark Manson?

  So I actually looked at a couple of studies around vision boards and

• 55:20Mark Manson?

  yeah, it just boosts your mood a little bit.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. It could do a short term.

• 55:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  You probably have a rebound effect though, too.

• 55:25Mark Manson?

  So I think it comes back to the point that we made in, unlike some of the entries at the bottom of this list, right? Because one thing we noted is that all the things at the bottom of the list are are just purely emotional indulgence with no sort of mental planning or logic component to it. I, I think this is another example of like, if there's no planning component, if there's no logic component married, like the visualization is probably an emotional boost. Like it gives you a little bit of a jolt of motivation or excitement.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  Indulgence a little bit even too.

• 55:56Mark Manson?

  Right, which is great.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:57Mark Manson?

  Like, and, and it's definitely, I, I will say this, like whenever I've had big goals, like I definitely fantasize about what it's like to have that goal. But I've never considered that like a success strategy. It's, it's more just been like, man, it's gonna be so awesome once I achieve this goal and imagining what my life is gonna be like once I do achieve that goal. Like, I definitely do that, but I, I have no illusions that that is actually what's helping me achieve the goal. I think it's just, that's just being excited about my goal.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, right.

• 56:30Mark Manson?

  It's, it's actually the planning and the strategizing and the action that, that that achieves it. Well, let's move on to the next one, because this next one is a little bit spicy, a little bit of a surprise. Uh, I never would have guessed it would, it would come out this high. Energy healing.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  Oh, Mark, did you play the crow, maybe?

• 56:49Mark Manson?

  Uh, this is, this is the, this is the revenge of the woo woo.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 56:52Mark Manson?

  All of our woo woo stuff, or most of the woo woo stuff was, was at the very bottom of this list. This one somehow made it to the top half.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  Right, right. I might question our methodology a little bit on this one, but, but we'll see. We'll see what you have to say about this.

• 57:04Mark Manson?

  There, there are different types of energy healing.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is a very big, like, catch-all bucket that we made, yeah.

• 57:10Mark Manson?

  I do have a hypothesis around this.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 57:13Mark Manson?

  Which is that, and, and I was very curious about this. So, as you probably know, there's a concept sometimes referred to as touch therapy, which is just that having human touch is in and of itself therapeutic. It helps people calm down. It helps people regulate their emotions. So, things like, things as simple as just hugging somebody, touching somebody, holding somebody, having somebody put their arm around you, like, there are real emotional, psychological benefits of human touch. It's like, very much an innate part of our nature. There is actually plenty of research on quote-unquote "touch therapy." And sure enough, uh, the effect sizes of that research come out to be very similar

• 57:54Mark Manson?

  to what a lot of the energy healing effect sizes look like, especially when it comes to managing pain.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, yeah.

• 58:01Mark Manson?

  So, my, my hypothesis here is that the 99% of the benefits of energy healing actually come from the fact that another human is just focusing on you, touching you, and, and doing it in a sympathetic and caring way.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  I would probably agree with that. Um, I think, you know, the one, one study I found, it was actually a placebo-controlled study, as best as you could with this, anyway. So, Reiki, there's this, this old Japanese, ancient Japanese tradition called Reiki, and it's kind of like, it's, uh, either light touch or no touch, actually, just kind of a practitioner, an experienced practitioner hovering over you.

• 58:38Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Um, while you're laying down, you know, eyes closed, very relaxed environment. In the study, they used that versus a sham control they called Fakey, which I thought was really funny. Um, which is like just an inexperienced, nobody who's, they're not a practitioner and they're just going to

• 58:52Mark Manson?

  They're just waving their hands around.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically what it was. And they did actually find so they compared that to a meditation group as well.

• 58:58Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  And then they had just a weightless control, no, no intervention whatsoever. Okay. So they did find that Reiki meditation and the Fakie group actually immediately improved a pain. It was, this was people with knee pain.

• 59:10Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  So it did immediately, all three of those immediately improved it.

• 59:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  That was very interesting. So, uh, you know, and about to the same degree as well. So meditation, Reiki and the Fakie. The interesting part with this study though, so that would suggest that Reiki and Fakie, like there's just a placebo effect going on, right? The interesting thing though, was a couple of months later, they followed up with them. And my guess is what happened, you know, after the, the study, they take these measurements, how's your pain doing? They tell them, and then they tell them, okay, actually you were in the Fakie group, you were in the Reiki group. You were obviously in the, the meditation group.

• 59:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  Right? Two months later, when they followed up with them though, the only ones that still had improved pain were the meditation and the Reiki group.

• 59:50Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  The Fakie group had went back to this, their old pain, which was interesting. So this could still be an expectancy effect.

• 59:57Mark Manson?

  Well, I was going to say that, that could just be the placebo.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:00Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  Right. It's just like that Reiki is a strong placebo, basically, right?

• 1:00:03Mark Manson?

  So I, okay, keep going.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  I, I'm just saying, it's like, technically it worked, right?

• 1:00:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Technically it worked, yeah.

• 1:00:10Mark Manson?

  I have two personal experiences around this.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:00:13Mark Manson?

  One is that I dated a girl at one point who had taken a bunch of Reiki courses and was supposedly certified in Reiki. And, uh, and she did it to me once. And I remember it was, it was because I was having lower back pain. And she was like, oh, I can fix that for you. And I was like, really? And she was like, yeah, lay down, you know, and she like did her whole thing. Uh, didn't fix it for me, didn't feel a thing. I was like,

• 1:00:39Mark Manson?

  Made fun of her. I was like, what the fuck? He paid for this? Yeah. I was kind of an asshole back then. Second experience. So I had a really good friend back when I lived in Boston, an older guy who was really into like, energy healing and he was an interesting guy because he was, he was definitely woo woo, but he was much more scientifically minded than, and often I would talk to him about things and he would even tell me, he's like, I don't know why this works, but it does. And I was like, okay, that's fair. So anyway, he was a energy healer. He had trained under some guru for multiple years and it was like, he, he kept saying, he's like, no, it's, it's really good.

• 1:01:19Mark Manson?

  Like it's very powerful. And I was like, sure, whatever. I broke up with a girlfriend. I just got out of a relationship, was really depressed, really down. And I was staying with him one weekend and he was like, he's like, you know, man, like, let me just do a session with you. Like it can't, it can't make it worse, right? And I was like, sure, fuck you. Why not? Anything. Yeah. I'm like, all right, man. Whatever. Sure. So I like, I laid down. He had this like little, it was kind of like a massage table. So I laid down on the massage table and he started doing all this stuff. He started putting his hands on all these places and it was very, at the time I was like, this is very meditative. It was very relaxing. Yeah, right.

• 1:01:59Mark Manson?

  But from what I could tell consciously, like, I couldn't tell if anything was happening or not. And then afterwards, he was like, that was a very intense session. You, you definitely want to take it easy for the next day or two. I don't know what it was. I slept like 10 hours at night, 12 hours at night. I was absolutely exhausted the next day.

• 1:02:22Mark Manson?

  I had crazy fucking dreams and, and I felt better. Yeah. A couple of days later, like it, it, I wasn't completely over the relationship. I wasn't over the breakup. It wasn't that I wasn't like depressed anymore. But I noticeably felt better a day or two later. And there was a weird like, like exhaustion, mental, emotional exhaustion that, that happened. And then there was, there was definitely like a, to this day, I don't know what the fuck he did. And, and he used to always just kind of laugh and be like, you know, if I explained it to you, you wouldn't even believe me. And I was like, okay. So it could have been a placebo. I have no clue what happened, but um.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  I there's a lot of people with the Reiki that report the whole sleep thing. They're like, yeah, I slept great after a session. A session and it gave me the relaxation part. The, you know, self-awareness part, I'm sure.

• 1:03:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Factors into that, but yeah, I don't know.

• 1:03:13Mark Manson?

  So I still.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  It works for some people.

• 1:03:15Mark Manson?

  You know, one of the things that's not on here that we could have done is hypnosis.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:19Mark Manson?

  Part of me, cause, cause this guy, this friend of mine, he also had a background in hypnosis. And so part of me wonders if there was like some aspect of like physical hypnosis that went along with it. I don't know. TBD.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:32Mark Manson?

  One of the mysteries of Mark's life.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, again, it works. It works for some people. I think there is a huge expectancy effect. It works better if you think it's going to work better. That said, like, okay, that whole study I explained about the knee pain and all of that. I mean, meditation worked just as good as Reiki.

• 1:03:49Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  So you don't necessarily have to go and pay somebody, you know, probably a couple hundred bucks to wave their hands over you necessarily.

• 1:03:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  But if you're into it, I don't know. There is a cool little ceremony around it. There's a social aspect, like you said.

• 1:03:59Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  And like that, okay, sure. Maybe there's different mechanisms between meditation and this, but.

• 1:04:04Mark Manson?

  And just to speak briefly to the power of placebo effect or the expectation effect. I don't think people realize like how absolutely powerful placebo effect can be.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:15Mark Manson?

  And like all the things you just said about there being a ritual around it, a social expectation around it. Being in a context or, or a, a mental state where you're open to it.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:27Mark Manson?

  Which actually, if you look into hypnosis, the biggest thing about hypnosis is that it's, you have to be open to being hypnotized. Like you, you need to be suggestible is what hypnotists call it. There's crazy, crazy stories of placebo effects in medicine around, there are things called sham surgeries. Where it's like, they put people to sleep and they like, don't give them the surgery and then when they.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  Make an incision and that's it. Yeah.

• 1:04:48Mark Manson?

  And then when they wake up, they, they're told that they had the surgery and they're like, oh, great. My knee feels great, doc. Thank you.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:54Mark Manson?

  And they don't have knee pain anymore.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. Especially around the pain stuff. It's not to say that like pain's in your head or anything like that, but there is a very, very much like a a connection between the mind, body connection there is very real.

• 1:05:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  And pain is very much modulated by the way you perceive it.

• 1:05:10Mark Manson?

  Big, uh, big ass question mark next to that one, but hey. Energy healing made it to number eight. The thing that's interesting, I mean, looking at, so like the way we measured this, right? So most of these, it's actually an interesting juxtaposition between visualization and energy healing. So visualization, average effect size of the best meta-analysis we found was .29, which is a pretty small effect size.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:33Mark Manson?

  Like, that's

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's pretty small.

• 1:05:34Mark Manson?

  That is in the neighborhood of a placebo.

• 1:05:39Mark Manson?

  But 95% of studies found a positive effect from it. Energy healing, the effect size that we found, the best effect size that we found was .53, which is a medium effect size, but only 56% of the studies that we looked at found any reportable effect whatsoever. So it's one of those, like, it works half the time, and when it works, it works really well, whereas something like visualization, it works almost all the time, but it

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  There's a small effect.

• 1:06:08Mark Manson?

  It's very negligible.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:10Mark Manson?

  Very marginal.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:11Mark Manson?

  All right, let's move to the next one, which is a little bit more modern. Cold water immersion.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  Well, yes. Well, it's modern, but it's actually very ancient at the same time, so.

• 1:06:20Mark Manson?

  Oh, excuse me. Dr. Bernie.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  There's a modern, there's a modern version of it, right? But people have been, people have been dipping into cold water for thousands of years.

• 1:06:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah, that is true. My biohacker, bro-science bias is kicking in where

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  You've got a cold bath, don't you?

• 1:06:36Mark Manson?

  I do have a cold plunge. It is the most unreasonable, impractical thing to own.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:41Mark Manson?

  Don't get me wrong, I love cold plunges, but it is such a pain in the ass to maintain and keep up. I mean, who would have thought, Drew, that keeping a running body of water outside of your house takes a lot of fucking maintenance?

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:57Mark Manson?

  They don't tell you that when they, when you click on the Instagram ad.

• 1:07:02Mark Manson?

  You're gonna be cleaning this thing twice a week for the rest of your life.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  I live in Colorado, so in the winter, you can just go to the lake.

• 1:07:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah, just jump in. It's funny, because I remember there was a cold shower craze about 10 or 15 years ago. There's a bunch of TED Talks about it, a bunch of YouTubers made videos about cold showers. I remember doing the cold shower thing and being like, well, this is cool. Like, it puts me in a good mood, but it definitely, I don't feel like it's changing my life or anything.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:28Mark Manson?

  Interestingly, cold water immersion has positive mental health benefits. This is found fairly consistently. It's not uniform across the board, but it is like, at this point, it is consistent enough that it does seem to be a real thing. And with that said, there's a lot of caveats and nuances here. I would put cold water immersion in the win more category. From what I saw from the research, it's the sort of thing that if you're already kind of healthy and already in a good mental health space, it makes you feel better.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:08:02Mark Manson?

  But if you are not healthy, or if you have serious mental health issues, it could potentially make things worse, just because it is getting into a body of very cold water is physically and mentally stressful. Like, it is a jolt to the system. And so if your system is already fragile for various reasons, that jolt can actually make things worse. Whereas if you're already pretty robust and resilient, then it can make you feel even more robust and resilient.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  There's also just a consistency aspect to it, too. Doing it once, like you said, you might get some short-term, hey, I feel better for the rest of the day, or a couple hours. Doing it every day, probably not either, too. There's a little bit of a U-curve here, like a sweet spot you gotta hit. But like, consistency over time, when you're already healthy, like you said, you have all those other things taken care of. Yeah, sure.

• 1:08:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  Probably helps in the margins, yeah.

• 1:08:52Mark Manson?

  I do.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Around things like stress and anxiety especially.

• 1:08:55Mark Manson?

  Right. It's interesting. I do it pretty consistently in the summers.

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Mark Manson?

  I'm too much of a pussy to do it when it's, when it's cold outside.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, those freezing LA winters, you know, out here.

• 1:09:08Mark Manson?

  It gets cold, man. I had to wear a jacket a few days ago.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, your Angelinos.

• 1:09:15Mark Manson?

  It's tough. Winter in LA is tough, Drew. You have no idea. I mean, sometimes you go to a restaurant and they seat you outside and it's windy and it's

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  And they bring you a blanket.

• 1:09:24Mark Manson?

  It's very uncomfortable.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, bring you a blanket with a heater and everything.

• 1:09:27Mark Manson?

  It's a problem. It's a big problem out here.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:09:29Mark Manson?

  Anything else we want to say about cold water immersion? I feel like, I feel like all the, all the, the bro-science people are probably angry that we're not lauding the benefits of this.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  Like this is the number one, yeah.

• 1:09:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  Okay, I have a little bit of a theory around this one, actually. And like I said, people have been doing this for a long time. It's an ancient practice, using cold water immersion for health purposes.

• 1:09:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  It goes way, way back, thousands of years, as far as we know. My theory, you know, kind of the modern rendition of it, though, too, a lot of people point to like the Scandinavian countries that do this, right? They'll go out and, you know, drill a hole in the ice in the middle of winter and they're all jumping it. There's a huge social aspect around that, too.

• 1:10:04Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  And I think this is what a lot of people miss is the real benefits come from you getting together with a bunch of people, going out and doing something kind of weird and strange together and a little bit like it's out of the norm, shocks your system a little bit, but you're all doing it together. I think that's actually would probably give you more benefit, especially around stress reduction, any kind of anxiety you have, depression, whatever it is.

• 1:10:26Mark Manson?

  Interesting theory.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. There's actually a huge social component to it. And so when, you know, they market you an ice bath to put in your backyard and go do it by yourself.

• 1:10:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  You might still get some of that, that benefit, but I think it's going to be smaller than if you would, you know, go out to some frozen lake and...

• 1:10:43Mark Manson?

  I, I buy that. I buy that. Although I, I imagine they probably control for that in a lot of the research.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Sure, yes.

• 1:10:48Mark Manson?

  But I do agree with that. And it's funny, too, because I, it's such an LA thing, but a bunch of my friends and I, we get together to do cold plunges and yeah.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's great, yeah.

• 1:10:59Mark Manson?

  It's a, it's like a thing to do out here.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:11:01Mark Manson?

  Another interesting caveat that is, is actually really important to point out. Two things, actually, that, that both, both surprised me. One is that colder water isn't necessarily better.

• 1:11:14Mark Manson?

  At least for mental health benefits.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:11:16Mark Manson?

  There might be certain recovery benefits or whatever that that colder water is is more beneficial, but you don't get any added effect by like making it ice cold versus just really cold.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:11:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And then the second thing is that like you need to work up to those colder temperatures. If people just jump into freezing ice water, water point blank, like with no work up to it or no experience, then again, you can set yourself up for a certain level of system shock and have worse outcomes than than if you gently push yourself up to it. One thing I've noticed is I really enjoy a cold plunge down to maybe 50 degrees Fahrenheit, like which is 10 degrees Celsius.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:00Mark Manson?

  Anything below that, in my opinion, hurts.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:12:04Mark Manson?

  And I'm like, why?

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:06Mark Manson?

  Why would anybody do this?

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:09Mark Manson?

  So I was happy to see that.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah, I only looked at like the the psychological outcomes for this. Have you like looked into more of the physiological stuff? Like I I've heard before, like if you, you know, the cold plunge will like help you burn off like internal fat reserves that you have or like the brown fat around your organs and stuff.

• 1:12:28Mark Manson?

  There's a lot, yeah, there's a lot of stuff around. My my understanding is that it's actually sauna that's.

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  Oh, so it's heat therapy instead?

• 1:12:36Mark Manson?

  Well, heat therapy, I believe, is is much better for your cardiovascular system.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:12:40Mark Manson?

  And then the cold therapy, I believe, is is better for like body composition recovery and recovery. I've used it for recovery primarily. It's funny, I don't notice a huge difference.

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:51Mark Manson?

  In in my recovery when I use it. I I notice a big mood boost. Like I get out and I'm like glowing for the next hour and a half. Like I just feel I'm in a great mood. I feel like I have tons of energy. I think it's the combination of of adrenaline and dopamine. Like it does release just a massive amount of dopamine into your into your system. I just like how it makes me feel.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:16Mark Manson?

  I personally can't attest to any sort of physical benefits.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:13:20Mark Manson?

  Or mental health benefits either. I mean, sure, maybe it marginally makes me a little bit happier, but.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, I mean, hey, if you need shocked out of like some funk.

• 1:13:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Try it, give it a try, yeah. Yeah. Sure. All right, let's move to the next one, which is a very interesting one, which I also have a lot of experience with. Yeah. Speed reading. Yeah. This actually really tracked my expectation. Like, if you had asked me before we researched this where I thought it was gonna come out, I would've said, kind of middle of the pack, it works, but with a lot of asterisks and caveats. Yeah. And I think I would've said exactly what we're gonna say here, which is that you can train yourself to read faster. You cannot train yourself to read that much faster. It's like marginal improvements in speed, like, so important to note here, the average person, I believe, reads around 200 words per minute.

• 1:14:11Mark Manson?

  A lot of the advertising around speed reading promises that they can get you up to 1,000 words per minute, which is a 5X increase. Yeah. What the research shows is that really what's realistic for most people is that you can go from 200 to 300. Okay. Or 200 to 400. Okay. So like a 50- That's pretty decent, though, yeah. It's significant, right? Like, imagine cutting, every book you read, it takes 30% less time. Like, that is actually very significant. And that's my experience as well. I think now I read at 350, 400 words per minute, or something like that. Two interesting caveats around this is that the research on reading speed basically finds that it's mostly genetic.

• 1:14:52Mark Manson?

  It has to do with, I forget what the actual word for it is, but it's your eyes' ability to see peripherally. Yeah, right. Like, so if I'm focusing, like, on your face, like, how aware is my vision of, like, the stuff that's in the peripheral parts of my vision? So some people apparently have much, I guess, a wider aperture of visual information that they can take in simultaneously, and some people have very, like, an extremely narrow aperture of the visual information that they can take in. And so what they find is that people who are- Just genetically have a wider aperture. They can take in more words simultaneously. And so the core, the core technique of speed reading that they teach you, like any speed reading

• 1:15:35Mark Manson?

  course you take, the first thing they teach you is about your kind of internal monologue as you read and they, they give you techniques to help shut that off.

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:15:44Mark Manson?

  Cause once you shut that off, you can actually start ingesting multiple words simultaneously. Cause the argument is, is that it's that internal monologue is, is your-

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  Slows you down.

• 1:15:54Mark Manson?

  It's your speed ceiling.

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:15:55Mark Manson?

  Cause you have to wait for your brain to like read every word to you. But if you can train your brain to stop saying every word out loud, you can ingest words much quicker.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:16:05Mark Manson?

  And you can ingest like chunks of words, like phrases and stuff.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  So it's just how you just like absorb the concept of the words or what? I've never tried speed reading.

• 1:16:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  So I don't know, like, and I'm a slow reader.

• 1:16:16Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  And it's very much like every single word in my head.

• 1:16:19Mark Manson?

  The answer is yes.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  Alright.

• 1:16:21Mark Manson?

  But that brings us to the next caveat is that they find that speed reading techniques decrease retention.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  Okay, of course.

• 1:16:27Mark Manson?

  So you, so you are-

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  There's a trade off there.

• 1:16:29Mark Manson?

  Yes, so there's a trade off. You recall things worse, you remember things worse, you remember details worse.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:16:35Mark Manson?

  And that is probably a direct result of eliminating that internal monologue. Right? Because when you construct that internal monologue, it's kind of like writing stuff down. There's a cliche that people say, there's a magic to writing things down. And it's like, I don't think there's a magic. I think it just forces your brain to slow down and focus enough.

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  Get very clear, yeah.

• 1:16:55Mark Manson?

  That it, that it makes a larger imprint on, on your, on your memory. And I think the same is true with reading. There's probably just an inherent trade off with speed of informational ingestion and retention.

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:17:09Mark Manson?

  And as you speed up, that retention goes down. And as you slow down, that retention probably goes up.

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  Right, okay. Yeah, that makes sense. There's been studies too where just metacognitive training, like just making you aware of those sorts of processes in your, in your mind. Like, speed reading courses versus just generic metacognitive skills. No difference there too.

• 1:17:31Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  Which makes sense.

• 1:17:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  Uh, and, and because speed reading is teaching you a metacognitive skill.

• 1:17:36Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  If you just have metacognitive skills in general, you're, you can do just as well. So, yeah.

• 1:17:42Mark Manson?

  So Tyler Callen is who I believe we both follow.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:46Mark Manson?

  Writes the, the blog Marginal Revolution. He, he is, he is a person, I believe that are known as like hyper, hyper readers. Like he literally reads, I think- Three, four, or five books a day.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:57Mark Manson?

  On average, and.

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  Doesn't surprise me. Yeah.

• 1:18:00Mark Manson?

  And it's funny because I listened to an interview where he was asked about this and he said, he was like, I did research on it. It seems to be primarily genetic. It's like a very rare thing. He said, I've always been a fast reader my entire life and I've only gotten faster the more I've read. And he, he actually made that point. He said, it's like anything else. The more you read, the faster you get at it.

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:18:21Mark Manson?

  And so the, the fast, and the faster you get, the more you can read. So it, it, it becomes kind of a virtuous cycle. But he, he actually made a very interesting point, which I, I agree with as well as he said, the more you read, the more stuff you already know. And so when you pick up a new book.

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

  Oh, you could skip a whole bunch of it.

• 1:18:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Which is, which is, I, I've experienced this within certain topics and domains. So like, if I pick up a pop psychology book, generally speaking, it's like, I open chapter one and it's like, oh, it's the marshmallow test. Yeah. I've read that fucking hundred times.

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  I see.

• 1:18:52Mark Manson?

  So I skip it.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:18:53Mark Manson?

  I'm like, okay, I already know the point he's making and I skip to the next section and then I read for say two or three pages. And then it's like, and it's the Milgram experiment. It's like, ah, I know the Milgram experiment.

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:19:03Mark Manson?

  So the skip the next three or four pages and it's like, okay, now what, now what point is he making? So now I technically just quote unquote, read 10 pages in like a minute. Whereas somebody who's not familiar with those things is like, probably still on page two.

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah. Reading as a skill in general, uh, that's a very good example of, oh, if you're reading a book and you come to something that you know, skip to the next chapter.

• 1:19:27Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:19:27Speaker 01

  You're going to be a faster reader, a more effective reader, just in general. So, yeah.

• 1:19:31Mark Manson?

  Which is, it blows my mind that people don't think about that. Like I, I've, I've said this, like I've made, we've made content around it. Like I've made content around this and people are just like, oh my God, I never thought it. I'm like, and I, I, some of it, I think it's.

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  That way before I heard you talk about it too. So yeah.

• 1:19:44Mark Manson?

  I just like, some of it, I think is the education system, you know, because it's in school, you have to read.

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  Do the assignment.

• 1:19:49Mark Manson?

  You have to read every fucking paragraph and you're going to be tested. You don't know what you're going to be tested on. So you have to read the whole thing. Whereas it's like in real life. If the only thing you care about is chapter eight, just read chapter eight.

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:00Mark Manson?

  There's not, there's not an exam at the end of this. Nobody's putting a gun to your head. Just read chapter eight and put the book down. Go pick up another one.

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  You know, one of the realizations I had around this too was when I was in high school and my cousin, he was like a year older than me and he had to do a book report. And he just read the first page and the last page of the book and he got like an A minus on it or something like that. And I was like, oh shit, you can do that?

• 1:20:20Mark Manson?

  Oh.

• 1:20:21Speaker 01

  So yeah.

• 1:20:22Mark Manson?

  Talk about 80/20.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:20:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:29Mark Manson?

  All right, we are back and we're in the final five, the five self-help techniques that actually work. Counting down, number five is actually something I have never done in my life.

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:20:42Mark Manson?

  That might surprise you.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:20:44Mark Manson?

  Gratitude journaling.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Okay. You're all right. You've never.

• 1:20:50Mark Manson?

  You seem stunned.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  Have you ever just like?

• 1:20:53Mark Manson?

  Been grateful for things?

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  Right. And like consciously like, okay, I'm gonna be like, okay.

• 1:20:57Mark Manson?

  So I've done like gratitude meditations.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:59Mark Manson?

  I've actually never gratitude journaled. I'm what I call a crisis journaler.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:03Mark Manson?

  So I like, I journal when shit's hitting the fan and I, and I want to jump off a bridge. That's when I journal.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:21:10Mark Manson?

  I've never like journaled being like, I'm so grateful for Drew. He's such a good co-host.

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  But you've practiced gratitude in some way, like you said, a meditation consciously.

• 1:21:18Mark Manson?

  Gratitude's awesome.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  Okay. I looked a little bit more into like just gratitude interventions in general. We can talk about the journaling aspect of it too, but gratitude interventions in general. It doesn't have to be journaling, which is I think maybe a relief that for some people because I just always found it hokey too. Just a little bit like write these three things down and you end up just kind of making it another chore.

• 1:21:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's probably useful differentiating those. By the way, journaling works.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:21:43Mark Manson?

  By and large and gratitude practices work. So you can combine them. You can do them separately, but why don't we just focus on gratitude practices?

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. First of all, like you can do, like I said, you can do the journaling, you can do the meditations, you can just take a moment and do it. I think really what I've found though, too, this and this checks out kind of anecdotally is like, if you're not a grateful person, this is probably something you need to do.

• 1:22:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  You're gonna have the most, there's like a kind of a floor effect here.

• 1:22:08Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  You can't go any lower, you may as well try it and it's gonna help you.

• 1:22:11Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  In some way or another. I just find myself to be a pretty naturally grateful person. I think I've just been fortunate in my life and like I can look around and be like, oh, I'm very grateful that I have these opportunities or whatever it is. The other thing though, that I found about in the, in the research, which was very interesting. It works, gratitude works. It helps reduce stress. It helps with depression. It helps with anxiety to some extent. The thing is, is again, we go back to that question compared to what? If you're doing nothing and you start a gratitude practice, that's gonna help you.

• 1:22:43Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:22:43Speaker 01

  If you're doing nothing and you start a meditation practice, we're gonna talk about that in a little bit. Or you start some sort of positive intervention of any kind, like actively positive, trying to like change things. It's about the same as gratitude as well. So I don't know if there's anything necessarily special about gratitude. I think being gracious and being grateful is a good thing.

• 1:23:02Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  Like just in general, and it has other effects we can talk about too. Gratitude works and it's very accessible. It's a very easy thing for a lot of people. I just don't think there, there's necessarily anything special about it.

• 1:23:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  You know what I mean?

• 1:23:15Mark Manson?

  I mean, in terms of just the aggregate data, this had a very small effect size. Of the top eight, it had the smallest effect size, but.

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  But very consistent.

• 1:23:25Mark Manson?

  Extremely consistent. It was the most consistent out of, out of everything that we analyzed. Out of 166 studies, 98% of them found a positive effect of, of gratitude practices. So it is consistent but small.

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:23:39Mark Manson?

  I find gratitude very easily.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:23:41Mark Manson?

  I'm often like, one of my first reaction, anytime anything goes wrong, one of my first reactions is always to think of like, why I'm lucky to have this problem and it, it's just kind of a default that my brain goes to. So I could see why forcing your, like, but if you're, if you're somebody who tends to dwell on problems and always think very negatively, then like, I could see why this would be a very useful practice to train in yourself.

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  And especially, this is another one where consistency matters a lot. If you, if you again are going from a not very grateful disposition to try to instill more gratitude in your life, being consistent with it matters a lot more than just like doing it. Haphazardly, right?

• 1:24:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  There's just a little bit of a compliance issue sometimes with people like, you know, if, if you're trying to like not be depressed or anxious or something like that, like you're probably going to be better off with medication and, and therapy than you are just like a straight gratitude practice.

• 1:24:35Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  It can help on the margins. Again, the effects are usually small, but they're consistent. There was a study too, an interesting study I found too, where they called it a menu-based gratitude practice. So you could choose from a number of different of these practices. There was journaling, there was meditation, there was just like thinking about it, those sorts of things. People were way more compliant when they had like a menu of options to choose from. So they could mix it up a little bit and they, they stuck with it longer doing that.

• 1:25:00Mark Manson?

  Isn't it funny how you see that show up in so many different

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  Didn't surprise me, yeah.

• 1:25:04Mark Manson?

  Study, like experiment constructions, like it just, when you give people choice, they're more likely to adhere to.

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:25:10Mark Manson?

  Even if, even if the choice is kind of fake and made up.

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

  It really is, it's a bit arbitrary, yeah, for sure.

• 1:25:15Mark Manson?

  Okay. Anything else you want to say about gratitude? Are you just grateful for this section?

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  I am.

• 1:25:21Mark Manson?

  I'm so grateful for this podcast, Drew.

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:25:24Mark Manson?

  So lucky.

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  The one study that I found that really, um, really focused on this question is like gratitude versus what?

• 1:25:31Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  If it's just major measurement only, like versus doing nothing, the effect size is pretty like, it's moderate, I would say. If it's compared to alternate activities, like just listing out the things you did during that day, good nor bad, whatever, writing about just neutral events that happened, uh, you get a little bit of a smaller effect. And then if you compare it to positive interventions, like I said, things like encouraging people to engage in acts of kindness, or they have this best possible selves exercise where you write about like, this is my best self, when I'm my best, this is how I am.

• 1:26:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:03Speaker 01

  The effect kind of starts to pretty much go away.

• 1:26:06Mark Manson?

  Go away, interesting.

• 1:26:07Speaker 01

  So it's more, again, I, I don't think there's like a specific gratitude mechanism necessarily. It's just, um, being more self-aware around, uh, just the positive events in your life, I think, in general.

• 1:26:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  Probably just helpful.

• 1:26:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah. All right. Number four, meditation.

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:26:27Mark Manson?

  A big favorite, a big crowd favorite.

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:29Mark Manson?

  Comes in at number four on this list. Uh, I would expect it near the top. Um, there are, I would say the things above this. Are a little surprising.

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:39Mark Manson?

  But I'm not surprised that it is in this cat. It definitely works. At this point, we know that. There are caveats. We covered that in our meditation episode last month. But by and large, for the vast majority of the population, it is a good thing and your mileage is going to vary. But generally speaking, it's probably going to help something.

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  There's been tons of study on meditation as we covered in the meditation episode. But like the meta analyses around this just show that, yeah, you can, especially for stress and anxiety. So they have this, there's a thing called mindfulness based stress reduction, which is a meditation, a modified meditation kind of program. It's like an eight week program they've used that's been, goes all the way back to the seventies or eighties, I think. And they've consistently used this in work settings and personal settings and organizational settings, whatever, to decrease feelings of stress, anxiety, even some depression to some degree. And it's effective and it works. This is another thing too, that another study I found as well though, was a comparison to like an SSRI medication. Like basically equivalent.

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  If you do like a consistent mindfulness based activity that you can do, has about the same effect as a lot of SSRIs for depression. Yeah. Again, though, just like with gratitude, there is a little bit of an issue around the active control problem. So compared to nothing, meditation's great.

• 1:27:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  Compared to other positive interventions, like for, for instance, there was a pretty well done study around active health education versus meditation. So just teaching people about healthy behaviors in their lives.

• 1:28:09Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

  Versus a meditation group, they did about the same as well.

• 1:28:12Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  So, you know, in the, in the meditation episode, we talked about like the different types of people who probably would benefit from meditation more than others. You're just somebody who's just like, I just can't meditate.

• 1:28:22Mark Manson?

  You don't have to meditate. It's like, you don't have to journal. All of these things.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  Right. But finding ways to be mindful and more intentional in your life is obviously going to help quite a bit.

• 1:28:31Mark Manson?

  I would say we have definitely not hit, there's maybe one thing on this list. I think number one is, might be the only thing that I would say people have to do. I would have the confidence to say that people have to do.

• 1:28:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:45Mark Manson?

  You have to learn how to do it.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  That's a good point.

• 1:28:48Mark Manson?

  I think everything else on this list is optional.

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:51Mark Manson?

  And, and your mileage is going to vary. And pretty much everything past.

• 1:28:56Mark Manson?

  Number 10 or 11 is like, probably you're fine not doing it.

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  Yes. Now, now, all of that said, I would still encourage people to meditate because not for these reasons, though, of like, stress reduction even, or better sleep, or all of this. This is the point I made in the meditation episode. The reason you should meditate is so you can know your mind better.

• 1:29:16Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  And you can control your intention.

• 1:29:18Mark Manson?

  Know yourself better.

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  Know yourself better.

• 1:29:19Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:29:20Speaker 01

  That might have all of these secondary effects, all these secondary benefits, but the primary goal of meditation is just to know your mind and yourself better.

• 1:29:30Mark Manson?

  I a hundred percent agree. I it's and it's funny, too, if you talk to any serious meditation practitioner, they they always say they're like, stress reduction is like, you're an inch deep in a

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  Who cares?

• 1:29:43Mark Manson?

  In a 20 foot pool, like, right? Like, you're you've barely even cracked the surface of what meditation can do. Sure, it can lower stress and anxiety, but like, that is honestly, like,

• 1:29:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:55Mark Manson?

  The very, the very first sliver of the benefits that you get.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  It's the hook that like, a lot of like marketers kind of use, you know, you get better sleep, and your stress and anxiety and depression and all of that.

• 1:30:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:06Speaker 01

  The real benefit comes much deeper.

• 1:30:08Mark Manson?

  Yes. All right. Number three. This was a surprise for me. But then, once I started reading through the research and the summaries, I was like, oh, okay, that actually makes sense. So there is a very famous self-help book from the 1980s. It's called Eat That Frog. It's one of those classic self-help books that probably should have been an article. It was written by Brian Tracy. But the concept of Eat That Frog, it's you, you take the most important task of your day, and you do it first. That's the whole book. More or less. I mean, there is a system of prioritization that he has within the book.

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:30:46Mark Manson?

  And then you take, there's like, kind of a process that he walks you through to figure out what that most, what what your frog is. But then the advice is just, that's what you should do first thing every single day. So that's all fine and dandy. And I think I think we briefly mentioned this in the procrastination episode. And we actually, I think you and I, we had, we were a little bit of ambivalent about it. I was surprised to see it land this high. It turns out 95% of the benefit of Eat That Frog is figuring out what the most important thing is. And then 5% of the benefit is the fact that you did it first thing in the morning.

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:21Mark Manson?

  So it's almost like a Trojan horse to just get you thinking about your priorities and what matters to you. That in and of itself like drastically changes outcomes for people. Whether you do it first or second or at 11 a.m. or 2 p.m. is probably like secondary.

• 1:31:39Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. You you don't practice, you actively practice the opposite of this, don't you?

• 1:31:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I eat cake first and then eat my frog.

• 1:31:46Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 1:31:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  And it seems to work for you.

• 1:31:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, like you said, you kind of like have a warm up a little bit in the morning and then you get to the stuff you need to do.

• 1:31:53Mark Manson?

  Right, but it is, I am very often thinking about what is the most important thing that I can be doing with my time? What is the thing I should be working on? What is the thing I should be thinking about? Like, those are questions I think about constantly.

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:06Mark Manson?

  And there's so much value in that, so much value in that. And I do agree that like, I think a lot of people go through life never considering those things.

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  Well, think about the clarity you achieve when you do that. That's, I think that's what a lot of people want.

• 1:32:21Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  When they're thinking about, the constant question they're asking is what should I be doing next?

• 1:32:26Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:32:26Speaker 01

  If you have the most important thing in front of you, well, there's no question.

• 1:32:29Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:32:30Speaker 01

  What you should be doing next, there's no anxiety around what you should be doing next, you just do it.

• 1:32:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  Interestingly, though, too, on top of that effect, I think there's another effect that this has, which is, they found in several different studies that if you, like, starting with the hardest task first, ending your day on the easier tasks, that actually has increases self-efficacy. So it increases kind of like your confidence that, oh, that was a good productive day.

• 1:32:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  Rather than doing it the other way around.

• 1:32:57Mark Manson?

  Makes sense.

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  For whatever reason. So it might be a little mind trick here that you're playing on yourself. But still, like, people just feel better, like, I got all this stuff done, I ended my day on a high note too, because it was an easy task.

• 1:33:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:07Speaker 01

  Like, I think it's just the momentum you create from it. You're not necessarily any more productive, is the thing. So even if you switch those around, you do the easy things first and you do the hard things later, you still get the same amount of work done.

• 1:33:18Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  But you feel better about it.

• 1:33:19Mark Manson?

  You feel better about it.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  Which means you're more likely to continue doing it that way.

• 1:33:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  In the long run. So I think that's a huge benefit as well.

• 1:33:25Mark Manson?

  It kind of reminds me of what we talked about with intuitive decision making, which is that listening to your gut doesn't make better decisions.

• 1:33:32Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 1:33:33Mark Manson?

  But you feel better about those decisions.

• 1:33:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:33:35Mark Manson?

  Which gives you the perception that you made better decisions. Yeah, there is some value in that.

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, gives you some peace of mind, sure, why not?

• 1:33:41Mark Manson?

  And I can, I can absolutely see the self-efficacy argument of like, just knowing you did the hardest, most important thing first in your day. And it's like 9:30 in the morning and you're like, I just, I already accomplished something very, very valuable. I can see how that could give you a high that you can kind of ride through the rest of the day. So I would have guessed that eat that frog would have been kind of in the middle of the pack. You know, it would have been one of those, uh, maybe depends on the context, the person, what you're doing.

• 1:34:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:10Mark Manson?

  I'm a little bit of a convert here. Um, the prioritization thing really hit close to home when I saw that. Obviously, it's like, that's basically what the subtle are not giving a fuck is about is prioritizing. I definitely understand the power and the clarity that comes from that. I guess I just never thought of it in those terms.

• 1:34:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:28Mark Manson?

  Like, I never.

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  A lot of these things are like that.

• 1:34:31Mark Manson?

  Yeah. It's not eating the frog that is the benefit. It's the process that leads to eating the frog that is the benefit. Very much similar to like the visualization stuff that we talked about.

• 1:34:41Speaker 01

  It's not universally beneficial across all tasks. They've found, you know, just in some realistic settings where they're doing more naturalistic observations and stuff. It's not always clear that this works the best. Also too, there, there's, let's go back to the ego depletion and the willpower thing. Like, some people think, oh, I need to do this thing first in order to have energy.

• 1:35:01Mark Manson?

  Maximize my willpower. Yeah.

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  That's not really how it works either. So because you, again, you can do the easy task first and the hard ones later and you still get the same amount of work done. If you're just trying to like get up in the morning and eat that frog, but you're a night owl, that's not really going to help you a whole lot either. So, yeah, I mean, there's some, there's some borders to it for sure.

• 1:35:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  Overall, I was very surprised by it, too.

• 1:35:20Mark Manson?

  I was also surprised by the next one. And this is, people are going to listen to this and they're going to think that I totally planted, I put a gun, I put a gun to you and our research team's head and it was like, put this number two, motherfuckers. You better find those studies.

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:35:37Mark Manson?

  Number two is reading self-help books.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, bibliotherapy.

• 1:35:41Mark Manson?

  Bibliotherapy, reading self-help books. So I had done some research on this before. So I knew, I knew reading self-help books did something. Like, I knew that there was a consistently positive effect size. I did not expect it to be this big. We looked at 188 studies, uh, 93% of them came out in support, average effect size of 0.56, which is decent. Like, that's no, like, you're approaching kind of

• 1:36:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:03Mark Manson?

  effect size levels of some modalities of therapy at that point. And so, yeah, I shocked, a little shocked, especially as somebody who's, I know it sounds weird coming from a self-help author, but like, I don't think super highly of this genre. I don't, I, I, I definitely, and I think a lot of self-help books are pretty trashy. I was, yeah, I was surprised.

• 1:36:25Speaker 01

  Well, okay, I mean, they did find that the quality of

• 1:36:28Mark Manson?

  Quality of the book matters.

• 1:36:29Speaker 01

  Matters a lot. Bibliotherapy itself, as is defined like in, in, in therapy and in psychology, there's some structure to it as well. It's like, they find it's most helpful, like if you're in therapy for a specific problem or

• 1:36:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

  issue, and you know, this, the therapist assigns you some books and

• 1:36:46Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:36:46Speaker 01

  walk you through it. The more structured it is, the better you get out of it. That said, there's still some just like unstructured evidence as well,

• 1:36:53Mark Manson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  or evidence around the unstructured reading that also shows a lot of benefit too. I don't know, I don't know if I was as surprised by this, and maybe that's just because I over-intellectualize things, but like some of the biggest like aha moments I've had have definitely been reading books.

• 1:37:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:08Speaker 01

  Um, of all kinds and even, even self-help books, sure. I've changed behaviors based on them. I, I mean, there is definitely a point where you go too far with this, obviously, where

• 1:37:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:18Speaker 01

  like, you know, you procrastinate.

• 1:37:20Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  changing anything because you want to read more.

• 1:37:22Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:37:22Speaker 01

  But just in terms of like changing your mind, I don't think there's a better way for me anyway than like reading a book that really lands. You know what I mean?

• 1:37:31Mark Manson?

  I think maybe the thing that makes me wrestle with it is the unevenness of the quality. Cause like,

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:37:39Mark Manson?

  For example, like if I think about all of the self-help, self-improvement, health books, pop psychology books that I've read, it, it is definitely a very, it's definitely a power law distribution, right? There's probably two or three that were very impactful on my life that you, I would call like quote unquote, life-changing. There's probably another 10 that I would say like were influential, were definitely a positive influence. And then there's probably like a hundred that I was like, okay, well, that was a thing. Or I just didn't finish them, or I was like, wow, that's six hours of my life I'll never get back.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:38:18Mark Manson?

  So there's, it's an extremely uneven experience. And I could see why, in the context of, of a therapist recommending a book, you do get a much higher hit rate because the therapist is probably speaking to the patient. They're probably noticing, they're like, oh, you're struggling with this one thing. You have this type of personality. You know what book you'll love? You should go read this book. It's, it's right up your alley. It's definitely, it's what you need right now. I think you'll relate to the author. You know, go check it out. I could see why that has a much higher hit rate than, say, just wandering into the, the self-help section at your local bookstore and grabbing something off the shelf at random. So perhaps it's skewed to the positive a little bit in that regard.

• 1:39:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:39:01Mark Manson?

  And that there's a little bit of a filtering that's happening in these studies.

• 1:39:05Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. That makes total sense to me.

• 1:39:07Mark Manson?

  So maybe this is, we, we cross this out and replace it with good self-help books.

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, obviously. Well, yeah, yeah. That's a, that is a big qualifier we have to, we have to point out, but that's, that's true. I think you've done, you've done some YouTube videos on this. What, what is like a self-help book that you think really changed? Or that had such an impact on you that you could still, even today, be like, yeah, that.

• 1:39:30Mark Manson?

  I mean, honestly, reading Tim Ferriss's Four Hour Work Week completely changed my life.

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:34Mark Manson?

  Completely changed the trajectory of my life.

• 1:39:36Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is the thing about self-help though, too, is like, the, when you read it, the reason you read it.

• 1:39:42Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  Like, it's very personal, right? Like, it's kind of hard to recommend a book to somebody because usually what happens is I found this book at the right time, when I was going through a particular problem, and it helped me a lot there, too.

• 1:39:54Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  Would I say The Four Hour Work Week is one of the best self-help books of all time? I don't know, but I know a lot of people have, like, changed their ways because of it.

• 1:40:02Mark Manson?

  Yes, that is, a timing is a huge component of this. And I, I've experienced that going in both, like, multiple directions, right? So like, I remember when I was, just came out of college, I read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. And I was like, oh my God, I'm gonna do all this. I'm gonna, I need to start doing this today, right? And it seemed very powerful and profound at the time. Looking back, it was a bunch of nothing. Like it was, I don't think it really had any effect on my life whatsoever. And I remember, it's funny because we just, we did a YouTube video about Napoleon Hill. So I went back and I read parts of Think and Grow Rich. And like, the whole time I'm reading it, I'm just like, what the fuck? Yeah. How did I ever read this? How did I ever get through this?

• 1:40:46Mark Manson?

  But I've seen that go in the other direction as well. For example, like when I was a teenager, I read Scott Peck's The Roadless Travel. And I, because it was my dad's favorite self-help book. And I remember at the time being like, God, this guy is such a downer. Like this is so like the stodgy and boring. And it's all about like love and how hard everything is. And I was just like, fuck off. And I remember I didn't, I didn't even finish it. I went back and read it in my late twenties. And I was like, this might be the best self-help book I've ever read.

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:22Mark Manson?

  Like it was excellent.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  I haven't read that one.

• 1:41:24Mark Manson?

  It's very good.

• 1:41:25Speaker 01

  Is it? Yeah.

• 1:41:26Mark Manson?

  So it, yeah, a lot of it is timing, where you are in your life at the time, what you're struggling with. You kind of have to be receptive to the message at the moment, I think, for it to land.

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:37Mark Manson?

  But yeah, I mean, the right book at the right time can be absolutely life-changing.

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  I do remember several years ago, I was dating a girl and she came over and she said, so my brother, he just broke up with his girlfriend. And I was like, oh no, what happened? And he goes, well, he read a book. And I said, oh yeah, what was that? You want to guess what book it was?

• 1:41:55Mark Manson?

  Subtle Arden.

• 1:41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. He didn't even know I worked for you or anything like that. So I mean, obviously, you know, there's been, I don't know, tens of thousands of people have told you this at this point, you know, that, that your book changed their life. And I think it, more than anything, it just, like I said, if you're open to the message, you then enter like this, a new kind of like mind space around how you approach things. Like, yeah, a book can do that. A book can definitely do that.

• 1:42:18Mark Manson?

  It's almost like hopping on a cognitive plane and visiting somebody else's brain.

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:25Mark Manson?

  For hours at a time. So you, you essentially get to live inside somebody else's mind temporarily.

• 1:42:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:32Mark Manson?

  And if that person has perspectives and experiences and ideas that are extremely profound for where you are in that moment, then it makes sense. Like I, I see why it happens. Maybe I'm a Negative Nancy. I did not expect it to be this high. I didn't expect it to be this consistent. Although the, the way you talked about the,

• 1:42:54Mark Manson?

  How the experiments were constructed like that kind of explains some of it. There's definitely some filtering that's going on here. I think if you, if you just raw dogged a random self-help book, it would not be, be this high on the list.

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  But for sure.

• 1:43:05Mark Manson?

  The right self-help book at the right time can be very powerful.

• 1:43:08Speaker 01

  I'll give my recommendation too.

• 1:43:10Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:43:10Speaker 01

  Just one that most recently, anyway, I guess it's been a few years. I don't really read a whole lot of self-help anymore, but Oliver Berkman's 4,000 Weeks. That's a fantastic book.

• 1:43:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  It masquerades as a productivity book and it's not.

• 1:43:24Mark Manson?

  No.

• 1:43:24Speaker 01

  It's all about your relationship with time.

• 1:43:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  And it like changes a lot of how you see just how you live your life.

• 1:43:30Mark Manson?

  He sent me the manuscript of that about six months before it came out.

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:34Mark Manson?

  And, uh, and I started reading it. I remember I got through like the first chapter and I became angry.

• 1:43:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:42Mark Manson?

  That he wrote it and I didn't.

• 1:43:44Speaker 01

  And you didn't.

• 1:43:45Mark Manson?

  It's like very rare that I have that experience, like just like very intense envy. And I actually, I like Oliver's an old friend. So like I, I emailed him and I told him that I was like, I, this is so good that I'm like pissed.

• 1:43:59Mark Manson?

  That you, you got to write it and I didn't.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  The writing, the content, the thinking around it. He puts ideas from so many different traditions and it's, yeah, it's very, very good.

• 1:44:08Mark Manson?

  Should we get to number one? We actually initially started researching the concept of fake it till you make it.

• 1:44:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:44:14Mark Manson?

  Which is, as we researched it, we realized was kind of nebulous.

• 1:44:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:44:20Mark Manson?

  Like, what does that mean? Does that mean that you like pretend you're a, a clown at the circus? And then before you actually become a clown at the circus? Or do you pretend like you know how to code in JavaScript before you code in Java? Like, what does that mean?

• 1:44:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, right, right.

• 1:44:37Mark Manson?

  And eventually we kind of just settled on, on this, this idea known as behavioral activation, which is actually more akin to what I call the do something principle in my work, which is just do the thing, even if you don't know what you're doing, even if you don't know what you should be doing, just do something. And if it's intimidating and scary or you're not, you don't feel motivated, reduce the scope of what you do. Until you feel like you can do it. And it almost doesn't even matter what you do. Like, it just fucking go do something.

• 1:45:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:45:10Mark Manson?

  Do, do the thing. There's been, there was a great essay that went viral a couple of years ago. Called Do The Thing. It's this whole thing, it's like, talking about doing the thing is not doing the thing. Planning how you're gonna do the thing is not doing the thing. Fantasizing about doing the thing is not doing the thing. Promising yourself that you're gonna do the thing is not doing the thing. It just like goes through all the typical ways that we avoid doing the thing. So I think what you could call number one, behavioral activation. And behavioral activation is, it's actually, it's like a very old therapeutic practice. Comes from, from clinical studies of basically taking depressed people and just making them do something.

• 1:45:51Speaker 01

  Right. Because when you're depressed, you don't wanna do it.

• 1:45:54Mark Manson?

  You don't wanna do anything.

• 1:45:55Speaker 01

  Like, it can be as bad as I don't wanna take a shower, right? Like, it can get down to that point, so yeah.

• 1:46:00Mark Manson?

  And, and sure enough, what they found is that doing the thing even when you don't wanna do the thing has incredible positive effects. Doing anything when you don't wanna do the thing also has robust positive effects. And if you are too intimidated or too scared to do the full thing, breaking it down and only doing part of the thing has highly replicable, repeatable, positive effects. To the point that it's actually more effective than a number of therapeutic modalities. It's on par with CBT, which is considered the most effective therapy. It doesn't cost you a fucking thing. You can do it tomorrow, you can do it right now during this podcast. It is the single most robust thing that we found in our research.

• 1:46:43Mark Manson?

  I love that it basically boils down to take action. The best thing you can do is just fucking.

• 1:46:50Speaker 01

  Just act.

• 1:46:50Mark Manson?

  Just do the thing.

• 1:46:52Speaker 01

  So wait, are we really saying number one is you just do it?

• 1:46:54Mark Manson?

  Just do it.

• 1:46:55Speaker 01

  Just, just do it. Just, just, just do it.

• 1:46:59Mark Manson?

  Is the shield, we should just put the shield, the booth meme here. Just do it!

• 1:47:04Speaker 01

  Fucking do it. This though, to me, over this last holiday season, I was traveling a whole bunch.

• 1:47:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  So I was getting very shitty sleep. Like I need consistency for sleep, but I was bouncing all over the place, coming out here, going back to my parents, being at home. My diet was garbage. I wasn't getting my workouts in. I, I started to feel pretty depressed.

• 1:47:24Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  Like I was, I was slipping into that where I was like, oh, I haven't felt this way in a very long time, but I remember it. Like what's going on here? And then after a weekend of literally just sitting around and Netflix, it wasn't Netflix and chill, it was Netflix and bleh, like that, you know? That's what I did for an entire weekend. And it had been, my house was a disaster. I hadn't cleaned it. I usually cleaned it once a week.

• 1:47:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:45Speaker 01

  I hadn't, like, all the things I enjoyed doing, I hadn't been out in my wood shop. I hadn't gone, I hadn't exercised. All of these things, I was just, and I was just like, I don't want to do any of this. And I just, after that weekend of Netflix and bleh, I made myself clean my house. That's what I did. It's like, I'm cleaning my house. I'm finally gonna do that.

• 1:48:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:04Speaker 01

  Felt okay. Like, I really did not want to do it, but it felt okay. I did that. I was like, okay.

• 1:48:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:09Speaker 01

  Fine. Then I got back into the gym one day and it was shitty shitty workout. I probably put 10% effort into it.

• 1:48:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:15Speaker 01

  But it felt a little bit better. Cooked some meals that were nice and healthy. Like, started doing the things that I knew before kind of kept me sane.

• 1:48:23Mark Manson?

  Don't you hate?

• 1:48:23Speaker 01

  Magically, here I am again, right? I'm feeling okay.

• 1:48:26Mark Manson?

  Don't you kind of hate that it's this simple?

• 1:48:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:48:29Mark Manson?

  Don't you wish it was, don't you wish there was some complex theoretical framework that we could just apply to everything and, uh, that there was a secret, you know, the secret morning routine that, uh, the billionaires don't want you to know, or the, the powerful affirmations that come from the ancient vedic texts that no one has translated before? Like, no, just go do the thing. Just go.

• 1:48:52Speaker 01

  You just have to do it.

• 1:48:53Mark Manson?

  Just go do the fucking.

• 1:48:54Speaker 01

  Learn how to do it when you don't want to do it.

• 1:48:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah, pretty much.

• 1:48:56Speaker 01

  Especially.

• 1:48:57Mark Manson?

  This is from research from an episode last year, but I remember there was, so there was a meta-analysis last year that came out around interventions for depression.

• 1:49:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:49:06Mark Manson?

  And it looked at everything across the board. And I remember it, it went viral because the number one thing that they found, they did kind of a ranking similar to what we did here. And the number one thing that they found was exercise. So obviously that got a lot of attention, but it was interesting because a few weeks later, one of the psychologists that I follow on, on Twitter, he got curious and he went and looked at the source studies that fed into that meta-analysis to see like what exercise. And the funny thing was is it didn't fucking matter. Like it was like literally like just walking in the park was 98% as effective as like the most intense gym routine. Dancing was like super effective. Lifting any weights, like doing anything, swimming, any basic. Kegels workout.

• 1:49:51Mark Manson?

  Like fucking anything, just doing a thing. Just do, doing a fucking thing. It's, uh, it's absolutely maddening. You know, there is a classic self-help book called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. Uh, by Susan Jeffries. She has probably been vindicated on this. I, I, I would like to break it down a little bit more minutely because it, it, it's easy to sit here and just tell people over and over to just do it. Just do it, bro. So I talk about subtle art, I talk about this, got you two, been talking about this for years, but I, I call it to do something principle, which is the biggest misconception that I think people have around this is that when they're in that sloth-like state that you were in, they have this, the, this mistaken belief that

• 1:50:35Mark Manson?

  inspiration or motivation has to strike. That it's like, well, I'll get off the couch when I feel like doing it. Yeah, I feel like doing it. When it's the other way around, it's the way to feel better is by getting off the couch. Motivation is not the cause of action, it is the effect of action. And so when you are in a situation like that,

• 1:50:57Mark Manson?

  where you're like, my God, I'm disgusting. I'm like a puddle on my couch. Uh, I haven't done anything useful in three days. I need to get up and do something. You start imagining all the things that you wish you were doing and you're not doing, and that overwhelms you. It feels like a lot. You're like, oh my God, I can't even imagine like the amount of willpower that's going to take. Again, if you're thinking in terms of willpower, you're already losing. We covered that. What works is you just take all those things you want to do and you just find the smallest viable thing that feels doable in that moment. So in your case, it was just like cleaning up the house a little bit, right? It's like, I'm going to go take out the garbage or let me go make the bed. Like that's another huge self-help book, right? It's make your bed.

• 1:51:38Mark Manson?

  Again, I think probably the large percentage of the value of that book is simply it's getting people who are prone to not doing things to do something. Do it first thing in the morning, build a habit out of it and that way it creates momentum for the rest of your day. So when we were developing Purpose, our AI coaching app, I did a lot of market research into like various.

• 1:51:59Mark Manson?

  Mental health apps, you know, different things that that are people use. There's one that's been blowing up the last couple of years. It's called Finch. It's almost comically simple. Like you, you get this little baby bird and you have to like, take care of it. And the way you take care of it is by completing actions throughout your day. And the actions are hilariously simple. It's like brush your teeth gives you five points. Take a shower gives you five points. Go for a walk gives you like 10 points. Eat a meal gives you five points. And I remember sitting there like hitting the, I'm like, yes, I ate a meal today. Yes, I took a shower today. And I'm just like accumulating all these points and my baby bird is growing. And I'm like, this is so ridiculous.

• 1:52:42Mark Manson?

  But then there's a certain logic to it that first of all, it gets a little bit addictive. And you keep like wanting to find like, cause obviously, once you get past taking a shower and eating food, it actually starts giving you kind of more meaningful things to do with your day.

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:57Mark Manson?

  And I was like, okay, so I, I actually see the logic behind this. And it turns out like, if you, if you read the user reviews online and you go look at their community, like people rave about it. They're like, I couldn't get out of bed for months. This app got me out of bed. Now I'm actually doing things with my life. We want to imagine it's complicated, that it's hard to understand that there's, that we have to listen to like, multiple five hour long podcasts to know how to do a thing. When really it's like the most effective intervention you can do is just do the thing. It's like, do something.

• 1:53:32Speaker 01

  Question, does your baby bird die if you don't do the things? How does?

• 1:53:35Mark Manson?

  I don't know.

• 1:53:36Speaker 01

  You don't know. You never, you never let it get to that.

• 1:53:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah, maybe I should go back and look. Try to resuscitate my, my dead baby bird.

• 1:53:45Speaker 01

  You know how we almost in previous episodes, we've almost always opened in some way with Aristotle, right?

• 1:53:51Mark Manson?

  Oh, boy. You had to go find one.

• 1:53:54Speaker 01

  I'm not, no, I'm not shoehorning this in. There's actual, there's, there's an actual, it actually kind of marries this whole do something principle with the fake it till you make it even too.

• 1:54:03Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:54:04Speaker 01

  Aristotle, I think we've mentioned this before. He actually said, the way that you become virtuous is through your actions.

• 1:54:10Mark Manson?

  Through action, yes.

• 1:54:11Speaker 01

  If you want to be brave and courageous, you must behave bravely and courageously.

• 1:54:14Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:54:15Speaker 01

  If you want to be, if you want to be an honest person, known as an honest person, you have to engage in honest interactions with people.

• 1:54:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:21Speaker 01

  This goes all the way back to that even too. And kind of, it's kind of like the fake it till you make it, but it's also very much just that you must, you have to act.

• 1:54:28Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:54:28Speaker 01

  Like your virtue, your life, your, who you are is only developed in, through your actions.

• 1:54:34Mark Manson?

  Yes. I think identity follows action, right? Like you are, I believe it originates with Aristotle where he says like, you are what you do repeatedly.

• 1:54:42Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:54:43Mark Manson?

  Um, therefore excellence is a habit, not a practice. And this is why fake it till you make it works. It's not comfortable. It's not easy. It doesn't necessarily feel good. Sometimes you feel like you're lying or you're an imposter, but it's why it works. It's if you do an action repeatedly, you start to, you eventually become the person, that sort of person.

• 1:55:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. You, you talk about it in terms of building evidence a lot.

• 1:55:07Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:55:07Speaker 01

  That's what I've heard you say. Like you have to build the evidence around this. If you want to take on a new identity, you have to have evidence for that identity.

• 1:55:13Mark Manson?

  It's if you want to be a fit person, it's not about your body fat percentage or how you look in the mirror. It is somebody who is regularly working out.

• 1:55:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:55:23Mark Manson?

  And, and developing fitness. And there's an interesting chain here of like, identity follows action. And I think emotions tend to follow identity in terms of like, we talked about on the ego episode, how whatever our identity is, we will psychologically defend it. Right? So it's, if something challenges that identity, we will become angry or scared or envious or whatever. So it's like the actions lead to the identity, the identity leads to the emotions, and then obviously the emotions lead to your subjective wellbeing.

• 1:55:59Speaker 01

  One thing I saw too, and I kind of pointed this out earlier, was just kind of the arc of how we think about these things. You know, positive psychology was kind of all their age back in the 90s and into the 2000s.

• 1:56:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:10Speaker 01

  There was all these studies coming out about it, that you have these huge effect sizes. And then, then the real kind of science had to come in behind it and be like, well, okay, here's some boundaries on it. The effects aren't necessarily as big. So it was really good to get caught up like on all of this research that's been going on for the last like decade or so that, you know, I knew a lot of these older studies and this was, this was good to see. Science works, it's just slow.

• 1:56:33Mark Manson?

  It is.

• 1:56:34Speaker 01

  You know, we went through the replication crisis. It feels like we're kind of coming out of that a little bit.

• 1:56:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

  And we're starting to get a better, more nuanced picture of all of these things.

• 1:56:41Mark Manson?

  Seven of the top 10 originated in the ancient world, which I think is very interesting.

• 1:56:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:49Mark Manson?

  Most of the new stuff is pretty close to the bottom of this list.

• 1:56:55Mark Manson?

  If you look at the bottom five, it's pretty much all stuff that's from the last 50 years.

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, a lot of fads.

• 1:57:03Mark Manson?

  Except for, yeah, except for maybe intuitive decision making. The other thing that I noticed, you know, we've already mentioned a couple of times that the bottom of this list is pretty much just indulging your emotions, is that hurts you. I would say the middle of this list is, it's very cognitively focused or physically focused, right? So it's, you're either trying to alter your body, or you're trying to adopt the right framework or mindset in your mind. Pretty much all this stuff that like either is placebo or only works in very specific contexts is cognitively driven or biologically driven. Everything at the top of this list is action-based. It's, it actually involves you doing a thing.

• 1:57:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:48Mark Manson?

  Whether you're meditating, or you're eating the frog, or you're reading a book, or you're practicing gratitude, like you are actively doing something.

• 1:57:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:57:58Mark Manson?

  Whereas everything in the middle of the list, it's like, oh, I figured out your learning style, practice your power poses, you know, recite your affirmation. Like, these are all very cognitively driven things. All, if not the majority of the value is driven from the perception that they're doing something much more than.

• 1:58:17Mark Manson?

  What they're actually doing.

• 1:58:18Speaker 01

  One of my real big takeaways from this was just how like individual and personal all of this can be. So like if we shat on one of your, you know, favorite little methods or whatever, like, don't take it too personally. It's just like, this is what the, this is what the research says so far.

• 1:58:32Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:58:33Speaker 01

  And then not only that, if it works for you, great.

• 1:58:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:35Speaker 01

  Like even, even, even the crystal healing, if that's working for you, sure.

• 1:58:39Mark Manson?

  Hey, man.

• 1:58:40Speaker 01

  Just don't go around claiming it's, you know.

• 1:58:42Mark Manson?

  So I can bring, I can bring my crystals to the next episode?

• 1:58:45Speaker 01

  You can't just don't.

• 1:58:46Mark Manson?

  Is that what you're gonna say?

• 1:58:46Speaker 01

  The rubbing.

• 1:58:46Mark Manson?

  Just don't rub them?

• 1:58:47Speaker 01

  The rubbing, you were like.

• 1:58:49Mark Manson?

  That's the best part.

• 1:58:49Speaker 01

  Oh, it was uncomfortable.

• 1:58:50Mark Manson?

  That's the best part.

• 1:58:51Speaker 01

  It was uncomfortable.

• 1:58:52Mark Manson?

  That's actually most of the therapeutic value.

• 1:58:54Speaker 01

  That's where you get the therapeutic value.

• 1:58:56Mark Manson?

  Rubbing my crystals as if they're large boost.

• 1:59:00Speaker 01

  If it works for you, fine. And this is why like, I, I think too, it was like, I try not to just tell people, oh, you, you have to do this or that. I think you're right in saying that the only one we think you really should do is go do something.

• 1:59:11Mark Manson?

  That's mandatory. Yeah. It's, it's really the, the do something principle, I would say is the, the one mandatory thing. Even if you want to call it fake it till you, like, I do think it's mandatory. Like at some point in your life, you're going to be in a situation where you, there is something you need to do that you don't feel like doing. And so you have to get good at that.

• 1:59:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have to do that.

• 1:59:31Mark Manson?

  That is, like, if I had a child and I, and I was raising them and I was looking at this list of like, okay, what do I want to teach my kid? I would probably cross off everything in the bottom 10.

• 1:59:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:43Mark Manson?

  The next five, I would, I would kind of keep.

• 1:59:46Speaker 01

  Use dry.

• 1:59:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I would like see like how his or her personality would develop, what they're into or whatever, maybe introduce them to a couple of things. But it's like really the, I'd say the top three or four I would, would be like, to me would be mandatory, right? So, uh, behavioral activation or like the do something principle, read books.

• 2:00:07Mark Manson?

  Eat the frog, so task prioritization. And then I would have them at least try meditation.

• 2:00:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was James Clear who said in his book, he's like, do the things you have to do so you can do the things you want to do.

• 2:00:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:18Speaker 01

  I think that's a good way to put it as well. Like there's some behavioral activation, some eat the frog in there too. Again, I think though, too, it's just like, I really like that a lot of this is you can personally experiment with a lot of this stuff. And that's what I think the big takeaway is, is like personal experimentation around this stuff.

• 2:00:33Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:00:34Speaker 01

  Find what works for you. And if it works for you, great. And you don't have to proselytize it or anything like that. You don't have to, it's not a religion necessarily.

• 2:00:41Mark Manson?

  It's also very likely it will work for a while and then it will stop working.

• 2:00:45Speaker 01

  That's the other thing I think I realized definitely too, is that like, especially when you get into something new, like it's going to work.

• 2:00:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:52Speaker 01

  Right away, there's probably some placebo effect with all of these things.

• 2:00:55Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:00:56Speaker 01

  And another big takeaway was just doing anything, you know, just doing, just doing anything that is somehow positively related to you doing, getting closer to what you want or what you, what you, who you want to be.

• 2:01:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:09Speaker 01

  Any of it, like that's great. That's just a good starting point.

• 2:01:12Mark Manson?

  I think I might, I might give eating the frog another shot.

• 2:01:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:16Mark Manson?

  I might try that in the next couple of months. It's like, maybe take a week and just try to really do the most important thing first thing in the morning. That's not solely based on this episode. I noticed that I've, I've been futzing around a little bit.

• 2:01:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:30Mark Manson?

  More than usual in the mornings and being kind of slow to like ramp up in the, into useful, valuable stuff. So I might, I might give that a shot.

• 2:01:40Speaker 01

  All right. You can tell us how that goes.

• 2:01:41Mark Manson?

  I will, I will. You, you're going to have to listen to it. You will have to, these people, they can turn us off, but you're going to have to sit there and listen to it. Be sure to check out the Purpose Coaching app. It is at purpose.app. We have a free seven day trial. It is kind of crazy how quickly it can spot your weaknesses and inconsistencies. So if you want your bullshit called, check that out and be sure to follow, leave a review, like and subscribe. Smash that like button, bro.

• 2:02:12Speaker 01

  Smash it.

• 2:02:12Mark Manson?

  Smash it. And we will see you next time.

• 2:02:16Speaker 01

  Bye.