What to Do When Your Worst Fears Come True: Mailbag
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Hello and welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the podcast, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. I'm joined today as usual by Dr. Rick Hansen. Rick is a clinical psychologist. He's a best-selling author and he's also my dad. So dad, how are you doing today?

Mellow. Mellow. We love mellow. So today we're going to be answering some questions from our listeners. We always love the mailbag episodes. People ask great questions. This week was no exception. If you would like to ask a question to be answered on a future episode of the podcast, you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. You can also write a comment down below if you're watching on YouTube. You can leave a rating and a positive review on iTunes that has a question in it. Hey, you could even send us an

email if you're still using that old fashioned technology. It's [email protected]. Okay, our first question today, what do you do if you finally get yourself to stop avoiding something and risk a dreaded experience? This is something we talk about on the podcast sometimes.

And then some form of the dreaded experience happens. For example, if you show some vulnerable emotion and feel like people pull away, or you ask somebody out and you get rejected. I know you talk a lot about facing dreaded experiences in managed ways and doing small exposures, but even in those small contexts, experiencing whatever it is that you dread can be very painful. What do you think?

Completely true. And even outside the frame of a dreaded experience that constrains our lives, just in life, we stumble into pain. Things happen. What do you do then? Three fundamental ways to practice with your mind. Be with what's there, release what's problematic, promote what's good.

Let be, let go, let in. If the mind is like a garden, you can witness it, you can pull weeds, you can plant flowers. So kind of following that out, when something like that happens, the first step is to be with it. Notice what you're feeling,

Try to name it to yourself, which neurologically reduces activation of the emotional circuitry that's underlying the distress of what's painful. Try to be aware of the difference between so-called first darts and second darts, between what is...

sort of inherent unavoidable discomfort in what has happened in proportion to what has actually happened compared to the turbochargers, the amplifiers, the distorters in the brain that understandably get acquired as we grow up and then intensify our reactions to something.

In all that, where you're just being with what's there, you might be doing some exploring to see what was earlier and similar in your own personal history. And hopefully you're bringing a quality to bear of kindness and support for yourself. In the process of that,

the painfulness of what you're feeling might change. It might reduce, but you're not deliberately, directly trying to nudge it. You're not making those kind of efforts in your mind. That's the first step. And really, it's important to include a sense of compassion for yourself. Then in the second step, you're really trying to let go.

especially the second dart turbochargers. Maybe there's an inherent painfulness. Suppose you express a vulnerable emotion and people are not good about it. Well, that's first dart stuff. We're social primates. Or you ask someone out and you're not their cup of tea. There's a rejection there. There's a natural amount of wincing that's going to occur. The second dart stuff is what we add to it.

So especially letting go, you're trying to understand those add-on reactions, those turbochargers through insight and just knowing about yourself. You're also really focusing on letting the body sensations

I know a lot of people in the personal growth human potential world, they have tremendous intellectual understanding about their minds. And in a way that we've talked about in other episodes, they get captured by that strength,

That becomes their go-to. So they think about what they're feeling. There's a place for that, but that's kind of a secondary technique. What's much more primary and helpful is to feel what you're feeling in your body and feel it on its way out the door. Feel it as you release it. Release it as you feel it. So you're in the second phase now of letting go.

Are there things like there may be beliefs that are perpetuating the upset and worsening it like, "Well, I can never express my true self," or "Everyone will always reject me"? Yeah, so that's the part of it that I think is really alive in this question for this person. Because when you're speaking to a dreaded experience, which is something we've talked about in the past, you're talking about a very central fear for somebody.

And really a fear that kind of dictates the shape of their life. So you haven't put yourself out there for a long time. You've lived inside of that safe container. And then you extend your head above ground and you feel like you get bombed.

And for the record, if you're somebody who lives inside that container, when you extend your head, you probably are going to get bonked for a whole bunch of different complex reasons. Some of these are social. Some of them is because you're going to have a relatively low threshold of what you consider a bonk. There's going to be a lot that's going on here. So it's going to be normal to experience that.

that person understandably then goes, screw that, I'm never doing that again. So how would you kind of coach the person around that feeling, if that makes sense? Never doing that again. Get me out of here. Nope. Back to the box. Okay, so let's use that as the segue into the letting in. What are you trying to encourage? So you're feeling the pain,

then at some moment that feels right--and I call that the Goldilocks moment, not too tall, not too short, it's just the right moment--you move into the release phase. You're releasing. And then you need to move into replacing. So maybe what you've released is a sense of yourself as inherently unlikable or unworthy, or you've released sort of sadness about

feeling rejected or not having something you hoped for going to occur, what do you want to replace that with? And very often what you want to replace it with is the opposite, the matched opposite. So if you've been trying to let go of the feeling of yourself as kind of squirrely and unlikable and unworthy,

you would then look for opportunities to take in and internalize the sense of being a good person. Other people like you. You have many good qualities. Those qualities in you are the kinds of things that are liked in other people. So people will like those qualities in you too.

You know, you're doing that. Or if you have a sense that you're doomed and it's horrible and you're just letting go of that, you could remind yourself that what you did here was perfectly good. Not everybody's going to choose you. You're not going to choose everybody. You need to be in the game. You need to have deal flow, you know, in relationships. Because you also yourself want to be selective. Mm-hmm.

You're selective, they're selective. It's all okay. It's all okay. It's not so personal. So to me, these are things that you're trying to stabilize into, you're letting go into. And in all this, I think there's a little bit here that has to do with how do you regard yourself? If you regard yourself as sort of broken, a hot mess on a project, when you run into these setbacks,

it will seem like, oh, it confirms your worst thought about yourself. But if on the other hand, you see yourself, for example, along the lines of being a plucky, admirable experimenter,

who is a voyager in life, trying new things, meeting new people, and freaking admirable as that kind of a being. Trying things on, bad stuff's going to happen, but it's okay. It's part of the process. Yeah, totally. Yeah, exactly right. Then when setbacks occur, if you're really on the ball, you can frame it entirely as good news. This is information.

Because I, the voyager in my life who is admirable and I feel good about myself in this way, I'm here to find out what works.

And so you not responding well to my vulnerable expression, you're giving me good information. - About what to do with you. - Yeah. Now I can look back, did I express my vulnerable feelings in a way that, you know, is it a board meeting? All right, it just wasn't the right place or time. - Set and setting, as they say. - Right, or I was expressing ecstatic joy at the memorial service for my aunt. No, but usually what you realize is that it's informative about the world.

You're doing fine. And it just means, oh, this is information for me about maybe setting up other people to be a little more receptive, like they know what's coming so it doesn't take them by surprise. Or frankly, it's telling me about that particular person or that particular type of person.

Whatever it is, it's fodder for my program. Here's the deal. Whose game are you in? Whose movie are you in? And if you're realizing, oh, we're in my movie of self-expression and growth and finding true love, okay?

we're in my game, so-called, then whatever's happening is grist for my mill, is fuel for my game. It fits into my movie. I'm going to use it for my purposes.

I'm using life, life is not using me. And that frame changes. - Yeah, and you're using it to get what you want at the end of the day. - Yeah, that's right. - Totally. All right, I think that was a great answer to that question. And it's a very common one that we get actually, 'cause we talk about dreaded experiences and then people are like, well, what if it goes poorly? - Yeah, sometimes it does. - Sometimes it does. - Yeah. - Yeah, no, for sure. - Keep going. - Keep going, I think, is the good summary of all of that. Okay, so here's the second question that we got.

I've noticed that I tend to get pretty defensive whenever someone offers me constructive feedback at work or in my personal life, even when I agree with what they're saying. I feel my body tense up and I often find myself arguing or making excuses. But then later when I look at it, sometimes I find that there's something useful there and they even made some good points. How can I work with this defensive reaction and become more open to feedback? For starters,

extremely self-aware question. Like just got to give the person props for that level of self-awareness. What would you say about this, Dan? Oh, there's so much about it.

When it's really natural, when negative feedback comes our way, or if it's a criticism, even implicitly, if people are offering suggestions. Sure, yeah. Right? Yeah, we love a suggestion. Yeah, or trying to help. I'm just trying to help. Just trying to help, yeah. Yeah, that implicitly says you need the suggestion. There's a shortfall between...

- Your performance not quite there yet. - Yeah, and what could be ideal? So it's very natural. It's very natural to be defensive, I get that. It's also true that to just draw on this really cool stuff from Jean Piaget, early child psychologist, I think psychiatrist,

He talked about two modes of learning, assimilation and accommodation. You know this. You could dive in. I love it. Assimilation is easy because we just suck new information into an old framework.

With accommodation, we bring new information in and we change our old framework to accommodate to the new information. That's hard for people to do. So if we get feedback that's jarring and kind of upends the apple cart of familiar perspectives that we have or assumptions, it can be particularly hard to integrate that. So it's natural. There are some natural reasons why this all happens. Additionally,

I've myself become a little more alert to tracking the motivations behind the input of others. And often what's true is that the content of the input has some validity to it.

It's a package. Not all parts of it are accurate or relevant. I think this is a really good point. Yeah, keep going. Okay. But there's still probably some value in it. Nonetheless, the packaging, whatever that value is,

Kind of sucks. Sometimes it's kind of fraught. Yeah, most people are not great at giving feedback. Yeah. Why are you telling me this? Why is this any of your business, for example? Or why are you not allowing me to kind of figure this out on my own? Or what secondary gain, what payoffs are you getting for putting yourself in that kind of one-up position where you're the knower, the teacher, and I'm the knowee? Yeah.

The learner. And I think some of the times when we get defensive, we are defending against the malintent of the other person, right? Understandably, we're a little bit sticking up for ourselves. Like, wait a minute here. I don't want to buy into this domination move that you're coming in with.

So I just kind of want to flag those parts as worth paying attention to actually. And could be a very understandable first response where you're trying to assess intent, so you're trying to figure out, okay, does the person have understandable reasons for offering me this feedback or is this really something where they're just trying to move into kind of a power relationship with me? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And so what do you do about it all? So what are things that help? One thing that really helps is to slow it down. Slow it down.

Another thing that can help you slow it down, imagine there's a video camera in the corner of the room that's recording everything and it's going to be played at fill in the blank. Your memorial service, your kid's wedding before the board of psychology, something. Then just slow it down and be measured in your response. That can really help you. Related to that, ask yourself, what's the real prize here? What is your priority?

Is your priority to get that person out of your face, back off? You're not interested in their input. They don't have the standing to give you input. You're not interested in their opinion. Maybe that's your priority.

Or maybe your priority is like you're trying to improve yourself a little bit like we talked about earlier that you're for yourself, you're a voyager, your game, your movie involves lifelong learning. And there, your priority is, and also maybe your priority is this whatever project or thing you're doing that they're inputting around, you really care about it being as good as it possibly can be.

Well, if that's your purpose, then that's your prize. You can become much more open to the input. Yeah. All right. So you know your purposes are. And then I would just say the last thing I find really helps is sometimes is to ask questions that can slow it down and it helps you sort out what their motivation is and it helps you sort out what's useful in the input you've received. And the last thing I'll just say about dealing with input is

is to keep reminding yourself you don't have to agree with it. You just don't, if you don't. And to preserve that right for yourself. And because you have ultimate autonomy about what is actually going to happen that you're going to agree to, you can be open to input. Yeah. And I think a big piece of this just in general is kind of a psychological flexibility thing. If you're a fundamentally rigid person, it's very difficult to take input.

Because it forces you to change your behavior. That's true. That's really astute for us. Yeah. So if you're open to change, period, it's going to be a lot easier to receive what somebody has to say about you. Just in general, being like, it's not such a big deal for me. It doesn't really matter if I turn left or I turn right because I can do both. So it's okay if you would like me to turn left a little bit more in this situation. No biggie. I can just do that. Where we tend to get stressed out about input.

Or in two categories. First category, implicit criticism. Just we were talking about off the, I feel like this is unfair. They're being mean. They've got a secondary agenda, whatever it is. Other category, I'm concerned I can't do it.

I'm not sure if I can act on this input in a helpful way. And often those two categories, they serve a kind of Venn diagram. And the really painful stuff is the stuff that's the intersection in between. It was offered unskillfully or it was offered with topspin and agenda. And also I'm fundamentally concerned that I can't change in that way. And so it's kind of like the double pain, right?

Sometimes you can literally ask for time. Yeah. Say, hey, do you mind? I hear what you're saying. All good. Well taken. And also I could just like do with 15 seconds here if you let me kind of come back home. Yeah. Great. Excellent. Fantastic for us. We'll be right back to the show in just a moment.

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A second, 15 seconds, a minute, longer? I just want to make sure I'm doing this correctly. We actually get a lot of procedural questions about this. - I know, it's such a great question. Bad news, neuroscience is a baby science. And there's no research on many really interesting questions.

It seems in general that negative experiences have a bias in the brain. We rapidly absorb painful experiences. - Which is very well researched, negativity bias in general. - Huge research on that. And it just takes more time and intensity and engagement

to counteract the negativity bias in the formation of what's called implicit memory. Not so much memory for what happened, but the felt sense in the body of the lived residues of experience. So my own rule of thumb is

within a second or two, a million-dollar moment can really land. Like your beloved can just startle you with some novel, which is one of the factors of learning, unexpected, loving, beautiful input. And it just, oh, okay, it didn't take very long for that one to really land, including the emotional somatic aspects of it. But in general, my rule of thumb is half a breath.

Or longer. And you can just kind of feel intuitively something useful has happened. You're experiencing something you want to grow inside, including broad things like gratitude or happiness. Yeah, a nice inhale for sure. Yeah, that seems about right. And if you want to keep those neurons firing together so they have time to wire together...

How about a full breath? Most people, it's maybe six or so seconds. So basically, my rule of thumb for people is to stay with it for a breath or longer.

So we don't know for sure. More is probably better. And hey, back of a napkin, five to 10 seconds, you're probably in good shape. Yeah, that's right. Even half a breath just to go. How long does it take to really register feeling loved, let's say? Not too long. Yeah. Or feeling good on me, I got that done. It's like a few seconds, actually. And I think there is some evidence that

The bad news is that with repeated stressful, emotionally upsetting experiences, particularly intense and even traumatic ones, the brain becomes more and more sensitized to the bad. So it takes less and less for the bad to impact us and to form an emotional memory. It could also be true going the other way.

that we can gradually over time, and there's not so much clear evidence for this, but there's some circumstantial evidence for this, that in the brain, the brain can gradually become sensitized to the good over time. So maybe in the beginning, it might take, let's say, six seconds

But maybe over time, you sensitize your brain. It only takes five seconds or four seconds or three seconds. Who knows? Yeah. Yeah. But I think that's quite plausible. Yeah. Very cool. Another reason to stick with it. The rule of practical neuropsychology summarized in two keywords for us. I know you've been searching for this formula your whole life. You ready? MoBeta.

More better. More episodes of internalization and more depth of engagement in them. That's the secret. It's the law of little things. And then they add up over time. And we love simple questions. They're great for this kind of a format too. It really helps us out. Okay, so the fourth question. In a recent episode with Joshua Fletcher, he talked about how you have to be in a state of anxiety to work with how you respond to it.

I have some social anxiety and particularly feel like I have a part that's concerned about coming across as too much in social settings like parties. But I feel like when I'm at a party out in the wild, as you and Rick like to say, that's not really the best time for me to try to work with this part. But then when I'm on my own, I can't really access it because I'm not having that experience. What can I do? And I feel like this is kind of the bookend to the dreaded experience question that first came up because this is basically like,

I'm trapped in that space where I don't want to risk that experience. I'm reflecting on complexities around it. For example, people can deal with generalized anxiety in all kinds of ways in which they're not engaging in the moment with particular triggers like being dragged out the front door or being in a social setting or whatever it might be that

is their anxiety issue, they're anxious about a particular thing. So first of all, this person could build up all kinds of strengths outside of party settings, such as self-awareness, self-monitoring, executive functions, impulse control. That could lead to it going better. Yeah, yeah. And build up this whole repertoire off the playing field.

that then you draw on on the playing field. I agree there are certain forms of learning that are, including emotional learning, that are only available on the playing field in the actuality of whatever it is. Okay. And still, there are many other kinds of useful learnings that can be acquired off the playing field. So I would just say that kind of in general. And then I think it

Also, there's a lot of value in which people can use mental rehearsal with feared triggers. So this person could imagine being in a party situation--and this, by the way, is a variation on the Rick Protocol I offered when we did an episode on letting go--where basically the way to do it is you see yourself acting the current ways, which are problematic, in a party setting.

of being too much, too loud, too much. You see yourself do that. You're concerned about that. This person is probably acting in a way that's very minimalistic actually because they're concerned about being perceived as too much. Yeah. Yeah. Or we could even do it that, okay, now see yourself being really contracted because you don't want to be perceived as too much, too loud, too big, too spirited. Fine. So now you see yourself doing that. Then see yourself imagine being the way you want to be.

There's a lot of evidence anecdotally in people's lives and also some research that imagining how you want to be in ways that are very rich, even through psychodrama kind of methods where you play it out, you imagine it, it's rehearsal. It's imaginal rehearsal.

that can have a lot of benefit for you. And then the trick, so you imagine yourself being a certain way, okay, pluses and minuses. Then you imagine yourself being the other way, let's say, pluses and minuses. And then you make an existential choice. Which way do I want to be? And then you imagine that again, which usually means imagining the higher road, way of being again. That too is something you could do outside of the party.

And then even in the party setting, it's great to deliberately, and I've done this a lot, to help yourself by incorporating what you're doing at the party into your own Voyager journey through life, your game, your movie, your program, your work in your program. And so you might deliberately pick somebody at a party

let's say off in a corner so you're not being noticed by everybody and deliberately with that person, let yourself be looser. Mm-hmm.

Let yourself just be a little more your natural uninhibited self. Say a little more provocative and see if you can find a middle place where it's actually working with that person. It's low risk, essentially. So yeah, you're working with it, just like Joshua was saying, in the setting in which you're anxious, but you're doing it

with a lot of control and you're doing it in a way in which you are helping yourself in the framing of your program. You are using what's happening here as a means to your ends, that agency thing. Yeah. And just to talk about the you can only change the amygdala when it's being activated thing a little bit, that is at least somewhat true.

but there are a lot of different ways to activate the amygdala. So sitting in your room, imagining a party situation where you're really dropping yourself into it, feeling what it feels like and sort of visualizing what it would be like if you had an excessively exuberant moment or something, that's going to activate your amygdala, kids. That is absolutely going to do it. You are going to start feeling the feeling of threat and disruption.

So the idea that you can only do these things through live rounds training with it is just not true. You can find different little exposures to use the example of somebody with a fear of spiders. You look at a picture of a spider, you look at a video of a spider, you look at a video of a spider crawling on a person. Whatever it is, you go and you go and you go. You don't have to just do that with an actual tarantula on your arm. There are a lot of different ways to work yourself up to it. And the broad principle is

without being egoic, conceited, sociopathic, et cetera, et cetera, about all this, to frame your life as your program. And you have a clarity about your values, your primary things you care about, and you're orienting to other things as they feed that, their means to those ends, including challenging experiences or negative feedback from other people. That's a fundamental orientation.

Okay, so fifth question: I have no difficulty managing anxiety.

And it's something I don't experience much of outside of normal times. My wife, on the other hand, is really impacted by it. And then they shared a bit of a story. For example, we finally got to go out to dinner alone for the first time since our daughter was born nine months ago. Family watched our daughter. We trust them completely. But my wife was so anxious about her that she couldn't enjoy the dinner or even really eat her food. Me being relaxed about it almost made things worse because now she feels like she's ruining our time together.

I feel a bit helpless, and she feels like it's just not something I can help her with. Are there any ideas on how I can support my partner when it's about something that's so far removed from my own experience? There's so much in that that's really very beautiful and tender and consequential.

I think it's helpful for all of us to realize that parents who did not get extremely anxious when they were separated from their infants back in the Stone Age were very unlikely to pass on their genes. It is normal to get very anxious on separation, and I think it's particularly normal for mothers.

in whom that evolved parent-child bond is extremely primary. And it's also helpful to realize that infants that were not really distressed

at separation at nine months, let's say from their primary caregivers, which don't have to be their biological parents, but their primary attachment figures, those infants were less likely to call out or do whatever was necessary to be found. And they often did not make it to sunrise. So it's normal. And this goes also to the general topic of the family bed and sleeping down the hall and how you manage all that. But it's really helpful to appreciate that there are

primal, impersonal, powerful processes at work here in people that can really help. Second thing that really can help is to, for example, in this case, to encourage the partner or the person to communicate with others that are like them in some ways. They have a similar background in addiction or they're similar young mothers of young children.

And then to use this example as kind of a springboard to more general type issues, one thing that really comes through I think that's very, very helpful is partner A and person B. Let's say person B is the person who's anxious about something or other. Start by joining.

That is such a key phrase. It became a motto for me when you were actually really, really young. I realized, oh, I need to start by joining with my wife, with you, with people. Start by joining rather than starting with my strength as analytic detachment and advice giving. So start by joining.

just try to find out about it. What's it like to be you? What's it like to be that other person? A asks, B in effect, what's it like to be you? And to do that in ways that are interested or sincere, considerate, there are all kinds of obvious values around that and good ways to do that. Sometimes the B person is a little startled because they've been advised probably a lot in their history by their people to get over it or not worry so much about it.

In that inquiry, without presuming to be one-up, without presuming to be any kind of a therapist or coach, if you possibly can, it's good to get at what does B think about this? How does B

consider all this? Does B, for example, realize that, let's say, the threat that B is worried about is actually much less likely than B is currently estimating? Does the person have what is described in therapy world as insight into their own mind? Can they step back from their mind and observe their own reactions and reflect on them?

In doing that, implicitly you are reinforcing their sense of responsibility and agency. Not that they are the cause necessarily of the pattern of mind, their anxiety per se, but they are responsible.

for dealing with it as an aspect of their life. So as you explore their own reflections about this and their own understanding about it and their own plans about it, you're reinforcing that sense of agency. So you can do that. Second thing you can do is to do damage control on how it impacts you.

Maybe they're kind of a homebody. They just don't want to go out in the world, and you're someone who likes going out and hearing new music and going to events. And you just kind of cut a deal that, well, one night a week, I'm sort of on my own, and I'm going to be ethical in our relationship, but I'm going to go do my thing. So sometimes we butt heads.

around the constraints or limitations of others. And we get caught up in that as a conflict and contentiousness, 'cause deep down inside, we just think truly to ourselves, you really don't need to worry so much about that. And that's not good for you, but you know, that other person, the be person's not budging much.

find her own way. There's a place for that. Yeah. I'm just thinking about this personally through the lens of my relationship with Elizabeth to some extent, where a version of this has been a major theme of our relationship, not about anxiety specifically, but broadly me getting it about a bunch of different stuff

that is totally foreign to my experience. Me kind of getting it about ADHD. Me getting it about traumatic experiences that happen to a person and the consequences of those experiences over time. Me really getting it about PMDD. And one of the things that really helped me personally, because the big question here fundamentally is an empathy question. What supports me in having empathy for this person and being able to drop into empathy even though their experience is different from mine?

And for me, honestly, that took a surprisingly long amount of time in some ways for me to really kind of get to getting it. I think I'm still working on it to some extent. What helped me was lightening up a bit about Vue for starters.

and not being so tied in some ways to what might be objectively true, but instead being very focused on the experience of the other person. Yeah, that's right. And particularly the emotional experience of it. That piece of it was very, very helpful for me to get the sensation of it, the feeling of it in a very felt way. I got a lot of juice out of that.

The what's it, curiosity and the what's it like to be you, to use the Rick question. Classic Rick psychotherapy joining question. So what's it like to be you? It was very helpful for me. What's this actually feel like? What is it like to feel anxious? To have that curiosity, that inquiry around it, I think can be very useful for people. And to your point, often people are not used to being asked that question because nobody's cared in the past. Everybody's kind of treated them like they're a crazy person. Yeah.

And instead, if you're actually like, hey, what's this like? It can be totally relieving for somebody to actually talk about it in kind of a free way.

And then that third step, building on what you just said there, after you've started by joining, you've joined with them, you've explored. Which is kind of what I was describing there, essentially start by joining. Yeah, wonderful. And you've taken care of your own legitimate interests. Which also was a part of my process with Elizabeth. Like, what can we do here to make it so that I still get to do the things that I like to do? Yeah, totally. That's right. Rather than

trying to change them and getting trapped in patterns of contentiousness and struggle. And I think our first big problem was me being in the, do you really have to feel this way mode, essentially trying to change them. And then the second big struggle was when we weren't enough in the, okay, what supports Forrest and also getting what he wants mode.

And we were able to find kind of the happy middle place. Yeah. Very, very good. And on detail about that, one really useful kind of breakthrough for me in terms of framing in a relationship context is essentially saying to the other person, in the service of my caring for you and in the service of the strengthening and the ongoingness of our relationship, it's really good for us to

If we let me, let's say, go out once a week and hear music. Be a little differentiated. Yeah, it's framed as that. So then we get to the third part though, which is what do you do when you just really think the other person should change?

You would really like to help them be less anxious. You have some stakes. You're affected or you really see that they're hurting themselves. They're doing things that are binge eating or they're drinking too much or they're avoiding life by playing video games six hours, eight hours, 12 hours a day. What do you do then? Then that becomes very fateful. You start shifting into...

I want to influence you. I want to budge you. I want to nudge you. I want to get you to change. And then that's a whole complication.

It's grounded partly in appraisals of the difference between can't and won't. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. No, totally. Totally. I think there's totally a can't-won't thing. Yeah. Yeah. If it's a can't category, it's a can't category. Yeah. But if at some level that person over there does have volitional control or they could employ it if they were sufficiently motivated, hmm. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors.

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Boulevard, software for self-care businesses. Now, back to the show. So one final question here. My therapist suggested I try mindfulness meditation, but I just can't do it.

I can sit still and quiet for maybe a few minutes, and then my brain just goes into overdrive. I start feeling anxious and overwhelmed. I can't focus on my breathing like I get legitimately panicky. It doesn't help that everybody talks about how great meditation is, and I feel like it just makes things worse for me. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong? What do you think, Dad? Well, let me ask you first, Forrest.

What do you think the person is experiencing when they start getting really- Great question. What do I think the person is experiencing? I think there are a couple of different options here. First, it could be that the person has a sort of

chronic buzz of doing that helps them cope with their anxiety. That would be my first nomination. And when that doing goes away, what they're feeling is the anxiety which is just running in the background all the time without anything modifying it.

without their kind of typical coping mechanism. So that would be my first guess. My second guess is that there's something in the practice itself that's putting them in contact with something that's quite emotional for them. That it's like surfacing some material...

Maybe they fill their mind normally with a lot of kind of chronic thoughts that then drown out the stuff in the background that now has an opportunity to come forward. I wonder about something like that.

If they're doing certain kinds of meditation, I could imagine that there could be something in the meditation itself that is activating for them. Like maybe this is a person, they're doing like a meta meditation. It doesn't really sound like it, but it sounds like they're doing sort of a basic close your eyes and listen to your breath. Yeah. Just something in the content of it that's maybe activating for a person. Those are sort of the three things that immediately come to mind. That's very good. I don't know what you think.

As a long time teacher of meditation and everything else. Yeah. I think you definitely tick some major common boxes and it's really good for this person or for people in general to be aware of what does make me restless? What is this from? Why? And what function is it trying to serve, for example? That can be really helpful.

So I would just say if this person's asking, if we frame their question as they're basically asking, how can I get the benefit of meditation as my nature, as myself?

Classically, I talked about in Buddha's brain broadly, meditation generally, in terms of the temperamental spectrum, if we have turtles at one end and jackrabbits at the other, it was generally created by turtles for turtles to become better turtles in turtle pens. And so what do you do if you're kind of a jackrabbit? One thing to do is to set yourself the benefit of very short intervals, one minute, for example, or 10 breaths.

Can you settle in and see what it's like to be primarily aware of 10 breaths in a row? You can count them as they go. It'll be less than a minute for most people. So short periods, maybe if this person is getting five good minutes,

Stop at five minutes before you start feeling really, really, you know, edgy or agitated. That's a good thing. Second, increase the stimulation of the meditation object.

For example, do walking meditation. One way to do that is to do it fairly slowly. You can even note what you're doing as you lift one leg, lifting, planting, lifting, planting. And you're using those verbal cues to stimulate you and to keep bringing you back into the practice. And

There's enough stimulation in the movement that it makes your basal ganglia happy, which has a kind of stymostat deep down in it that wants a certain amount of stimulation. And people have different stymostat settings.

someone, let's say, at the more spirited end of the spectrum by temperament or by training and culture just gets habituated to a really dense incoming baud rate of stimuli, their stimmostat starts freaking out when there's not much stimulation. So you're giving your stimmostat more stimulation by moving around in that way. That's good. Another is to...

be aware, for example, breathing in your whole body or to focus on something like feelings of gratitude or love as a meditation object because that's a lot more interesting than the breath, a lot more emotionally rewarding, do all those things. Yeah, I think that's really good advice. And something that I didn't name as a possibility but that I want to name here is that

this could be a person, as many people are, who are at this point in their lives used to something always happening. They're always looking at their phone, they're always looking at the TV, there's a podcast that's playing in the background, maybe they're constantly listening to music, whatever it is. I was really noticing this about myself recently and one of my New Year's things was like, "Whoa, I just want to spend more time in a quiet room because I tend to play a lot of music or a podcast or something in the background."

And we're essentially just like dopamine maxed all of the time. Yeah, that's right. And so all of a sudden, you try to go from that into essentially like the equivalent of a sensory deprivation tank. Wow, you're probably going to be kind of freaked by it for a while, and it's going to be really hard to keep on focusing. The good news, this gets better.

If you're able to stick with it, this gets better. And I find that for a lot of people when they first start doing meditative practices, this is kind of a phase that a person goes through where there's a lot of struggle and a lot of, ugh, this feels bad in my body. And understandably, that causes them to get off the horse. You just got to get back on the horse for a minute or two or three a day, day after day after day. And most of the time, it really does get better. This really is just a phase for you. Yeah. I would finish by...

asking in effect, what's the approach that this person or any person is taking? Because meditation is sort of the big deal. People often bring an approach to it, I think that has almost a kind of force to it. Like, okay, you got to swallow your cod liver oil. You got to do this painful, unpleasant, irritating thing because somehow it's going to be good for you. Then it's hard to stick with it. It doesn't feel very good.

Alternately, my own view is that meditation is homecoming. You are coming home to the present, you're coming home to your own body, coming home to your own mind, you're coming home. It's nice to come home. What's it feel like to come home? You come home from a long trip, you drop your suitcase down, you plop in a chair,

like Sam toward the end of the Lord of the Rings saga, you're home. It's good to be home. And so it's helpful to orient to it as something that's restful, that's pleasant. It feels good to disengage from the rush and the work. You don't have to do any work. You don't have to get anything done. You don't have to please anybody. You don't have to go anywhere. You don't have to be somebody.

Just, oh, they're coming home to the present. What's it like to be you? And you're kind of resting in your own awareness, untroubled, undisturbed, undefended, here,

Yeah. That feels really good. And can you find the like really good in that? Yeah. You're like the frog on a lily pad, plop. Yeah. And I love the general point you're making, Dad, about finding the like enjoyable aspects of the experience and really orienting toward those aspects and how can I get more out of those aspects as opposed to really focusing on the more difficult or more aversive aspects of the experience and being like, okay, how can I just persevere through this? You know what I mean? How can you make it easier for you to do? Yeah. Great point.

Yay. Love doing this with you today. Thanks for answering all of these questions. We got great questions. Thanks for the mailbag. Totally. And as always, a lot of fun. As always.

Thanks again to everybody for sending in questions to be answered on the mailbag. I love these episodes of the podcast. They feel so alive because people are directly engaged with them. We get great questions from people. If you would like to send in a question to be answered on the podcast, you can find us at contact at beingwellpodcast.com. You can leave a comment down below on YouTube if you're watching over there. You can leave a rating and a positive review. Or hey,

you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. That is probably the best way to get your questions answered. So we started today with a question that focused on dreaded experiences, which are these kinds of experiences that we sculpt our lives around avoiding. And the question was about what to do when we risk a dreaded experience.

And then the bad things happen. We don't get positive feedback. It doesn't go the way that we want it to. We are so scared of putting ourselves out there and getting rejected by somebody else. And then guess what? We get rejected. What then?

Rick focused on appreciating this as a normal part of the process. Of course, when we risk things, sometimes it's not going to go our way. But the important part is that you risked it at all. The important part is that you put the effort in, that you really cared about what it was that you were doing, that you cared about yourself.

And that was what he oriented to, the idea that we are the agents of our lives. And so we can't be so focused on all of the responses that we get from other people. We can't be so focused on the outcome. We can just be focused on our own effort. And the more that we're able to focus on what we're doing,

which includes things like, hey, risking something that we find really spooky, putting ourselves out there in new and uncomfortable ways for us, the more that we're able to focus on that, including our own good intentions along the way, wow, the better our lives are going to get.

The second question was about defensiveness when other people offer constructed feedback. And the person said that, hey, even when I agree with the feedback, I find myself getting really defensive. And so I would like to become more open to feedback. Rick had some really interesting points for this one. First, he mentioned being aware of what the other person is trying to do or trying to offer.

including situations where they're trying to control us in different ways by offering feedback. So you might be kind of subconsciously or implicitly responding to that bid for control from the other person. But in situations where the feedback is truly offered in a well-meaning way, it's thoughtful, it's reasonable, the person's been pretty smart about how they've offered it, he also gave a few tips on what to do. First, slow down.

do what you can to buy a little time, it is very natural for us to have that initial defensive response when we feel like we've been corrected, which is what feedback implicitly is. And so if we can buy ourselves some time, it's going to make our lives a whole lot easier. Then he mentioned focusing on feedback, not as a assault on our character,

but as an attempt to improve performance after a kind of mission, right? It's pretty easy for us to internalize feedback as like something is deeply wrong with me. And the more we're able to be a little impersonal about it essentially, the easier it's going to be for us to take the value out of whatever somebody's saying and really actually use that feedback to improve our performance in meaningful ways.

Third question was about taking in the good and how long a person needs to take in the good for, for it to make a real difference for them. And unfortunately, this is one of those things where there is not a concrete answer. As Rick said, more better. The more you're able to do it, the better your results are probably going to be. But in general, if you're able to stick with a feeling for a couple seconds, five seconds, 10 seconds, couple breaths, you're probably in pretty good shape.

Fourth, we talked about working with anxiety and particularly situations that somebody who wants to work with their anxiety could be in where it doesn't really feel appropriate for them to suddenly make a big bid in a social setting. It feels too scary. It's too unmanaged. But then when they're on their own, they can't really do much to work with the anxiety because they're not really feeling it. They can't connect with that part of who they are.

And Rick really emphasized how there actually are a lot of things that most people can do to work with their anxiety when they're just on their own. If you're in your room and you have a fear of spiders, imagining a spider is going to activate a feeling of some anxiety, and that's a place where you can start to try to work with it.

If you are at a party, you can go off to the side, talk to another person, engage with them, and start to try to do some of the things that the questioner was talking about, where they talked about wanting to feel like they could be a little bigger, a little bit more authentic, but without falling into really overwhelming people or coming across as too much.

So can you try to do that just in a conversation with a friend and start there? How about in a conversation with a couple of people that you don't know so well, but you know a little bit? Maybe try that on. And then we can scale our way up to an actual party environment.

He also mentioned how there are all of these different strengths that a person might develop that could support us in being more the way that we want to be in a social setting. Maybe some distress tolerance, maybe some self-compassion, maybe an appreciation for ourselves as a whole complicated person as opposed to one narrow kind of thing. There are all these different things we can develop inside of ourselves that could make things go better when we actually do risk the dreaded experience.

Fifth, we talked about situations where two people, particularly two romantic partners, are in a situation where they just have very different natural tendencies around something. Maybe one person has more of an anxious temperament while the other person really doesn't experience much anxiety at all. So

So you create this complicated situation where you've got one partner who is feeling kind of chronically unseen in their experience and the other partner who thinks that they're either unable to help their partner or they think that their partner is kind of just exaggerating whatever this issue is. And this is the kind of situation that comes up in relationships all the time that people really struggle with. It creates a lot of problems for people. And I speak to that from some experience. If you've listened to the episodes that I've recorded with Elizabeth,

And one of the things we've talked about is how it took me a while as a very neurotypical, very kind of normative person to really get where she was coming from about some different things. And then Rick and I talked a bit about what people can do about this.

So a great place to start, start by joining. If you take that as a good rule for relationships in general, it will not steer you wrong. It's one of the most useful phrases I've ever learned. Start with empathy, start with connection, start with, "Hey,

What's it like to feel that way? Explain it to me. Wow, could you really tell me about that? What's that like for you? Oh my God, I would love to understand more about how you really feel. Choose your phrase here. But something that moves you into the other person's experience. So then anything that you talk about afterwards is coming from that stance of mutual connection and relationship.

Something I mentioned to a coaching client recently was just the feeling of being on the same team. Do you feel like you're on the same team with your partner, with your friend, with your boss, whatever it is? Or do you feel like you guys are on fundamentally different teams?

Then really importantly, Rick talked about what can you do as the person maybe who doesn't feel so much anxiety to still make sure that you're getting your needs met along the way. And this totally mirrored my journey with Elizabeth, where at first we kind of erred in

in my lack of empathy and my lack of ability to relate. And then second, I kind of erred in just sort of leaving myself behind and trying to kind of totally move in to what would be maximally helpful for her, what I perceived as being maximally helpful for her. When the real truth was that what would be helpful for her was me being able to take care of myself some more. So I'm more pleasant to be around. So I have more space inside of myself. All of those kind of good mutual partnering things that we talk about on the podcast regularly.

Finally, we got a question from somebody who really struggled with mindfulness meditation, but they wanted to get more value out of it. In particular, they felt kind of anxious and overwhelmed when they started to meditate.

And there are a lot of potential reasons for this that we talked about. Maybe the person just has a flightier temperament, and so sitting like a turtle for an extended period of time, maybe that's just kind of not for them. Maybe they were somebody who was really used to having a lot of stimulation, and so losing that stimulation then made things really tough.

And Rick talked about different ways that the person could maybe modify a mindfulness practice to suit their needs a little bit better. Maybe they'd be better served by a walking meditation. Maybe they need to focus on feelings of, as they say in Buddhist practice, loving kindness toward others. Maybe that's more stimulating and therefore more interesting to them. And that lets them stick with the feelings for longer.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thanks again for sending in great questions. We can keep on doing these mailbags because of the quality of the questions that we receive. It is awesome to see so much engagement from people. I really appreciate it. Again, if you would like to send in a question, please do so. At the start of the recap, I mentioned a whole bunch of different ways, comments, Patreon, email, whatever works for you. And until next time, thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.