GUEST SERIES | Dr. Paul Conti: How to Understand & Assess Your Mental Health
03:42:49 Share

Welcome to the huberman lab guest series where I and an expert guest discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm endure huberman and am a professor neurobiology and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. Today's episode Marks the first in a four episode series all about mental health.

The expert guest for the series is doctor paul county. Doctor paul county is a medical doctor and psychiatrist who completed his medical training at stanford university school of medicine and then went on to become a chief resident of psychiatry at harvard medical school. He then went on to found the pacific premier group, which is a collection of psychiatry and therapists who are expert in treating all types of psychiatric disorders and life stressors. Across the four episodes of the series on mental health, doctor count teaches us about the structure of our own minds and how to think about our own minds as a way to enhance our mental health. He explains how our subconscious ous mind and our conscious mind interact to drive our motions are decision making in our behavior.

And while any series about mental health requires that from time to time we discuss personality disorders in psychiatric chAllenges, the main discussion in today's episode and in fact, all four episodes, the series, or about what that means to be mentally healthy and how to build one's s mental health through specific practices, either done alone or with a today's episode, address as several key questions, as well as provides protocols for you to address questions about your own mental health. For instance, you will learn what constitutes the most mentally healthy version of yourself. You will learn to assess, and indeed you will learn protocols for addressing levels of anxiety, levels of your confidence, how to think about your beliefs and internal narratives, how to think about yourself, talk and restructure yourself.

talk. We discuss common chAllenges such as overthinking. We talk about the role of defense mechanisms and other aspects of the conscious and unconscious mind interactions that can lead us tored or away from the versions of ourselves. You'll notice that during the first five minutes or so of today's discussion, doctor county describes a framework of what he refers to as the structure of self and the function of self. And he describes several pillars for understanding what those are.

I'd like to highlight that while that short portion of our discussion does bring up a number of terms that are likely to be novel to you, they certainly were novel to me that as our conversation proceeds, you will really come to appreciate just how simple and yet powerful that framework is. IT will help you understand, for instance, the relationship between your conscious mind and your subconscious mind in ways that you can really apply toward enhancing your mental health. In addition to that, doctor county has generously provided a few PDF, which illustrate that framework for you and that are available completely zero cost by going to the links in the sono captions.

So you have the option to download those PDF and to look them over either prior to or daring perhaps after you listen to these four podcast episodes. As a final note before for beginning today's discussion, just want to emphasize my sentiment, which i'm confident will soon be your sentiment as well, which is that doctor paul county shares of thus immensely powerful tools for enhancing mental health that, at least of my knowledge, have never been shared publicly before. In fact, of somebody who has done more than three decades of therapy, i've never before been exposed to a conversation about the structure of the mind and the subconscious mind, as well as tools and protocols for enhancing mental health as powerful as these.

For me, the information was absolutely transformative in terms of reshaping my thought patterns, my emotional patterns and indeed several of mi behavioral patterns. And i'm confident that the information that you'll clean from today's episode and throughout the series will be positively transformative for you as well. Before we begin, i'd like emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research.

Rs at effort. IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero costs to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank sponsors of today's podcast.

Our first sponsor is Better help. Better help offers professional therapy with the license therapies Carried out online. I personally have been doing weekly therapy for more than thirty years. And while that weekly therapy was initiated not by my own request, IT was in fact a requirement for me to remain in high school over time. I really came to appreciate just how valuable doing quality therapy is.

In fact, I look at doing quality therapy much in the same way that I look at going to the gym or doing cardio accused training, such as running as ways to enhance my physical health. I see therapy as a vital way to enhance one's mental health. The beauty of Better help is that they make IT very easy to find.

An excEllent, an excEllent therapies can be defined as somebody who is going to be very supportive of you in an objective way, with whom you have excEllent report with and who can help you arrive at key insights that you won't have otherwise been able to find. And because Better help is conducted entirely online, it's extremely convenient and easy to incorporate into the rest of your life. So if you're interested in Better help, go to Better help dot com slash huberman to get ten percent off your first month that Better help speed H E L P dot com slash huberman.

Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that offers dozens of guided meditation sessions, mindfulness trainings, yoga ea sessions and more. By now, there's an abundance of data showing that even short daily meditations can greatly improve our mood, reduce anxiety, improve our ability to focus and can improve our memory. And while there are many different forms of meditation, most people find IT difficult to find and stick to a meditation practice in a way that is most beneficial for them.

The waking up that makes them extremely easy to learn how to meditate and to Carry out your daily meditation practice in a way that's going to be most effective and efficient for you. That includes a variety of different types of meditations of different duration, as well as things like yoga, edr pe, which placed the brain body into a sort of pu du sleep that allows you to emerge feeling incredibly mentally refreshing. Fact, the science around yoga ea is really impressive, showing that after a yoga eja session, levels of dopamine in certain areas of the brain are enhanced by up to sixty percent, which places the brain body into a state of enhanced readiness for mental work and for physical work.

Another thing I really like about the waking up up is that IT provides a thirty day introduction course. So for those of you that have not meditated before or getting back to a meditation practice, that's fantastic. Or if you're somebody who's already a skilled in regular meditator, waking up has more advanced meditations in organizer sessions for you as well.

If you'd like to try the waking up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a three thirty day trial again, that's waking up dot com slash huberman. And now for my discussion about how to understand and assess your level of mental health with doctor paul county. Doctor paul county, welcome. Thank you. I'm very excited for today's episode and for the series because i'd, like so many other people out there, have a lot of questions about myself and themselves, and not just about ourselves, but how the different personality types out there, the healthy types, the narsisi know all the things that we hear about these days, gas lighting, all these sorts of things, what all of that really is. Perhaps we can dispell some of the miss that exist during the course of the series.

I'm sure we will for you will think and also raise certain important questions that we should all ask ourselves in terms of try to understand who we are and how we can be the best versions ourselves, how we can experience the most happiness, also the most richness in life because of course, life isn't just all about being happy. So start off this question. I I want to raise a parallel with something I think for most people is is more concrete, which is physical health.

Um well, there isn't an ideal physical self that's been defined by the medical community. We know, for instance, that there is a range of blood pressures that are considered healthy. There is a range of body mass index that's considered healthy though that a little controversially IT depends on how much muscle, how lean people are at sea.

But you know, I think it's reasonable to say that the healthy individual is not going going to get exhausted walking up a flight of stairs. They could bend down and lift in object without hurting themselves. They might even have some additional strength and dance at a within the physical health domain.

All of that is fairly well scripted, and there are protocols that people can follow to improve their physical health. We've covered many of them on this podcast before. When IT comes to mental health and IT comes to concepts of the self, things become much more abstract for people. In fact, I think most people, including myself, are kind of wandering around in the dark, wondering whether not we are the best versions of ourselves, whether not we're thinking about ourselves in the world, around us in the best ways.

So to start things off, you tell us what is the healthy version of self mean, what should we all be inspiring to? You've worked with people who um so we are healthy and people who have severe pathologies of different psychiatric types, right bipolar archaistic c sociopaths and everything in between so for me and for the listeners, what is a healthy self? What should we be striving for?

A healthy self approaches life through the lens of agency and gratitude. If you look at happy people know people who like their lives, right? No matter what stage of life they're act to way, no matter what there is society omc status is, you know, race, religion, that there's so many things that we think matters, right? And then and and they matter to a lot of things.

Do they matter to? Is someone happy or not, right? They they are not factors, right?

The factors that tell us is this person enjoying life, they going to take care of themselves. So they happy there. Here are they engage productively in the world, is agency and gratitude. And if we have those two things, then IT is interesting.

You almost never see someone go wrong, right? And even if if they're difficulties, even if there are the things happen in life that that can make some unhappiness, right? That doesn't take away the person's engagement in life, persons enthusiasm for life. And I think if you look at even traditions of understanding, how are people happy, whether it's in psychiatry or it's through literature or through religious lands, IT is always people who approach like through the lens of agency and gratitude.

Could we go a little bit deeper on agency and gratitude when I hear the words agency in gratitude, I think your agency and ability to affect the world around me in the ways that I want and I think gratitude, being thankful and uh and we didn't entire episode all about gratitude practices in some of the neuroscience and neuroimaging and no chemical changes that occur in the brain and body when people exert a gratitude practice. But have a feeling that when you talk about agency and gratitude, you might be talking about something slightly or maybe even quite a bit different than the way that i'm defining IT.

Yeah, I would say agency and gratitude are these amazing rewards, right, that sit on top of the highly complex brain function inside of us and the highly complex psychology in all of us. So if we think about a self right, that I identify A A self right, i'm an I right.

If i'm gna approach the world with agency and gratitude that sitting on top of a lot of healthy things, right, and the idea that, okay, they're ways in which we can be mentally unhealthy, right? But to start with, like what is going on inside of us, right? And what does that look like when we're healthy? So there's a structure of the self, right? There's function of the self.

And if we look at the structure and the function and the parts, the components of structure and function, we can come to understand what what is going on in us. What might we change for the Better? How do we build empower ment? right? Empowerment is is the the the ability to navigate the world around us and to bring myself to bear in ways that are effective.

And from empowerment arises the sense of agency, right? I have agency because I am empowered, right? And also, from a healthy structure of self and function of self, we end up with humility, right? We come through that with a sense of our our place in the world and our power in the world to to navigate, we choose.

But also a sense of the world around us that's far more complicated, right than just we are, extends beyond us to other people, to the climate around us, to the health of the whole planet, right? We feel a sense of humility that i'm here and I can do good things, fortunate to be here, and i'm part of this bigger ecosystem, right, all the way up to the scale of the ecosystem of earth, right? And if we feel that humility, then we approached the world through the lens of gratitude.

So the idea that a healthy structure of self and a healthy function of self leads to empowerment and humility. Then upon that we are, we are sort of imbued with agency and gratitude. And that leads us forth to happy lives.

okay? So it's clear to me why having agency in gratitude would be wonderful, perhaps even the goal state that we should all be seeking to achieve. And IT also makes sense to me as to why empowerment and humility are important components that feed into our ability to have agency gratitude, because all of that, at least in my mind, sums to a very clear statement about having agency in gratitude is the best way to approach life.

That all makes perfect sense to me. And yet i've never really thought about IT that way. And I think most people haven't ever been told this, right? I I mean, what what should we be seeking? Agency and gratitude? yes. So we've heard any less number of podcast, including this podcast about physical health.

And we've been told by physicians and everybody else that you know we should seek to have a relatively low pressure, we should seek to have a relatively low heart rate, that our cholesterol should be at a certain level that set us so within the physical health domain, in their strong, clear messages about what we should all be striving toward and in a similar way to how we're discussing the self and psychology. You know, I don't think anyone six to have low blood pressure or low heart rate because that's what they want per say. They want those things along with some capacity for endurance.

The ability to to, you know, lifting objects are some strength that that are because of the way that those metrics of health allow them to move through the world in the best possible way. In other words, having some degree of endurance allows you to walk down the block maybe a lot further when to walk up several flies of stairs, or to have some strength allows you to pick up objects and effectively move through life, right? You're telling us that having a sense of agency and gratitude, and that agency and gratitude are underrated by empowerment, in humility.

And that's the best way to move through life, the most effective, happiest, if you will wait to move through life. Well then I think we have to ask ourselves the same thing we would ask about physical fitness, which is what goes into creating a sense of agency in gratitude, empowerment and human. What are the action steps? Because if I want more endurance, I know to get on exercise bike, or when a trade mail are go out for a run a few times a week or more, if I want to get stronger, i'm going to lift objects that are difficult to lift until they're easier to left.

I am pretty straight forward in the physical domain, but in the in the mental health domain, in the psychological domain, IT does become a bit more abstract, I think, in part because no one's ever told us certains. No ones ever told me what you really need in agency and gratitude in order to have the best possible life. So I very much appreciate that you're telling us this. And I love you to tell us what are the action steps that go into creating these things that we're calling agency gratitude, empowerment and humility.

There's actually quite a strong parallel between the physical health dimension and the mental health dimension. So so as you're saying, like why do you put in the time, the energy, the learning right to be physically healthy? It's a lot of effort and and we put so much of ourselves towards IT.

If if we decide that we value that right, why do we do IT right? Because as you said, it's the best way to approach life. Like there maybe something that I want to do.

I want to run a race, right? Or I I want to limb a mountain, right? But ultimately, we take care of ourselves physically because we don't know what's coming next in life, and we want to be prepared for a good, bad and otherwise, right? And the same thing is true of mental health.

So I can feel grateful for something. I can feel grateful that i'm still breathing right now, right? I can exercise agency. I can pick up that cup and take a drink, right? But that doesn't mean i'm living life through the lens of agency and gratitude, which is consistent with every opinion. If you look psychological, through the lens of literature, through the lens of sociology and psychology, agency and gratitude make happiness, right?

The ways of approaching life, and just like physical health, is undergraded by by cardiovascular health, heart health, muscle strength, right, that there's an underground of agency, and gratitude and empowerment and humility are ways of describing, okay, what arises, right, from understanding ourselves, taking care of ourselves, that then gives us the agency and gratitude. So we have empowerment, we have humility, but where does IT all come from, right? So just like we have to understand the physical body and what to do to IT in order to be healthy, we also have to understand the mind, right, the self that wants to be healthier. And that comes to understanding the structure of the self.

And we have enough science through the lens of neurobiology and psychiatry, to understand the structure of self and then the function of self raise how we work, right? How we interface with the world. So it's actually not more complicated than physical health is just that we don't spell IT out that way, right? We come at IT through the lens of pathology of what's wrong and who has some diagnosis.

And you know what we're looking for the problematic instead of saying like what do we look like when we're happy, right? And then going and digging down into the mechanics of at all, right? And if we're not in that state, right to go and look at that and to make changes just as if you were very, very physically right.

But do you know your heart rate couldn't go up that much without you feeling very, very fatigue? We say, well, look, you're doing a lot of the right things, right? But let's work more on on your heart, right?

We would go look at the pics of IT because that's how we understand IT. And we just don't apply the same science, logic, common sense to mental health as we do to physical health. But it's time for that to change because we have the knowledge and ability to do just that.

When we had doctor and a galpin on this podcast to do a series on physical health and up fitness, essentially, he said something that really stuck with me, which is that the number of different workouts that people can do out their body weight workouts, work with weight with machines. You can run far. You can run shorter distances more quickly.

You new planes, you will sit up so many variations on exercise routines. But what he very clearly stated was that there are only a few core adaptations that the body can undergo that lead to these byproducts that we call lower blood pressure, enhanced endurance, improve strength, improve your muscular function, improve brain function. For that matter, IT sounds to me like there are a lot of parallels in creating the healthy psychological self.

So what are the core components that I and other should think about in terms of understanding? And he described them as the structure of the self and the functions of the self. Again, just to draw a para of physical held OK connections between nerves and muscle that allows us to move our limbs.

If you apply a certain amount of resistance, you get a certain adaptation, which is the the neuromuscular connection get stronger, the muscle might get bigger or just stronger. It's that flexibility. You know, you just push your range of motion just a little bit into discomfort.

You do that. We so happens to be the case that you do that for just a couple of a minutes each day over the course of about a week or so, you get a significant increase flexibility. okay.

So it's all very clear in the physical domain, in the system gc domain, I hear you telling us that the action steps that we all should be taking in order to be the happiest version of ourselves by achieving agency and gratitude, is to explore the structure of self and the function of self. So if you could tell us about what is the structure of self like what goes into Andrew being Andrew and paul in paul and. Whatever the listener is into being who they are, what is that? And what is the function of self? how? How does the psychic think about that? How should we think about that?

okay. If I could start maybe to set the stage for that right, by pointing out that as we go up the hierarchy, right of health, right, everything should get simpler, right, not more complicated, right? If you think about physical health, right, there's so much complexity on the initial levels, right? So we think about your physical health status verses mine, right?

It's gna be different, right? We going to have different cardiologists and muscle function and pulmonary function. If we're gone to be healthy, we could do a lot of different things, right? There might be whole set of choices that would work well for you, different choices that would work for me.

And we engage intensity, timing, frequency. It's very complicated when we're on the the lower levels of the hierarchy as we get higher up. Let's say you and I both do the right things, then what happens? We both have endurance, right? We both have some strength or both robust, right?

Things are getting simpler because where we're approaching the unique idiosyncrasies in all of us, right? And we have to look at that and look at that in a very specific way. But what we're trying to get to is, is something that's common for all of us.

So staminate, for example, and physical health and endurance, right? And agency and gratitude in mental health, right? So then if we go and we look, and we look at the structure of the self and the function of self, we find that there is more complexity, but that IT is also understandable, mean, there is tremendous complexity in the body, just as there's tremendous complexity in the mind.

And we can understand what is the structure of self, what is the function of self. And we can look at that and assess that in the same way we would physical health parameters, so that we arrive at the place we want to be, be IT, endurance or agency, or gratitude. So structure of self, right? We all have an unconscious mind, right? And we pay so little attention to this part of us.

That really is the biological supercomputer, right? So millions of things are going on all the time. I can every split second. So for example, I can say these words, right? You can listen to the words and you can say things back, and I can listen right there.

Millions and millions of things going on under the surface, much of which comes from either biological predispositions right? Or habits over time, right? Thought process is patterns, right? So this unconscious mind, this supercomputer, is doing all of these things at the speed of light, right?

Their electrical and chemical signals and multiple pathways as common as as complicated as super highway systems that they get, consult ted and communicate with others, right? And then what comes up from all of that is the conscious mind. So imagine an iceberg, right? And it's a really, really big iceberg, right? And and we see the part above the surface, right? That's the conscious mind, right? But there's a huge part of this iceberg, maybe ninety five percent of IT.

It's underneath the water right there. There's this hooking mass that we don't see. That's the unconscious mind, right? And it's feeling up to the conscious mind, which is a much small all or part of our brain function, right? But it's the part that we're aware of, right? It's sitting on top of all the unconsciousness, which are extremely important, but then we become aware so that we can engage in the real world in order for to have this conversation.

The millions of things per second have to be going on underneath the surface so that you and I, as conscious eyes, right, as conscious cells, can ride along on top of IT. So that's the part of the iceberg that's above the water. It's a conscious self.

Then imagine that the conscious self is graded by A, A, A, A set of, you know, long generals that come out from under the water, right? That there are defense mechanisms that are unconscious to us that sort of guard the conscious mind. So do we rationalize automatically? Do we avoid automatically? Do we act out automatically?

Are these things in us in ways that we can observe and change, but that are there to try and protect the conscious mind from the the sling and arrow of the world around us? right? So if you imagine there is the big part of the iceberg under the water, the unconscious ous mind, the consciousness ind.

Is riding on top of IT. But the conscious mind that part is seeking out of the water is vulnerable, right? So imagine that there's a defensive structure and that IT rises from the part of the iceberg that's underwater that is there to defend and protect the conscious mind.

So when you say to defend in protect, when you say that the conscious mind is vulnerable, what do you mean? Do you mean that it's vulnerable to physical attack or that it's vulnerable to us realizing that were just a bunch of neurons that are clicking away underneath? Like in other words, where does the vulnerability of the conscious mind really reside? Not physically? Where does IT reside? But you know what do myself worried about in in terms of my safety? I mean, right now in the room, I feel pretty safe.

Um I don't think you're going to attack me verb or physically. I suppose it's possible that could happen, but IT seems like a very distance possibility. So when you say that these defenses are there to protect us from some sort of awareness, what awareness are we tried to avoid?

So the vulnerability of of the conscious mind is to fear, confusion, despair, right? There are so many things that that we can fear, right? Some people are afraid of snakes or spiders. Some people are afraid of death. Some people are afraid of health issues that could come to them or to people they love.

We can get confused and not know what decisions to make and how to navigate the world and how to be who we want to beat to ourselves into others, right? We can feel tremendously vulnerable and desperation if we lose others. Or we know we start to see things happening in the world around us that that we don't like.

We started to feel like what will happen to the planet we live on, whether be war, where I live, will my children be safe, right? There's so much that we need to protect ourselves again. So that vulnerable part of of us, right?

The part of the iceberg digging out above the water needs the defensive structure around IT to protect IT against the vulnerability of fear, confusion, despair, right? And because the conscious minds this is seeking out of the water with the defensive structure around IT, right? IT is the the row material from which we create our character structure.

So the character structure is all of that, the part under the water, the part above the water, the defensive structure. So imagine a nest around all of that, and that the character structure that we utilize to interface with the world, right? So the character structure is like the thing that i'm using, right?

So if you're driving somewhere in a car, right, the car is the thing that you're using to go there, right? The character structure is the thing that we're using to interface with the world. So for example, how trusting in my versus suspicious, right?

How readily do I come to make friends with people, right? How much do I act out if i'm frustrated, right? How much do I, um you know, exclaiming something negative, right, is opposed to holding IT inside of me.

How much do I rationalize if something is IT going? Well, do I want to look at IT and maybe see that IT is so that I don't have to face IT? right?

How much do I avoid problems in the world around me? How much do we exercise altruism, right? That these are all the ways in which were engaging with the world around us.

And this determines the self. Imagine that the self then grows out of this nest from the character structure that we used to interface with the world and the decisions that we make so far. Character structure is is the thing through which we engage with the world, then we're in acting. But what is inside of us, what we've determined through our unconscious ous mind, or conscious mind, our defense mechanism, there is a certain us that that comes at the world in a certain way, and for more or less trusting, more or less avoid, and we rationalize more or less.

These are the factors that determine, like, do our lives go right? Because on top of all of this, imagine that the nest of the character structure around all of this grows from at the self right, the product of the feelings inside, the things that we know about ourselves and don't know about ourselves, the decisions that all of that leads to. So I may choose to be, for example, more trusting, and that may bring an opportunity to me that I wouldn't have otherwise had, right? I may choose to be more trusting, and IT may bring risk to me that I wouldn't otherwise have had.

So we want to be as healthy as we can, as knowledgeable of ourselves in the world around us, so that it's safe for us to have a healthy character structure through which we can engage in the world around us with a sense of prudence, right? Taking reasonable risks, right? Not too little so that we shut ourselves down and maybe end up to sparing not so much that that scary things can happen to us and we end up fearful, right? But the idea that if we know ourselves well, the character structure is healthy, right? Because it's built upon a structure of yourself in a function of self that are healthy and out of IT is coming.

Empowerment, right? And empowerment and humility, right? That then lead us to agency and gratitude, right? The idea here is that this is the character structure that we create that can then interface with the world in a way that's good for us and good for the world around us. That leads us to be able to live in much more harmony inside of ourselves and outside of ourselves.

So if I understand correctly, defense mechanisms that grow up out of this portion of the iceberg that we are calling the unconscious mind, they protect our conscious self in ways that can be adaptive, or that can be more adaptive. In other words, defenses can be healthier or they can be unhealthy. yes.

And perhaps in a few minutes we can get into what a healthy versus and unhealthy defense looks like. But the way you described character structure sounds to me like an array of contextual disposition. I don't want to add unnecessarily complex language, but IT sounds to me like a unch of dispositions.

Like like if i'm walking into the office where I know everybody and I see familiar faces, there's no reason for me to be on guard. If I trust those people, but if i'm walking down A A street at night that i'm not familiar with and and i'm starting to get the sense that this nights hood might not be the best IT makes sense for me to be on relatively high alert. So different dispositions, depending on different conditions.

I can't help but mention my bulldog costolo, who had basically three dispositions, was a sleep in all seriousness. The second one was um a board the bulldog faced kind of bored or if something was given to him that he liked or if we were doing something you like the light he busy at three dispositions. As far as I could tell, I think one of the reasons we like dog so much or that many of us like dogs so much, is that their decisions are very predictable, taking to the party's happy, unless he happened to be ill that day, which was rare, you know, freedom.

He's happy. There wasn't a lot of I don't like this particular meal or I don't like this particular park or this be on freezed doesn't smell so good to me IT so simple and and you people are very complex, right? I, I, I can look at myself and say, okay, what like, what is my character structure and character structures?

Certain things. I like certain things. I dislike certain things. Really, you to take me certain environments in people, I just delighted. okay. So is the definition of a healthy character structure one in which the disposition match the context perfectly?

I know how any of us could be like that, but is is that sort of the idea much in the same way that um you know we could probably arrive at at an ideal degree of stampa that one could have a minute? Some people want run ultramarathons hundred miles or more. Some of you want to run a marathon.

Some people like me don't really desire to run a marathon. But I want to be able to run a mile, if I need to, without being completely exhausted and injured. So when we ask ourselves about character structure, are we asking ourselves about context driven dispositions? And how do we start to evaluate that for ourselves?

I think because we're more complicated. I think it's not disposition as much as it's predispositions, right? So so in the example that you gave, right, you have a certain predisposition to be either trusting or wary, right? And and you and that's healthy in you, right?

So when you come into a setting where there's not a good reason to feel mistrust, to feel anxious, to feel vulnerable, right then you feel at, right? So you walk into the work setting, the people you know, the people you like, everything is okay, right? You have a different per predisposition when the context is different, right? So if the context could bring a lack of safety, then you respond accordingly with the lack of safety, right? But but it's possible, certainly those predispositions can be in unhealthy places, right?

So for example, you might have been traumatized in a certain way, or you might approach the world in a certain way because of prior experience, that you may not register as trauma, but IT may be that within you is a predisposition to be mistrustful. So you could walk into a room of people that you know, of people who've never met you any harm and still feel unsafe. Right now, this happens most often after trauma, but there are other ways that people can get to that where the predisposition isn't so healthy.

The converse s is true too, right? There are people who can have too much of what's called them on nippit dence defense. And then they don't recognize danger when danger is around them. So the idea, the character structure is that nest right, that's built around the defensive structure in the conscious mind that sitting on top of the part of the iceberg, the unconscious ous mind underwater. And it's that next that is interfacing with the world through a whole set of predisposition.

I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, A G one, ag one, is a vitamin, mineral probiotic drink that meets all of your foundational nutrition needs. I started taking A G one way back in two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast.

The reason I started taking ag one and the reason I still take a ag one once or generally twice per day, is that is the easiest way for me to ensure that i'm getting all of the vitamins, minerals, probiotics and fiber that I need in my diet. Now, of course, it's essential to get proper nutrition from whole foods, but most people, including myself, find IT hard to get enough servings of fruits and vegetables each day, and especially to get enough prebiotics and pro biotics to ensure god health. As you may know, your gut contains trillions of little microbiota, so called gut microbiome, which establishes critical connections with other organs of your body to enhance brain health, as well as to support your immune system in other aspects that relate to mental and physical health.

One of the most common questions I get is, if you were to take just one supplement, which supplement would that be in? My answer is always ag one. Because by taking ag one, i'm able to ensure that i'm getting all of the vitamins, minerals and probiotics s that I need to enhance my mental health, physical health and performance.

If you'd like to try ag one, go to drink A G one dot com slash huberman in to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs, and they'll give you a year supply a vitamin d 3k two again， that's drink A G one dot com slash human to claim the special offer. I think most of us are familiar with assessing and assigning names to the character structures of others.

And at least for most of us, we do that with no professional training or authority. We say that person is great. They're super nice person's a jerk like weird you know, it's at at sara.

I think very few of us are familiar with assessing our own character structure, right? right? And I have to presume that some of what happens when somebody comes to you as a psychiatrist, to a psychologist, is that certain questions are asked and certain narratives are told that start to reveal to the clinic the character structure and perhaps from there some of the possible defense mechanisms and uh, the structure of the person's unconscious mind, unconscious mind that obviously are unaware to them, but would be cleared by much in the same way that if somebody goes into the doctor, and, you know, I don't feel well, they going to start pRobing with questions or they are going to breathing and the psychology of psychologists uses words and lying to probe yes. So what are the sorts of aspects of character structure that we can be aware of in ourselves in other words um should we be asking what type of character do I have depending on one circumstances another um should we ask ourselves what sorts of defenses we have and and maybe this would be a good opportunity to address this issue of what are healthy versus on healthy defences um because IT sounds to me, if I understand correctly, that the defense mechanisms are a very strong component in determining what our character structure is.

right? Because the defense mechanisms are unconscious, right? The character structure that nest around the defenses in the conscious mind through which we interface with the world is very, very complicated.

So there are many character structures as there are human beings, right? So it's very, very complicated, but there are factors that are consistently relevant across people and get identified as such. So so one example would be isolation versus affiliated ation, right?

So does a person tend to group with others right? Or does a person tend to avoid grouping right and and go about, uh, thoughts, tasks of proceed to life in in a more a singular manner right? So is just one out and i'm making value judgment about IT because IT can be good or bad on either end of the spectrum, right?

So we're just saying what are the factors? So am I more affiliated ative or do I tend to isolate and be more of singular? That's just one example, right? Another example could be things like, for example, use of humor.

right? Uh, does a person use humor and in what way right is a person use humor to deflect, uh, discomfort and negative situation? This is a person use humor in order to be little others or to be little themselves or is a person not use humor, right? So there these aspects of character structure and so much research has been done on this over the years to determine what is most silent, right in this. This thing that we use in order to face with the world around us, up out of which grows ourself.

makes good sense. And and IT makes me want to revise a little bit what I asked about before, which is I said that when IT comes to an exam of physical, healthy measure, blood pressure, 那是 a breathing at sara。 Maybe you have a blood test. Look at some biomarkers.

But what you're describing a little bit more analogous to the physician addressing a patient who's having some physical discomfort and malaise and saying, tell me about your day, what do when you get up in the morning, if the persons as well, you know, I drink a quarter pint of vodka is a very different answer. Then go outside and get light, drink a glass water and maybe have a cup of coffee right you know um or I have six six expresso. If I understand correctly, the character structure is Better revealed by expLoring the action states that can engages in isolation versus engagement um as opposed to a read of one specific biomarker .

the structure brought to life. right? Yes.

immediately i'm thinking about movies in books where we learned so much about somebody through observing the way that they interact with people in in very um very poor ways so far, insistence that I can think of countless movies where you learn a hunt about somebody in the first scene simply because of the way they react to somebody who you cut them off on in traffic, they just explode. okay.

Well, then we think of that person as reactive from that point on unless there's a significant amount of material to revise that. But it's in the action of of getting explosive and cursing. It's that are as supposition if they just kind laugh at off or laugh at themselves or blame someone within their own vehicle or something like that.

So is are those the sorts of things that a clinical like yourself is listening for when somebody says you, I don't feel well and he said will tell me about what's going on lately and they start describing what's going on in their life? And are you listening for those places where the the defensive mechanisms can are start to reveal themselves? The character structure starts to reveal itself through these action steps that the person seems .

to be taking isn't yeah yeah maybe one way of looking at character structure is that its its potentialities and predispositions right that there's so much that that late. That then interfaces with events like the person stuck in traffic. How does that person respond? If that person weren't stuck in traffic, there would would be a response to IT.

Very so. So they are potentialities their predispositions, and then we live through enacting them as we're moving them through life, right? And the attempts to understand. So using the physical health parallel, right, if you came in and you say, I don't feel well, right, when we might run a lot of tests, right, we might get an mi or a cat can or even putting the stethoscope and listening to us inside of you.

Those weeks are unconscious things like, you know, you're not aware of what the imaging may show or the blood test may show or how your lungs may sound when someone put the stuff scope on them, right? So so a clinician, if you're trying to understand and help someone, then you do want to look for those things, right? You want to look for the things that are underneath the surface, but that, but that can be very, very important.

You also want to look at everything that's on the surface, right? So if you if you're engaging with someone, you're engaging with the self, right? The self that grows out of the character structure nest, right? So by engaging with and and doing one's best to understand the self, then you learn about what is underneath of IT, right?

So I may then learn what how do you respond in certain situations, right? Just like I get asked you questions or, well, when do you not feel well, right? You're asking a person questions because the idea is to understand elements of the character structure.

So how do you respond in certain situations, what's going on inside of you, what you understand about yourself and what you not understand about yourself, right? How do you bring yourself to bear in the world around you? So there's a similar process going on, but here we're trying to understand the self.

And the understanding of the self can help us understand the components underneath of the self because that's where we're gonna to make things Better, right? The idea is there shouldn't have to be mystery, or certainly not mystery any more than there is in physical health. I mean, you rarely someone comes in and they're really not feeling well.

And and a whole set of everything that should be done is done, right? Labs, physical examination history, imaging, right? And and you still just don't know, right? I mean, sometimes that can happen, but it's very rare.

And the same should apply here that if we are examining a self right, and we're looking for the components out of which that self comes right, then we should be able to understand well enough to go back to the components of self and to make change so that the self is in a Better place, right? And that self can then be empowered, can feel humility, right? Can then come at life through the altering ism and gratitude that we seek.

Because again, you show me someone who's coming at life through alterations, ism and gratitude and is not happy with their life. And you'll be showing me something i've never seen before, something entirely new. So if we want to get there, we want to know how to get there. And there are ways, as there should be, that parallel physical health that aren't mysterious that we can come out to make understanding .

and change and wondering about the role of anxiety in all of this. The reason I ask about anxiety is that you said that so much of character structure is determined by set of previous positions and potentialities. And earlier, we're talking about example of either being afraid or unafraid in particular environments or feeling like we can walk into a classroom and learn or whether that we're overly concerned about what people think about us or both, right? This could be a mix um whether or not we can embrace novel environments and safe and adaptive ways, whether or not we can grow from them as supposed to, whether that we can be overtaken by them perhaps you been injured, harm pholoe physically or both.

Anxiety to me is is a very basic function, I think about inter of the automatic nervous system and degrees of excitability and IT said, an ability sleep night, an ability to wake up feeling reasonably good, but not have a panic attack. But anxiety to me does seem like a key node in all of this, meaning at most people, including myself, I don't walk around thinking about my character structure. I don't walk around thinking about how i'm going to behave in a bunch of hypothetical environments.

I think about the fact that most mornings I wake up and I feel pretty good to be, quite honestly, as good as I would like to feel. And then solution because anything's wrong, but because I think i'm wired to be a little bit more on the anxious side and to predict what's going to happen next and what needs to be done. And so until i'm actually engaging in certain behaviors, that anxiety homes a little bit high for me, the gears turn a little bit faster perhaps.

And I would like when I wake up in the morning. But once I engage, I feel like that the speed of that year turning matches the demands of life pretty well. I feel agency OK. Um so if you don't mind, could we explore this this feeling of anxiety or lack of anxiety that I think people are pretty familiar with within themselves, different times of day and and under different conditions because to me IT seems like a um an interesting lens to to explore this notion of character structure and defenses. Is an anxiety a healthy defense or an unhealthy defense or does IT simply depend on the circumstances?

H we all have some degree of anxiety in us, right? We all have some awareness that we're navigating the world and like not everything is is perfect, right? This is not nervous.

A so there's some anxiety within us and the thought is that that anxiety can keep us vigilant about the things we should be violent about, you know, health and safety, right? But that too much anxiety then becomes counter productive. And we can look at this in a very regimented way, right?

So so some anxiety makes sense, right? IT keeps us being careful, keeps you because you're being careful as you're pulling out of a driveway, for example, right? So okay, you can be IT can be absolutely fine. But let's say you bring something to clinical attention that isn't absolutely fine, right? Let's say I didn't know you and you come in.

We have the example that, that we that you use before where where you you walk into work and there's the a group of people that you that you know well and like, right, let's say you told me when I walk in there, I feel very anxious, right? I don't feel like things are okay, right? So then we would go through a week that's not good, right? Maybe it's impacting your professional life.

Things are not going well, like you really want this to change. This is impacting your life in a negative way. We say, okay, lets look at that from the perspective of structure of self, right? So first, unconscious right is that they just genetically, are you built with just higher levels of anxiety, right? So we could learn OK.

Have you always been like, this is is always been in your lives and you were a little kid no matter what. So we're looking for biological nature, so to speak, variables. We might also look for things that have happened to you that are lodge in your unconscious mind, right? Is there trauma that you haven't processed, right? That now is underneath the surface, but is spinning off more anxiety, right? Is, let's say, you tell me, oh, wasn't that longer? O you started being anxious.

I did something happen that did you walk into a group of people and how do you tripped and you felt bad about something way, and then you get more anxious, right? So are there things going on underneath the surface that are impacting you? Like, let's let's look into that, right? Because that's the biggest part of the iceberg, right?

Then your conscious mind, we could start thinking about, okay, what what's going on? What do you actively thinking about, right? So these were sometimes cognitive behavioral techniques can can come into mind.

Like, are you thinking like, oh, no, i'm scared IT isn't gonna well, like you having thoughts of the thoughts and making you more anxious, right? What's going on in your conscious, right? I will also be very interested in the defenses around you.

So for example, do you tend to avoid, right, has this been getting worse for three months? But you just your your mind wouldn't acknowledge IT, right? And by the time you have to acknowledge now it's really bad, right? Or do you not avoid IT? And like this started just started happening and you will need IT in the border, right?

So I would be interested in the defense mechanisms, right, that are guarding your conscious self, and I would be interested in the character structure. What decisions are you then making? Like, are you going anyway, right?

Are you having troubles? So sometimes you avoid, are you then making decisions that make you late, and that causes problems? How does the impact you once you're there? Are you engaging differently with people doing your work differently?

So I want to understand the character structure. And ultimately, you understand all this by pRobing the self that's writing along on top of IT. And then what is the experience of that self? Like, do you see that? Okay, this is a problem and I I wanted address IT, but like, look, I know that i'm good at what I do. And you know I mean, this isn't some like awful thing about me.

I just have to deal with IT, right? Or is yourself impacted when you start thinking maybe I can do this anymore? I'm not good enough for you know, we want to understand what's the experience of the self, right? And if we do all of that, how is IT that we don't get to a place where we can understand that anxiety, right? And we can make things Better.

So just like an physical health, okay, maybe we can, but that is a dramatic outlier. If we bring ourselves to bear, we would say you should not have to have this in you, right? Because IT is something negative.

IT is making unhappiness for you. IT is taking away from empowerment, right? And it's also taking away from humility, right?

Because if someone's beats up on themselves, you're beating up on yourself about IT, then that's not humility, right? Then that's being falsely persecutors, right? This is not an honest humility to that. IT leads us away from health. So so we don't want IT to be this way, right? Because that is working against agency and gratitude so we can understand IT and we can go after IT and make IT Better.

One of the most common questions I get on the internet and I get a lot of questions, is what can be done to improve confidence? You and I thought a lot about that question. Know what is confidence? In the context of what we're talking about now is one reasonable definition of confidence.

Our ability to trust our predispositions and our potentialities enough that where we to encounter scenarios a through z, we feel pretty good that we would respond the right way in a way that wouldn't threaten our conscious mind at a core level, right? You know that we wouldn't. I used to use, determine and joke a lot in my laboratory.

A with the the phrase dissolve into a puddle of our own tears is going to like hyperbolic explanation of what I think many people fear, like they're going to be called upon to answer a question publicly you or give us beach or are be at a critical moment in relationship or something and and just everything is is going to go so badly wrong that it's just gonna solve them as a person impossible right resolve in a bottle er of our own tears is impossible but I think that's a fear that a lot of people live with because we can get into this little bit later and we will i'm sure you know this notion about protecting ones E O. Seems really vital to being a human being, someone like you. We don't want to dissolve until puddle over here.

So is confident, cy, ability to trust ourselves in a bunch of different context. And at the same time, I I do have to raise the this notion of narses ism I think um uh you know this world gets thrown around a lot lately but IT seems to me that any um truly psychological healthy person would also not want to be the idiot that thinks that they're Better than they actually are. That what are your thoughts on this?

I agree with the things that you that you said about confidence, except I would add two factors that I think are really big, big factors, right? One being state dependence and the other being phenomenology, right? So think about the state dependence first, right? We're talking about confidence.

It's it's not uniform, right? IT was not automatically uniform, right? So if you were able to tell me all I lack confidence right, then I I want to understand is that across the board is like, is that a way that you feel about yourself for that? Like that way? I'm not good enough at anything, for example, right? Or do you lack confidence in a specific area, right? This is often the case, right? And this is a huge difference, right?

He says that person has the machinery of confidence, so to speak, right? They have the potentialities in the previous positions for confidence, right? When that character structure, the self built upon IT, is engaging with the world, right? But they're not able to bring IT to bear in, in, in a certain special situation, so to speak. So for some people, for example, that the way we most often see this is like the car was out of romance, right? Well, because it's so emotionally late, right, and like rejection can feel so bad, right, that we can see people who are very confident in many, many aspects of life, but they are very different about romance.

And we'll say different and IT never works out for me or no one will ever like me, right? And you say like that's not how that person actually feels right about themselves as a whole human being, right? Which which, which is then we are coming out how to make that Better in a way that a very robust, right? We may say something like, hey, here's the good news is you have the tools in the machinery that you need, right? You're confident in so many ways, right? In fact, maybe in always except this one.

So let's go take a look at like, why is that special, right? And then and where are we? We're back.

Is IT something in the unconscious mind? Is IT is something in the in the conscious mind about how that person is engaging, right? So we have to understand what the state is. And if the lack of confidence is state dependent, if the person is not confident across the board, then again, we go back to the same. You always go back to the same places to look right.

But then you might more think, okay, is, is there an impact of childhood trauma or early life trauma that they took away from that person know that their ability to gain confidence, right? Because if you have no confidence across the board, there's a deeper problem, right? Because there would be something anyone can be good about that and feel confident in, right? So the state dependence is very important, as is phenomenology.

So what is your experience of being confident? If you tell me, well, i'm let's say, in a different version of this example, you say, you know, actually i'm i'm quite I feel quite confident when I when I walk into a room of of people say, okay, I don't want to understand more about that too, right? Because if I ask questions about that and you say what, I feel confident because no, look, i'm a pretty smart person.

I can think on my feet. I can, I can deal well with with people. Something doesn't go right.

I can recover from me like I got know why I have feel confident. You know, I say, okay, that sounds pretty good. If you say, well, I feel confident because I know that i'm Better than everybody. Now we have a problem, right, like that's not going to go well in other in other uh aspects of life and engagement like this.

It's not going to lead to humility and gratitude like so so where's that coming from? And again, maybe there's a deeper problem sort of narcissi, right, which can be A A, A A reaction, which is a reaction to vulnerability, right? So then there's was got a reaction information and now the person is actually deeply different, right? But presents is very, very confident and with a sense of superiority and that's not a recipe for for happiness, right? So so in the in approaching IT, we we do want to understand all the things that you said.

What are the factors in the the set of predispositions and the set of potentials? But then what's the real world experience of that across situations? And what is the person's experience of that inside, which is why, if we're going to understand and help people like that, the stand part right, you know, is why they can vary about medicine.

You know, that doesn't work right in situations where we're dealing with human beings like mental health, right? We have to understand something about people, to understand whatever they're telling us means. Otherwise you have no context, so you have no knowledge.

Another very common set of questions that I get that I believe is very directly related to this is about beliefs and internal narratives. You know, people ask me all the time, how can I change what I believe about myself? And they also ask, how can I change the script in my head? How do I typically it's, how do I shut down a particular narrative in my head? This seems to fit very well in thing about structure of self.

Because as you pointed out, you know, the the self or the structure of self includes the unconscious mind. What's going on below the surface of the water in the iceberg model? It's going on in the conscious mind that the conscious mind is protected by these defensive mechanisms that grow up from the unconscious mind, from that come as a character structure.

And then the thing that we call the self, right. But when IT comes to beliefs and internal narratives, those seem to me and things that people are pretty well aware of. In fact, the very example that people are asking me this all the time, how to change, believes internal nature, means they are aware of them.

IT also suggests that for many people out there, their beliefs about themselves and their internal narratives are not healthy or at least they don't feel are serving them well or that they are intrusive. Um I don't know how open people are about their belief and internal narratives when they come to you in the in your clinical practice. But um if you can tell us a little bit about beliefs and internal narratives and whether not they are important to rewire and reset.

this part is extremely important, right? So imagine, for example, that i'm saying to myself over and over again that i'm a loser, right? I'm not good enough, right? I mean, imagine trying to go through life and someone else were saying that to you all the time, right? That means worse when it's inside your own head, right? So what's going on inside of us? Our internal dialogue, our internal narrative are extremely important.

And here's where we went into. A very big problem is that we live in an era and in a culture that is very attuned to rapid gratification, right? And all of this that we're talking about can change, but that does not change quickly.

And it's amazing to me when you'll see under insurance paradigms often, right, no matter what's going on with someone ten sessions of cognitive behavioral treatment, right, if if there is something we're trying to change beliefs, it's a guarantee of failure, right? Because belief don't change that fast, right? So imagine, for example, that we unite, chose a word, a random word, and we decided to say five hundred times, right? We should be saying IT tonight, right? Not going to be out of our minds by tonight, but because we will took a random word and set at five hundred times, right?

So imagine that there's something that's highly emotionally later, and we've said at thousands and thousands and thousands of times, right? There's not gonna go away quickly, right? But you can go away and during the process of IT atrophy, right, or our lives can get Better, right?

This is the opposite of hopeless right, is actually very, very encouraging. But in a world that's rapid gratification, really, how do we fix this? How do we fix this? Now that doesn't acknowledge this. We hear all the time a person is failed therapy, right? Like this is said all the time that person failed.

That was failed theri mean, right? I mean, I think there be failed that person, right? But we we label, I hope the person isn't Better, right? But there are things going on inside of us that could take a month and month or years to make Better.

Now again, that's okay. If we're aware of what's going on. Just the very fact that we understand and we're making change, right? IT helped us feel Better about ourselves and more confident, right, that we can change all of this, but we have to approach IT in the right way.

So let's say that i'm telling myself over and over again um you're gonna get there right in the place I want to go professionally, right? Or no one's ever gna really want you right? If if it's, i'm looking for a romantic partner, right? So so imagine these things are going on and they're going on over and over again.

And you can imagine now it's it's intruded into the unconscious mind. It's going on to my conscious mind. My defensive structure is shifting in negative ways.

Coming more avoided, like, nothing about this is good, and I wanted to change, and I wanted to change something that says, like, you can do IT read or you are lovable, right? You can be a good partner to someone where, so I want to change IT, right? So imagine now when I start to make that change and blazing a path, right? And i'm blazing a path, whether wasn't a path before right, and I can blaze a path and I can go through that path, but that path is going to be nothing like maybe the four lane highway, right?

A Jason to me, where the thing that i've been telling myself for years and years and years born of trauma, right, is is going back and forth, right? I means got a four lane highway. I'm cutting a path, right? But over time, you cut that path more and more, you treat that path more and more, you take energy towards that path.

IT becomes Better. Now let's imagine, like the path is well, lid and it's twelve feet wide, and maybe we can pay the path. So more, more traffic, so to speak, goes down IT, and we're taking energy away from that fall lane highway.

And maybe IT starts to be overgrown a little bit and they are cracks in the road. Like we can change all of that, but we have to understand what's going on and and identify, like, what is going on inside of me. What do I make of IT right? How do I understand the process of change? How do I increase my empowerment during the process of change?

If we come at IT the right way, all of this can be changed. It's not hardwired in us. It's just very, very strongly reinforce the same way our bringer built this way.

So we don't forget our own names, right? You know, we don't forget where we live, you know, back when we were hunting and gathering, and we don't forget you know where where the good fruits are, right? And this goes on in human life.

Now that we have to remember, things is very, very important if something is has high emotional violence. And we ve thought IT a lot that we don't forget IT. But that mechanism gets hijacked by things that are not good for us, and we can take IT back, but not if we don't .

understand. So what are the tools? Are the questions that you give or ask of patients in order to help them along that pathway? Because I totally agree that changing belief in internal narratives is very, very hard.

Just one quick example that meshes with the physical health. Where am I? Have a friend and colleague.

He's a very complex to entities who is very overweight. For a long period of time. He finally made some behavioral changes that allowed him to lose. I think he was in upwards of eighty pounds, a significant amount of way, felt much Better, looked much Better.

He just delighted in his ability to do that, but then started to reveal to me that he was definitely afraid that he was going to lose control and start eating the way he was before and stop exercising in a way that would return him to his previous weight and feelings of malaise. And I said, well, all the things are doing. You're in the direction of health.

None of what you're doing speaks to the possibility of this all crumbling. This was the dissolve into a puddle of my own tears kind of narrative, but at this point, coming from him and he just said, I know, but despite doing all the right things, i'm still incredibly afraid that it's gona happen. IT was as if that the beliefs and the internal narratives had been changed despite the fact that he was engaging in the world differently and more positively.

But I have been checked in with him recently to find out where ries out with this. Now, several years later, he has PPT off most of the weight, not all they gained a little bit back, but he's still far healthier than than he ever was. So hopefully experience some relief.

But you know, what do you tell a patient who saying, you, i've got this loop in my head that tells me i'm not good enough, or that even when things are going well, they're going to return to that state that I fear so much? Once again, this kind of like, you know, lack of agent, right? Just lack of agency, lack of agency, lack of empowerment. What sort of practical tools can can one give themselves or that you would provide to somebody .

no matter what is behind what's going on in that person's mind? It's addressable, but you don't know what that is and how to address IT until we ask a question of what's going on inside, right? So if he's afraid that he's going to gain all that, wait back, right? And he has a history that if significant negative things happen, he throws self care to the wind, right, then we would come at IT through that pattern, right? Because he would have a very know, he have a good reason to be worried, right? Because this pattern of something bad happens and I I don't take care myself for six months.

You know, maybe someone I am just making up and maybe someone in his life is ill, he's fearing a death. Know if you chose something that would say that's a very legitimate fear to have. Like, let's talk about that.

Let's look at where that comes from, right? What got that person into the that pattern in the first place, right? By understanding the pattern and by working together, right? Can we can we stave that off, right? But IT could be different.

The person might say i'm really, i'm having a lot of food cravings, right? And we like, okay, what does that mean? Where is that coming from? Or maybe is depressed and when and he's getting depressed and when he's depressed, he can't stop eating more, right? So you know you would look or might just be played.

Fear like this is so good, right, that i'm worried IT will go away right then we might want to reinforce like, okay, like you know you're a person who's able to use circumspection and perseverance and preserve goodness, right? So like you do that, you do that really well. So let's let's make sure we're doing that here, right?

So you know, a lot of times a person is worried, but that worries is coming through the lens of health like they're healthy, right? So then we look at, okay, can we sue that? Where where is that coming from, right? We can come at IT and reinforce the positive.

But if there is something negative, there's a trauma driving cycle. There is depression in their cravings. We can understand that too.

So so I come back to this idea that there's answers to just about everything. And in a very regimented scientific way, it's not that hard to come to them, right? Just like in physical medicine, like we have the product, we have the tools that we need to bring to bear.

But you have to understand the person again. If you come in and say i'm not feeling good and someone else comes in and says i'm not feeling good, the dog Better not do the same things, right? This is how you not feeling good.

OK. Let me understand that. And then let me a map that also too, you, whatever underlying state healthy, may have a diagnoses.

You may have the same is true. And mental health. If we just apply that, then it's remarkable. The good that we do, which i've seen very consistently across twenty years of doing this, not only in my own practice while they care the people who do really, really well, trying to understand and take care of people, including sometimes not doing too much and realizing, like person is okay, like there's a state of healthier, but this person is worried, how do we sure them? How do we help someone living a good life, live a Better life? If we're going to do all of this, we have to approach people as individuals, as just, I mean, the science tells us sad, and common sense tells us sad too. But if we do that, a person can get to the place they want to be.

I'd like to address a different person as an example, a hypotheses ticals person OK. And i'm certain there are many, many of these people out there. These are the sort of people that think, okay, there's a self in a mind and a unconscious mind that set a bit at some level.

Why not just do what needs to be done in life like the people that don't want to explore yourself? You know, because to me, that seems so absolutely clear that just as it's important to have a certain level of endurance, strength, lex ibis, so that one can extract the most joy and agency and gratitude and empowerment ment and humility from life, that IT makes sense to explore the self, to ask, you know, where are my internally strong? Where am I internally weak? Where might I perceive myself as strong? Where as i'm actually weak? I this seems like they seem like very important, if not crucial, questions to ask.

But I know that there are certain number of people in the world think all of that is just kind of a waste of time, right? It's all about doing stuff. It's all why explore themself, you know and um I think the rest of us are looking at that person often and thinking, well, you're exactly the kind of person that needs to do this because of the ways that you greet on other people but but not always right.

Some elza people just appear to be just very effective. They're all about the outward expression of what they're doing. And I certainly don't know how other people feel waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night and throughout the day, but to the person that feels like introspection and expLoring, maybe even an excavating for trauma that they haven't been in touch with or haven't dealt with yet, but the person that feels that all of that is kind of not really worth the effort. And that's all about action.

What can we say to that person or those people? Put differently, does one need to change and need to believe in the power of these sorts of approaches in order for them to work? We often hear that people don't change until they want to change and um and could we also say perhaps that even for the people that feel like they're functioning extremely well in all domains of life, I know no such people and I know some very high cheating was as as you do too I know no such people the only people who seem to exist in that sphere are the the clear nsi is that to them just like they're doing great but everyone else can stand them, by the way, nor suis. No one else can stand you what what do we say to to those individuals because I think it's a big swath of humanity and I think IT IT accounts for a lot of suffering in the world.

including their own suffering. yeah. So I would make an A. To common sense, right? So imagine you you take someone who doesn't know anything about health, they don't know.

They don't know how to exercise on how to eat well, they just don't know. They're very, really, really unhealthy, right? They're over way. The low energy they have sleep happened.

They no need to have you and and why not just say to them, well, like just go be different, like the fact be different now why aren't you different right now? right? Like of course, we would never do that because IT it's it's absurd.

H and by the way, also would be cruel, right? So it's absurd and it's cruel. So we would never do that, right? Let's say now let's say we fast forward some period of months, says make IT up, right? And we see that person.

And wow, they are much healthy. They're much more energy. They've lost way. They've physically fit. A lot will have gone on in between those two snapshots of that person. That person is to learn a lot, right?

How does one take care of oneself, right, than, more specifically, had always take care of myself with healthy foods. You know, will I like, what healthy foods will I eat? How I put that on the table? What kind of exercises can work for me? How they work for me? How do I strengthening muscle?

How do I strengthened the hard? How do I increase long? There's learning, there's diligence. You know they're stick tuition veness, right? There's resilience. That's how the person gets there, right? Is no different if it's mental health, right?

If we say, well, you feel you feel different across the board or you feel superior across the board or whatever IT is like life isn't going well, you don't have things you want and know the self talk is negative and we would just be different right now, right? I mean, it's remarkable that people will say that at times, not just in a way that's denigrating and awful for others, but to themselves too, right? I mean, I hear people say this most often to themselves, like, why am I not just different, right? I want to be different.

Or what's wrong with me that i'm not? And unlike kay, is like everything else, like you have to ply understanding and work and effort like the good news is you can get to whatever change you want that mean a person can get to whatever reasonable change that person want. So I know I am fifty four years old.

I'm not going to climb mount every. I'm not a mount climate, right? But if I want to, like I want to to climb tins, I want to get out there and do something, I can go do that right?

The same thing is true with our mental health goals, but not at the snap of a finger, not by magic, right? It's through applying the same science and common sense, combination of science and common sense that we apply to other things. That's why we go through this procedure of unconscious mind consciously in the structure and function of the self. Because that's that's how it's done. That's how the after snapshot looks different than the before from the mental health perspective as well.

That's very helpful. And I think it's going to be very helpful to a lot of people and thinking about what to think about what sorts of questions to to address, maybe even whether or not to get therapy. And hopefully we will remap their notions of therapy. I mean, of course, this critically relies on the therapies being good to excEllent.

Um and I think in the previous um sit down we had around the in the epsom on trauma specifically, you mapped out a number of the features of quality therapy so we can refer people to that if they're thinking about it's time stamped in that episode. So you know what to look for in a therapies, how to access whether not it's going well or not, whether not to move on or or stay put with that therapies and so on. You've been telling us a lot about the structure of our of the self, unconscious mind, conscious mind, defense mechanism, character structure, self. We haven't talked so much about the function of self. I realize it's been woven in here, there.

Yes, could you tell us about the functions of self, the functions of self verb actions? I mean, are these things that we are all doing right now that reflect our character structure? Are these things that um we can change more red than trying to snap our fingers and say, okay, i'm now going to be a more altruistic c person because I can decide that right now but then ultimately I have to engage in some altruistic behaviors to lend support to that um again saying with the parallel that I can just start my fingers and a lower blood pressure now I have to do some meditator practice as m cardiff cual training and things so that's worth what? What is this function of self thing? What goes into the functions of self OK?

So so just stepping back to the framing, right? So there are these two pillars upon which we build our lives, the structure of self and the function of self. And we've been talking, as he said, more about the structure, which is more than nouns of IT.

Like, there is an unconscious. What is in that unconscious? For example? There are defense mechanisms, uh, uh, how are we using them? Like it's not all nouns, but it's more water those things.

And then we start talking about how we put them into practice. The function of self is much more the verbs, right? So if the structure is more now, the function is more, the verbs, right? The actual engagement, right?

So so that would start with an awareness of I, so a function of self has to start with an awareness, like there is a person, there is, there isn't me, that is separate from others, right? And I have responsibility for this eye, right? Like IT is me.

No one else is guiding IT like it's me. I know there's me. okay. Then on top of that, we start seeing defense mechanisms in action, right? We're thinking about function, right? We're weare that there's an I but the first thing that starts happening to that I are unconscious things, right? So the defense mechanisms because we're not choosing them right, they start doing things automatically.

So if, for example, I have A A defense of avoidance, right, then i'm not thinking, you know if it's i'd like to meet a new person but I automatically am shining away, right then that's not it's not good. It's a factor, right? But it's a factor i'm not aware of til I start this process of interest expecting, right? So the defense mechanisms are then kind of determining the lay of the land, right?

So in that example, I started to up, but not up. But in that example, the returning away you describe as reflective. So you think about someone craps, you would like to have a romantic partner meet, somebody have a companion, and they go to the grocery store, and somebody says something as they reaching for the milk.

No, there's that moment of opportunity where they could say something back, but instead they just kind of go, oh, yes, thanks. And then they go away. And then they the narrative in their head might be, there was sillier, but they don't really think about the the alternate possibility.

There might be no narrative.

They had off, they had off to the produce section.

they go home. And and since this, oh, anything happened, I mean, once the growth that no right.

because all unconscious.

right? Okay, right now, again, we can can we explore that and change that? Yes, right.

But it's important to understand that whatever that nest of defense mechanisms is like, that's what i've got right now, right? And i'm living through that right now, right, is performing a function, right? This because it's an unconscious function, doesn't mean this is not a very, very important function.

I can see in that example how IT protects the conscious mind from risk because there's always a possibility of rejection. There is a possibility of over interpretation of what the other person is talking to them for, right like is the person interested in them or whether not this is just friendly banter um the sort that anyone would have next to anybody that is not special to them so I can see how that the the unconscious turning away is protective against all the negative possibilities and in some sense is pretty rational because the the probability that that one interaction could rattle IT up to A A life of companionship and and romance with somebody. Music is in succeedin ly small really.

although you can not imagine a set, a data points where you string together, know like five second clips, you know, all like the time, something like that has happened, right? So maybe this is a person that mentally, like people are interested in that i'm asking, hey, you're saying hello or showing interest. You could string all those together.

And the person, as he noticed one of them, right, and then could have a very negative sea. nobody. No one wants me. No one's interested in me, whatever the person is saying. But but like it's different if you see from the outside, like it's objectively different, but that person doesn't know. And that's why after being an awareness, there is an I the next thing that I think of in in the function of self is, is the defense mechanisms in action.

What are some other examples of defense mechanisms in action? Because I think there's immense interest in this on the idea that we have unconscious processes in us that are reaching up out of the iceberg in preventing us from seeing our life in ourselves the way that IT actually is occurring, and perhaps preventing us from achieving these ideals of agency and gratitude, empowerment and humility. I mean, they seem like very powerful and important forces. And and I and I know many other people out there want to understand whether not what we're doing and what we're feeling and experiencing, whether that is serving as well or not.

So I think the place to start is to say that there's something very, very complicated going on the part of the iceberg underneath the surface, right? That biological supercomputer that's running in a million thoughts, in a million actions, in million internal process as a second is constantly shifting our defensive structure. So so it's complicated.

And you can almost imagine that like one leaves and another comes in and they're shifting and there's a little bit of one in some of another like so it's a very complicated process, but we can look at IT and and understand. So so an example of a defense mechanism that's very common and can cause us a lot of problems is projection, right? I'll give two examples of of projection. So so one is the experience of sitting in a car, right, and being stuck in traffic, being a little bit late, right, and feeling be legal, right?

I mean, this has happened to me more times than I can count, but at some point I started with with my own therapy, looking at like what's going on in me when i'm doing this, right? So the thing that be feeling be legal, right? As if what does that mean? Like there's something called traffic that exists and has a mind and wants to work me right, is that individual cars is that the people in the car is right.

What's going on is the perception of hostility I feel be legal, right? But it's it's anger and frustration inside of me, right? I'm i'm the one feeling angry and frustrated there.

There's no one and nothing but me that feeling anything about this, right? But I have this sense of of the world around me being hostile because i'm projecting my anger outward right now, think this isn't good because instead of sitting in traffic and saying so, maybe IT totally makes sense that i'm stuck in traffic and that i'm not happy. Maybe I should believe a little bit earlier and I wouldn't be late or if it's i'm going to work.

Should I live closer to work, I can make a whole set of decisions that i'm not making, right? Or maybe i'd know I think can be a fifteen minute drive and like there was an accident, right? And okay, there are things that I can't control.

Must was to control everything. If you think about what can I control, being aware of that, and what can I not control, right, then you can make the situation much Better. So this doesn't happen with this frequency. And IT also takes away the anger and the frustration, right? So I think that's a good example because IT IT happens a lot, is very, very common. But projection then also happens with people, right? So that was that you and I work together and we're going to do something, collaborate together and i'm just not having a good day and something negative happened before I came to work.

And you know, i'm not at my best and i'm a little bit i'm a little bit erith and frustrated, right? If this happens all the time within the person sits down with someone and then i'm being irritable and frustrated, which doesn't feel good to you, right and and you may become suitable and frustrated, right? And then I say, oh, look, he's irritable and frustrated, right? But even if you don't, the fact that I feel that way, right, that projection often would lead me to think that is to you who's that way? Here I come wanting to do this job and you're not at your best.

It's me who's not at my best, right? But we do this all the time and then we make incorrect or inaccurate attributions, right? So so projection is this is an example of a defense mechanism that can cause us a lot of trouble, right? A lot of trouble.

Uh, another can be displacement where, uh, if i'm feeling anger or frustration, say, in a certain realm, then I the idea of feeling get at work and then kicking the dog right like it's not good that we do that. We're not acknowledge ing was going on inside of us at work what we could change, what we could make Better and the dog doesn't want to be kicked right and the dog is often you also the family, right in. And that could be physical or could be through words, right? But the idea that was that there's something negative being generated in us, but but inside where were perceiving that it's coming from somewhere else, right?

I mean, the therapy is all things to lead a substrate, right? When they're negative defences, right? There can be positive defences too, such as altruism, right, that that someone could do something negative to me.

And instead of me passing that along, I could decide i'm going to do something, i'm going to something nice for the next person. I have an opportunity to do something nice for, right? Like that's a defense that sometimes we could think of IT and decide that way.

But there are people who react that way like something negative that happens and they respond with something that's that's different from that. So defense mechanism, m can work against us. They can work for us. They are complicated their combinations of them.

But we can look inside and say, for example, if i'm using projection all the time, right? And I think everyone around me is kind of always angry and frustrated right? Then there's always bad traffic, right? But then as we start to talk about IT more IT becomes a parent that there's a lot i'm angry about gray, but i'm not aware of IT then then reflection or therapy, right? Or a good friend we're talking till he can help us see, right, that, hey, this is going on inside of me, right? And that can really help us.

Same with use of humor. O, K, i'm using humor, and i'm kind of decompressing uncomfortable situations. If things that make me feel uncomfortable, maybe that greece, the wheel of social progress, but maybe over time I come to use humor in a way that self disintegrating, right? Well, that's not so good anymore.

But I may not be aware of the shift just because I could maybe be funny and certain situations that i'm now not using that for myself anymore. I'm using IT against myself. And by talking to people by reflection, like we can be aware of the defensive structure that's going on inside of us.

And then there's not an automatically to IT. If you point out that i'm using projection a lot, I can start to be aware of that. Just like if someone that said you were with me at the grocery store, right, and someone say something nice and I shy away and you say, y you know you don't even even aware someone said hello to you and then I I want to be more aware of that.

Like I I don't want that thing to happen unconsciously. So maybe now I think, okay, any time someone I don't know says something, i'm going to just stop and think like what's going on here right there is a person being friendly to me, as they just know, just person exchanging money to cash rates. So what's going on to we take what's unconscious and we make a conscious so that we can change .

IT sounds to me like expLoring and thinking about our reflexes is what's really key here. Example of display acec that you give you are kicking the dog. I couldn't help but smile, not because I think it's a good thing to do.

I never once kicked my dog, by the way, folks, terrible thing to do. So he was the size of a balder IT, injured more than injured him. But I never would do such a thing. However, in academia, there's this phenomenon is very common that that I referred to as trickle down anxiety, where the person running the laboratory is inevitably under a tremendous amount of stress, grants and papers that said a and graduate students and post docs will immediately be familiar with them describing but um for those of you that haven't gone to graduate school, um this will be a little bit form.

But you'll think of other examples where when the lab head is under stress, it's incredibly common for lab ads to walk through the laboratory and start asking about experiments and telling people to do additional experiments. And basic, just assigning busy work to people or pressuring what simply cannot be moved along any faster. And when I was a graduate student, I worked for somebody who, the exact opposite of this fina type, when I was a post dog, Frank worked someone who was a little bit of that finot pe, although I still like to working from very much.

But I used to have a response that, at least for me, was adaptive, which was, I would always say i'm working as fast as I carefully can, because no scientist I ever wants to, somebody to cut corners. No good scientists anyway. But trickle down anxiety is common in every occupation. I think we see this sort of displacement all the time where someone's anxious and so they go start creating anxiety for other people. And you can just as you're describe beyond seeing how pathologic that is for .

everybody involved. So the academic the trick anxiety that you are just talking about IT is it's a related but but it's a different defense mechanism is projective identification, right, which is which is causing others to feel the way that you feel in order to get your needs met, right?

This a form of projection. And actually perhaps you could clarify the definition of projection versus displacement versus projective identification.

So projection is when you don't own IT. So so it's not me who's mad. It's you, right? So I don't know that I mad at all, right? I just think that is you even the one the one who's mad, right?

Display acec is what comes out of us. So what were our attribution can shift, right? It's it's not this person is making me angry.

It's that person because that's a safe for person, right, to be angry at, right? Or if i'm then going to take out my anger, right, instead of metaphorical kicking the person who might who might respond to me in a way I don't want, maybe I kick the door, the tell us, respond back, right? That's displacement.

Projective identification is there's there's an expression of an emotional state inside of a person that then becomes to other people, even though the person isn't trying to do that, the person says, i'm going to make you anxious. That's not a defense mechanism anymore, right? So here's an example.

I think I dence is the best example of projective identification. So for a little bit of time at work, I would occasionally lose my keys, right? So now i'm trying to go, and I I can find my keys, right? So I say, I don't know.

Wear my keys are right. And I start expressing something right. And i'm anxious and i'm tense right now people around me hear that right? And what do they start feeling? These are feeling anxious, intense, the way that I do, right? And now they are what they want.

They want to find my keys, right? They want to help me so that I stop spreading anxiety, intention into the whole environment around me, right? So then they help me find my keys.

I say, thank you. My own emotional state comes down and upon reflection, I think, hope I don't want to do that right. I got my i'm getting my needs map by making other people feel in a way it's like not a good and comfortable way to feel.

So here's a way around that. Like put my keys in the same place every day, right? So then I can avoid that because IT doesn't feel good to me.

Like then if I get out to my car, like I find you know a little bit breathing, a little heavy, like I don't doesn't feel good because I was just agree, right? And I did that to other people too, right? So is an example of how projective identification works.

And it's kind of simple example. But IT chose is happening all the time. You know, all these things are happening all the time, but we can become aware of IT, then I don't lose my keys.

I don't have to feel bad about all to activate myself for no reason, and I don't have to activate other people. For no reason of thinking and reflecting like change that thing for the Better. And I can do IT with much bigger things too.

Thank you for that was clarifications. I'd like to touch on humor for a moment. Obviously, humor is a wonderful thing or can be a wonderful thing. I've also seen a lot of examples of where very smart and or accomplished people, because those are not always um uh the same thing, use sarcasm as a form of humor and IT can be very funny. But I have to imagine, based on everything i'm hearing from you today, that there is a form of sarcasm, which is an unhealthy defense.

I'm thinking of the person that no matter what someone else says that's positive or or no matter what someone does that could be viewed as positive, they find some way to diminish by and like through sarcastic a humor. I see this a lot and I think closely nested with sarcasm is cynicism. In fact, I have a family member.

I won't name who they are to protect the not so innocent who used to be very cynical um and I want to ask you know what is the thing about cynics and and they said, well I have had a particular uh genre of of schooling road up a formal schooling where if anyone behaved too happy express too much happiness, rather too much delight. They reviewed as stupid like like as if to be happy as to um to be unaware of of the sophistication and the importance of things in life right and I hope that this is unrelated to most people listening. But I didn't think that sarcasm is is a double ge blade in the sense, and that cynical m is is perhaps double ge blade as well, but that IT might even be worse than sarcasm because it's a way of really now reflecting back what's, by definition, what's not good about life, what's not good about what's happening.

And and IT does seem protective, right? IT IT protects one from disappointment. If you're already disappointed, how could you be further disappointed? IT also seems to me like a bit of a power move. It's like you're going to be happy long when to take that away for from everybody like as something that's like for myself. And is any of this actually hold in the inside of the the clinical literature because again, I enjoy a good sarcastic joke. In fact, there's a collaboration around a sarcastic joke IT can be truly to everybody but um sarcasm mcinnis um I feel like are often used to cut down what would otherwise be um but event or or responding experiences .

absolutely I grew up in central new jersey. Humor as a weapon right or IT certainly can be right.

And people can be very aggressive through humor so so acting out which is is letting our aggression flow, right? That's a defense, right? So just being aggressive and pushing someone back, right? However, that means like if I don't feel good about myself, I want you to feel not so good about yourself, right, is where we start getting into into envy, right? And humor can be used that way.

So so that that the biding sarcastic humor is is a form of acting out, is a form of aggression, right? It's not humor as a healthy defense. We call the same thing, but we could also call a different things.

This is the new ones of our language, right? If, if, if humor can be a defense, like I trip and fall, I make a little joke. People are laughing at with me instead of at me, right? Hey, humors a good defense. I made myself feel Better. Make things flow, flow more easily.

But if i'm using sarcastic humor to a sale, someone right then that's not it's not that thing anymore, right? And you know now it's a manifestation of aggression, right? And they do that you know is is more than what to talk about the world view, right? Like arctic is something that can be done now like we can make a sarcastic joke funny you're not.

It's over right um but cynical m is is a way of coming at the world there's a different kind of defense right? The idea that hey, so I put the fox in the sour grapes like I don't think there's anything good to be had anyway, right? So you can take anything away from me can't make me feel worse, right? I already feel a very, very bad about the world and about everybody in IT and i'm protecting myself that way like that then and unhealthy defense because what does that lead to at these isolation at least to mistrust? Know we know that people are happy if they live through altruism and gratitude, and they're well connected with others.

So so the cynical point of view, which you get to some degree being in the world, build some cynics in us, right like that, that's okay. That's part of that is a part of awareness in some sense. But I think what you're talking about is a very pervasive cynics that then is an unhealthy defense that is very harmful to others.

The idea that I feel lousy about everything, and if you don't, i'm onna, try and bring you down, right? Like too much happiness will label that is something, label IT is stupid, right? So now like it's not OK to be happier than some sort of cynical baseline, right? And then there's nothing about our tourism and gratitude that's not happy, right? I mean, who's happy in that situation? cynical. The people who are overly cnc are not happy and people around them, we're not happy.

Nobody's happy. Thanks for the clarification on new jersey. A good portion of my biological families from new joys adore them. But it's true. There was once a moment at a family gathering where somebody said, oh, let's let's hug or something and the reaction was like, oh, we're gonna hug now, you know, was IT was IT was entirely sarcastic and cynical.

And like the hug that resulted from that was this like, like, like didn't kind of thing I was now i'm laughing about and it's funny and they're very loving people but you're right. It's it's A A different style of of humor and discourse yeah so you've been talking about these two pillars of the self and who we are and how things play out in the world for us as the structure of self and the function of self. In terms of the function of self, you described self awareness.

This notion are this realization that there is an eye, there's a me, and then we be talking about defense mechanisms in action and play out in in the real world with positive and negative IT. Seems to me that a lot of what is happening here in terms of understanding the function of self has to do with the what we pay attention to, where we place our our efforts, or choose to not place our attention and not place our efforts. Do I have that right?

The silence is is a huge concept in in human existence, right? I mean, there are thousands upon thousands of things that that you or I could be paying attention to right now, right? But but where we're not paying attention to anything except what we're doing right here.

So we are getting out so many other thoughts, ideas, narratives inside. Now something were to shift very quickly. If we heard a loud noise, right, our attention would shift, right? So, so our attention is its focus. We're sAiling to one another because this is what we've chosen. We're focusing our minds.

And we are also somewhere inside of us aware that we could shift away from IT is something more important, like something dangerous, like where to happen, right? So IT let us be here and be selling IT to one another and have this conversation, right. But in the course of life, what's sAiling to us is so complicated and determined by so many factors that is absolutely worth a lot of attention to. So so one example is so many people have a negative internal dialogue that's running in them over and over again, or they are running through images, events or they may be traumatic events or things that they're not happy with images of themselves in negative ways um that that these internal narratives or internal images can become so strong that there is no room for anything else so you know an example would be a person who who really, really loved music, right, and could have, you know just in addition to enjoy music, like had a good thoughts while listening to music.

Know what, I could go do this right? And at a history of of like that really working out well, like following his interest and and I really creating to the goodness in his life, right, who now was going for a long drive, like longer than would be needed to go somewhere or get something, like, why the extra time in the car? And I had had a presumption, okay, the person's listening to music and thinking, but but IT isn't quite add up.

And then I learned that the person is not listening to music, right? That they're using that time, so that the internal narrative right, which was a very, very negative, repeated internal negative, you're not going to get anywhere. You're going to make anything of yourself, right? IT could be there in his mind, right? That was a form of self punishment, right? IT was a form of of taking the anger and frustration inside and enacting IT towards himself.

And that was so silent that this person could not see his way to any goodness like nothing could change. Nothing could get any Better like felt very sure and very resolved about that. And the answer was, yeah, that's right.

right. Nothing can get any Better with this constant montreal running over and over again. But things can get Better, right? If that becomes less sAiling IT over time and your own thoughts and reflections become more sAiling IT.

So at the other end of that shift, you know, that narrative that was still there, but IT was weakened, right? Because IT takes time to really change things that was very much weakened. The person was listening to music again.

Those thoughts had had come back to the surface, and they were being sort of jumbled, you know, in ways that they are brought, new and interesting thoughts coming from them. And the person was an entirely different place, and I completely changed their life. right? I mean, this is, this is true, right is a dramatic example. But dramatic examples inform us, right, where the silence shifted and then the life shifted after that.

What you're describing in terms of the specific example doesn't resonate with me in terms of my own experience, although he point out it's very striking, it's very dramatic, but IT resonates with me from a different perspective. I'm not seeking a free clinical session here, but but to give meat to the example i'm about to ask you for insight on, you know, i've never allowed myself to stay in a bad professional situation for very long when things didn't feel writer, when I send someone I was working with or four wasn't the right situation. I got out despite if I were to really think about that, that could have been pretty severe long term consequences.

Fortunately, IT all worked out in fact so much so that I would say, um you know I pay attention to whether not people I work with and four are of the sort that I want to be working with and if I send a particular type of danger, look at that. And i'm one hundred percent so far, not on wood, but one hundred percent so far unrecognizing later that IT was a great decision and move on. And on the website of IT, I made, I believe, excEllent decisions in terms of who to work with, in terms of my podcasting, in terms of my academic career eta.

But i've had to move away from people that just want to right for me. I don't think they were truly bad actors, but thank goodness I moved away. And then goodness, I found these other wonderful people to work with.

However, there are circumstances that have been repetitive in my life where i've just be honest, repeatedly made not good decisions about who to be involved with over fairly long periods of time, and there can even be an awareness. So I should say there has been an awareness like this is into good situation, and yet i'm persisting in seeking out this and similar types of situations. So I consider myself a at least partially rational human being with some degree of introspection.

You know, when I look at this.

and I think, okay, this is a choice to focus on placing myself. And I have to assume IT placing myself in the situations that are chAllenging for me, in a way that I know is preventing me from living in certain ways that I want and from being happy in certain ways that I want. When you hear a scenario like that, like I can do IT over here, but I can't seem to do IT over here.

In fact, I see myself doing at the wrong way here. right? A little bit different than the example you gave a moment ago, because guy was driving to work, not listening to music, but wasn't putting into into together about what was going on.

But when somebody can see what's going on, I think this might even be called the repetition and compulsion or yeah sometimes you what is that about? Are people trying to work out something specific? Or are they deliberately creating some friction to accomplish something else? right?

I mean, I realized this could be infinitely complex. And again, i'm not trying to extract the clinical insight for my own sake. I started up on that.

Thank you. But I think a lot of people do this. They they do what they know they shouldn't be doing.

They know they shouldn't be doing. IT da and just said that two ways. And but they do IT like, you must serve them in some way. You know, you think about, um when you get a dog and you're talk your dog trainer, they say, you know a dogs do what works, right they get a reward for something, something to continue doing IT uh apply that to the same sort of thing i'm describing for myself and that i've observed another people. You must say I must work for them.

You hear this and kind of pop psychology IT must work. You must be solving something. why? How do I do this? Why do people do this? Is IT real pathology, or is IT a around about way to get to something else that's actually i'm pretty adaptive.

Instead of defining this pothole, I would not defining IT mythology. I would define IT as humans. If humanness is not in enough itself pathological, then all you're doing there is is describing something that is common, widespread across human beings.

Now doesn't mean we can understand IT and make IT healthier, right? I work in a discipline that wants to put a number on everything, right, label that has something and then do something about IT that's more often than not ineffective, right? Because we're not looking at things in top down way of what is human experience, what are the natural aspects of human experience that are less than ideal, right, that we can then understand and make Better.

If we come at IT that way, then we see, uh, is a great example because here's where structure meets function, right? So on the structure side, we say OK there defense mechanisms, and we imagine the branches, right, they are coming up from the unconscious mind, right? And the here IT meets function right? Defense mechanisms in action on the functional side, then determining silent.

So what I would imagine in your example, my image, is that your defensive structure, when you're doing the thing that effective, right, the professional decisions. But IT looks elegant, right? Like there is harmony to where those branches are.

The consciousness is sitting in between that you can see, you can see the elegance to IT, right? That I can just imagine shifting, right when you're not doing the thing effectively, right? Because now you're using an entirely different defensive structure, which is going to functions differently and create different sAilings.

And I imagine that it's convoluted and know that sort of peace meal, that it's not something elegant, right? So you say, okay, what does that actually mean? Let's translated into what are the actual defenses. So think about what you're not doing when you're making good decisions in the professional round, right?

You are not using denial or avoidance or rationalization or projection or projective identification or acting out, right? They're all these things that you are not doing that are the sort of unhealthy defensives bagenal to us, I go. Won't be easier to kick the can and down the road, right? You know, wouldn't IT be easier to just ignore everything's okay, everything's gonna out okay.

Wouldn't IT be easier instead of being angry at one person who is really intrinsic to the environment, if you, you know, is actually somebody else, you know, are you displacing project that tell people that we get ourselves into trouble, right? And and if that's going on, then that set of defense mechanisms in action, right, creates something that obscures the ability to make good judgment, right? But with none of those things going on, then what what are you doing? What you're applying your intelligence, you're applying your designation, right? You're applying your desire to make things Better.

You're able to look at IT. You are able to bring diligence, perseverance, but you are able to bring healthy aspects of self to the question and decide, oh, I don't want this and I should be different, right? And there again, what's going on? There's a complexity under the surface, but now we're coming up to its simplicity, right? We're coming up towards things that are healthier, that are simply list c.

If we look then, okay, what's going on if you're making the same mistakes over and over again? Well, we could. We would dive under the hood and really look.

And so what are you doing there? But IT has to be an array of unhealthy defences. No other thing you could be.

So we will see. Okay, are you using? Are using avoidance? Maybe a little, maybe a lie.

What about denial? What about rationalization? What about projection? Like, you know, you go through the unhealthy defenses and and you see what is IT that you're bringing to bear that is leading you a stray.

And of course, that the goal is to use the the role modeling and you role model for yourself how to be healthy, right? So let's take that role modeling and apply IT to the thing you sort of carving out and and treating differently. And that's a reason when people talk about repetition compulsion.

That is not a formal term because because what we're really talking about, his repetition, right? We're interested like why do we repeat things now that's one, that's one reason, right? Because we bring an unhealthy set of defenses and then at the end of the day, things come out the same because are bringing an unhealthy set of defences right? There can be other motivations that are related to all of that and is going this complexity to IT.

But but the compulsion part can be that we can reenter situations that didn't go well with the idea that we're going to we're going to fix what happened in the past. We're going to make ourselves feel Better. We're gonna take away the mark of trauma because trauma doesn't care about the clock or the calendar. So that's why i'll see someone who has had take five abusive relationships that looked very much the same right, and is about to enter the sixth right.

And he said, it's not because, hopefully in most cases, not because that person I want to be hurt, right? I mean, sometimes it's a different problem, right? But but there can be a drive inside of us to try and fix something if I can make IT work this time, I won't have to feel so bad about the other five.

right? So an attempt to change the past through one's current actions.

right, which is rooted in the olympics system, and how and how trauma affects us, and how, again, it's outside the clock in the calender. So that kind of magic, so to speak, can happen so the brain can seek that magic. But again, there are unhealthy defenders coming into play, right though, because there has to be denial, right?

Otherwise the person would map, you know, if the same thing happened five times and this looks the same, it's probably going to happen now, right? So so any time you think a person, most often it's us, right? You know, IT is smart enough for wordly enough to like no Better, which that happens all the time, right?

Then look for the answer, right, say, well, shouting that person know Better then to get into the six abusive relationship. Parents, yes, right? Like because it's not that hard if you saw set of circumstances five times to map that the six is going to have the same outcome, right?

The person would do that in other scenarios, right? So then you say, right, that is true. So now let's look for why the person is, isn't, recognize that. And again, we go down into the structure of self and the function of self, defense mechanisms and action sAiling of things that we're talking about now does that.

So yeah make sense of what what comes to mind is the idea i'm getting into a car that you know is going to get into an accident over and over and over again, but being quite cognition of safety and its importance in every other domain of life yes, not even jail walking right, but getting into like if if certain uber arrived with a little flashing light, this ride is gonna an accident like getting getting into that vehicle and I see this and others as well yes.

And any raises all sorts of questions like um is the person actually unconsciously afraid of the vehicle arriving where they want to go? Because then like our people actually afraid of things working out? I mean gets just something that I so I .

can say yeah that we have to know the person right like who is that person right? Why are they not want to get in that car? Are they afraid they're not going to get somewhere? They're are going to get somewhere, right? Ultimately, we're looking for unhealthy defenses.

And I I D so want to emphasize that that and I will often think that the aspect of my education that most helpful in me doing my job, when I, when i'm in the job as as a practicing psychiatrist, st is is actually my mathematics minor, right? Because there's a lot more math to this, right? People tend to think of a mental health.

It's it's all esoteric and you can try to say anything you know, anything you want and there is no way of proving your decision. It's not like that at all, right? There is a mathematical aspect to IT.

So if you do the correct logical comment thing right in all aspects of your life except one, and you're like a hundred times more intelligent than you need to be to figure IT all out, right then then if there's a car vote, we say, look, that's a huge interest, right? I mean, the probability that we're going to find something interesting there is one hundred percent right, because we know that you know Better. We know that you do Better.

But but why here? So like, that's so interesting, right? Like that's where the x Marks the spot.

Look, let's go dig there, right? So then when we go and dig there, like we're going to find something right and and we're say, what is that? Do we find that? Like, oh, in a ray of a really unhealthy defense mechanism, maybe we find that do we find that there's a deep unconscious motivation, right? We might find that too, right? We might find a lot of things, right? But we're going to find them if we go back to what is the structure of self, what is the function of self.

If we go and look like that x Marks the spot means there's payderson there, right? And then when we figure that out, then we go through and we can make things change. So if it's a deep seated, trauma driven unconscious motivation that is resulting in an unhealthy array of defensive mechanisms, well, lets go look at that, right? Lets look at the trauma.

Let's take the thing that's unconscious and and bring IT to consciousness, right? Then we can make that Better. And that array of unhealthy defences, again, we're not going to change IT overnight.

But can we change IT very, very significantly? Pretty rapidly? Probably, yes. And we can almost entirely change you across time.

So there is a mathematical aspect of this that I think is so important to point out because of mental healthy, if even as a field right just meant we all want to be mentally healthy, like there's a ryan and reason to IT that, yes, IT follows science. And yes, IT also follows common sense. And if we apply those things, we get the answer .

very reassuring.

Thank you.

Thinking about the functions of self, and again, just to remind myself and and other people, starts with self awareness, all defense mechanisms in action. Then there's the silents peace, paying attention to what's inside of us as well as what's external. And then you're now describing lot of your choices, choice making and behavior and action in the world.

I have to assume that for the person trying to improve themselves and get to agency and gratitude, and that paying attention to all of these is important. But of course, if a defensive mechanism is unconscious, we can simply decide, okay, I want to see the unconscious defensive mechanism. Does that mean that we should ask ourselves about what is most salient to us um or should we be focusing on our behavioral choices? Mean, in the example I just gave up, i'm aware of my behavioral choices making certain decisions to engage with certain people and not with others.

But should I be asking, for instance, you know what sAiling like like what are the thoughts leading up to that decision? In other words, how does sAiling, it's of internal and external cues and processes relate to behavior? In which of these should we be painting attention to if our goal is to eventually change our behavior?

So so think about we're starting we're starting at the bottom, right. So we're starting with, look, there is an eye, right? And that's just not not just an apprehension, right? There's a lot to that, right? So so for example, I know someone who who is doing the mirror meditation, staring into the mirror, right, looking back itself within IT with a desire to be aware, like there is a me like this me is in the world right .

this is the first i've ever heard of such a practice um except when I was in elementary score maybe was the eighth grade I had a teacher who talked about gave us an assignment to look in the mirror and ask ourselves questions but if I understand quickly, you think there's utility to people spending A A few minutes or more looking in the mirror and and thinking about oneself in the eye is a way to build up this self awareness.

Do I have that right? If you want to take the best care of yourself that you can, you want to understand yourself the best you care, and you want to make your life the best that can be, right? Then if there are answers right in the city, answers are in five or ten different colors, right? Look in all of them, right? I mean, that's that's the idea right there.

If if we want to know something, look everywhere for IT. And also realized what we are building, what we are creating may be a recipe there, maybe things from different colors that overlap. So the way to translate that practices, to say, to find the answers to what what is either killing us, why we're repeating things we don't want to repeat, or even if things are going OK, but we want them to be going Better, because we don't quite feel the peace and contentment we want to feel, then look everywhere.

So in this, the function of selves and the function of self, start with the ee, right? There are ways of increasing self awareness. You know, they can range from contemn lation of self to meditation, to looking in the mirror.

There are things that we can do to more strongly emphasize to ourself that there is an eye and this ee is going through life, right then we know that they're defense mechanisms and that they're present, that they're acting in us, right? We can't just see them because they're unconscious. But if we start thinking about them, we can learn about them, right? And that's where silence comes into play.

Silence kind of points both ways, right? SAilings can point us towards the unconscious mind, right? I realized i'm doing this over and over again. I'm saying this thing to myself over and over again.

Where's that coming from? We start becoming curious about ourselves, and we look to the unconscious mind, and then we also look to the conscious mind that that's why after silence is behavior, what am I doing? right? And a lot of times we don't know, he said, examples of, we don't know why we're doing things like someone who wants to lose weight but always goes to the grocery and comes home and is I has some sense surprise that their things there, they don't want to eat, right?

Like, why am I behaving in a certain way? Why do certain things bother me when other things don't? right? I am.

I really touchy about one thing and not another. Why would I there be things that bother others and not me or vice versa? R right. So so you know, we're looking at what's going on inside of us and then how we respond, right? Because how what may be upsetting me or what's going on inside of me, both conscious and unconscious, or is then determining how i'm acting, how i'm behaving in the world around me if I want a Better job.

But I never taken an interview for another job, i'm not going to get another job if I want a romantic partner, but I automatically turn away from anyone who smiles at me. I'm not going to have a romantic partner, right? If I want life to be Better and there's a certain thing I repeat and I don't want to repeat that I want to understand myself Better so I can change to the behavior.

And that's why the function of self ends with strivings, right? The strivings are into the future. I know there is an eye. I know there is a network and web of defense mechanisms in action.

I know that there's sAilings going on inside of me and i'm going going to pay attention to a few things from the thousands I could pay attention to. I want to be aware of that and have more control over that. Then i'm enacting behaviors are engaging in the world around me.

And ultimately, I want things right. I want life to be Better. I want to to have that feeling that you can get to.

I want to be in the state of of agency and gratitude. So again, these two pillars, structure of self, function of self. That's where all the answers are.

So there are all the cover, right? There are these five cubs in the structure of self and five in the function of self. And I know the ba, you have IT out there in the P. D, A of right, because, because you can go back there. And that's where the vast majority of answers are to both understanding and routes to change.

What you just describe is incredibly helpful. It's absolutely apparent to me why looking at all the covers is so key. It's also a parent that many different aspects of psychology, and at least as I understand that my probe for this is just at the level of behavior.

You know, I think this is they just do IT montreal. Well, just do the right thing, right? You know you're not finding a romantic partner like, you know, schedule three dinners with and ask them to invite over people who are looking for part.

Sounds really simple, right? But much as with the example of my friend who lost all this wait through behavioral change, the fear still lives within them very, very strongly. And so clearly there's some stuff happening under anything. And unfortunate he did lose the way to kept most of IT off but it's clear to me that until he addressed some of these other issues of saillant and uh defense mechanism self awareness that a that um the fear he's still experiencing makes total sense because the foundation of that change is not nearly as strong as I could be.

Maybe right or maybe this isn't engh to have the fear, but he's not gone to learn either one without the exploration. So he won. If there is risk, he won't be able to avert the risk. And if there's not risk these then to the laboring through life, which is difficult enough without being worried about something you don't have to be worried about, right? So the process of inquiry will always make that Better.

It's clear to me that his fear of regaining weight is absolutely sapping his enjoyment and his productivity in other domains of life.

So Warren's attention, right, because because we're deciding and that sort of mathematical way, IT doesn't have to be that way doesn't mean you can change overnight, but I can be understood and IT can be changed.

What's for that reason, and many other reasons, that i'm very grateful that you explain these two pillar, structure of self and function of self, and how these flow up to empowerment in humility, and how those flow up to agency and gratitude. You ve given us so a set of ideals and in a road map of how to get there in one that we're going to continue with in a moment here. Um I did want to reserve what you said, which is that there is a PDF version of this, the structure, this road map of ideals and how to get there um that's been provided as a link in the shown at captions so people can refer to them their individual form if they like.

If you're interested in understanding yourself and in having goodness in your life as much as you possibly can, then you're interested in the structure of the mind. And this means that you're interested in the unconscious mind in all the things that go on a million things a second, that we don't no or understand one by one, but that we can explore and understand Better.

In total, were also interested in the conscious mind in being self aware or interested in the array of defense mechanisms and whether or not they their elegant and light passes clearly through them or whether they're distorting light in creating misperception. If you're interested in the structure of the mind, then you're also interested in the character structure. What is your character structure? What is the nest around all of IT had interface with the world? And then you're interested in the self that you grow from that phenomenon logically meaning, what is your experience of self? How does that feel to you?

These are all important parts of this pillar of health and happiness. The other pillar is the function of the mind. And of course, there's overlap.

There are different cumbers, but the covers all contain different ingredients that together make the recipe I saw. If we're interested in the function of the mind, then we want to pay attention that there's an eye. We want to be self aware and we want to cultivate self awareness.

We're also interested in how those defense mechanisms work when they're in action, right? What's sAiling inside of us and outside of us, what are we paying attention to? How are we behaving? Where are our strivings? Do we feel hopeful about ourselves in the world around us? We're interested in all of these things. We can help but be respectful of just how complicated this is. Like life is difficult and understanding ourselves is difficult.

You know, wonderful joy can come of living life, but IT is hard, and it's hard day by day and trying to understand ourselves going to these places, these pillars that hold the answers they they can't, but making us a respect for all of IT, right? And the respect for ourselves, for others brings with IT humility, right? When we come to this point of looking at ourselves and expLoring, then, yes, we become empowered, right? Because we've gained a lot of knowledge, right? We're digging where the patter is.

We're figuring things out. And along with that, empowerment comes humility, a respectfulness for how difficult all this is, how complicated we are, how we can make happiness in our lives. But how is certainly isn't easy.

And we take with us the empowerment and the humility, and we express them. And if we're expressing empowerment and humility, we come to living through agency and gratitude. So here both are active words.

So agency it's it's easier to see IT. It's an active word where i'm aware of my ability to to project myself into the world around me. I know that I can't control.

Everything, right? But i'm really trying to understand what can I control, right? How can I control? What do my decisions now lead to in the future? So agency is very, very active, right? Gratitude is active too, right? Was we're bringing an active sense of gratitude, sense of the amazingness that were here and and pride in ourselves and others were being here and trying to move forward as best we can.

And then we bring that to our interactions were much more likely to have a kind gesture towards others instead of being angry. We're much more likely to have something compassionate to say, including to ourselves. Then we are to have something angry to say that gratitude accompanies agency, their active words and their active together.

And if we're living life through agency and gratitude, and there's a lot of wisdom about this, there's a lot has been written and researched about this. And if you look at what is IT telling, right, remember things, we're getting simpler, right, as we're getting higher up the the levels here, right? The unconscious mind is most complicated.

Now we're at, hey, can we live our lives with agency and gratitude at the forefront? And what does IT bring for us? And I think IT brings what we are seeking that we may think we we're seeking happiness.

And I can mean a lot of things, you know, a lot of different things that can be a very active thing in my happy in the moment. And we can use happy and sometimes to distract ourselves, like happiness is important. But words when people really think like what is that that they want or what is that that they have, right?

If they they are over joy to be alive, they're finding a sense of peace, they're finding contentment, they're finding delight, the ability to be delighted. This is what people want. Our, our, our human history and our, our searchings tell us this in our own experiences tell us this.

And and now you could lead a person to think, well, okay, what's going on? I mean, is, is this someone who's, you know, levitating at the top of a mountain? Like, is this just a state? Is this a state that people are in and in the answers? No, maybe sometimes we could be in that state where we can feel peace. There's no tension inside of us.

So I can feel to have times when I don't feel tension inside of me, there's contentment, there's piece I have to drive towards anything, right? But it's not the passive experience of IT because we are living life is that, that feeling goes hand in hand with a drive with in us that when we're in this healthy place, we are living life the decisions that we're making, what is putting the rubber to the road, IT is a generative drive. Within us, there is a drive to make things Better, to understand, to explore, and it's that drive that we access and cultivate.

And synonymous with happiness is it's not just the the state when people want to be happy and that very, very general way. Yes, contentment, peace, the light, right? But but they're happening as we're living life, right? As we're enacting a general drive where we're looking at ourselves in the world around us and we're interested in understanding, we're interested in making things Better, and that's the place that we're trying to get to. I believe that with all my, with all my heart and my and my brain, my education, training, experience and also experience living, living life and and for twenty years, doing this work with people tells me this is what we're seeking and it's an active way of of experiencing ourselves and our place in life.

I love that because IT emerges both the knows and the adjective in the verbs you know in this notion of a general drive to me is so compelling because um I have the sense and I hope i'm right that we all have some sort of general drive within us, starting at an early stage, maybe even starts as visual for rigid, touching things with our hands as an infant and an exploration of the world.

Right is what brings about the changes in the neural circuitry that allow us to engage you even more and and in progressively on the one had narrow ways, but also with more richness. And in more detail, could you tell us more about general drive and how this shows up in different types of people? Um is IT always positive? Can there be too much of IT? Um I certainly know a number of people who are addicted to work.

Those of you listened and raising my hand, but I would say nowaday, i'm not as addicted to work as I once was in the sense that I derive far more satisfaction from less work now provided that the work is really in depth. You know, I think that there were years in in graduate school where I wanted to publish a bunch of papers and then quickly realized through the not a gentle persuasion, momentous, that like, let's just do the best possible work we can do and there's so much more Richard and and experience and things to be gained from that. So i'm familiar with general drive as as I understand IT, but maybe if you would if you could flush out a bit of what general drive is and and does IT arrive um in parallel with or before we are able to access peace, contentment and delight um can IT even be separated out from that um what what is this generation drive?

Yeah so drives are built in teas. So the tsunami mous with our existence. If we exist, then then we have the drive. I think that's how drive is defined.

And we understand going far back to to psychodynamic and psychoanalysis and when people really thinking hard about human beings and what's going on inside of us that we've sort of identified and then validated over the the period of time since that we have aggressive drives within us and we have drives towards pleasure. Now this often is misunderstood that so aggression can be, uh, I can be active violent aggression, for example, but aggression can also be a sufficient of agency, right? The inaction of agency, like I want to do things, I want to change, I want, I want to make the world a different place, right?

That that all of that comes under this, a drive. So aggressive and aggressive drive is not a bad thing. If we had no aggressive drives, the thought we have just lie down, and nothing else, would we'd all be gone n right.

So so there's a way in which this drive within us moves us forward, right? And of course, extremely complicated. The ways we can manifest too much of IT or too little love IT, or how our defense mechanisms can into twin with the drive. But the drive is there. It's like it's fuel with in us that comes with our existence and then how that fuel moves us forward, how much of IT there is now that is determined by the meshing of the drive with how we're living life, right? And the same would be true of pleasure.

No, the pleasure drive doesn't just mean that we all want to be hitless right inside IT means that we want things that are gratifying, but we want to feel good, right? This isn't just, you know, the drive towards physical pleasure like a sex drive, or or eating food or having comfort like all of that can be part of IT, but it's a dry for relief, right? The idea that we don't want to be White knocked ling life, right, searching for pleasures.

So having aggressive with in us as we White nuckles life and we search for some pleasure and relief, right, these drives within us can be healthy. They can be unhealthy. They can be anything right well springs within us that then fuel us forward.

And there's controversy to the idea of is there a general drive? And they're certainly at part of the field that do not think so, right? But there have been strong thinkers in the field that have thought we do have a general drive that IT is within us to look around us, to be curious, to be amazed, right? To think, like how how can I engage with this and make this Better or happier? To think outside of ourselves, right? To think, if I, if I feel good and you're in pain, can I make you feel Better? right? Having nothing to do with me, right?

The idea of altruism coming to the four and having industriousness with us within, right? And in the idea that there is a generative drive, it's strengthened when you look at how humans behave, when you we're not struggling, right, that people are interested in learning, you know, you think about how much of people give of themselves to learning or to serving others, like there's so much of this goodness in the world around us now, if we shut people away, right? They have no imagine, you know, god forbid, someone is in a solitary confinement from when the the moon, when they're born.

Then there is not an opportunity for the general drive to thrive, right? And we see so many, so many situations where IT doesn't thrive enough, right? You violence in people's roundings lack of opportunities that we can square a general drive, anyone's general drive.

But if we give ourselves opportunities, if if we're healthy, that we are not weigh down by trauma and illness and miss perceptions of self, and we can live life in a way that brings us to agency and gratitude. Now we're a lying with the general drive that I absolutely believe is within us. I think just look at life, look at human beings.

We observe that we have this drive within us. And if that drive is at the forefront and that drive then naturally, of course, allies with agency and gratitude, then I think we're at the place that is the place we we ultimately seek, right? And that we can find IT for brief periods of time.

So so by really pursuing this, and like really strongly in my own therapy and reflection and attempts to understand, I can have periods of time where I can feel that way. I can feel outward growth and interest in the world then and I feel good i'm not trying to answer some question of like why my alive, like i'm doing things that I feel good about and I feel good about doing those things about being in the world. And and I think this is not uncommon.

You know, IT may be far more common in societies that are allegedly less advanced, right? That is, have less distractions or maybe you know less knowledge of of all the awful things in the world that can happen to us that are constantly fed to us like this. There are whole bunch of other questions in topics about IT.

But but this, this, you know if this absolute belief that there is this generative driving us that wants to alive with agency and gratitude, and that we all have IT within us to bring those to the forefront, aren't to find that thing that we seek. Whether is someone's person says it's in navona, the other person says it's joy or happiness or peace or nummi, you know, whatever IT is there, there's something. To IT, we were not feeling the tension within us. We're not feeling the anxiety, the pressures that we're feeling. A sense of goodness.

the way you're describing IT makes perfect sense why peace, contentment and delight be so closely linked to this general drive the word peace as as he alluded to, is often um brings to mind the idea of passivity but general drive and the inclusion of things like aggression and a drive for pleasure are anything but passive. So anything that's important for me and for everyone to understand that peace, contentment and delight can really be action terms again, moving moving them from um you know from the more typical conception of them to to verb states.

So peace, contentment and delight are not passive. States meet. There can be periods of time where we can be just very peaceful and very much at rest. But but those words are not synonymous with inaction, right? In fact, there are cynthy mous with action.

A lot of the time, if we are suffused ed with peace, contentment, the ability to delight, then what we're doing is we're raising up the generative drive or making conditions that are permissive for the general drive to come to the forefront, right, to be paramount over the aggressive and the pleasure drives. Remember, we're not trying to get rid of those drives, right? We just want the general drive in us to be at the forefront.

Then we will be able to harness the aggressive drive through, for example, a strong sense agency, fueling the sense of agency forward, as opposed to destructive aggression, right? The search for pleasure, which sure can include physical pleasures in in ways that are good and reasonable and healthy for us, but also the pleasure of learning, right? The pleasure that altruism m brings that we can take the aggressive drive that we know is in us and the pleasure drive that we know is in us, and we can dial them to the right places like this is very complicated.

And it's easy to do that too far up. And it's easy to, I look too far down, right? But if both are serving the general drive, because we lift up the generative drive and we bring IT to primacy by being able to handle our lives, to understand ourselves, to go back to those pillars and to build upon IT the agency and the gratitude that then leads s us to peace, contentment and the light, we can put all of this together. And like we're really and truly living in an active way in the world, is good for us, good for the world around us and doesn't leave us with a sense of earning or sense of tension within us.

Do you think it's also the case that generative drive has kind of a self amplification feature to IT? What comes to mind as you're describing generation drive and its relationship to peace, contents and delight, is that approximately in a half hour after I wake up, I start to feel more physically energize. I'm not somebody you're just pops out of bed where to go exercise or due mental work.

But about thirty minutes or so after waking, my my mind starts to wake up. And i've noticed that if I read a scientific paper, or if I read a chapter in a book, or if I do something that feels a little bit difficult, cognitive ly difficult in particular, that the sense of satisfaction that I get from that is immense. And it's it's not a sure the case that have to learn something that i'm going to use that day.

But for me, learning and and often learning and sharing what I learned with the world, whether not they want to hear IT or not is is part of my pleasure loop and um and i've learned that if I don't capture some new knowledge in a way that's chAllenging in the morning time, I feel like the gears are still turning but but I start to lose energy whether if I find something interesting in particular and and I write IT down and and I feel like I own IT, that's what I enjoy so much about learning is like it's in there. Maybe i'll be used for at some point that IT won't. But it's like it's like an animal finding a tool that I can may be used to forge more, more effectively later in life.

I get such a sense of satisfaction, then I find that I have immense energy to do whatever is next, like whether or not that exercise or learn more or a prepare podcasts, ter red grants or we're of paper in this feature of my mental life has is so that um I almost have to forced myself to do with each day and there are so many distractions in the world nowadays that i've come to a place where I almost have to force myself to do what I know works for me but when I do IT IT feels like a almost like a chemical rocket fuel IT does not make me manic or crazy. I don't need to pick up the phone body, tell everybody about post on social. It's more of a deep sense of satisfaction and and I get energy from IT is that the generative drive was great .

that that works for you. What you're saying is that for you, like you can prime your general drive that way, right? And then you prime IT is you prime the pump c, it's arrived up, right? Like, and then and then it's really manifesting itself inside of you.

I mean, there is many different manifestations of the general drive as there are people, right? So some things going to work for some person, other things going to work for a different person, right? But but, but you're saying that, hey, I know this thing works for me and even though sometimes it's not easy to do, I do IT and then look what IT gets for me, right? And that's that's really healthy, right?

Is like knowing that this thing works for you and then you become committed to IT because your general drive is, is, is really strongly supported by IT, right? And then you have this sense of good feeling, right? So then you you have the peace and you have the you're just the overall sense of goodness, right? Your peace and contentment and delayed.

You're getting that in learning and in teaching. So you're figuring out OK. This works for me, right? And again, you don't have to figure IT out through this lens is if we find parts that aren't working, then we go back and we figure them out, right?

Maybe a good example maybe is. So let's see you take someone who really enjoys gardening and get something out of gardening, right? So there are as many generate drives and how they measured out as there are humans.

But there can be common outcomes of that, right, to the enjoyment of of Fostering plants, growing a guard. And that's not uncommon in humans, right? So imagine someone who hasn't been doing that, right? They really want to, they ever drive to do IT.

There is a lot of land in the back that they used to cultivate, right? So if they're not doing, if they're any number of reasons, maybe maybe they were depressed and they needed mental health treatment, maybe they just got away from the path that they were on. Maybe they're defensive shifted a little bit, whatever the case.

Maybe they go back to the pillars and they figure IT out, right? And now they're in accord with themselves, right? And they're living through agency and gratitude. And they feel where I can go back out there and I can till that land, I can, I can get a whole out. I can, I can make the plus.

I'm going to put the season i'm gonna nurtured, like, I can go do that, and I can do IT even what, even though I was depressed, even though somebody assaulted me five months ago, you know, even though I lost my job, even though, even though, even though, right, they overcome the, even though, right. And the sense of agency tells them, right, I can go do that, right? And the sense of gratitude, no one who's miserable and and and now is is in such an awful position about life because they were attacked or lost their job or something bad happened.

Whatever IT may be, they're lost in cynicism. There's no gratitude. There is a gratitude for being in life, for having the capability of going back in and in and planting seeds in that garden.

That's the alliance between agency and gratitude. And then the person goes and does that, right? So think of what's going on there.

They do this thing. They feel good about this thing they can have. They can look out of the garden, feel some peace.

But I feel some contentment to them, be the lighted by what they did. Remember how much they loved IT before, how much IT means to them. So yes, that goodness comes, that goodness of fuses us, and IT raises up.

The general drive that is right, is good. We breathe some life into IT right enough to get that garden done. Now the generative drive is further Fostered forward by the goodness the person feels.

So so the example of the difference between the person who's like once a garden feels terrible about themselves, they're not doing IT and they feels loud every time they look at the window. And there they are looking out the window, right? The difference between that and having made a garden, looking out the window added is a night and a difference.

And the the person who is looking out the window with the garden that they build, overcoming whatever was inside of them because they they went and addressed IT in and proved to themselves that they could. That's what we're after in life, right? IT is we all know this.

IT doesn't look like somebody levitating at the top of a mountain, right? That's what IT looks like. The looking at the window with the garden and thinking about what they over over came to create the garden and seeing the goodness .

of IT all glad you said that we're creating because he seems it's about creating things in real, tangible things, but that the process to get there is every bit as important. What's created when .

you create knowledge that that's tangible, right? Like you, you create knowledge. Maybe that that person looks down the role of beautiful flowers and has the same sense of godness inside of them that you do when you're well, like, great I I just went learned something yes.

you described that I thinking I certainly hope so because for me it's it's an incredible sense of satisfaction and and one that I enjoy so much that I almost don't want to look at IT too much because to me it's sits in this a rare domain of perfect, like it's just IT just feels so good and that and that I can get back there is is very comforting to me.

right? And that's all of this that IT feels so good. That's what all this is, is the general drive, right? It's the it's the gratitude. It's the contentments like all that coming together.

And it's interesting we could contrast that to to when you talked about a repeated cycle that's negative, right thing, you're not feeling that, right? So so think by the learning they can come from IT. Right, that you you can achieve this and feel this and be in the state in one aspect of your life.

What can you learn from that to bring to the other place? And more? Yes, that's important. It's more it's often starting with what's going on in the place that's not doing well, right? Like is that why the repetition, right?

So this is how we we can have what we're seeking in parts of our lives, even if we don't in others. But if we can have IT in parts of our lives, we can have IT in others too, and we can become role models for ourselves. We can learn from ourselves. We can learn from what brings the good to how to raise up the things about us in our lives in the year.

I often get the question, how from the general public, how can I stop over thinking? You know, I have to imagine, based on, in fact, I get that question so often that there are a great number of people who sense their own generation drive. What are your thoughts on that?

Thinking can be wonderful if we're using thinking to learn right, to figure things out. So when thinking is doing that, thinking is great. But a lot of thinking is just in the service of something else, right? And a lot of thinking works against us.

So imagine the person making the garden, I like the person asked to think about IT. If you think about what seeds to make, they have to think about what the tools are. They're to think about what they are doing when they are planting, when they're watering.

There's a lot to do. But the beauty of IT isn't in the thinking, right? The thinking is in the service of what is generative.

So so that's a different kind. It's it's just thinking in the service of something. But a lot of of our thinking is that, you know, it's it's planning is projecting. We tend to glorify the planning and the projecting and and IT can be great when we're learning, when we're figuring things out.

But a lot of that is, is there so that we can do the things that are good for us to do, right, the planning in the projecting round, making the garden where the point of IT is the garden is not the thinking part, right? We can also use thinking against us. So much thinking is repetitive and and not just not just unproductive, but harmful, right? That person who's looking out the window at the garden, maybe thinking, I mean, sometimes they are just pauses and our thinking, but you a lot of times a person must be thinking.

And and what often goes on there is just a repetitive negative thinking is, you know, guys, I used to have a guard and remember when that was beautiful or remember before the decision said a person passed away and we start making the garden or i'll never build to make a garden again or gosh, it's too much, you know, it's just something it's negative and unproductive. Mean, what else is there to think if the persons actually looking at the window at the garden, right, and they're in this, what a stock state, they're not an agency state, then the thinking becomes becomes repetitive and IT further is all the negative, right? He said, the more we further than negative, the more we take IT.

This is a full lane highway that we want to atrophy. Let I make IT into a six line in highway. But we do that when we have this repetitive thinking, which then can evolve into the narratives of things that we say to ourselves, right? So so you're thinking is wonderful.

It's a wonderful. But IT can also just observe something else. And I can also be used against this. So what we're talking about, IT doesn't glorify thinking. I mean, IT does if it's in the service of the generative drive, but IT doesn't in .

enough itself. I think many people set a time, say, you know, nine thirty A M or ten A M, when they are going to begin doing something that they want to do or know they should do. That little bit chAllenging to be exercise could be cognitive ly demanding work.

And then ten o'clock roles around they okay ten, fifteen and they're distracted by often social media texting these days. I think those are the main culprits really. Um I don't know too many people they get distracted by exercise and reading books.

Some do um and doing complex bustles or math but social media is a little bit like mental chewing gum except that I would add to that is the kind of chewing gum that um really does um sake the appetite in a way that prevents you from eating nutritious food IT unless used correctly right? And then people feel bad about themselves because the whole morning went by, now want to knew, and then they require some food like any great person. They then they might need a nap for the prandial dip in energy and then the afternoon and and then IT goes on and on.

I mean, I hear this all the time. I've experiences this before, so I am not immune this myself. That's why I try and capture that early wave of energy, whatever IT might be, a different, nor adrenaline, some combination, the way you describe thinking and its potential relationship to generate drive IT.

Seems to me it's so important that we capture those moments of potential creation, however small the action might be, to remind ourselves that we are capable of moving things from point a to point b. Because in the description, escape of the person that lets the morning escape, there's there's really um no external barrier except these distractions. Put differently, all the tools exist within most all of us to be able to create what we want to create, or at least to create something right, I mean, right. And yet many, many people just don't fulfill that um that right that they were and that we've all been given.

right. So let's think think about what's going on there. So so the person is not going to exercise at ten o'clock right now.

I push you back at ten fifteen and they do something on social year. They push you back ten thirty, it'll be OK. I'll get IT all in.

What they're doing is they're engaging is unhealthy defense mechanisms, right? So if we go back to the the pillars, right, the structure of self, the function of self, there may be other reasons for politicians identify the unhealthy defenses of avoidance and rationalization, right? And then there's no thinking going on about that, where they just unconscious processes, and you kick IT down, you know, you kick IT down the clock fifteen minutes, right? They are not thinking about IT.

Thinking then is observing something different, right? The thinking is observing the avoidance. If i'm going to go look on something to read a couple of things, reply, you know, i'm thinking on planning, right? I've got to get the maybe I got to get the phone out, I got a tap, you know, my code in to IT.

I got to go to a certain website like you were doing something that was thinking about that I think about what i'm going to write back, but the thinking is all in the service of the unhealthy defences, right? So then by understanding ourselves Better, we can we can bring that to a healthier place. How by by actually using thinking for what helps us, right? So let's think of what, okay, what's going? Let's say, if you're doing that, okay, what's going on when you're doing that easily?

So do you you really want to exercise, right? But like it's not easy to exercise and something like just problem solving, are you doing the thing you like? Maybe something you like more. There's lower barrier a but let's say we're just working within the psychological right. Then you can come with that a couple of ways like I don't want to do that things that things hard, right?

I mean, I think that about things in my life sometimes and IT always makes me have, makes me waiting and unhappy, where I may as well put twenty point weight on the side of me, right? I mean, I can look at IT that way, right? Or there's a different way of looking at IT that actually fits much Better, which is like i'm not daunted by doing difficult things and I can get out there and and apply myself and know when I feel good about that.

When I do difficult things is like part of my identity, right? Is like part of how I see myself. So right, i'm going to go do this thing and i'm going to feel good about IT.

And isn't IT amazing that I get to do IT right? I will Carry him on my live. I'm healthy, right? I can go do this thing. My health is is good, but I want to make IT Better, right by working out, or i'm at least alive.

And if I lose a little bit of weight or feel healthier, like to come on, this is good, right? And then i'll feel different about that, right? And unlike the truth is one of the others like, oh, both can be true.

And what will be true is what you choose, right? And if you choose the negative, then yes, the unhealthy defences perpetuate. And even if you get yourself to do IT today, it's harder to do IT tomorrow. That's why sometimes i'll say to a person like just take a look at IT and decide if you want to do IT or not.

If you don't want to exercise, just decide you don't, right? And then okay, there's a trade offer, everything, maybe okay with the trade offer, right? But what am I trying to do there? right? Is bringing to consciousness that that person is making a choice, right?

Do you want to do IT if you want to do IT? If you want to do IT, it's great to just do IT, right? And if you don't, it's great to not do IT. At least you're being honest and clear with yourself and you're not wasting all that time when you keep kicking IT fifteen minutes down the down the clock, you know, until it's too late makes sense. I think how the structure here really does IT works because it's is pulling together what we know from the biology to the psychology of like how to understand ourselves and how to understand when things aren't the way we want them to be so that we can make them the way we want them to be, not magic. It's it's following the sort of mathematical aspects of you know going to the factors, assessing that, making changes and and then of course, we see the outcome we wanted.

see the way you describe. IT doesn't make sense. And I appreciate IT because I think ultimately seems to rach IT back to actions, to verbs to bring us to these feeling states that you, I think, are what people are seeking, you know, peace, contentment, delight you through agency, gratitude as active terms, I think these universal desires and getting you're providing this wonderful road map for people to arrive there.

Thank you. I do have a question about some of the underpinnings of general drive, in particular this notion of aggressive drive. Um i've known people that seemed up a lot of this just have a lot to get up and go or A A lot of drive to create in the world or to figure things out.

Um they often do create great logic for themselves in work and relationship at sea. I've also observed that these people often don't have the best relationship to themselves or that they run up against barriers are Frankly sometimes straight in to brick walls in certain domains of their life, perhaps as a consequence of having too much of this general aggressive drive. And at the same time, I know that there are people in the world, many that have what seems to be a low general drive.

I don't know that the case or not, but um that they um think have a hard time engaging like in doing things and and often you get the impression that they somewhat completely given up like just like life is just too hard or um sometimes is a even more subtle like I know someone who they like their job, but they ever come to the place that um you know like it's just work, like it's a paycheck and then am I be enough but they're always talking about IT. So I have to assume that it's not enough. They aren't able to slot their work into one domain and and just focus on the other aspects of their life that are going well.

IT doesn't compensate for them to think, but the other aspects of there are life that is. So i'm either continuum of general drives that existing us are these intrinsic I realized there a new infinite number of conditions that um could give rise to one or the other, could be hardwired, could be nature, could be nature. But what is the relationship between and um I want to say, arouse or a potential for arouse and aggressive drive and um and these things that we're seeking yeah .

yeah so they too care.

I'd like to start like the first principles of the drives so that the theory of drives came about when when people were observing very closely like human beings and human behavior, individuals, a society's culture, right? And identifying that he, that you can boil a lot of things down to to a drive that we call aggressive, right? There's something to, like, impose myself out there on the world around me, right? IT explains a lot of what people do, right? And then the other identified drive was pleasure, right? Was so enjoyment, even relief of unpleasant this, right? Those like you, you can describe a lot of human behavior and and that to understand, like, what's going on inside of us.

That means that we're here, right? You see that through the lens of aggressive and pleasure drives. And like that's the answer to IT to how we survive.

But I think that is not the answer to IT that if we were just aggressive drives and pleasure drives, there is not a value system around that like somebody whose very industries can build or destroy, right? And we see this in historical figures like being very intelligent and very industrious. This has nothing to do with whether you're building or destroying, right?

So if IT we're just an aggressive drive and a pleasure drive, then we wouldn't be having this conversation, right, because the species would have were not survived, right? So if you believe that, and I believe that, then you look for something else. You say, maybe we look and we ve found two things when there are more things, right? And then we start thinking about learning for learning sake, altruism, things that are not explained right, unless there's a self reference where you feel good doing something for someone else.

Therefore, itself is like there's a lot of generations around that. If you really observe humans use to see a altruism, you see learning for learnings sake, you see people being benign when everything about a situation would say that they could, would or should, under society's rules, not be benie. right?

And then we started to see that there is another drive that, how do you explain that we're here? Yeah aggression, pleasure and generative veness or generative drive the drive to make things Better. That's why we build more than we destroy.

We destroy a lot, right? But we build more than we destroy. Otherwise we couldn't have closed on our backs, let alone have the the technology to sit here and to be able to do this.

So it's the generative drive that, that is most realized in the healthy person. 哎， and the healthy person has the strong general drive. Now as you said, there are other factors in this sort of what you are asking about.

There are probably the natural levels of aggression or pleasure seeking or gender. Is that differ across people because where a product of you know the complexity of our genetic, you know all the complexities of nature and nurture. So we're going na get to a place where where some of us have more, some of us have less, right?

The conclusion that is for all of us, the generative drive being at the home is what what leads us to be to live good lives, right? To live to the things that we aspire to, the peace and contentment, right? So we want the general drive to rule the day, right? Whether a person is study neuroscience to be growing gardens, right? The important is about being generative.

Then then aggression and pleasure can observe the generative drive, right? And then the question you're asking, I I think which is, well, what if there's too much aggressive, too little aggression, right? Or too much pleasure seeking, too little pleasure seeking, that's when we we can see problems, right? And the problems, and lead us back to the pillars to figure out the problems.

So too much aggression ultimately becomes envy, right? Too much aggressive means like, I want, I want, impose myself on on the world around me, more than I can, more than is reasonable, more than I can do without, in pinching upon others, right? That what you end up doing is taking from others, right, too much aggression, IT becomes destructive, right? Maybe a person destroys, tear something down, right, takes from others.

He says the, the, the nasty comment when IT wasn't necessary and everyone feels bad, right? But there's that too much aggression, star IT becomes envy, right? And envy is destructive, right? The same thing with too much pleasure seeking.

If I say, okay, you know, I want my fair share of pleasure, you relief of distress, another pit. If I start, if I rely on that too much, right? Announce ad of aggression eclipsing the general drive. Now it's pleasure eclipsing the general drive, and I want more pleasure and more pleasure and more pleasure.

And how long before I want your pleasure, right? So till then, it's not healthy rate where IT becomes as envious rate IT becomes destructive because now then I become coverless of your pleasure, or if I can't get IT but I could bring you down, then i'll feel Better about myself. That's an envy, right? So too much aggression eclipsing the generative drive, too much of the of pleasure seeking a pleasure drive eclipsing the general drive. And we end up in places of envy, and envy is destructive and now were in trouble.

I've never thought before about the relationship between aggression, pleasure and envy. But as you're describing, IT comes to mind the movie american psycho where Christian bail place this um basically in easy happy in working in finance in new york and and for anyone that seen that is that can only be described as a violent parody of of a op culture and its IT could be and don't let your Young children watch IT because it's very grew so and like very sexual and but the the the aggressive features within the character that bail plays um are immediately apparent in the movie like violent aggression, sexual aggression um seeking money, seeking wealth all the time at uh a narcissi to an obsession with like everything from his skin care routine to his eight pack ABS and like it's it's ridiculous but but also an interesting window into some milder forms of those features that still exist in many people today right um but the envy component starts to reveal itself a little bit later into the movie where um the scene I recalls one around where so hands of a business card and then you hear the narrative in his own mind about how much nicer that guys business card is then his and how we hate him so much he ends up killing the guy in very violent and the stic fashion that right and so in the whole movie is about um this one aspect of culture at that time ability to impose their will on everyone at their wim basically belt just does whatever the holy wants at any point goes returns video types in between and you know and there's so much woven into IT and that is relevant so much that that's woven into IT that's just purely for people, is gna sick at entertainment.

But that I believe is brand eastern, elisa wrote down, you know, is tapping into the the aggression component, the pleasure component, but the envy component is really what resonates as as he come to the end of the movie is like there's no satisfying this guy. He could killer or sleep with as many people as he wants in the movie. And he can have as much wealth as he wants.

He can have entire buildings. In fact, I think he's living in an entire building at some point. He takes over people's abovethis after he kills them. It's it's wild and disgusting but IT really speaks to the extent to which envy is woven into absolutely aggression and pleasure seeking and it's not something that had a really sunk in for me until you describe IT now, because I think for most people they imagine, okay, when somebody has x number of millions, are billions of dollars that theyll reach this place of peace, contentment and delight, right? They'll have enough.

And in the movie wall street, there's that one seen where someone says, you know, what's your number like? At what point is that enough? And the guy says more. That says all sorts of things about the dopa energy c system of reward systems in the brain. But I think IT says a lot more about envy and and just what and what a pit of despair, envy is for everybody involved.

right? right? Look, envy may not be the root of all evil, but envy plus natural disasters, maybe so much evil and destruction arises from envy.

And IT may be that is at the root of all of IT. And we so I appreciate that, right? We so underappreciated why people are destructive, which is why the roots aren't always in trauma.

But but a significant aspect of of where envy arises from can often be trauma, creating a sense of guilt and shame and vulnerability. But but wherever a person may come by IT and it's a larger discussion of ambient where IT may come from is IT drives destruction. And if the aggressive drive is greater than the general drive or if the pleasure drive is greater than the general drive, or if both are greater than the generative drive, IT will drive destruction.

And that destruction, the vast majority of times, if you look deep enough, you find at its roots envy. That envy may arise from guilt and shame within the person. But as soon as IT becomes about another right, I feel guilt and shame inadequacy inside of me, but then I feel envy of those around me that he drives the vast majority of destruction.

Do you think that's what's happening when we see this? Sadly um ever more frequent examples of active shooters and school shootings thinks that's where.

yes, there are there are other people who have life, right? And that person doesn't feel that they do so they want to go and take IT away from them. That's why is as long as we have human tribulation and a lot of guns, this. It's going to happen.

It's a logical conclusion of enough people being in places of despair and how envy can be cultivated within us and then ultimately, how IT lines people that creates such a desire for destruction that then people will take life away from others, and often enough to people will sometimes take their own life, which which I think really brings to the forefront, like that person doesn't feel that they have a life certain ly, not a life worth preserving. So they are then going to take the lives of others. And I think we are seeing that is a stark a portrait of where envy can lead. I think as we can find on a one person basis, we we can look at wars and their destruction on a societal basis. But I think that's that's the ultimate in understanding where and we can drive a person.

What about the other end of the spectrum when aggression in pleasure seeking or too low?

The other side of the spectrum is demoralization. And so the matter, very, very low aggressions, so low self assertion, low agency, that the there comes a place where that the person is not then imposing themselves or believing that they can in, in, in much of any way on the outside world. And that creates a sense of isolation, understandably, right, a sense of powerlessness and vulnerability and isolation.

And that then becomes demoralizing, which is not the same as depression. I mean, you know we know depression is is there's a neurochemical imbaLance, right? Whether that imbaLance came purely biological or or came psychologically or because of external events, there is a neutral ical imbaLance. You know here we're not talking about an illness state as identified by modern psychology.

There's not a number in the in the book of the diagnosis that goes along with with being demoralized, right? But why? Because it's a state that humans can be in and too low of an aggressive drive, right? And all the things that come of that, it's isolating and it's demoralizing.

The same with too low of a of a pleasure drive. So an example that may be reliable IT is to some people is knowing someone who who who has had a couple of really bad break ups and and then so i'm not you know what i'm done with that is no more roman. I'm i'm going to be single wait.

And you know like that person has a driving them like there an interconnected person like they they want roman. These are things they're important to them. They they make a decision.

I'm not going to have that in my, in my life, but what would be called in some cr dynamic senses, inviting death into life, a little bit of death by by wearing off something that that the person has a drive to us, by the pleasure, drive of companionship and of romance, right? That that then becomes demoralizing as well. So sure, those things demoralization can predispose to depression. But demoralization is a thing in enough itself, is where then there's a sense of hopelessness, there's a sense of the goodness stand is inaccessible anymore. And that's the other side of envy.

Can low levels aggression and the resulting demoralization be coupled with high levels of seeking? So i'm thinking about the person that um is a very overweight, clearly um headed for health issues if they don't already have them and no perhaps would like to remove that weight, would like to feel more vigorous, doesn't want type two diabetes and an early death, but at some level they given up.

But because that the pleasure of eating is something they really enjoy, they really love IT. And yet IT has a component to IT in their life where they either sell suit with IT or they're just trying to hit baseline levels of satisfaction tion with IT. And and um they allow themselves to effectively be set tary.

And and then the other source of trouble started to show up, you know sleep happening from caring excessive weight and then they're feeling tired during the day. And then who can exercise when they're too tired when you got to work and maintain other life demands? And you kind of see where this could rise and and makes perfect sense.

You also see where um if there were just a little bit more aggression, IT could all be turned around but they don't have IT. So is the scenario described something that you've seen clinically? I certainly observe IT in my non clinical stance out there in the world a lot.

right? I think the the most important thing you pointing out is that aggression and pleasure on the high end, right, we know can trump the generative drive, right, but that this can also happen on the low end, right? So you're describing the situation. This is a great example, but but is not uncommon in the world around.

So the aggression, meaning the fuel, to put oneself out there in the world, right? To utilize the sense of agency, right? So this is going to a person who is low agency, right? The aggressive drive IT has as little fuel than to give this of agency.

It's further square by neg negative sense of self and negative self talk. Now you find where the aggressive drive is is too low. And too low can also trump the general drive, right? Because in that person can take care of themselves.

The general drive would say there's a lot of life to live and there can be great things in life and take Better of care yourself. And by the way, you like people that you love and people that love you or there is not that there's an animal that regarding you love, right? So so the general drivers is saying that, right? But it's not winning the day because the aggression or aggression is one word we could put in that drive because called IT an assertion drive, we called an agency drive.

But that's we know we're using agency in a different way, but that thing is too low. So IT wins out over the general drive. And then in the example you gave, it's not surprising that the pleasure drive goes the other way.

Maybe there's a predisposition to that genetically. Maybe it's just reinforced because a person in that place could say, well, think what the the self conception would be, right? I'm in this terrible place, you know, means a terrible person.

I can make myself Better, or i'm not good enough to get Better. No one cares about me. I can't make anything right. So therefore, like I I don't matter, is no reason to take care of myself.

So why would I not do if I eat that one thing that I enjoy and IT gives me pleasure, even IT give me pleasure for two minutes and i'll need another one like in sense. So why? Because I don't feel that i'm worth preserving with that I can preserve myself.

There's a nihilism to IT that then kind of make IT make sense to overindulge the pleasure drive, whether it's whether it's biologically pretty. Disposal one is just arriving there. But the the reason all that is bad is because the aggressive drive is too low. And in fact, it's low enough that it's outwit the general drive and the pleasure is going to come to know one place or another if it's also really low.

The person does not much of anything in ways away, which tragically happens a lot in our society, right? Or if the pleasure drive is high, maybe that person over indoors and things that provide to turn gratification, and then that causes a different set of problems. But but what's deterministic there is whether whether aggression or certain, again, that we get a different words to that drive.

But what we've been calling the aggressive drive and the pleasure drive are they is one or the other or both high enough to trump the general drive or low enough to tempt the general drive. And and I think all problems that we see, like everything fits into this model, because IT honnor what we know, right? IT honors what we know about human behavior and insightful to human behavior over hundreds of years, over thousands of years, like the wisdom that remains forward. And IT honnor the science. And that's why IT fits together, because I think IT honors who we are as what are species is what we are um and you know what it's like, what life is like as as we trying engage with .

that yeah i've in cases of demoralized people where they simply disappear, they they high, they isolate, they slow down.

They take terrible care of their health and you know sadly i've known several people like this in my lifetime one of whom killed themselves that the other um just has an immense number of health problems related to over eating and um in activity and and knows IT and talks about IT in any but nothing seems to change despite multiple interventions from a caring standpoint from friends at sea i've also seen examples of people who are demoralized to seem to band with other demoralized people. Sort try to we calibrate the standard that they feel oppresses them, you know that. And this isn't necessarily just in the realm m of a physical fitness.

This is also in the alm of like, school demand. I went to a very demanding high school, as talk about before in a couple of podcast. I barely finished high school.

I was not an attentive student, was my aggressive and pleasure drives went into non academic endeavors. And I regret that I had so much making up of of learning to do by time. I unfortunately got to college eventually caught up.

But um my experience of high school was that there were these you know kids scoring perfectly on the S A T in the early admission, harvard in early admission, a yl and all these places. And then there was you know a distribution in the middle. And then there was a collection of of kids who were not doing well, knew they weren't doing well and kind of banded together around the idea of not doing well.

I didn't consider myself part of that group because I Frankly win there that often and and um I was focused on other things as I mentioned. But but what came of that group was actually quite tragic, not just for them but for a lot of other people. They uh eventually engaged IT wasn't a school shooting types scenario, but they eventually set off explosives and on the school campuses was after they graduated. Um I don't know where they are nowaday, but things did not go well for them and they um exerted a lot of destruction or to other people around them. But before they did that there was this kind of abandon together around there the fact that they didn't fit in that and they weren't bullied, as I recall. I could be wrong about this, but i've seen this another forms too like you know if if you can't meet the standard, band up with other people and change the standard and then you don't feel as demoralize perhaps um I can understand I can realize why this would be a reasonable approach but um i'm seeing this more and more um i'm also seeing by the way you know the other end of the spectrum. People are overly aggressive and pleasure seeking and and things that sort but for for the moment i'd like your thoughts on you know how demoralization can split off into different expressions depending on how um people feel and who else they're relating to.

Yeah yeah I think the place I would start IT is to say our society rushes headlong forward in a way that causes our society to travel. People who are vulnerable and vulnerable people are demoralized people. Demoralized people are vulnerable.

People in our society often tramples them, and then they're not here with us any longer. And that is tragic. But at times they don't get trample, they get cast aside.

They they are injured, right? And cast, decide. And from that place, tragic things happen, right? People then stay isolated. I think it's a tragedy that we don't. All band together and go door to door right to like seek people who who aren't coming at the doors right you know in the sense of like we let people be so so isolated and and often times that's that's the tragic end of someone's story right um but sometimes people do engage right either demoralize but they can engage in in ways that involve in in a filter of defense so sometimes people who demoralized can affiliate. They can ban together in in ways as I think you are eluding to that can that can make things Better.

So if if people are demoralize because, say, there are a group in society that that is chronically very mistreated, right, then IT can be very powerful to band together, both because there's what's called an affiliate defense that if I feel bad about myself, about something and i'm alone, it's highly like continue feeling bad about myself about that thing, right? But if you feel Better about yourself, about the same thing and then work together, right? We help each other feel Better.

We don't feel so lonely. We don't alone, and we don't feel so isolated. We don't feel so ashamed, right? So in a few of defense can help people to say where is acting like i'm that there's nothing wrong with me and i'm not going to take this line down as something right and then and to make assertions that create Better rights in the world around us. So, so very good things can happen from from affiliation in the context of demoralization.

But very bad things can happen to, right, because people can also affiliate around things that are very destructive and hateful of society. And I would like to be destructive and i'm alone. Okay, I could do destructive things alone.

But if I ban together with a couple other people who feel that way now i'm in power to feel that way, right? Instead, maybe I feel that way and there's racism or prejudice. I don't feel like I I can say that right.

But then when it's permissive, right, because other people are are in the same place, then people can accentuate the the hatred within within them. So affiliation is very, very powerful. And part of society rushing so headlong forward and either tramping or marginalizing people is that we then don't pay attention or not enough attention to what happens with the affiliates groups.

right? How do you guide people towards toys being able to filiation in ways that are productive? How do you give them routes of being productive? right? How do you try and protect against the ways that affiloir can lead to destructive behavior? So I think a lot of this is these are the natural things that happened with in us. But a lot of what we're talking about now get impacted a lot by society and society standards, which we, of course, all together determined, right and arise from us. But they they start to sort of transcend because is now people interacting with a whole social system going .

back to the other end of the spectrum, access aggression, in particular in a conversation with somebody recently very successful, like beyond most people's comprehension of successful, financially successful, and seems to just set cheat off their goals one one box at a time from go.

But who described his underlying psychology in emotional state as one in which much of what he does on a data day basis is driven by aggression in fact, he a volunteered anna ic ote about the fact that um he hates early morning meetings on zoom but he shows up them as sort of a like an F U toward somebody that might not even beyond the meeting and and so there's a friction point for him that allows him to engage in a way that he wouldn't otherwise be able to engage any he channels that towards productivity. And clearly it's worked for him. You know I don't know if he's done this sort of intra cof uh deep dive I imagine know through the structure, self and function herself, but know what are we to make of of that sort of example?

I mean, I like the idea that if someone has a strong, aggressive drive, that they would channel IT toward good. I mean, I have no reason to think this person's doing anything but good in the world for themselves and others. They are certainly not harming anyone, at least not to my knowledge. But that seems like got a rough place to live. For me, that seems like a rough place to live.

And at the same time, i'll offer a very brief, antic dote that know at one point in my career, namely when I was a postdoc, I was in a position by virtue, having left a laboratory in the nature, the field at the time where the work I wanted to do was directly pitted against the work of another very powerful laboratory, except that I was alone, postdoc, working in a laboratory essentially on my own, on this problem. And I remember going to my post store advisor, the late man barras, and saying, you know, I think I might just move to a different problem because I don't really want to go up against this alive. And he said, this is the best I can capture.

Benn's voices that they're absolutely not like. There is no way you love the scoff. You have to do IT because you love IT. And he kept telling how much I love IT and he reminded me that indeed I did love the questions and once I was able to tap back into the love for in the curiosity around the questions, I was able to push aside the the concerns enough that we did well um in publishing certain papers they did well but those five years Frankly were a lot less pleasure for than they could have been I think because much of the script in my head was that I was in friction with this like at least in my mind, this oppressive force IT was IT was purely competitive and I truly believe that we can be at in our most creative state when we are competing with someone else. Bike definition because then you you're creating against a standard as opposed to raw creation. So um in both cases, a lot of aggressive drive, Frankly, I have some of that and I had that um but a desire for revenge, uh a component of friction mixed you know or integrated with this aggressive drive like this picture, like even as I describe IT as you know, causing the release of a world but of a general, it's not a comfortable state.

It's IT can't be a state of happiness, right? So as you said, people can do good in the world. They can do not good in the world.

But when I make a value judged about what the person is doing, because that's not what the question is about, right? Like how are they feeling? How are they doing? right? What's going on inside of them, right? And that can be happy, right? That can be happy because if if if you're built to be pretty good at competition, right, so you can size up or the factors know you can strategize, right? So the prison is built to be really good at competition, then you know that sounds pretty good.

To make everything a competition, right, because you have the highest winning percent is right. And that's that's good to achieve some end, right? That doesn't have any feeling intrinsically associated with IT, right? And if all you're doing is a series of competitions and what you're doing then is winning, right? And like winning is something like the winning is I want I beat you, what whatever that is like that that can be part of happiness, but IT doesn't have to be right.

That's not happiness, right? So so yes, that kind of i'm really built to compete well and i'm gona just see a series of competitions in in front of me that's for expedient forward progress, right? That's a very effective. But again, expedient forward progress is nothing to do with peace, contentment, delay, like it's not you know, IT isn't anything to do with that nor doesn't anything to do with doing good or bad, right? And I think the example you gave in your own in your careers, like it's such a good example, right?

Because now if you think about IT, when the way that you are sort of framing IT inside is like there's a question i'm asking, there's a question they're asking, right? And there's a competition, right? Nothing has to be to to to compete, right? So so there's almost an automatics ity right that like deciding the same thing. Maybe you know they feel competitive or certain .

people there too they were were in are definitely competitive. They know who they are. They're extremely and very successful.

okay. So then so then you will got them in a competition now again. But you never decided to be in a competition, right? But but automatically, right. I means interesting way to understand you're acting as if you're in a competition.

You I don't want this competition right because like they're bigger than me, is can be unpleasant, is gonna away from really thinking about what you want to do, right? Is going to make IT harder to do a to do the job you want to do, right? Because they're embroiled in, you know, something that, you know, there has aggression behind IT, right? So so you choose, no, I don't I choose not to do that, right? And then then barris reframes IT to the truth and says this is this is not a competition because you're not choosing to compete, right? What has been pointed out, what was important to you was the questions, right? So it's like converses have been reminding is not through the aggressive drive.

Look at IT through the generative drive. That's what wins out in you, right? And then you can apply .

yourself to IT yeah and bless him for doing that because from that point forward, I i've made my firm mission to always do things from a place of what I was think about as delight, curiosity, delight that the things that give me energy and that give me more energy from doing them. Um IT wasn't a coincident. I believed that in there was five years when I was Operating from a mix of general drive and the the competition would then resurface and I couldn't t hold constant that I was absolutely exhausted by the end of that phase. I just in a way that sucked a lot of the pleasure out of IT, I still derive some pleasure, but then, as I mentioned, fortunately, I was able to pivot back to doing things out of love, you know, and and getting back to a peace, contentment and especially delight, right?

And I absolutely make a value judgement about that, right, that what you did is Better, right? So what if you what if you were different? So think about, if we talk about IT through this accurate lines, what if you were different at that time and the aggressive driving you was greater than the general driving you, right?

We should be an unhealthy state to be in. puts. So you were in that on healthy state, then you probably would have still done what you did, but you would have done IT through the lens of aggression.

Like i'm going to get that right now. You're competitive with them there. There's anger in you. There's there's aggression, right? That you you're in acting in fantasy is know you're thinking about them and how you onna win like all sorts of things go on inside us.

And I would say there is no way on earth you could have done the science as well as you did, right? IT couldn't be because all that stuff is distracting, right? That kind of negative. We affect pools for energy and time from you.

And also, what seeds would you have planted in the the microcosm that you're Operating? right? More, more competition, right? More competitive, more badness, right? So let's look at what you did do, right? Because your healthier this particular question about this particular thing, we know for sure, because you're generative drive eclipses the aggressive drive, then you set yourself to the work in a way that's gonna be more effective, right? Your brain isn't clouded.

You're not wasting energy know plotting some revenge. You're plotted what you're going to do if they come to take something from your love and whatever IT is you know like you're not living in any of that. So you're going to do a Better job at what you're what's so important to you to do and what seeds are you doing that, right?

You're sowing seeds of collaboration, right? And even then, if someone could say, well, what is even that matter, right? So he doesn't matter because what you're doing, then we just fall for the math of IT, right, is contributing to understanding that, contributing to human health, right? And the Better understanding we have a human health, the more people stay alive and the more people say healthy, which could mean any one of us, just like any one of us, could be the vulnerable person that society tramps are cash IDE.

We all have IT enough to be that. We have been added stages of our lives, right? We also all have IT in us to be the opposite of that.

We have IT in us to be generation. We have IT in us to make good. We have IT in us to contribute to health, to survival.

And that I place value judgment upon is why doing good is Better than doing bad, why creating is Better than destroying, and why ultimately, is the generative drive that has to trump t the other drives. And when IT does, we're happy. We're healthy.

We make the world a Better place. We lie with and are refused with the gratitude and agency innis are fully active and were a used with peace, contentment to delight. As you said, that the place to be from that place, we get this thing that we want, and we help to make the world a Better place, which helps us to keep the thing we want.

IT sounds so simple because, as you pointed out, the manifestations of looking at the right things and doing the right things are so simple. Yes, right? It's a list really.

And again, we have A P, D, F. That includes this, listen and the structure of of the pillars and how they flow up to this. But ultimately, it's peace, contentment and delight, you know, undergraded by agency and gratitude as active terms. I'm very simple at some level and yet for many people, including myself, at certain times in life, the the access or or a lack of aggressive drive or access or lack of pleasure drive can interfere with people's ability to access these these simple but um incredibly powerful being states because it's nature .

and nurture, right? So you might be built with a uh a greater or lesser the amount of one drive. And I am right, because we've had life experience that creates a delta around that, right?

So so you say, okay, we're built with different amounts of all these drives. Yes, yes, we are. But we also have control right through our decisions to how we handle our lives, to modulate them.

So that makes sense. So because I thought we the drivers with the drive is and that varies across people know there's a range the drivers in, and that range can be very bright. People can do all sorts of things to cultivate, to cultivate, the Better we all can, right?

So if we look at IT as an unlimited upside, right, then what what we see is I want to know where they add me now, right? What's going on inside of me? What are all those other factors, right? Because I want to to cultivate the good.

I want to cultivate that general drive, and I want to make sure the aggression in the pleasure aren't out to baLance one way or another like we can actively look at that and manage IT. And I think that looks so what we're striving for because there's nothing here that we don't have some control over right in. The higher we get up right, the simpler IT gets.

the more we have control over IT. And for people who feel like the the ideals that were providing a road map toward are not accessible for whatever reason, may be feeling little bit were a lot demoralized, overly aggressive and not ending up where they want to go or ending up where they want to go, and not experiencing deep satisfaction, peace, contentment and delight.

Where should they look in this framework that includes these pillars at the deep levels of structure of self, function of self, that you um give rise to empowerment, humidity, agents, see gratitude, peace, contented to let you if someone should find themselves unmotivated or or stuck, you know, metaphorically speaking, staring out the window into the garden. That could be in that they want so very much but they're not creating again, that should translate whatever domain of life you you're seeking or not even in touch with what you really want. Infinitely confused about what to do, relationship, school, work, life, you know and and thinking about all the oppressive forces in the world like the political cases and that, you know pandemic ics and lockdowns and like and all the stuff and all the things that are wing down on us.

So what should that person in otherwise, what should we all do? At that moment, you stop. And what?

Each pillar has five covers, look in all five and follow the clues that you find there at the answer.

So go back to structure of self, function of self, ask questions about and engaging practices that bring about more self awareness, practices that draw attention to what silent for us. Ask ourselves, you know, what am I thinking about internally? What is my internal script? what? What am I focusing on externally? You am I spending all day on twitter looking at accounts that I know I hate because IT activate something in me.

It's I might have revealed something about myself. I'm just getting that's not my my behavior, but I see a lot of other people doing IT. What are my behavioral choices? You know what could bring about more hopefulness and and strivings have that right now.

There's so much of this I say one could do on one down, right? Because we can think about ourselves and we can learn things. We say, I don't really know that much about defense mechanisms, okay? Like we can read about IT, really.

We can do a lot of this on our own, and we can get so much from talking other people, you know, people in our lives who are closed to us. We love us, right? We can talk with them about what's going on inside of us, right? And that is such an amazing mechanism of learning.

And they're also professional resources. I mean, like good therapy he should encompass. Like this should be what it's doing, right? IT might come out if you one lands or another lands.

And no course, every everybody's different than we can mean different modalities, but ultimately be that's what good therapy is doing, right? It's looking at all ten of those covers and it's same. Where's the issue? Let's follow the clues.

That is a spirit inquiry, right? Whether we're doing IT on our own or we're doing IT with other people in our personal lives, we're doing IT with someone professionally. It's a spirit inquiry to follow the clues because if we follow the clues, there are answers, right? And if we have the answers, then we can bring things into Better alignment and then we're in a Better place.

Those pills are more stable and we can build on top of them what we want to build on top of them. And the drives come Better into line that that we can do that. And that can be an iterative process of know if we we take some Better state of mind and like life is Better and like we're happy, like this happens to people, there's a lot of contentment in peace.

And if things are going well and now something isn't as much, go back and look again, right? It's it's a process we can use over and over because IT works, because IT fits with the truth in the realities as we have understood. Learn them in our education. The so these are learning about humans that across hundreds of years .

tells us this IT makes very good sense to me in the way that you have mapped IT out for us so much sense in fact, that just struck by how divergent IT is from what I think most people think of when they think of therapy or the some of the risks of going to a psychiatrist um which I think it's only fair to consider in particular the way that um least from my outside non clinical understanding um these sorts of situations of high levels of demoralization or excessive aggression or just people not being in the place are being able to exert their their um their actions in the world the way they want or not get the results they want is you'll start asking questions like, you know maybe have a chemical imbaLance.

Oh, maybe we'll go to a clinic, maybe a cognitive of behavioral therapies or or psychist and more often than not, that seems they'll get, you know, prescription for x number of milligrams of some such erga agonis or diploma gic agony and IT, of course, as a neurobiologist. I know apple laud the exploration of underlying brain mechanisms and the involvement of no modulators like dopamine and are toned, but what you're describing today is is very different. I I think then what most people are expect if they go to the typical psychiatrist or typical psychologist, which is part of the reason, were having this conversation.

But i'd love your thoughts on that um and I don't want to make this about me. I only offer this anette is a way to round out a little bit of the earlier discussion. I'll I never shared this publicly but when I was a postdoc and going through that very hard phase of competition that I didn't want and having a hard time staying in touch with that, and there were some other developmental things starting to resurface just by virtue of moving back to the town.

I grew up and said, a there I recall getting to the stairway of the building I was working in. The time, which is the same one where my laboratory exists now actually, and realizing I I can go up the stairway, i've always been reasonably fit and just being so exhausted and then driving home that day on two eighty and thinking like none is matters. Like, what am I doing? Like, none of this matters.

I could have been exhausted. I don't know what I was, but what that ultimately resulted was me talking to a psychiatrist who gave me a low dose of a, of a, of a ceremony. Gic anti depression.

I took that logo so saterlee c anti depression overcall, which one IT was? Maybe was the telegram with that make sense? And spent that evening staring at my plate of thy noodles for about two hours.

IT hit me really hard and and I hate IT that feeling that just stop taking the drug now i'm not this is no knock on satel pram or the use of service and educations in the proper context. They've save lives of problematic too. But I just know that wasn't the out that eventually got me out of IT IT.

IT was mainly talk therapy and self care but um I just offered that because you even as a new biology, I perhaps especially as a neurobiologist like that okay, here's the solution, right? It's going to shift some internal modulator system and i'm a feel OK about the situation I mean and then goods IT didn't work even for a short while because the while I didn't do all the things that you're describing here of expLoring the function of self because now it's ever laid this out for me. I um I took the out of of talk therapy which I I find immensely beneficial um takes time but immense facial um so what are your thoughts on the current strategy for diagnosis where they succeed, where they fall short and in the role of medication in navigating this you know simple and yet plex landscape?

We are so dramatically over reductionist, you is almost to the point of believable, right? Mean, think about getting a medicine, getting some saves, satio pram because of what happened, right? IT can't possibly work right now.

Maybe a judiciously chosen medicine could provide a little more distress tolerance, and you could sort of think about IT more and you could find your way through IT. But clearly, there was an issue of self, right? Like you're in a situation that was high stress.

And where we're going to have to have this competition or not is that can be good for you. And no, you don't want that, but can you avoid IT like there's something going on that makes you not be able to walk up those stairs, right? So i'm not criticised.

I don't with the person what kind of conversation you had about IT with them with the idea that a pill will fix that is like that insane right now. Medicines can help smooth the way. So so let's say you you initially went in the first time you see someone and they say that we've to talk about this that was going on in your life.

And you know because Normally you can walk upstairs and go to work, right? Why can't you now like we need to think about that. We need talk about that. Let's say you start doing that and you're having a lot of trouble with IT.

Uh, where are you having really high levels of anxious? We may look at medicine, can kind of take the temperature down a little bit, no, give you a little more distress hance. And then, you know, we can you can think about IT Better inside of you, and we can talk about IT Better.

But it's medicine in the service of understanding. Now sometimes medicines are doing things like medicines that but prevent bipolar episodes, right? Like they're doing something that is purely biological.

But we use so many medicine for things that are not biological or psychological. But we we are so over reductiones that we could actually over reduce the problem that you said, right, like a clear, well, that's fascinating, right? Like how many kinds of you gone up those stars and now you can it's so interesting.

The idea, like I just give you appeal, I mean, IT IT really makes no sense. But if we're over reduction is enough. You could see how that the logical end point of an illogical process, right? And give me another example.

And this is really a true story of A A woman who Young woman comes into the emergency room and he says he can't sleep, and you know, he looks anxious and he feels very, very anxious by her description, and is why SHE can't sleep in, and SHE gets sleeping medicine and SHE goes home, and then SHE comes back. He comes back couple of days later, and she's very, very anxious and SHE can't sleep and he looks like he did before, like nothing seems to be different and isn't got and any sleep. But also the doctor in charge gives her a higher dose of the sleeping medicine.

Then he goes home and then SHE comes back yet again and nothing is any different. She's still not sleeping. She's still anxious.

And then the doctor concludes that she's drug seeking because he wants more and more of the sleeping medicine. Okay, who's actually going on was she's getting hurt at home. She's terrified to go home.

Of course, he couldn't sleep, right? Like bad things were happening, right? But no one asked the question, right? They thought he cannot sleep, will give sleeping medicine instead of asking why, right? And then he gets home to send home.

And when the medicine doesn't work, well, now there's something wrong with her, right? And a youth with that label on her now she's drug seeking right, then she's not going to a get any help, right? So i'm not against medicines. I mean, I I use cycle from my college is part of my practice. And I think from a from a biological based perspective about many things, but we have to know what something is the answer for and what I think is not the answer for.

And in in the overly reduction this world of throop in in healthcare systems, people are even being trained these days that don't know any different, right? I am trying to be overly critical of practitioners this often practice ans are working in impossible situations where the goal is through through put. And that's more efficient in the short term, right? It's more efficient today, right? But it's of course not good in anything but the today term and is interesting because it's never good for the person even today.

It's like never good for the people in IT, right? But but often these decisions are being made based upon business and money. And I I understand business and money and the capital is i'm interested in these things.

But the way that we have let things get the business and money with a short cited the short term perspective, then bonds with the over reductionist ways that we approach medicine. And then we have these bizarre things happen and these kind of bizarre things and lives, right, to change the courses of lives. And unfortunately, you, you know, you got you got what you needed and you figured things out.

But if you hadn't, what do you have the career you have? Like, we don't know, right? If if someone else hadn't realize, like let's talk to that woman and see what's going on, the chip survived.

I mean, we don't know the point of that is like a lots of bad things happen, right? This we're rolling the days too many times with too many people and IT doesn't have to be that way in the way that we're doing. IT now is not only inefficient financially, right? The thing that we seem to be caring about most IT leads to bad outcomes, and IT also makes no sense. We're looking at IT through the sort of bizarre lens then we may find within us the strength to change that and to change IT in way that actually fits the science and fits the common sense.

I have to imagine that both for people who require medication in order to cope, in order to manage their way through these questions about function of self and how they are in the world, what they're paying attention to, eat a end for people who don't require medication to do this exploration, that this very same exploration is the road map feeling, yes, agency, gratitude, peace, contentment and the .

light medicines may have a role. So if, for example, we go look at the pillars and things, you're not going so well. And and you see that whenever that person has a bipolar romanic episode, while things get really, really damaged and very, very hard, that they can't recover from that in the way they want to, and we say, let's, we're going to use medicine to help this right now.

Of course, there are other things to use, behavioral changes, for example, right? But, but there is a clear biological role, just like we use medicine to stop seizure, right? But people also have to make sure that not super sleep deprive, there's another part to a two.

We can use medicine to prevent bipolar episodes, but there's another part of self care involved. But it's it's a role of medicine, right? Just as if anxiety levels aren't coming down too much, say, for the person to get at the trauma, right? They know there's a trauma we've talked around IT, you know for twenty years.

They know it's been impacting them. They're not sure how it's hard to go there. They're with a trusted therapies, but it's still trying to put words to IT.

And now, you know there maybe having a panic attack, right? anything? Okay, let's we can use medicines to take the temperature down to to sort of e ease that person's way forward so that they can understand something right that then provides a resolution in that part of the pillar. And then the other things are set in a Better place. So so the biological aspect know specifically here we're talking about medicines has its place, but the idea that medicines are a substitute for understanding makes no sense.

Will you've provided us an incredible framework? Thank you. This framework really speaks to all of us, right? You know that the components that make us who we are know that put IT the structure of the self, you know, everything from the Young, conscious mind and conscious mind. Defensive mechanism, m, character structure, self and the functions of self, these components of self awareness, defense mechanisms, reaching up from that iceberg under the water, what we pay attention to, our behaviours, and hopefully our strivings and sense of hope, and help those two pillars flow up into empowerment, humility, agency and gratitude, again, as action terms, as active terms, and eventually to peace, contentment and delight in this notion of general drive, as well as some of the pitfalls and and chAllenges that can pull down on general drive, or a clue general drive. And you very clearly point to us to where we should all look in terms of understanding ourselves Better and where we could do Better and be Better in the world because this is a series we have the wonderful opportunity to um have you tell us even more about how the structure plays out? Both in terms of its healthy expression and in terms of its unhealthy expression.

You in different pathological conditions that you know most of us are familiar with, at least in name and and i'm sure you're going to tell us more about what the what the real are both under things and expressions of things like nursey ism, you know extreme and mild form um you know anxiety and its extremely mild forms and also some of the a the names and diagnosis that were more familiar with hearing about such as you know bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive things of that sort um but that all relate back to and and really are nested in the this structure and function of self and where you can all go so um first of all, I want to say and thank you really in immense thank you for for so long for defining the structure and making IT so clear to to me and everybody else in and as you said, IT has its complexity there. In fact immense complexity down there at the bottom but that flows up from complex to very simple ideals and in a row map to get there. And again, the P.

D efforts available to people as as a link in the shown out captions, should they want to see this individual form. I also want to thank you for assembling the structure, not just as a tutorial, but because at least of my knowledge, no such structure or some mary of these structures exist and anywhere in the world, and certainly not in any form that the non clinical and not, you know, highly trained psychiatrist could ever access to understand. So a this is both in immense resource and immense gift to us all. Thank you so very much.

You are so welcome and thank you for having me here, which is a gift .

um to be continued in the next episode. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for this first episode of our series on mental health with dr. R. R. Paul county, and encourage you to keep an eye out for the second episode in the series, which is going to be about how to improve your mental health.

I'll just remind you that all episode of the huberman lab podcast can be access completely, zero costs and in all format s by going to huberman lab dot com. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our youtube channel. That's a horrific zero cost way to support us.

In addition, please subscribed to the podcast on both spotify and apple and on both spot of hand, apple. You can leave us up to a five star review. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode.

That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me, you're comments about the podcast or guess that you like me to consider hosting on the huberman lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on youtube. I do read all the comments and if you're not ready following me on social media, I am huberman lab on all platforms.

So that instrument twitter linked in threads and facebook, and on all those platforms, I discussed science and science related tools, some of which overlap with the content of the huberman lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content of the huberman and lab podcast. So again, if huberman lab on all social media channels, not on today's episode, but on many previous episodes of the huberman lab podcast, we discuss supplements. While supplements are not necessary for everybody, many people derby tremendous benefit from them for things like enhances sleep, for hormone, on support and for focus.

If you like to see the supplements discussed on the human lab podcast, you can go to live momentous built O U S. So it's live momentous 点 com slash huberman。 If you haven't already subscribe to our news letter, IT is a zero cost newsletter called the neural network newsletter.

And in the neural network newsletter, you get free podcast summaries as well as tall kits. The tool kits are brief PDF that listed off the specific science back protocols for things like improving your sleep, improving focus, optimizing dopa amine deliberate old exposure. We have a complete summary of our fitness series.

Again, all available completely zero costs. You simply go to huberman lab, a duck com, go to the menu, scroll down the newsletter and provide your email to sign up. We do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion, which is the first episode in our series about mental health with doctor paul county. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.