Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
What's up, everybody? Welcome back to The Honest Drink. I'm Justin. You can always reach us at thehonestdrink at gmail.com. And if you've been enjoying this podcast, go ahead, rate, comment, and subscribe.
Now, our guest today is the head of psychology at the Qinghou Clinic. He works there as the chief psychological counselor and spends his time helping people overcome psychological difficulties, whether it be in their personal or professional life. He frequently has to treat issues like anxiety, depression, social phobia, personality disorders, grief.
work-life balance, and much, much more. He also spends his time giving talks and lectures as well as being an active researcher in the field of psychology. This man is always publishing new articles about relevant modern day issues we all go through. They're very interesting to read.
He was an absolute pleasure to talk to, and I sat back, I mostly just listened, I found what he had to say very interesting, and there's a lot to unpack there. So, without further ado, please welcome David Amerslager. ♪ Just a lucky little girl, I just don't like it ♪
Cheers, David. Cheers. Let's try this. We're drinking the Long Morn Speyside Single Malt Scotch Whiskey, 18 years old.
And double cask matured. Double cask matured, yes. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds good. Cheers. Cheers. Let's see it. Yeah. It's a very complex whiskey, I feel. Yeah.
- Do you drink a lot of whiskeys? - Not that much. - Not that much. What do you usually drink? What's your drink of choice? - Wine. - Wine, okay. - Yeah. - Sounds about right for a psychologist. - Yeah, and that's my French side. - So David, thank you for being here. Thank you for doing this. - My pleasure. - I was actually pretty surprised to learn later on how sought after you were for interviews. From radio to news outlets, they're all seeking you out for interviews. So I was like a little surprised
But then the more I thought about it, the more it really makes sense. Because as I see it, psychology...
woven into the fabric of basically everything we do. Right. I think the definition of psychology is the study of the processes behind human behavior. Is that basically what it's summed up to be? Yeah, but that would be only a behavioral approach to the psychology. Basically, you can approach psychology through different ways, many different ways. And
But there's a whole history behind that. Initially, it originated from philosophy.
And then it became more and more a science. And the method to research psychology has become more and more scientific. Nowadays, it has really been set into the larger environment of natural sciences, which is close to medical sciences. And this is why we talk about mental health care as well as we speak about physical health care.
So there's a whole history behind psychology. And I would say the science itself has become more and more scientific. Now, other people feel uncomfortable with that and they want to see a little bit more spirituality to these things or other approaches, which is called holistic approaches that really encompass all aspects of our existence, of our thoughts and so on. So I would say it's a very interesting science. As you say, for me, it's
the science that really puts, I would say, the human into the center of everything. And from there, you can spawn into biology, into philosophy, into spirituality, into many different aspects of what it is to be actually a human being. That's really interesting. So what's the difference between psychology and psychiatry?
So psychiatry is a purely medical science. A psychiatrist would be a medical doctor, and he would have a very good knowledge about how your brain works, your chemistry, your body chemistry works. And if you go to see a psychiatrist, that means that he will prescribe you some medication and the treatment will be purely biological.
Whereas psychology, even though there is a biological and a medical understanding, the approach in a healing approach or treatment approach would be a psychotherapy or a psychological counseling, which is a talk, a discussion, an interview. And there we actually try to understand more about the human being itself.
The thing is, our brain, the whole body basically is so complex in every aspect that medical science cannot understand and grasp everything. So like the science has not caught up to the...
By far. The study of it. By far. And whoever tries to explain to you that quantum physics can give you some understanding of the human mind or something like that, that is not true for the moment. Maybe in a very, very complex way, yes. But we are, I don't know, decades, maybe centuries away from actually understanding this. Well, the human mind is really still a frontier that has...
not really been explored, right? Why is that though? Is it just the technology is not there yet? - Well, the thing is, if you think about this, you have about 1 trillion neurons in your brain, in your brain alone. And then you have every one of these neurons have several thousands, even tens of thousands of connections in between each of these neurons.
And in addition to that, each one of these connections is secreting up to 200 neurotransmitters. The neurotransmitters are substances that give a certain information. And sometimes you have cocktails of neurotransmitters. So you have actually even the combination of 200 different neurotransmitters that can
act correspondingly. In addition to that, you have hormones. You have several dozens of hormones that actually are also secreted by glands inside of your body and create a different kind of body chemistry. So this is just an example of how complicated everything gets
And right now, we don't have the technical means to understand these things. Right now, we have different ways, EEGs or something like that, that actually can measure brain activity. So whenever you're doing certain tasks, what kind of area in your brain lights up
But even that is very complicated because sometimes, let's say you have a mathematical equation that you're solving. And then suddenly, okay, usually it's your prefrontal cortex that will light up a little bit and so on. But then suddenly something else happens and boom, the whole brain activity goes into another side because suddenly you are thinking about something else.
So it's very difficult to really measure what is happening right now and why is that happening in your body. And this is also why medication that the psychiatrist is giving you is a little bit dangerous actually because we don't have medication that actually heals mental health disorders.
they can help you feeling better. They're only attacking the symptoms, right? Exactly. They're only attacking the symptoms. It's basically like if you have bad eyes and you're wearing glasses. The glasses help you to see better, but they're not actually healing your eyes, right? And the problem is because it's an invasive means of treatment. It's a medication that you're taking. There will be side effects.
For example, antidepressants, they will have a tendency to have a lot of side effects, but more precisely, they will numb all your feelings. So basically, you will feel less depressed, but at the same time, you will become addicted to them. And I have actually a lot of people having addiction to their antidepressants, their sleeping pills and stuff like this. But on the other side, it also numbs your feelings. So it's...
It prevents you from feeling very bad, but it also prevents you from feeling very, very happy. So that is not really the life that you want, right? And the only way that you can really actually do something in order to feel better is working on yourself. And that is sometimes a little bit difficult for many people because we want like...
You know, we are in a consumeristic society where we just want to pay something and then we just get something easily. Immediate reward. Immediate reward, quick fix. And that's the thing. But basically, with our mental health, this is not something that you can do. You really have to face your own demons. You really have to think about yourself, analyze yourself, introspect and do the whole painful work to learn, to grow, to develop yourself and to think differently.
And not everybody is ready to do that. But very often when people are so desperate that at some point they want to do that, this is almost already too late. Because then we are really in a very bad shape. And then...
We need to have some medication and psychotherapy at the same time. Yeah, you can't just rely on the medicine. You have to change the way you're thinking, the way your cognition is working. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's many different approaches. So this is also the other thing. Be careful when you're talking about psychotherapy. There's more than 200 research and scientific kinds of therapy.
I would say each therapy is a little bit like if you allow me the parallel again to physical health, it's like a pill, you know. You have painkillers, you have aspirin, you have antibiotics and so on. And you don't want to take antibiotics, for example, for a virus because that's not working. So this is why if you have, for example, there's something very popular right now, that's cognitive behavioral therapy.
you can use that very efficiently for certain things, but it might not be so useful for other things. And it depends also on the person. Some people will be more receptive to certain kinds of therapy and, and maybe less receptive to other kinds of therapy. So it's very important that you have, whenever you're seeing a therapist that you talk about these things, that he has also conscious that, um,
maybe he needs to adapt his approach. And if the approach is not working, then maybe you need to change the therapist because maybe he's using an approach that is not. Yeah, I was going to ask you, like, I would think you would have to be equally careful in terms of finding the right therapist, right? Yeah. So how, I mean, because you're an expert in that field, what advice would you give someone looking for a therapist? Like, how do you try to find the right one?
I think it's important that you choose somebody, well, that has some qualifications in that. It doesn't mean that you need to have the most famous super professor in psychology or a world class expert or something like that. Because the thing is, you need somebody who knows what he's doing, obviously.
But on the other side, the thing that is most important is the relationship that you will have with this therapist. It's a bit different with a doctor because the doctor, you see him as an expert and you want his expertise. With a therapist in the healing process, there will be something that is called the therapeutic relationship. There's transference and countertransference. I don't know if some people have heard about these things, but basically what that means is that you will build this relationship
I would say a little emotional engagement, a certain way of being with this therapist. It's a very strong, confidential and trustful relationship that you're building because you will show a very intimate and vulnerable side of you to this therapist. So you need to be very comfortable with that person. And you need to be comfortable enough to...
Yeah, really open up, show the true self and talk sometimes about very intimate things and so on. So I would say it's important that you find somebody that you really feel comfortable with, but also who has the right training and the right qualifications.
Is that part of the reason why psychology, is it considered one of the hard sciences? It's not, right? But is it because that there's so many intangible things
And, you know, it's like there's so many unknowns and that you can't just put on a piece of paper. Like, you know, there's not so much quantifiable data like other sciences. Well, this is a very interesting question because here we come back to what is a science, right? And many times, if you look at what we call hard science, there has been things that have been thought-provided
where we are proven and then in the end we have found that it's more complicated than that. And so I would say psychology is again a little bit
In between these things, what has been tried is to apply to psychology the strict hard science methodology. So whenever, for example, we are researching psychology, there's different research methods. And one of these research methods is quantitative research methodology. And that is really through experimentation, through quantifiable statistics, and
which is imperfect as well. I mean, it's human behavior. So it's very difficult to really assess and measure these things. But I would say the end goal is to get as close as possible to the hard science, to a really logical and quantifiable research method as possible.
So what's your particular view on the more holistic approaches to psychology? I think that...
Just relying on the science is great because the science allows us to have something that we can really, I would say, use and that is measurable and probably universal, relatively universal, knowing that you have cultural aspects, educational aspects, environmental aspects and so on. But so beyond this universal aspect,
The holistic approach is something that will touch the person more intimately. And that's also, for example, talking about cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a relatively scientific approach to psychotherapy.
I would say holistic approaches will make us click sometimes in a different ways. And that's very important because many people have, they're not just like artificial intelligence or robots, right? We have a complex belief system. We have an emotional system.
And some people have a strong spirituality as well, which you have to take into account whenever you are working with these people. So a holistic approach is really something that will encompass everything and will try to really put the person in the center of everything. And when I say this, I mean really the person in all its complexity. Nothing is perfect.
black or white about anybody and and talking i mean the more i study human beings and and and individuals i would say the less you can really say this person is like this this person is like that we are very often prone to being judgmental about people but in the end everything might be right and everything might be wrong because it's just a gradation of different grace mm-hmm
I was looking through some of the articles you had published in the past, and there was one thing you had written that really struck me was that unlike the body, the mental health system has no immune system. There is no immune system for mental health. And I've never really thought about it that way, but why is that though? You don't think there's any defense system for the mind at play?
When it comes to trauma and mental illness?
If there is, I don't know, a big fight, some people will shut up. Some people will actually take the fight and will get angry. Some people will try to rationalize their emotions. Some people will anything, you know, everybody has their own coping stances. And I would say, I mean, actually, this is what it's called. Some coping stances are what is called functional or adaptative. And some others are dysfunctional or maladaptive.
So what does that mean? It means that some, I would say, make us feel better. And some of, I mean, all of them are made in a way that makes us immediately feel better. But some of those actually make us feel better for the long run. And some of those make us feel not better for the long run. So, for example, yes.
Trauma typically is something that happened and you did not understand or that had a very strong emotional impact on you and it kind of gets stuck in your mind and you cannot really get rid of this.
Many people suppress this and just like try to forget about it and whatever. It's not important and so on. But it really comes back all the time. And I have people, the more they actually try to forget this traumatic event, the more it comes back and it really haunts them all their lives. And I think all of us, we have experiences and things that really make us feel bad about our lives.
And that means that this is an issue that is unresolved. And it continuously creates some frustration, some anger. And actually, I mean, sometimes whenever we think about certain events, we actually feel even physically sick. We get suddenly some heartache, some stomachache. We start sweating or something like that. And that's really the physical result of something that is basically psychological.
So what do you see as are the biggest psychological threats in modern society today? - Well, the things that I'm seeing most in my practice
is anxiety first. And this is interesting because I have been talking with people that have many more decades of experience than me. And my colleagues told me that 20 years ago, probably the main problem was depression. So it feels like anxiety is catching up on depression. And we really are in an anxiety triggering society today.
There's many reasons for that uncertainty, complexity or something like that. Another thing, of course, is depression as well. Many people feel depressed, lonely, isolated, misunderstood, lack of control over their lives. Do you think there's a rise in anxiety and depression today versus in past years or past decades?
I'm not sure that there is a rise, but I would say the toughness probably maybe is getting stronger because the thing is, well, okay.
Well, it's difficult to talk about these things because then we have different cultural situations, right? We can talk about the situation in China, but we can talk about the situation in other parts of the world. So I would say it really depends very much on the country and the society, the civilizations and the environment we're talking about. But
I would say modern society is a society that puts us much more into a situation where we are in need because marketing actually and the whole consumeristic society wants to create need and frustration. Basically, the whole business is about having this need. And maybe, actually not maybe, there's some research that shows that, but maybe
You have more and more needs and therefore more and more frustrations, more and more unsatisfied desires. You dream more about what might be possible because you could be a superstar, you could be rich, you could be this. They want to convince you like you're never good enough the way you are. Exactly. And you always need this thing or that thing, this service, that product. Absolutely. To be better. Absolutely. Absolutely. And then also the way we relate to other people has changed.
Something that is very interesting, it's what is called the grant study. It's the longest study that's ever been done, and it's done by the University of Harvard. And they studied people for 75 years. And every year they asked these people, what makes you happy? What is happening in your life, basically?
And they asked 200 poor guys, actually delinquents from Boston, and they asked 200 Harvard graduates. And there was one commonality between all these people. It's the thing that was most important to happiness and to longevity, to a healthy life and so on, was connection with other people.
The relationship, the quality of the relationship that we're building with other people was key to basically everything. It's absolutely impressive how strongly it impacts us. And it doesn't mean that you have to have the best love relationship or that you have to, you know. And it's very interesting because there's nothing materialistic behind this.
this from from rich to poor there is no difference the quality of the the people around you whether that is your your couple your family but also your community your friends even people at work all the people the human beings around you this is what really creates the strength of of your life basically and
And nowadays with social media, with we're chatting, we are talking to many people, we are networking and so on. But the intimacy and the strength of the connection and the trust we give to each other, I'm not sure that this is actually something that is strengthening more and more.
It's like we're human beings, we're social creatures. So we have to, if we have a strong social foundation, whether that's with your partner or your family members or even close friends maybe, that kind of...
That trickles down to kind of everything you do. It strengthens your mental state in almost every area, every aspect. Yes. But a good relationship. It doesn't mean that you just have to be close to other people because sometimes that can be counterproductive. So it's the quality of the relationship, not the quantity of the relationships. Exactly. Exactly.
So for like the younger generation, like the millennials now, growing up in a world where all they know is social media. Like I'm old enough, I'm not sure about you, but I think we're both old enough to have known days without internet. We knew a time without internet, without social media. But now these millennials, they grow up and it's really consuming their time.
their time and their thoughts and their lives in a way. So do you see that as a very dangerous thing going forward?
Well, I'm not qualified to say it's dangerous or not. But what I'm seeing is, yes, it creates a lot of hardship, especially for those engaging massively into this. And there has been studies that showed that, for example, grades and well-being benefits from social media if you're engaged in it moderately.
And that means just like having, you know, using it for your few friends, for a group, for a few groups with your family and, and close relations. But as soon as it really becomes too kind, too time consuming. And that means actually what we are doing, most of us spending maybe several hours, uh,
on social media, on our phone, talking, chatting, posting things and so on, then it becomes actually negative. It negatively impacts our relationship. It negatively even impacts our health because that can even trigger pressure, stress, anxiety. And the interesting thing is that it increases actually a feeling of loneliness and isolation. Yeah.
And even deeper than that, it actually questions our very existence. What do you mean by that? Yeah, I'm coming to that. It's something that actually in existential psychology and existential philosophy, the question here is how do you define yourself? And if I ask you, who are you?
You will tell me a lot of stories about where you're coming from, how you grew up and the studies, maybe your parents, your friends, your whatever, you know, all the things that make up your life and that actually you have in your memory system and that actually in your understanding defines yourself. Now, if we look at this, how do we define ourselves with social media?
How is actually our existence in society defined if we are spending most of our time in social media and we are not actually making all these stories, all these events, all this quality time that we're spending with our friends, with our family, with other people to actually make up these nice stories that define us. See what I mean? And in the end...
It's also a way to lie about yourself because many people post pictures that are photoshopped, improved. If you look at moments on WeChat or whatever, on LinkedIn posts and so on, it looks like everybody's super smart, super good looking, super nice and so on. And is that really you, right? This is how you want to be. So your whole existence is defined by the thing that you post and you want to appear to be.
And in the end, some people make, I mean, pretend to believe you, but actually nobody's really believing each other. So this is also, you know, cutting down the trust because in the end, you can't really trust what you see about the other person on social media. And talking, I mean, before we talked about trust, this actually is a disruption for our trust, I would say. That's very interesting to put it that way. I would agree. Yeah.
I think it creates... I mean, social media clearly has its benefits, but I think it also can create, like what you're saying, a pretty toxic...
Yeah. Right. Where you're not really trusting and everyone, everyone knows the social media game, right? Like when, when you're posting these great moments of your life and these snapshots that are, you're in the best year, you're looking beautiful, you're having the greatest time of your life. Yeah. Like we're all living life. We know what's reality and what's not. And we know that it's not realistic that, you know, every single moment of your life is awesome. Absolutely. But, um,
I say this a lot in other episodes, but I have this idea that kind of going back to what you were saying is we see ourselves and we define ourselves compared to other people. - Very true, yeah. - Right? And it's almost a comparison to other people that kind of defines us. And I said this in a past episode, I'm like, well, what if we were born in a world or a society where there was no one else, it was only you? So there would be no idea of comparison.
Would you still have things like anxiety and depression and, you know, these kind of mental states that are just kind of toxic? Well, the thing is, anxiety itself is related, I would say, to an existential question about our survival.
So, of course, you would have still anxiety and depression if there was nobody else because the fundamental question and the fundamental problem of your life would still not be satisfied. It's how am I going to survive and when am I going to die? How am I going to die? I have an age and stuff like this. However,
You're absolutely right. We mirror ourselves in the eyes of other people, which is actually also a little bit dangerous because and it's beneficial and dangerous at the same time because we can learn from each other. We actually as human beings, we learn all the time from each other. And the reason why we have become so smart is that we engage each other. We enhance each other.
And that's the positive interaction. But whenever that becomes competitive as well, and actually you are more or less destroying the other people because you feel like the other person is a competitor that you need to like get out of the game, that is dangerous. And this is also something that is very interesting. If you really look at brilliant people, they actually kept brilliant people around them.
Somebody absolutely brilliant is not trying to get rid of all the competitors around him.
Because if you're the only good person in the room, you're not getting any better. It's only because you are amongst brilliant people that you are actually getting better. And that's true for everything, for the economy, for companies need strong other competitors because that's the way they actually can get better. And they need strong clients. They need strong suppliers because that's how everybody gets rich. If you have just one company that monopolizes everything, then
They have maybe the most power, but that's not how they get richer in the end, because they are not like a mutual engagement. And that's the very same with people. So if you're the best and the most brilliant person in the room, maybe you're shiny, but then you're not actually learning anything anymore.
Going along with that kind of sentiment, like how, what do you see as the role of psychology in politics then? Like political tensions between countries, like let's say between US and China right now, things like that. Like, what do you see like, like from a psychological perspective, like how, how do you view that? Well, the interesting thing is, the more I study psychology, the less I see nations, and I see only people.
Because in the end, we are all human beings. And we can try to have a trade war, to have nationalistic feeling, patriotic feeling and so on, which, okay, which is something. But in the end, we are all human beings. And something that I found very interesting with this coronavirus epidemic is
which actually shows that the virus knows no nation. There is no difference between Chinese, American, European, French, German, whatever. We are all in the same boat. And whatever ethnicity you are coming from, whatever your age, your whatever, your culture, your religion, we are all exposed to the same dangers. And in the end, this is why I really like going back to fundamental questions because
It's we are all finite in this world. We all have to face death at some point. And there is no difference beyond death, basically. So I would say that the role maybe I don't want to say that there's a role for psychology in politics, because that's also very dangerous. I mean,
I mean, you have a lot of research and historical examples where you can show how politicians can influence masses and manipulate and so on. So that's, I would say, what is called social psychology. But I'm not too much into that kind of thing. And I would say it's also a bit dangerous to see these things. So...
Again, I really see more and more the power and the unicity of human beings. So how do you, like, during this time of the coronavirus, and, you know, everyone's scared, how do you explain then from your perspective, like, a lot of the xenophobia that's going around?
Ideally, I agree with you. You don't see countries. You don't see borders. You don't see boundaries. You see people. And the virus doesn't know any race or doesn't have any prejudices against its victims. But then you see a lot of widespread xenophobia going around.
How do you explain that? You know, xenophobia in general is coming from fear and from misunderstandings, from lack of understanding, actually, and from a certain adversity of the unknown, basically.
So what happened was, for example, there was some xenophobia happening against Chinese people in Western countries when the spread started suddenly. Because people, I would say people without a lot of education, because it's also a matter of education, were
oh, this virus is coming from China. And so all the Chinese people will have it or something like that. There's some very stupid associations and people tend to simplify. People tend to have stereotypes. People tend to have what is called cognitive biases. That means that you're making...
intellectual simplifications of the reality just because it's simpler, it's easier to understand and to accept basically.
So that happened. Now people have been more educated and learned a little bit more. So that is happening less and less. But the interesting thing, I see that now happening also in China a little bit against the Westerners. Because suddenly Chinese people feel like, okay, we did everything we had to do because we were like two months on the lockdown. And now these foreigners come to China and now they infect us. So...
They, well, Chinese people due to foreign us a little bit, what foreign us were doing to Chinese people before, which shows that it's, it's, it's,
It's all about fear and misinformation. I would say it's about badly managed emotions. And it's very important in these cases that we distinguish the problem from the people. And it's very important not to generalize. It's something that I'm always actually...
unsatisfied to see is when we say Chinese people, American people, Western people, Asian, whatever, you know, Asian people, Arabs. And this is so untrue because you cannot put everybody into one category.
Everybody is different. And yes, you have, I would say, uneducated people, bad people or whatever in every kind of population. It's not related to race, to origin, to ethnicity, to whatever. So the problem is all the simplification. And xenophobia is basically about simplification and oversimplification.
The oversimplification thing, does that come from just the way we've evolved to handle information, to handle just all the data that's coming in into our brains every second, right? We have to have a way to filter through it efficiently because we can't go through every single page, every single piece efficiently.
We have to kind of lump things into buckets and generalize, like you're saying, in order to sift through all that data that we're bombarded with. Yeah. What you're talking about is described by what we call actually heuristics and cognitive biases. That's actually mental shortcuts, intellectual shortcuts that we are doing in order to make complex things less complex and understandable. Right.
that's like stereotypes. Uh, if we picture, uh, somebody from a certain country, we will have an image of this guy, um,
I mean, I'm German and French. So whenever I ask you, imagine a French guy, you will see a red wine. A beret or a baguette. A beret, exactly, baguette. And the German guy, yeah, sausages with some beer and so on. So this is the funny side, but it's stereotypes in the end because...
Very few people will actually walk around like that when you go to France or to Germany. So this is stereotypes that we do mentally to make things a little bit easier for us to process intellectually and also emotionally, of course. Now, on the other side, the way that we can actually, I don't know, manage these things is to accept the complexity, right?
and try to see beyond the categories themselves, but try to see the human being that is actually there. And I mean, there's also a lot of research about why these oppositions between nations happen and so on. I mean, we are social beings, human are social beings, and we have a sense of belonging.
So automatically, we try to define a group that we belong. And this is the in-group and out-group logic. So whenever you identify yourself as, I don't know, belonging to a certain nation, but it can be anything else, actually. It's also, it has been measured with clubs.
Well, it's the idea of tribalism, right? Exactly. We all want to belong to a tribe and identify with a tribe. Absolutely. It can be your university. And if you look at it, there is some very strong rivalry sometimes between companies, between universities. Sports teams. Sports teams. And people... It almost becomes like your identity. It is. And you get really defensive about it. Absolutely. Look at the hooligans. That's these extreme football fans that can actually...
get into a fight and physically violent over football teams because they have the sense of belonging to a group of the fans of this specific football team. But it can be many, many things. So this is the group logic between groups and a group needs to actually, in order to be strong, to have this very strong sense of belonging.
And the stronger the people feel for their group, but also at the same time against the other people, this is actually something that the group is craving for because that makes the group stronger. So is that how you would explain this idea of tribalism from a psychological perspective? Like where does that need come from? Like why do we have to feel like we belong to a larger group? Why is that such a fundamental part of,
Of the human condition. Security. We want to feel secure. We want to feel belonging. That we belong to something. That we will have people. A group of people. Somebody caring for us. Taking charge of us. If we have a problem. Then these people will take us under their protection. Security. Comfort. And so on. In the end. It's very interesting. Deep down. We have a fundamental existential problem.
anxiety about death, about health, about our basic needs of food, shelter, comfort and so on. And whatever actually will enable us to feel secure for these specific needs,
is the thing that we were craving for. And the group, and this is historical. I mean, you talk about tribes, but this is exactly how we were before, right? It was the city. It's how we survived. It is, exactly. I mean, the human being in nature is weak. We are not fast. We are not very strong. So our strength is in a group, basically. It's our intelligence.
but it's also within the group. How to coordinate and work as a team. Exactly, or coordinate as a team. And you can look at primal hunters. They were hunting best in a team. Some were attracting the animals, some were killing it, and so on. I mean, it was a whole process of actually hunting as a group.
And communication is also very important. This is also why language is so key in defining a group because communication and having the same values, the same ideals, the same things. Sometimes, well, there's a very interesting book that is called Sapiens by a professor, which is called Harari. It's a classic, classic book. Exactly. And he says the basic for each group is a myth, is a story.
And this story can be religious. It can be about a leader. It can be about how we defended ourselves against the other group. It can be about victories, about many different things that actually define this group and will create this body of stories that the group tells each other.
to actually say we are this and the other people are our enemies or are the others, basically. It's a way to like galvanize people to do something together. That might be very difficult to do. You need to kind of have another group
That is a quote unquote, I guess, like the enemy, right? Or the supposed threat. So then you galvanize everyone to do hard tasks and to accomplish certain goals. Because they have that motivation all of a sudden. Absolutely. And I mean, my own country, one of my two countries, Germany was actually built through that.
Before 1870, Germany was split into more than 370 different kingdoms, princedoms and so on. But then one of these kingdoms was more strong and said, we have a common enemy and that is France.
And so all these kingdoms went together and made a war against France. And once they won this war against France, they said, okay, we are so strong, we are so good. Now we become one country and that's Germany. So they really defined this country by opposition to another country. It's funny. Well, it's not funny, but it's very interesting how that same logic unites people
Yet divides people all at the same time. Yeah. Right? Because if you take it too far, you know, it can be used in...
in ways that are just not good, right? - This is how you have wars in the end. - Exactly. So like with like things like nationalism and a lot of like kind of modern day politics in terms of like, you know, tensions between countries, it's that kind of tribal thinking of like, oh, there is this other country now coming up and they are the threat to us. - And what we are forgetting is in the end that we are stronger together.
We are stronger if the other countries are thriving as well, basically. Because we are all, especially nowadays in our global world, every country is making business, is having exchanges with all the other countries. So if the other countries are getting rich, you are getting rich. In the end, it's just to have an equal share of it. It has to be balanced, of course. It has to be fair, right?
And that is all very complicated. - But it's the fight to, everyone wants to get rich and everyone knows if the rising tide lifts all boats, right? So you want all the countries to be rich, but it's that fight to see who is gonna be richer, right? - Yeah, yeah. - You gotta be the best, right? And I think that's where a lot of that, in a political arena, a lot of that conflict, that's where it comes from. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, in the end,
I mean, this is not my stuff. So, of course, I'm not into these things. But yeah, at some point, we need also to see how far should we go. And in the end, of course, we can always think about getting richer. But in the end, is that really possible?
what life is about. And you have also, looking at the country logic, for example, you have a lot of research about happiness in nations. And the richest nations are not the happiest. The happiness factor
And I'm not talking about the developmental factor, right? But I'm talking about actually how people in this country experience life and feel about life and the positivity about life. And that is absolutely disconnected from... Yeah, it's not correlated at all with wealth. Not correlated at all. Of course, countries that have wars and genocides and civil wars or whatever, confrontations or extreme poverty, right?
of course, okay, they are not so happy. That's for sure. But I would say once you have reached a certain level of, uh, wealth and, and, and, um, yeah, comfort, um, it's totally not correlated to, to, to what they do surveys about this, right? Like general, like livelihood and happiness. Absolutely. And it's usually like a, like a country like Switzerland or something like that. Right. Well, what is it? Switzerland has a fantastic level of, of, of life quality. Um,
But yeah, and they are amongst the happiest nations and definitely not one of the most powerful or most richest even because you have actually very rich countries. There's something talking about a more micro level. There's very interesting studies about the relationship between wealth and happiness and
And actually, it's a curve that is at some point a tangent. So that means that, of course, when you're very poor, you're not happy because basically you're lacking the main basic needs. Exactly. And I don't know if some people remember what is called the Maslow Pyramid of Needs, right? It's a pyramid of needs where you have down the basic needs and then it goes up to the less basic needs.
And so in this curve, basically, if you as soon as you are able to cover your basic needs, happiness reaches a certain point where the incremental wealth has very, very little impact on your actual happiness.
And to make it more practical for you, if you have one car, then having a second car or a third car or fourth car. You get diminishing returns. Exactly, exactly. And once you have like three or four or five cars, what do you care about your car anymore? Yeah, there's been a lot of studies done on kind of like the diminishing returns between wealth and happiness. Exactly. Because once you have your basic needs met,
those returns diminish very quickly. So if you're between being a millionaire or a multimillionaire, the difference between happiness is very, very minimal. - Very, very minimal.
Actually, at some point, there is even some studies have even shown that there is a counterbalance. Because at some point, the richer you get, the more problems you're going to have, the more problems you have, the harder you have to work to get to make that money. Yeah, of course, this is another thing. I mean, many people actually have sacrificed so much in their lives to get there to get to this point. That's interesting.
Basically, they already have, I wouldn't say wasted, but they have spent most of their energy, maybe the best years of their lives, basically, to achieve this level of wealth. And maybe they're not actually even any more wealthy.
able to enjoy it as much as they would like to. - Well, they had to sacrifice one part of their life for another. So maybe it was like time with the family that they had to sacrifice. - Exactly. - So their family relationships have suffered because of it or for whatever other reason. - Exactly. - Because when you're that dedicated and you spent, worked that hard, put that much time, there's gonna be other aspects of your life that are gonna be sacrificed. - Exactly. And this is where I get back to you on the grand study that I mentioned before about quality of relationships.
and that the actual measurement of happiness, health and longevity is about connections. Now, of course, some people get these connections, these quality relationships at work as well. So if you workaholic, then maybe your best friends will be your colleagues and the people at work and not your family. That's possible as well. But yes, you have to sacrifice certain things. And
everybody has different, I would say, histories and experiences. So maybe some people will be happy about this. But something that is interesting here as well is what makes you happy? Is it only the result or is it the process? A lot of people that I'm talking to, that I'm actually having in my practice, are obsessed with the result itself.
They want to become rich. They want to become successful, even if it's in a job that they don't like.
But they want the results. So they are focusing all their life on getting something. And once they have something, maybe they have gotten this promotion, this bonus, and finally they are able to afford having a Porsche or a Lamborghini or something like that. But then they want something else. They want to have a bigger house. They want to have a mansion. They want to have a yacht. It never ends. It never ends, really.
And if you're only being driven by goals, you're not enjoying the process. You're not enjoying the journey. And actually life is a journey. It's not a stay, basically. It's a journey. And you cannot just think about the end destination because the end destination is going to be the same for everybody, basically. So...
people being driven only by the results miss a big chunk of life that is actually life itself. Wow. That's pretty powerful. Cheers. Cheers. Well, do you see, like, during these times right now, you know, when a certain, like, kind of crisis hits and people are starting to, you know, fear for their lives and panicking and, you know, have different degrees of that going around,
But do you see, have you seen any kind of difference in the patterns or in the way people have reacted, let's say, to the coronavirus between, like, let's say, China or in Europe or in America or in other parts of the world? Do you notice differences or do you just find that everyone's reacting pretty much the same way? This is very interesting because here you can really see, I would say,
versus the culture. Individually, everybody is afraid. Yeah. And people have had the same fear experiences. I mean, we talked about xenophobia and this is, I would say, some
the animal inside of us you know where we say oh my I need to survive I need to protect me and my family and some people were hoarding food and stuff so this is the kind of behavior that you had in all the countries everywhere I was surprised actually how much unicity you had in that level of fear
Now you have the cultural factor. And it was very interesting. I'm talking mainly about France and Germany because that's the countries, of course, I'm from and I'm closest to. The French reaction, which is maybe not easy to understand from other people, is officially they say, I don't care. It's...
C'est la vie, right? C'est la vie. I'm going to die. What the fuck, you know? Just be happy while you can. Be happy while you can. Let's party. I don't want to disrupt my life. It doesn't mean that they're not responsible. It doesn't mean that they are not conscious or something like that. This is their way of managing their fear.
It's like their coping mechanism. Exactly. Exactly. So this is what we talked about at the beginning. This is their coping mechanism. And I saw that when I was actually studying in France, when we had an exam, people would say, oh, I don't care. I'm never going to work for that. And even the day of the exam said, this exam, I so don't care. Actually, the guy has been studying the whole night.
And the people, you know, it's not a pretense. Some people might feel it's arrogant. Actually, it's not. It's just the way that they're reassuring themselves, you know. People will say, oh, I don't care about this. It's okay. C'est la vie. But in the end, deep down, they really care.
They actually do care. That's really like the difference in culture because it gets so often mistaken as like arrogance. Yes, yes, yes. Especially the French. Absolutely, absolutely. But it's really, I guess, yeah, like you're saying, because I'm just learning this now, hearing you talk, it's a cultural thing. It's a cultural coping mechanism. It is. It's really not an arrogance thing. It is not. It's not an arrogance thing at all. And actually, if you really talk to French people, they're not that secure.
They're not, you know, people think, and again, we're coming back to stereotypes. We think French people are arrogant. Actually, they're not that arrogant. They appear arrogant, but deep down, if you start to analyze them, and if you see them in a psychotherapy session, for example, I can guarantee you they're not arrogant and confident like that.
But it is some way of coping, of appearing, of making themselves feel okay, feel more secure and dealing with the hardship. So on the other side, for example, you have Germany. And I don't know if you have heard Chancellor Merkel saying, well, anyway, 60 to 70% of the people will be sick anyway. So...
Or is it not the UK we're saying too? No, no, it's Chancellor Merkel. The German Chancellor, she said 60 to 70% of people will probably get sick
So there is no way that we actually can really fight this contagion off. What we have really to deal with and to work with is that we have to prevent that the vulnerable people will get contaminated. And if that happens, how are we going to make the hospitals ready and so on? So this is the very German planification.
German want to have risk assessment. What is the worst case scenario? How can we deal with this? And how can we anticipate?
So that is also why very often German people appear a little bit more reassuring for business partners or something like that because they really like to have... They're very structured and protocol and reasoned and measured. And risk assessment, measurement, monitoring, controls and so on, which for other people might feel...
a little bit too much, because then other people might say, you want to control everything, you want to make everything rational logic, and so on. And that's not possible.
But that is their way to actually cope also with the anxiety and insecurity and so on. So it's all coping mechanisms of different cultures. It is. But if you look actually deep, I mean, at what the governments are preparing, the French reaction and the government reacted about as well as the German ones.
Hospitals are getting ready. You have a very structured plan as well to react. Of course, I really don't want to make any politics. So I'm not saying if it's right or wrong, but what I'm just saying here is there was a structured approach, but the communication, the way that people appeared to react is very different. And that is actually very cultural.
Have you noticed any coping mechanisms for Chinese people?
I think for China it was a bit different because Chinese people were the first exposed to this. So I think for everybody, I mean, I was in China all along. And so I really have seen that mounting. At the beginning, people felt surprised by this. So at the beginning, everybody didn't know exactly what was that about. I think also anxiety has been mounting because it was a little bit like...
in a horror movie, you know, when you have something creepy coming up and then invading the country. It started in Wuhan, then it started coming in Beijing, in Shanghai, and then it spread over the country. So I think there was some increasing anxiety levels. It felt like an impending doom, right? Exactly, exactly. Something that was invasive and coming and mounting and you would never know when it would stop and so on. So
For me, the situation in China was very different because it was the first country that was exposed to that. And I think, I mean, people reacted wonderfully because the best thing was that we just shut down everything. In the end, what we did was like lay low and see what happens so that we can actually study this thing. Yeah.
And it is amazing when you look at it, how much information and data was collected by the medical staff and by people in China during the first weeks. I have seen medical reports and I mean, I'm not a medical expert myself, but
Medical experts say that we got more research and more data collected on this virus in two months than as much data, I would say, than on AIDS or on Ebola over 20 or 15 years or something like that. So the effort is really impressive. Yeah.
And it's like during times like these, obviously, like, you know, one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on here was like because the obvious thing for people like the obvious people that like, you know, experts that people want to talk to during this time are usually going to be like doctors, health professionals, even politicians and policymakers to see kind of like, OK, well, what is the government going to do about this?
But then what kind of gets lost in all this is really the kind of psychological impact it has on people and the way people are going to react to it. So do you see any, do you think there's going to be any like lasting psychological impact from this? Like once this is over and life returns to normal,
do you see any lasting psychological impact from this? It's difficult to actually say what is going to be the lasting effect on this. But there are actually already some surveys about the current psychological situation. And currently, because of the lockdown, the isolation, and all the efforts that we had to make...
We have, well, the Chinese Psychological Society actually has measured a huge increase in anxiety and depression levels and something very interesting. Here in China? Yeah. So the actual data, I have it here. It's 42.5% of the people have clinical anxiety levels.
21.5% have been measured with clinical PTSD. That's post-traumatic stress disorder. That's a lot. That's a huge lot. And 16.6% of people have been measured with clinical levels of mild to severe depression. How many percentage? For the depression, 16.6%.
But the first one you said was 60 something percent. No, no, no, 42.6%. 42%. But which is huge. 42.6% of people having, careful, clinical levels of anxiety. So when you say clinical levels, what does that mean? It means that it actually... It's been diagnosed? Yeah, it's diagnosable, but it also goes beyond certain thresholds.
And that there's actually a certain symptomaticity of the anxiety. So it actually, basically, it disrupts your life. It has a life disruptive effect on you. So this is a kind of unrelated question, but I just want to ask you, is that what's up with all these people hoarding toilet paper?
Like, have you seen that? I've seen that in Australia and in the United States. Like, can you explain that as a psychologist? No. Why people are hoarding toilet paper more than any other thing? I don't know. I really don't know. But you've seen the videos. I have seen the videos. I...
You know what? I mean, I have, I don't know. I have a few guesses, but I think my guess is as good as anyone's. Give me your guesses. I think, again, it's about anxiety. And maybe some people feel that there will be a shortage of something. And because toilet paper is accessible in public toilets, so it's easy to...
you know, steal in a certain way. And it doesn't really feel like it's stealing because anyway, it's open. It's there in the open and stuff like this. So maybe people feel just comfortable having something. I think in the end, what people really have trouble with is that
feeling security, feeling care, feeling that there is something that they have to cling to. And if that is material something, and even if that is a bunch of toilet paper at home, maybe it's something that makes them feel more secure and, I don't know, that will reduce their anxiety, basically. So it's just another coping mechanism. It is, it is, it is. Yeah.
I don't know. So, like, what do you think... Like, where do you think this is going? Like, in terms of the future of, like, psychology in your field of research, even, like, psychotherapy, things like that, like, where do you see the future of that going? Well, the thing is...
It has been pointed out by more and more official instances, governments, administrations, the World Health Organization and so on as a major source of concern. It has been flagged out as the third major health concern by the World Health Organization. Is mental health? Mental health.
So I think there's a very bright future for professionals in this area. So there's certainly a need. Now, I would say for people, I think it will become more and more a concern because also society as such doesn't take care of our mental health.
On the contrary, I mentioned marketing, for example. Marketing is there to feel us, to make us feel frustrated, to create a need, to create a crave for something. And to create more anxiety about your shortcomings and insecurities. Exactly, exactly. And
give you the illusion that if you don't have this product, if you don't have this thing or use that kind of thing, you are nothing or you are not going to enjoy life as much as you could or something like that. So I would say a lot of things in our lives are building up anxiety, building up problems and things that actually are challenges for mental health.
we were talking about social media. Um, what about like the, um, like, especially in the States, um, the mass shootings you see there, like mass shootings. Yeah. Um, do you see that as like a very clear symptom of like mental health on the rise? Well, of course, I mean,
There was violence in every time of history, right? That's true. So the thing is, mass shooting, I mean, this is another topic that we can talk about for ages, but definitely these people have a mental health issue. And if these individuals have been put into this extreme distress that they actually felt they had to kill other people,
That means that nobody really was listening to them. Nobody really took care of these people. If that person would have seen maybe a therapist or a psychologist or would have been treated for their problems, maybe it would not have happened. Instead of being like cast out by society. Exactly, exactly, exactly.
Well, I think, you know, there was a U.S. presidential candidate, Andrew Yang. I don't know if you heard about him in the U.S. Yeah, dropped out already. But, you know, he was always a proponent of the White House having an in-house psychologist. That was like right there for all the White House staff, including the president. And I think that was a great idea. Like, I want to see a future where psychology is a
a bigger part of the mainstream. Absolutely. And because it really ties into everything we do, whether it's our social life, whether it's sports, whether it's politics, or even things like how we react and respond to the coronavirus, it's ingrained in everything we do. And it needs to be, and I feel like it's the psychological aspects of a lot of things are
kind of forgotten in a large part by mainstream society. Yeah. And something that we always, I mean, that people think about too much is that the psychologist is not just there for the extreme cases. We're talking about the shootings and these people are definitely extreme cases. But everybody of us is facing some hardship at some point. I mean, I have never, ever encountered anybody who was okay all his life. Yeah.
And if you're telling me this, I don't believe you. And even if that was true, actually, I would say poor you because also your hardship makes who you are and makes you stronger. It makes you... It builds character, right? It builds character, definitely. And all these coping mechanisms that we're talking about, we have built them through our hardships. Now, sometimes we have bad coping mechanisms that actually are counterproductive. Like drugs. Like drugs, like medication, like anger, anger.
isolation, withdrawal or whatever. I mean, and these bad habits or bad coping mechanisms, therapists and psychologists can help you changing these things into positive coping mechanisms that will actually help you maybe actually use your weaknesses in order to make them strength.
Well, even going back to what you were saying about like the extreme cases, but even the extreme cases, they don't start off as extreme cases. Of course not. It builds up as a small thing. Yes, yes, yes. That could have been very treatable in the beginning. Oh, yes. But it accumulates, right? Absolutely. And it festers. Absolutely. And this is something that has that actually, so this is forensic psychology. Forensic psychology is the part of psychology that deals with the criminal behaviors of
If you look at people who actually went into criminal behavior, almost everybody, very, very few cases were genetically predisposed.
almost everybody was starting as a normal person but uh because of their education the family background um all the the the bad things that happened to these people and the way society treated them they become they become crazy we might say at some point they became really radically violent and extreme so where do you stand on the whole nature versus nurture debate yeah this is a very interesting question um
I mean, in the end, it's a mix of both. Yeah. And there's got to be, right? It's got to be. But very often the nurture, that means the environmental influences on who we are, how physically our physical health is faring and stuff like this. I would say it's very often more than we think it is. And there's a lot of research done on...
one cellular twins that's called monozygotic twins from the same egg, you know. Oh yeah, it's a famous study, right? There's many studies. These twins have been studied in all ways that you can imagine. And the very interesting thing is that you have cases for almost all twins
mental health or developmental issues where you have twins from the same egg that radically evolved differently and that's true for for autism for for schizophrenia for almost all the other or other the disorders there is actually classification
There's discussions about how accurate that is, but about the percentage of how much in which disorder is genetically predisposed and how much... Which one's stronger, right? Is the nature or nurture, which one's stronger? It depends on the disorder. So for example, autism has been estimated 80% genetic, 20% environmental. But if you see about cancer, for example...
the level of genetic predisposition predisposition
is less important than the actual nurturing, the lifestyle, the things. And this is schizophrenia, for example, if I remember well, the level was 50-50. Oh, really? Yeah. So schizophrenia, it's 50% genetically predisposed, 50% from nurturing. Okay.
I don't remember all the exact numbers, but it's a very, very interesting study that really shows these things. Well, David, thank you for being on here. I had a really good time on this conversation. It's my pleasure. Thank you. Cheers. Cheers. Let's do this again sometime. Absolutely. With pleasure. Are you working on a book right now? I am.
I did research last year about change and facing change. My interest point here is how people or what is the common denominator between all the people whenever there's a changing situation. And this changing situation can be positive or negative. It can be something positive like getting married, having a child or something like that.
or negative like death of a close by parent or something like that and how is that really impacting the person and how can you cope with this situation well when you're ready to publish that book let's do this again oh totally well it will it will take some time all right cheers again david thanks again for doing this yeah yeah all right guys bye bye
♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪