Anxiety & Overthinking Are Habits You Can Break - Dr Julie Smith

why are emotions so hard to understand for humans well we we're gonna start with a big question Sor Chris in the deep end yeah well I guess I've made a bit of a career out of um working with people on their emotions and um as a as a psychologist you know I was in the NHS for 10 years and then um worked in a very kind of small private practice and I would say you know all of that work however diverse it was in terms of what people were with mostly the common problem was there's this feeling or set of feelings that I have and I don't want to have them and there's these other feelings that I would like to have more of the time but I'm not sure how to access them and and nobody has this sort of manual for how to manage emotions and how to understand them and um we don't even really have a great vocabulary for you know we're quite Limited in you think about the sort of the diversity of uh the different sort of minute uh feelings that you can have throughout the day that apply to different situations they're all slightly different you know if you say I feel um Joy one minute joy in a certain scenario might feel quite different to Joy in a different scenario you know the qualita differences are there and you can feel that but we don't necessarily have the words to express it and we certainly don't have uh the sort of models to understand it um and you know it's only in re Rec years that people have even started to talk about them so um we're in the early stages but it's you know exciting are we doomed to fail in some regard there as humans that we have this very rich inner experience which is very difficult to communicate to measure to understand to export to somebody else hey this is what I'm feeling and then you have just this limited language which is constrained not only by the words you know but even the Lang you know German has a ton of words that we don't have in other languages that almost unlocks your ability to understand emotions in that way are we uh uh fated to kind of always be scrabbling to try and understand emotions but never fully doing it no and I don't think I don't think it's necessarily um sort of our failure or our limitation that um emotions can't be measured and Quantified I think it's it's a limitation of the method isn't it that that why do we want to um we don't have to do that in order to you know there was that real push actually you know in in my career where we were asked to sort of you know measure things on scales and numbers and and actually when you looked at how that would be applied in the room with someone when you're working with someone it was sort of really really limited and how helpful it could be um you know if someone came back with some kind of uh mood diary in which they'd kind of added a scale of and you get this a lot on apps don't you you know rate how you feel today out of 10 and really doesn't tell you much at all because you don't feel it on a scale you don't feel a number you have a a set of feelings and um that are kind of different and sometimes deep and sometimes complex and sometimes confusing and it's our sort of um often it's when people are trying to kind of sell something around mental health that they try to make it really simple um but it's okay that it's not I think what's your advice for people who are overthinking everything well I think this is actually a really popular subject online people I think it's something lots of people are dealing with and and that's because I think the way that life is set up now right we're all expected to do all the technology that we have in theory life should be really easy it was all sold to us as if that will make life easier and you'll have more time on your hands and actually all that happened was we increased our expectation about how much we get done and how much we can handle and so what we're dealing with in terms of mental load is so much more than uh what you know would have and actually you know the way that life is set up now away from traditional roles where you know you know a man might go out to work and a woman would take care of the family um those things were separated but now both people are trying to do both actually you're both taking on two full-time jobs and so the mental load is there and and so it makes sense that people are living at a higher level of stress all the time and when you're when your your stress level your arousal level is higher you're more vulnerable to overthinking so a lot of people think I'm overthinking something because there's something wrong with me or I'm just a warrior and I always say to people don't label yourself as just a warrior because that gives you that sense that you can't overturn it or you can't do anything about it which is wrong um you know it's a habit as much as anything else but it's also something that is more likely to happen when you're already stressed so you know if someone came into the room with me and said you know I'm just overthinking everything what shall I do actually what we would look at is life as a whole like the full context of it's not only what are you overthinking and how can you stop thinking about it in that way it's you know what is going on with the your stress levels in general that's causing you to be at that State where you're looking for the worst case scenarios so cuz that's what you're set up to do right it's not a fault in your brain your brain's doing a really good job you're probably giving your brain lots of s s sort of lots of signs rather that um things aren't okay you know you're maybe your blood pressure is high maybe you're on the go all day and so your brain is getting those signals from in your body and from your surroundings that uh we're not all you know not all as well here that there's a lot going on I've got a lot to deal with be alert because something could be unpredictable here we need you know so that's your kind of state of Readiness um so I think when you're dealing with overthinking it's important not to just deal with overthinking but to look at everything as a whole yeah I wonder whether there's more opportunities for people to consider and ruminate about what's going on in their life at the moment because most of the base needs for most people that are listening to this podcast are sorted they know where they're going to sleep tonight they know where the food is going to come from etc etc uh and oddly enough uh an existential crisis or you know worrying about emotions thinking about thinking is actually kind of a luxurious position to be in in order to be able to get to that stage I'm aware that for everybody that deals with it including myself it doesn't feel luxurious at the time but it's probably an indication that the base of maso's hierarchy of needs is probably being sorted and we're then moving on to what's next but yeah the threat detection thing the fact that there is uh an infinite number of potential uh stressors out there and are biased toward looking at those ones as opposed to something a little bit more calming the the Calm stuff that's not Salient I don't need to worry about that but I'll worry about the thing that I think I need to worry about so what about in the moment somebody's in that sort of they're trapped in that cycle that overthinking loop I imagine this is something that your clients talk to a lot about what are interventions or what are the ways when you find yourself doing that that you take yourself out of it as best you can yeah so so if you're worrying I think there's a lot of work that you would do around building awareness of what's happening at the time so um you we formulate so we pretty much draw out the cycle on on pen and paper just um you know we look at the scenario that comes before so what you what tends to happen in the lead up to the overthinking and what's the you know what the things that are contributing to that and then what are the types of thoughts that you're having and so you be build this awareness that um they are usually Horror Story thoughts you know it's the worst case scenario that you can possibly come up with and you play it out in your mind over and over again and and that ramps up your anxiety and then when you feel those symptoms of anxiety whatever they are for you you then look you know become more Vigilant and you become you sort of look for more things that could go wrong and so when you do that when you look at the cycle even though the the minute details will change depending on what's going on for you and what the situation is the cycle will pretty much always be the same and so you get this sort of uh insight into the the cycle that you're going around in and when you do that I mean in therapy you do it in hindsight right so you go and you look at the week that's just gone by and you say this happened and I was really worrying about that and that's how I dealt with the worry and often you're looking at you know what you did in response to that feeling that then actually fed back into the cycle and when you see it on paper and you see that when you you know you did something to get rid of that feeling um but then actually it brought you background you can see that you're doing things that actually contribute to making it worse and and there has to be a kind of careful process of self-discovery um and when but when you do it you you begin to get this awareness in the moment as it's happening so you start with it in hindsight you're looking back and then the more familiar you become with it the more you start to when you're in it go oh I know where I am I think that that's that thing again that we thought about last time and now it's happening yeah that's interesting using uh sort of retrospective uh assessment as a predictive tool you go hey this thing happened before maybe it'll happen again that pattern's beginning to come up uh so for me when I'm underslept I'm underslept my uh ability to sort of regulate just falls out of the window yeah uh so okay right I'm I'm tired therefore I need to sort of adjust the sight on my scope to be like am I actually that bothered about this or did I just get four hours sleep last night yeah yeah uh what about fear as well because I think that this is kind of a a two-pronged uh challenge that people have um a lot of fear a lot of concern about making decisions about whether or not I'm doing the right thing uh very visceral emotion how can people better deal with fear yes do you know I um I actually wrote the chapter on fear in this book when so over the summer I went through um uh some health problems I was diagnosed with cancer and uh at that point I was about six weeks away from finishing the book on yeah no yeah I was six weeks away when I um started going for tests and then I was about two weeks away um from handing the book in when I got my diagnosis so I was so determined to finish the book and at that point I was just reading it through right I was just and and I i' read through just happened to read through the chapter on fear um the day after and uh I thought this isn't what I need to hear right now this isn't right what was wrong with it hit delete so it was probably more gentle than I wanted um than I personally needed and and I think generally um that that can happen you know lots of people do need that approach but at the time I got selfish with it and I thought I need something a bit different to this I hit delete and I rewrote it for myself so it's much more about you know in that moment okay fear is here and it's necessary and it's information it's telling me that not all is well and I need to be alert and I need to think about how to work through this and so I'm going to use that fear but I'm not going to be the victim in this I'm not going to be the you know there's often you talk people talk about cancer there's often this idea that that thing is attacking you and you're victim to it and I just did not want to be in that place at all and so I wanted to kind of turn the tables and so um in the chapter I talk about this idea of you know choosing to be the prey instead of the uh choosing to be the Predator instead of the prey so um sort of always being on the front foot and forward motion and looking at what's my plan and what am I going to do next and taking action so that I didn't feel you know cuz you can feel you still feel fear when you're on the front foot but you're using it and that feels so fundamentally different to sitting in fear and just allowing it to implode I had this realization toward the end of my 20s when I was trying to unpack uh a you know three decades of of not understanding myself and uh I remember I wrote down action is the antidote to an anxiety and the reason for that was I became way less fear about the future when I was moving myself toward it uh when I didn't feel passive when I didn't feel like I was being being blown around by the wind and um yeah there's this interesting this interesting sort of uh coming back to Center moment I think with a health scare or with fear in general if it's really visceral you know if it's emotional fear or if it's serious uh and it really does kind of remind you about this essence of yourself at least I found that that when I'm in when I've got uh a big period of of ruminative stress I actually feel oddly more myself than uh I do at other times I think it's sort of strips away a lot of the bravado and momentum and inertia that you've got going on uh compensating mechanisms and the ways that you can kind of hide things when everything's going well and then you kind of come back to Center and you kind of remember what that is but yeah action being an antidote to anxiety I think um and it's ruthless because the action uh is the exact thing that anxiety stops you from wanting to the the very last thing I'm going to stay in bed I don't want to get up I don't want to be leaning in I don't want to be sort of uh taking charge of the situation and a lot of it is being able to recognize urges and override them so recognize that urge to go for safety and comfort and and act opposite to it and um in the same way that you do in kind of more light-hearted situations so I don't know exercise you know you get to a point where your body's sort of hurting a bit and you would rather stop but you practice sort of overriding the urge and that's a a big sort of um skill set that is actually taught in certain therapies um acting opposite to urges and you can do it in really small ways so um you know you might you know put Polo in your mouth and resist the urge to Crunch it and you know so you can do it in really light-hearted kind of simple ways but then what you're doing is you're kind of practicing that mental Muscle really to be able to recognize that in moments when you need it most and and to be able to do it so it's not the first time you're doing it doesn't feel you know you you know the process it's a vicious cycle you know there's periods where momentum seems to be working with you and then periods where it seems to be working against you and uh I think what we all everybody wants is this sort of permanent upward spiral toward ever increasing capacity and ever increasing hope in ourselves but you know there is a there is a vicious sort of other side to that momentum too and uh stepping in to kind of have a circuit breaker on that is um yeah something I think a lot more people need yeah and I think you know people want to feel uh courageous and strong and and I think what we forget is that fear is a core component of that you know it's a core ingredient of uh of Courage you can't really call yourself courageous if you didn't do something that filled you with fear um so in order to kind of and you do when you when you face things that are that scare The Living Daylights out of you and and you do that with sort of forward action and um you know take a sort of commanding composure in FA in the face of those really scary things um you you start to feel that and you and you start to discover that what you thought were your limits uh was really kind of a smoke screen trust really is everything when it comes to supplements a lot of Brands may say the top quality but few can actually prove it which is why I partnered with momentus they make the highest quality supplements on the planet three of the products that I use to support my brain body and sleep every day are Omega-3s creatine and magnesium L 38 honestly I try and limit the number of supplements I rely on but when I take these consistently they have a massive impact on my cognitive performance my strength and my sleep momentus are literally unparalleled when it comes to rigorous third party testing what you read on the label is what's in the product and absolutely nothing else best of all they have a 30-day moneyb guarantee so you can buy it and try it for $29 days and if you do not love it they will give you your money back plus they ship internationally right now you can get 20% off everything sitewide plus that 30-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to Liv mous.com slod wisdom and using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's l i v m o ment us.com mod wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout it's different you know one of the taglines of CrossFit for a while was get comfortable being uncomfortable and um it was sexy or whatever but I always felt a little bit um I don't know I I it always felt a little Hollow to me because the discomfort that people were getting comfortable with when doing a workout was something they elected to do like you chose to go to the gym you you already do this because you like to do it yeah maybe you've pushed yourself Beyond a limit that would be reasonable to even almost everybody but still it's sort of within your control yeah cancer diagnosis is a degree of discomfort that you didn't choose yeah so you know reflecting I guess on the last year for yourself what's your advice to somebody who is going through a tough time with their health uncertainty fear of the future uh you know this is the personal and the professional colliding for you I suppose yeah um what did you what would you say to somebody I think when when uncertainty is I mean that's the the big thing about something like that is and and you don't when it happens as well you it's not like this sort of big dramatic moment where you suddenly you know what the diagnosis is you know what the plan is you know what the risk is it doesn't really happen like that it's all in stages so there is this sort of big period of being really uncertain about everything and not knowing what to do with that um and then not knowing who you can really share that with because you don't want to scare the living DS out of everybody else that you love um and so when there is such uncertainty in that way the way that I dealt with it and and would do in again in the future is just narrow everything down narrow your focus down what's the next move what's the next step and let's take that get that get that bit done take action what would be an example of that um so actually it was a really kind of strange experience where the day I got diagnosed the day after the consultant I was under was about to go on holiday for two weeks and then we had a holiday booked for two weeks after that and um and once he went um some more tests came back and the the the treatments or the recommendations were changed but the team wouldn't tell me what they were because that was his role to do that um so I was sort of thinking okay they're not going to tell me so it must be something bad do I cancel my holiday what do I do and there's all these kind of um you know uncertainties around what to do and and I could feel myself I was sat there trying to edit the book and and and it was just consuming me and and I'm rightly so right my brain is saying hang on a minute let's sort this out and and I could feel that sort of sense of just being in termal not being able to affect anything or control anything and just waiting I thought I'm not doing this there's no way so um you know um my husband came home from work and we just we started doing lots of research on um uh surgeons and uh Consultants and you know we're lucky enough that we were in a position to go and pay to go and see someone but you know I started asking Medics I know for recommendations um found someone that was nearby um made those calls got those appointments and in the process of just doing that you know nothing's changed in theory but I am moving forward and taking action and it felt just fundamentally different to you know I wasn't sitting there shaking and weeping I was okay what's the next call we can make who you know how much does that cost what can we do who can we see and um and we did and and it actually helped the process um and I you know found someone to um you know do the surgery for me and all that kind of thing and and it was really positive um but yeah I think sitting there like and that's where I got that feeling of the rabbit and headlights I'm not going to sit here like a rabbit and headlights I'm going to move forward and I'm gonna you do something and you can't in every situation not in every situation you can do that but um you know I'm lucky enough that um touch word I'm lucky enough that I was in that position where I could you know affect the outcome trying to contribute to your own future again it's that action being the antidote to anxiety thing I think time yeah yeah you don't want to feel like life is buffeting you around and you're at the mercy of it yeah uh you're already feeling a little helpless you're already in a little bit of hell you know well that it's going to get worse yeah so yeah trying to step in and I think it's okay for that action not to be the solving of the thing as well you know people often say oh you know um don't sort of avoid things by getting busy with something else but sometimes that's necessary um for you know improving the moment and not making it worse well there's better and worse coping mechanisms and if one of the coping mechanisms is I made myself feel better for half an hour today I did a thing that gave me some respite you know it's a very low resolution way to look at what you should or shouldn't do like a random judgment that you're making on it which is well do you think that being sympathetically activated for 18 hours today is a good way to spend what if you could get that down to 17 and a half okay is that worthwhile are you saying that that's a coping mechanism or is that maybe you actually giving your body a little tiny bit of rest bite so uh looking forward what about looking back how can people better understand their childhoods um in terms of understanding a childhood I think it really helps to do a lot of people are doing that online with kind of bits of information that come up on you know videos and stuff like that um but I think if you want to do it in depth in a really constructive way that's truly going to help you and not send you into kind of resentment and bitterness about everything your parents got wrong then um it does help to do that with somebody else um where you can look at it in a constructive way that's actually going to help because you know there's utility in going back and and and processing that and and creating that sort of um uh sort of narrative really a timeline of okay this happened and that influenced me in this way and this happened and and then you know and and that's that's really useful but sometimes if it's not constructive it just becomes a rant of everything that was done wrong for me and and all the negative impact that's had on my life and that's quite dangerous in some ways because you can then get into that that cycle of that sort of turmoil really of resentment and and feeling like a victim of it um whereas when you do that constructively for example when you do that in therapy it'll be a fairly balanced uh View and it will kind of look at the things that you wouldn't change and the things that you might do and um how they've impacted you now and how if if something happened in your childhood got you stuck into a certain cycle of I don't know something that you do in your relationships today that you'd rather not then you you're using that right you're you're going to use that to then break the cycle because you're going to use that to say okay I know what I'm doing now it's because of something that happened earlier on and and I'm going to choose to do something different I'm going to break that cycle um so it can be really really productive um but it has to be carefully done I think what about if I mean every body's parents will have made mistakes some larger than others how can people learn to get back to neutral with something that they can't go back and change there is no time machine to go and fix whatever it is they feel like they've inherited this version of themselves that their parents created the the pathologies the thought patterns the biases the ways of seeing the world and themselves and the inner voice and all of that stuff yeah if our parents got it wrong and in the ways that our parents got it wrong how can we become more at peace with that I think in some ways a part of that work is is understanding where your parents have come from and that they more than likely had their own complex childhoods in which they had their own um you know damage that was done and and cycles that they were stuck in um and and probably you know they were sort of growing up in an era where there wasn't that education around this kind of stuff and there wasn't that insight and so they would have been living out their own uh coping strategies with whatever they were dealing with so I think that's part of it is understanding that doesn't make it okay if your parents were you know horribly abusive but it's it's one way of understanding these cycles that people get stuck in and how um damage can be caused often without intention um but also there's a degree of um you know in that parent child relationship often we carry the parent child relationship into adulthood and and we still behave like the child in that relationship that's just what I was about to say yeah in a sense that we we give all the responsibility to our parents for making a good relationship and actually what you have now is an adult to adult relationship in which you get to decide you can't change your parents and and actually often people assume that if I could just convince my parents that and and and help them to see the damage that they did and get that apology that everything would be better and you know possibly but but a lot of parents won't necessarily have any more insight than they had when you were a child and so I think we can't sort of rest our idea of healing on that on getting those apologies or getting their Insight um because often they don't have it and and often it's about developing a relationship with our parents that um that they are capable of as well um so that we're not expecting more of them than they're actually able to give it's it's interesting that we see the lineage between our parents did this and therefore I am like that how unfair how could this be the case you just go just go back one generation just move back by 25 years and you go well your grandparents were like that which made your parent how can you give yourself this uh excuse or this reason and not continue to R and then the great grand parents the grandpar you know you go all the way back yeah so yeah it's um it is odd and I think that you're right as well every generation thinks that it's Unique and I get the sense that emotionally maybe this has been the biggest change across one generation from sort of like Boomer period to whatever ex- Millennial genz just that the opportunity for people to ruminate the challenges that people have from an emotional stressor perspective perspective uh the information that you have to become aware of how much better things could be as well which creates an ideal and then you sort of compare yourself to oh well if only I could get rid of my anxious attachment if only I could get rid of my fear of the future if only I could get rid of my overthinking or my whatever it is um which is now opened everybody up to think back more but our parents don't necessarily have that they're just sort of uh dealing with the physics of their system the way that it was given to them without necessarily realizing quite so much or quite so visceral that well things could have been a different way it's like well things just are the way they are and you go okay so what do you want do you want to be largely unaware that things could have been different and to understand the way that attachment Styles and child rearing and behavioral genetics and etc etc work to influence the disposition you have as an adult or do you want to have it this way like is ignorance Bliss because for me personally I would much sooner be able to contribute a little bit to have the pain of the realization that there's something which is in my hands and that there are ways that this can be but be educated on this and actually be able to make some sort of an impact as opposed to just being at the mercy of it yeah absolutely and I think what we have to be really careful of and you kind of see a lot of online is is this sort of resentment and bitterness this sort of um one-sided this negative thing was done um you know parents are the bad guys I'm the victim of the bad guys and and now it's awful and you know to a degree you know in in the most severe scenarios where things are just awful um you know that's almost separate from from what we're talking about here where you know you can have a a fairly sort of normal childhood um and there were things that negatively affected you but there would also have been a lot that positively affected you and and so I think one way of sort of creating a sort of antidote to just feeling bitterness and resentment towards your parents is to sort of nurture some gratitude around okay these were the things about your childhood that weren't ideal what what would be the things that you would repeat you know when you become a parent yourself what were the things that you value about your childhood that you think helped you become the person that you are or that helped you you know feel secure or you know so your your parents might have been um emotionally neglectful and not sort of spent lots of time with you but actually maybe uh they held down a really difficult job and endured that so that you could have food on the table every night and maybe you know maybe your mom was at home every day when you got home from school with a warm dinner and you know had that kind of dutiful sense of of loving you and uh so so there will be new ways of sort of turning something and looking at it in a slightly different way that helps you to uh shift shift the the feeling and and not just sit in that resentment of um you know I've I've survived um despite my parents rather than because of them are you familiar with the Thomas Soul quote there are no Solutions only tradeoffs I am now okay so I I this year it feels like that's been the quote of the Year for me um and a lot of the time what it means is trying to optimize absolutely everything and railing against things that are shortcomings is a uh Surefire route to misery because you're not going to be able to get everything to be perfect and in many situations something is positive and something is negative and the negative thing has probably come along for the ride as the dark side of the positive thing yeah uh and I think that it's the same with the parents it's so right you know um uh Dad wasn't there for me uh sufficiently emotionally I imagine that's a big sort of uh Millennial complaint about Boomer parents you know Dad was sort of this classic still Blue Collar guy and you go yeah he was at work like 10 hours a day five days a week for 18 years to raise you and before that and for brothers and sisters and all the rest of the stuff and you go okay so there are no Solutions there's only tradeoffs you had this level of SEC or maybe there's somebody else who dad was there for me a lot of the time but we really struggled with money and you go okay again you you it came to me because I started I made a big pivot with my diet and that improved uh a turn of energy problems that I was having but I was finding myself waking up at 3:30 or 4 in the morning every single day for a week uh and the first day I thought oh this is just it'll be like it's a transition thing then the second day I thought oh no this has become a habit and then by the third day I was railing against it so I woke up and I was like God like why is this the case how come I'm waking up at this time this is so annoying I'm going to be tired tomorrow etc etc and that Thomas Soul floated into my head and he the quote there are no Solutions only tradeoffs I thought right okay would you be happy to get up at 3:30 in the morning if it meant that your mood and your cognition throughout the day was better than it had been over the last couple of months it's like yes like what are you complaining about then what you're complaining about is why can't I have the entire world exactly the way that I want yeah it's like no no no no you don't you would that be beautiful yes is it in anyone's World realistic absolutely not and the same thing I think when we look at our parents is a nice perspective yeah absolutely and it's there's always something to be grateful for and something to feel a bit annoyed about or miserable about and um I think part it's a really important life skill to to just have that Clarity that you can choose you don't have to be you know we're all human we all find ourselves in those moment and you know when I'm talking about that you know uh Health scare stuff that I went through in the summer um and I talk about sort of you know being the Predator not the prey and all that that doesn't mean every moment I was feeling that that that was a response to those dark moments where you feel oh my you know what what's going to happen to me and and and you those dark moments so it's only human to find yourself in those but we just by having that awareness and knowing that it's a choice gives you that opportunity to step back from it get that you know put it at arms length see it for what it is and then you get to choose but you know having those moments of ulty or the moments when you're not doing that like you say the the dark moments in the morning when you're thinking oh why am I doing this it's okay to have those moments doesn't mean you're failing but then you had that process of hang on a minute I remember that quote now I get to choose and and you just learn from all of those experiences this episode is brought to you by function I partnered with function because I wanted a smarter more comprehensive way to understand what's happening inside of my body twice a year they run lab tests that monitor over a 100 biomarkers and their team of expert Physicians will analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan if you've been feeling a bit sluggish your testosterone levels might be a problem they play a massive role in your energy and performance and being able to see them charted over the course of a year with actionable insights to actually improve them gives you a clear path to making your life better Dr Andrew hubman is the scientific adviser and Dr Mark Heyman is their chief medical officer so you can trust that the data and insights you receive are as scientifically sound as they are actionable getting these lab tests done would usually cost thousands but with function it is only $500 right now you can get function's expert blood work analysis and bypass the 300,000 person weight list by going to the link in the description below or heading to function health.com slod wisdom that's function health.com slod wisdom I imagine that a lot of parents I'm not one yet but I imagine a lot of parents have the reverse problem which is that they're terrified of getting it wrong for their kids as they're raising them or shortly after they've raised them what is your advice there it is part and parcel of of the whole experience and and you feel it a woman as a woman you feel that that from the moment you know you're pregnant and suddenly everything you do is about somebody else and um and so you feel guilt no matter what you do really um and and and with feelings of guilt it's it's important to listen to it as well I mean there's kind of you know there's stuff online about sort of parent guilt and and how you know you shouldn't feel it or you should ignore it um and do what's good for you and that's fine you know there are moments you know that might be in in the context of taking a break because it's difficult to do that and take time for yourself and that's when you you know acknowledge that guilt and you take it with you because you know this is the right thing to do um and there are other times when it's important to to listen to that guilt more deeply and go well am I feeling that because I'm not living in line with my values as a parent and um so I don't know um uh if I you know feel guilty about coming here so so coming to London for a couple of days doing some interviews there's a sense of I don't want to leave you guys and and if one of my children got upset um which they didn't but if they did but um I would feel that sort of oh why am I leaving and that's sort of the point where I have to get that Clarity of the situation where I'm doing this because um it benefits the family like the payoffs thing right your dad's at work all day that kind of thing um they're difficult decisions and by having your values really clear in your mind about why you're doing something um it's easier than to kind of not make the guilt go away you just you're willing to take it with you so you get it in your backpack and you you know you take it with you because you know you're doing the right thing and because sometimes that feeling is um is not based on something that's warranted you know sometimes it's you know if you're I don't know uh a people pleaser or something because of how things were set up in your childhood you'll probably feel guilty all the time uh when you feel like you might have you know upset someone um and and that's that's not necessarily warranted that's a pattern um so sometimes you know if we if we engage in sort of emotional reasoning right which is that bias of I feel it therefore it's true uh that can get us into all sorts of trouble so if because I feel guilt that means I'm a terrible parent then I'm going to have a terrible time that's interesting yeah so if you if you feel the guilt and you don't recognize it as a as a normal part of being a parent um then you're likely to just think that you're failing all the time so it's not just the sensation it's the story that you tell yourself and you happen to be defaulting to a very particular story which is because dot dot dot because I'm a bad parent I mean look the only thing I can contribute is sort of a bit of an evolutionary lens but I imagine that mothers especially but also fathers have a pretty easy to activate guilt response to kids why well because the parents that didn't feel guilty when they left their kids their kids died and we've selected for the most neurotic overbearing caring parents that we can think of and that's that those are your ancestors yeah okay so this is going to arise you leave like you know I'm sure that even just Dad going to work Mom going to work on a morning normal day at work kid is sad you go okay I understand that in order to put food on table to keep tiny Child Alive I have to go to work yeah do I feel guilty about that well kind of no but then if it's something that seems more elective then it feels like yeah that is because it's I don't know less justified in some way or you know more opulent more more chosen so you go okay well I I just need to work out is this in line with something like you said principles the life setup uh am I doing something that makes the world a better place that my kids can grow up in is this something that they're going to be proud of is this something that affords us a different type of lifestyle is this something that they would want me to do if they were in 20 years time would they want to look back and say you know what it is I'm really glad that you actually went and did that yeah uh but in the moment you've got a crying child and you feel like a piece of [ __ ] because you're leaving yeah and you know it is important to listen to anyway isn't it because like I say even if you got the values and you know it's there it might be an indication that you know I do feel guilty so maybe I need to just redress the balance a little bit so you know it I think people talk about balance as if you find this perfect spot and then you just don't move and that's the perfect way to live and it really isn't that you know if you if you see someone on a a balancing beam or a tight rope they're always doing this they're always moving slightly from side to side and readjusting readjusting notice when you're going off tomb far readjust and um and particularly for you know uh as as a working parent I find that's constantly you can listen to those feelings when when they happen it can be it's information it's you know do I need to just spend some more time with them maybe I have spent a bit too much time on the book this week yeah do I need to um you know block out the weekend just I suppose as well an uncomfortable realization for look look at me bro sciencing parenting from bro parenting from the from the sidelines over here but I imagine as well that you there should also be a question uh that parents ask where they say well are my kids maybe too sensitive are they are they um too unfamiliar with me being away from them are they unable to regulate uh even a small amount of time away which is unrealistic and is making them fragile in a way maybe I need to step in on the other side maybe they need we need to do a little bit of training I need to sort of bring them into land a little bit I need to calm them down I need to say hey this is what's going to happen I'm going to be away for 15 minutes I've got to go to the shop I've got to go and do whatever uh so yeah they're all signals and I guess it's a good learning experience and If you deny them then the opportunity to learn is just out the window yeah yeah absolutely and it's all about opportunities to learn isn't it and like you say if like you said if a child has been used to having you there you know that sort of post lockdown kind of experience for lots of parents actually where you know everyone had been at home for many months it was really difficult young children to then transition out go to Nursery or go go to school or you know um I wonder what we'll see in a a decades time um from an attachment perspective from a lifestyle perspective from a psychological makeup persp perspective you know we may find out that kids are largely so robust that a 2-year period during their formative years didn't make that much of a difference or maybe it'll be really great or maybe it be really terrible and uh time will tell yeah uh you mentioned before about people pleasing uh this is something that over the last year or so I've realized that uh maybe a pathology I'm more familiar with than I realized what have you come to learn about people pleasing people pleases where it comes from yeah so you know often often it makes sense you know often these things feel um confusing until you hear someone's story and then it makes complete sense and you kind of I've had so many of these moments with people in the room where you know they come in and and think you're just not going to understand this this is just bizarre and complex and I I don't get it and and then you spend a decent amount of time going through someone's story and then you get to this lovely point where you kind of say to each other of course of course it is this way how could it not be given everything that's happened and you know there isn't sort of one story or one scenario that always leads to people pleasing there are lots of different ones and but I think it's important to distinguish that people pleasing isn't being a nice person it's it's so much more than that it's um it's being absolutely Vigilant to how other people feel and placing that as your absolute priority over and above your own well-being your own health anything so you know it's just terrifying the thought of displeasing someone else or um experiencing their disapproval or they're not liking you or rejecting you um and so you know I've seen people who live in in turmoil um trying to please everybody around them and keep them pleased uh which is not sustainable and so it creates chaos where you know you're you're constantly chasing your tail and and it gives other people a lot of power over you so you can end up in in relationships that are sort of exploitative or um just not healthy for you um and and yeah so I think it's one of those things that sort of banded around um and and it's something that a lot of us kind of do in bits and Bobs kind of like yeah sometimes I'm like that or in certain situations I'm like that and and some people spend their lives um really really struggling with it the desire for us to take something we do a little bit and turn it into a label that describes our entire personality uh is quite strong in the pathologization of sort of normal emotions in that way which is odd right because both me and you um are fans of sort of emotionally informed therapy and people understanding their emotions I also think it's very interesting I think it's one of the most interesting things that you can do uh and yet I imagine that you have a similar problem to me as the the overuse of therapy speak online to describe like this person wasn't mean to me they were narcissistic or they caused me trauma uh you know I'm not sad I'm depressed and uh the sort of the straying over into you cross the boundary that's that's one of my bound etc etc um so people a lot of the time will say yes to things when they mean to say no or they want to say no they want to become firmer at being able to disappoint those around them how can they become better at that I think is one of the most important skills anyone will ever learn actually because you're you put yourself at risk if you if you can't uh say no when you need to or you can't hold boundaries and there's that people pleasing tendency so if everything is about everybody else and what they want from you um and that's where it's not the same as being a nice person so you know if you're um if everybody else's needs and wishes and desires come first and you don't have the ability to put a stop to that when it doesn't fit then you'll end up doing things that you regret and don't fit with your values or that don't feel like you're being a nice person but it's because somebody else has more power over your behavior than you do um so I think assertiveness skills are a big part of what's taught in therapy actually you know teaching people to manage uh difficult people and and people who perhaps have more power in relation ship or you know um it kind of sounds easy to be able to say no um and and it's not because it's always packed out with lots of emotion and complex Dynamics between two people and so it can be really difficult but it's absolutely learnable and so that's where um it's it's important to remember that even if you've had a habit for life of putting everybody else first and being the I don't mind I'm fine you know whatever you think um type person that you can begin to change but it's often about learning specific skills and why do you stop what are the skills so uh a lot of it is practice in uh light-hearted ways you know we talked about the sort of acting opposite to urg is using polos and kind of you know situations that aren't necessarily um the most emotive the most difficult for you you kind of grade situations you could even make a list to be fair so you can uh make a list of the different situations where it's difficult to be assertive or state your own needs and you take the easiest one and you start with that and you practice and you have a go and then you come back and you see how it went what went well what would you know and um so I was working with someone on um on dealing with those kind of assertiveness skills or needing to State your ones in a workplace and and uh you know going at home on time or taking holiday those sorts of things and so we started with something really uh that felt the easiest and then we just assessed it so you know stress test things and then learn from it actually the anticipatory anxiety about it was much worse than actually the awkward moment of saying what I needed to say and their reaction was not as bad as I thought it would be um you know I had all that fear and discomfort but that died down as soon as the moment was over and then actually I got what I needed and uh the situation was better than it would have been and I'm not living in resentment so when when you start small you get these small victories that give you that momentum and give you that sort of drive to move forward and go for the next challenge but you can't expect to suddenly go right from now on I'm going to be bounded and assertive and strong and and going overnight harder yeah right it's just not going to happen you have to do these things gradually and start with the easiest thing something that almost feels a bit silly that's so easy it's it's a bit kind of really am I starting here but then you get that little easy Victory and then you move on to the next one which is a little bit more difficult and and so on that anticipatory anxiety thing is so funny because you're right it's almost always your ability to uh turn the future situation into a nightmare is significantly better than it almost ever is and the stupid thing is that all of the nightmares that you genuinely uh encounter in the real world the ones that you probably didn't see coming to go okay so I have this unbelievable ability to predict things that aren't problems not predict things that are going to be massive issues okay brilliant thanks amazing way our brains are set up um but yeah I I I think that that's right and again is a uh uh slowly rehabilitating people pleaser uh that's a way that that I found to be better as well um to learn to be able to make demands of other people to not subjugate my needs uh or believe that I don't have needs or think that it's Noble to not have needs to put somebody else ahead of me oh this is like a sort of a sacrificial type it's a sort of odd like emotional puritanism where you think uh if I feel bad but someone else feels good net net that means that it's good go what if both what if you could both feel good but you just need to sort of make a demand yeah yeah so true and often you're when you feel like you're being a nice person because you're making them feel good um actually sometimes what you're doing is just appeasing them and you're just scared of their emotional reaction or their disapproval and it's you know feel it's it's motivated by fear of of what their reaction might be rather than um you know your own values around what should happen in that situ it's also not very trustworthy if somebody can't trust your no it's very difficult to trust your yes and you know you hinted at uh if you don't have any choice it's not particularly virtuous you don't even feel good about doing The Virtuous thing because you didn't have any other option but you didn't choose to be nice to this person you simply couldn't be bad yeah and um I had I wrote about this this week actually that uh a friend of mine a few months ago me and him had had a a sort of well-meaning debate but I was worried that I'd upset him so I rang him a little bit afterwards and I was like hey man I just wanted to sort of check in and make sure that you're right he like yeah of course like of course it was it was totally fine and then I he heard me start to chastise myself for going see this is this is my people pleasing nature coming out this is me I had to check in he's like whoa whoa whoa hang on a second the reason that I love you as a friend for one of the big reasons is because you decid decided to put me first even in this situation even the one that was neutral the fact that you did reach out and car he's like be careful pathologizing something which is actually a really virtuous part of who you are and I'm like right okay so doing the thing was uh good it's a part of my nature that my friends are glad that I have yeah but by not really but by being compelled to do it as opposed to choosing to do it that does kind of dagate some of the virtue that's behind it so I was like right okay so am I supposed to purposefully try and get rid of that so briefly make myself a worst friend to then relearn it again consciously so that I can finally get back to the place that I was in the beginning I'm like that seems unnecessarily effortful like to go around this whole Loop to end up at the place that I started again but this time it's you know what I mean and I think this a this line between virtue from compulsions and virtue from choices and then this odd sense that we need to deprogram it's right okay so if it's hard to do does that make it more virtuous like it's in my nature like that's just me speaking forward what a lovely way to be would you rather be somebody that's mean and you have to work hard to do that thing would that make you a better person if you were good but you was naturally mean I'm sure I'd be able to find a way to castigate myself and whip myself into submission say well I mean you know that you did the thing but you didn't feel like doing the things that's you know the uh human desire to minimize uh our sort of good uh points is um robust to say the least yeah and and like you say it's all about um the choice and you know that you clearly have an awareness of it now and so if you found yourself in a situation where it was really detrimental to you and you knew that you probably should say something different but you'd said X because um because of that people pleasing tendency then you'd be in a a better position to be able to choose something different because you have that awareness and and that's the key isn't it is it's okay to have that as a trait and and that sort of tendency um because if you're aware of it then when it becomes Troublesome you stand a chance at doing something different doesn't mean you have to kind of eradicate everything and you know clean slate and start again um you can and that's the thing you know a lot of um a lot of stuff now is about you like you say pathologizing everything and and as if it's something that's wrong with us and and actually those those Tendencies can also be really lovable parts of us and things that other people appreciate about us or that we appreciate about ourselves um but that don't always work in every context in other news this episode is brought to you by element for the last 3 years I've started every morning with element element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't each grabbing go stick contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium with no coloring no artificial 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what's your advice for dealing with passive aggressive people oh uh so with passive aggressive behavior I think it's one of those things that you feel it very subtly so and you start to question yourself I think that's one of the Key signs is that that you know something will happen maybe it's a a compliment that feels more like an insult or uh something that's where on the surface everything seems friendly superficially but you come away feeling like you're not sure if they really liked you or uh you come away feeling sort wounded in some way and or maybe you're being kind of subtly excluded um and and that sort of behavior is is inviting you in to become es especially if someone uh is being a pass pass aggressive by um taking on role of a victim in a situation they're inviting you to come in as a perpetrator and and passive aggressive behavior is one of those things that it's really difficult to um pinpoint exactly what it was and well the culpable deniability is the entire reason for the passive aggression yeah so someone could you know I don't know let's say uh you know something Great's happened in your life you've been really successful one of your friends has a problem with that and and so starts sort of ignoring you or trying to exclude you and stuff but as soon as you uh pick up on that and and say are we all right then all is denied right they that everything's fine I've just been busy haven't been able to you know and and so you you're kind of stuck in this place I can't really address it because they will deny it um and yet I feel terrible and I don't feel connected to this person anymore I feel like they maybe don't like me or something is going on and and the trouble is the more you then uh get sucked into kind of joining the circus in that way and playing the game um the more you lose I think um so a lot of it is about watching and learning you know if someone reveals themselves to you that they're not okay with you in a certain way or um that that friendship is now conditional on you I don't know making yourself smaller or um not doing certain things or associating with certain people um then all you can do is learn from that and make your own decisions then about whether that's a friendship for you or whether that's something that the Friendship can overcome you know might be a a blip but it might also be something bigger yeah I I'm intimately amiliar with passive aggression and uh it it never really points at the thing that someone's trying to say it's this sort of Shadow sentence that gestures in the direction of it whilst also being able to be completely denied that it is that thing that we're talking about so that it's kind it's it's quite a cowardly form of communication I'm aware that it's coping mechanism there's lots of reasons that people do it but it's a very cowardly form of of communication because it doesn't ever actually say the thing that you mean it just sort of points in the direction and then gets mad at you if you don't realize it yeah uh so Neil Strauss says unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments and I think that's sort of passive aggression in a in a nutshell yeah but yeah you know there's two at least for me there's sort of two broad approaches the first one being like call it out as gently as possible you're like look hey man uh it feels like such and such a thing has happened I'm not really too sure what it is um but I don't like this sort of lingering sense of something unspoken help me understand here like what's what's going on this is an open Forum I'm not going to judge you just let me know uh and for me with that you know that's a really as long as you deploy it in the right way that's a really open door policy that's an olive branch for somebody to go okay it's a bit safe yeah do you know what it is like he I know that you don't even think about it but you said this thing the other week and [ __ ] it's just got to me and I haven't really being able to stop thinking about it and you go awesome like water run to the bridge and you can then round it out quite nicely by saying something like hey man look I I just want to let you know if this ever ever happens if anything even remotely close to this happens again just call it out like just say it to me straight away like is that what happened for you in your situation I mean I like I say illustrious career of dealing with passive aggressive people and um but that's at least my current working theory of one of the better ways to deal with it and um the the second side of it is look like if you've put that forward and this person sort of Behaving this way I think going okay like I I I trust what you're saying but it still feels like there's something lingering there and you know reliably now those situations those people have just got faced out of my life so I'm like hey man I overthink enough I don't need to be overthinking about your thinking as well like I've got enough of my own thinking to over think about yeah and andna there's a big decision to make isn't there when when someone is behaving in that way towards you and you know friendships are valuable so you know it's important not to um make that decision impulsively but to like you say do that over time so you know someone might make a mistake because they're having a hard time and and that might change and and get better after a while or it might not and so with that sort of watch and learn approach take it in adjust your the amount that you trust someone so adjust how much you uh share with them adjust how much you trust them to you know um know certain information or whatever um so that you can kind of not so that you're always guarded but so that you're just protecting yourself if this person is reading themselves not to have your best interest at heart um and then gradually come to a decision about whether this friendship is really um for you or not whether it really uh adds to your life or if actually takes away from from your life um and but yeah I think sometimes that that decision has to come just carefully and considered so that you're not sort of impulsively um pushing someone out and then later realize it there might have been an explanation for it it seems like I think talking about relationships Intimate Relationships there's sort of two broad buckets of challenges early on in relationships one being you loving somebody who doesn't feel the same and the other being somebody loving you but you sort of struggling to let them get in close the sort of anxious versus avoidant I suppose the push versus the pull yeah what's your advice for these two buckets of people yeah so that I mean it's quite um it's quite common actually this sort of uh avoidant person getting into relationship with an anxious um attached person so uh If you're sort of anxiously attached you might uh always be you know worried about what that other person feels and you will want more affection from them and more reassurance that they still love you and and you know that's based on those early attachments whereas the avoidant person they still need love and they still need that reassurance but they're not going to ask you for it and when things get too uh sort of intimate then that will fill them with some sort of uncomfortable feelings maybe fear um and they will kind of shut that down and doesn't mean they don't need love from the other person they still benefit from connection they just find it really difficult to um to reach out for it and to um and to sit in that sort of exposed state that vulnerable state of of being close to someone or being intimate with someone so I think what you're doing when when you're working with couples who are in that kind of relationship the risk is that the relationship ends because the the avoidant person becomes so overwhelmed by the anxious person who keeps trying keeps trying keeps trying um that they kind of um push back or become sort of rejecting and then that's too much for that anxious person and in the end they say I I can't do any more of this and they move on um and so what you're aiming for in that scenario is um to and it's important to I know we you said at the beginning there about you know someone who doesn't love you back this is a kind of scenario where these people do love each other they just have different styles of attachment and so what you're aiming for is awareness of each person's cycle you know own sort of cycle or pattern of dealing with people in the relationship so that they have some level of appreciation and a degree of patience for the other person and what they you know what they're experiencing but for both of those to aim for a more secure attachment style so to Edge towards somewhere in the middle which involves compromise from both people so it involves you know the person who's more avoidant um building up their tolerance for intimacy and closeness um and for for the anxious person to build up their uh resilience for uncertainty and uh the tendency to kind of seek reassurance and cming that so so it involves both people kind of working to fit together and it's absolutely possible um you know there are lots of couples with those sorts of styles of that that work really well um yeah what about the person that doesn't love you back the I guess we're one step before the relationship here you know pining pandering claing for somebody who just you want them and they don't want you yeah I think you know there were just oh I don't know probably thousands and thousands of books written on that kind of scenario that sort of qu to love and things and um I think you know when we're talking about the peop pleasing side some people will have that tendency to uh stay in relationships in which the other person has no affection for them um because of the fear of being alone being rejected and I think you make better decisions about those kind of relationships if you work on having your own back so it's much less scary the idea of leaving someone or being rejected by someone if if you know that you will look after yourself and do the best by yourself and uh you know you're much more resilient to any of that and you're much less likely to put up with someone who who doesn't love you back and treats you poorly if you have your own back and you're looking after yourself so having that kind of um good relationship with the self where you you come first uh helps you to be able to do isn't it strange we've got this sort of odd balance when we get into relationships with people before we met them we were self-sufficient human perfectly fine most people maybe in many ways preferable uh to uh being in a relationship and then you decide to you decide to let this other person into your life and you think right okay well I I know that in order to fully love this person in order to integrate them into my lifestyle I need to not just sort of continue to do the independent thing that I was doing with the window dressing of like some companionship every so often but they actually Infuse themselves into it I begin to um take heed of what they say I care about their opinions uh there is a bit of them in me and if that leaves there is this void there and you're sort of trying to create this Balancing Act and then as things get more and more you think well maybe even their opinion of me is more important than my opinion of me and I am so concerned about what whether they're okay that I can't be okay without that and if they were to leave I don't even know what would be left but in order to have in order for you to hold on to the initial type of sort of Ruthless Independence that you had before it feels like you wouldn't ever really fully be able to let that person integrate into your life so yeah I this sort of uh delicate balance between you are okay you can back yourself you are not a fragile little mouse and also if you want to experience everything that there is to enjoy in a relationship you need to allow yourself you need to open up that side of yourself in order to be potentially hurt yeah uh it's a not a simple balance yeah and it's it's a risk but um it's a risk that's worth it because we we do um a lot better in relation ships um than we do outside of them and you know you you there is so much to gain from that risk that it makes it worth it you do make yourself vulnerable going into relationship don't you and um so when you're kind of at stage where you're you're not sure whether um the relationship is going to end like you say when when people have been so into a relationship and and sacrifice so much of themselves that it's become all about the other person ending that relationship then can be this process of rebuilding you you don't know what your preferences are because you've spent you know so many years prioritizing somebody else's and but it it's absolutely possible to do that and to to ReDiscover you know yourself and your own preferences and the things that you like to do or your own goals and your own values but it you know takes a bit of work we'll get back to talking to Julie in one minute but first I need to tell you about Maui newie not all meat is created equal and that is why I partnered with Maui Nei not only does their meat taste amazing it's actively combating the environmental destruction caused by Maui's Axis deer overpopulation it has the highest protein per calorie ratio on the market up to 53% more than grass-fed beef and it is the only stress-free 100% wild harvested red meat available their venison sticks are with me whenever I travel these are phenomenal they taste unreal nine grams of protein I love them they're a complete life hack you need to get more protein in your diet and this is going to help you can get the healthiest red meat on the planet delivered directly to your door by going to the link in the description below or heading to Mau venison docomond wisdom using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's M AI nuui venison docomo wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout I suppose a lot of the time the the sort of disagreements I guess before the relationship breaks down uh the kind of arguments that people have uh I had Ben Shapiro on the show recently uh who's a good debater and he mentioned that uh he has to remind himself that being loved by his wife is more important than winning an argument because a lot of the time regardless of whether he's in the right or in the wrong he he's very well trained it's like saying I go into a fist fight and I'm an MMA fighter um he has a very particular set of skills humans hate being so wrong so much I think that we can become myopic about this sort of stuff that we just don't want to lose the AR argument to our partner yeah even if we might be in the wrong even if the outcome results in us being more miserable or things being more sad yeah how what's your advice for uh better disagreements and for sort of letting go of this need to win arguments it's interesting isn't it because when you're in the moment and you're angry with someone it feels as if the best feeling is going to be when you prove that you're right and you come out on top and and you're the only person that that thinks you look good when you win and and actually if you're in a loving relationship with someone and you know you prove yourself right and you feel like you've won the argument what the other person then feels is probably a bit crushed and a bit disappointed in you for uh being so ruthless with them and and so it's so important and I think you learn this over time the longer that you're in relationships learn how to argue in a way that leads to reconnection and uh the the aim is no longer to work out who's winning and and whether the relationship is going to continue the aim is to resolve it in a way that doesn't hurt either of you too much and um and arguments that focus on reconnection and repair as opposed to winner and loser lead to much much stronger relationships um in which you you can argue and still trust each other I always had this thing in my mind uh this was early Bro Science from me this is like early 20s bro science stuff uh where I noticed that the tone that was set at the very beginning of a relationship that I would get into very much sort of determined expectations down the line that um you know during the first you know 6 months or whatever 3 months where everything's amazing uh the expectations coming down the line if you spend four nights a week together because you're botted and you can't think about anything except for them etc etc but really where you want to bring this relationship into land is you probably see each other two nights a week or whatever um the change the pivot that then gets made or there's a particular demeanor that you have in the beginning maybe you're more aloof you're playing it more cool or maybe you're more lovey or whatever it might be um that that uh tone setting in the beginning is uh highly determinant of what is expected down the line and quite rightly so like this is the relationship that I got into what's this one like why is what what what's happened with this sort of adjustment here um but I get the sense that with disagreement with attachment Style with regulation co-regulation with the way that you um makeup after you've argued Etc uh setting the tone for that as early as possible as well is maybe even more important because that is going to determine or at least my current working theory is that most relationships live and die not on how happy you guys are together but how well you disagree because like insufficient happiness may be a reason for a relationship to break up but what's more likely is too much disagreement too much unhappiness right like let's get past that first because that predicates you being able to access the happiness thing in any case and yeah the sort of direct communication that hey when X happened I felt y I'm sure it wasn't your fault I'm sure that you didn't mean to make me feel that way but I I I don't want to lie to you I just want this to be other there and this is a collaborative process almost treating the relationship like a third person and being like look we have this thing which is the way that we're in mesh together and I want to do things that allow that to flourish as much as possible yeah yeah and and also it's okay to um for it not to be perfect at the beginning so you know I've been with my husband for like 20 years and we don't argue in the same way that we did when we first got together you learn to argue you learn to yeah your relationship evolves and as long as you're always doing your best to try and improve on yourself and how what you bring to the relationship and making adjustments when things don't work well um then what you have is this amazing flourishing strengthening thing over time um whereas I think you know if you if you base your choice about whether you continue a relationship on um you know how you're arguing right now as if that's the only way it can ever happen then you might end a relationship that could have improved or got better so it's all about sort of learning from each experience isn't it and then trying to you know do better if you feel like you've not really bought your best getting on to the individual what's your advice to people that have got a critical inner voice you know what in in my years of uh sort of doing therapy with people I've come across so many people who are highly self-critical painfully so and yet hold on to it for dear life because they think that that's their source of drive and motivation and productivity and achievement and so they'll defend it like it's doing something for them um and until they learn that actually it's probably doing damage or it's holding them back and um because often they'll they'll they'll come with a some other problem and won't necessarily recognize that it's being perpetuated by that that tendency to um not only be self-critical but just you know psychologically hammering yourself into the ground when things go wrong or when you're not perfect and that sort of thing um but I always like talking to people about the idea of okay we all want to do well in life right we want to you know be at our best and but if you take that idea and you take I don't know Elite athlete there is no Elite athlete out there that um chooses not to have a coach or support around them to do their best right they recognize that that's helpful but they also don't choose their high school bully to come and Coach them and and come along to them with the come along to competitions with them or uh they'll choose someone that they trust someone that is honest with them but delivers that Honesty with respect and someone who genuinely wants them to be at their best and Achieve and so if you take idea of a sports coach and everything that they have to embody to be decent at that job to get the most out of someone why wouldn't you want to also do that for yourself in your own head um you know the the differences um between you know that kind of high school bully sound or you know the um you know abusive parent or whoever that voice is in your mind that is never going to get um the kind of outcome that you would get from you know a really good coach or someone who genuinely wants the best for you it's a great realization it's a really lovely realization you know I would certainly put myself into the category of person who believed that his castigating inner voice was uh encouraging his performance for a long time kind of got myself to at least now realizing it's probably not helping it's certainly not making me better but then it there's an even more sort of difficult question which is okay it's not even useful dot dot dot and it's still there right okay so it's no longer performing the function that I thought it was but you've got this you know lifetime of habit of that just being the default that you go to remember I used to do this thing when uh again CrossFit world uh it's interesting that I use CrossFit a lot of the time when I'm talking about kind of like the induction to personal growth because they those both those things happened at the same time okay um so I kind of anchor a lot of the things that I was doing then to the training modality that I did uh and if I was doing a workout on an assault bike my heart rate was really really high it's 1 70 or whatever I've got the taste of metal in the back of my throat uh I'm aware 170 is not that high for some people but it was high for me uh working away in the assault bag and these sort of during that extreme stress like acute stress uh this sort of weird texture would appear this sort of landscape or whatever in my mind and it was always critical voices it was always and I have had it a couple of other times when I'm under periods of extreme stress the less gracious parts of my inner monologue come up uh and yeah I wonder it certainly got infinitely better but there's still work to be done did it help you at the time to perform yeah I think so I mean look in my experience most high performers are not driven by a perfectly balanced desire to enact their logos and actualize themselves they are looking for validation from the world they are looking for Acceptance in a way that they never got it as a child they're looking to prove the chip on their shoulder or the Bull's wrong or whatever it might be a lot of people are driven by running away from something they fear not running towards something that they want and uh it allows people to create very very impressive lives but in the only way that everybody else can judge it which is outwardly yeah and you know I know that this is one of your uh pet uh obsessions too which is the price that successful people pay to be the person that you admire it's probably been the most interesting question that that I've considered over the last few years and and you speak to a lot of people that are very successful and you look at the price that they pay and you go I didn't know if this is worth it like you have this Cathedral of of accolades and success and reputation and and other people admiring you and so on but look at what you've had to do to get there and again there are no Solutions only tradeoffs um I'm I'm currently sort of really really trying to work about what would this be like if it was more fun what would this be like if I sacrificed maybe even you know 2% or 5% of the gripping and the cloying and the sort of like control in the real world to maybe unlock 50% more enjoyment internally uh and I don't even know if that's a trade that needs to be made it might be a sort of a false equivalence or whatever but uh I've made it I've made a ton of progress so for the the people who've got um an endemic uh critical in a voice I think uh certainly there is at least a little bit that can be done to deprogram that how much whether you can get to the stage where it's you know the the perfect high school coach that you never had uh I'm not sure but uh yeah I'm moving in the right direction yeah and I think um a lot of people get the impression that if you're not sort of verbally hammering yourself that the alternative is some kind of Airy fairy um you know you're lovely as you are and that kind of thing that you just you can't believe in and just feels I and and there's a lot in between isn't there so you know when I talked about the kind of fear chapter and and that sort of inner voice that I needed when I was going through all my health stuffff in the summer um I needed a hard hard voice uh we are we are not victims here we are being strong here we are doing this and and and it was very um sort of powerful and needed to be a powerful approach and needed that I think what wasn't there was the contempt was the you know digging at yourself so I think um what stops a lot of people from trying to kind of challenge how they speak to themselves is that they think the Airy Fairy stuff is um the only self-indulgence is the only alternative and it's not you know actually self-compassion has to be honest all the time and if you're not um living in line with your own values or you're not making yourself proud you have to be honest with yourself about that but in a way that's also respectful um and that doesn't make you recoil in shame and then unable to learn from it so there's this kind of whole spectrum and variability and choice about what that tone is like I think it's well it's very much a horses for courses thing that maybe at the beginning of your journey if look if you are 450 you're kind of getting towards the stage where you just need to use whatever you can and if shame is the most salent uh sort of tool that can get you from there down to a more healthy body weight or you know pick whatever it is if you're on the verge of a drug addiction or whatever like you just get whatever fuel you can grab a hold of most easily but after a while you have to think right okay I've got myself into some degree of momentum here is the tool that got me here the one that's going to get me there and is this really like have I worked this hard to achieve all of these things to still call myself a piece of [ __ ] if I fall short it's like really that's what you're doing that's the that's the fuel that you're relying on like a a guy with a hammer you go okay there's only one use that I have for this I only have one mode of in a monologue I'm never going to be gentle with myself I'm never going to be caring I'm never going to be reassuring I'm never going to be supportive it's like no no no no I'm just going to whip myself into submission and it's always that's that's it and and those sorts of responses are often going to increase the urges to escape and avoid which aren't going to lead to success anyway so you know even if um you feel like shame or fear or something like that has worked to get you set on a better path um it's not sustainable because it's more likely to lead to uh the need to use those Escape methods and um later on so yes it's recognizing that even if it's been useful it's really helpful to find other resources as well is this similar to the approach that you have for dealing with self-doubt yeah I think with self-doubt a lot of the stuff online is a sort of like you know just don't do it just believe in yourself and and again honesty has to be part of that so with self-doubt um sometimes it's useful to listen to it because it some of it's valid and warranted you know so if you're you know really doubting your ability to perform I don't know in an exam um because you haven't studied then you want to listen to that self-doubt but in a constructive way so it's like why am I feeling this okay I haven't studied let's book in a load of study time and let's make it happen so there are certain you know you don't want this sort of like you know happy clappy I'm never going to be honest with myself I'm just going to be happy with myself all the time um it's okay to feel these things all of those emotions that we can feel including the negative ones they are information and we get to choose what we do with that you have to choose to listen to it first off and when you're listening to it you kind of have to ask yourself is this warranted and is it a fair reflection of reality and is it in proportion to reality as well so you know some people will have self-doubt because that's a really useful natural thing to do and it reflects a need in the situation and other people will just chronically doubt themselves all the time and sometimes that's more of a pattern that's developed that does doesn't always reflect reality um you know it's it's a learning experience that has happened possibly earlier on in life all of this is made significantly harder when you're overwhelmed and emotionally activated though I guess which is you know to kind of Bring It full circle I suppose all of the things that we're talking about in the cold harsh light of a podcast studio uh sound achievable uh rational um Within Reach but you're just swimming in emotions this thing happens I'm overwhelmed there's too much going on um what is a what is a way that people can kind of come back to Center when we've got we've got these we maybe even understand the tactic I should be I should be more supportive with myself my in there's that in voice thing again but you're just all you can feel is just this activation yeah and that's why I wrote the book actually this idea that um when you're in it when you're in the storm what you don't need to hear is someone saying well maybe you should have learned to meditate six months ago you be all right now right what you need then is you need someone to kind of you know grab you by the shoulders look you in the eye and say okay I know a way through this follow me here's what you need to focus your attention on and here's the next step you need to take and we're going to take that together and you know it's really difficult when you have a flood of emotion because of whatever situation you're in it's difficult to work out which way is up let alone what step you need to take there are these moments of your brain is sending you lots of information in the form of emotion in its attempt to apply meaning to what's happening and to work out what's happening and what you need to do next so in that moment you know the best thing for our nervous systems is each other and is someone else and so I always say I think um I say in the introduction actually you know the inner world is a bit like a saer there is benefits to be being there but only if you don't stay too long and so in if you're struggling uh reach out to somebody else another human being that you trust for connection and that will be the most helpful thing to you if you have someone in your life like that uh but not everybody else not everybody has that but also even the people that have it sometimes that person isn't with them all the time and or in the moments that they most need it and so that's what this was really about is about kind of talking to someone in the moment and say okay right we're in this situation it is what it is here's here's how we deal with this moment find some calm find some clarity and then work out which way we get through this um because the only way is through it if as soon as you numb all that emotion well that's all information for you so if you numb it you're not going to be able to use it um but it's just it's not easy to kind of work out in the moment because life is complex and it throws stuff at us right I realized that the sort of numbing of emotions the uh fleeing from them there are better and worse ways to do it it's TR you know people to say well it's better to be addicted to the gym than it is to be addicted to fentanyl you go like yeah obviously but one of the more sort of not Insidious but certainly subtle ways that people do that was uh meditation or breath work or um you know what people would typically consider to be very healthy very embodied uh solutions to this so an emotion arises inside of you and if you're good at meditation you notice it you release and allow it right okay brilliant you still don't know anything about that emotion you haven't sat with where that's come from and that's just going to continue coming up now are there times when you need to just let it go yes absolutely but if this thing's going to keep on happening like you're it is permanently putting some sort of Band-Aid over the top of this and again and again and again and again you go after a while you need to kind of admit I just need to I just need to sit and investigate where this comes from yeah and some people are able to do that individually and kind of sit with it and listen to it and be with it and other people need support to do that because it feels danger you know it's only uh feels comforting if your body feels a safe place to be so for some people that's not the case and it's terrifying and leads to all sorts of unhealthy strategies um so that's when it can be really helpful to do that with someone else who can kind of guide you through listening to that and then when things get too much kind of pulling back a bit and coming in again and you know these things can be done really carefully and piece by piece and by teaching some of the skills to begin with to cope with how distressing that can really be you know some people have a lot um a lot in the past that they've been really successful at numbing and covering up and so the minute you ask someone to take a look at that well there is a reason they've been numbing that for a long time and so well because it's really painful and it's really scary um so you know no therapist worth their salt would ask you to sort of do that without first teaching you the skills to be able to cope with how distressing that could be Dr Julie Smith ladies and gentlemen Julie I appreciate you I think the book's great why should people go they want to keep up to date with everything you're doing um I'm on Instagram and YouTube and all the platforms just as Dr Julie but um uh yeah the the books available everywhere I think thank you I appreciate you thank you thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode you will love my full length 2hour long conversation on an LED video wall with Dr K just here go on press it