Dr. Paul Conti: How to Improve Your Mental Health | Huberman Lab Guest Series

[Music] welcome to the hubman lab guest Series where I and an expert guest discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine today's episode marks the second episode in our four episode series with Dr Paul kti about mental health the first episode in the series dealt with how to understand and assess your level of mental health today's episode is about how to improve your mental health I do want to EMP emphasize that you do not need to have heard or seen the first episode in order to understand or glean important information from today's episode about how to improve your mental health but I do encourage you to go and listen to the first episode at some point if you have not already today's episode deals with several topics important to all of us as well as protocols to improve one's mental health for instance you will learn how to guide yourself through a process of self-inquiry in which you address certain key questions about your drives your level of aggressive Drive pleasure drive and the so-called generative Drive these are essential things to understand about oneself if you want to guide yourself toward your aspirations and if you want to understand how your subconscious processing is influencing your thoughts and your behaviors and your feelings in ways that sometimes serve your aspirations and in other ways that can hinder your aspirations Dr kti shares with us a way of assessing our internal narratives as well as a way of creating a constructive self-awareness and an understanding of where those narratives and that that self-awareness stem from in our childhood so that we can navigate forward with the greatest sense of agency we also talk about how to move past common hindrances to improving one's mental health such as overcoming intrusive thoughts and perhaps most importantly today's episode provides information and protocols that anyone can use to cultivate their generative Drive which is a Hallmark of mental health just a reminder that Dr Paul kti has generously provided a few diagrams that we include as PDFs in the show note captions they are completely zero cost to access and they can help you understand some of the material that was discussed in the first episode of the series as well as the current episode about how to improve your mental health and while those simple PDF diagrams are certainly not necessary in order to understand the material in today's discussion or in the other discussions of this series many people find them useful so I encourage you to check out those links in the show note captions before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is better help better help offers Professional Therapy with a licensed therapist carried out online I personally have been doing weekly therapy for more than 30 years and while that Weekly therapy was initiated not by my own request it was in fact a requirement for me to uh remain in high school over time I really came to appreciate just how valuable doing quality therapy is in fact I look at doing quality therapy much in the same way that I look at going to the gym or doing cardiovascular training such as running as ways to enhance my physical health I see therapy as a vital way to enhance one's mental health the beauty of better help is that they make it very easy to find an excellent therapist an excellent therapist can be defined as somebody who is going to be very supportive of you in an objective way with whom you have excellent rapport with and who can help you arrive at Key insights that you wouldn't have otherwise been able to find and because better heal therapy is conducted entirely online it's extremely convenient and easy to incorporate into the rest of your life so if you're interested in betterhelp go to betterhelp.com huberman to get 10% off your first month that's betterhelp spelled hp.com huberman today's episode is also brought To Us by waking up waking up is a meditation app that offers dozens of guided meditation sessions mindfulness trainings yoga NRA sessions and more by now there's an abundance of data showing that even short daily meditations can greatly improve our mood reduce anxiety improve our ability to focus and can improve our memory and while there are many different forms of meditation most people find it difficult to find and stick to a meditation practice in a way that is most beneficial for them the waking up app makes it extremely easy to learn how to meditate and to carry out your daily meditation practice in a way that's going to be most effective and efficient for you it includes a variety of different types of meditations of different duration as well as things like Yoga Nidra which place the brain and body into a sort of pseudo sleep that allows you to emerge feeling incredibly mentally refreshed in fact the science around Yoga Nidra is really impressive showing that after a Yoga Nidra session levels of dopamine in certain areas of the brain are enhanced by up to 60% which places the brain and body into a state of enhanced Readiness for mental work and for physical work another thing I really like about the waking up app is that it provides a 30-day introduction course so for those of you that have not meditated before or getting back to a meditation practice that's fantastic or if you're somebody who's already a skilled in regular meditator waking up has more advanced meditations and yoga Neer sessions for you as well if you'd like to try the waking up app you can go to waking up.com huberman and access a free 30-day trial again that's waking up.com huberman and now for my discussion about mental health with Dr Paul Ki Dr Ki welcome back thank you in the first episode of this series you laid out for us in a very structured way you know what true mental health looks like essentially what we should all be aspiring to and he touched on these themes of agency and gratitude as uh verb States really ways of being in the world yes that allow everybody to have some sense of well-being to have some sense of themselves in a way that is kind to themselves and to others and really to feel good and do good good in their life and and without question this is what people want right you also spelled out for us these two pillars the structure of self and the function of self that consists of a number of different things that from which geyser up or kind of you know give rise to these feelings of empowerment humility agency and gratitude and reminded us several times that when we are challenged when we're not doing as well as we would like that we need to look back to the structure of self and the function of self and ask specific questions in order to arrive or rear at the sense of agency and gratitude yes I think it would be wonderful for us if you could just of recap the overall model um because it has the components that I just mentioned but there's some subtlety and some really key aspects of these pillars of structure of self and function of self I think if people keep in mind for today's episode which is about challenges that people commonly face and even uh if you will phenotypes that we see commonly out there for people that haven't heard of phenotypes phenotypes are um the typical appearance of something so there is the phenotype of the anxious person the phenotype of the person who just can't seem to get out of a rut there's the phenotype of the tra traumatized person and these things play out differently in in different individuals men and women boys and girls but we're going to visit U many of the most common phenotypes out there and think about how to do better be better feel better through the lens of the model that uh We spelled out in episode one and of course if people have not seen or heard episode one today's discussion will still be entirely accessible to them so in keeping with that if you could just um give us an overview of of what this uh structure of the healthy self looks like as a road map for uh where we're all headed today thank you thanks very much um revisiting the the pillars is is I think the best place to start because they're really are routes to understanding and if we understand then we can strategize we can make change right we can make things better so the the the first pillar the structure of self starts with the unconscious mind right this incredibly complicated biological supercomputer that's firing a mile a minute right underneath the surface in us and is throwing up to the surface all sorts of thoughts and ideas and states that then the conscious mind apprehends and our awareness comes into play and then we have defense mechanisms that sort of Rise Up from the unconscious mind and they they Circle and sort of G themselves around the conscious mind which they can do in an unhealthy way or in a healthy way or any anything in between and then the the character structure is sort of the nest around all of that and it's from the character structure that we that we are engaging in the world in the ways that we're engaging right it's our active engagement with the world around us and the idea is that the self grows out of that it grows out of that Nest sitting on top of the unconscious mind to the conscious mind Rising above the defense mechanisms and the character structure and and if we go back to that when we're trying to understand ourselves you know we're trying to understand states of Health as well as states of unhappiness or or states that aren't healthy right by by going back and looking at the structure we can learn a tremendous amount and the other side the the other pillar is the the function of self and it really starts with the self-awareness right the awareness that hey there is an ie right I am in the world right this is 24 hours in the day are going to pass today and I'm going to be doing one thing or another I'm I'm so I'm to some very significant extent deciding how am I going to engage in the world around me during that time right so on top of that are the defense mechanisms in action so defense mechanisms remember are unconscious so there's a lot then going on inside of us that's determining sort of the field set of options right there may be a lot of automaticity that narrows down the set of options of what we may entertain what we may be aware of what we may decide and that could happen For Better or For Worse depending upon the health of the defense mechanisms but on top of that lies Salient so the idea then we would next visit okay what are we paying attention to right what what's coming from inside what's coming from outside and we have to not pay attention to many many many many things in order to pay attention to whatever our attention has lighted on at the moment so it's a complex process uh and it's worth looking at very closely if we want to understand ourselves so after thinking about the the defense mechanisms in action right the unconscious aspects of how we're engaging with the world then next to consider is salience which is sort of where does the Mind arrive at at rest right where does the Mind Trend towards is it something internal is it something external what are all the things we're not paying attention to in order to pay attention to something uh and is that thing healthy is it not healthy is it serving us well so there's so much to understand about salience and then The Next Step Beyond that is understanding Behavior right how are we engaging with the world around us what are our behavioral choices what are our automatic behaviors and then sitting on top of all of that are our strivings so we we have a sense of wanting something in the world around us like what is that and how we trying to get to it and how does it make us feel so if we look at the the 10 elements right the five under the structure of self and the five under the function of self then what we're really looking at is is sort of like looking at 10 cabinets right and if we're trying to understand ourselves whether we're trying to just generally understand ourselves or we're trying to get at a problem right then looking in all 10 of those cabinets make sense right some of them will be bare meaning that they may seem to have very little to do with the problem we're bringing and we kind of maintain an open mind right we may be led back to that cabinet and there may be something there but what usually happens is if we look in all 10 places we find a couple where there's there's some rich material to explore soort of the x marks the spot and then we go and we we dig there to sort of mix metaphors we we dig in the cabinet where we're going to find something right and then it leads forward a process of understanding and if we're bringing those things into line where we have a healthy structure of self and a healthy function of self and we're aware of all of this and we're working on it we're self-aware and we're paying attention to everything built on top of that then what we end up with is a sense of humility because one cannot be anything but respectful compassionate understanding the complexity of of all of this and understanding how does it manifest itself in us and and just the very fact that we can wake our ways in the world right is so just so impressive and in a way I think it brings to us a respect just a respect for being here navigating the world and I think of that respect is born humility the complexity of us the fact that millions of things are going on underneath the surface millions of of uh neurotransmission and endocrinological function all of this is going on under the surface I'm not even aware of it and then it kicks up to the surface generates a tremendous amount of respect for the complexity and also the diligence and perseverance it takes us to navigate through the world and I think built upon that understanding is a sense of humility and a sense of empowerment and the humility and empowerment in action right so so Express right become agency and gratitude and agency and gratitude as you said at the beginning we're seeing as verbs right that's like how we're living life it's it's through the lens so to speak of agency and gratitude that we're actively living and again I would put forth that when we look at measures of human happiness right across disciplines and across time this is always what we see is is some way of describing how agency and gratitude together as verbs manifest and then create happiness it's the state that we're seeking to be in right because from that state of active agency and active gratitude we achieve what it is that I think we're really searching for and you know there are by infinite words throughout human history to describe what that is we might choose to use words like peacefulness a sense of Peace a sense of contentment uh being delighted by things like just being amazed and impressed by things in the world around around us like this is a state that we're striving for and I think when people talk about happiness and what we're really trying to get to it's this right but it's not that these things are passive right these things are coming from the active agency the active gratitude and they're then interacting with a generative Drive within us we have an aggressive drive we have a pleasure drive like this has been thought about now for a long long time within mental health and validated in a lot of ways but what hasn't been validated is that they're the only things right we see human beings striving we see human beings wanting better for themselves and for the world around them we see acts of kindness that seem to be rooted to nothing other than the act of kindness we have within us a drive to know to understand to learn to make better and that has been described as many many things across human history but I think the words we might choose are a generative drive a drive to create and to make better and it's the the generative drive as something active within us right that is then aying with agency and gratitude right the active ways in which we express ourselves and then that all together brings us the peace the contentment the sense of delight sometimes that may exist in us in a state of rest right but very often it's in it's existing in us in a state of activity right and that's why people find you know the quote unquote happiness like what people are seeking not just in you know meditation sometimes we can find it there but people also find it in in action right they find it in doing that thing that they love to do or taking care of someone and learning something so when we look at all of this we we can then we can then have a route of understanding what is going on inside of us and how we can make the changes that let us be in this state which is really the state that we are seeking I really appreciate that you highlight that agency and gratitude are verb States uh from which peace contentment and Delight emerge and also the way that you explain the generative drive that um is distinct from aggressive drives and pleasure drives that exist in all of us um you know I I'm smiling because a number of examples of U peace contentment and Delight while in action come to mind I mean for me podcasting and in particular preparing for a podcast tring to mine the literature and figure out you know where the gems reside and where the confusion could could emerge and all of that brings about such peace contentment and Delight for me but is it's anything but passive it's um uh likewise yesterday uh had the experience of running into a puppy it's been a while since I've own a dog and um dogs are delightful puppies are particularly Delight the experience of seeing you light up when you ran into the puppy you know I and uh you did and um and I'm still buzzing from that short interaction with the puppy downstairs a wayar and or puppy um it just that I don't know why but I just Delight in in animals of of most all kinds not a fan of reptile sorry reptile fans uh so much but I just drived so much energy from it it felt like life energy and the the way the animal is sort of intentionally scattered as amusing to me as compared to the dog that he will eventually be which is going to be more linear in his thinking like it encapsulate so much of other things I love like brain development Etc anyway I highlight those examples because um there's nothing passive about it it's pure delight and joy for me um and it intersects with other Delights and joys and I think that um as you describe agency and gratitude peace contentment and delight and these generative forces um as well as other forces that exist in us I think it's really uh critical that uh people understand that you these are not states that you sit down and and place yourself into although perhaps one could through uh reflection or meditation or waking up from a really great night's sleep things of that sort but that um these are things that we can find ourselves a wash in if we are doing the right things and those things can oftentimes be very challenging um so assuming I understand the way the model is spelled out correctly um I'm more and more delighted at the fact that this is not just accessible in one domain but is accessible in many many different domains for everybody right this is not something unique to my experience even though I give examples from my own life but um that we really all do have access to this if we're looking in those cupboards those 10 cupboards and asking the right questions yes and and to maybe comment even a little further on the experience of of you and the dog right so so it was a an experience of delight right and and you enjoyed it and it brought a sense of peace and contentment like all of that happens right but think about what that's link link to like I I believe there's a strong sense of agency in you that you are enacting there's a strong gratitude in you that you're enacting you're you're handling your life in a way and and also for all of us good things always come with Good Fortune but but it comes with our strivings and our achievements that you're in a place to Delight in that right if you're unhappy like I don't like what I'm doing I'm I'm angry I'm frustrated right then there's no room in you to to find the Delight right and the Delight that you find is also very much linked to the generative drive right that it makes me think of how you you loved and nurtured Castello right so you have it in you to love and nurture a dog and you have done that in a really wonderful way and that generative Drive is part and parcel of the Delight you feel when you see a dog because you love dogs and you think about nurturing and it all comes together the the the agency and the Gratitude expressed as verbs puts you in a position to have that sense of delight which is so intertwined with your generative drive with a sense of caretaking a sense of creating the the Beyond self because although you enjoyed and loved Castello you enjoyed and loved his happiness right so it all comes together and I think it's interesting because in some ways it's a simple example but like that's life you know life has its its big moments but so much of our lives are the smaller moments that link together and I think that smaller moment becomes a big example I appreciate that you mentioned Costello for listeners of this podcast that have I'm tuned into early episodes costell was the source of the the background snoring for those of you that haven't you can go check he's a was a 90 pound English Bulldog Mastiff who um who had many skills um the best of which was snoring um so in addition to the generative Drive which is something that we certainly want to um talk more about today you mentioned these other drives aggressive drives and pleasure drives and much of what we're talking about today is going to be where people can go wrong wrong or where people struggle we are also of course going to go deeply into where people succeed and in particular where people can ask questions of themselves um in particular what is working for them and why as a route to understanding how to sift through those cupboards and understand what's not working and why and come up with real actionable answers and and then the ability to move forward um so if if you would could you tell us a little bit more about drives generally like like you know when I hear drives I I can't help as a neuroscientist but default to okay the dopamine circuit or the the endogenous opioid circuit or the serotonergic circuit but you know how do you conceptualize drives within us and and then perhaps you could tell us what the nature of aggressive drives and pleasure drives and generative drives so the the concept of a drive the definition of a drive is is something that's intrinsic to humans so we could look at it as a motivation right I mean we don't just lie on the ground and do nothing until we passively die right so something is going on inside of us that is driving us to do something other than that and historically the thinking in the field arising from early psychodynamic principles the the the the theory in the field that has really dominated the field either directly or indirectly in so many ways has been that there are two drives within us that there there's aggression and pleasure and again these are just words right so we could put apply Many Many Words which is why of course we want to Define what that means right so aggression even though we're using that word for it because the word for it is commonly used right but it means it means sort of forward active engagement right so so a a good healthy amount of aggression using that word for the drive would be a strong sense of agency right so so too little aggression can be a problem right then the person isn't bringing themselves to Bear right so there's too little in the way of self-determination um forward movement empowerment agency right and and in the same way too much of this drive becomes actual aggression so you know the idea that I want more and if I can't get it in in certain ways I'll just take it right so so then so it starts to become you know what we more map to the word aggression which which would be something negative in most cases like like a desire or a tendency to harm is that yeah sure we as as aggressive drives get higher which you see why they're in us because let's say we're defending ourselves or or or you're defending a family member right or or like an entire family right then it it makes sense to have high levels of aggression if like your family is threatened right so so those drives are in us with with at potentially those high levels for a reason but we we certainly access very high levels of aggression without the the indication of preservation of life or preservation of safety so so the thought is that's a drive in us and that gets us up and off the ground so to speak right and that the other drive then is pleasure which again doesn't just mean that like we we all want to be hedonists right so so pleasure could be even the pleasure of relief and safety right like we're like you know we're all back in the cave together and and we roll the stone in front of the door ah we're safe you know throughout human development you know pleasure comes in a lot of ways it can come through the pleasure of food or other people you know friendship romance sex there a lot of ways we can achieve pleasure it can be relief of things that are unpleasant you know relief of pain but that there's a drive towards this in humans which again really does does make sense and and too little of it again can be problematic because the person then isn't motivated to sort of seek things because they're they're not anticipating or don't receive gratification and too much of a drive for pleasure can also create problems so so we can kind of see how these two drives like okay they get us up and off the ground so to speak but the question is do they explain everything right and it's a very important question because if they explain everything then there's not really there's not room for behaviors and choices that are beyond the self right there's not an explanation for the person who I'll give you an an example of uh a person I've taken care of who's is a very strong swimmer you know knows how to swim and swam throughout his life who was in a place I saw video of it where there had been a hurricane and the waves were so frightening you know there were just hu this huge Surf and there were people who who had gotten dragged out and you just see him he runs into the water right he runs in and he goes and and he was really at risk he need to be saved himself but he saved them and I do not believe you can explain that through these drives I don't think you can say well that was he was aggressive he he wanted to go and do something you know that was imposing himself on the world or he got pleasure in thinking ah I'm strong enough to go do this I mean I think we're really gyrating you know we're contorting ourselves right in order I to explain it that way if we think there's a goodness in that man's heart like I know there's a goodness in that man's heart I know him right and and and that goodness sees his him in the moment and you know he knows that maybe he can save them maybe he can he's not sure but maybe he can so the next thing you know he's in the water and I think things like the love and nurturing of of other people you know of children love and in of animals of plants right like there are things inside of us that we can't explain with those two drives and and I think they have led to a very sort of Darker way of just conceiving of humans you know I I think it's a reason why now you know you look at us in in the modern day and age we comment humans through the lens of pathology right I mean there's there's a very very thick book that if if a person is assessing another person you know is thinking about like okay what what numbers in that book apply right which is like that that's not the way to go about understanding humans and I think if we just think there are those two drives we're not doing Justice to to humans right one I think it's not true I think it's evident that it's not true and then if we're framing it in a way that's not true we are not appropriately respectful of humans and if we come from what I believe to be the truth that there is a generative Drive in us a drive for the Beyond self a drive to make things better whether it has anything really directly to do with me or not and as with the other drives you know there can be more or less in people you a combination of Nature and nurture you know what what genetically is in us a predisposition you know based upon the genetic lineage that comes down to us and the recombination and now we're a unique person with a unique set of drives but they are impacted by the genetics and then they're impacted by life experience so more strongly formative life experience right so the younger the person the the sort of deeper the impact of events of nurturing versus abuse right on the the array on the relative waiting of drives within people but ultimately we get to these three drives and how they're functioning in a person being a way of understanding and assessing like how healthy or not healthy the person is and then we look back to those 10 cupboards right for the answers if we're finding things that we don't like these those drives are out of balance and they're and here are the problems causing so very very concrete issues right of problems in people's lives we can look and see where is that out of balance and if it's out of balance there's something in those pillars that are not in the right place we can then go back and look in all those cups for like Oh Where Do We dig to find the answer right we learn things we we bring things more into balance right so so the pillars are in a healthier place and then what sits on top of it as you you use the word geyser right the geyser that then comes up and floats everything on top of it can do that in a in a healthy way yeah during episode one we touched on some of the similarities between understanding the self and um building towards a healthy or healthiest version of self where agency and gratitude are these states that are being expressed and one of the themes there was this idea you know people perhaps want to be healthy so that they live a long time but presumably they also want to be healthy so that they can walk up flights of stairs pick up their kids move objects not get injured perhaps even do sport or um and of of course some people want to be healthy for aesthetic reasons as well and if we were having a discussion about physical health we could address the major pillars there which were were um items within the covero like um you know most people want uh some ability to have endurance or stamina to walk some distance or maybe even run some distance uh as I mentioned before walk up a flight of stairs have some strength some degree of flexibility certainly some Mobility U maybe even Dynamic Mobility Etc and in order to address those or improve upon those they could look in those covers and say well how much you know running swimming you know long form cardiovascular exercise am I doing per week how many steps am I taking per day uh how many times a week do I lift objects that are slightly heavier than is comfortable for me to lift Etc it's very tangible very concrete um here you're making the the psyche and the and and the self and mental health uh very much concrete in some of the same ways saying there are 10 cupboards that one can look in and these drives as you refer to them as uh generative Drive aggressive drive and pleasure Drive um you'll probably tell us in a few minutes um can be expressed to varying degrees in different people and how that shows up and what that looks like and I just want to frame this in people's minds as very similar to addressing whether or not okay if somebody can run very long distances but they're always a you know uh having aches and pains or they they they feel weak or they are weak you know there are good reasons for that they're overemphasizing one form of exercise the expression is more along the lines of endurance and stamina not strength um or vice versa the the powerlifter who can you know lift you know 750 pounds from the floor in a deadlift but walks up two flights of stairs and is you know belly breathing and has to stop at the top of the stairs you know it's it's obvious in the Physical Realm it's slightly um more cryptic or more cryptic in the psych ological realm but here it's becoming concrete for us so I think it's it's very interesting and very ironic right so the field that I'm in the field of Psychiatry has historically wanted to be sort of part of the rest of medicine or like the rest of medicine and and what I believe it's ended up doing is glorifying a taxonomy right glorifying a category uh mechanism of understanding human beings so in the way that that if okay if I'm a a practicing general medicine and you come in and you're congested and and I determine like oh you have you have bacterial sinusitis right so so now I I've made a diagnosis and now I I know what I'm going to do about that right so so okay I'm going to prescribe an antibiotic now the thought comes in of like what antibiotic right but the identify sinusitis now you need an antibiotic is like kind of how medicine works right so the thought was Psychiatry is going to categorize everything right so we'd say have listened to you like ah I know your number or your numbers right and then once I've given you the numbers now I know what to do I prescribe this medicine that medicine these many sessions of a certain kind of psychotherapy and like that doesn't work right it doesn't work in mental health it may I mean it's not that it never works but if you're going to try and understand people like it's different the problem of self like if I have a lack of confidence in one area of life and not in others right that's a significant issue it is not like bacterial sinusitis where then you know okay arrow goes to prescribe antibiotic and I think what is ironic is that this route of approach right actually does bring Psychiatry mental health into line with the rest of medicine right which is why you you can make that parallel and you know it fits well right when you're making the parallel to physical health and to I want to be healthy okay what are the components of that what am I doing to achieve that if something's not the way I want let me go back and look at those components I mean it may be because it's more tangible is sort of essentially easier to comprehend right because it's it's more concrete but but I don't in a sense see it as cryptic just less obvious right but if we go and we look at it and we say oh like that really makes sense right and and in a sense it makes sense that it makes sense right if there's a mechanism of understanding that applies to lots and lots of things that are more concrete why would a similar kind of mechanism like understand what the components are understand what's built on top of them like this I believe is how Psychiatry actually fits with the rest of medicine not by glorifying a taxonomy but by coming through the lens of understanding yeah I couldn't agree more and I I think that uh what's so reassuring is that both in terms of creating physical health Health across the various domains of you know heart health lung Health endurance strength Etc cognitive Health as well as mental health is verbs you know it comes back to action items that we each and all should engage in in order to arrive at the states and you know ways of being that we all want to be in right we want to feel healthy look healthy you know Etc we want to um be happy right I know very few people who don't want to be happy I mean certainly there are people who give up but we'll talk about that today and and routes out of that but at the end of the day it's all about looking in those bins asking specific questions and then moving forward in specific actions to get to the place of empowerment humility agency gratitude peace contentment Delight Etc um as opposed to um simply using words and understanding to arrive at insight and then stopping there and expecting everything to change and I think that's where a lot of people are confused about psychology therapy Psychiatry and um and as you mentioned Psychiatry has its own um uh Shadows if you will within it where the the use of of drugs which C certainly can be very useful even lifesaving absolutely often times is is seen as a um a fix all that um somehow could reorder everything within the cupboards and and make the recipe just right when in fact so we'll talk about today that that is um generally not the best route but again with the understanding that drugs can be very powerful tools play a role right but it's important we understand what role is appropriate for them and that's where we often go astray I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors ag1 ag1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that meets all of your foundational nutrition needs I started taking ag1 way back in 2012 so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast the reason I started taking ag1 and the reason I still take ag1 once or generally twice per day is that it's the easiest way for me to ensure that I'm getting all of the vitamins minerals probiotics and fiber that I need in my diet now of course it's essential to get proper nutrition from Whole Foods but most people including myself find it hard to get enough servings of fruits and vegetables each day and especially to get enough prebiotics and probotics to ensure gut health as you may know your gut contains trillions of little microbiota the so-call gut microbiome which establishes critical connections with other organs of your body to enhance brain health as well as to support your immune system and other aspects that relate to mental and physical health one of the most common questions I get is if you were to take Just One supplement which supplement would that be and my answer is always ag1 because by taking ag1 I'm able to ensure that I'm getting all of the vitamins minerals and probiotics that I need to enhance my mental health physical health and performance if you'd like to try ag1 go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman to claim this special offer so as we move forward here and defining and and helping people gain uh for lack of a better word agency over their own mental health and and self-standing and defining for them what what action items to take you know I think I'd like to ask you about some of the things that I observe in the world and hear a lot about in particular from the audience of this podcast you know um it's obvious to me that people vary in terms of their level of aggressive Drive pleasure drive and presumably generative drive as well um one common question is how do I become more motivated right you know um and of course that opens up a bunch of other questions like are people afraid of failure and that's why they're not motivated are people afraid of success is that why they're not motivated is there some underlying childhood trauma or unconscious process uh that's driving that fear um and so on but if we were to take the psychiatrist perspective your perspective if someone comes to you and says you know I you know I just don't really feel like trying it's you know schools hard school loans are you know are excessive which is true by the way um you know it's not even clear that with a a degree I can do much you know or I had a series of failures in in the work domain or in the relationship domain and and they're just feeling weighed down as if it's not worth trying um you know what does that tell you in terms of where to look and and what does that tell you in terms of their drives I mean do we conclude something about their innate level of aggressive Drive um or their pleasure drive or their generative Drive I mean I think there are many such people out there and then we'll consider some other um kind of uh phenotypic examples right so it's a great example because sort of like any good clinician right could could hear that story and then and have thoughts about it right that that could and would hopefully be helpful right without necessarily referring to drives right so so I think you can anchor any set of Assessments any evaluation any attempted understanding to drives right but but it doesn't have to be that way so for example you might ask that person more questions about what they're doing how they spend their time because you're chall me about someone who's not en getting enjoyment or gratification out of anything right and and that then Becomes Of Interest to me right is is there is there something this person does enjoy right something they'd rather be doing like did they did they go to college and take on a bunch of loans because they thought that was better because they thought they were going to do something that now they actually don't want to do right or that opportunity isn't there and now they're frustrated like what is inside this person that might seem different than that and and again the answers could be complicated it could be maybe that person enjoys what they're doing but the cost of living where they are is so high that they still feel miserable there's a sense of privation and then that gets back mapped to like I don't I'm not getting any pleasure out of anything right so the answer could be as simple as you strategize with the person of you know for example does a person like that move you know move to a different area so so like there's so many ways of looking at this and so many ways of understanding this but you're describing someone to me who who is kind of really complaining that nothing is feeling good right nothing's providing a sense of uh of enjoyment or of pleasure right so I I would probably be interested in that first and think maybe the the pleasure Drive is higher than what's being fulfilled right maybe the pleasure Drive is is low and that's an issue in and of itself but we sort of learn those things right maybe the aggressive Drive is low and you know if that person just put a little more energy into it right like they could be in a different place right so you try and help the person understand themselves so that you can make change and again that understanding doesn't have to be anchored to to the drives but I do believe the drives are at the root of all understanding because if you sit with that person and you talk to that person then you're going to be able to understand what is out of balance right either in the the actual array of the drives or in how they're being being experienced because again if you have a high pleasure drive for example and it's not gratified right like that represents a problem right yeah what what about people who um can experience some pleasure or can keep busy say for instance on social media or playing video games and I should also say perhaps it's bringing them to a place of Peace contentment and Delight but in some sense it's not really generative right it you know I'm not going to cast judgment and say that video games and social media are all a waste of time I mean I'm on social media trying to provide value to people and learnings and um and I derive value and learnings from other accounts as well but you know there are these um Milestones if you will in life I mean not that everyone has to you know go to college and and get married and have a family I mean there are a lot of different paths through life that I would consider successful but in some sense we you know there are Milestones like we want to move forward there's this phenomenon nowadays of a lot of um Young people so-called Failure to Launch like they're not leaving home or they're not finding a vocation they're not they're not feeling as if they're good at anything um or they have the sense that unless you're going to be a Prof you know like top 1% in something it's not worth trying but they can still find uh you know what most people would describe as Pleasures like they might yeah they enjoy food um maybe a little too much uh they enjoy um alcohol maybe a little too much they enjoy social media or video games maybe a little too much I say a little too much because it it's providing more or less a a a SN or or a reservoir for their aggressive and pleasure drives that's not moving them forward in the standard Milestones of life um I I hear about that a lot I I see that a lot um you know so it's a slightly more um complex uh phenotype than what described before is just simply the a motivated or non-motivated person but you know what does one you know what do you think of of that uh of the fenotype I just described again because we're unique right each person is unique although we fit categories right so there are categories a person there could fit that could be different from what I'm saying right but I think most people just say on balance right what's what is most prominent right I think what is most prominent in that situation is there's something out of balance in the generative drive right and what you see a lot of times is the person has a generative Drive in them that's higher than their ability to to realize that drive the generative drive then is frustrated so I'll give an example this a a real true story of a person who had worked very very hard gone to school for a long time and it achieved a very high-paying job and like that was the goal right it's a prestigious job it's a high paying job and the person for a while was was doing quite well at it and you know things went well relatively rapidly in a negative Direction so maybe for a little while the person's doing okay then the person becomes very negligent of themselves and their environment when they're not at the job so you know the the house is a mess things are dirty the person is wasting time with things so this is a person who enjoys it wasn't exactly video games right let's say let's say it could have been right well like enjoys them to a certain degree and can really gain pleasure and feel good about the time spent right but starts spending tooo much time right now what was pleasurable starts becoming a distraction mechanism right and then what that transitioned to was overuse of alcohol right so now you have either something that is actually destructive and was negative to job performance right towards the person this wasn't a person who was drinking a lot before and this is a person who was miserable when they were drinking or they were sort of wasting their time right and we're aware of all of this well there was a very clear problem which is that that person had no interest in what they were doing none whatsoever it felt like the majority of waking hours were spent in an automaton likee way but being awake and aware of the tedium of it the frustration of it the professional side so they they essentially had very little uh intrinsic curiosity or desire to do the job that they were successfully doing right which comes out only after exploration because it seems like what's going on with this person like this person has a good job and their life was going really really well and and they're doing well financially and you know is this person trying to now you know overly indulge themselves right like is that why they're drinking what's going on right and what you you feel is that this person had a strong generative drive and it wasn't met one little bit by what he was doing which was creating such frustration inside that the person was either taking himself online or doing something that was punitive and self-injurious and like this is a real story the person exchanged that job for a job that paid a tenth of what the job they had paid and the change in the person's life was amazing like I didn't know this guy could smile right he became happy he loved what he was doing he sold the larger house bought a smaller house kept it beautifully like he was happy right that's what he needed to be happy because then the generative driveing him he loved what he was doing right gets enacted it gets expressed and then other other things can come then into line right he's not being overaggressive towards himself and drinking too much you know because he's saying oh to hell with you to the world around him and to himself right he's not taking something that serves a purpose in his life like again if the example had been video games it would be like yeah great you enjoy doing that x amount of time and like go do that and get gratification from it as opposed to then over relying on it and then it's not providing gratification it becomes a distraction so those things came back into balance in his life but there had to be the understanding and I think there's a lot of that in people who have a generative Drive in them that they feel is frustrated by a world around them that isn't cooperating now do I think we can understand that and change that in the vast majority of people who are in that place yes but it has to be looked at first right because when it's not always that it's just that a lot of the time right so it has to be understood what is it in that person and then how do you go back to those pillars and look at what's going on that the person is in that place because the world can bring us a lot of difficulties right and that person who now is saddled with a lot more loans than they expect like I have tremendous compassion for that and sympathy for that like that's real right so people can be up against a lot of things and that's just one of them right but it doesn't mean that life can't be okay right it doesn't mean that but the person has to feel that there's some way of they have to understand enough about themselves okay this is what this is and I kind of see what this is and why and how I'm here and from there I can start to plot a route to something that is better because yes we have our difficulties and we can have a lot of them right but it's for the vast majority of us it's not like they're not surmountable we have to just understand them and let's say if that person goes and say I'm going to get some help and they go and someone says okay wait you you get 10 sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy and you're try like how can that person think differently then they'll feel differently look cognitive behavioral therapy has its place right but it's not going to solve that right like that person needs to understand something about themselves not redirect their thoughts to better places right so if the person gets a reflex because that reflex works well for the system right it reflex works well for the system that's treating that person for the medical system the insurance system that person isn't helped one bit right and maybe a medicine can help right maybe a medicine helps to just take down the anxiety and the tension in the person then the person can sort of think more about it and and truly medicine did help this person because the idea of leaving the job I'm leaving the prestige I'm leaving the money is that okay to do like it generated a lot of anxiety and it helped to kind of bring the temperature down a little bit of that so that he could think about it engage in therapy ultimately navigate to where he wanted to be then we could back away from the medicine so like medicine has a role but if he just got medicine I mean what are the possibility what are the odds of that helping like zero right it's it's not going to make the answers unless somehow the person feels a little bit better and figures it out on their own I it's not how it works right so medicine has its place but a kind of therapy that recognizes the limitations of medicine in most situations and is designed to really help the person understand like that's what we need the example you gave is a spectacular one because as you mentioned medication had its place uh perhaps even redirection of thought in some sense had its place because as I recall under the the pillar of function of self you one of the the the key items uh is salience you know what we pay attention to internally or externally what our internal narratives are but um in staying with the example of this individual again as a as a phenotypic uh example for everybody to to learn something from the asking of better questions about oneself is really what leads to the understanding so that like better forms of inquiry right the to me the these are the these better forms of inquiry uh better questions are really the uh cardiovascular exercise the strength training the flexibility training the mobility training coordination training of physical health just translate to to mental health right it's so it's so interesting right because if you think about it in the example I gave both the the therapy part from through the system right the the CBT has a play right and the medicine part also had a place so both of those things have their role but if we build the whole story of like this is what this is and this is how you're going to be helped around those things we don't help that person at all in fact we ultimately if you take on balance you take all comers we end up doing harm well in some ways if we stay with the um the analogy of physical health it would be like the person who wants to get in shape and then they get a a I'm not picking on pelaton um as a brand but just a stationary bike and they they pedal every morning and they lose weight their blood pressure goes down they're doing better but then at some point if we we know for C with certainty that if you just do the same form of exercise over and over again like sooner or later you're going to get overuse injuries so then there's like the lower back piece and another piece and and you become out of balance right there's just but you know I guess this is stealing from the Lance Armstrong book uh but it's not about the bike right I mean that you know it's not about the bike it's about the elevation of heart rate it's about the um whatever other healthy activities go along with ex exercising first thing in the morning and that all the things that you're not doing as a consequence of exercising in the morning um so it it seems to me that these these uh better lines of inquiry as the path to um better mental health a better life um that sit under these pillars of structure of self function of self are really the key so but in this example right the parallel that you made is even more dramatic right it wouldn't be the the stationary bike right because a stationary bike is achieving a lot of ends right it would be more like telling the person you know you should walk more briskly when you're going upstairs right like that's a good idea but that's not going to make the change right so the idea that some CBT some medicine makes sense it's more like that right it's not that walking more briskly up the stairs isn't a good thing it's that we can't build the story around your whole health is going to change based upon that and then that's that's a problem then if the person thinks just walk more briskly the stairs and you'll be healthier because when it doesn't work now they've failed right and this gets used a lot in mental health that person failed this therapy failed that medicine right and I think it's so also ironic because that's often what the person internalizes well they failed because we set them up 100% for failure right because we took things that have their role at least potentially have their role and we built the whole story around them because that story is convenient for the systems that are providing the care it's it's convenient for the Health Care Systems is convenient for the insurers CBT packages very nicely and you could see how you if you start changing thoughts and how they make you feel like you know you can get some movement on the surface even if there's no movement underneath right and again I'm not saying CBT is bad but to see it as the whole answer guarantees failure in so many situations same thing with the medicine if you build the whole story just cuz it's convenient and and by and large medicines are cheaper than people right so so you can prescribe medicines very reflexively psychiatrist with 15 minutes with a patient that they can't then see back for a couple of months like how does that go well the answer is it only goes well the way a broken clock is right a couple of times you know twice twice a day right I mean some look sometimes it goes well where it just somehow it works out and that person can do a little bit therapy in 15 minutes and choose the right medicines but by and large we do those things because they're convenient for the systems even though that's why like people don't get better like like we think they would that's why they stay in systems that's why they come in and out of emergency rooms that's why they're not able to stop the drugs that end up you know only being stopped when the person dies like this happens all the time and we don't stop it because we're coming from a perspective that is so limited it's not saying say let's take a step back and look can we really like help someone can we really help that person understand can we help that person make change which ultimately would be of course so much better for the person and so much better for society but is also better if we just look at bottomline dollars and cents right because the short-term view of it is cheaper today to have a psychiatrist in a 15-minute appointment reflexively prescribe a medicine that is cheaper today is that cheaper across time when that person is utilizing more resources or they in and out of emergency rooms it's so shortsighted with which fits with many ways in how our society works right that we want gratification and we want gratification rapidly that's why a person would accept that their problems could be changed by a medicine right we're kind of conditioned that way well and then of course there's the the cost we don't see which is that person doesn't get the opportunity to express their generative drive and so the and the the consequence of that is incalculable right yes and if we take a step back and we look at that I think that what we will see is that we have it's not quite like painted ourselves into a corner but it's like you know the idea that if there's a a beautiful tapestry that's the size of the wall right that you can see that only standing back from it right I mean this goes back you know I think a couple thousand years right this this sort of thought and idea but if you come up too close to it then you you can't see what it means anymore and we're up so close to it that we're thinking well okay how could one parameter change and you know can can this person get a 15minute visit sooner rather than later or how about this medicine instead of that and then it's like our noses are right up against the tapestry and we don't see that we're not doing right by individual people a a lot of the time and we're not doing right by society which then if you stop and think about it we're not doing right by us because any one of us could be in that position and many of us have been in that position being on the other side of things and willing needing help and needing to understand so any of us can be there so if we're failing a lot of individual people and we're failing the society it doesn't matter who we are listening to this like ultimately we're failing ourselves I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor eight sleep eight sleep makes Smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking capacity I've spoken many times before on this podcast and elsewhere about the fact that getting a quality night's sleep on a regular basis is the foundation of Mental Health phys physical health and performance when we're sleeping well everything goes better and when we are not sleeping well or enough everything in terms of mental health physical health and performance gets far worse very quickly one of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment and that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep you need your core body temperature to drop by about 1 to 3° and in order to wake up feeling refreshed you need your core body temperature to increase by about 1 to 3° that all becomes very easy when using an eight- Sleep mattress cover because it allows you to program the temperature of your sleeping environment at the beginning middle and towards the end of your night when you wake up I started sleeping on an eight- sleep mattress cover over two years ago and it immediately and persistently improved the quality and depth of my sleep and as a consequence I wake up feeling far more refreshed I have enhanced mood focus and alertness throughout the day if you'd like to try eightsleep you can go to eights sleep.com huberman to save up to $150 off their pod 3 cover eight sleep currently ships in the USA Canada UK select countries in the EU and Australia again that's 8sleep.com huberman let's therefore talk about what does work you know and again placing on the Shelf the the fact that medications can help and CBT cognitive behavioral therapy can help but it they are just but two components of a much larger picture the map that we described briefly at the beginning of today's episode and that is by the way available as a downloadable PDF in the show note captions I've people want to look at it visually and that was described in a lot of detail in episode one which I hope people will take the time to listen to because it's so rich with depth of understanding and I'm certain everyone will learn a ton about themselves and others simply by listening to your words I'm absolutely certain of that that map provides essentially a description of the bins the cupboards to look in uh to arrive at better answers and and even the sorts of questions that one might ask uh if we could just talk about that in the context of the example that you gave of this person who made this really incredible choice to move away from this higher paying job um you know they were overindulging in in certain U maladaptive behaviors and again we will use this example but um this example is about one of an infinite number of examples that we could use of a person who's you know in a struggle right they're doing something that's not working for them and they're also not doing things that they know they ought to be doing okay um this is important for people to to understand because um there going to be people out there that are thinking oh like this poor guy like he's making tons of money poor him you know but you know he was experiencing deep lack of satisfaction so it could could have been the reverse example like the person isn't in a job that that brings about enough wealth for them to to thrive right because there are Financial realities to life um so it's just one example right but it's a good one I think because the person left the money right so it's like would make you leave that right and say well what would make you leave that is if you are miserable in the situation with that and you're happy in the situation without it right so it's about leaving misery and and finding happiness that's so if you'd be willing to share with us a little bit of your mindset during those sessions meaning the sorts of questions you asked him about the structure of hisself or to reveal the structure of himself and the function of himself that allowed the both of you to eventually set him down this um far better course you know what's better than moving away from frustration and overindulgence in maladaptive Behavior to deep satisfaction peace contentment and Delight into to become a generative human being right so we can look in each of those 10 cabinets right so let's say we look in the unconscious mind cabinet there's not much there right when the person was growing up it was very clear that having more money and having a job that impressed people was was an important thing he internalizes some of it so some of it's unconscious but by and large he's aware of it and was revealed to you how he you know you would ask him a question about um you know like tell me about your upbringing and he would say yeah like you know money was important in my family but we I always felt like we had you know enough he wasn't super wealthy but had enough and so when you say there wasn't a lot there do you mean that there was no kind of like x marks the spot or like like blinking red light like whoa there's something really in his unconscious mind that's in his way is it do I have that right well more because it was conscious right so so he was aware that it was very much like be into him right like this is the only way to be okay right is to have a prestigious job that makes a lot of money right but he's aware of it if he weren't aware of it we have to bring that to light right but he was aware like look it has a big impact on me it makes it hard to step away like I know I don't really care that much about the money but I also kind of do you know money I always say money can't buy happiness but it certainly can buffer certain stressors in life I mean nobody you know sometimes you hear people who have a lot of money saying like money can't buy happiness cuz you know the a lot of miserable rich people but it's like you know uh it's very different to have a a two night nurses to take care of a baby than to be the person who has to stay up all night taking care of a kid especially or a single mother versus a a a mother that has a partner who's who's willing to pitch in right you know you just can't compare and while that's that's absolutely true in this case we're just looking at money as money like as an endo right the idea that no matter no matter what right how how secure and safe like is more money better right and he had an intrinsic overvalue of that right so so it made it harder to step away from it because he he was overvaluing it he knew he was overvaluing it just in and of itself not even for what it gets you right but for the psychological meaning of it right then we look at his defensive structures if we look in that cupboard you see that they've they've really shifted right they shifted from healthy places now they're sort of Twisted and distorted and he's doing a lot of denial a lot of avoidance a lot of rationalization right he's an a lot of aggression towards himself and he's prog he's he's doing a lot of projecting right he's he's harming himself with the alcohol he's punishing himself like so his defensive structure it can be healthy we know that because it was healthier right but then we see that it is so Twisted so we learn a lot from that right a lot is conscious in this person the defensive structure can be healthy because it was healthy but it's eventually it was healthy well it was healthy before I see it was healthy before so you know that it can be healthy again right he has it in him to have healthy defenses they just started getting away from him as he felt less and less satisfied with his job and more and more angry with himself and more and more miserable um this is a really key point for me and everyone else to understand you know throughout the years of high school and college and friends and things of that sort I would hear this like I used to be really good at Fitness or I used to you know if I had a dollar for every time someone said you know you should have seen me in high school you know like like the person who lets themsel go and and arguably is very busy with with professional duties and family duties and you know you can understand why their time is more compressed um than it was when they were in high school but nonetheless you know you hear these sorts of things all the time like I used to have this sense of like I could do things or that like things could work out or that uh and then it's as if there was a previous version of thems that is completely atrophied and the new version of themself or the the later version of themselves rather just simply like doesn't have access to that anymore right and that's the impact of trauma yeah right okay right whether it's big trauma or it's you know a big event or it's multiple things like oh the The World Isn't rewarding me I'm trying the world's not rewarding me I'm trying the world's not rewarding me then people become dispirited right demoralized right so so it it's the trauma of that that takes away the the sense of self the sense of agency like I thought I could do things before now I don't think I can do things right but but nothing has really changed in me I mean that that's that's a problem right and it's a problem the vast majority of times it's born of trauma does that um necessarily mean Early Childhood trauma or um I suppose it could be later life trauma I mean one of the things that I I like about what you're saying so much is that you know you the psychiatrist is hears I used to be able to do something well or feel well and and that's like it sounds like is a a sign it's really a beacon of Health that still exists in the person but that they're out of touch with I think for for most people when they think about themselves or people who talk about how they used to be functional in some domain and they're no longer functional in that domain any longer it sounds as if like things are fundamentally broken like like it's as if a piece of them that was that was functioning like drifted out of their body and left right but I I love the optimism all right because I think so much of what we're interested in covering today is not just what's not working and why but also what's working and why and what used to work and why and and the idea that you know within these coverboards there can be the discovery of of problems uh clearly that's why one goes to the coverboards right as we're defining it but that um there are a lot of answers there are there are re the ingredients for Success already exist within us right right especially if we know we've had that ability before right because we know that we had it before so think about in this man he he he felt that he couldn't make change like now he's stuck right like I I I I got a lot of things done I was able to to get myself into this school and achieve this and you know and then get this job like he he could do all those things but now he feels like he can't do anything to make himself happy so like we know he could do that he had a strong sense of agency he does it now right and and like people often do they they feel a sense of loss like naturally I've had this happen in myself like it feels like something's cut out of you and there's something Hollow I had that thing and now I don't right hence that I'm broken I'm hopeless the things that we hear over and over and over again so think about the shift in this person to like what's actually going on which isn't that hard to discern we just pay attention to it so then if we run up the structure of self we say okay not a lot of it is rooted in the unconscious mind right there there are are problems of overvaluing certain things but they're in the conscious mind he knows like in his household over dinner it was you know Dad or mom you know uh being proud of of some dollar amount that they they achieved so so that narrative exists and and he's like yeah like money was a big deal in my family kind of thing by the way I'm not speaking about my family but rarely were there discussions about money there were discussions about other things of course but in in this hypothetical he knows a real patient sorry he knows he overvalues it right he he knows independent of what money buys and what he needs and all like he just puts too much importance in money and he knows that right so okay they conscious mind issues he's pretty aware of them and they're pretty kind of set in him like those are the issues and they're there okay we learned that then we go look at his defensive structure boy that's very very helpful to talk about W like you had a very healthy defensive structure what were you doing before a lot of sublimation right take could you explain sublimation yeah take anxiety or tension or something something negative in the self or that could be negative and you Channel it towards something positive right he channeled that energy towards learning right he channeled some of the aggressive drive right into sense of agency that that got achievement so you look and he said right those you know the that um Network right of of defense mechanisms that comes up out of the unconscious mind was like looking pretty good right it was pretty clear light was coming through it in a you know in a way that wasn't distorted and now we could look at wow like that things are pretty different now right as as he's saying no it's okay like what what do you mean I I spent 10 hours of my weekend utterly wasting time and what's wrong with that right or you know he's rational izing even that he likes to drink when he doesn't because he so mad at himself like the defensive structure now is Twisted right so we can say okay we that's a big observation right and then the character structure when we look at that we find a person who's pretty good at figuring out and understanding things and coming right up to the precipice of change but is a long history of then difficulty making the change right I know it and I'm on the verge of it but I don't I can't bring myself to do it it like that's in his character structure by the way such a common thing I mean people that know better know they know better sometimes you almost have to wonder whether or not it's like um it's like a medication in the pocket like they could take it if they wanted to that that might even give them some comfort but they just don't do it they just don't engage in the proper actions to move their life from one place to the next right and if we look then at the level of strivings like he does know what he wants like he he wants a feeling of contentment it's really what he wanted was a feeling of contentment a feeling of like I'm taking good care of myself I'm doing something that's a value I'm enjoying doing it like he wanted those things and even when we talked more he had ideas of what jobs would do that in the beginning he said he had no ideas what he really meant that he said to me but was also saying to himself is I have no ideas of jobs that would meet these requirements for me that pay as much as the one I have right so but but within him which we got to where where he knew that there were jobs that would make him happy he just had to get over that they were lower paying so think of what we learn about that there's nothing lost in this man there's nothing cut out of him but he's not damaged he's not hopeless and now he can understand that you know he that he understands himself actually pretty well right and and his conscious mind is is apprehending pretty well what's going on and where he wants to go but boy as he hasn't taken good care of himself the defensive structure gets sort of warped and then then it makes it a lot harder to take care of yourself it starts making other problems in life and he starts like feeling lousy about himself like maybe I can't do much of anything right why because work isn't going as well because he's drinking too much and role performance goes down right so we can see that and then you know what's of most interest there is that there's a character structure that can come right up to the precipice but not but not pull the trigger so to speak on what the thing the thing the person wants to do because now we start getting okay and understanding of what's actually going on right and then if we look at function of self let's look in those cabinets too right to help him be more aware of there's an eye here like which he was pretty well aware of but not enough like there's a person here I'm shepher through 24 hours in the day right like I am an eye and I'm aware of what's going on inside of me and it can make me happy or it can make me miserable like let's let's let's be more aware of that how did he go about doing that because I I find this this first step within addressing the function of self you know self-awareness and really understanding that there's a there's a there's an i there's a me and I'm moving myself through life I I find this to be so interesting and on the one hand kind of obvious like okay there's there's a mean like tangible thing you look in the mirror you see yourself but at the same time it's a bit abstract I think to me and to many people out there like how does one go about building up a sense of self in a way that provides positive agency in the world is it to tell you know we hear all the time about these like affirmations and I'm sure there are people who look at themselves in the mirror and say you are enough and these and I'm not making fun of these people right I actually have my own internal um list that I uh tell myself on waking every morning which has nothing to do with positive affirmation it's just actually defining the different roles that I play I don't know why this is useful to me but I find it incredibly useful to me um it reminds me who I am it also reminds or Le reassures me that I don't have uh any dementia yet uh so um you know we'll see going forward but but um hopefully not but yeah let's talk about this this line of inquiry within the the category of self-awareness that people can do regardless of whatever challenges they they might be having or not having you what does that look like and what do you think that accomplishes at the level of self- understanding and and agency in the world so one way of looking at that is and this not the words I would use but like what's pervading a person and sort of set set setting the stage right which you can discern by inquiry so so for example in this case the person so there's a person right who would really not think this is okay right this person taking a job at 10% of the previous pay and the job has less Prestige right there's a person who would be very unhappy about that and very faulting of that and and talk to this person my patient through the lens of that he should feel shame for that that person's not alive the person is not alive so one way of looking at is what Master are you serving right and a lot of like the Givens right the automaticity in him was a as if like that person was alive inside of him really telling him like how this wasn't okay like he was fighting that he wasn't aware that hey that's some other person's voice it was like he's like no I'm very very conflicted about this actually he wasn't very conflicted about this right when he starts focusing on the eye like what do I actually think what do I actually think I don't I don't care if I make 90% l like I don't care my needs are met I put some money away I want to be happy I'm not conflicted like so so but in order to get there we we have to look at the eye how much is the eye at Center Stage right in all the I don't mean in in some way of like paying too much attention to the self but like we're all acting through the lens of the eye no matter what we're choosing right so to be aware of that and do I want to be impacted by the opinions of this other person because I can let someone else's opinions very much I mean we we all do right very much impact my thoughts but I want to kind of decide that do I really value that person's opinions I don't want them automatically inside my head telling me how I feel about myself I can't tell you how many people I know come to me in a place of struggle even though I'm not a clinician and as I listen to what they're struggling with it's so clear that they know the best answer and Route forward but that they're dealing with some internal oppressive voice about whether or not they are a good person or a bad person whether or not the choice they want to make is really a good choice at all uh sometimes those voices are the voices of parents um you know in these particular examples or the voices of um peers um and so I think if I understand correctly what what you're talking about is getting really firmly rooted in who a person is for themselves and what they really value and what they what they really know to be true for themselves and really trying to not necessarily quiet those voices but see those voices truly as other even though they come from with within their head yeah is that right yes yes to to stop and think what voices do I want inside so so maybe I want the voice of a Kind Mentor who still held me to account you know for a very high standard right it's a good voice to have inside of me I got a few of those and but what might not be a good voice is like say a not so kind mentor for whom you could never do anything good enough that's not so good or maybe you take part of that and you leave part of that but the earlier and more formative the voices are the more they're in our head automatically like think about that man thought that he was deeply conflicted absolutely 100% like you talk and in he was right like his experience was to be deeply conflicted but when you go in and dig there's actually if you just dig and you and you get to like okay the eye is going to assess this he's he's not conflicted at all right which is why then if you're coming up the function of self ladder right and you look at defense mechanisms in action right and what's on top of that salience right now is when it creates an immediacy right so defense mechanisms in action sort of inform the process and say hey the defenses are shifting to denial acting out right and that's what sort of gives us a Time Horizon like this things this is not going to be okay right that if we kept down this path what was very clearly going to happen you don't have to roll the tape forward that much to see that he's going to lose his job right he's going to feel very ashamed of that like a bunch of negative things are going to happen so it helps the person apprehend that like there's something going on here like I'm changing right because like in some way I'm thinking now that it's okay that I'm wasting 10 hours on something that I could really enjoy if I spent 90 minutes on it like like well I'm kind of losing a little bit perspective there right so it it adds a sense like it frames the situation right and the salience of it could you elaborate a little bit on um this defense mechanism in action of acting out you know I think uh we covered in episode one and I'm sure it will come up several times more during today's discussion about things like denial projection displacement etc those defense mechanisms um seem have their own intrinsic definition but you know acting out is something that we hear more and more about these days like they're acting out uh like what is acting out um is it is it acting out of some conflict um is it trying to uh you know demolish a a struggle by by going and doing something else yeah we can think of it as by and large an unhealthy manifestation of a lot of aggression which could be a very high aggressive drive or an aggressive drive that's not too high but is then furthered its powers furthered by a negative situation right say like this one right because the the acting out what was going on here inside of this person is he was very very mad right and this isn't a person who who expressed a lot of anger right so or had outlets for right he he wasn't going and running 10 miles or right this was all inside of him he wasn't getting it out in one way or another so what he starts doing is he starts acting out the anger now he's angry at the world around him because he's unhappy in it and it's not giving him more choices now of course this is about him and not the world around him right but but he's feeling an anger towards the world that won't cooperate right and he's angry towards himself right because like he can't make himself happy like look look at all this look at all that he did and look how miserable he is right so a way of acting out then was was is the drinking right because the drinking is to hell with the world right you think I shouldn't be drinking at night and come in to work hung over I'll do it anyway right to hell with the world it's a way of snubbing his nose at the world right he's also snubbing his nose at him right to hell with me right the guy who now doesn't come across the way he did before because I'm showing up at work not in the responsible way I showed up before but a way it's a little disheveled function is lower to hell with me right it's a form of self-denigration like let people think worse of me right cuz why because I'm so mad at myself that I think it's Justified right and then there's also the inviting of hey if I if I really have an addiction problem here I lose my job it's like fine I deserve that too right like you know there's an acting out against the self that if the person doesn't stop and look at that that can become true right because that person didn't really wasn't built to say the hell with the world and with me or or to not even understand that what's the hell with the world mean it also means to hell with me and it's not for the world or me right but he was able to understand that because we would look at like wow what shifted in you this is a person who did a lot of sublimation before who now all of that's going into acting out so they're not taking negative energy and doing something good with it they they're taking negative energy and doing things that are bad with it why because there's too much there's a lot of negative energy it's overwhelming everything else and then it's going down these Pathways where the the unhealthy defenses are always beckoning us send the energy down here it's easier to avoid than it is to face something and figure it out right it's easier to just act out than it is to hold what's inside of us and then think about why it's there so the unhealthy defenses are beckoning us and for him to see hey you you have had a healthy defensive structure like you can be healthy again you're not broken right but to also see the way these defenses are going is bringing real risk to you know to your to your ability to even be happier you get further down the shame and loss path that can be hard sometimes impossible for the person to get back so it it sets the stage like this is very very important what these defenses are how they're being enacted and for him to be able to see that like oh this could be healthy but it's not now yeah these um slow uh you know degrading forms of acting out and self-sabotage and sabotage of others I I think are the particularly Dangerous Ones because because they're slow and they the sometimes the the change is imperceptibly slow and then one day somebody arrives at a place where as you said you know they unfortunately can't get back or or it requires um you know going into residential treatment or things that really you know big departures um in order to get back into life and um you know I would never wish for somebody to choose to act out by driving off a cliff instead but but there are other forms of acting out that immediately wake people up um but it seems like people don't often select those they select these more subtle forms of acting out where they don't get caught and they or they or no one's calling them out on on it because you know you know plenty of people have five or six drinks at happy hour right as opposed to 50 right you know so um so it's it's self slow self-sabotage as opposed to immediate self-destruction um and again we're talking about alcohol but we talking about food video games social media um uh arguing with spouse I mean all of these kinds of things that build up over time time to eventually deliver people to a place of of real real problems um I'm curious for this particular individual you worked with sounds like that's not what happened they they started this process of of self-inquiry around self-awareness and um did you see that the uh salience that is what they paid attention to internally and externally immediately shifted and the defense mechanism um of acting out immediately dissolved I mean what was the kind of contour and time and course there was there was less so if we're looking in the cabinets there's a lot in the defense mechanisms and action cabinet there's not as much in the salian cabinet because this is the major thing on his mind right above all else like you know and he was having intrusive thoughts about it and his selft talk was about it but we kind of already knew that you know just like we knew it was in the conscious mind so you think where's the money at right it's not as much in that realm because he's aware of it if he thought oh I'm not this isn't bothering me very much and then he said well all his internal dialogue is about it right then like okay there's a lot there's a lot to achieve there but just as he brought a lot that was unconscious into the conscious mind was aware of it um it was Salient there's less to do there right because the things to understand and change are not residing so much there for people that are no doubt everyone is thinking about their own internal processes and um and where they could ask better questions and and arrive at better answers to help themselves along um perhaps you could uh elaborate a little bit more on this salience covered under function of self you know to me salience is what's most apparent um and and uh as you talked about yesterday and again today you know there's this internal narrative like what's on my mind often or what kind of jumps to mind um I've started doing this recently based on our discussions here um and I've noticed that under different states of arousal and here I'm talking specifically about sleepiness versus alertness type arousal like when I wake up in the morning or when I'm tired in the evening you know where my mind is at where it defaults to um and what I'm paying attention to throughout the day um is that you know just asking myself to notice and I've certainly noticed some some uh some patterns um I for instance I've noticed that anytime um My overall state is elevated more alertness or in the middle of exercise my mind goes to some um not so pleasant thoughts um and it's interesting to me it's like wow this is strongly correlated with states of internal arousal that are healthy exercise you know within a limited frame is is or exercises in general if done in a healthy way is healthy um and when I'm sleepy those thoughts never come about uh when I wake up in the morning certain thoughts tend to LEAP to mind other thoughts no so sort of categorization of different types of thoughts depending on my internal state is that the sort of line of inquiry that you're that you're um suggesting or describing here yeah it's I think it's quite half the picture right because half the picture would be what's going on in your mind when your mind is sort of at rest right what what is then starts playing itself right in your mind right the other side of it is what comes to the four when there's a lot of competition for attention right so I'm s making this up but but the idea that like if he stubbed his toe really badly he'd still be thinking about this right because it's so much power now again maybe if God it has a badly broken bone there's a lot of pain like he's going to think of that first right but it takes a lot of other stimulus to to be more Salient than this right so so you can look at what's coming in your mind when your mind is sort of free and open that's very very important and relevant and then what's winning out when there's maybe a high arousal State and a lot of competition for attention that's very helpful um again I think that along with this um self-awareness piece um the asking of oneself you know what is happening in my mind when I'm in different states or throughout the day um and as you're describing now also including when um there are other things available to think about like does that include how often I'm distracted by a particular thought like how many times throughout the day my mind goes from the conversation I might be in to something else or yes yes yeah does it hijack your attention ition you know there one way of putting putting that a lot of people um mention to me challenges with intrusive thoughts um what can be done about those intrusive thoughts or is it simply a matter of paying attention to the fact that they're there and um and then thinking about the the origins of those thoughts right absolutely I mean one example you could have intrusive thoughts because there's trauma in your background maybe very clear trauma that you're not facing and addressing and then you have Rive thoughts to say I'm not safe okay go look for what's still in the unconscious mind or when it comes out a little bit you you push back into the unconscious mind that would be a that's a very different scenario than like in this case this man was having intrusive thoughts about his job situation his overall situation and it made sense that he was having those intrus they were markers of the Acuity of it right of like you have to do something about this or like something very bad is going to happen so the intrusive thoughts there and is made sense right like this is not going well and and your mind is sort of forcing you to pay attention to this because time really kind of is of the essence you're real risk now so intrusive thoughts can be anything from as they often are they can be markers of something that is traumatic something that's underneath the surface something that is really bothering us that we've shoved down that's making guilt shame distress vulnerability that's that's very often the case but sometimes intrusive thoughts are a marker of like oh right that's a thing to pay attention to and once we identify the intrusive thought I mean how do we eradicate it I mean how do we uh work with it I mean uh we're talking about trauma now you know um of course it might map back to a childhood experience um some internal narrative but um is there some road map for moving intrusive thoughts from a place of intrusive and disturbing to Simply there and kind of meh um I mean it'd be wonderful that hit a delete switch but obviously we don't work like that well let's take a look if we could at this example right which is a little bit different if we if we run through this example of the person and the job because then we we should talk about trauma driven intrusive thoughts which is I think in many ways the biggest topic about intrusive thoughts but think of this person here if we go up from salience we look at behaviors right and behavior actually now is very very important right this person is drinking they're still going to that job they don't want they haven't gotten interviewed for the jobs they want right so we start looking at the behaviors that are making problems the changes in behaviors that could make things better right and then on top of that we arrive at strivings and I think when I was talking about structure of self I think at least one time I misspoke and said said striving instead of self right at the top of these pyramids self and striving have a lot of overlap right because if you're growing a healthy self right out of you know the the sort of top of the structure of self pyramid then that self is going to be aware of strivings and and it's going to be better able to enact them so you know his his sense of self was shaken here but he was aware of the strivings for a better life right so now let's see the road map it's interesting right because the road map is his road map right if we look in those 10 cupboards we come up with a road map and and the road map doesn't have a spending very much time in like unconscious land right because he doesn't really need that right if we look at what makes the difference for him what did we do right we really cultivated the self-awareness the eye that is making decisions for him we looked at how his defensive structure had changed and the things he didn't want to be there now and the good things that were there before and how could he get back some of that how could he Trend back towards what was working before so we start to really look at that and then we go from there really to changing behaviors of like it requires a behavioral change which is not to walk to the precipice of doing this each day but to actually do it right because it was very clear all the vectors so to speak inside of him were pointing towards doing it and that that was consistent with the self being healthier that garden growing on top of the structure and the strivings then being realized so for him that was the road map and the in the the salience right wasn't really part of it because the intrusiveness the salient's bias inside of him made sense and then like of course it went away once he made the decisions right because the intrusive thoughts of like you have to figure this out you have to figure this out right weren't there anymore along with the intrusive thoughts of you'll never figure this out or like it goes away because he made the change but he made the change because we looked at self-awareness and we strengthened self-awareness we looked at defense mechanisms how they could be versus how they are we looked at the behavioral change which was really necessary and then also referencing a character structure that had has difficulty right coming coming across the precipice right so we we say okay that's a baseline characteristic of him we kind of understand that but how do we help him change the behaviors anyway when he does that the self is in a better happier healthier place the strivings are realized this person stops drinking in the way they were they start doing the the enjoyment aspects of their life they start doing them within reasonable bounds again they're taking care of themselves person smiling that the and now think the generative Drive is much more fulfilled so so what comes on top of those pillars right is that person has a sense of humility right enough humility to say I'm going to walk away from this job I don't it's okay that the people in the job will think I'm crazy how could you leave that and and like it trigger something in me in some way but like it's okay right like I don't I don't have to you know I'm not out there for that I'm not out there for the big thing that everybody is is guiding I can have the humility to go to the job that I know makes a difference and feels good to me right he's empowered to make change he's moving away from dis the disempowerment of the alcohol and the avoidance right so there's empowerment and humility and and absolutely if you talk to that person on the other side of it like shortly as he was enacting it right getting just to the other side of it there was so much empowerment and so much humility which were then brought to bear through a sense of agency that made the changes right that changed the job that stopped drinking that dealt with the people who thought negatively of it right through a sense of gratitude of it's not awful that I I I'm going to go make less money a lot of people said that to him like how could you do it it was so terrible he's like it's not terrible right I'm grateful like you know what I'm going to do I'm going to go make an amount of money that that's all that I need right so it was like that's what helps a person do that thing and that's actually true right that's what What mattered to him so an activated an active a verb sense of agency and gratitude then leads him to the place where there was a peace contentment Delight he was delighting in the job that he chose and his generative Drive was in accord with it you know then we stopped at some point working together he didn't need me anymore he could always come back but we didn't need me anymore and you look at how were those last sessions a lot of the last sessions were him like in an excited way telling me what he was doing right like oh and then we did this and like I did this I figured this out like he was so happy about it and you can see that man's generative Drive which naturally naturally is quite high in him but was being squelched right that brings him out of balance now the generative Drive was in quite a good place and he had enough aggression or assertion right to to go and do that job and to do that well and and even enough to counter anybody who would still kind of rise up and say that wasn't a good idea he could counter all that he was getting pleasure from it he didn't need to seek pleasure by what not even pleasure because alcohol was pleasurable no pleasure because harming himself and saying to hell with you to the world and to him was pleasurable right he's not getting pleasure that way he's getting pleasure in healthier ways taking care of himself to doing the job he loves doing his leisure activities like the man comes into balance and then like life is good and when we say yeah okay come back in a couple months like comes back in a couple months maybe in six months comes back one more time I don't see him again that's great he totally doesn't need me again and I atrophied right from his life great that's that's the success state of it he eventually arrived at being truly wealthy right yeah with all with all the components of mental health and peace contentment light the as you describe his story which is a remarkable one um it occurs to me that the narratives that we hear as children end up being so powerful yes um and I'm sure there are people out there that receive such direct messages from their mother and or father like you have to do this you cannot do that but often we get messages through observing and over hearing right um the way that our mother talks about our father when he's out of the room the way that our father talks about our mother when she's out of the room and some of this could be non-verbal Like a Rolling of the eyes or a um somebody saying yes yes agreeing and then they walk out and they just you know and kind blowing them off right I mean kids are we are all so aware and integrating all of that all the time and I I I do think those messages get woven into us at a very deep level and then of course there are the um conscious narratives that we build up as we go through in particular I think elementary and middle school and high school I mean I can still remember a a negative comment somebody made about a jacket that I was wearing in like the third or the fourth grade I forget everything else that happened that year remember that remember that yeah and I'm not um you know I'm not insecure about the clothing that I pick you know I mean obviously it's it's a black button-down shirt I've had similar shirts since the first grade just kidding um but you know the but we the fact that that's embedded in my memory systems is like just speaks to the the salience of of negative of insults basically it was an insult um and I'm sure I've insulted plenty of kids and coming up you know as a teenager and and back and forth and um and so but these narratives get so deeply embedded and the idea that one could pick a different path of vocation or like you miss the opportunity to be truly happy at a deep level based on these narratives I mean on the one hand it's obvious on the other hand you just go like whoa this is this is not good this is this is a flaw in the in the design right um and yet you're giving us a road map to to understanding and and to um overcoming it right let's say we take your your examples and we we look they're great examples and we we look at them right the the person making fun of the code in third grade right we're resuming it hasn't harmed you it hasn't changed the course of your life right what does it tell us it shows negative stimuli are very Salient right I'm sure you got a lot of compliments in third grade too right but it's the negative that stands up which just shows that there's a salience bias in US towards the negative and that's probably about survival and threat sensing like in some ways it makes sense around human survival but it doesn't make sense around human trauma right so then so you had given the example of what gets communicated to the child when say mother says something negative about father when father's out of the room father says something negative about mother when Mother's out of the room just to give an example right so children because the the complex cognitive mechanisms haven't been formed yet right then the natural way that the brain functions is in a self-referential way right so so the child generally doesn't have the capacity to say like oh Mom and Dad aren't really getting along well in in this certain way so when daod here Mom vents a little bit about something about him by say the child isn't thinking about that right then what the child will often internalize is okay there's me and there's mom and dad and mom says Dad is bad and dad says mom is bad and I must be bad too right because in general if your parents are bad then then the child takes that on themselves now again I'm giving a simple example but I'm very much extrapolating it I mean imagine if that were very very aggressive where the mother when this happens right just tells the child how awful the father is and the father does the same you you're not going to someone's not going to come out the other side of that being like you know what maybe they're both awful but I'm not that's not how that goes right so the lessons the the the traumatic lessons of childhood get internalized right and they don't even always have a solution state so so you think about the man who knew like okay you have to go get this job and like all those things he internalized you might say well I mean he got to a good place for him right so so For Better or For Worse at least there was a place to go right to like to go go work hard go succeed go check this box you've been told you're supposed to check but often times there is no solution state so how many children I mean it's it's terrible that this is such a high percentage of the work adult practitioners do is is helping people who has children were told one way or another that they were worthless incapable um bad right that gets that gets put into the child unfortunately far far I mean one time on the planet is too frequent let learn how long often this happens yeah um that example makes really good sense could we and this is a question could could we add to that the example whereby the child overhears um again examples of what say men should be like or women should be like like the these things it's not so much um like you did wrong Andrew or you know you did wrong Paul like or or telling um the DAR like you screwed up but but it's more um again narratives that we overhear or even a parent um showing Delight or excitement about a certain phenotype in the world like oh wow look at that person or look at them like like isn't she beautiful right that the young child thinks like okay well then that's the epitome of beauty through the lens of the parent or gosh like this person like G you know like then that that child internalizes that this is the epitome of disgust with another human being and I think children are so Savvy uh without realizing it is they like okay well then I guess you you move toward that and you and you aspire to that and you deflect from that and you can see how these trajectories can be set very early on I mean these are the these are the four-lane highways that we were talking about in episode one where just routes of neural processing that can bring us to choices in life and places in life that oftentimes you like I don't want to go down this path anymore and and so the the exploration of of early narratives both direct and indirect you know first person and third person seem so critical how how does one go about that I mean clearly with a trained clinician like you uh you would guide somebody through the process but if somebody were to try and do this in some sort of structured way for themselves um what do those lines of inquiry look like because we have vast number of experiences from childhood um but some messages are going to be more Salient than others sure yeah the idea that reflective self-scrutiny you know can help us I think is it's a great idea it's a great concept and and we we do a lot of different things sort of inside and we're guided to do a lot of things inside but this I think should overshadow many if not most of all those other things of like what's really going on inside of me because if you think about it a lot of people will come through that and they'll learn right so the person is told like this is what beautiful is this is what successful is this is what good enough looks like right and and that person may through all sorts of experiences know maybe other people in their lives who are more balanced be able to arrive on the other side of that even still sometimes going through the midst of it depending upon age and situation and know like okay like that's what you know my my father and mother thinks like this is what beauty is this is what successes but it's one set of opinions and it's not a set of opinions that are going to Define me like sometimes people get to that place but a lot of times they don't and they carry that lesson forward and they're not aware of it right so they think that they're very unattractive even though other people are giving them different signals they think that they're very dumb even though other people are giving them different signals and their own grades and their own success may be giving them different signals right but they're not putting the two things together and that's going to generate tension right that might be why that person doesn't follow up on potential relationships right they just don't think they're good enough and the person's eventually going to reject them because of what they look like right they taking that with them in this in this example from childhood right or they're they're not satisfied with the job that in other ways is like really great right they they enjoy the work they enjoy everything but it doesn't pay enough right why because they have some false idea inside of what it's supposed to pay right because it's what the parent said so so by self scrutiny of like what are the Givens you I always think it it goes back to the math minor right if you can't solve the problem go back and look at the Givens right what are you taking for granted like oh I know that every time I see an X that x equals four right really maybe you know maybe you wrote down four somehow because you were thinking of four at the time and X actually is a three right so like just go back and look at what you're taking for for granted right and a lot of times this is what we're doing in the therapy process and then that's when the person can realize so I'm simplifying but for the person to realize like oh there's a voice in my head so to speak it's an actual voice that is the voice of this person right who who may not even be around anymore whose opinion doesn't mean is to me what it did before but that voice is saying you're unattractive you're not making enough money you're not good enough right and you know what I don't believe that right I don't they can identify that and then you can it doesn't happen all at once but you can get it out of you but General you don't get it out of you unless you realize that it's there what is the process of getting it out um because I think that we all have the capacity to remember certain things and and to arrive at a place where we can um understand okay I'm I'm taking for granted the fact that there's a voice in my head that says blank actually I have a brief anecdote to say about this and this isn't the the quote unquote I have a friend thing literally have a a uh a female friend who the other day called me laughing and crying because um she was being evicted from her her apartment and she told her mother about this over the phone and her mother's response was well at least you're thin wow like it like like and and and she was laughing and crying about it because it reflected so much of her childhood right right that like no other accomplishment of having a job having an apartment Etc like you know mattered it was it was it was about one thing it was about a a certain form of aesthetic beauty that I'm not even sure she sub subscribes to even though she happens to be thin right so so the fact that her mother would would lift that from the the conversation there's such a a deprivation of of of so many things in that in that interaction but but it really wasn't about that interaction it was you know she was calling me because it was really about her entire childhood right and obviously I'm not equipped to to solve the problem and it wasn't a request for money or anything of that sort it was just it was almost like the the hilarity and the um and the the sadness of the whole picture right but again it speaks to these narratives that we internalize and that sometimes show up in very glaring ways in the real world it's like to hear that I think was shocking to her I think she needed to tell me to like like is this real but then it was clear that that message had existed in her head for a long time anyway um that could be very pivotal if she realizes that right and even the power of the humor of it like this is absurd right that can be very powerful in in creating change because if there's some vestage of that inside of her right where like she still believes like oh I'm not good enough because I achieved a and C but I don't look like X or whatever it can very much help because there's a lot of power behind realizing that absurdity of like oh my God that's bizarre like so but but wait is any of that inside of me am I carrying some of that with me I mean there's an incentive for self scrutiny and you know through what you're describing because what's the ideal amount of that to still be in her zero so as as one comes to realize the messages they've heard or perhaps like in this case that they're still hearing is the process of overcoming those messages and really arriving at the self it it sounds to me like it's a two-part process at least two-part process it's to look in the bin of what are the giv what are the what are what am I taking for granted about the internal narratives and I'm thinking about their origins in childhood or elsewhere but then also cultivating the self awareness piece that's under the function of self like wait what's really true for me at the level of me that has that that isn't the and this is really I think about separating out the voices in one's head these internalized narratives from the person that we really truly are because the idea is that those two pillars en Encompass everything we need to look at right th those those 10 cupboards Encompass everything so it's all that right the person who's going and looking at the given they're trying to understand what might be in my unconscious mind that I'm not aware of right and huh wow the you know the last time I got this like big award at work I had this reflexive thought of like but you're not thin enough wow whoa right like there could be a process like that's going on inside of me I don't want that going on inside of me right so the process of trying what is unconscious in us that may be causing us harm which is often where the that's where the trauma goes right it's where it's where the childhood trauma seats itself which brings us back around to the intrusive thoughts right intrusive negative thoughts negative self dialogue usually does not mean what it meant to the man who need to change jobs right because there they were there for a good reason right and he needed to make change more often there the the the vestages The Hangover the lingering Badness of some prior trauma so often times when you think like we talked a little bit yesterday about the person who was driving in the car and just telling themselves over and over that they were that they're a loser right and then they they can't achieve the things that they achieved when they stopped doing that I'm simplifying a little but that's the basics of it right because the the intrusive thoughts the self-narrative all the negativity in US is often coming from places that are in the unconscious mind right not always but this idea that I I don't think I'm good enough I'm saying to myself over and over again like well let's go back and look at why because the answer to that again lies in a different place there's just a different road map right the man who needed to change jobs had a road map that like spent a little bit of time in the eye self-awareness and then it kind of then it went through self defense mechanisms In Action Land and it spent a lot of time with behavior and then it got up to the strivings that's his that's his road map whereas for someone who's laboring under the intrusive thoughts the negative selft talk the automaticity the giv of childhood trauma then needs to go to a different place where now we're spending time with the in the unconscious mind thinking about what's there figuring out what's there bringing things to Consciousness right that person say realizing maybe you know your friend who had this realization of like oh my goodness we say wow did that bring something to the conscious mind in her if so great let's look at that and let's look a lot at it and let's look are there other things there too right are there other giv right let's bring them to conscious to Consciousness so that we can talk about them we can identify them and then look at how does that how does that relate to defense mechanisms and character structure and like now what are we doing a a process of of interested inquiry like this is really really interesting I mean it should be interesting to the person doing it it's them right and it should be interesting to the person doing it with them right because if you're a therapist and it's not interesting to you you need another job right so you're talking to a friend like if it's a friend is going to be interested so there's an interested honest open inquiry with the idea of H we're going to let's learn things so that we can make change for the better and even though as we talked about yesterday the intrusive thoughts and the self- dialogue that's gone on over and over and over again it doesn't go away easily but that doesn't mean it it doesn't atrophy over time and go away or that the person can have that reflexive thought like oh there's the thought again that I'm a loser or that I should cut myself or I should drink or whatever it is like I know that thought appears in me automatically at times because it was in my head for so long but it does not telling me anything right it's just an automatic thought it's telling me I should drink it's not telling me anything right other than the fact that like oh that's what happens in human beings like that's how the self-standing brings change in us and gets us over the barriers of why I've been trying this for you know what modern mental health would often was think I I took the select and I did the 10 sessions of CBT like like you know I'm a failure nothing will ever get better you know a different framing that says hey like this can get better over time and my understanding and my efforts and my thought redirection my behavioral changes all makes it better and then those things I don't want in my head they're going away it's taking time but they're going away I'm relieved to hear you say that one can have intrusive thoughts and that one approach to dealing with those is to acknowledge them and look at them and not try and push them back deeper uh you know not try and eradicate them um I'm familiar with having intrusive thoughts not all the time but it various periods throughout my life and um the idea that one can just like extinguish them is is a great idea but that's simply not the way it's worked at least not for me but I have found that if I you know just say okay this is spontaneously coming up through the neural circuits of my subconscious and and they're intrusive and I don't like them but I eventually arrive at exactly the place that you described which is that it's like there's nothing actionable here like it's just they they go from being um intrusive and and troubling to intrusive and just kind of mildly irritating to intrusive and like okay you know I I just um uh you know and yes I I go through some redirect like trying to redirect my attention from time to time when they're happening but I eventually just get to a place where it's like okay it's just a boring story or or or boring imagery there there's nothing there like there's nothing there and then and then they eventually break up like like clouds and that process could take a while but because you took the energy out of them right you made them go away which happened over time and then the energy that was so powerful becomes less and less and less and what happens they dissipate they atrophy right that's how they go away because there's no more power there's no more power in them and and that really is the way that we make change and I think you you know your emphasis upon the fact that it takes time the fact that it takes effort the fact that it only goes away slowly over 20 years of of at times being a therapist but what I've seen be the most daunting the thing that makes people just give up and go away and go back to the things that are bad give up on themselves are that it takes time and you know if you think it's supposed to take two weeks and the world around you is kind of leading you to think that and then you go for help and the help kind of leads you to think that whether it's 2 weeks or it's 10 weeks if it's going to take two years you're going to go away disheartened right or maybe more angry at yourself or maybe demoralize so we we have to look at the truth of all of this like parallel to your story in my own life for for years and years and years I carried a negative voice inside it was always waiting for me to do something wrong so if I say something that's a little bit off or not exactly what I want to say now it would say like that wasn't good like it say something negative inside to me or it's waiting for me to drop something and say that I'm stupid and clumsy right with me all the time but over time through self-reflection through therapy like through a lot of hard work but a desire for things to be better and a desire to understand it right like it's not there anymore I mean every now and then it'll raise its head right I'll I'll do something really I dropped a cup of coffee I haven't done it in 10 years and it made a mess and now people are coming to clean it up and man The Voice came back right but I could recognize it right like I really feel bad about this and now it gives that voice a chance to come out but it doesn't come out much anymore whereas what I lived with it for years it doesn't come out much anymore and when it came out not that long ago like I could recognize like I'm not happy I did this and let me help clean it up but it doesn't mean I'm an idiot right so so the voice in my head can just go away as it's as as I've been helping it to do for a bunch of years now yeah I think also important for people to understand is that it takes time but that we can all potentially engage in right actions you know moving towards strivings and hopefulness as we cope with those and try and diminish those internal narratives those intrusive thoughts it's not as if during the entire process you know you can't function I mean I think that the uh it's uh cognitively and sometimes even physically demanding to do but we can still engage in healthy ways in in the world and we can I'm still try and uh avoid acting out and and avoid um forms of denial and and as I say this I'm realizing that you know the the wish for or the impulse to really just suppress intrusive thought born of trauma or whatever else is is really futile like that's not going to work it's not going to work we have to embrace these narratives and and not expect them to disappear in a finger snap but but embrace them and like see them and look at them and and and be unafraid to look at them and um discount where they are absolutely not true right um I would say unafraid to understand right because we must understand means we must look at what's going on inside of us when I didn't like that voice but was afraid of it like what is going on inside of me what does this say about me and I'm and I'm directing away from it well that's why it was with me for like several decades right but when I start to go look at it I can find an answer to it and it you have to look at what's going on in that person because one might presume and maybe people listening are presuming this or maybe not but but the but a reasonable presumption that might just reflexively happen in a person would be to think that oh when I was younger the messaging I was getting was that you're not good enough right you're not good enough right that's why I carry with me that you're not good enough right but it's not that sometimes it's the opposite that I was rewarded a lot when I was younger for doing things in a way everyone thought was great right like getting great grades and being well behaved doing all sorts of things that brought a lot of positive reinforcement to me but I never handled well things that fell even a little bit short of that and then it would evoke a lot of Shame so so the oppression inside is not coming from denigration it's coming from something different right which is which is also why this is not a search to blame someone right because sometimes the people who are giving the message like they're doing the best they can I mean someone who's saying to a child you're a loser like that's not okay right no matter what that's not okay but but that's often not how it happens like you know that the parent like you says communicating they don't realize that that every time they're admiring a certain level of wealth or a certain kind of beauty they're giving that message that the child that that doesn't meet that or isn't ends up not meeting that isn't good enough like but they don't know that or you know I had like my my parents tried to nurture me and they did a good job of it in many ways and teachers did a good job but so they they're not realizing hey this person's going to end up you know a bunch of years from now not thinking anything's you know good enough and I mean they don't know that so it's not a search for blame and I think that's very very important very important because often people don't want to look inside because they think either I'm going to find something dramatically wrong with me and the answer I would give is there's almost surely not something dramatically wrong with you if you're having that thought and if somehow there is you're better off looking at it now than later right and so that's part of it the other part is that that people become worried that they're going to ruin something you know I'm going to I like my parents and if I go look at this I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to hate them or like people say say things or think things like that and the idea that we may get down to something that really involves someone being responsible for something bad now that's if that's the truth the person already knows that inside the vast majority of times they know that they're just not facing that but most of the time also it's not that it's just like okay that's how life evolved and what's the predisposition like you know I was smart enough to get good grades and I have a low threshold for shame and people reinforce me and and like oh like I can kind of understand that so then I can get control over it it's not a search for anger frustration blame of self or others yeah and oftentimes I I hear that people are afraid of um dealing with these deeper issues or addressing these deeper issues for fear that they'll lose say their their drive right that the thing that makes them successful in the first place and that allows them perhaps even to afford therapy or afford the time to think about these sorts of questions so it seems to me that the drives that you referred to earlier the generative Drive the aggressive drive and the pleasure Drive are such critical nodes or areas to look for all of us in terms of figuring out whether or not we're doing well or less well according to some features that are pretty much Universal in people essentially what I'm saying is um at least by my understanding we all have drives to some extent or another and to the extent that our aggressive Drive is very high and pleasure Drive is very high and whether or not it's pointed in the right direction it can be generative if it's not perhaps it can undermine our generative drive I'm very curious to know how you've observed the different uh ranges of these drives in people and how that predicts whether or not people will do uh more or less well in different areas of life essentially how the different drives play out mhm mhm I think the the first thing to say is where the drives are at so to speak in in any of us is a combination of Nature and nurture so the nature part tells us the range sort of that the drive is going to be but because nurture means so much to humans as as we understand from epigenetics from from the advancement of of science we see more and more and more how much nurture matters so the range that's denoted by nature is probably pretty broad I mean we we see the manifestation of that and then the nurture lets us then move that drive now sometimes nurture that's not gone in the right place can move the drive in the wrong direction right but as as adults as people who can take care of ourselves who can learn about ourselves we can change where the drives are seated it's not an easy thing to do because it requires a lot of changes of self with self- knowledge and hard work and but we can do it right we can change the the sort of array of how those drives are manifesting themselves within us and we see that I mean that's part of the hopefulness of mental health treatment right that we see not just surface changes but we can see changes on a deeper level so I think it's important that these things are not fixed although there are some natural elements you know someone who may have a natural sort of low aggression or low self assertion okay it's going to be in the lower range but it doesn't mean that it's locked in at any one particular point and that the place that we want to be what is the place that's consistent with the things that we want the the agency and gratitude as verbs and the uh the sense of well-being and all of that so the the idea is the state of health has the generative drive as as prominent right that's it's the dominant drive and then aggression and pleasure which are still active in us but they're subserving the generative drive and that's the state that we wish to be in so when we're assessing okay why why is there something that doesn't feel okay or something that's not going okay right then one way to start right is to look at okay what's going on in the person what may be off in the drives that gives us a very strong idea of okay what's going on a way of understanding what's going on as we then go and look in the 10 cupboards to figure out the specifics okay what is actually going on here that we can then change but the framing of what's going on can come through the lens of looking at the drives and how they're manifest in us what does it look like when the aggressive Drive is very high and the pleasure Drive is also very high so if these drives are running too high where we end up at is in a place of Envy right and and envy I I'm always sort of on the soapbox about Envy because I think Envy is just so wildly destructive and if the aggressive Drive is very high so the person say in in one way of U one way this can manifest itself just wants more and more and more right they're not getting satisfaction from anything but they want more that may be because of a strong vulnerability inside of them so something that might map to to narcissism for example there's Al there could be a strong aggressive drive to get more and that leads to to something that's very unhealthy so the idea that I want more I need more I don't have enough I can't get enough then Fosters Envy right- which is the the not the desire to like be better or to have more but it's just the desire to feel better about the self whether that involves raising the self up or bringing someone else down that's why Envy is destructive so very high levels of aggression that are not tempered for example by a generative drive that that would also be high then create a circumstance of envy and the Envy is destructive and the same happens if the pleasure Drive is very very strong so so if one continues to want more pleasure so I can't find any satisfaction I don't feel good about myself I feel bft inside right and and I see that oh pleasure can make me feel better but just for a little bit right then it fades away and I want more of it and I want more of it that also can lead to the place of Envy like that's the outcome so if the aggressive Drive is running very high or the pleasure Drive is running very high or if both are running very high but it only takes one in order to end up in a place of Envy so if the generative drive is not high enough to overcome how high the aggressive Drive is which would mean then the aggressive drive would be sublimated towards good productive things so take the energy and put it towards something that is goodness but if the aggressive Drive is was way out there ahead of the generative drive that that ends up in a place of Envy as does the pleasure drive if I want more and more and more but I never get satisfaction from from anything it never brings me any sense of goodness that where it ends is is in a place of of vulnerability and resentment right because Envy involves wanting more right and and and envy if we look at what's really going on Envy under the surface involves wanting everything right if a if a person is at the outer limits of Envy right which is why Envy is so destructive because if I can't get enough pleasure and there's so much aggression in me then I'm not going to make myself feel better better but what I can do is make other people feel worse I want to ask you more about Envy but first I want to ask is one way to characterize the generative drive and to distinguish it from the other drives is to say that generative drives are pro-social meaning they tend to bring about benevolent interactions between people yeah in the sense that so Pro social as constructive right as as in a sense building goodness then yes because it it's the drive in us that makes us want to love and nurture things right that makes us want to learn and and sometimes learn to make better in the world or learn for learning's sake that there that the drive is a drive of goodness so if the drive is then going to going to enact itself in the world around us it's going to be pro-social because we we exist as social units right I mean if we decide oh I want to be an island off somewhere like that's not healthy right we exist in Social units from small like a nuclear family right to a neighborhood right all the way up to Nations and to the to the planet so if we if we perceive the truth of that that hey there's an interdependence between me and others and and I see that then the drive will lead to choices and behaviors that are socially constructive earlier you talked about aggression and you were clear to make sure that we all understood that aggression does not necessarily mean violent aggression right um that there are different forms of aggression I'm curious if you could give us some examples of how you've observed um people with high levels of aggression and high levels of pleasure drive as well both male and female uh and you know here without um defaulting to stereotypes I think a lot of people just despite the fact that you've clarified what aggression is and isn't in this in the context of this conversation we hear the word aggression and we think uh verbal attack physical attack however the way you're describing aggression and the aggressive Drive I I have a feeling that you're referring to other expressions of aggression as well so if the aggressive Drive is running too high and that could have factors of nature factors of nurture right factors of the situation the person is in factors of their whole life but it ends up at the moment in a place that is too high then what that person is doing in one way or another is to try and exert an unhealthy level of control and that can be done in so many different ways it can be done in that way of of just intimidating people right of of using harsh language towards people it can be done by manipulating people it can be done through passive aggression there are all sorts of ways that the person can try and exert unhealthy control but that's where we end up if there's too much expression of the aggressive Drive in us that makes sense and it reminds me of an example from my own life where um first off I should say I've had almost exclusively positive collaborations among my colleagues at Stanford and elsewhere like every one of those collaborations has ended in a paper that we were all happy with but more importantly the relationships grew and uh we're not diminished right um but I had one collaboration with someone not to be named where um it was going very well but I had the need to reschedule an appointment uh so I sent ahead a note about the fact that my Cary dealing with I had some other things I explained why I need to reschedule the appointment um and didn't receive a reply repy which was a little unusual but then eventually received a reply that said um well it's clear that you don't want to pursue this collaboration which is like the furthest thing from the truth right and so I um and so I expressed that and then the collaboration was reinstated but it it brought to mind some concern for me um because it was sort of an extreme reaction to you know something that happens among academics um or anyone we get busy where things come up it was important to tend to uh the car that is and then at some point later um they were late to a number of meetings okay no big deal we're academics we tend to run late that's typical of many academics but then I was late once to a meeting and they essentially left and wrote an email that said something of the sort like uh I've got my own great ideas so I'm no longer interested in pursuing the collaboration and I and I was like pretty shocked right because um there was nothing really outside the ordin in terms of busyness and preoral schedules and and there were other people involved postto and things like that and there was a great project to be you know to be worked out so I remember being disappointed but also really kind of surprised but then when I mapped it back to the earlier example of the the car inst and I thought who like there's a real um sort of lack of ability of this person to handle disappointment and yet they're exerting or demonstrating rather some of the same behavior of k run running tardy and these kinds of things um and I remember feeling like it was pretty aggressive like it's a pretty aggressive reaction to something that you know could have been handled with a conversation now I must say I'm very grateful that the collaboration didn't proceed and it went elsewhere and it worked out great and they're doing great and we're doing great and so no hard feelings but um it stands out to me as a as a pretty Salient example of aggression but not played out at the level of yelling or anything there's a passivity in there but then there's also kind of a a kind of entitlement and here of course I'm only looking at the other person's behavior and I should acknowledge I realize cancelling not good being late not good but listen I'm a human being and I you canel once you were late on this this isn't this isn't habitual this is human stuff right right and and a lot of um a lot of good work had gone into the project right and there was a cost where a you know most most importantly the postto suffered because they weren't involved in these interactions at all and and yet that the project halted at that point um so to me that seems like an example of um somebody who has a well strong aggressive drive and that's clear from that they're incredibly successful in in in the academic domain um and when disappointed you know lashes back or is passive one or one or the other is that is is that kind what we're getting at here um not surprisingly perhaps that the person rarely publishes with other people right probably doesn't make a very good collaborative partner right and it it totally makes sense I mean think about what you're describing here right which is some vulnerability in the person there's some way in which the person doesn't feel good enough no matter what this person has achieved so then there's a sense of of the need and the right to overcontrol so when you agree to work together you know you didn't agree that I'll never have to cancel anything right but but but the thought was different the framing is different on the on the other end that now we've we've we're going to work together right so I'm exerting significant control over you right and again you're not aware of it right and may maybe that he's not aware of it in this case it was a she okay okay so I was thinking of someone different but she has to have some deficit of self that that results in in the reflexive need to overcontrol and and think about the first response is a non-response right which is that's aggression but it's just it's just passive aggression right the thought would be well you're you're worry something doesn't feel good in you because I didn't respond which was true right you're expecting a response maybe you don't know did you get the email you know what's happening is she mad so it's sort of effective it creates some consternation and some dissonance in you right then on top of that the person is willing to potentially at that point sacrifice the relationship right so you think about aggression now is not good right this excess aggression is not good for you it it also is clearly eclipsing the generative drive right because it's not good for this person and their research it's not good for this person and the posts in their lab right but the but the person is willing to accept that in the service of gratifying the excess in aggression now so then you said something that then sort of made it okay right for the short term okay then the person feels gratified like whether you apologize or not they took it as you know you've to some degree bowed down before me now like it'll be okay for at least for the short term right but then the next thing that happens actually does end the collaboration right so that's not good right and you say even from a self-serving perspective that person was collaborating with you for a reason right she saw a benefit to the science that she's very very interested in through the collaboration with you but then let that all go right in the service of what in in the service of of the ego right of you know I don't feel good enough about myself right the response to that then is a is a response of envy that I don't like that you have the freedom to behave differently than I want you to right I don't like any of it I don't like that I don't control you as much as I would like to and ultimately it's that envy that becomes destructive so it's a setback for that person it's destructive of the science that person was doing it's destructive of the science that you were doing so Envy is destructive and here the the the high level of aggression the aggressive drives that a very high place it's exceeding the generative Drive the pleasure Drive isn't high enough either because there's not enough pleasure coming from the great science that's being done right so then the person is approaching the world through the lens of Envy right they don't feel good enough they want to exert that aggression through overcontrol and what they end up doing is destructive right and it's very clearly destru it's a great example because it's destructive of the science which is ostensibly the reason that you're there right it's the reason you were there but someone who needs to exert Over contr Control is there not just for that reason and then the other reasons can Trump the generative reason that they're there and that's how Envy when when it is the product of aggression or pleasure seeking being too high always unfailingly creates destruction and how different is that from agency and Gra attitude as active verbs right there's there's a sense of agency but the agency isn't being exactly enacted because if the agency is being enacted in the service of science or career or whatever it may be that's not that's not going so well right and the and the Gratitude part isn't active like my goodness I'm here like I have this great career I'm discovering things I get to spend my life in science I get to collaborate with you like there's so many things to feel good about I have post dos in my lab right I get to nurture them because I know more and I can guide like that that's not leading right Envy is not those things which is why people who are doing that at least in this realm of Life although this often no this bleeds into other Realms of Life what you the vast majority of times you see is someone who does not have happiness right in the way that we're you happiness with the quotes right that happiness is you know the sense of peace right the sense of of uh well-being right this this being able to Delight in things contentment right the person doesn't have that right and here it's interesting right this person gets to the highest levels of Academia and they're very successful and they have a lab of their own and they're collaborating you think that's all great right but not inside of them it's not bringing them those things is evidenced by how this person is behaving and and I would bet Almost 100% if you say what's that person like in other aspects of Life at least in the professional realm probably in others too no one's going to describe a happy person so much of what you just said captures this individual um extremely well and um it also reminds me that so much of the way that you're describing this aggressive Drive can also be observed perhaps in the way that people show up to social interactions not necessarily big interactions maybe even just interactions between two people what I'm I'm thinking of here is the the person male or female who shows up and and just kind of takes over like like talks the whole time and tells stories I went to a meal at the when I graduated University and someone showed up for the first time um at this meal meaning we had never met them before and just like sat down and just started telling stories for like an hour MH and it was interesting portions of it were captivating and then at some point I realized like this is this is either total pathology like this person is is crazy but they weren't crazy o or um they have no recognition that they're absorbing all the oxygen in the room as it's sometimes described um but it seemed like they had this need to just control the whole environment by way of speech just like you know fire hose stories um and I've seen this definitely in the academic realm I've seen this in the non-academic realm in Social settings and and what's interesting is perhaps why this person does this or these people do this but what's also interesting is how people react to it you know that on the one hand it I think most people find that kind of obnoxious mhm but there also seem to be people who see this as like oh that person has a lot of agency like they're a leader like they they they actually grab a lot of the attention that they're seeking and we tend to view those people as kind of empowered I don't actually think that they're necessarily empowered but but perhaps this stems from the feeling that the rest of us I like to think have which is some sense of um social etiquette where there's some give and take you know you walk into a room you kind of assess you know what's the context here uh there's some listening as well as some speaking uh and so on and and so when someone shows up and kind of violates all those rules on the one hand it it can be obnoxious and overtake everything but as said before you know there's also this the sense of like oh like that must be nice to just be able to like be be as one one feels um and so I think um I'm describing this not because I I think people should mimic this type of behavior either way you know be really meek and not say anything that's on their mind or or just overtake but because I feel like it might be an exploration of this aggressive Drive um and if someone's doing that are they trying to like mask something else um and why do people react to uh these seemingly powerful people in this way these things happen in the world around us right they're independent of the spectrum of gender the spectrum of intelligence achievement right they're human problems so a person you're describing whether that person has character structure problems that that are present with them across time or whether they're in a certain place you know whether it's in Life or today like we don't know for sure what the underpinnings but but what you're describing is it's a presentation of narcissism right and narcissism is rooted not in confidence not in arrogance right it's rooted in vulnerability it's rooted in I don't feel good enough and narcissism then then engages with the world through the lens of Envy so no one else gets to have any time no one else gets to say anything funny no one else maybe gets to say anything at all right there there's a there's a dominance of the room right there's a dominance of the room that comes through an inability to tolerate the back and forth of human interactions right human engagement right so then that person becomes very dominant and why is that because when they tell a story and they get a laugh or even if it's not that funny and it's a 15 story but somebody Smiles a little bit or nobody Smiles they can perceive inside that like I just did that I said that and maybe somebody responded positively I feel good about that for a split second now that's gone and they then you know then the next thing comes and the next thing comes because people who are coming at the world through the lens of narcissism whether it's just in that particular event right or it's a cross life right are never satisfied and nothing ever brings enough goodness nothing ever brings enough feeling of pleasure so the person then wants more and that's how the person dominates the room now that can be very seductive right narcissistic people not always but are often very seductive because of that appearance of Mastery right of control so that person did have we we could look at it in the short term and say that person had Mastery over the room right no one said anything for an hour but them right so they had mastery over the room they had control over the room but what they're doing is exerting overcontrol right in the short it's like you know Penny wise and pound foolish right they borrow a dollar today to pay back a hundred tomorrow right because they got to control that room but a lot of people not everyone right some people are seduced by it right but a lot of people will take away from that something that's not a good feeling something that wasn't Mutual that doesn't make that person want to collaborate with that person even be in the same space as that person right so it's it's counterproductive right because the people who might come under the spell so to speak right they're the people who were brought under the spell right they're they're less observant Dynamic you know intuitive introspective they they're they're not the people that you want in a sense on your side right the people that would be most valuable to collaborate with even as thought Partners have conversations with but those people are going to be put off because even if they don't know exactly what's wrong they know like that didn't feel good and they M do I want that feeling more in my life no right so that's the the counterproductive aspects that's why narcissism is destructive because you might say well there's nothing destructive in that you know in that interaction but again you have to be standing so up close to it that you don't see the bigger picture because when you stand back from that that's not a person who's by and large you know you see that's not a person who's interconnected in the world around them has a group of good supportive friends has a bunch of colleagues where they can s of exchange information and and you know cuz all that social Dynamic has to happen in the rest of life so you're seeing a situation that is that is counterproductive that is destructive and you always see that when people are enacting narcissism whether it's okay bunch of bad things have happened and for whatever reason like I'm in an unhealthy place and I'm enacting it right now or if I'm enacting it every day of my life because it's in my character structure and I have it recognized and and changed it it's always destructive the narcissists that I've known and observed almost always seem to have a partner who um clearly supports their narcissism or at least doesn't speak up very much against it at least not publicly and not much else except a professional role MH um in fact there's one scientist who I did not work with who comes to mind and and the joke about him was always that um this person would talk about themselves endlessly for the first half hour that you run into them and say okay well enough about me why don't you tell me about meh um this person moved to a different country with their partner comes back every once in a while has essentially done nothing over the last um decade or so kind of left the field and um it's kind of the secretly the laughing stock of the field uh there was a one other anecdote about this person I'm just I'm not picking on them I'm just trying to explore the these dimensions of aggression and and and low pleasure uh Drive um and envy um at lab meetings it was it was well known that they they would host a basketball game um and but it was well known that you um did not want to score like you know like on this person right um because you would be asked to leave the lab and indeed several people were asked to leave the laboratory for having made embarrassed the the lab head at one of these lab events by participating in exactly the event that was described in the way it was described and doing something competent right so so the the game was essentially a way of for the person to build themselves up and they were a mediocre at best basketball player so like here's this game where everyone's expected to pretend right and I have to imagine pretend that the person is actually better at what they do than they are and and and in some ways this it feels like a like a replica of of how narcissism shows up in so many other areas of life like you said you know these people are rarely surrounded by people who um are actually very bright self you know um uh self- effacing Etc you know who um they tend to gather people that just support them or no one at all because because no reasonably healthy person would would choose to be around that right you know because that that game is a metaphor for all of life for that person it's sending that message like see this message and extrapolate it out to everything else right and what is so what's the metaphor what's it communicating it's communicating that you don't do anything better than I do right you don't rise above me interesting right you don't arise above me in any way you don't get to know things I don't know you don't get to do anything better than than than I than I do right or I will be destructive towards you right it's it's fascinating right because it's not about the game right the the the game is a way of of of communicating that message right interesting the person not even that good at the game like why not choose something you're really good at right because then the message is not communicated as clearly right and a lot of this coming is unconscious let's choose some I'm kind of fair to middling at right and then make it very clear that no one gets to be better or I do something destructive to them I mean that's exactly what that is and and imagine like someone is thrown out of of the lab right I mean like this is in many ways like a like the biggest thing in their life or one of the biggest things antig generative I mean the the cost of that in the larger world is one less potentially fantastic scientist right and that's the broader that's always the broader picture because the narcissist is standing very very close close to the tapestry right and and so so the interaction there is um you have squired a basket when I have not right so you you don't understand the message that you're not supposed to exceed me and now I will get rid of you because you're dangerous to have around right because you don't get the message and and you may exceed me in other ways and also I'm going to feel better because I have the power to be punitive right even though it's wanly punitive right and un completely unjustified but I have the power to do that and it'll make me feel good then to push you away and I know that's not going to be good for you and I'll feel good about that right but that doesn't last of course that's why the person continues to do it and it also doesn't understand at all that like that's not good for science right or most importantly that's not good for me right there's a graduate student in that lab because you didn't say fire The Graduate St make the graduate student leave if the person wasn't good no it's make the graduate student leave no matter what so the person is doing things that are injurious to the society around us obviously to the specific person they're targeting and also to themselves and that's where if you follow if you follow envy and you know you see high levels of it in situations that are unbounded so like this situation is unbounded in the sense that the person can do that there's no higher authority right well Labs um now this is changing um and by the way I I should back up a second and say that I do believe and it's been my experience that most scientists in last heads are not narcissists are quite kind are benevolent I mean they can be a little quirky we're scientists after all but um but not narcissists um at the same time it is true that for a long time less so now Laboratories were sort of like little fums there was very little oversight from the universities and so the lab you joined became your entire world and Landscape right and there was some exploitation by narcissistic lab heads for sure um as you said it was unbounded did right like there was no oversight whereas this would be much harder to recreate today if someone we wanted to and I think that's why by almost everyone listening to this will it will resonate with them they'll find some familiarity because you see this you can see this in situations where there's a bounded group of people right there's just a certain group of people in a certain situation and that's who they are but the authority of the person leading the group is unbounded so there's a situation where if that person has narcissistic Tendencies aggressive Drive is too high pleasure Drive is high but not being met if all those things are happening that's when you see this come to light which is why the destruction varies based upon the destruction that's permissible within the framework right so here that this person wasn't going to like fire everyone in their lab right so in a sense they could only damage their Labs so much although maybe if you damage your lab so much you don't get funding inadvertently sink yourself right so so even there that person could bring about their own destruction but when you see the other end where it's truly unbounded like like in the sense of War right is someone who has who can control a a machine of War who who then has everything right like what do they need right well they need something they don't have and never will get so so now they start enacting war and war is destructive right and you think oh that person wants something I mean how many times does someone start a war right that's this clearly an unjustified War right it's a war because they they want something then they get something and they're satisfied right that that's not how it goes right then they get something and they're not satisfied and they want more so in in discussions at times about narcissism and envy and and how that can play out on the the world stage so sometimes you know huge events in human history will come up and people for example will will bring up Adolf Hitler and and the idea that Hitler wants things wanted things no the the the Unbound narcissism the Unbound Envy wanted destruction right this is a person who if things had continued to go as this person intended right there would have been no one left on Earth but him because the process is nothing but destructive which is why after the fact there's incalculable human Carnage right and he himself was among the incal cble human Carnage because that's the end point of narcissism that's the end of narcissism on a broad stage right that's the end point of Envy at its highest magnitude and we see that as examples whether we see on the smaller stage of the lab right ahead that you're describing or on the larger stage of of unbounded War we end up with destruction like 100% time that's the final common pathway for all of that are there some consistent themes of childhood that lead somebody to become a narcissist and in addition to that I'm curious whether or not narcissists ever have Insight whether or not if offered the opportunity to explore the 10 cupboards under the structure of self and function of self whether or not they eventually see inside those cupboards and go oh my goodness I've got this uh self that's clearly over inflated and I've got these defense mechanisms and I'm so envious and and and modify their behavior or whether or not the narcissists are immune from uh constructive self-reflection right right to answer the the first part is is the vast majority of narcissism it maybe all of it we don't know for sure is is rooted in the childhood trauma of not feeling good enough right which is not an excuse right for people doing doing awful things it's not what what we're saying we're trying to have an explanatory mechanism right which which goes back to formative life experiences and not feeling good enough whether it was because that person was directly denigrated or that person wasn't denigrated but could never work hard enough never could could be enough to to to get um approval right again it's not 100% in human beings are complicated but if you go and look you you see that that there was never a state of like oh I feel good enough about myself right and if there's never a state of I feel good enough about myself because someone has told me that and given me the pat on the head or given me the positive comment you can see how in a certain sort of natural lay of the land genetically and in in concert with with other experiences that person can get to adulthood with with a lot of aggression in them and never having experienced I'm good enough it's still running along inside of them and then they're enacting that aggression in the world around them that's most commonly what we see and because there's such deep vulnerability and such deep insecurity then people say people who suffer from full-blown narcissism narcissistic personality disorder so in action of Envy on the on the highest levels that is they're so defended they're so strongly defended in an unhealthy manner from seeing their own vulnerability that it is extremely difficult to get that person to come around and say okay let let's look in those 10 cups within the field people often talk about treating narcissistic people they talk about it a in a nihilistic way and and some you see very experienced people say oh that's impossible right that never gets better now I I'm not a believer in therapeutic nihilism I I think that yes it is it is the norm that that person just can't get it together to go look at that thing they're so defended against it they're so afraid of it right they won't look anywhere near it so they're looking in the other direction and they're furthering all that on health it's not the case that that it's always that way and on a couple of occasions I have worked with seen you know witness narcissistic people who can make changes now it's usually in the context of something very extreme that causes them to do that so someone who will no longer have access to family members they want to see or to financial resources that they you know need to keep themselves afloat it's things that often are that dramatic it's not always that but we can see though in those kind of extenuating situ situations where the the problem is so big the Envy is so high um but the motivation for change is very very high because since on the kotan stick model the stick here is very very strong that if a person then goes and does that you you can see change inside of them so we're never in a place of of therapeutic nihilism but the but the the barriers to that are very very high because the the self is so wounded that the person is protecting that self so strong that's why the narcissism and envy are so full-blown and it's hard to get that person to go back and look but not impossible based on what you're telling me it seems that it's a very low probability that a non-clinician could change a narcissist like in other words if one is engaging in the world with a narcissist um because they have to presumably or they just find themselves in that place um would you say to that person there's very little if anything that you can do to change the narcissist Behavior or um psychological framework if they for because of course if the narcissist can't often do it for themselves with the help of a skilled clinician why would a um why would anyone else be able to achieve that so we're coming at what we're doing here from a perspective of truth about human beings right and that truth brings with it hopefulness right it brings with it hopefulness that people can change and how people can change and and and I am 100% all for that it's the way to look at ourselves right but it is also true that there are aspects of pathology that that require clinical treatment in order to improve so now we're looking from the other side and saying hey there's a problem here and there's a deep problem here and that we have to come at from a different perspective of how can you help that problem and there's a science behind this too of what level of clinical care for example is most likely to be helpful to someone like this and it's not an individual clinician even right it's a team of people who work through different modalities who can sort of wrap around that person so it's not just a level of clinical care is needed but it's a relatively high level of clinical care and that in general is the is the only way that we get at narcissism that's not 100% but that's the vast majority of time so what can then the person do right a person cannot be a team of clinicians right what that person can do one choice is to disengage right but disengagement can come with the promise of re-engagement right many many times I've worked with people and practiced and rehearsed with them like okay what might you say to someone along the lines of you know I've known you for a long time or I care about you or I love you right whatever they may say to lead in but I I can't be with you or I can't be around you right there's there's there's something going on that that makes it not okay for me it doesn't feel okay you person maybe says things like you know you're aggressive or demeaning or whatever it is or maybe they just say it just doesn't feel okay I can't have it and and then the the the need to step away from the person but but look if you if you got some help right if you took better care of yourself in ways that would be better for you and for the people around you then of course I'd want to be in your life you know something like that so disengagement can come you know with that um encouragement right to to the person but but one way or another you have to set boundaries which is okay I have to deal with this person so I'll deal with them a little bit um or I don't have to deal with this person so I won't right or I can't get away from this person so I have to take with a grain of salt what they're saying to me but ultimately some form of strong boundaries or disengagement is like that's the response that that that that's the self-care response right for the person who's who's with the narcissist what are some other ways that the aggressive drive and pleasure drive and generative drive for that matter play out for instance we talked about the former patient VI viewers who eventually switched jobs um clearly had a generative Drive within him but it was being blocked by a number of choices rooted in narratives that originated in childhood Etc we talked about individuals with high aggressive Drive High degree of pleasure drive but a very diminished capacity to experience pleasure and therefore a lot of envy and the destruction that comes with Envy yes what are some of the other variations on these drives um as You observe them in your clinical practice well our overall framing is we want the generative drive to be the one that's deterministic right it's the one with the strongest influence so we want to we want to nurture the generative Drive in us and in others and and it makes sense for us to to talk about that but we've looked at how do things get out of balance right and from the perspective of well what if the aggressive drive or the pleasure Drive what if they're too high right and then it makes sense that often not always what can be driving them to be so high are things that aren't healthy in us then the higher they get the harder it is to gratify them so we end up with that problem of Envy right but we can be out of balance in the other direction too right where where the person does not does not experience an ability to um engage with the world around them right they they don't think they can do anything to change anything for the better inside or outside of themselves and you know they're not doing much they don't feel that they can do much and and and also not receiving pleasure from things there's no gratification from the things a person is doing like we see situations like this too with the aggressive Drive the pleasure drive or both and then we end up not at Envy because Envy is the side of excess but we end up at demoralization on the Lower Side now demoralization is is not a specific psychiatric diagnosis it can predispose to psychiatric problems like the biochemical abnormality of depression right but what we're talking about here is not a psychiatric diagnosis right like Envy is not a psychiatric diagnosis like it's a it's a thing right that can be experienced that can lead to diagnosis the same thing with demoralization if you don't feel that you can make a difference to anything right and you're not enjoying anything or feeling gratification from anything then that pull is going to win out that's going to be a demoralized person the same way of course we know in experiments when you know the the know you have a a a rat going for food if like if you do it enough when the rat goes for the food and you take the food away the rat stops trying they learned helplessness phenomenon right that exists in us too and it comes along with all sorts of other things CU being not rats right we have a whole bunch of thoughts about that of oh my God I'm not good enough and nothing will ever be okay and you know so demoralization then is is can be very very strong in taking a person away from the other things we're trying to seek right either because that person has the the essentially the Learned helplessness right and all the things the complicated things inside of us that can come along with that or the person isn't gaining pleasure from anything so when when we're considering the ways in which we can be out of balance right we think okay aggression and pleasure drive if if one or the other or both is too high we end up at envy and if one or the other or both are too low we end up with demoralization and you can take almost any scenario it could be a scenario of something that's just not really not going well for a person it's not a clinical scenario it's a thing in a person's life or we can take clinical scenarios and the vast majority you know outside of outliers like a head injury for example we can take those scenarios and we can look at it in that way and we can understand what's going on at least we can understand enough that when we go back and look in the 10 cupboards of the two pillars we can then have some understanding of okay what is going on we know the basic picture and how things are not in uh in the balance we want them in now we can understand that enough to go back and then look in those 10 cupboards and and I I believe that just about everything except those biological outliers like a head injury fits into that puristic which is why we can use it to understand we can use it to help we can use it to make change what a powerful lens to think about and explore the self and where things are working for us and where things are possibly not working for us if I or anyone else out there wanted to get some read on assess their level of aggressive drive and their level of pleasure drive and their ability to experience pleasure what sorts of questions would one ask you know um for instance uh is it a question of like how driven am I um how how much get up and go do I have um how much pleasure do I uh experience from an interaction with a puppy uh an interaction with food um is it too much right like does it draw me off course are those the sorts of very simple but um perhaps also very informative questions that we could start to use to probe our psyche yeah I I think yes but I would come top down right so if if the goal of health is that aggression and pleasure those drives are subserving the generative drive and start to look there right if a person can take so an honest inventory of self like what kind of force am I being in the world around me and and that could mean for example what kind of force am I being in my family right am I denigrating to the people around me are the other people in the home afraid of me like what kind of force am I being a Force for good am I bolstering like it people can't always see that in themselves and take stock of themselves but what we're talking about a situation where we think a person can like they can bring to bear who am I being in the world in other ways think of the example of the person who needed to leave the job who who could look at that and say say no I'm not you know I'm not being generative in the world in the way I want to I'm I'm certainly not doing my job as well as I would want to I'm making my own life worse right so so that person could then see that's out of balance or in another way a person might see know a lot of what I'm doing is s of self-serving or maybe destructive like people can realize that right so you can realize by taking an inventory of self is is the generative Drive what's deterministic in me and again not always but we're talking about a process of exploration if the answer to that is yes if you say I'm trying to be the best person that I can and I think about the people over whom I have any Authority right and and like I try to be reasonable and I try to be fair and I try to be circumspect and you know I try and think in someone else's shoes I mean you know sometimes I have to set boundaries or expectations or even punishment right but but I'm like careful about how I'm doing that and I'm certainly not perfect and I get things wrong at times but you know I do think I'm contributing to the world I'm doing doing whatever I take on you know as well as I can do it I'm productive at work I you know my my kids are doing okay or my friends are are are doing all right whatever it is that if we can come up with that then then we can say Okay exhale a little bit like you're in a good place right it doesn't mean everything is optimal of course so then go look at the level of the aggressive Drive which might mean you know how assertive am I right am I the kind of person who comes up to the precipice but doesn't make the decision am I the kind of person who's little too assertive and sometimes I'm sort of walking on people a little bit like a person can go look at the aggressive Drive within them or pleasure seeking am I doing things that bring me gratification right am I engaging with the people around me in a way that brings the gratification that one might one might wish for right so if it's in a romantic relationship is there romance like are we being nice to one another right so so you can go and look at that and say am I getting gratification from the things I'm doing right am I in am I taking this wherever this drive is is within me and trying to satisfy it in reasonable healthy ways that are also good for others and we're back to the generative drive so that's one way of coming at it and it's the way that we would like to because now what are we trying to do next and what can we make things better right can we optimize things okay things are okay right but can we make them better but let's say we see that the the the generative drive is not winning the day right and people can see that they like look I'm seeking pleasure right it's why I got for example I hear over and over that's why that's why I got addicted to this substance it now is not providing any pleasure to me and is now making me miserable right but but the but I wanted what it was giving me again this doesn't mean that the person just wants to have the world's best time right it may mean that they're really suffering a lot right and the pleasure that that drug gave them was some relief from pain this is how many many people tragically ended up becoming addicted to and dying from opiates right because say the opiate after the surgery or the opiate after the injury then is soothing something right and it's soothing something because that person feels less bad about something inside of them you hear this all the time that that then Fosters addiction so so that person looking for pleasure this isn't something where we would say in some light-hearted manner that person took Chances with their life I mean sometimes we'll see that but but more and more what people are looking for then is relief from suffering right but we can get to that point where where we can ascertain for whatever reason that the pleasure seeking is is too much and if pleasure seeking and aggression are too much we we we become aware of dissatisfaction right if you're if you're relying too much on aggression I always want my way it's not always going to happen right or I always want that pleasurable thing I always want to feel better that also doesn't happen right so so then that can guide us towards being aware of where are those drives and if the drives are high right how much uh dissonance is created by the the what's actually coming of the drive right versus the level the drive is at so so I guess it's a long way of saying yes to your question but I would sort of come top down because the generative Drive is so important and it does Gau gate forward like kind of where are we at you know in the spectrum of like how healthy am I or are there elements of unhealth I want to kind of go after or you know am I seeing things in myself that really say things that are unhealthy are really dominating my life are deterministic like addiction you know just just one example you know addiction things that are self-destructive right because then that's a place to then look at it more through the clinical lens and maybe I won't just talk to a trusted other you know or and go get a book but maybe I should and maybe I should have clinical care yeah the example of addiction is very potent um and it also brings to mind the perhaps um less apparently dangerous situation but one that I think is really common where people have a certain amount of aggressive Drive they have a certain amount of pleasure drive but there's a kind of um passivity and draining out of the generative drive or competing out of the generative drive because of social media uh and the reason I I bring this up is again not because I dislike social media I rely on and use social media for teaching and learning extensively really but in going back back to the pillars that underly whether or not we achieve and experience agency gratitude peace contentment and Delight within the pillar of function of self there's this thing salience you know and what we're paying attention to internal and external and social media does seem to me a unique circumstance never before observed in human evolution where you have a near infinite number of uh environments available to you and we know that you know a picture is worth a thousand words and a movie is worth a billion pictures when it comes to drawing our attention I mean you just look at you give a young child even an infant an iPad I mean that kid is in the tunnel I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing and there computers and computer screens are going to be a part of their lives now and forever presumably but it is the case that there are a lot of people who um perhaps have the propensity for a strong generative drive but because they also have a propensity for a uh pleasure Drive they wake up they pick up the phone they look at the phone you know something captivates their attention then they're thinking about that it might be um something that brings them Delight but more often than not it's something that brings them either mild irritation or or mild entertainment um maybe even intense entertainment for a short while but very quickly minutes and hours go by in which we are not engaging in the world unless we are posting valuable content um and so social media is a bit of a of a drain on these drives I mean it Taps into these drives in very strong ways and all one has to do is observe the behavior of people in public spaces now uh in airports uh um on trains um even in their cars and I mean people are essentially watching TV all day long and and it does it does concern me and and I I raise it because um I feel like it it can distract from our generative Drive in a way that um it doesn't necessarily speak to any kind of like deep character flaw or any kind of subconscious narrative but just that that salience um cupboard uh is is like clearly something within that salience cupboard is is happening that's um unprecedented um and very very powerful and potentially quite destructive yeah I think to to understand this you know I would uh cite this belief right I I believe this to be true that human beings have a long history of under appreciating the power of the discoveries that are then in their own hands so we discover gunpowder how long until we're shooting each other right we discover nuclear fision right now are we going to destroy the planet right so social media since it's a discovery it's a thing that comes from what we've figured out as humans that now is there in in front of us and big powerful discoveries deserve to be treated with respect right gunpowder is very powerful and if people need to hunt in order to survive gunpowder can help them hunt without getting hurt and be more successful right nuclear fision can has provided some good things to humanity but it can also destroy Humanity so I think the same is true here that what you're talking about is something of immense power and you can see how it if it gets out of balance so so let's use the saling so let's say the social media is too Salient right that's going to make a problem right if it's too salient in the sense that the person is always looking at things that don't make them feel good enough right well that's not going to go well and that's going to affect what's in those other 10 cupboards right and what is built on top of it so then it gets into the unconscious mind like Oh I thought I was good enough until like now I'm looking at all the social media and I realize I'm not I mean this is people who who treat teens you know often talk about this that you see something that you didn't often see before where a person who might have gotten through a lot of formative years thinking like like oh how I look is okay for example then is bombarding themselves with social media that tells them how they look is not okay and then that changes absolutely or perhaps social media is just simply absorbing a ton of time and energy but mostly time that could be devoted to to a generative Force right that's the that's the other side of it so think about the example of the person who I know it wasn't social media but we were saying what if it were social media that instead of 90 minutes a day you know it's it's 8 hours cuz there's an analog there right and we see a lot of this then it's taking something that that can be good right and can in sense in s you because they even should be good like there's enough out there right in terms of learning and bolstering that like why should it not be good right but it's not good because the defenses then shift like if you if you're relying on it 10 hours a day there has to be some denial right because there are other things to do in the world there has to be some avoidance there has to be some rationalization like something is going on there that's not healthy so if you tell me this person is utilizing social media 10 hours a day they're not looking at things that make them feel bad about themselves they're just doing it then then I think okay something is is out of balance now it may be that that that person's defenses are out of balance so think about the example of the person with the job they didn't like then their defensive structure changes then the thing that was good for them they rely on too much and now it becomes something that's not good for them right so then you go and look at what else is out of bound here right what else is is is driving this so maybe it's being driven by the change in defense mechanisms Etc maybe it's the other way around that that this person just kind of habituated to doing more and more and more and more of it and then you would come at it in a different way of okay can you can you slowly but surely do less you know replace the the time with things that were good before because you could then back that person out to where they were before but you're not going to back the person out to where they were before if it's being driven by something else so we again come to the Curiosity you tell me that person is on social media 14 hours a day I'm curious right I want to understand what what is what is the balance of those drives right you you've just told me a very powerful point about salience that doesn't sound like a good one so already you're giving me clues about where the drives are right which means where's that person at what's going on in all those cabinets then you give more information now sit and talk with the person now you know you're going to understand like what is the lay of the land here and how do we go about making it better I love the concept of the generative Drive first of all because it's pro-social it brings about great things for us and for for the world and I mean what is better than peace contentment and Delight especially when we remind ourselves that those are active phrases or those those can be achieved and experienced inside of action it's not just sitting levitating Naval gazing that sort of things it's not Enlightenment right it's peace contentment and Delight um very big difference right very very big difference yes one of the other reasons I love this concept of the generative drive so much is also because it is a verb state it has to do with creating things in us and in the world in cultivating our experience of things and and what we do and what we say and how we respond to what others do and say and I also like it because it's distinct from the way that we're normally taught to think about psycholog iCal well-being or being a healthy individual which is usually centers around a discussion of goals and values and you know like what am I trying to focus on and and you what sorts of people do I want to engage with in the world and certainly all of that is really important goals and who you engage with but I think for many people out there much of their time is spent thinking about other people like how healthier or unhealthy are the the people they're dating or their friends or what's going on between to family members you know which of course is fine to think about but a lot of emphasis is placed on like our assessments of others and how those are impacting us um and in some cases people default to just thinking about others and their problems and seeing their problems and what we're really talking about here is a process of introspection and inquiry that's very structured and as it's been laid out by you you know these two pillars structure of self function of self with these 10 cupboards um that might sound like a lot of cupboards but as we talked about in the first episode all of that flows up to these very simple right ideals and Concepts and action States and ways of being and to me there's nothing more powerful than the statement that what we are all seeking are states of agency and gratitude because again to go back to the analogy of physical fitness there are not an infinite number of different physical States or states of Fitness that one um can seek there's endurance there's strength there's flexibility there's Dynamic movement there's you know explosiveness there speed there a bunch of you know subtleties to it but here it really seems that the psyche ourselves and our mental health is really tractable if we turn the lens and we look inward yes yes I think that hits upon a very very important Point as we talk about understanding oneself and the process process of change right and I would describe that as rational aspiration right so let's use the physical health example right if if I think okay I want to be healthier you know I want to have more strength I want to have more endurance and I might even have ideas of what that would be I want to be able to run a certain distance in a certain time lift a certain amount of weight I have an idea of what that is but rational aspiration is rooted in our present like I'm aware that there's a me now that that that like isn't in that state and I'm aware that there's a there things that I'm going to do to get to that state right and I'm not that dreading them like okay they'll be difficult right but that's okay I can do difficult things I can take pride in doing difficult things and that's how we all achieve things so I see myself in the present because of course goals are good and that that's true as long as we're still living our lives in the present because otherwise goals just become fantasies or things we want to want to possess so if I'm aware of the state of physical health I'm in right now and I'm aware of the state of physical health I want to be in and I know there's a bunch of Pathways I could take to get there but I have to think about it about it figure it out do those things and then I'm going to navigate myself there that's how the whole process is good right I don't feel bad about myself now I recognize something I would like to change I'm not saying oh you're a loser because you don't have those things right I feel I feel good about myself now I recognize there's something I want and there's going to be a process a process across time across effort that's going to navigate me there then when I get there I feel good about being there right it's very very different if I think I want that I want to possess in a sense right I want to possess the ability to run a certain distance in a certain time I just want the thing I'm Covetous of the thing right that is not good right because the person then often is denigrating to the self not always but that's a motivation to go out and get that thing that's better and and they're they're really um lamenting the process of getting they're like they just want something as an end point and that doesn't make for happiness it doesn't make for even the the humility and humility in action the Gratitude right of the humility is I can't just do that overnight I'm going to have to work hard people have to work hard I'm no different than anybody else I'm not special I got to get in there and work and use the elbow grease and then I'll get healthier like all of that is good that I just want to possess something is not good and that's why people in in scenarios like this they might like go through maybe in an unthinking way or they're gutting it out where they go and they get that thing right but then that thing is not enough right and they want more now there's not there's nothing wrong with wanting more if it's if it's the healthy inaction of self right I'm going to Now map my way this feels better I want to map myself from here to the next level of better physical fitness that's different than I just want that thing because then if I get it it won't be good enough right it doesn't make me happy it doesn't satisfy me and that's the that's the the unhealthy state of just wanting things to possess them and then we don't feel good about them which is you know the thought of if you give people if you give a person something they'll resent you for it right again that we're we're painting it in a s a certain way the context of that statement which I used to hear you know a lot even when I was younger people would say that right and what were they trying to get at right what they were getting at is it doesn't feel good if you didn't work for something right like if you know you didn't work very hard and you got a C but I give you an A or somebody gives me an a right I know that that's not good I know that I got the thing I got the A and I might feel happy in the moment cuz I wanted that thing but there's no real pleasure in it there's no satisfaction there's no contentment there's no sense of self there's nothing generative I didn't work hard enough to go from a c to an a right so it's that that and and that really brings us back to to the self that we're growing on top of you know of the structure right and how that how that self is functioning right right how it's striving because now we're really talking about strivings and if I'm going to strive for something and work hard to get it will I get the good feeling on the other side of it and now we're we're living in the generative space well I love the structure of what you've laid out again thank you the pillars of structure of self and function of self with 10 coverboards between the two of them that when explored can seem a little bit complex but they're really some very straightforward types of inquiry that anyone can go about about self-awareness and address potential defense mechanisms what we're conscious of maybe what we're not conscious of look at our behaviors and our strivings and how that flows up to these simple ideals again of empowerment humility agency and gratitude as verbs and then from that peace contentment and delight and the generative Drive which gosh if there ever was a a more powerful concept and something to strive for I I I don't think it exists because um the gener Drive is is extraordinary in in the number of different ways it plays out and it seems always positively right um and of course the aggressive Drive the pleasure Drive exists to varying extents in all of us but um cannot be allowed to overcome the generative drive if we're going to to Really Thrive so um so thank you again so much for this framework and again to remind people listening and watching that uh this framework is is mapped out in a downloadable PDF if people want to see it visually even though we've touched on it several times before um I really appreciate how logical clear and actionable this framework is and um and also that in providing a framework for us it gives us something to hold our mind to you know I think I and so many people out there are familiar with like being in a struggle and and not being able to orient like like where am I in the struggle not knowing what to do and you you've provided some incredible points of reference for us to really like focus on start asking questions about I and how I see myself what am I paying attention to and so on and so forth to really first anchor and Orient and then be able to move forward in this process as many times as is required to uh get where we each and all want to go so thank you so much for this I know in our next discussion we're going to touch on the relational aspects of human existence you know and not just selves but interactions between selves including some of the um let's call it darker and unfortunate aspects of of human existence like narcissists and um some of the challenges of different you know full-blown personality disorders but also just in terms of building healthy relationships between friends romantic Partners parents and children and siblings and and co-workers and and all the rest so thank you again for this incredibly Rich um knowledge that you provided us and and a map forward you're very welcome and thank you I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it with you great well to be continued thank you for joining me for today's discussion about how to improve your mental health with Dr Paul Ki if you're learning from Andor enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests that you'd like me to consider hosting on the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments and if you're not already following me on social media I am hubman lab on all platforms so that's Instagram Twitter LinkedIn threads and Facebook and on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools some of which overlap with the content of the huberman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content of the huberman Lab podcast so again it's hubman lab on all social media channels not on today's episode but on many previous episodes of The hubman Lab podcast we discuss supplements while supplements aren't necessary for everybody many people derive tremendous benefit from them for things like enhancing sleep for hormone support and for Focus if you'd like to see the supplements discussed on the huberman Lab podcast you can go to live momentus spelled o us so it's lives.com huberman if you haven't already subscribed to our newsletter it is a zeroc cost newsletter called the neural network newsletter and in the neural network newsletter you get free podcast summaries as well as toolkits the toolkits are brief PDFs that list off the specific science-backed protocols for things like improving your sleep improving Focus optimizing dopamine deliberate cold exposure we have a complete summary of our fitness series again all available completely zero cost you simply go to hubman lab.com go to the menu scroll down to newsletter and provide your email to sign up we do not share your email with anybody thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Paul kti and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]