Dr. Paul Conti: How to Understand & Assess 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 first in a four episode series all about mental health the expert guest for this series is Dr Paul KY Dr Paul kti is a medical doctor and psychiatrist who completed his medical training at Stanford University School of Medicine and then went on to become chief resident of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School he then went on to found the Pacific Premier Group which is a collection of psychiatrists and therapists who are expert in treating all types of psychiatric disorders and life stressors across the four episodes of this series on Mental Health Dr Ki teaches us about the structure of our own minds and how to think about our own minds as a way to enhance our mental health he explains how our subconscious mind and our conscious mind interact to drive our emotions our decision-making and our behavior and while any series about mental health requires that from time to time we discuss personality disorders and psychiatric challenges the main discussion in today's episode and in fact all four episodes in this series are about what it means to be mentally healthy and how to build one's mental health through specific practices either done alone or with a therapist today's episode addresses several key questions as well as provides protocols for you to address questions about your own Mental Health for instance you will learn what constitutes the most mentally healthy version of yourself you will learn to assess and indeed you will learn protocols for addressing levels of anxiety levels of your confidence how to think about your beliefs and internal narratives how to think about your selft talk and restructure your selft talk we discuss common challenges such as overthinking we talk about the role of defense mechanisms and other aspects of the conscious and unconscious mind interactions that can lead us toward or away from the healthiest versions of ourselves you'll notice that during the first 5 minutes or so of today's discussion Dr kti describes a framework of what he refers to as the structure of self and the function of self and he describes several pillars for understanding what those are I'd like to highlight that while that short portion of our discussion does bring up a number of terms that are likely to be novel to you they certainly were novel to me that as our conversation proceeds you will really come to appreciate just how simple and yet powerful that framework is it will help you understand for instance the relationship between your conscious mind and your subconscious mind in ways that you can really apply toward enhancing your mental health in addition to that Dr kti has generously provided a few PDFs which illustrate that framework for you and that are available completely zero cost by going to the links in the show note captions so you have the option to download those PDFs and to look them over either prior to or during or perhaps after you listen to these four podcast episodes as a final note before beginning today's discussion just want to emphasize my sentiment which I'm confident will soon be your sentiment as well which is that Dr Paul kti shares with us immensely powerful tools for enhancing mental health that at least to my knowledge have never been shared publicly before in fact as somebody who has done more than three decades of therapy I've never before been exposed to a conversation about the structure of the mind and the subconscious mind as well as tools and protocols for enhancing mental health as powerful as these for me the information was absolutely transformative in terms of reshaping my thought patterns my emotional patterns and indeed several of my behavioral patterns and I'm confident that the information that you'll glean from today's episode and throughout the series will be positively transformative for you as well 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 zeroc 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 betterhelp 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 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 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 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 Nidra 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 in 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 and regular meditator waking up has more advanced meditations and yoga needer 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 how to understand and assess your level of mental health with Dr Paul KY Dr Paul kti welcome thank you I'm very excited for today's episode and for this series because I like so many other people out there have a lot of questions about myself and themselves and not just about ourselves but how the different personality types out there the healthy types the narcissists the you know all the things that we hear about these days gaslighting all these sorts of things what all of that really is um perhaps we can dispel some of the myths that exist during the course of this series I'm sure we will or you will thank you and also raise certain important questions that we should all ask ourselves in terms of trying to understand who we are and how we can be the best versions of ourselves how we can experience the most happiness also the the most richness in life because of course life isn't just all about being happy so to start off this question I I want to raise a parallel with something I think for most people is is more concrete which is physical health you know um while there isn't an ideal physical self that's been defined by the medical community we know for instance that there is a range of blood pressures that are considered healthy there's a a range of body mass index that's considered healthy although that's a little controversial because it depends on how much muscle how lean people are Etc but you know I think it's reasonable to say that the healthy individual is not going to get exhausted walking up a flight of stairs that they could bend down and lift an object without hurting themselves they might even have some additional strength or endurance Etc within the physical health domain all of that is fairly well scripted and there are protocols that people can follow to improve their physical health we've covered many of them on this podcast before when it comes to mental health and it comes to concepts of the self Things become much more abstract for people in fact I think most people including myself are kind of wandering around in the dark wondering whether or not we are the best versions of ourselves whether or not we're thinking about ourselves and the world around us in the best best ways so to start things off you tell us what is the healthy version of self I mean what what what should we all be aspiring to you've worked with people who uh presumably are healthy and people who have severe pathologies of different psychiatric types right bipolar narcissistic sociopathic uh and everything in between so for me and for the listeners what is a healthy self what should we be striving for well a healthy self approaches life through the lens of agency and gratitude if you look at happy people you know people who like their lives right no matter what stage of Life they're at right no matter what their socioeconomic status is you know race religion there's so many things that we we think matters right and and and and they matter to a lot of things do they matter to is someone happy or not right they they are not factors right the factors that tell us is this person enjoying life are they going to take care of themselves are they happy they're here are they engaged productively in the world is agency and gratitude and if we have those two things then it's interesting you almost never see someone go wrong right and even if if there difficulties even if there are things happen in life that that can make some unhappiness right it doesn't take away the person's engagement in life the person's enthusiasm for life and I think if you look at even traditions of understanding how are people happy whether it's in Psychiatry or it's through literature or through a religious lens it is always people who approach life through the lens of agency and gratitude could we go a little bit deeper on agency and gratitude sure when I hear the words agency and gratitude I think agency and ability to affect the world around me in the ways that I want and I think gratitude being thankful and uh and we did an entire episode all about gratitude practices some of the neuroscience and neuroimaging and Ne chemical changes that occur in the brain and body when people exert a gratitude practice but I have a feeling that when you talk about agency and gratitude you might be talking about something slightly or maybe even quite a bit different than the way that I'm defining it yeah I would say agency and gratitude are these amazing rewards right that sit on top of the highly complex brain function inside of us and the highly complex psychology in all of us so if we think about a self right that I identify a self right I'm an ie right if if I'm going to approach the world with agency and gratitude that's sitting on top of a lot of healthy things right and the idea that okay there are ways in which we can be mentally unhealthy right but to start with like what is going on inside of us right and what does it look like when we're healthy so there's a structure of the self right there's function of the self and we we look at the structure and the function and the parts the components of structure and function we can come to understand okay what is going on in us what might we change for the better how do we build empowerment right empowerment is is the the the ability to navigate the world around us and to bring myself to bear in ways that are effective and from empowerment arises the sense of agency right I have agency because I am empowered right and also from a healthy structure of self and function of self we end up with humility right we come through that with a sense of our our place in the world and our power in the world to to navigate as we choose but also a sense of the world around us that's far more complicated right than just we are extends Beyond us to other people to the climate around us to the health of the whole planet right we we feel a sense of humility that I'm here and I can do good things I'm fortunate to be here and I'm part of this bigger ecosystem right all the way up to the scale of the ecosystem of earth right and if we feel that humility then we approach the world through the lens of gratitude so the idea that a healthy structure of self and a healthy function of self leads to empowerment and humility and then upon that we are we are sort of imbued with agency and gratitude and that leads us us forth to happy lives okay so it's clear to me why having agency and gratitude would be wonderful perhaps even the goal state that we should all be seeking to achieve and it also makes sense to me as to why empowerment and humility are important components that feed into our ability to have agency and gratitude yes right because all of that at least to my mind sums to it a very clear statement about having agency and gratitude is the best way to approach life that all makes perfect sense to me and yet I've never really thought about it that way and I think most people haven't ever been told this right I mean what should we be seeking agency and gratitude yes you know we've heard endless number of podcasts including this podcast about physical health and we've been told by physicians and everybody else that you know we should seek to have a relatively low blood pressure we should seek to have a relatively low heart rate that cholesterol should be at a certain level Etc So within the physical health domain you know there are strong clear messages about what we should all be striving toward and in a similar way to how we're discussing the self in Psychology you know I don't think anyone seeks to have low blood pressure or low heart rate because that's what they want per se they want those things along with some capacity for endurance the ability to to you know lift an object so some strength Etc because of the way that those metrics of Health allow them to move through the world in the best possible way in other words having some degree of endurance allows you to walk down the block maybe a lot further or to walk up several flights of stairs or to have some strength allows you to pick up objects and effectively move through life right you're telling us that having a sense of agency and gratitude and that agency and gratitude are underg guarded by empowerment and humility and that's the best way to move through life the most effective happiest if you will way to move through life well then I think we have to ask ourselves the same thing we would ask about physical fitness which is what goes into creating a sense of agency and gratitude empowerment and humility you know what are the action steps because if I want more endurance I know to get on an exercise bike or or a treadmill or go out for a run a few times a week or more if I want to get stronger I'm going to lift objects that are difficult to lift until they're easier to lift I mean it's all pretty straightforward in the physical domain but in the in the mental health domain in the psychological domain it does become a bit more abstract I think in part because no one's ever told us certainly no one's ever told me what you really need in is agency and gratitude in order to have the best possible life so I very much appreciate that you're telling us this and I'd love for you to tell us what are the action steps that go into creating these things that we're calling agency gratitude empowerment and humility you there's actually quite a strong parallel between the physical health Dimension and the mental health Dimension so so as you're saying like why do you put in the time the energy the learning right to be physically healthy right it's a lot of effort and and we put so much of ourselves towards it if we decide that we value that right why do we do it right because as you said it's the best way to approach life like there may be something that I want to do I I want to run a race right or I you know I I want to climb a mountain right but ultimately we take care of ourselves physically because we don't know what's coming next in life and we want to be prepared for it good bad and otherwise right and the same thing is true of mental health so I can feel grateful for something I can feel grateful that I'm still breathing right now right I can exercise agency I can pick up that cup and take a drink right but that doesn't mean that I'm living life through the lens of agency and gratitude which is consistent with every opinion if you look psychologically through the lens of literature through the lens of so of sociology and psychology agency and gratitude make happiness right they ways of approaching life and just like physical health is undergirded by uh by cardiovascular health heart health muscle strength right that there's an undering of agency and gratitude and empowerment and humility are ways of describing okay what arises right from understanding ourselves taking care of ourselves that then gives us the agency and gratitude so we have empowerment we have humility but where does it all come from right so just like we have to understand the physical body and what to do to it in order to be healthy right we also have to understand the mind right the self that wants to be healthier and that comes through understanding the structure of the self and we have enough science through the lens of neurobiology and Psychiatry to understand the structure of self and then the function of self right how we work right how we interfere face with the world so it's actually not more complicated than physical health it's just that we don't spell it out that way right we come at it through the lens of pathology of what's wrong and who has some diagnosis and you know we're looking for the problematic instead of saying like what do we look like when we're happy right and then going and digging down into the mechanics of it all right and if we're not in that state right to go and look at that and to make changes just as if you were very very physically healthy right but you know your heart rate couldn't go up that much without you feeling very very fatigued we'd say well look you're doing a lot of the right things right but let's work more on on your heart right we would go look at the specifics of it because that's how we understand it and we just don't apply the same science logic common sense to mental health as we do to physical health but it's time for that to change because we have the knowledge and ability to do just that when we had Dr Andy Galpin on this podcast to do a series on physical health and uh Fitness essentially he said something that really stuck with me which was that the number of different workouts that people can do out there body weight workouts work with weights with machines you can run far you can run shorter distances more quickly you know you can do planks you know situps so many variations on exercise routines but what he very clearly stated was that there are only a few core adaptations that the body can undergo that lead to these byproducts that we call lower blood pressure enhanced endurance improved strength improved uh neuromuscular function improved brain function for that matter it sounds to me like there are a lot of parallels in creating the healthy psychological self so what are the core components that I and others should think about in terms of understanding I think he described them as the structure of the self and the functions of the self again just to draw a parallel if we were talking about physical health we'd say okay there's connections between nerves and muscle that allows us to move our limbs if you apply a certain amount of resistance you get a certain adaptation which is the the neuromuscular connection get stronger the muscle might get bigger or just stronger Etc flexibility you know you just push your range of motion just a little bit into discomfort you do that we it so happens to be the case that you do that for just a couple of minutes each day over the course of about a week or so you get a significant increase in flexibility okay so it's all very clear in the physical domain in the psychological domain I hear you telling us that the action steps that we all should be taking in order to be the happiest version of ourselves by achieving agency and gratitude is to explore the structure of self and the function of self so if you could tell us about what is the structure of self like what goes into Andrew being Andrew and Paul being Paul and whoever The Listener is into being who they are what is that and what is the function of self how how does a Psy Christ think about that how should we think about that okay if I could start maybe to set the stage for that right by pointing out that as we go up the hierarchy right of Health right everything should get simpler right not more complicated right if you think about physical health right there's so much complexity on the initial levels right so we think about you know your physical health status versus mine right it's going to be different right we're going to have different cardiac function and muscle function and pulmonary function and if we're going to be healthy we could do a lot of different things right there might be a whole set of choices that would work well for you different choices that would work for me and we can gauge intensity timing frequency right it's very complicated when we're on the the lower levels of the hierarchy as we get higher up let's say you and I both do the right things right then what happens we both have endurance right we both have some strength we're both robust right things are getting simpler because we're we're we're approaching the unique idiosyncrasies in all of us right and we have to look at that and look at that in a very specific way but what we're trying to get to is is something that's common for all of us so stamina for example in physical health and endurance right and agency and gratitude in mental health right so then if we go and we look and we look at the structure of the self and the function of self we find that there's more complexity but that it is also understandable I mean there's tremendous complexity in the body just as there's tremendous complexity in the mind and we can understand what is the structure of self what is the function of self and we can look at that and assess that in the same way we would physical health parameters so that we arrive at the place we want to be be it endurance or agency or gratitude so structure of self right we all have an unconscious mind right and we pay so little attention to this part of us that really is the biological supercomputer right so millions of things are going on all the time like in every Split Second so for example I can say these words right you can listen to the words you can say things back and I can listen right they're millions and millions of things going on under the surface much of which comes from either biological predispositions right or habits over time right thought processes patterns right so this unconscious mind this supercomputer is doing all of these things like you know at the speed of light right there are electrical and chemical signals and you know multiple Pathways as common as complicated as super highway systems that then get Consolidated and communicate with others right and then what comes up from all of that is the conscious mind so imagine an iceberg right and it's a really really big Iceberg right and and we see the part above the surface right that's the conscious mind right but there's a huge part of this Iceberg maybe 95% of it that's underneath the water right that there's this hulking mass that we don't see that's the unconscious mind right and it's feeding up to the conscious mind which is a much smaller part of our brain function right but it's the part that we're aware of right it's sitting on top of all the unconscious things which are extremely important but then we become aware so that we can engage in the real world in order for us to have this conversation the millions of things per second have to be going on underneath the surface so that you and I as conscious eyes right as conscious selves Can Ride Along on top of it so that's the part of the iceberg that's above the water it's the conscious self then imagine that the conscious self is girded by by uh a a set of um you know long uh tendrils that come out from under the w water right that there are defense mechanisms that are unconscious to us that sort of GD the conscious mind so do we rationalize automatically do we avoid automatically do we act out automatically are these things in Us in ways that we can observe and change but that are there to try and protect the conscious mind from the the slings and arrows of the world around us right so if you imagine there's the big part of the iceberg under the water the unconscious mind the conscious mind is riding on top of it but the conscious mind that part sticking out of the water is vulnerable right so imagine that there's a defensive structure then that arises from the part of the iceberg that's underwater that is there to defend and protect the conscious mind so when you say to defend and protect when you say that the conscious mind is vulnerable what do you mean do you mean that it's vulnerable to physical attack or that it's vulnerable to us realizing that we're just a neurons that are clicking away underneath like in other words where does the vulnerability of the conscious mind really reside um not physically where does it reside but you know what am I so worried about in terms of my safety I mean right now we're in a room I feel pretty safe um I don't think you're going to attack me verbally or physically I suppose it's possible that could happen but it seems like a very distant possibility So when you say that these defenses are there to protect us from some sort of awareness what awareness are we trying to avoid so the the vulnerability of the of the conscious mind is to fear confusion despair right there's so many things that that we can fear right some people are afraid of snakes or spiders some people are afraid of death some people are afraid of health issues that could come to them or to people they love we can get confused and not know what decisions to make and how to navigate the world and how to be who we want to be to ourselves and to others right we can feel tremendously vulnerable and despairing if we lose others or you know we start to see things happening in the world around us that that that we don't like right we start to feel like what will happen to the planet we live on where there'll be War where I live will my children be safe right there's so much that we need to protect ourselves again so that vulnerable part of of us right the part of the iceberg sticking out above the water needs a defensive structure around it to protect it against the vulnerability of fear confusion despair right and because the conscious mind is is sticking out of the water with a defensive structure around it right it is the the raw material from which we create our character structure so the character structure is all of that the part under the water the part above the water the defensive structure so imagine like a nest around all of that and that's the character structure that we utilize to interface with the world right so the character structure is it's like the thing that I'm using right it's like if you're driving somewhere in a car right the car is the thing that you're using to go there right the character structure is the thing that we're using to interface with the world so for example how trusting am I versus suspicious right how readily do I come to make friends with people right how uh how much do I act out if I'm frustrated right how much do I um you know exclaim something negative right as opposed to holding it inside of me how much do I rationalize if something isn't going well do I want to look at it and maybe see that it is so that I don't have to face it right how much do I avoid problems in the world around me how much do I exercise altruism right these are all the ways in which we're engaging with the world around us and this determines the self imagine that the self then grows out of this Nest from the the character structure that we use to interface with the world and the decisions that we make so if our character structure is it's the thing through which we engage with the world then we're enacting right what is inside of us right what we've determined through our unconscious mind our conscious mind our defense mechanism there's a certain us that that comes at the world in a certain way and if we're more or less trusting more or less avoidant we rationalize more or less these are the factors that determine like where do where do our lives go right because on top of all of this imagine that the nest of the character structure around all of this grows from it the self right the product of the feelings inside the things that we know about ourselves and don't know about ourselves the decisions that all of it leads to so I may choose to be for example more trusting and that may bring an opportunity to me that I wouldn't have otherwise had right I may choose to be more trusting and it may bring risk to me that I wouldn't otherwise have had so we want to be as healthy as we can as knowledgeable of ourselves and the world around us so that it's safe for us to have a healthy character structure through which we can engage in the world around us with a sense of prudence right taking reasonable risks right not too little so that we shut ourselves down and maybe end up despairing not so much that that scary things can happen to us and we end up fearful right but the idea that if we know ourselves well the character structure is healthy right because it's built upon a structure of self and a function of self that are healthy and out of it is coming empowerment right and empowerment and humility right that then lead us to agency and gratitude right the idea here is that this is the character structure that we create that can then interface with the world in a way that's good for us and good for the world around us that leads us to be able to live in much more Harmony inside of ourselves and outside of ourselves so if I understand correctly defense mechanisms that grow up out of this portion of the iceberg that we're calling the unconscious mind they protect our conscious self in ways that can be adaptive or that can be maladaptive in other words defenses can be healthier they can be unhealthy yes and perhaps in a in a few minutes we can get into what a healthy versus an unhealthy defense looks like but the way you describe character structure sounds to me like an array of contextual dispositions I don't want to add unnecessarily um complex language but it sounds to me like a bunch of dispositions like like if I'm walking into the office where I know everybody and I see familiar faces there's no reason for me to be on guard if I trust those people but if I'm walking down a a street at night that I'm not familiar with and and I'm starting to get the sense that you know this neighborhood might not be the best it makes sense for me to be on relatively high alert so different dis positions depending on different conditions I can't help but mention my uh Bulldog Costello who had basically three dispositions it was asleep but in all seriousness the second one was um kind of bored the Bulldog face is kind of bored or if something was given to him that he liked or if we were doing something he liked Delight he Bas had three dispositions as far as I could tell um I think one of the reasons we like dogs so much or that many of us like dogs so much is that their decisions are very predictable take him to the park he's happy unless he happened to be ill that day which was rare um you know feed him he's happy right there wasn't a lot of uh I don't like this particular meal or I don't like this particular park or this Bean fris doesn't smell so good to me you know there's a it was so simple and and yet people are very complex right I I I can look at myself and say okay what like what is my character structure character structur is certain things I like certain things I dislike certain things really irritate me certain environments and people I just lighten okay so is the definition of a healthy character structure one in which the dispositions match the context perfectly I mean I don't know how any of us could be like that but is is that sort of the ideal much in the same way that um you know we could probably arrive at at an ideal degree of stamina that one could have I mean some people want run ultramarathons you know 100 miles or more some people want to run a marathon some people like me don't really desire to run a marathon but I want to be able to run a mile if I need to without being completely exhausted and injured so you know when we when we ask ourselves about character structure are we asking ourselves about context driven dispositions and you know how do we start to evaluate that for ourselves right I think because we're more complicated I think it's not dispositions as much as it's predispositions right so so in the example that you gave right you have a certain predisposition to be either trusting or wary right and and you're and that's healthy in you right so when you come into a setting where there's not a a good reason to feel mistrustful to feel anxious to feel vulnerable right then you feel at ease right so you walk into the work setting there are people you know there're people you like everything is okay right you have a different pre predisposition when the context is different right so if the context could bring a lack of safety then you respond accordingly with a lack of safety right but but it's possible certainly those predispositions can be in unhealthy places right so for example you might have been traumatized in a certain way or you might approach the world in a certain way because of Prior experience that you may not register as trauma but it may be that within you is a predisposition to be mistrustful so you could walk into a room of people that you know of people who've never met you any harm and still feel unsafe right now this happens most often after trauma but there are other ways people can get to that where the predisposition isn't so healthy the converse is true too right there are people who can have too much of what's called an omnipotence defense and then they don't recognize danger when danger is around them so the idea the character structure that Nest right that's built around the defensive structure and the conscious mind that's sitting on top of the part of the iceberg the unconscious mind underwater right it's that Nest that is interfacing with the world through a whole whole set of predispositions 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 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 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that's drink a1.com huberman to claim this special offer I think most of us are familiar with assessing and assigning names to the character structures of others and at least for most of us we do that with no professional training or authority right we say that person is great they're super nice person's a jerk they're like weird you know etc etc I think very few of us are familiar with assessing our own character structure right right and I have to presume that some of what happens when somebody comes to you as a psychiatrist or to a psychologist is that certain questions are asked and certain narratives are told that start to reveal to the clinician the character structure and perhaps from there some of the possible defense mechanisms and uh you know structure of the person's unconscious mind and conscious mind that obviously are unaware to them but would be clear to the clinician much in the same way that if somebody goes into the doctor and says you know I don't feel well they're going to start probing with questions or they're going to put you know take a take a listen to their breathing listen to their heart right I me get out the stethoscope and figure it out these are the probes whereas that the psychiatrist or psychologist uses words and language to probe yes so what are the sorts of aspects of character structure that we can be aware of in ourselves you know I in other words um should we be asking what type of character do I have dependent on one circumstance or another um should we ask ourselves what sorts of defenses we have and maybe this would be a good opportunity to um address this issue of what are healthy versus unhealthy defenses um because it sounds to me if I understand correctly that the defense mechanisms are a very strong component in determining what our character structure is right because the defense mechanisms are unconscious right the character structure that Nest around the defenses and the conscious mind through which we interface with the world right is very very complicated so there are as many character structures as there are human beings right so it's very very complicated but there are factors that are consistently relevant across people and get identified as such so so one example would be isolation versus affiliation right so does a person tend to group with others right or does the person tend to avoid grouping right and and go about uh thoughts tasks approaches to life in a in a more singular manner right so it's just one element not making value judg about it cuz it can be good or bad on either end of the spectrum right so we're just saying what are the factors so am I more affiliative or do I tend to isolate and be more singular that's just one example right another example could be things like for example use of humor right uh does a person use humor and in what way right does a person use hum humor to deflect uh discomfort in negative situations does a person use humor in order to belittle others or to belittle themselves or does a person not use humor right so there these aspects of character structure and so much research has been done on this over the years to determine what is most Salient right in this this thing that we use in order to interface with the world around us up out of which grows our self that makes good sense and and it makes me want to revise a little bit what I asked about before which is I said that when it comes to an exam of physical health we measure blood pressure measure um uh breathing Etc maybe even a blood test look at some biomarkers but what you're describing is a little bit more analogous to um The Physician uh addressing a patient who's having some physical discomfort or malaise and saying tell me about your day you know what do you do when you get up in the morning if the person says well you know I I drink a you know a quarter pint of Vodka it's a very different answer then you know I go outside and get sunlight in my eyes drink a glass of water and maybe have a cup of coffee right you know um or if somebody says I have six espresso if I understand correctly the character structure is better revealed by exploring the action states that somebody engages in isolation versus engagement um as opposed to a read of one specific biomarker um it's character structure brought to life right yes immediately am thinking about movies and books where we learn so much about somebody through a observing the way that they interact with people in in very um very potent ways so for instance I can think of countless movies where you learn a ton about somebody in the first scene simply because of the way they react to somebody who you know Cuts them off on in traffic they just explode okay well then we think of that person as reactive from that point on unless there's a significant amount of material to revise that but it's in the action of of of getting explosive and cursing Etc as opposed to if they just kind of like laugh it off or laugh at themselves or blame someone within their own vehicle or something like that so is are those the sorts of things that a clinician like yourself is listening for when somebody says you know I don't feel well and you say well tell me about what's going on lately and they start describing what's going on in their life and are you listening for those places where the def the defense mechanisms can are start start to reveal themselves the character structure starts to reveal itself through these action steps that the person seems to be taking is it yeah yeah I mean maybe one way of looking at at character structure is that it's it's potentialities and predispositions right that there's so much that that's latent that then interfaces with events like a person's stuck in traffic how does that person respond if that person weren't stuck in traffic there wouldn't be a response to it right so so there potentialities there predispositions and then we live through enacting them as we're moving then through life right and the the attempts to understand so using the physical health parallel right if you came in and you said I don't feel well right you know we might run a lot of tests right we might get an MRI or a CAT scan or even putting the stethoscope and listening to what's inside of you those we could say are unconscious things like you know you're not aware of what the Imaging may show or the blood tests may show or how your lungs may sound when someone puts a stethoscope on them right so so a clinician if you're trying to understand and help someone then you do want to look for those things right you want to look for the things that are underneath the surface but that but that can be very very important right you also want to look at everything that's on the surface right so if you're if you're engaging with someone you're engaging with the self right the self that grows out of the character structure Nest right so by engaging with and and doing one's best to understand the self then you learn about what is underneath of it right so I may then learn well how do you respond in certain situations right just like I could ask you questions well when do you not feel well or right so you're asking a person questions because the idea is to understand elements of the character structure so how do you respond in certain situations what's going on inside of you right what do you understand about yourself and what do you not understand about yourself right how do you bring yourself to bear in the world around you so there's a similar process going on but here we're trying to understand the self and the understanding of the self can help us understand the component underneath of the self because that's where we're going to go to make things better right the idea is there shouldn't have to be mystery or certainly not mystery any more than there is in physical health I mean you know rarely someone comes in and they're really not feeling well and and a whole set of everything that should be done is done right Labs physical examination history Imaging right and and you still just don't know right I mean sometimes that can happen but it's very rare and the same should apply here that if we're examining a self right and we're looking for the components out of which that self comes right then we should be able to understand well enough to go back to the components of self and to make change so that the self is in a better place right and and that self can then be empowered can feel humility right can then come at life through the altruism and gratitude that we seek because again you show me someone who's coming at life through altruism and gratitude and is not happy with their life and you'll be showing me something I've never seen before something entirely new so if we want to get there we want to know how to get there and there are ways as there should be that parallel physical health that aren't mysterious that we can come at to make understanding and change I'm wondering about the role of anxiety in all of this the reason I ask about anxiety is that you said said that so much of character structure is uh determined by a set of predispositions and potentialities mhm and earlier we were talking about example of either being afraid or unafraid in particular environments or feeling like we can walk into a classroom and learn or whether or not we're overly concerned about what people think about us or both right it could be a mix um whether or not we can Embrace novel environments in safe and adaptive ways whether or not we can grow from them as opposed to whether or not we can be over taken by them or perhaps even injured harmed psychologically physically or both anxiety to me is is a very basic function I think about it in terms of the autonomic nervous system and degrees of excitability and Etc an ability to sleep at night an ability to wake up feeling reasonably good but not have a panic attack but anxiety to me does seem like a key node in all of this meaning you know I most people including myself I don't walk around thinking about my character structure I don't walk around thinking about how I'm going to behave in a bunch of hypothetical environments think about the fact that most mornings I wake up and I feel pretty good to be quite honest not as good as I would like to feel necessarely because anything's wrong but because I think I'm wired to be a little bit more on the anxious side and to predict what's going to happen next and what needs to be done and so until I'm actually engaging in certain behaviors that anxiety hums a little bit high for me the gears turn a little bit faster perhaps than than I would like when I wake up in the morning but once I engage I feel like the the speed of that gear turning uh matches the demands of Life pretty well I feel um agency okay um so if you don't mind could we explore this this feeling of anxiety or lack of anxiety that I think people are pretty familiar with within themselves at different times of day and under different conditions because to me it seems like a um an interesting lens to to explore this notion of character structure and defenses is anxiety a healthy defense or an unhealthy defense or does it simply depend on the circumstances well we all have some degree of anxiety in us right we all have some awareness that like we're navigating the world and like not everything is is perfect right this is not Nirvana so there's some anxiety within us and the thought is that that anxiety can keep us Vigilant about the things we should be vigilant about you know health and safety right but that too much anxiety then becomes counterproductive and we can look at this in a very regimented way right so so some anxiety makes sense right it keeps us being careful it keeps you keeps you being careful as you're pulling out of a driveway for example right so okay it can be it can be absolutely fine but let's say you bring something to clinical attention that isn't absolutely fine right let's say I didn't know you and you come in we have the example that that we that you used before where where you you walk into work and there's a group of people that you that you know well and like right let's say you told me when I walk in there I I feel very anxious right I don't feel like things are okay right so then we would go through we say that's not good right maybe it's impacting your professional life things are not going well like you really want this to change because it's impacting your life in a negative way and we say okay let's look at that from the perspective of structure of self right so first unconscious right is it that just genetically are you built with just High levels of anxiety right so we could learn okay have you always been anxious like this is this has this always been in your life since you were a little kid no matter what so we're looking for biological nature so to speak variables we might also look for things that have happened to you that are lodged in your unconscious mind right is there trauma that you haven't processed right that now is underneath the surface but is spinning off more anxiety right let's say you tell me oh it it wasn't that long ago you started being anxious ah like did something happen happen like did you walk into a group of people and I don't know you tripped and you felt bad about something right and then then you get more anxious right so are there things going on underneath the surface that are impacting you like let's let's look into that right because that's the biggest part of the iceberg right then your conscious mind we could start thinking about okay what what's going on what are you actively thinking about right so this is where sometimes cognitive behavioral techniques can can come into mind like are you thinking like oh no I'm scared it isn't going to go well right like are you having thoughts or the thoughts and making you more anxious right what's going on in your conscious mind right I would also be very interested in the defenses around you so for example do you tend to avoid right has this been getting worse for three months but but you just your mind wouldn't acknowledge it right and by the time you have to acknowledge it now it's really bad right or do you not avoid and like this started just started happening and you want to nip it in the bud right so I would be interested in the defense mechanisms right that are ging your conscious self and and I would be interested in the character structure what decisions are you then making like are you going anyway right are you having trouble so sometimes you avoid are you then making decisions that make you late and that causes problems how does it impact you once you're there are you engaging differently with people doing your work differently so I want to understand the character structure and ultimately you understand all of this by probing the self that's writing Along on top of it and then what is the experience of that self like do you see that okay this is a problem and I want to address it but like look I know that I'm good at what I do and you know I mean this isn't some like awful thing about me I just have to deal with it right or is your self impacted where you start thinking maybe I can't do this anymore I'm not good enough or you know we want to understand what's the experience of the self right and if we do all of that how is it that we don't get to a place where we can understand that anxiety right and we can make things better so just like in physical Health okay maybe we can't but that is a dramatic outlier if we bring ourselves to Bear we would say you should not have to have this in you right because it is something negative it is making unhappiness for you it is taking away from impowerment right and it's also taking away from humility right because if someone's beating up on themselves if you're beating up on yourself about it then that's not humility right then that that's being sort of falsely persecutory right this it's not an honest humility to that it leads us away from health so it's like we don't want it to be this way right because that is working against agency and gratitude so we can understand it and we can go after it and make it better one of the most common questions I get on the internet and I get a lot of questions is what can be done to improve confidence you know and I've thought a lot about that question and you know what is confidence in the context of what we're talking about now is one reasonable definition of confidence our ability to trust our predispositions and our potentialities enough that were we to encounter scenarios A through Z we feel pretty good that we would respond the right way in a way that um wouldn't threaten our conscious mind at a core level right you know that that we wouldn't um I I used to use the term and and joke a lot in my laboratory uh with the the phrase you know dissolve into a puddle of our own tears right it's kind of this like hyperbolic explanation of of what I think many people fear like they're going to be called upon to answer a question publicly or give a speech or they're going to be at a critical moment in a relationship or something and there and just everything is just going to go so badly wrong that it's just going to dissolve them as a person it's impossible right dissolve in a ble of our own tears is impossible but I think that's a fear that a lot of people live with because we can get into this a little bit later and we will I'm sure you know this notion of like protecting one's ego is seems really vital to to being a human being some level like we don't we don't want to dissolve into a puddle of our own tears so is confidence the ability to trust ourselves in a bunch of different contexts um and at the same time I I do have to raise the this notion of narcissism I think um uh you know this word gets thrown around a lot lately but it seems to me that any um truly psychologically healthy person would also not want to be the idiot that thinks that they're better than they actually are that's a um what are your thoughts on this well I agree with the things that you that you said about confidence except I would add two factors that I think are like really big big factors right right one being State dependence and the other being phenomenology right so think about the state dependence first right when we're talking about confidence it's it's not uniform right or it's not automatically uniform right so if so if you were to tell me oh oh I lack confidence right then I I want to understand is that across the board is like is that a way that you feel about yourself that like I I'm not good enough at anything for example right or do you lack confidence in a specific area right and this is often the case right and it's it's a huge difference right it says that person has the Machinery of confidence so to speak right they have the potentialities and the predispositions for confidence right when that character structure this self-built upon it is engaging with the world right but they're not able to bring it to bear in certain in a certain special situation so to speak so for some people for example the way we most often see this is like the carve out of romance right where because it's so emotionally Laden right and like rejection can feel so bad right that we can see people who are very confident in many many aspects of life but they are very defent about romance and they'll say oh it never works out for me or no one will ever like me right and and you see like that's not how that person actually feels right about themselves as a whole human being right which which which is then we are coming at how to make that better in a way that's very robust right we might say something like hey here's the good news is you have the tools and the Machinery that you need right you're confident in so many ways right in fact maybe in all ways except this one so let's go take a look at like why is that special right and then and that where are we we're back to is it something in the unconscious mind is it something in the in the conscious mind but how that person is engaging right so we have to understand what the state is and if the lack of confidence is State dependent if the person is not confident across the board then again we go back to the same we always go back to the same places to look right but then you might more think okay is is there an impact of childhood trauma or early life trauma that that took away from that person you know the their ability to to gain confidence right because if you have no confidence across the board there's a deeper problem right because there would be this something anyone can be good about at and feel confident in right so the state dependence is very important as is phenomenology so what is your experience of being confident if you tell me well I'm let's say in a different version of this example you say you know actually I'm I'm quite I feel quite confident when I when I walk into a room of of people I say okay I want to understand more about that too right because if I ask questions about that and you say well I feel confident because you know look I'm I'm a pretty smart person I can think on my feet I can I can deal well with with people if something doesn't go right I can recover from it like I've got you know it's why I feel confident you know and say okay that sounds pretty good if you say well I feel confident because I know that I'm better than than everybody right now we have a problem right right like that's not going to go well in other you know in other uh aspects of life and engagement like there's you know it's not going to lead to humility and gratitude like so so where's that coming from and again maybe there's a deeper problem right s about narcissism right which can be a a a reaction right which is a reaction to vulnerability right so then there's was called a reaction formation and now the person uh is actually deeply diffident right but present is very very confident and with a sense of superiority and that that's not a recipe for for happiness right so so in the in approaching it we we do want to understand all the things that you said what are the factors and the the set of predispositions and the set of potentialities but then what's the real world experience of that across situations and what is the person's experience of that inside which is why if we're going to understand and help people like that's the understand part right you know it's why the conveyor belt medicine you know doesn't work right in situations where we're dealing with human beings like mental health right we have to understand something about people to understand whatever they're telling us means otherwise you have no context so you have no knowledge another very common set of questions that I get that I believe is very directly related to this is about beliefs and internal narratives you know people ask me all the time how can can I change what I believe about myself and they also ask how can I change the script in my head how do I typically it's how do I shut down a particular narrative in my head this seems to fit very well in thinking about structure of self because as you pointed out you know the the self or the structure of self includes the unconscious mind you know what's going on below the surface of the water in this Iceberg model what's going on in the conscious mind that the conscious mind is protected by these defense mechanisms that grow up from the unconscious mind from that comes the character structure and then this thing that we call the self right right but when it comes to beliefs and internal narratives those seem to me things that people are pretty well aware of in fact the very example that people are asking me this all the time how to change beliefs internal narratives means they are aware of them it also suggests that for many people out there their beliefs about themselves and their internal narratives are not healthy or at least they don't feel are serving them well or that they are intrusive I don't know how open people are about their beliefs and internal narratives when they come to you in the in your clinical practice but um if you could tell us a little bit about beliefs and internal narratives and uh whether or not they are important to rewire and and and reset this part is extremely important right so imagine for example that I'm saying to myself over and over again that I'm a loser right or I'm not good enough right I mean imagine trying to go through life and someone else were saying that to you all the time right I mean it's worse when it's inside your own head right so what's going on inside of us our internal dialogue our internal narratives are extremely important and here's where we run into a very big problem is that we live in an era and in a culture that is very attuned to Rapid gratification right and all of this that we're talking about can change but it does not change quickly and it's amazing to me when you know you you'll see Insurance paradigms often right no matter what's going on with someone they have 10 sessions of cognitive behavioral treatment right if there's something like we're trying to change beliefs it's a guarantee of failure right because beliefs don't change that fast right so imagine for example that we you know you and I chose a word a random word and we decided to say it 500 times right we' each be saying it tonight right like it's not going to be out of our minds by tonight because we what took a random word and said it 500 times right so imagine that there's something that's highly emotionally Laden and we've said it thousands and thousands and thousands of times right it's not going to go away quickly right but it can go away and during the process of it atrophying right our lives can get better right this is the opposite of hopeless right it's actually very very encouraging but in a world that's rapid gratification right like how do we fix this how do we fix this now that doesn't acknowledge this we hear all the time that a person has failed therapy right like this is said all the time that person failed what does failed therapy mean right I mean I think therapy failed that person right but we we label like oh but person isn't better right but there are things going on inside of us that could take months and months or years to make better now again that's okay if we're aware of what's going on just the very fact that we understand and we're making change right helps us feel better about ourselves and more confident right that we can change all of this but we have to approach it in the right way so let's say that I'm telling myself over and over again um you're not going to get there right and let's say a place I want to go professionally right or no one's ever going to really want you right if if it's I'm looking for a romantic partner right so so imagine these things are going on and they're going on over and over again and you can imagine now that's it's intruded into the unconscious mind it's going on my conscious mind my defensive structure is Shifting in negative ways I'm becoming more avoidant like nothing about this is good and I want it to change and I want it to change to something that says like you can do it right or you're lovable right you can be a good partner to someone where so I want to change it right so imagine now when I start to make that change I'm blazing a path right and and I'm blazing a path where there wasn't a path before right and I can blaze a path and I can go through that path but that path is going to be nothing like maybe the four-lane highway right adjacent to me where the thing that I've been telling myself for years and years and years born of trauma right is is you know is going back and forth right it's got a four-lane highway I'm cutting a path right but over time you cut that path more and more you tread that path more and more you take energy towards that path it becomes better now let's imagine like the path is well LED and it's 12T wide and maybe we can pave the path so more more traffic so to speak goes down it and we're taking energy away from that four-lane Highway and maybe it starts to be overgrown a little bit and there cracks in the road like we can change all of that but we have to understand what's going on and and identify it like what is going on inside of me uh what do I make of it right how do I understand the process of change how do I increase my empowerment during the process of change if we come at it the right way all of this can be changed it's not hardwired in us it's just very very strongly reinforced the same way our brains are built this way so like we don't forget our own names right you know we don't forget where we live you know back when we were hunting and Gathering we don't we don't forget you know where where the good fruits are right I mean this goes on in human life now like we have to remember things it's very very important if something is has high emotional veilance and we've thought it a lot that we don't forget it but that mechanism gets hijacked by things that are not good for us and we can take it back but not if we don't understand what are the tools or the questions that you uh give or ask of patients in order to help them along that pathway um because I totally agree that changing beliefs and internal narratives is very very hard uh just one quick example that meshes with the physical health realm I have a a friend and colleague he's a very accomplished scien who was very overweight for a long period of time he finally made some behavioral changes that allowed him to lose I think it was in upwards of 80 pounds a significant amount of weight felt much better looked much better he just delighted in his ability to do that but then started to reveal to me that he was deathly afraid that he was going to lose control and start eating the way he was before and stop exercising in a way that would return him to his previous weight and feelings of Malay and I said well all the things you're doing are in the direction of Health none of what you're doing speaks to the possibility of this all crumbling this was the dissolve into a puddle of my own tears kind of narrative but at this point coming from him and he just said I know but despite doing all the right things I'm still incredibly afraid that it's going to happen it was as if the the beliefs and the internal narratives hadn't changed despite the fact that he was engaging in the world differently and more positively uh I haven't checked in with him recently to find out where he's at with this now several years later he has kept off most of the weight not all of it gained a little bit back but he's still far healthier than than he ever was so hopefully he's experience some relief but you know what do you tell a patient who uh is saying you know I've got this Loop in my head that tells me I'm not good enough or that even when things are going well they're going to return to that state that I fear so much once again this kind of like you know lack of agency right just lack of agency lack of agency lack of empowerment what what sorts of practical tools can can one give themselves or that you would provide to somebody no matter what is behind what's going on in that person's mind it's addressable but you don't know what it is and how to address it until we ask the question of what's going on inside right so if he's afraid that he's going to gain all that weight back right and he has a history that if significant negative things happen he throws self-care to the wind right that then we'd come at it through that pattern right because he would have a very you know he'd have a good reason to be worried right because this pattern of something bad happens and I can't I don't take care of myself for 6 months you know and maybe someone I'm just making this up and maybe someone in his life is ill or he's fearing a death you know in the future just something that would say that's a very legitimate fear to have like let's let's talk about that like let's look at where that comes from right what got that person into that pattern in the first place right by understanding the pattern and by working together right can we can we save that off right but it could be different the person might say well I'm really I'm having a lot of food cravings right and we like okay what does that mean where's that coming from or maybe he's depressed and when and he's getting depressed and when he's depressed he can't stop eating more right so you know you would look or it might just be plain old fear like this is so good right that that I'm worried it will go away right then we might want to reinforce like okay like you know you're a person who's able to use circumspection and perseverance and preserve goodness right so like you do that and you do that really well so let's let's make sure we're doing that here right so you know a lot of times a person is worried but that worry is coming through the lens of Health like they're healthy right so then we look at okay can we Soo that worry where where's that coming from right we can come at it and reinforce the positive but if there is something negative there's a trauma driven cycle there's depression there Cravings we we can understand that too so so I come back to this idea that there's answers to just about everything and in a very regimented scientific way it's not that hard to come to them right just like in Physical Medicine like we have the par we have the tools that we need to bring to bear but you have to understand the person again if you come in and say I'm not feeling good and someone else comes in and says I'm not feeling good the doctor better not do the same things right says how are you not feeling good okay let me understand that and then let let me map that also to you whatever underlying state of health you may have or diagnoses you may have the same is true in mental health if we just apply that then it's remarkable the good that we do which I've seen very consistently across 20 years of doing this not only in my own practice but like who are the people who do really really well trying to understand and take care of people including sometimes not doing too much and realizing like hey this person is okay like there's a state of health here but this person is worried how do we reassure them right how do we help someone living a good life live a better life right if we're going to do all of this we have to approach people as individuals it's just I mean the science tells us that and Common Sense tells us that too but if we do that a person can get to the place they want to be I'd like to address a different person as an example a hypothetical person okay and I'm certain there are many many of these people out there these are the sorts of people that think okay there's a self and a mind and a unconscious mind Etc but you know at some level why not just do what needs to be done in life like the people that don't want to explore the self you know because to me it seems so absolutely clear that just as it's important to have a certain level of endurance strength flexibility so that one can extract the most joy and agency and gratitude and empowerment and hum humility from life that it makes sense to explore the self to ask you know where am I internally strong where am I internally weak you know where might I perceive myself as strong where as I'm actually weak right these seems like these seem like very important if not crucial questions to ask but I know that there are a certain number of people in the world think all of that is just kind of a waste of time right it's all about doing stuff it's it's all you know why explore the self you know and um I think the rest of us are looking at that person often and thinking well you're exactly the kind of person that needs to do this because of the ways that you grate on other people but but not always right sometimes these people just appear to be just very effective they're all about the outward expression of what they're doing and I certainly don't know how other people feel waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night and throughout the day but to the person that feels like introspection and exploring maybe even Excavating for trauma that they haven't been in touch with or haven't dealt with yet but the person that feels that all of that is is kind of not really worth the effort and it's all about action you know what can we say to that person or those people put differently does one need to change and need to believe in the power of these sorts of approaches in order for them to work uh we often hear that people don't change until they want to change and um and could we also say perhaps that even for the people that feel like they're functioning extremely well in all domains of life I know no such people and I know some very high achieving people as you do too I know no such people uh the only people who seem to exist in that sphere are the narc the clear narcissists that to them just seem like they're doing great but everyone else can't stand them by the way narcissist no one else can stand you um what do what do we say to to those individuals because I think it's a big swath of humanity and I think it um it accounts for a lot of suffering in the world including their own suffering yeah so I would make an appeal to common sense right so imagine you you take someone who doesn't know anything about health they they don't know they don't know how to exercise they don't know how to eat well they just don't know and they're very really really unhealthy right they're overweight they have low energy they have sleep apnea they no need to have you and and and you why not just say to them well like just go be different like be in fact be different now why aren't you different right now right like of course we would never do that because it's a it's absurd and by the way also would be cruel right so it's absurd and it's cruel so we would never do that right let's say now you let's say we fast forward some period of months say make it up right and we see that person and wow they are much healthier they have much more energy they've lost weight they're they're physically fit a lot will have gone on in between those two snapshots of that person that person has to learn a lot right how does one take care of oneself right then more specifically how do I take care of myself right what healthy foods you know will I like what healthy foods will I will I eat how will I put that on the table what kind of exercises can work for me how will they work for me how do I strengthen muscle how do I strengthen the heart how do I increase lung capacity right there's learning there's diligence um you know there's stick tutiven right there's resilience that's how the person gets there right it is no different in its mental health right if we say well you you feel you feel different across the board or you feel Superior across the board or whatever it is like life isn't going well and you don't have things you want and you know the selft talk is negative then we say well look but just be different right now right I mean it's remarkable that people will say that at times not just in a way that's denigrating and awful for others but to themselves too right I mean I hear people say this most often to themselves like I why am I not just different right I I want to be different or what's wrong with me that I'm not and I'm like yeah it's like everything else like you have to apply understanding and work and effort like the good news is you can get to whatever change you want I mean a person can get to whatever reasonable change that person wants like you know I'm 54 years old I'm not going to climb Mount Everest I'm not a mountain climber right but if I want to like I want to learn to climb some mountains I want to get out there and do some things I can go do that right the same thing is true with our Mental Health goals but not at the snap of a finger not by Magic right it's through applying the same science and Common Sense combination of Science and common sense that we apply to other things that's why we go through this procedure of unconscious mind conscious mind the structure and function of the self because that's how that's how it's done that's how the after snapshot looks different than the before from the mental health perspective as well that's very helpful and I think it's going to be very helpful to a lot of people in thinking about what to think about what sorts of questions to to address maybe even whether or not to get therapy and hopefully we'll remap their Notions of therapy I mean of course this critically relies on the therapist being good to excellent um and I think in the previous um sitdown we had around the uh in the episode on trauma specifically you mapped out a number of the features of quality therapy so we can refer people to that uh if they're thinking about it's timestamped in that episode as so you know what to look for in a therapist what how how to assess whether or not it's going well or not whether or not to move on or or or stay put with that therapist and so on you've been telling us a lot about the structure of our of the self unconscious mind conscious mind defense mechanisms character structure self we haven't talked so much about the function of self I realize it's been woven in here or there yes um could you tell us about the function of self self are the functions of self verb actions I mean are these things that um we are all doing right now that reflect our character structure are these things that um we can change more readily than trying to snap our fingers and say okay I'm now going to be a more altruistic person because I can decide that right now but then ultimately I have to engage in some altruistic behaviors to to um lend support to that um again same with the parallel that I can't just snap my fingers and say lower blood pressure you know I have to do some meditative practi some cardiovascular training and things of that sort uh what what is this function of self thing what goes into the functions of self okay so so just stepping back to the framing right so there're these two pillars upon which we build our lives the structure of self and the function of self and we've been talking as you said more about the structure which is more the nouns of it like there is an unconscious what is in that unconscious for example there are defense mechanisms uh uh how are we using them like it's not all nouns but it's more what are those things and then we start talking about how we put them into practice the function of self is much more the verbs right so if the structure is more nouns the function is more the verbs right the actual engagement right so so that would start with an awareness of eye so a function of self has to start with an awareness like there's a person there isn't there is a me that is separate from others right and I have responsibility for this I right like it is me no one else is guiding it like it's me I know there's a me okay then on top of that we start seeing defense mechanisms in action right because we're thinking about function right we're aware that there's an eye but the first thing that starts happening to that eye are unconscious things right so the defense mechanisms be because we're not choosing them right they start doing things automatically so if for example I have a a defense of avoidance right then I'm not thinking you know if it's I'd like to meet a new person but I automatically am shying away right then that's not it's not good it's a factor right but it's a factor I'm not aware of until I start this process of introspecting right so the defense mechanisms are then kind of determining the lay of the land right so in that example I'm sorry to interrupt but sorry to interrupt but in that example um the the Turning Away you describe as reflexive so you're you're talking about someone perhaps would like to have a romantic partner or meet somebody um have a companion and they go to the grocery store and somebody says something as they're reaching for the milk and you know there's that moment of opportunity where they could say something back but instead they just kind of go oh yeah thanks and then they they kind of move away and then they the narrative in their head might be oh gosh that that was silly or but they don't really think about the the alternate possibility or there might be no narrative they they just they head off to they head off to the produce section yeah and then they go home and and some says oh anything happened at the you mean any one at the groceries no right because it's all unconscious right okay right now again we can can we explore that and change that yes right but it's important to understand that whatever that nest of defense mechanisms is like that's what I've got right now right and I'm living through that right now right that that's is performing a function right just because it's an unconscious function does it mean it's it's not a very very important function I can see in that example how it protects the conscious mind from risk because there's always a possibility of rejection there's a possibility of over interpretation of what the other person is talking to them for right like is the person interested in them or whether or not this is just you know F friendly banter um the sort that anyone would have next to anybody that it's not special to them so I can see how the the uh the unconscious turning away is protective against all the negative possibilities and in some sense is pretty rational because the the probability that that one interaction could ratchet up to a a life of companionship and and romance with somebody is is in uh exceedingly small really although you could imagine a set of data points where you string together you know like 5-second Clips you know all like the time something like that has happened right so maybe this is a person that you know intermittently like people are interested in them or saying Hey or saying hello or showing interest you could string all those together and the person hasn't noticed one of them right and then could have a very negative see nobody no one wants me no one's interested in me or whatever the person is saying but but like it's different if you see from the outside like it's objectively different but that person doesn't know and that's why after being an awareness there is an i the next thing that I think of in the in the function of self is is the defense mechanisms in action what are some other examples of defense mechanisms in action because I think there's immense interest in this you know the idea that we have unconscious processes in us that are reaching up out of the iceberg and preventing us from seeing our life and ourselves the way that it actually is occurring and perhaps preventing us from achieving these uh ideals of agency and gratitude empowerment and humility you know I mean these seem like very powerful and important forces and and I and I know many other people out there want to understand whether or not what we're doing and what we're feeling and experiencing whether or not that that is serving us well or not so I think the the the place to start is to say that there's something very very complicated going on right the the part of the iceberg underneath the surface right that biological supercomputer that's running at a million thoughts and a million actions and million internal processes a second right is constantly shifting our defensive structure so so it's complicated and you can almost imagine that like one leaves and another comes in and they're shifting and there's a little bit of one and some of another like so it's a very complicated process but we can look at it and un understand so so an example of a defense mechanism that's very common and can cause us a lot of problems is projection right so I'll give two examples of of projection so so one is the experience of sitting in a car right and being stuck in traffic being a little bit late right and feeling Bel leaguered right I mean this has happened to me more times than I can count but at some point I started through my own therapy looking at like what what's going on in me right when when I'm doing this right so think about the be feeling be leaguered right as if what does that mean like there's something called traffic that exists and has a mind and wants to thwart me right is it individual cars is it the people in the cars right what's going on is I'm having a perception of hostility I feel Bel leaguered right but it's it's anger and frustration inside of me right I'm I'm the one feeling angry and frustrated there's there's there's no one and nothing but me that's feeling anything about this right but I have this sense of the world around me being hostile because I'm projecting my anger outward right now think this isn't good because instead of sitting in traffic and saying look maybe it totally makes sense that I'm stuck in traffic and that that I'm not happy like maybe I I should leave a little bit earlier and I wouldn't be late or if it's I'm going to work should I live closer to work I could make a whole set of decisions that I'm not making right or maybe I I know I thought it was going to be a 15-minute drive and like there was an accident right and okay there are things that I can't control am I supposed to control everything right if if you think about what can I control being aware of that and what can I not control right then it can make the situation much better so this doesn't happen with this frequency and it also takes away the anger and the frustration right so I think that's a good example because it it happens a lot it's very very common but projection then also happens with people right so let's say you and I work together and we're we we're going to do something collaborative together and I'm just not having a good day and something negative happened before I came to work and you know I'm not at my best and I'm a little bit I'm a little bit irritable and frustrated right this happens all the time where then the person sits down with someone and then I'm being irritable and frustrated which doesn't feel good to you right and and you may become irritable and frustrated right and then I say oh look he's irritable and frustrated right but even if you don't the fact that I feel that way right that projection often would lead me to to think that it's you who's that way here I come wanting to do this job and you're not at your best it's me who's not at my best right but we do this all the time and then we make incorrect or inaccurate attributions right so so projection it's it's an example of a defense mechanism that can cause us a lot of trouble right a lot of trouble uh another can be displacement where uh if I'm feeling anger or frustration say in a certain realm than I the idea of feeling it at work and then kicking the dog right like it it's not good that we do that we're not acknowledging what's going on inside of us at work what we could change what we could make better and the dog doesn't want to be kicked right and the dog is often you know also the family right and and it could be physical or could be through words right but the idea that that there's something negative being generated in us but but inside we're we're perceiving that it's coming from somewhere else right I mean the thought is all things to lead us astray right when when there are negative defenses right there going to be positive defenses too such as altruism right that that someone could do something negative to me right and instead of me passing that along I could decide no I'm going to do something I'm going to do something nice for the next person I have an opportunity to do something nice for right like that's a defense and sometimes we could think of it and decide that way but there are people who react that way like there's something negative that happens and they respond with something that's that's different from that so defense mechanisms can work against us they can work for us they're complicated they're combinations of them but we can look inside and say for example if I'm using projection all the time right and I think everyone around me is kind of always angry and frustrated right and there's always bad traffic right but then as we start to talk about it more it becomes apparent that there's a lot I'm angry about right but I'm not aware of it then then reflection or therapy right or a good friend we're talking to can help us see right that hey this is going on inside of me right and that can really help us same with use of humor like if I'm using humor and I'm I'm kind of decompressing uncomfortable situations or things that make me feel uncomfortable maybe that greases the wheels of social progress but maybe over time I come to use humor in a way that's self-denigrating right well that's not so good anymore but I may not be aware of the shift just because I can maybe be funny in certain situations that I'm now not using that for myself anymore I'm using it against myself and by talking to people by reflection like we can be aware of the defensive structure that's going on inside of us and then there's not an automaticity to it if you point out that I'm using projection a lot I can start to be aware of that just like if someone let's say you were with me at the grocery store right and someone says something nice and I shy away and you say Hey you know you didn't weren't even aware someone said hello to you and then I said say I want to be more aware of that like I want I don't want that thing to happen unconsciously so maybe now I think okay anytime someone I don't know says something to me I'm going to just stop and think like what's going on here right is that person being friendly to me is it is are they just you know it's just person exchanging money at the cash register like what's going on so we take what's unconscious and we make it conscious so that we can change it sounds to me like exploring and thinking about our reflexes is what's really key here um the example of displacement that you gave you know kicking the dog I couldn't help but um smile not because I think it's a good thing to do I never once kicked my dog by the way folks terrible thing to do also he was the size of a boulder it would have injured me more than it would have injured him but I never would do such a thing however in Academia there's this um phenomenon that's very common that that I refer to as trickle down anxiety where the person running the laboratory is inevitably under a tremendous amount of stress grants and papers Etc and graduate students in postdocs will immediately be familar with what I'm describing but um for those of you that haven't gone to graduate school um this will be a little bit foreign but you'll think of other examples where when the lab head is under stress it's incredibly common for labhe heads to walk through the laboratory and start asking about experiments and telling people to do additional experiments and basically just assigning busy work to people or pressuring what simply cannot be moved along any faster and when I was a graduate student I worked for somebody who was the exact opposite of this phenotype when I was a postdoc frankly I worked with someone who was a little bit of that phenotype although I still liked working for him very much but I used to have a response that at least for me was adaptive which was I would always say I'm working as fast as I carefully can because no scientist ever wants to uh somebody to cut Corners no good scientist anyway um but trickle down anxiety is common in every occupation I think we see this sort of displacement all the time where someone's anxious and so they go start creating anxiety for other people I mean you can just as you're describing I was just seeing how pathologic that is for everybody involved so the the academic the trickle down anxiety that you were just talking about is it's a related but but it's a different defense mechanism and it's projective identification right which is which is causing others to feel the way that you feel in order to get your needs met right is this a form of projection and actually perhaps you could um clarify the definition of projection versus displacement versus projective identification yeah so projection is when you don't own it so so it's not me who's mad it's you right so I don't own that I'm mad at all right I just think that it's you even though I'm the one who's mad right displacement is what comes out of us or what what we're our attribution can shift right it's it's not this person who's making me angry it's that person because that's a safer person right to to to be angry at right or if I'm then going to take out my anger right instead of metaphorically kicking the person who might who might respond to me in a way I don't want maybe I kick the dog that's helpless to respond back right so that's displacement projective identification is there's there's an expression of an emotional state inside of a person that then becomes contagious to other people even though the person isn't trying to do that if the person says I'm going to make you anxious that's not a defense mechanism anymore right so here's an example I think I think this is the best example of projective identification so for a little bit of time at work I would occasionally lose my keys right so now I'm trying to go and I I can't find my keys right so they say oh I don't know where my keys are right so I start expressing something right and I'm anxious and I'm tense right now people around me hear that right and what do they start feeling they start feeling anxious and tense the way that I do right and now they're like well now they want to now they want to find my keys right they want to help me so that I stop spreading anxiety and tension into the whole environment around me right so then they help me find my keys I say thank you my own emotional state comes down and upon reflection I think look I don't want to do that right I got my I'm getting my needs met by making other people feel in a way that's like not a good or comfortable way to feel so here's a way around that like put my keys in the same place every day right so then I can avoid that because it doesn't feel good to me like then if I get out to my car like I find you know I'm a little bit I'm breathing a little heavy like I don't doesn't feel good cuz I was just agitated right and I did that to other people too right so so it's an example of how projective identification works and it's kind of a simple example but it shows it's happening all the time you know all these things are happening all the time but we can become aware of it then I don't lose my keys I don't have to feel bad about I don't have to activate myself for no reason and I don't have to activate other people for no reason so so thinking and reflecting like change that thing for the better and it can do it with much bigger things too thank you for those clarifications I'd like to touch on humor for a moment obviously humor is a wonderful thing or can be a wonderful thing I've also seen a lot of examples of where very smart and or accomplished people because those are not always um uh the same thing use sarcasm as a form of humor and it can be very funny but I have to imagine based on everything I'm hearing from you today that um there's a form of sarcasm which is an unhealthy defense I'm thinking of the person that um no matter what someone else says that's positive or or no matter what someone does that could be viewed as positive they find some way to diminish it by like through sarcastic humor right I I I see this a lot and I think closely nested with sarcasm is um cynicism um in fact uh I have a family member I won't name who they are to protect the not so innocent who used to be very cynical um and I want to ask you know what is the the about cynicism and and they said well I have had a particular uh genre of of schooling growing up a formal schooling where if anyone behaved um too happy expressed too much happiness rather too much delight they were viewed as stupid like like as if to be happy is to um to be unaware of of of the sophistication and the importance of things in life right um and I hope that this is unrelatable to most people listening but um I do think that sarcasm is is a double-edged blade um in this sense and that cynicism is is perhaps um uh double-edged blade as well but that it might even be worse than sarcasm because it's a way of really reflecting back what's by definition what's not good about life what's not good about what's happening and and it does seem protective right it protects one from disappointment if you're already disappointed how could you be further disappointed it's also seems to me like a bit of a power move it's like you're going to be happy well I'm going to take that away for from everybody like as something that's like for myself and um does any of this actually hold in the inside of the CL clinical literature um because again I enjoy a good sarcastic joke in fact there's a collaboration around a sarcastic joke it can be truly funny to everybody but um sarcasm and cynicism um I feel like are often used to cut down what would otherwise be um benevolence or or or bonding experiences yeah absolutely look I grew up in central New Jersey humor is a weapon right or it certainly can be right and people can be very aggressive through humor so so acting out which is is letting our aggression flow right that's a defense right so just being aggressive and pushing someone back right however that means like I if I don't feel good about myself I want you to feel not so good about yourself right is where we start getting into into Envy right and humor can be used that way so so that that sort of biting sarcastic humor is a form of acting out it's a form of aggression right it's not humor as a healthy defense right we can call it the same thing but we could also call it different things it's just a Nuance of our language right if if if humor can be a defense like I I trip and fall I make a little joke people are laughing at with me instead of at me right hey humor is a good defense I made myself feel better made things flow flow more easily but if I'm using sarcastic humor to assail someone right then that's not it's not that thing anymore right you know now it's a manifestation of aggression right and the idea that cynicism you know is is more then we're talking about a worldview right like sarcasm is something that can be done now like we can make a sarcastic joke funny or not then it's over right um but cynicism is is a way of coming at the world is a different kind of Defense right the idea that hey it's like the fox and the sour grapes like I don't I I don't think think there's anything good to be had anyway right so you can't take anything away from me it can't make me feel worse right I I already feel uh very very bad about the world and about everybody in it and I'm protecting myself that way like that's then an unhealthy defense because what does that lead to it leads to isolation at least to mistrust you know we we know that people are happy if they live through altruism and gratitude and they're well connected with others so so the cynical point of view which again to some degree being in the world builds some cynic ISM in us right like that that's okay that's part of that's a part of awareness in some sense but I think what you're talking about is a very pervasive sinicism that then is an unhealthy defense that is very harmful to others like the idea that I I feel lousy about everything and if you don't I'm going to try and bring you down right like too much happiness we'll label that as something right we label it as stupid right so now it's like it's not okay to be happier than some sort of cynical Baseline right and again there's nothing about altruism and gratitude like that's not happy right I mean who who's happy in that situation Cy the people who are overly cynical are not happy and the people around them are not happy nobody's happy thanks for the clarification on New Jersey a good portion of my biological family is from New Jersey come out well armed I I I adore them but it's true there was once a moment at a family gathering where somebody said oh let's um let's hug or something and the reaction was like oh we're going to hug now you know it was like it was it was it was it was entirely sarcastic and cynical and like and the the hug that resulted from that was this like little like like distant Pats kind of thing it was and now I'm laughing about it and it's funny and and they're very loving people but you're right it's a it's a a different style of of humor and discourse yeah so you've been talking about these two pillars of the self and who we are and how things play out in the world for us as the structure of self and the function of self and in terms of the function of self you describe self-awareness this notion or this realization that there is an i there's a me and then we've been talking about defense mechanisms in action how these play out in in the real world both positive and negative it seems to me that a lot of what is happening here in terms of understanding the function of self has to do with like what we pay attention to and like where we place our our efforts or choose to not place our attention and not place our efforts do I have that right right yeah salience is a is a huge Concept in I think in in human existence right I mean there are thousands upon thousands of things that that you or I could be paying attention to right now right but but we're we're not paying attention to anything except what we're doing right here so we are gating out so many other thoughts ideas narratives inside now if something were to shift very quickly if we heard a loud noise right our attention would shift right so so our attention is it's Focus we're Salient to one another because this is what we've Chosen and we're focusing our minds and we are also somewhere inside of us aware that we could shift away from it if something more important like something dangerous like were to happen right so it lets us be here and be Salient to one another and have this conversation right but in the course of Life what's Salient to us is so complicated and determined by so many factors that is absolutely worth a lot of attention to so so one example is so many people have a negative internal dialogue that's running in them over and over again or they're running through images events you know they may be traumatic events or things that they're not happy with images of themselves in negative ways um that that these internal narratives or internal images can become so strong that there's no room for anything else so you know an example would be a a person who uh who really really loved music right and could have you know just in addition to enjoying music like had like good thoughts while listening to music like you know what I could go do this right and and and had a history of of like that really working out well like following his interests and and like really creating sort of goodness in his life right who now was going for long drives like longer than would be needed to go somewhere get something like why the extra time in the car and I had had a presumption okay the person's listening to music and thinking but but it didn't quite add up and then I learned that the person is not listening to music right that they're using that time so that the internal narrative right which was a very very negative repeated internal negative you're not going to get anywhere you're not going to make anything of of yourself right it could be there in his mind right so it was a form of self-punishment right it was a form of of taking the anger and frustration inside and enacting it towards himself and that was so salient that this person could not see his way to any goodness like nothing could change nothing could get any better like felt very sure and very resolved about that and the answer was yeah that's right right nothing can get any better with this constant Mantra running over and over again but things can get better right if that becomes less Salient over time and your own thoughts and Reflections become more Salient so at the end of that shift you know that narrative that was still there but it was weakened right because it takes time to really change things so it was very much weakened the person was listening to music again those thoughts had kind of come back to the surface and they were being sort of jumbled you know in ways that that brought new and interesting thoughts coming from them and the person was in an entirely different place and like completely changed their life right I mean this is it's this is true right it's a dramatic example but dramatic examples inform us right where the salience shifted and then the life shifted after that what you're describing in terms of this specific example um doesn't resonate with me in terms of my own experience although as you point out it's very striking it's very dramatic um but it resonates with me from a different perspective um I'm not seeking a free clinical session here but uh but to give meet to the example I'm about to ask you for insight on you know I've never allowed myself to stay in a bad professional situation for very long you know when things didn't feel right or when I sense someone I was working with or four wasn't the right situation I got out despite if I were to really think about it there could have been pretty severe long-term consequences fortunately it all worked out in fact so much so that I would say um you know I pay attention to whether or not people I work with and four are of the sort that I want to be working with and if I sense a particular type of danger I'll look at that and I'm I'm 100% so far knock on wood but 100% so far on recognizing later that it was a great decision to move on and on the flip side of it I've made I believe excellent decisions in terms of who to work with in terms of my podcasting in terms of my academic career Etc but I've had to move aways from people that just weren't right for me I don't think they were truly Bad actors but thank goodness I moved away and thank goodness I found the these other wonderful people to work with however there are circumstances that have been repetitive in my life where I've just be honest repeatedly made not good decisions about who to be involved with over fairly long periods of time and there can even be an awareness or I should say there has been an awareness like this isn't a good situation and yet I'm persisting in in seeking out this and similar types of situations so I consider myself a at least partially rational human being with some degree of introspection you know when I look at this and I think okay this is a a choice to focus on placing myself in I have to assume it placing myself into situations that are challenging for me in a way that I know is preventing me from living in certain ways that I want and from being quote unquote happy in certain ways that I want when you hear a scenario like that like I can do it over here but I can't seem to do it over here in fact I see myself doing it the wrong way here right a little bit different than the example you gave a moment ago because the guy was driving to work not listening to music but wasn't putting two and two together about what was going on but when somebody can see what's going on I think this might even be called the repetition compulsion or yeah sometimes you know what is that about are are people trying to work out something specific or are they deliberately creating some friction to accomplish something else right I mean I realize this could be infinitely complex and again I'm not trying to extract um uh a clinical insight for for my own sake I started the clock on that thank you um but I think a lot of people do this oh yes they they do what they know they shouldn't be doing they know they shouldn't be doing it duh I just said that two ways and but they do it like it must serve them in some way you know think about um when you get a dog and you talk to a dog trainer they say you know dogs do what works right they get a reward for doing something they're going continue doing it uh you apply that to the same sort of thing I'm describing for myself and that I've observed in other people and you must say it must work for them you hear this in kind of pop psychology like it must work for them like it must be solving something why the hell do I do this why do people do this is it real pathology or is it around about about way to get to something else that's actually pretty adaptive yeah I mean instead of defining it as pathology I would not Define it as pathology I would Define it as humanness if humanness is not in and of itself pathological then all you're doing there is is describing something that is common widespread across human beings now it doesn't mean we can't understand it and make it healthier right I work in a discipline that wants to put a number on everything right label it as something and then do something about it that's more often than not ineffective right because we're not looking at things in a top- down way of what is Human Experience what are the natural aspects of human experience that are less than ideal right that we can then understand and make better if we come at it that way then we see ah this is a great example because here's where structure meets function right so on the structure side we said okay there's defense mechanisms and we imagine the branches right that are that are coming up from the unconscious mind right and here it meets function right defense mechanisms in action on the function side then determining salience so what I would imagine in your example my image is that your defensive structure when you're doing the thing that's effective right the professional decisions right looks elegant right like there's Harmony to where those branches are the Consciousness is sitting in between it you can see you can see the Elegance to it right that I can just imagine shifting right when to when you're not doing the thing effectively right because now you're using an entirely different defensive structure which is going to function differently and create different salients and I imagine that it's convoluted and you know that it's sort of Peace meal that it's not something elegant right so you say okay what does that actually mean let's translate it into what are the actual defenses so let's think about what you're not doing when you're making good decisions in the professional realm right you are not using denial or avoidance or rationalization or projection or projective identification or acting out right there are all these things that you are not doing that are the sort of unhealthy defenses beckoning to us like oh wouldn't it be easier to Kick the Can down the road right you know wouldn't it be easier to just no no everything's okay everything's going to work out okay wouldn't it be easier instead of being angry at one person who is really intrinsic to the environment if you you know it's actually somebody else you know are you displacing it projecting that's how people that's how we get ourselves into trouble right and and if that's going on then that set of defense mechanisms in action right creates something that obscures the ability to make good judgment right but with none of those things going on then what are you doing what you're applying your intelligence you're applying your discernment right you're applying your desire to make things better you're able to look at it you're able to bring diligence perseverance right you're able to bring healthy aspects of self to the question and decide like oh I don't want this and it should be different right and there again what's going on there's a complexity under the surface but now we're coming up towards Simplicity right we're coming up towards the things that are healthier that are simplistic if we look then okay what's going on if you're making the same mistakes over and over again well we could you know we would dive under the hood and really look and say okay what are you doing there but it has to be an array of unhealthy defenses there's no other thing it could be so we would say okay are you using a are you using avoidance maybe a little maybe a lot what about denial what about rationalization what about projection like you know you go through the unhealthy defenses and and you see what is it that you're bringing to bear that is leading you astray and then and then of course the goal is to use the the role modeling and you role model for yourself how to be healthy right so let's take that role modeling and apply it to the thing you're of carving out and and treating differently and and that's the reason when people talk about repetition compulsions you know that's it's not a formal term because because what we're really talking about is repetition right and we're interested like why why do we repeat things now that's one that's one reason right because we bring an unhealthy set of defenses and then at the end of the day things come out the same because we're bringing an unhealthy set of defenses right there can be other motivations that are related to all of that and there's again there's complexity to it but but the compulsion part can be that we can reenter situations that didn't go well with the idea that we're going to we're going to fix what happened in the past we're going to make ourselves feel better we're going to take away the mark of trauma because remember trauma doesn't care about the clock or the calendar so that's why you'll see someone who has had say five abusive relationships that looked very much the same right and is about to enter the sixth right and you said it's not because hopefully in most cases not because that person like wants to be hurt right I mean sometimes that's a different problem right but but there can be a drive inside of us to try and fix something if I can make it work this time I won't have to feel so bad about the other five right so an attempt to change the past through one's current actions right which is rooted in the lyic system and how and how trauma affects us and how again it's outside the clock in the calendar so that kind of magic so to speak can happen so the brain can seek that magic but again there are unhealthy defenses coming into play right there has to be denial right otherwise the person would map you know if the same thing happened five times and this looks the same it's probably going to happen now right so so anytime you think a person most often it's us right you know is smart enough or worldly enough to like know better which like happens all the time right then look for the answer right you say well shouldn't that person know better than to get into the six abusive relationship the answer is like yes right like because it's not that hard if you saw a set of circumstances five times to map that the six is going to have the same outcome right the person would do that in other scenarios right so then you say right that is true so now let's look for why the person doesn't recognize that and again we go down into the structure of self and the function of self defense mechanisms and action salience the things that we're talking about now does that fit yeah it makes sense and what what comes to mind is the idea of um getting into a car that you know is going to get into an accident over and over and over again but being quite cognizant of safety and its importance in every other domain of Life yes not even jaywalking right but getting into like if if certain Ubers arrived with a little flashing light that said this ride is going to have an accident it's like getting getting into that vehicle and I see this in others as well yes and and it raises all sorts of um questions like um is the person actually uh unconsciously afraid of the vehicle arriving where they want to go because then um like are people actually afraid of things working out um I mean this gets to something that I'm so sorry to can I can I say for that's why you have to know that the person right like who is that person right why do they not want to get in that car right are they afraid they're not going to get somewhere they afraid they're going to get somewhere right but ultimately we're looking for unhealthy defenses and I I so want to emphasize that that I you know I will often think that the aspect of my education that's most helpful in me doing my job when I'm when I'm in the job as as a practicing psychiatrist is is actually my mathematics minor right because there's a lot more math to this right people tend to think oh mental health it's all it's all esoteric and you can sort of say anything you know anything you you want and like there's no way of proving or disproving it's it's not like that at all right there's a mathematical aspect to it so if you do the correct logical Common Sense thing right in all aspects of your life except one and you're like a hundred times more intelligent than you need to be to figure it all out right then then if there's a carve out we say look that's of huge interest right I mean the probability that we're going to find something interesting there's 100% right because we know that you know better we know that you do better but but why why here so like that's so interesting right like that's where the x marks the spot like let's go dig there right so then when we go and dig there like we're going to find something right and and we'll see what is that like do we find that like oh it's an array of of really unhealthy defense mechanisms maybe we find that do we find that there's a deep unconscious motivation right like we might find that too right there we might find a lot of things right but we're going to find them if we go back to what is the structure of s what is the function of self if we go and look like that x marks the spot means there's Pay Dirt there right and then when we figure that out then we go through and we can make things change so if it's a deep-seated trauma driven unconscious motivation that is resulting in an unhealthy array of defense mechanisms well let's go look at that right let's look at the trauma let's take the thing that's unconscious and and bring it to Consciousness right then we can make that better and that array of unhealthy defenses again we're not going to change it overnight but can we change it very very significantly pretty rapidly probably yes and we can almost entirely change it across time so there's a mathematical aspect of this that I think is so important to point out because you know mental health just even as a field right just me we all want to be mentally healthy like there's a rhyme and reason to it that yes it follows science and yes it also follows common sense and if we apply those things we get to answers it's very reassuring um thank you thinking about the functions of self and again just to remind myself and and other people you it starts with self-awareness involves defense mechanisms in action then there's the salience piece but paying attention to what's inside of us as well as what's external and then you're now describing a lot of you know choices choic making and and behavior and action in the yes I have to assume that for for the person trying to improve themselves and get to agency and gratitude uh that paying attention to all of these is is important but of course if a defense mechanism is unconscious we can't simply decide okay I'm going to see the unconscious defense mechanism does that mean that we should ask ourselves about what is most Salient to us um or should we be focusing on our behavioral choices I mean in the example I just gave I'm aware of my behavioral choices making certain decisions to engage with certain people and and not with others uh but should I be asking for instance you know what Salient like like what are the thoughts leading up to that decision um in other words how does salience of internal and external uh cues and processes um relate to behavior and which of these should we be paying attention to if our goal is to eventually change our Behavior so so think about we're starting we're sort of starting at the bottom right so we're starting with okay there is an I right and that's just not not just an apprehension right there's a lot to that right so so for example I know someone who who is doing sort of mirror meditation staring into the mirror right looking back itself with an with a desire to be aware like there is a me like this me is in the world right this is the first I've ever heard of such a practice um except when I was in elementary school maybe it was the nth grade I had a teacher who t talked about look gave us an assignment to to look in the mirror and ask ourselves questions but if I understand correctly you think there's utility to people spending a few minutes or more looking in the mirror and thinking about oneself in the eye as a way to build up this self-awareness do I have that right if you want to take the best care of yourself that you can right you want to understand yourself the best you can you want to make your life the best it can be right then if there are answers right let's say the answers are in five or 10 different cupboards right look in all of them right I mean that's that's the idea right that if if we want to know something look everywhere for it and also realize what we are building right what we are creating may be a recipe there may be things from different cupboards that overlap so the way to translate that practically is to say to find the answers to what what is either ailing us why we're repeating things we don't want to repeat or even if things are going okay but we want them to be going better because we don't quite feel the peace and contentment we want to feel then look everywhere so in this the function of Self in the function of self start with the eye right there are ways of increasing self-awareness you know they can range from contemplation of self to meditation to looking in the mirror right there are things that we can do to more strongly emphasize to oursel that there is an eye and this eye is going through life right then we know that they're defense mechanisms and that they're present that they're acting in us right we can't just see them because they're unconscious but if we start thinking about them we can learn about them right and that's where salience comes into play sence kind of points both ways right salans can point us towards the unconscious mind right oh I I realize I'm doing this over and over again or I'm saying this thing to myself over and over again where's that coming from we start becoming curious about ourselves and we look to the unconscious mind and then we also look to the conscious mind that that's why after salience is behavior like what am I doing right and a lot of times we don't know just examples of we don't know why we're doing things right someone who wants to lose weight but always goes to the grocery store and comes home and is like has some sense of surprise that there are things there that they don't want to eat right like why am I behaving in a certain way why does certain things bother me when other things don't right why am I really touchy about one thing and not another why might there be things that bother others and not me or vice versa right so so you know we're looking at what's going on inside of us and then how we respond right because how what may be upsetting me or what's going on inside of me both conscious and unconscious right is then determining how I'm acting how I'm behaving in the world around me if I want a better job but I never take an interview for another job I'm not going to get another job if I want a romantic partner but I automatically turn away from anyone who Smiles at me I'm not going to have a romantic partner right if I want life to be better and there's a certain thing I repeat and I don't want to repeat that I want to understand myself better so I can change the behavior and that's why the the the function of self ends with strivings right because strivings are into the future I know there is an eye I know there's a network and web of defense mechanisms in action I know that there's salience going on inside of me and I'm only going to pay attention to a few things from the thousands I could pay attention to I want to be aware of that and have more control over that then I'm enacting behaviors I'm engaging in the world around me and ultimately I want things right I want life to be better I want to have that feeling that you can get to I want to be in the state of of agency and gratitude so again these two pillars structure of self function of self that's where all the answers are so they're all the cupboards right there there these five Cupboards in the structure of self and five in the function of self and I know there'll be a you know we'll have it out there in a PDF right because you can go back there and that's where the vast majority of answers are to both understanding and routes to change what you just described as incredibly helpful it's absolutely apparent to me why looking in all the cupboards is so key it's also apparent that um many different aspects of psychology and Psychiatry um at least as I understand them might probe for instance just at the level of behavior you know I think this is the the just do it Mantra well just do the right thing right you know you you're not finding a romantic like you know schedule three dinners with friends and ask them to invite over people who are looking for part sounds really simple right but um much as with the example of my friend who lost all this weight through behavioral change that the fear still lives within him very very strongly and so clearly there's some some stuff happening underneath there now fortunately he did lose the weight and he's kept most of it off but it's clear to me that until he addresses some of these other issues of sence and uh defense mechanism self-awareness Etc that um the fear he's still experiencing ing makes total sense because the foundation of that change is not nearly as strong as it could be um maybe right or maybe he doesn't have to have the fear but he's not going to learn either one without the exploration so he won't if there is risk he won't be able to avert the risk and if there's not risk he's then sort of laboring through life which is difficult enough without being worried about something you don't have to be worried about right so the process of inquiry will always make that better it's clear to me that his fear of regaining weight is absolutely sapping his enjoyment and his productivity in other domains of life so warrants attention right because because we're deciding in that sort of mathematical way like it doesn't have to be that way doesn't mean it can change overnight but it can be understood and it can be changed well it's for that reason and many other reasons that I'm very grateful that you explained these two pillars structure of self and function of self and how these flow up to uh empowerment and humility and how those flow up to agency and gratitude you've given us a a set of ideals and and and road map of of how to get there and one that we're going to continue with in a moment here um I did want to reiterate what you said which is that there is a pdf version of this this structure this road map of ideals and how to get there um that's been provided as a link in the show note captions um so people can refer to them there in visual form if they like if you're interested in understanding yourself and in having goodness in your life as much as you possibly can then you're interested in the structure of the mind and and this means that you're interested in the unconscious mind in all the things that go on a million things a second that we don't know or understand one by one but that we can explore and understand better in total we're also interested in the conscious mind in being self-aware we're interested in the array of defense mechanisms and whether or not they they're elegant and light passes clearly through them or whether they're distorting light and creating misperception right if you're interested in the structure of the mind then you're also interested in the character structure like what is your character structure what is the nest around all of it how do you interface with the world and then you're interested in the self that you grow from that phenomenologically meaning what is your experience of self how does it feel to you these are all important parts of this pillar of health and happiness the other pillar is the function of the mind and of course there's overlap there different cupboards but the cupboards all contain different ingredients that together make the recipe right so if we're interested in the function of the mind then we want to pay attention that there's an eye like we want to be self-aware and we want to cultivate self-awareness we're also interested in how those defense mechanisms work when they're in action right what's Salient inside of us and outside of us what are we paying attention to how are we behaving what are our strivings do we feel hopeful about ourselves and the world around us and if we're interested in all of these things we can't help but be respectful right of just how complicated this is like life is difficult and understanding ourselves is is difficult you know Wonderful Joy can come of living life but it is hard and it's hard day by day and trying to understand ourselves going to these places these pillars that hold the answers right they they can't but make in us a respect for all of it right and the respect for ourselves for others brings with it humil right when we come to this point of looking at ourselves and exploring then yes we become empowered right because we've gained a lot of knowledge right we're digging where the Pay Dirt is and we're figuring things out and along with that empowerment comes humility a respectfulness for how difficult all of this is how complicated we are how we can make happiness in our lives but how it certainly isn't easy and we take with us the empowerment and the humility and we express them right and if we're expressing empowerment and humility we come to living through agency and gratitude so here both are active words so agency it's it's easier to see right it's an active word where I'm aware of my ability to to project myself into the world around me I know that I can't control everything right but I'm really trying to understand what can I control right how can I control it what what do my decisions now lead to in the future so agency is very very active right gratitude is active too right because we're bringing an active sense of gratitude sense of the amazingness that we're here and and pride in ourselves and others for being here and and trying to move forward as best we can and then we bring that to our interactions we're much more likely to have a kind gesture towards others instead of being angry we're much more likely to have something compassion to say including to ourselves than we are to have something angry to say that gratitude accompanies agency they're they're active words and they're active together and if we're living life through agency and gratitude I mean there's a lot of wisdom about this there's a lot that's been written and researched about this and if you look at what is it telling us right remember things are getting simpler right as we're getting higher up the the levels here right the unconscious mind is most complicated now we're at hey can we live our lives with agency and gratitude at the Forefront and what does it bring for us and I think it brings what we are seeking that we might say okay we're seeking happiness and that can mean a lot of things you know a lot of different things it can be a very active thing am I happy in the moment and we can use happiness sometimes to distract ourselves like happiness is important but words when people really think like what is it that they want or what is it that they have right if if they're they're they're Overjoyed to be alive right they're finding a sense of Peace they're finding contentment they're finding Delight the ability to be delighted right this is what people want our our our human history and our our searchings tell us this and our own experiences tell us this and and now it could lead a person to think well okay what's going on I mean is is this someone who's you know levitating at the top of a mountain like is this just a state is this a state that people are in and and the answer is no it be sometimes we could be in that state where we can feel peace there's no tension inside of us right I could feel I have times when I don't feel tension inside of me there's contentment there's peace I don't have to drive towards anything right but it it's not the passive experience of it because we are living life it's that that feeling goes hand in hand with a drive within us that we're when we're in this healthy place we are living life the decisions that we're making what is putting the rubber to the road it is a generative Drive within us there is a drive to make things better to understand to explore and it's that drive that we access and cultivate and synonymous with happiness is it's not just the the state when people want to be happy in that very very general way yes contentment peace Delight right but but they're happening as we're living life right as we're enacting a generative Drive where we're looking at ourselves and the world around us and we're interested in understanding we're interested in making things better and that's the place that we're trying to get to I believe that with all my with all my heart and my and my brain right my education training experience and also experience living living life and and for 20 years doing this work with people tells me this is what we're seeking and it's an active way of of experiencing ourselves and our place in life I love that because it merges both the nouns and the adjectives and the verbs you know and and this notion of a generative drive to me is so compelling because um I have the sense and I hope I'm right that we all have some sort of generative Drive within us starting at an early stage um maybe it even starts as visual foraging or touching things with our hands as an infant and you know exploration of the world right is what brings about the changes in the neural circuitry that allow us to engage even more and in and in progressively on the one hand narrower ways but also with more richness and and more detail um could you tell us more about generative drive and and how this shows up in different types of people um is it always positive can there be too much of it um I certainly know a number of people who are addicted to work for those of you listening I'm raising my hand um but I would say nowadays I'm not as addicted to work as I once was in the sense that I derive far more satisfaction from less work now provided that the work is really indepth you know I think that there were years in in graduate school where I wanted to publish a bunch of papers and then quickly realized um through the not so gentle persuasion of my my mentors that like let's just do the best possible work we can do and there's so much more richness and and experience and things to be gained from that so I'm familiar with generative drive as as I understand it but maybe if you would if you could flush out a bit of what generative Drive is and and does it arrive um in parallel with or before we are able to access peace contentment and Delight um Can it even be separated out from that um now what what is this generative Drive yeah so drives are built into us so the the the synonymous with our existence like if we exist then then we have the drive I mean that that's how the drive is defined right and we understand going far back to to psychodynamic and psychoanalytic roots and and when people were really thinking hard about human beings and what's going on inside of us that we've sort of identified and then validated over the period of time since that we have aggressive drives within us and we have drives towards pleasure now this often gets misunderstood that so aggression can be uh it can be active violent aggression for example but aggression can also be sort of a sense of agency right the inaction of agency like I I want to do things I want to change things I want to I want to make the world a different place right that that all of that comes under this drive so so aggressive an aggressive drive is not a bad thing if we had no aggressive drives the thought is we just lie down and nothing else would happen and then we'd all be gone right so so there's a way in which this drive within us moves us forward right and of course it's extremely complicated the ways we can manifest too much of it or too little of it or how our defense mechanisms can intertwine with the drive but the drive is there it's like it's fuel within us that comes with our existence and then how that fuel moves us forward how much of it there is no that is determined by the meshing of the drive with how we're living life right and the same would be true of pleasure you know the pleasure Drive doesn't just mean like we all want to be hedonists right inside it means that we want things that are gratifying right we want to feel good right this isn't just you know the drive towards physical pleasure like a sex drive or or eating food or having Comfort like all of that can be part of it but it's a drive for Relief right the idea that we don't want to be white knuckling life right searching for pleasure so having aggression within us as we White Knuckle life and we search for some pleasure and and relief right these drives within us can be healthy they can be unhealthy you know they can be anything right they're they're they're Wells Springs within us that then fuel us forward and there's controversy to the idea of is there a generative drive and there's certainly at parts of the field that do not think so right but there have been strong thinkers in the field that have thought we do have a generative drive that it is within us to look around us to be be curious to be amazed right to think like how how can I engage with this and make this better or happier to think outside of ourselves right to think if I if if I feel good and you're in pain can I make you feel better right having nothing to do with me right the the idea of altruism coming to the four and having industriousness with us within us right and and the idea that there's a generative drive it it's strengthened when you look at how humans behave when you know we're not struggling right that that people are interested in learning you know you think about how how much of people give of themselves to learning right or to serving others like there's so much of this goodness in the world around us now if we shut people away right they have no you know imagine you know God forbid someone is in a solitary confinement from when they're the moment they're born you know then there there's not an opportunity for the generative drive to thrive right and we see so many so many situations where it doesn't Thrive enough right you know violence in people's surroundings lack of opportunities right that we can squelch a generative Drive anyone's generative drive but if we give ourselves opportunities if you know if we're healthy that we're not weighed down by trauma and illness and misperceptions of self and we can live life in a way that brings us to agency and gratitude now we're allying with the generative drive that I absolutely believe is within us I think just look at life look at human beings we observe that we have this drive within us and if that drive is at the Forefront and that drive then naturally of course allies with agency and gratitude then I think we're at the place that is the place we we ultimately seek right and that we can find it for brief periods of time so so by really pursuing this and and like really strongly in my own therapy and reflection and attempts to understand I can have periods of time where I can feel that way I I can feel outward growth and interest in the world and and I feel good I'm not trying to answer some question of like why am I alive or like I'm doing things that I feel good about and I feel good about doing those things and about being in the world and and I think this is not uncommon you know it may be far more common in societies that are allegedly less Advanced right that is have less distractions or maybe you know less uh knowledge of of all the awful things in the world that can happen to us that are constantly fed to us like there's there a whole bunch of other questions and topics about it but but this this you know I have this absolute belief that there's this generative Drive in us that wants to AE with agency and gratitude and that we all have it within us to bring those to the Forefront and to find that thing that we seek whether some this person says it's Nirvana the other person says it's Joy or happiness or peace or numbing you know whatever it is there's there's something to it where we're not feeling the tension within us we're not feeling the anxiety the pressures but we're feeling a sense of goodness the way you're describing it um makes perfect sense why peace contentment and Delight be so closely linked to this generative drive you know the the word peace as you alluded to is often um brings to mind the idea of of passivity but generative drive and the inclusion of things like aggression and a drive for pleasure are anything but passive uh so I think that's important uh for me and for everyone to understand that um Peace contentment and Delight can really be action terms again move moving them from uh you know from the more typical conception of them to to verb States so peace contentment and Delight are are not passive States I mean there can be periods of time where we can be just very peaceful and very much at rest but but those words are not synonymous with inaction right in fact they're synonymous with action a lot of the time right if we are suffused with peace contentment the ability to Delight then what we're doing is we're raising up the generative Drive we're making conditions that are permissive for the generative Drive dve to come to the Forefront right to be Paramount over the aggressive and the pleasure drives right and remember we're not trying to get rid of those drives right we just want the generative Drive in us to be at the Forefront then we'll be able to harness the aggressive drive through for example a strong sense of agency fueling the sense of agency forward as opposed to destructive aggression right the search for pleasure which sure can include physical Pleasures in in ways that are good and reasonable and healthy for us but also the pleasure of learning right the pleasure that altruism brings that we can take the aggressive drive that we know is in us and the pleasure drive that we know is in us and we can dial them to the right places like this gets very complicated and it's easy to dial that too far up and it's easy to dial it too far down right but if both are serving the generative drive because we lift up the generative drive and we bring it to Primacy by being able to handle Our Lives to understand ourselves to go back to those pillars and to build upon it the agency and the gratitude that then leads us to peace contentment and Delight we can put all of this together and like we're really and truly living in an active way in the world that's good for us good for the world around us and doesn't leave us with a sense of Yearning or sense of tension within us do you think it's also the case that generative drive has kind of a um self-amplification feature to it what comes to mind is your describing generative drive and its relationship to peace contentment and Delight is that approximately a half hour after I wake up I start to feel um more physically energized I'm not somebody who just pops out of bed and is ready to go exercise or do mental work um but about 30 minutes or so after waking my my mind starts to wake up and I've noticed that if I read a scientific paper or if I read a chapter in a book or if I um do something that feels a little bit difficult cognitively difficult in particular that um the sense of satisfaction that I get from that is immense and it it's not necessarily the case that I have to learn something that I'm going to use that day but for me learning and um and often learning and sharing what I learn uh with the world whether or not they want to hear it or not um is part of my uh pleasure Loop and um and I've learned that if I don't capture some new knowledge in a way that's challenging um in the morning time um I I feel like the gears are still turning but but I start to lose energy whereas if I find something interesting in particular and and I write it down and and I feel like I own it that's what I enjoy so much about learning it's like it's in there maybe it'll be useful at some point maybe it won't but it's like a it's like a animal finding a tool that it can maybe use to forge more more effectively later in life I I get such a sense of satisfaction that then I find that I have immense energy to do whatever is next like whether or not that's exercise or learn more or prepare a podcast or write a grant or um or work on a paper and this feature of my mental life has is so prominent that um I almost have to force myself to do it each day and there are so many distractions in the world nowadays that I've come to a place where I almost have to force myself to do what I know works for me um but when I do it it feels like a almost like a chemical Rocket Fuel and and it doesn't make me manic or crazy I don't need to pick up the phone and call somebody or tell everybody about it or post on social media it's more of a deep sense of satisfaction and and I get energy from it is that the generative Drive well it's great that that works for you what what you're saying is that that for you like you can prime your generative drive that way right and then you prime it you prime the pump it gets revved up right like and then and then you know it's it's really manifesting itself inside of you I mean there's many different manifestations of the generative drive as there are people right so some things are going to work for some person other things are going to work for a different person right but but but you're saying that hey I know this thing works for me and even though sometimes it's not easy to do I do it and then look what it gets for me right and that's that's really healthy right it's like knowing that this thing works for you and then you become committed to it because your generative Drive is is is really strongly supported by it right and then you have this sense of Good Feeling right so then you have you have the peace and you have the you just the overall sense of goodness right the you know peace and contentment and Delight you're getting that in learning and in teaching so so you you're figuring out like hey this works for me right and again you don't have to figure it out through this lens it's if we find parts that aren't working then we go back and we figure them out right maybe a good example maybe is um so let's say you take someone who who really enjoys gardening and gets something out of gardening right so there are as many generative drives and how they're measured out as there are humans but there can be common outcomes of them right so the enjoyment of of fostering plants growing a garden is like that's not uncommon in humans right so imagine someone who hasn't been doing that right they really want to they have a drive to do it there's a plot of land in the back that they used to cultivate right so if they're not doing it there any number of reasons maybe maybe they were depressed and they needed mental health treatment maybe they just got away from the path that they were on maybe their defenses shifted a little bit whatever the case may be they go back to the pillars and they figure it out right and now they're in accord with themselves right and they're living through agency and gratitude and they feel like right I can go back out there and I can till that land I can you know I can get the hoe out I can you know I can make the plots I'm going to put the seeds in I'm going to nurture like I can go do that and I can do it even what even though I was depressed even though somebody assaulted me five months ago you know even though I lost my job even though even though even though right they overcome the even those right and the sense of agency tells them right I can go do that right and the sense of gratitude no one who's miserable and and and now is you know is in such an awful position about life because they were attacked or lost their job or something bad happened whatever it may be or they're lost in cynicism there's no gratitude there right it's a gratitude for being in life for having the capability of going back and and you and planting seeds in that Garden that's the alliance between agency and gratitude and then the person goes and does that right so think of what's going on there they do this thing they feel good about this thing they can have they can look out at the Garden feel some peace right feel some contentment to them be delighted by what they did remember how much they loved it before how much it means to them so yes that goodness comes that goodness suffuses us and it raises up the generative drive that says right it's it's good we breathe some life into it right enough to get that Garden done now the generative Drive is further fostered forward by the goodness the person feels so so the example and the difference between the person who's like wants a garden feels terrible about themselves and they're not doing it and they feels lousy every time they look out the window and there they are looking out the window right the difference between that and having made a garden and looking out the window at it is a night and day difference and the the the person who's looking out the window with the garden that they built overcoming whatever was inside of them because they they went and addressed it and and prove to themselves that they could that's what we're after in life right it's we all know this it doesn't look like somebody levitating at the top of a mountain right that's what it looks like the person looking out the window at the Garden and thinking about what they overc overcame to create the garden and seeing the goodness of it all yeah I'm glad you said the word creating because it seems It's about creating things real tangible things but that the process to get there is every bit as important as what's created when you create knowledge that that's tangible right like you you you create knowledge maybe that that person looks down the row of beautiful flowers and has the same sense of goodness inside of them that you do when you're well like right I just I just went and learned something as you described that I I'm thinking I I certainly hope so because for me it's it's an incredible sense of satisfaction and and um one that I enjoy so much that I almost don't want to look at it too much cuz to me it it sits in this um uh rare domain of perfect like it's just it just feels so good and um and that I can get back there is very is very comforting to me right and that's all of this that it feels so good that's what all this is It's the generative drive right it's the it's the Gratitude right it's the contentment it's like all that coming together and it's interesting we could contrast that to to when you talked about a repeated cycle that's negative right then you're not feeling that right so so think about the learning that can come from it right that you you can you can achieve this and feel this and be in this state in one aspect of your life like what can you learn from that to bring to the other place and more yes that's important it's more it's often starting with what's going on in the place that's not doing well right like I said why the repetition right so this is how we we can have what we're seeking in parts of our Lives even if we don't in others but if we can have it in parts of our Lives we can have it in others too and we can become role models for ourselves we can learn from ourselves eles we can learn from what brings the good to how to raise up the things that about us in our lives that aren't there yet I often get the question H from the general public how can I stop overthinking you know I I have to imagine based on the fact I get that question so often that there are a great number of people who um sense their own generative Drive what are your thoughts on that thinking can be wonderful if we're using thinking to learn right to figure things out so when thinking is doing that thinking is great but a lot of thinking is just in the service of something else right and a lot of thinking works against us so imagine the person making the garden right at the person has to think about it they have to think about what seeds to make they have to think about where the the tools are they have to think about what they're doing when they're planting when they're watering there's a lot to do but the beauty of it isn't in the thinking right the thinking is in the service of what is generative right so so that's a different kind it's it's just thinking in the service of something but a lot of our thinking is that you know it's it's planning it's projecting we tend to glorify the planning and the projecting and and it can be great when we're learning when we're figuring things out but a lot of that is is there so that we can do the things that are good for us to do right the planning and the projecting around making the garden where the point of it is the garden it's not the thinking part right we can also use thinking against us so much thinking is repetitive and and not just not just unproductive but harmful right that person who's looking out the window at the Garden may be thinking I mean sometimes there just pauses in our thinking but you know a lot of times a person must be thinking and and what often goes on there is just repetitive negative thinking it's you know gosh I used to have a garden I remember when that was beautiful or know remember before such and such a person passed away and then we stopped making the Garden or I'll never be able to make a garden again or gosh it's too much you know it's just something that's negative and unproductive I mean what else is there to think if the person's actually looking at the window at the Garden right and they're in this sort of stuck state they're not in a generative State then the thinking becomes becomes repetitive and it furthers all the negative right as we said The more we further the negative the more we take if there's a four-lane Highway that we want to atrophy let's not make it into a six Lane Highway you know but but we do that when when we have this repetitive thinking which then can evolve into the narratives the things that we say to ourselves right so so you thinking is wonderful it's wonderful but it can also just subserve something else and it can also be used against us so what we're talking about here doesn't glorify thinking I mean it does if it's in the service of the generative drive but it doesn't in and of itself I think many people um set a time say you know 9:30 a.m. or 10: a.m. when they are going to begin doing something that they want to do or know they should do that's a little bit challenging could be exercise could be cognitively demanding work and then 10:00 rolls around they say Okay 10:15 and they're distracted by often social media texting these days I think those are the main culprits really um I don't know too many people that get distracted by exercise and reading books some do um and doing complex puzzles or math but um you know social media is a little bit like mental chewing gum except that I would add to that it's the kind of chewing gum that um really does um sate the appetite in a way that prevents you from eating nutritious food unless used correctly right um and then people feel bad about themselves because the whole morning went by now it's noon then they require some food like any typical person and they eat then they might KN a little nap for the Post prandial dip in energy and then the afternoon and and then it goes on and on I mean I I hear this all the time I've experienced this before so I'm I'm not immune to this myself that's why I try and capture that early wave of energy whatever it might be adrenaline noradrenaline uh some combination the way you describe thinking and its potential relationship to generative drive it seems to me it's so important that we capture those moments of um potential creation how however small the action might be to remind ourselves that we are capable of moving things from point A to point B because in the description I just gave of the person that lets the morning Escape there's there's really um no external barrier except these distractions put differently all the tools exist within most all of us to be able to create what we want to create at least to create something right I mean right um and yet many many people just don't fulfill that um that right that they were and that we've all been given right so let's think think about what's going on there so so the person says I'm going to exercise at 10:00 right now they push it back to 10:15 and they do something on social media they push it back to 10:30 it'll be okay I'll get it all in what they're doing is they're they're engaging in is unhealthy defense mechanisms right so if we go back to the the pillars right the the structure of self the function of self there may be other reasons for it but let's just identify the unhealthy defenses of avoidance and rationalization right and then there's no thinking going on about that right they're just unconscious processes and you kick it down you know you kick it down the clock 15 minutes right they not thinking about it thinking then is subserving something different right the thinking is subserving the avoidance if I'm going to go look on something read a couple things reply you know I'm thinking I'm planning right I got to get the maybe I got to get the phone out I got to tap you know my code into it I got to go to a certain website like we're doing something that we're thinking about it I think about what I'm going to write back but the thinking is all in the service of the unhealthy defenses right so then by understanding ourselves better we can we can bring that right to a healthier Place how by by actually using thinking for what helps us right so let's think of like what okay what's going let's say if you're doing that okay what's going on when you're doing that right so so do you you you really want to exercise right but like it's not easy to exercise and sometimes mightbe just problem solving are you doing a thing you like maybe something you like more there's lower barrier Etc but let's say we're just working within the psychological right then you can come at that a couple of ways like I don't want to do that thing that thing's hard right I mean I think that about things in my life sometimes and it always makes me H makes me weighty and unhappy right I may as well put 20 lb weights on either side of me right I mean I can look at it that way right or there's a different way of looking at it that actually fits much better which is like I'm not daunted by doing difficult things and I can get out there and and apply myself and you know and I feel good about that when I do difficult things it's like part of my identity right it's like part of how I see myself so right I'm going to go do this thing and I'm going to feel good about it and and isn't it amazing that I get to do it right like look here I am I'm alive I'm healthy right I can go do this thing my health is is good but I want to make it better right by working out or I'm at least alive and if I lose a little bit of weight I'll feel healthier like come on this is good right and then I'll feel different about that right and and like truth is one or the other it's like oh both can be true now what will be true is what you choose right and if you choose the negative then yes the unhealthy defense is perpetuated even if you get yourself to do it today it's harder to do it tomorrow tomorrow that's why sometimes I'll say to a person like just take a look at it and decide if you want to do it or not if you don't want to exercise just decide you don't right and then okay there's a trade-off for everything maybe you're okay with the trade-off right but what am I trying to do there right is is bring to Consciousness that that person is making a choice right do you want to do it if you want to do it if you want to do it it's great to just do it right and if you don't it's it's great to not do it at least you're being honest and clear with yourself and you're not wasting all that time when you keep kicking it 15 minutes down the you know down the clock you know until it's too late does does that make sense that's I think how the structure here really does it works because it's it's pulling together what we know from the biology to the psychology of like how to understand ourselves and how to understand when things aren't the way we want them to be so that we can make them the way we want them to be it's not magic it's it's following the sort of mathematical aspects of you know going to the factors assessing them making changes and and then of course we see the outcome we want to see the way you describe it does make sense and I I appreciate it because I think ultimately it seems to ratchet back to actions to verbs to bring us to these feeling states that you know I think are what people are seeking you know peace contentment Delight you know through agency gratitude as active terms right there yes you know I think these are Universal desires and again you're providing this um wonderful road map for people to arrive there thank you I do have a question about some of the underpinnings of generative Drive in particular this um notion of aggressive Drive um I've known people that seem to have a lot of this they just have a lot of get up and go or a lot of drive to create in the world or to figure things out um they often do create great lives for themselves in in work and relationship Etc I've also observe that these people often don't have the best relationship to themselves or that they run up against um barriers or L sometimes straight into brick walls um in certain domains of their life perhaps as a consequence of having too much of this generative or aggressive drive and at the same time I know that there are people in the world many that have of a what seems to be a low generative Drive I I don't know if that's the case or not but um that they um they seem to have a hard time engaging like in doing things and and often you get the impression that they somewhat are completely given up like they just like life is just too hard or um sometimes it's even more subtle like I know someone who they like their job but they've come to the place that um you know like it's just work like it's a paycheck and and that might be enough but they're always talking about it so I have to assume that it's not enough they aren't able to slot their work into one domain and and just focus on the other uh aspects of their life that are going well it doesn't compensate for them to think about the other aspects of their life that is so um is there a Continuum of generative drives that exist in us are these intrinsic I I realize there are near infinite number of conditions that um could give rise to one or the other could be hardwired could be nature could be nurture but what is the relationship between kind of um I want to say arousal or um the potential for arousal and aggressive drive and uh and these things that we're seeking yeah yeah so if it's okay I I'd like to start like the first principles of the drives right so the the theory of drives came about when when people were observing very closely like human beings and human behavior individuals uh societies cultures right and and identifying that hey that that you can boil a lot of things down to to a drive that we call aggressive right there's something to like impose myself out there on the world around me right it explains a lot of what people do right and then the the other identified Drive was pleasure right was you know so enjoyment even relief of unpleasantness right that that the those like you can describe a lot of human behavior and and that to understand like what's going on inside of us that means that we're here right you see that through the lens of aggressive and pleasure drives and like that's the answer to it to how we survive but I think that is not the answer to it that if it were just aggressive drives and pleasure drives there's not a value system around that like you know somebody who's very industrious can build or destroy right and we see this in historical figures like being very intelligent and very industriousness has nothing to do with whether you're building or destroying right so if it were just an aggressive drive and a pleasure drive then we wouldn't be having this conversation right because the species would have would not have survived right so if you believe that and I believe that then you look for something else you say maybe we looked and we found two things and there more things right and then we start thinking about learning for learning's sake altruism things that are not explained right unless there's a self-referential where you feel good doing something for someone else so therefore it's selfish like there's a lot of gyration around that if you really observe humans you do see altruis altruism you see learning for learning sake you see people being benign when everything about a situation would say that they could would or should under society's rules not be benign right and then we start to see that there is another drive that how do you explain that we're here yeah aggression pleasure and generativist or generative Drive the drive to make things better that's why we build more than we destroy we destroy a lot right but we build more than we destroy otherwise we wouldn't have clothes on our backs let alone have the the technology to sit here and to be able to do this so it's the generative drive that that is most realized in the healthy person right and the healthy person has the strong generative drive now as you said there are other factors and this is sort of what you were asking about they're probably their natural levels of aggression or pleasure seeking or generativist that differ across people right because we're a product of you know the complexity of our genetics and you know all the complexities of Nature and nurture so we're going to get to a place where where some of us have more some of us have less right the the the the conclusion though is for all of us the generative Drive being at the helm is what what leads us to be to to live good lives right to live to the things that we aspire to the peace and contentment right so we want the generative drive to Rule the Day right whether a person is studying Neuroscience or growing Garden right the importance is about being generative then then aggression and pleasure can subserve the generative drive right and then the question you're asking I I think which is well what if there's too much aggression too little aggression right or too much pleasure seeking too little pleasure seeking that's when we we can see problems right and the problems then lead us back to the pillars to figure out the problems so too much aggression ultimately becomes and right too much aggression means like I want I I want to impose myself on the on the world around me more than I can more than is reasonable more than I can do without impinging upon others right that what you end up doing is taking from others right too much aggression becomes destructive right maybe a person destroys tears something down right takes from others uh says that the the nasty comment when it wasn't necessary and now everyone feels bad right but there there's that too much aggression start it becomes Envy right and envy is destructive right the same thing with too much pleasure seeking if I say okay I want you know I want my fair share of pleasure and you know relief of distress and all that but if I start if I rely on that too much right we now instead of aggression eclipsing the generative drive now it's pleasure eclipsing the generative drive then I want more pleasure and more pleasure and more pleasure and how long before I want your pleasure right so so then it's not healthy right what it becomes is envious right right it becomes destructive because now then I become Covetous of your pleasure or if I can't get it but I could bring you down then I'll feel better about myself that's Envy right so too much aggression eclipsing the generative drive too much of the of pleasure seeking the pleasure Drive eclipsing the generative drive and we end up in places of envy and envy is destructive and now we're in trouble I've never thought before about the relationship between aggression pleasure and envy but as you're describing it I comes to mind the movie American Psycho where Christian Bale placs this um well basically an 80s Yuppy in you know working in finance in New York and um and for anyone that scen it it's a can only be described as a violent parody of of 80s yepy culture and it's it's me dark comedy as there's going to be yeah it's as dark a comedy as it could be and and don't let your young children watch it because it's very gruesome and has like very sexual and but the the the aggressive features within the character that Bale plays um are immediately apparent in the movie like you know violent aggression sexual aggression um seeking money seeking wealth all the time a narcissism too an obsession with like everything from his skincare routine to uh his eight pack abs and like it's it's ridiculous but um but also an interesting window into some milder forms of those features that still exist in many people today right um but the Envy component starts to reveal itself a little bit later into the movie where um the scene I recall is one around where someone hands him a business card and then you hear the narrative in his own mind about how much nicer that guy's business card is then his and how he hates him so much he ends up killing the guy in very violent and sadistic fashion that's aggression over generative right right and so and the whole movie is about um this one uh aspect of culture at that time's ability to impose their will on EV everyone at their whim you know basically Bale just does whatever the hell he wants at any point goes returns videotapes in between and you know and there's so much woven into it and uh that is relevant and so much that's woven into it that's just purely for people's kind of sick entertainment um uh but that I believe it was Brett Brent East Ellis that wrote that and you know is tapping into the the aggression component pleasure component but the Envy component is really what resonates as as you come to the end of the movie is like there's no satisfying this guy he could kill or or sleep with as many people as he wants in the movie um and he can have as much wealth as he wants he can have entire buildings in fact I think he's living in an entire building at some point he takes over people's Apartments after he kills them it's it's it's wild and disgusting um but it really speaks to the extent to which Envy is woven into absolutely aggression and pleasure seeking and it's not something something that had really sunk in for me until you describe it now um because I think for most people they imagine okay when somebody has X number of millions or billions of dollars that they'll reach this place of Peace contentment and Delight right they'll have enough um and in the movie Wall Street there's that one scene where someone says you know what's your number like at what point is it enough and the guy says more that says all sorts of things about the dopaminergic system of reward systems in the brain Etc but I think it says is a lot more about Envy absolutely and just what in what a a pit of despair Envy is for everybody involved right right look Envy may not be the root of all evil but Envy plus natural disasters may be so much evil and destruction arises from envy and it may be that it's at the root of all of it and we so underappreciate that right we so underappreciate why people are destructive right which is why the roots aren't always in trauma but but a significant uh uh aspect of of where Envy arises from can often be trauma creating a sense of guilt and shame and vulnerability but but wherever a person may come by it and it's a larger discussion of envy and where it may come from is it drives destruction and if the aggressive Drive is greater than the generative drive or if the pleasure Drive is greater than the the generative drive or if both are greater than the generative drive it will drive destruction and that destruction the vast majority of times if you look deep enough you find at its roots envy that Envy may arise from guilt and shame within the person but as soon as it becomes about another right I feel guilt and shame and inadequacy inside of me but then I feel Envy of those around me it drives the vast majority of Destruction do you think that's what's happening when we see these um sadly um ever more frequent examples of um active Shooters and school shootings things of that sort yes there other there are other people who have life right and that person doesn't feel that they do so they want to go and take it away from them and that's why as long as we have human tribulation and a lot of guns this it's going to happen it's it's a it's a logical conclusion of enough people being in places of Despair and how Envy can be cultivated within us and then ultimately how it blinds people it creates such a desire for Destruction that then people will take life away from others and often people sometimes take their own life which which I think really brings to the Forefront like that that that person doesn't feel that they have a life certainly not a life worth preserving so they're then going to take the lives of others and I think we're seeing that is as Stark um a portrait of where Envy can lead I think as we can find on a one person basis we we can go we can look at Wars and their destruction on a societal basis but I think that's that's the ultimate in understanding where and we can drive a person what about the other end of the spectrum when aggression and pleasure seeking are too low the other side of the spectrum is demoralization right so just imagine very very low aggression so low self- assertion low agency like the there comes a place where that the person is not then imposing themselves or believing that they can in in in much of any way on the outside world and that creates a sense of isolation understandably right a sense of powerlessness and vulnerability and isolation and that then becomes demoralizing which is not the same as depression I mean you know we know depression is it is there's a neurochemical imbalance right whether that imbalance came purely biologically or or came psychologically or because of external events there's a neurochemical imbalance you know here we're not talking about an illness State as identified by modern Psychiatry there's not a number in the in the book of diagnoses that goes along with with being demoralized right but why because it's a state that humans can be in and too low of an aggressive drive right and all the things that come of that it's isolating and it's demoralizing the same with too low of a of a pleasure drive so an example that maybe relatable is um to some people is you know knowing someone who who has had a couple of really bad breakups and and then says I'm not you know what I'm done with that there's no more Romance I'm going to be single right and and you know like that person has a drive in them like you know they're an interconnected person like they they want romance they these are things that are important to them but they they make a decision I'm I'm not have that in my in my life what what would be called in some psychodynamic sense is inviting death into life a little bit of death by by swearing off something that that the person has a drive towards right the pleasure Drive of companionship and of romance right that that then becomes demoralizing as well so sure those things demoralization can predispose to depression but demoralization is a thing in and of itself where then there's a sense of hopelessness there's a sense of you know the the goodness then is in accessible anymore and that's the other side of Envy can low levels of aggression and the resulting demoralization be coupled with high levels of pleasure seeking so I'm thinking about the person that um you know is like very overweight clearly um headed for health issues if they don't already have them and you know perhaps would like to remove that weight would like to feel more vigorous doesn't want type two diabetes and an early death but at some level they've given up because the the pleasure of eating is something they really enjoy they they really love it and yet it has a component to it in their life where they either self sooe with it or they're just trying to hit Baseline levels of satisfaction with it and and um they allow themselves to effectively be sedentary and and then the other sorts of trouble start to show up you know sleep apnea from carrying excessive weight and then feeling tired during the day and then who can exercise when they're too tired when you got to work and maintain other life demands and you can kind of see where this could rise and and makes perfect sense um you can also see where um if there were just a little bit more aggression it could all be turned around but they don't have it so is the scenario describ something that you've seen clinically I certainly observe it in my non-clinical stance out there in the world a lot right well I think the the most important thing you're pointing out is that aggression and pleasure on the high end right we we know can Trump the generative drive right but that this can also happen on the low end right so you're describing a situation this it's a great example right because it's not uncommon in the world around us so the aggression meaning the fuel to put oneself out there in the world right to utilize the sense of agency right so this is going to be a person who's low agency right the aggressive drive has has little fuel then to give the sense of agency its further squelch by neg by you know negative sense of self and negative selft talk now you find where the the aggressive Drive is is too low and too low can also Trump the generative drive right because then that person can't take care of themselves a generative drive would say there's a lot of Life to Live and there can be great things in life and take better care of yourself and by the way they're like people that you love and people that love you or or if not you know there's an animal or a garden you love right so so the generative Drive is saying that right but it's not winning the day because the the aggression or you know aggression is one word we could put to that drive you could call it an assertion drive you know we call it an agency drive but that's you know we're using agency in a different way but that thing is too low so it wins out over the generative drive and then in the example you gave it's not surprising that the pleasure Drive goes the other way maybe there's a predisposition to that genetically maybe it's just reinforced because a person in that place could say well think of what what this the the self-conception would be right I'm in this terrible place um it you know means I'm a terrible person I can't make myself better or I'm not good enough to get better no one cares about me I can't make anything right so so therefore like I don't I don't matter there's no reason to take care of myself so why would I not do if I eat that one thing that I enjoy and it gives me pleasure even it gives me pleasure for 2 minutes then I'll eat another one like in a sense so what well cuz I'm I don't feel that I'm worth preserving or that I can preserve myself right there's a nihilism to it that then kind of makes it make sense to overindulge the pleasure Drive whether it's a whether it's biologically predisposed or one is just arriving there but the the reason all that is bad is because the aggressive Drive is too low and in fact it's low enough that it's outweighing the generative drive then the pleasure Drive is going to come into you know one place or another if it's also really low the person does not much of anything and wastes away which tragically happens a lot in our society right or if the pleasure Drive is high maybe that person overindulges in things it provide short-term gratification and then that causes a different set of problems but but what's deterministic there is whether whether aggression or assertion again we could put different words to that drive but what we've been calling the aggressive drive and the pleasure Drive are they is one or the other or both high enough to Trump the generative drive or low enough to Trump the generative drive and and I think all problems that we see like everything fits into this model because it honors what we know right it honors what we know about human behavior and insights into human behavior over hundreds of years right over thousands of years right the wisdom that re brings forward and it it honors the science and that's why it fits together because I think it honors who we are as what our species is what we are um and you know what it's like what life is like as as we try and engage with it yeah I've seen cases of demoralized people where uh they simply you know disappear they they hide they isolate they slow down they take terrible care of their health and um you know sadly I've known uh several people like this in my lifetime uh one of whom killed himself the the other who um just has an immense number of health problems related to overeating and um inactivity and and knows it and talks about it and and but nothing seems to change despite multiple interventions from a caring standpoint from Friends Etc I've also seen examples of people who are demoralized who um seem to band with other demoralized people sort of um try to recalibrate the standard that they feel um oppresses them you know that they and this isn't necessarily just in the realm of of physical fitness this is also in the realm of like School demands I I went to a very demanding High School as I've talked about before on a couple of podcasts I barely finished high school I was not an attentive student I was my um aggressive and pleasure drives went into non-academic Endeavors and I regret that you know I I had so much making up of of of learning to do by the time I you know fortunately got to college uh eventually caught up but um my experience of high school was that there were these you know kids scoring perfectly on the SAT and the early admission to Harvard and early admission to Yale and all these places and then there was you know a distribution in the middle and then there was a collection of of kids who were not doing well knew they weren't doing well and kind of banded together around the idea of not doing well I I I didn't consider myself part of that group because I I frankly wasn't there that often and and um I was focused on other things as I mentioned but but what came of that group was actually quite tragic not just for them but for a l lot of other people they uh eventually engaged it it wasn't a school shooting type scenario but they eventually you know set off explosives in the on the school campus this was after they had graduated um I don't know where they are nowadays but things did not go well for them and they um exerted a lot of uh destruction to other people around them but before they did that there was this kind of banding together around their the fact that they didn't fit in that they and they weren't bullied as I recall that I could be wrong about this but I've seen this in other forms too like you know if you can't meet the standard band up with other people and change the standard and then you don't feel as demoralized perhaps um I can understand I can rationalize why this would be a reasonable approach but um I'm seeing this more and more um I'm also seeing by the way you know the other end of the spectrum people are overly aggressive and pleasure seeking and and things of that sort but but for the for the moment I'd like um your thoughts on you know how demoralization can split off into different Expressions depending on how um people feel and who else they're relating to yeah yeah well I think the place I would start is to say our society rushes headlong forward in a way that causes our society to trample people who are vulnerable and vulnerable people are demoralized people demoralized people are vulnerable people people and our society often tramples them and then they're not here with us any longer and that is tragic but at times they don't get trampled they get cast aside right they they they're injured right and cast aside and from that place tragic things happen right people then stay isolated you know I I think it's a tragedy that we don't all band together and go door Todo right to like seek people who who aren't coming out of doors right you know in the sense of like we let people be so so isolated and and often times that's that's the tragic end of someone's story right um but sometimes people do engage right they're demoralized but they can engage in in ways that involve an an affiliative defense so sometimes people who are demoralized can affiliate they can band together in in ways as I think you were alluding to that can that can make things better so if people are demoralized because say they're uh a group in society that that is chronically very mistreated right then it can be very powerful to band together both because there's what's called an affiliative defense that if I feel bad about myself about something and I'm alone it's highly likely I'm going to continue feeling bad about myself about that thing right but if you feel bad about yourself about the same thing and then we're together right we help each other feel better we don't feel so lonely we don't alone we don't feel so isolated we don't feel so ashamed right so an affiliative defense can help people to to say wait a second like I'm not there's nothing wrong with me and I'm not gonna take this line down or something right and then and to make assertions that create better rights in the world around us so so like very good things can happen from from affiliation in the context of demoralization but very bad things can happen too right because people can also affiliate around things that are very destructive I mean if I am hateful of society and I would like to be destructive and I'm alone okay I could do destructive things alone but if I band together with a couple other people who feel that way now I'm empowered to feel that way right instead of maybe I feel that way and or or there's racism or Prejudice and I don't feel like I I can say that right but then when it's permissive right because other people are are in the same place then people can accentuate the the hatred within you know within them so affiliation is very very powerful and part of society rushing so headlong forward and either trampling or marginal izing people is that we then don't pay attention or not enough attention to what happens with the affiliative groups right how do you guide people towards towards being able to affiliate in ways that are productive how do you give them routes of being productive right how do you try and protect against the ways that affiliation can lead to destructive Behavior so I think you know a lot of this is these are the natural things that happen within us but a lot of what we're talking about now gets impacted a lot by societ and societal standards which we of course altogether you know determine right and arise from us but they they start to sort of transcend because it's now people interacting with a whole social system going back to the other end of the spectrum excess aggression uh in particular uh I was in a conversation with somebody recently very successful like Beyond most people's comprehension of success financially successful and um seems to just have you know checked off their their goals one one box at a time you know from from go um but who described his um underlying psychology and emotional state as um one in which much of what he does on a day-to-day basis is driven by aggression in fact he he uh volunteered an anecdote about the fact that um he hates early morning meetings on Zoom but he shows up to them as sort of a uh like an Fu toward somebody that might not even be on the meeting right and um and so there's a friction point for him that allows him to engage in a way that he wouldn't otherwise be able to engage and he he channels that towards productivity and clearly it's worked for him um you know I don't know if he's done the sort of introspective uh Deep dive I imagine no through the structure of self and function of self but you know what are we to make of of that sort of example I mean I I I like the idea that if someone has a strong aggressive drive that they would Channel it toward good I mean I have no reason to think this person is doing anything but good in the world for themselves and others they're certainly not harming anyone at least not to my to my knowledge but that seems like a rough place to live for me it seems like a rough place to live and at the same time I'll offer a very brief anecdote that you know at one point in my career namely when I was a postto I was in a position by virtue of having left a laboratory and the nature of the field at the time where the work I wanted to do was directly pitted against the work of another very powerful laboratory except that I was a lone postto working in a laboratory essentially on my own on this problem and I remember going to my postto adviser the late Ben Baris and saying you know I think it might just move to a different problem because I don't really want to go up against this Goliath and he said uh you know the this is the best you know I can capture Ben's voice he said absolutely not like there's no way you love this stuff you have to do it because you love it and he kept telling me how much I love it and he reminded me that indeed I did love the questions and once I was able to tap back into the love for and the Curiosity around the questions I was able to push aside the the concerns enough that we did well um in publishing certain papers they did well but those 5 years frankly were a lot less pleasureful than they could have been I think because much of the script in my head was that I was in friction with this like you know at least in my mind this oppressive force it was it was purely competitive and I truly believe that we can't be at in our most creative state when we are competing with someone else by definition because then you're you're you're creating against a standard as opposed to Raw Creation right so um in both cases a lot of aggressive Drive frankly I I I have some of that and I had that um but desire for Revenge a a component of friction mixed in you know or integrated with this aggressive drive like this picture like even as I describe it is you know causing the release of a little little bit of adrenaline it's it's not a comfortable State it's not it it can't be a state of Happiness right so as you said people can do good in the world they can do not good in the world like we're not making a value judgment about what the person is doing because that's not what the question is about right like how are they feeling how are they doing right what's going on inside of them right and that can't be happy right that can't be happy because if if if you're built to be pretty good at competition right so you you can size up what are the factors you know you can strategize right so a person is built to be really good at competition then you know it sounds pretty good to make everything a competition right because you have the highest winning percentage right and but that's that's good to achieve some end right that doesn't have any feeling intrinsically associated with it right and if all you're doing is a series of competitions then what you're doing then is winning right and like winning is something like you know winning is like I won I beat you what whatever that is like that that can be part of happiness but it doesn't have to be right that that's not happiness right so so yes that kind of I'm I'm really built to compete well and I'm going to just see a series of competitions in front of me that's for for expedient forward prog ress right that's very effective but again expedient forward progress is is nothing to do with peace contentment Delight like it's it's it's not you know it doesn't have anything to do with that nor does have anything to do with doing good or bad right and I think the example you gave in your own in your career is like it's such a good example right because you know if you think about it when the way that you were sort of framing it inside is like there's a question I'm asking there's a question they're asking right and there's a competition right again it has to be two two to compete right so so there's almost an automaticity right that like they're studying the same thing maybe you know they feel competitive or certain people there too they were were in our definitely competitive they know who they are they're extremely compe and very successful right okay so then so then you okay I'm in a competition now again but you never decided to be in a competition right but but automatically I mean it's interesting right to understand you're acting as if you're in a competition you go I don't want this competition right because like they're bigger than me it's going to be unpleasant it's going to take you away from really thinking about what you want to do right it's going to make it harder to do a good to do the job you want to do right because now you're embroiled in you know something that's you know that has aggression behind it right so so you choose no I don't I I choose not to do that right and then Ben Baris reframes it to the truth and says well this this isn't this is not a compet I because you're not choosing to compete right because Ben pointed out what was important to you was the questions right so it's like almost as if Ben reminded you no no no no this is not through the aggressive Drive look at it through the generative drive that's what wins out in you right and then you go and apply yourself to it yeah and bless him for doing it because uh from that point forward I I've made it my um firm mission to always do things from a place of what I always think about as Delight you know curiosity Delight that the things that give me energy and that give me more energy from doing them um it wasn't a coincidence I believe that in those five years when I was operating from a mix of generative drive and the the competition would then resurface and you know I I couldn't hold hold it constant that um I was absolutely exhausted by the end of that phase I just in a way that um sucked a lot of the pleasure out of it I still drive some pleasure but then as I mentioned fortunately I was able to U pivot back to doing things out of love you know and and and getting back to uh peace contentment and especially Delight right you know right and I absolutely make a value judgment about that right that what you did is better right so what if you did what if you were different so think about if we talk about it through this accurate lens what if you were different at that time and the aggressive Drive in you was greater than the generative driving you right which would be an unhealthy state to be in but let's say you were in that unhealthy State then you probably would have still done what you did but you would have done it through the lens of aggression like I'm going to get them right now you're competitive with them there's there's anger in you there's you know there there's aggression right that you're you're enacting in fantasy as you're you know you're thinking about them and how you're going to win like all sorts of things go on inside of us and I would say there's no way on Earth you could have done the science as well as you did right it couldn't be because all that stuff is distracting right it's you know that kind of negative affect pulls for energy and time from you and also what seeds would you have planted in the the microcosm that you operating right more more competition right more competitiveness more Badness right so let's look at what you did do right because you're healthy or this particular question about this particular thing we know for sure because your generative Drive eclipses the aggressive drive then you set yourself to the work in a way that's going to be more effective right your brain isn't clouded you're not wasting energy you know plotting some revenge or plotting what you're going to do if they come take something from your lab I mean whatever it is you know like you're not living in any of that so you're going to do a better job at what you're what's so important to you to do and what seeds are you sewing then right you're sewing seeds of collaboration right and even then if someone could say well what does even that matter right say no it does matter because what you're doing then we just follow forward the math of it right is is contributing to understanding that's contributing to human health right and the better understanding we have of human health the more people stay alive and the more people stay healthy which could mean any one of us just like any one of us could be the vulnerable person that Society tramples or casts aside we all have it in us to be that or have been that at stages of our lives right we also all have it in us to be the opposite of that right we have it in us to be generative we have it in us to make good we have it in us to contribute to health to survival and that I place a value judgment upon it's why doing good is better than doing bad why creating is better than destroying and why ultimately it's the generative drive that has to Trump the other drives and when it does we're happy we're healthy we make the world a better place we Ally with and are suffused with the Gratitude and agency in us are fully active and we're suffused with peace contentment Delight as you said that's the place to be from that place we get this thing that we want and we help to make the world a better place which helps us to keep the thing we want it sounds so simple because as you pointed out the manifestations of looking at the right things and doing the right things are so simple yes right it's it's a list really and again we have a PDF that includes this list and and the the structure of of the pillars and how they flow up to this list but ultimately it's peace contentment and Delight you know underg guarded by agency and gratitude as active terms I mean very simple at some level um and yet for many people including myself at certain times in life the the um excess or or lack of aggressive drive or excess or lack of pleasure Drive can interfere with people's ability to access these these simple but um incredibly powerful um being States right because it's nature and nurture right so you might be built with a a greater or lesser natural amount of one drive than I am right but then we've had life experience that creates a Delta around that right so so you say okay we're built with different amounts of all these drives yes yes we are right but we also have control right through our decisions through how we handle Our Lives to modulate them right so that makes sense because the thought could be well the drive is what the drive is and it varies across people no there's a range the drive is in and that range can be very broad people can do all sorts of things to cultivate to cultivate the better we all can right so if we look at it as an unlimited upside right then what we what we see is I want to know where they at in me now right what's going on inside of me what are all those other factors right because I want to cultivate the good I want to cultivate that generative drive and I want to make sure the aggression and the pleasure aren't out of balance one way or another like we can actively look at that and manage it and I think that's like so what we're striving for because there's nothing here that we don't have some control over right and the higher we get up right the simpler it gets the more we have control over it and for people who feel like the the ideals that we're providing a road map toward are not accessible for whatever reason maybe they're feeling a little bit or a lot demoralized uh overly aggressive and not ending up where they want to go or ending up where they want to go and not experiencing deep satisfaction peace contentment and Delight where should they look in this framework that includes these pillars at the Deep levels of structure of self function of self that you know um give rise to empowerment humility agenty gratitude peace contentment Delight you know if someone should find themselves unmotivated or or stuck you know metaphorically speaking staring out the window into the garden that could be and that they want so very much but that they're not creating again that should translate to whatever domain of life you're you're seeking or not even in touch with what you really want you know infinitely confused about what to do in relationship school work life you know and and thinking about all the oppressive forces in the world like the political Chasm and the you know pandemics and lockdowns and like and all the stuff and all the the things that are weighing down on us what should that person in other words what should we all do at that moment you know stop and what each pillar has five cupboards look in all five and follow the clues that you find there that's the answer so go back to structure of self function of self ask questions about and engage in practices that bring about more self-awareness practices that um draw our attention to what's Salient for for us ask ourselves you know what am I thinking about internally what is my internal script what what am I focusing on externally you know am I spending all day on Twitter looking at accounts that I know I hate because it activates something in me etc etc I might have revealed something about myself that I'm just kidding that's not my my behavior but I see a lot of other people doing it what are my behavioral choices you know um what could bring about more hopefulness and and strivings I have that right right and there's right and there's so much of this that say one could do on one's own right because we can think about ourselves and we can learn things if we say well I don't really know that much about defense mechanisms okay like we could read about it right like we can do a lot of this on our own and we can get so much from talking to other people you know people in our Lives who are close to us who love us right we can talk with them about what's going on inside of us right and that is such an amazing mechanism of learning and they're also Professional Resources I mean like the good therapy should Encompass like this should be what it's doing right it might come out through one lens or another lens and you know CU every everybody's different and we can bring different modalities but ultimately that's what good therapy is doing right it's looking in all 10 of those cupboards and it's seeing where is the issue let's follow the clues like it's a spirited inquiry right whether we're doing it on our own or we're doing it with other people in our personal lives or we're doing it with someone professionally it's a spirited inquiry to follow the clues because if we follow the clues there are answers right and if we have the answers then we can bring things into better alignment and then we're in a better place those pillars are more stable and we can build on top of them what we want to build on top of them and the drives come better into line that that we can do that and it can be an iterative process of you know if if we we attain some better state of mind and like life is better and like we're happy like this happens to people there's a lot of contentment and peace and if things are going well and now something isn't as much go back and look again right it's it's a process we can use over and over because it works because it fits with the truths and the reality is as we have understood learned them you know our education the you know this a learning about humans that across hundreds of years tells us this it makes very good sense to me in the way that you have mapped it out for us um so much sense in fact that um I'm just struck by how Divergent it is from what I think most people think of when they think of therapy or the some of the risks of going to a psychiatrist um which I think it's only fair to consider in particular the way that um at least from my outside non-clinical understanding um these sorts of situations of high levels of demoralization or excessive aggression or just people not being in the place or being able to exert their their um their actions in the world the way they want want or not get the results they want is they'll start asking questions like um you know maybe I have a chemical imbalance or or maybe they'll go to a clinician maybe a cognitive behavioral therapist or um or psychiatrist and more often than not it seems they'll get you know prescription for X number of milligrams of some serotonergic Agonist or uh dopaminergic Agonist and of course as a neurobiologist I I you know I applaud the exploration of underlying brain organisms and the involvement of neuromodulators like dopamine and serotonin but what you're describing today is is very different I I think then um what most people are can expect if they go to the typical psychiatrist or typical uh psychologist which is part of the reason we're having this conversation but um I'd love your thoughts on that um and I don't want to make this about me uh I only offer this anecdote as um a way to round out a little bit of the earlier discussion uh I'll I've never shared this publicly but when I was a postto and going through that very hard phase of comp competition that I didn't want and having a hard time staying in touch with that and there were some other developmental things starting to resurface just by virtue of moving back to the town I grew up in ETC there I recall getting to the stairway of the building I was working in at the time which is the same one where my laboratory exists now actually and realizing I I couldn't go up the stairway I've always been reasonably fit um and just being so EX exhausted and then driving home that day on 280 and thinking you know like none of this matters like what am I doing like none of it matters I could have been exhausted I don't know what it was but what that ultimately resulted in was me talking to a psychiatrist who gave me a low dose of a of a um of a serotonergic anti-depressant I took that low dose of serotonergic anti-depressant I don't recall which one it was maybe it was sat talopram would that make sense and um spent that evening staring at my plate of Thai noodles for about two hours it hit me really hard and and I hated that feeling and then just stopped taking the drug um now I'm not this is no knock on satal pram or the use of serotonergic agents in the proper context they've saved lives so the the problematic too but I just you know that wasn't the route that eventually got me out of it it was it was mainly talk therapy and and self-care um but uh I just offer that because I you know I even as a neurobiologist I perhaps especially as a neurobiologist I thought okay here's the solution right it's going to shift some internal modulatory system and I'm going to feel okay about the situation I'm in and thank goodness it didn't work even for a short while because um the while I didn't do all the things that you're describing here of exploring the function of self because no one has ever laid this out for me I um I took the route of of talk therapy which I I find immensely beneficial um takes time but immensely beneficial um so what are your thoughts on the current strategies for diagnosis where those succeed where they fall short and and the role of medication in navigating this you know simple and yet complex landscape right we are so dramatically over reductionist you know it's almost to the point of unbelievable right I mean think about getting a medicine getting some say calop pram because of what happened right it can't possibly work right now maybe a judiciously chosen medicine could provide a little more distress tolerance and you could sort of think about it more and you could find your way through it but clearly it was an issue of self right like you're in a situation that was high stress and are you going to have to have this competition or not is it going to be good for you and you know you don't want that but can you avoid it like there's something going on that makes you not be able to walk up those stairs right so so again I'm not criticizing got with the person what kind of conversations you had about it with the person but the idea that a pill will fix that is like that's insane right now medicines can help smooth the way so so let's say you you initially went and the first time you see someone they say okay we have to talk about this right like what's going on in your life and you know because normally you can walk upstairs and go to work right why can't you now like we we need to think about that we need to talk about that let's say you start doing that and you're having a lot of trouble with it uh or you're just having really high levels of anxiety we might say look a medicine can kind of take the temperature down a little bit you know give you a little more distress tolerance and then you know we can you can think about it better inside of you and we can talk about it better but it's medicine in the service of understanding now sometimes medicines are doing things like medicines that can help prevent bipolar episodes right like they're doing something that is purely biological but we use so many medicines for things that are not biological they're psychological but we we're so over reductionist that we could actually over reduce the problem that you said right like a clear wow that's fascinating right like how many times have you gone up those stairs and now you can't it's so interesting the idea of like let's just give you a pill I mean it it really makes no sense but if we're over reductionist enough you could see how that's the logical Endo of an illogical process right and I'll give you another example and this is really it's a true story of uh a woman who young woman comes into the emergency room and she says she can't sleep and you know she looks anxious and she feels very very anxious uh you know by her description and that's why she can't sleep and and she gets a sleeping medicine and she goes home and then she comes back she comes back a couple days later and she's very very anxious and she can't sleep and she looks like she did before like nothing seems to be different and she hasn't gotten any sleep at all so the doctor in charge gives her a higher dose of the sleeping medicine then she goes home and then she comes back yet again and nothing is any different she's still not sleeping she's still anxious and then the doctor concludes that she's drug seeking because she wants more and more of the sleeping medicine okay what was actually going on was she was getting hurt at home she was terrified to go home of course she couldn't sleep right like bad things were happening right but no one asked the question right they thought she cannot sleep we'll give sleeping medicine right instead of asking why right and then she gets home sent home and when the medicine doesn't work well now there's something wrong with her right and if you put that label on her now she's drug seeking right then she's not going to get any help right so I'm not against medicines I mean I I use psychopharmacology as part of my practice and I think from a from a biologically based perspective about many things but we have to know what something is the answer for and what something is not the answer for and in the in the overly reductionist world of throughput in in Health Care Systems people are even being trained these days that don't know any different right I'm trying to be overly critical of practitioners because often practitioners are working in impossible situations where the goal is through throughput and that's more efficient in the short term right it's more efficient today right but it's of course not good in anything but the today term and it's interesting because it's never good for the person even today it's like never good for the people in it right but but often these decisions are being made based upon business and money and I I understand business and money I I'm a capitalist I'm interested in these things but the way that we have let things get the business and money with a shortsighted short-term perspective than bonds with the over reductionist ways that we approach medicine and then we have these bizarre things happen and these kind of bizarre things end lives right it change the courses of lives like fortunately you you know you got you got what you needed and you figured things out but if you hadn't would you have the career you have like we don't know right or if if someone else hadn't realized like let's talk to that woman and see what's going on you know would would she have survived I mean we don't we don't know but the point of that is like lots of bad things happen right there we're rolling the dice too many times with too many people and it doesn't have to be that way and the way that we're doing it now is not only inefficient financi right the thing that we seem to be caring about most it it leads to bad outcomes and it also makes no sense right we're looking at it through this sort of bizarre lens then we may find within us the strength to change that and to change it in a way that actually fits the science and fits the common sense now I have to imagine that both for people who require medication in order to cope um in order to manage their way through these questions about function of self and how they are in the world what they're paying attention to Etc and for people who don't require medication to do this exploration that this very same exploration is the road map to feeling yes agency gratitude peace contentment and Delight medicines may have a role so if for example we go look at the pillars and things are not going so well and and you see that whenever that person has a bipolar manic episode while things get really really damaged and like it's very very hard they can't recover from that in the ways they want to then we'd say well let's we're going to use medicine to help this right now of course there are other things too use behavioral changes for example right but there but there's a clear biological role just like we use medicine to stop seizures right but people also have to make sure they're not super sleep deprived there's another part to it too we can use medicine to prevent bipolar episodes but there's another part of self-care involved too but it's it's a role of medicine right just as if anxiety levels aren't coming down too much say for the person to get at the trauma right they know there's a trauma they've talked around it you know for 20 years they know it's been impacting them they're not sure how it's hard to go there they're with a trusted therapist but it's still it's hard to put words to it and now you know they're maybe having a panic attack right you think okay let's we can use medicines to take the temperature down to to sort of e you ease that person's Way Forward so that they can understand something right that then provides a resolution in that part of the pillar and then you know things are set in a better place so so so the biological aspect you know and specifically here we're talking about medicines has its place but the idea that medicines are a substitute for understanding this makes no sense well you've provided us an incredible framework thank you you know this framework really speaks to all of us right you know the components that make us who we are you know that as you put it the structure of the self you know everything from the unconscious mind conscious mind defense mechanisms character structure self and the functions of self you know these components of self-awareness defense mechanisms reaching up from that Iceberg under the water what we pay attention to our behaviors and hopefully our strivings and sense of hope and how those two pillars flow up into empowerment humility agency and gratitude again as action terms as active terms and eventually to peace contentment and Delight in this notion of generative drive as well as some of the pitfalls and and um challenges that can pull down on generative drive or Aude generative drive and you very clearly pointed us to where we should all look in terms of understanding ourselves better and where we could do better and be better in the world because this is a series we have the wonderful opportunity to um have you tell us even more about how this structure plays out both in terms of its health healthy expression and in terms of its unhealthy expression you know in different pathologic conditions that you know most of us are familiar with at least in name and and I'm sure you're going to tell us more about you know what the what the real um both underpinnings and expressions of things like narcissism in you know extreme and Mild form um you know anxiety in its extreme and Mild forms um and and also some of the uh the names and diagnosis that we're more familiar with hearing uh about such as you know bipolar disorder obsessive compulsive things of that sort um but that all relate back to and and really are nested in the this structure and function of self and where it can all go so um first of all I want to say an thank you really an immense thank you for for oh you're so welcome for defining the structure and making it so clear to to me and to everybody else and and as you said it it has its complexity there's in fact immense complexity down there at the bottom but that flows up from complex to to very simple ideals and a ro map to get there and again the PDF is available to people as as a link in the show note captions um should they want to see this in visual form I also want to thank you for assembling the structure not just as a tutorial but because at least to my knowledge no such structure or summary of these structures exists anywhere in the world and certainly not in any form that the the non-clinician and not you know highly trained psychiatrist uh could ever access around understand so uh this is both an immense resource and an immense gift to us all thank you so very much you're so welcome and thank you for having me here which is a gift um to be continued in the next episode thank you thank you for joining me for this first episode of our series on Mental Health with Dr Paul kti and I encourage you to keep an eye out for the second episode in this series which is going to be about how to improve your mental health I'll just remind you that all episodes of The 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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 which is the first episode in our series about mental health with Dr Paul Ki and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]